Chapter 6: Day 1: The Bed of Rot
Shirou walked out of the academy and looked up at the setting sun.
The sky had already begun to darken at the edges. Orange light stretched low across the town, catching on rooftops and windows and turning the street ahead of him softer than it really was. He had not realized how much time had passed.
That was mostly Issei's fault.
Well, not really. Blaming Issei for it felt unfair when the truth was much simpler. The heaters had not taken long to fix. They had barely been a challenge. Shirou had already figured out what was wrong with two of them within minutes, and the third had only needed a little more work because one of the internal connections had degraded worse than expected.
The problem was that he and Issei had started talking.
And once that happened, time had quietly stopped meaning anything.
That was how it always went with Issei. They would start on one subject, drift into another, then somehow end up discussing things that were both completely pointless and strangely important. Complaints about school budget allocation would turn into a conversation about temple discipline. A comment about club activities would become an argument about whether curry counted as proper breakfast food. Then they would somehow arrive at a serious discussion about personal responsibility or community duty, only for Issei to say something so monk-like and sincere that Shirou had to fight not to laugh in his face.
They had just enjoyed being there.
That was all.
By the time Shirou noticed how low the sun was getting, he had cursed under his breath, promised Issei they would finish the conversation another day, and rushed through fixing the last heater while Issei stood nearby holding the tools and watching him work with calm interest.
Not that Issei had minded. If anything, the guy had looked pleased.
"Your attentiveness is impressive, Emiya." Issei had said, as if discussing a martial arts kata instead of a beat-up school heater.
Shirou had only stared at him for a second before snorting.
'How very monk-like of you.'
Even now, remembering it made him shake his head a little.
He sighed and kept walking.
The cold air bit at his lungs in a way that felt oddly comfortable. It always had, ever since that day. Heat still felt wrong with him, even now. Fire belonged to memories he never wanted to revisit for too long. The cold was simpler, cleaner. It stung, but it never felt greedy. It never felt like it wanted to consume anything.
So Shirou let himself breathe it in.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and headed down the street toward where he remembered the Matou estate to be, not without a dull, uncomfortable ambivalence settling in his chest as he went.
He hated going there. That had never changed.
It did not matter how many times he told himself it was only a house. It did not matter that Shinji walked around school like the place was perfectly normal. It did not matter that Sakura came and went from it every day. Every time Shirou got near the estate, something in him tightened.
Still, he kept walking. No matter how much he disliked it, he would push through.
Just as she would for him.
Sakura Matou was… odd.
That wording felt too harsh, maybe. Or maybe it was not harsh enough. Odd was a small word for something that Shirou had never once been able to neatly understand.
When they first met, the smell surrounding her had nearly made him vomit on the spot.
Even now he remembered that first impression with embarrassing clarity. Not because of Sakura herself, but because of the way his whole body had reacted before his brain could even catch up. One look at a small girl standing beside Shinji, and then that smell had hit him. One of rot and dampness. The reaction had been immediate and vicious. His stomach had turned, his throat had tightened, and he had needed every bit of self-control he had not to visibly gag in front of her.
His senses had never been normal after the fire.
That was especially true of his sense of smell.
Kiritsugu had explained it to him years ago in the best way he could. Shirou could almost smell magecraft. That was the easiest way to put it, though Kiritsugu had corrected him almost immediately after saying it.
It was not really that he smelled magic itself. It was that his brain interpreted his ability to sense magic through smell.
The human mind struggled with things it was never meant to process. Pure magical energy did not fit neatly into ordinary perception, so magi often ended up experiencing it through strange channels. Some heard tones that were not there. Some described seeing texture or feeling color. In Shirou's case, his awareness of magical energy translated itself into scent.
Kiritsugu had called it a highly specialized form of synesthesia.
Shirou had called it deeply annoying. Because it meant that whenever something was wrong in that particular way, he had to smell it.
And right now, approaching the Matou estate again, that sense was making him regret being born.
The stench hit him as the manor came fully into view.
