Kairi Sisigou knew the value of a Command Spell.
He only had three. He had already burned one just to pull Mordred out of that forest. Using a second one purely for healing, before the Holy Grail War had even officially begun, was a tactical disaster. But finding a Servant with healing capabilities among a roster of seven was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Shirou Kotomine's smile deepened, perfectly reading the necromancer's hesitation. "Using a Command Spell for recovery is a terrible waste of resources, wouldn't you agree?"
Semiramis, standing beside the priest, offered a haughty, elegant smile. "Though I manifested in the Assassin class, I am quite well-versed in magecraft," she said, her golden eyes drifting toward Kairi. "If it is mere healing you require, I am more than capable of providing it."
It sounded like a lifeline. But then Shirou delivered the catch.
"Therefore, let us first rendezvous with the other Masters of our faction," the priest suggested warmly. "Once we are all gathered, Assassin will tend to your Saber's wounds."
"..."
Kairi stared at them. On paper, it was a perfectly reasonable request. A team should gather before pooling resources. Any normal magus would have nodded, smiled, and followed the priest right into the trap.
But Kairi was a freelancer who survived the underworld by trusting his gut. And his gut was screaming that if he walked into a room with the other "Red Masters," he would never walk out with his autonomy intact.
"Could you just do it here?" Kairi asked bluntly. "Right now?"
"Oh?" Shirou blinked, feigning a look of mild surprise. "Are you not fond of group meetings, Sisigou?"
"You could say that," Kairi muttered, not taking off his sunglasses. "Necromancers like me are a solitary bunch. We don't play well with others. Besides, my Saber is more than capable of fighting on her own once she's patched up."
Shirou and Semiramis exchanged a brief look. Seeing that the necromancer was absolutely unwilling to yield, Shirou sighed in defeat.
"Very well. As you wish."
With a wave of her hand, Semiramis channeled a soothing, emerald light. The magic washed over the empty air beside Kairi, where Mordred was lingering in spirit form. The severed nerves and shattered armor of the Knight of Treachery began to knit back together.
The moment the healing was complete, Kairi turned on his heel. He didn't linger to offer profound thanks or discuss strategy.
"The enemy Black Faction has already mobilized an entire army," Semiramis warned, her voice cold as she watched him walk toward the heavy church doors.
"And now, we have an unknown, highly dangerous entity prowling the territory. A ghost that crushed a top-tier Saber. If you act alone, you will only bring ruin upon yourself and become a liability to us."
"Even knowing this, you insist on leaving?"
Kairi didn't stop. He pushed the heavy oak doors open, letting the morning sunlight spill into the church.
"Sorry," he called back over his shoulder. "But I work better alone."
The doors slammed shut, leaving the priest and the empress standing alone in the quiet church.
…
A tiny spark of golden light condensed in the palm of my hand.
Metal shifted and folded at a microscopic level. In less than a second, a mechanical drone no larger than a grain of sand materialized. Its wings buzzed silently, and it took to the air, vanishing instantly into the surrounding environment.
It was the morning after my encounter with the red knight, Mordred.
Currently, I was residing in a pocket dimension—a blank, white void generated by Pseudo-Endo: Ain Soph Aur. Here, outside the bounds of normal reality, I could work without any risk of detection or interruption.
My primary task: establishing a surveillance network.
Since last night, I had been manufacturing and deploying these micro-drones. I had already released tens of thousands of them. They slipped out of the pocket dimension, scattering across the winds to act as my eyes and ears.
While my clones could also perform reconnaissance, they required a constant stream of processing power from my Main Unit to maintain their complex AI and combat readiness.
These micro-drones, however, were simple, independent machines. I could deploy millions of them without straining my system's bandwidth.
By this afternoon, I calculated that my network would cover the entire surrounding region.
While the drone production ran in the background, I focused a fraction of my processing power on Pseudo-Rasiel.
Even with only 50% of the world's data unlocked, it was more than enough to establish my basic GPS coordinates.
[Location Query Complete.]
[Current Location: Northern Balkans, Eastern Europe. Nation: Romania.]
I stared at the data overlay.
Romania?
My internal fans whirred slightly faster. In my previous life on Earth, my knowledge of the Fatefranchise was limited to what my friend had rambled about. I knew about a Holy Grail War that took place in a Japanese city called "Fuyuki."
Romania, a country bordered by Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary, was definitively not Fuyuki.
I let out a quiet, internal sigh.
My reliance on a broad keyword search for the Dimensional Engine had been a critical error. Fate was not a single story; it was a sprawling multiverse of spin-offs and alternate timelines. I had essentially thrown a dart at a board while blindfolded.
[System Update: 'Keyword Search' protocol reclassified as HIGH RISK. Random dimensional transit without specific coordinate data is now restricted.]
Fortunately, this specific "roll of the dice" hadn't landed me in a truly apocalyptic timeline. If I had been dropped into a universe completely devoid of mana or populated by cosmic entities that defied logic, the consequences could have been fatal.
It was a valuable lesson learned.
I closed the system log and looked at the steady stream of drones departing my hand.
Since the moment I awoke as an Ex-Machina, the mysterious System that accompanied my transmigration had completely overwritten the native AI of my chassis.
At first, I had viewed it simply as a tool. But moments like this made me profoundly grateful for its existence.
According to the lore of No Game No Life, the Ex-Machina named Schwi had suffered catastrophic system errors and logical paradoxes when she attempted to process the concept of a human "heart."
The conflict between machine logic and human emotion had literally broken her code.
….
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