“Go for it, Sir Bluebeard! Destroy them! Slaughter them! This is God's own toy box!”

Just then, he was shoved hard by an unseen hand.

Falling painfully on his backside, he looked around, shocked. Nobody was near enough to touch Ryūnosuke. On the contrary, the people around him started to scream and back away when they saw him. It was as though he was one of the absurdities in the river and in the sky, appearing right before their eyes.

“What is it? Hey, what?"

Just as Ryūnosuke expectantly started asking the people around him where this new oddity was occurring, he casually put his hand to his stomach and felt something hot and slippery... and then, he started fixedly at his own hand, dyed crimson.

“Whoooa..."

Red. Pure, captivating red.

The glistening, vivid, fundamental color that he had always been seeking.

Ah, this is it ― Ryūnosuke instantly understood, a faint smile on his pale lips.

The color he was searching for all along. The thing he teared through all sorts of places to find but could never obtain, the true "red".

Lovingly, he embraced his abdomen, gushing with fresh blood.

“I see...... I never realized, huh......”

"The darkest place is under the candlestick" - those words were well said. He had never thought that what he was seeking could be hidden somewhere so near himself...

He was intoxicated, his skull completely filled by the surging analgesia. The second shot struck him in the center of the forehead.

Even though his entire head above the nose had been blown away without a trace, his lips still traced a smile of total bliss.

※※※※※

Got him ― confident, Emiya Kiritsugu, kneeling on one knee on the deck of the ship, lowered the muzzle of the Walther night vision sniper rifle.

He was about two hundred meters downstream from Caster's monster, close to the heart of the river at Fuyuki Bridge. Kiritsugu, who happened to have been staking out the harbor just as Caster appeared, promptly chose one of nearby empty yachts and commandeered it, arriving here.

Needless to say, it never crossed his mind to attack the monster Caster had become. Using the panic as cover, Kiritsugu's aim once again was to 'hunt' the Master.

The light amplification scope loses its efficiency as the number of particles in the air increased, making it useless in this fog; however, this was no trouble for the infrared scope, crucial for differentiating magi. Within the gathering crowd of onlookers, Kiritsugu searched for the thermal pattern characteristic of Magic Circuits. As a result, one of those individuals was gunned down.

Under these circumstances, anyone loitering near the riverside while keeping Magic Circuits active must be involved in the Holy Grail War.

The probability of his target being the Master of Caster was over sixty percent. For now, taking the shot was the right choice.

- Fate/Zero: Act 10, Part 3