It had worsened since the last time he had been here. A lot worse. It rolled through the cold evening air in a way that felt almost thick. Not just rot or stale decay now. It was foul in layers. In wet, sour, crawling layers. It smelled like someone had fed Maggots corpses that had been left to fester in the sun, then let it curdle and become carrion.
"Ough... fuck..."
The words slipped out before he could stop it.
Shirou clutched a hand over his mouth and bent forward, bracing his other palm against the nearest wall to keep himself upright. His stomach turned so hard he thought for a second he might actually throw up right there on the street.
His eyes watered as he forced himself to breathe through his nose once, regretted it instantly, and switched to shallow breaths through his mouth instead.
'What the hell is this?'
How could a smell like this exist in a neighborhood like this?
The street around him was quiet, clean, and expensive. The kind of area where everything was trimmed, orderly, and painfully respectable. A nice neighborhood, if you ignored the fact that one property inside it seemed to be leaking the scent of death into the world like a curse.
He didn't get it, how could such a smell exist in an otherwise lͬoͣvⷫeͨlͥyͩ neiᵍgͬhͣbͮoͤuⷱrͣhͬoͩod? How is it that Sᶠhͦiͦᶫnji and Saͫkͤuͣrͭa never mentioned it? Was he going insane? Was it just him?
Did no one else smell the corpses left festering out to rot in the wake of the Black Sun?
The thought flashed through him so sharply that he froze. That phrase. That image.
Shirou shut his eyes hard and forced the thought back down.
'Not now…'
He stayed bent over for a while, breathing carefully until the worst of the nausea eased.
It took about a minute for him to gather himself enough to move again. Even then, he was not really okay. He had only managed to push the smell far enough to the edge of his mind that he could tolerate it.
That was different. Not better.
He straightened slowly and wiped at the tears stinging in the corners of his eyes, then looked up.
The Matou mansion stood ahead of him.
From the outside, it looked respectable. A large quiet, traditional manor, one built with old money in old land before the rest of the urban sprawl eventually caught up with it. The sort of place that should have felt dignified.
Instead, it felt wrong.
His thoughts, perhaps because he desperately needed them to be somewhere other than the smell, drifted back to Sakura.
To Sakura Matou, the girl he had come to treat as his little sister.
Or maybe something a little more than that, though he tried not to look at that thought too directly.
When Shinji had first introduced them four years ago, Sakura had just been a small quiet girl.
Now she was his junior. A girl who came to the Emiya house to help around the home, who cooked breakfast, cleaned without being asked, and smiled softly enough that people kept underestimating how much effort it probably took her to do it. The childish image he had first attached to her was fading more and more each year.
At first, Shirou had not thought much of her.
She was his best friend's little sister. That alone put her into a category that was supposed to be untouchable by sacred law. The Bro Code was clear on this sort of thing, Sakura Matou was completely off limits.
Then he had gotten injured during archery practice a year or so back.
Sakura had approached him on her own, without Shinji there to mediate or interrupt. She had offered to help while he recovered. There had been nothing dramatic about it. She had simply appeared, polite and hesitant, and asked if he needed anything.
Shirou had not known what to make of her.
It would only be polite to accept his junior's kindness. That part was obvious. But the smell clinging to her then had been so strong that it made his stomach turn. The rot mixed with the heavy perfume she wore, sweet enough that it almost made the underlying stench worse.
He had not known what to say. He had not known what to do.
So, like an idiot, he had asked her about it. Directly and without thinking.
He could still remember her face from that day.
He had never seen anything like it before or since.
Emba̾rͪrͣaͫsͤsment, yes. But not only em̾bͤᶫaᶠrᶫaͦsͣsͭmͪeͥnⷫᵍt. There had been something else there too, something tighter and deeper, something that made her whole body seem to close in on itself for a second as if he had reached out and touched a wound he had never even known existed.
He had realized a moment later how rude he sounded. How absurdly, unbelievably rude.
So he had apologized immediately, repeatedly. Before then inviting her in, because he could not bear the thought of leaving things there
It had taken a long time after that.
A long time to reassure her, to get her to speak to him properly instead of moving through the house in near silence, cleaning and cooking like she was trying to earn the right to stand in the same room as him.
An even longer time to get her to come out of her shell at all.
But since then, they had grown close.
Close enough that Shirou thought of her as part of his family.
That was the truth of it.
Even if, from the outside, he knew it probably looked strange. Fuji-nee had certainly had a fit when she first realized how often Sakura was visiting. He still remembered the exact expression on Fuji-nee's face when it dawned on her that there was apparently another girl regularly entering his life through the front door.
That woman's capacity for making normal things weird remained unmatched.
Shirou shook his head slightly, clearing the thought as he stepped up to the door. The smell was still awful, his stomach still did a nervous little twist. But none of that changed what he had come here to do.
He raised his hand toward the bell and pressed it.
The chime rang out through the manor at once, cutting through the evening silence.
It took a while for anyone to answer the door. Long enough that Shirou started to think no one would come at all.
He stood there in the cold, trying not to breathe too deeply through his nose, staring at the dark shape of the manor and listening for footsteps from inside. Nothing came. No light changed. No voice called out. The house just sat there in silence, as if it had decided to ignore him.
Then, in the absence of his own inner voice, he heard it.
A soft, dry sound of chittering and movement. It sounded like tiny legs scraping over wood. A faint rustling, as if a hundred little bodies were shifting somewhere close by, just out of sight.
Shirou went very still.
And now that he noticed it, he found it deeply wrong that he had not heard it before.
The sound was obvious. It should have stood out from the start. It should have been impossible to miss in the silence around the estate. But he had missed it anyway, or perhaps it had only started just now, the moment the house decided to acknowledge him.
His jaw tightened. 'What the hell is that?'
"Excuse me. Do you need something?"
"...!?"
Shirou spun around so fast his shoulder almost jerked out of place.
There, in the darkness of the night, as if he had stepped out from inside the sound of the bugs themselves, a figure stood behind him.
An old man. His body was small and bent, his frame thin enough that it looked like a strong wind could knock him over if it felt rude enough. But his eyes were sharp, sharp enough that Shirou's whole body locked up the moment they settled on him.
And yet his presence did not match his body at all.
"What is wrong, young one? Why do you not answer?" The old man asked, his voice was dry, calm, and almost amused. "If you do not answer, I shall jump to conclusions. Hmm.. So, can I assume you are the stranger Sakura was talking about?"
Sakura?
The word hit him first before he processed the situation.
The old man had said granddaughter before. He had said Sakura. He had appeared here, inside the grounds, moving like he had every right to be there.
So this had to be…
"Geez..." The old man went on, sounding mildly inconvenienced. "Since it is my granddaughter's wish, I cannot just let you go. I am sorry, but I will have to hurt you a bit. Just to be sure, you do not intend to hand yourself over to the police graciously?"
Shirou's mind went blank for half a second.
There was no mistake.
This was the first time he had ever seen him, but this man had to be Sakura and Shinji's grandfather.
And he was saying some deeply insane shit right to his face. Was this what people with senile relatives felt like?
"Ah... no, you have got it wrong." Shirou said quickly, forcing his throat to work as he scratched the back of his neck. "My name is Emiya Shirou. I am in the same class as Shinji, and I am a friend of Sakura. I just came to see how she was. I have not heard anything from her all day."
The old man smiled.
Shirou did not find it comforting.
"Oh. I see, you are their friend. Then I am sorry for stopping you. Well, I can go and get them. Or would you like to have dinner with us?"
"N-No." Shirou answered immediately, quicker than intended, if was being honest. "I was just stopping by, so I will be going. By the way, is Sakura home? Again, I am worried for her."
" ⷬZͣoͬuͣk̾eͥnͭᵉ."
The old man said the word instead of answering.
Shirou blinked.
"Huh?"
"Matou Zouken." The man continued. "It is wrong for me not to name myself when you have done so."
Matou Zouken.
He said it like the introduction mattered more than the question Shirou had actually asked. Then, without waiting for a proper response, he turned and began walking toward the gate with small, light steps.
It was so strange that Shirou just stood there and watched him.
The man had that kind of presence, and yet he moved so quietly it made Shirou's neck prickle.
After a moment, Zouken spoke again without looking back.
"Sakura is home, and she is doing well. She simply came down with a bit of a cold, so I am tending to her."
Shirou had no choice but to believe him.
There was nothing else he could do right now. He could not exactly force his way inside the Matou estate and demand visual confirmation that Sakura was tucked into bed and not being harvested for nutrients or some other equally horrible nonsense.
Still. Something about the way Zouken had said tending made Shirou's stomach turn and flip.
The old man then said something else. Something that shook him hard enough to wipe every other thought from Shirou's head.
"By the way, more importantly, is the daughter of the Einzberns doing well?" Zouken said, in the same mild tone.
Shirou's whole body went cold.
He did not react outwardly. Kiritsugu's training kept that from happening. But inside, everything in him snapped into place so fast it almost hurt.
That name.
The smell.
The pressure coming off this man.
It all made sense now.
Matou Zouken was a Mage.
And by extension, Sakura and Shinji Matou were part of a Magus family.
Shirou's guts twisted violently. The stink in the air suddenly felt less abstract and more personal, like the whole estate had been rotting from the inside for years and he had only just now learned the family living there called it normal.
Even so, he kept his face together. It was not perfect, he knew that much. He was not Kiritsugu. But he hoped he remembered his father's training well enough.
He swallowed. "...Huh? Ein-what? What's an Einz-boon?"
Zouken did not even turn to fully look at him. He only tilted his head slightly, seeming subtly amused by his silly mistake.
"Do not play dumb. It is natural for the daughter of the Einzberns to go and see Emiya. I am asking you how well it is this time around."
Shirou's heart pounded against his ribs.
He looked around on instinct, not wanting to but unable to stop himself. His eyes flicked toward the dark edges of the garden, the eaves of the house, the trees, the corners where something might be hiding. Every instinct in him screamed that this was bad. That the old man in front of him was dangerous. That this whole estate had just shifted from unsettling to enemy territory in the span of a single sentence.
Zouken, meanwhile, looked utterly unconcerned.
He did not raise his voice, or threaten Shirou.
That was almost worse.
"...Hm." Zouken murmured after a second. "It seems you really do not know."
He sighed.
It made Shirou's heartbeat get louder. One slip and the old man would attack him now. He knew it. And his instincts screamed at him to strike first.
Kiritsugu had trained that into him too. There were situations where the first move decided everything. Situations where waiting politely got you killed. Situations where smiling old men were the worst kind of enemy because they made you hesitate.
This felt like one of those situations.
Even so, Shirou held onto his better instincts. "...Well, I do not really understand, but I am sorry."
That was probably the safest answer he could muster.
The old man tilted his head a little farther, looked away for a moment as if considering something, and then turned back to him with a small smile.
"No, no. It is nothing you should feel bad about. It was a mistake on my part, I am sorry to bore you with such things. Here, if you want to see my grandchildren, do not hesitate. This old man will go away, so please do not reserve yourself."
The offer was creepy enough that Shirou had to fight not to make a face.
"Um, no, I really just stopped by today." He blurted without thinking, adding further on to help smooth over his awkwardness. "But, um... do you live here?"
"I do." Zouken answered with not a small amount of amusement. "But as you can see, I am old. So I merely lie in the rear tatami room all the time."
That was… not reassuring. And incredibly concerning. And also… entirely unrealistic, considering the western look of the mansion.
The two of them looked at each other for a few seconds without speaking.
"..."
"..."
"...I see."
Shirou nodded slightly, because something had to be said and because he desperately wanted this conversation to end before it got any stranger.
In truth, he had come to this house once about a year ago.
Back then, it had seemed like only Sakura and Shinji lived here. Or at least, they had been the only ones who mattered in any visible way. No sign of parents or relatives. No sign of anything except too much empty space and that awful smell.
Now he knew better.
"Then excuse me, Emiya Shirou. Please stay friends with my grandchildren."
Despite his appearance, he left with light footsteps and did so without even opening the gate.
That detail lodged itself in Shirou's mind immediately.
The old man just moved, simply passing back toward the estate with the same quiet, dry presence he had appeared with, and Shirou stood there unable to move for a second, watching him go.
There was no change in the house. The windows stayed dark. Nothing about the estate looked different than it had a minute ago.
But the sound of the bugs had stopped.
The silence that replaced them felt worse.
Shirou wanted to vomit.
The urge came up so fast and so hard he had to lock his jaw shut and breathe through his mouth again. His stomach twisted. His nose burned from the stink in the air. His pulse would not slow down.
But he held himself together, if only barely.
He knew better than to show weakness here.
Not now. Not in what had just revealed itself to be enemy territory.
So Shirou turned and walked away without looking back.
…
Shirou did not stop walking until he was out of the block entirely.
He kept moving with measured steps, even though every instinct in him wanted to run. His spine felt like it was on fire. His shoulders were stiff. His jaw hurt from how hard he had been clenching it. He kept going anyway, putting one street between himself and the Matou estate, then another, and another, until the stink of rot and death finally began to thin into the comparatively clean night air of the rest of Fuyuki.
Only then did his body give up pretending it was fine.
He found the nearest wall, caught himself against it with one hand, bent over hard enough that his ribs hurt, and vomited.
It came up bitter and violent. What little he had eaten at lunch, sour stomach acid, the taste of the Matou estate still somehow clinging to the back of his throat. He coughed between retches, eyes watering, breath tearing in and out of him in uneven bursts as his head spun.
"Damnit all..." He rasped, spitting the taste out of his mouth. "Is this what you meant, Ri... Tohsaka?"
He stayed there a while, one hand braced against the wall and the other pressed to his stomach, breathing through the aftershocks. His whole body felt wrung out. The smell was gone now, or far enough away that it no longer sat on his senses like a weight, but his nerves still remembered it.
And now that he had put a name to what he had felt there, now that the problem had begun to show itself, his mind went somewhere he had spent years refusing to let go.
Back to that summer day in that alley, to Rin's face when she looked at the knife in his hand and realized what he was.
"Please forget about me, and do not let anyone else know you are a Mage."
"This is for the best, for both of us. I cannot protect you if they find out about you."
At the time, he had not understood.
With his father's help, he had understood enough for it hurt even more.
Now, kneeling half-sick beside a wall because Sakura's house smelled like a graveyard soaked in magecraft, he understood a little more.
Kiritsugu had not told him everything.
His father had never intended him to be deeply involved in the world of Magi to begin with. He had taught Shirou enough to survive, to understand danger when it looked him in the eye, and enough to keep his body from tearing itself apart under the pressure of his open circuits.
But beyond that, Kiritsugu had always avoided giving him too much.
Still, Shirou knew some things.
He did not know any of the smaller families. Those did not matter in the bigger picture, according to his father. Kiritsugu had only ever spoken in detail about the three main families, the ones who had created the Holy Grail War in the first place.
The Einzberns. The Tohsaka. And the Makiri.
He knew Rin had to be one of them. That much had stopped being a question years ago. Rin Tohsaka was a Mage of the Tohsaka family. That was a fact. There was no room left to doubt it.
As for the Einzberns, Kiritsugu had spoken of them more than once in those rare moments when he let old memories slip into the present. He spoke of a woman with red eyes and white hair. A castle. An alliance during the Fourth Holy Grail War. A tryst that had ended in blood and regret and the birth of... her.
Kiritsugu had never said too much beyond that. He never needed to. The way his face changed when he spoke of it told Shirou enough.
But the Makiri… Those were the ones Shirou knew almost nothing about.
Only that they had somehow been instrumental to the creation of the war. Only that the name carried weight in the old stories Kiritsugu let slip. Only that it belonged to the sort of thing people did not mention casually unless they wanted a room to get tense.
And now there were the Matou.
A family set up within Fuyuki. A family carrying magecraft that made the whole estate rot from the inside. A family with an ancient old man who knew the name Einzbern, the name Emiya, and asked his questions like he was checking on the weather.
It did not take much to line the pieces up. Were the Matou the ones Rin had meant?
The family she feared would kill him if they found out about him?
It made sense. Shirou hated how much sense it made.
Yet knowing that brought him no comfort at all. Because once the pieces settled into place, and the fear took on a proper shape, all it left him with was one simple question.
Was Sakura Matou his enemy now, too?
The thought made him sicker than he expected.
He did not even want to think about it. His mind tried to step around it, tried to soften it, tried to phrase it in any other way. But the question stayed there anyway.
Sakura, who came to his house early in the morning and smiled softly while making breakfast.
Sakura, who cleaned the kitchen without being asked and pretended it was no trouble.
Sakura, who looked relieved and beamed whenever he praised her cooking.
Sakura, whose smell had always been wrong, and who had always gone quiet when he asked about it.
Could she really be part of that? Could she have known? Could she have been hiding it from him the whole time?
Shirou clenched his hand against the wall.
'I don't want that answer.'
He did not get long to think about it.
A voice came from behind him.
"So you really are still alive, Mͫoͦnͬgͭrͣᶫel?"
Shirou froze and turned around slowly.
A man stood atop a nearby building, looking down at him.
Even before Shirou's mind caught up, even before recognition hit, his body understood that what he was looking at was beyond him. It had too much presence, too much weight in the air around him.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered, and so offensively beautiful it almost looked deliberate. His hair was a pale gold that caught the moonlight and threw it back. His face had the sharp, perfect lines of some foreign king carved into flesh.
His crimson eyes looked down at Shirou with open disdain, as if the gap between them was not just height but class, species, and worth. As if it was even bigger than the difference between the Heavens and the Earth. He wore dark modern clothes, but they looked strange on him in a way, like ordinary fabric had somehow ended up draped over something royal by mistake.
There was arrogance in every line of him, and on the smirk lacing his face. The expression belonged on his face.
Shirou stared up at him, heart kicking hard against his ribs.
He truly did not understand what the hell the man was saying, but he did recognise him blankly.
Kiritsugu had spoken of the greatest threat he had faced in the Fourth Holy Grail War more than once. But he told him enough. Enough for Shirou to remember the details that mattered. A Servant in pure gold. A king. A monster who looked at everyone else as lesser lifeforms. A being who called others Mongrel like it was not an insult but a statement of fact.
And the magic pouring off him.
God… It was revolting.
Shirou could feel it even from here. The man was like a black hole set loose in the night, greedily pulling at all the mana in the air around him. The space around him felt starved, drained. As if magical energy itself rushed toward him just to vanish.
The golden creature threw his head back and laughed, it cut through the street and left Shirou's skin tight despite how soft it was in actuality.
"This is hilarious. It seems like Fate itself has chosen you to amuse me."
Shirou said nothing. Partly because he knew better than to speak without permission here. Partly because he genuinely had no idea how to answer that.
The man's red eyes narrowed slightly, amused by Shirou's silence rather than bothered by it.
"You are a worthy clown, I approve. Go forth, then, and do your best to entertain me. Summon your very own Servant, so that they may prove a suitable plaything for my Garden."
His Garden.
The man said it like he owned everything under the sky, and anything interesting that appeared in it automatically became his.
Shirou's throat tightened. So this was him, there was no doubt left now.
It was Gilgamesh, the great King of Heroes.
The greatest threat Kiritsugu had faced in the Fourth Holy Grail War. And he was here.
Standing under the moon in the middle of Fuyuki, looking down at Shirou Emiya like he had stumbled over a mildly interesting insect.
Before Shirou could force any words out, Gilgamesh disappeared without a warning.
One moment he stood on the building with the moon blazing behind him. The next, the place he had occupied was empty.
Shirou remained where he was, one hand still on the wall, staring up at the rooftop and the hard white moonlight beyond it.
He didn't know why but could still feel, deep in his gut, the cold certainty that things had just gotten much, much worse.
After all, the King of Heroes himself just announced it himself.
The Fifth Holy Grail War had begun. And Shirou Emiya had to prepare.
Lest his Dreams and Ideals die out in mockery and oblivion.