Empty Husk 1 (Patreon)

Empty Husk - or ‘My Emotions, Shattered but my Will, Unbroken’ (Kotomine Kirei!SI feat. Whitesnake)

August 1979.

It was a hot day in the Bosnian Countryside, and the military train that was escorting a VIP target from Zaghreb to Sarajevo and then to Belgrade was going through its planned route as smoothly as possible.

The soldiers were not aware of why a single man warranted this much cover. Not even the officers in charge of the operation knew, but they were told by the Army Chief that this was an important task and that they would face extreme consequences if they did something to ‘unnerve or hurt their guests’.

This piece of information shocked a few officers, but none spoke about it as they just proceeded with their task. The country was a bit strained as of recently, but the military control was still absolute. So, they complied to their command and… met their demise while trying to protect the oddly nervous British man.

The first clue they were damned was when a seemingly invisible string broke through the nearest window to where the skittish VIP was pacing by. The string wrapped around his neck, pulling him through the opening made through the window.

Panic surged within the soldiers near to the sight, but before they could have uttered something at the absurd scene of their VIP’s kidnapping a large bomb exploded. No, it wasn’t just one. It was multiple bombs going all at once.

The explosives outright shredded the entire train into pieces, the sheer amount of TNT employed being stunning in its magnitude and settlement. But of the surviving witnesses, only three could see the end result.

No one but the man that was quickly silenced with a concussion, and the two ‘terrorists’ behind the attack. The one that retrieved the VIP, who in truth was a Rogue Magus from the Clocktower that had decided to vanish after being caught in an investigation over his ‘Pro-Nazi’ experiments back in WW2 and was being hunted down by the Magus Association, was none other than the youngest Executor in the Holy Church.

And that’s me.

My name is Kirei Kotomine, I am 12 and I have been in service of the Holy See as one of the most dangerous agents around for two years now. And the mission I had been given… I know that the original Kirei wouldn’t have taken.

Not without reason, not without purpose. But I had one despite the fact that, ever since I woke up in the body of one of the most dangerous monsters of Early Fateverse Lore, I have been lacking the physical capacity to harness emotions. My mind was unable to properly establish emotions and the only way I could muster those at times was by ‘muscle memory’ through my soul.

It was an odd phenomenon, but I would dare to say that the lack of a genuine ego-driven understanding of my ‘pain’ as an emotionless bastard had somewhat given me the means to fully understand its meaning.

It wasn’t a curable trait. This was a saddening element that I had to accept-

What I couldn’t accept was leaving someone else that didn’t deserve it to perish for a sin that she didn’t deserve. Hence why, two years into being an Executor, I had to do something quite illegal by the order’s standards: I acted on this mission without the explicit support of the Holy See.

‘Too dangerous’. What a shitty excuse. It was frustrating when politics were involved. The Association had put a lot of stakes to see this bastard dead, and, admittedly so, he had done enough to warrant it. In truth, however, the necessity to see him dead was to cover up something far more sinister- the fact that the Association had indeed supported his research during the war and provided with the  right amount of corpses and live specimens to get progress done.

The reason why I was hunting him down was less on what he did, but what he found. The man had been working mostly on people that were afflicted by Immunodeficiencies and had known to have made some progress on the topic on how to solve such a dangerous illness. Hence why I needed his knowledge on the matter.

Now, normal Magecraft can’t exactly do this. You have to be from a specific family to be able to harness such a power within this world. Or, that is what the standard rules dictated in this regard.

But my existence is… anomalous. The day I ‘arrived’ was the day Kirei Kotomine ‘died’. Such a circumstance was similar to how Ciel came to be in the Tsukihimeverse. And while that meant she couldn’t die, mine was anomalous enough to create something else that stuck to me. Something tied to my soul.

And that ‘thing’ was now the key to my success in interrogation.

Standing at almost twice my height and mustering muscles I didn’t have, the Stand known as ｢Whitestnake｣ was not the best Stand by the ‘super-stronk’ Jojo-tier standards. Muscles or not, its Destructive Power was ‘unknown’ for a reason as it could hardly muster the proper strength to know how really powerful it was. All I knew was the DISC trick which allowed me to steal conceptual aspects of an individual, such as their knowledge and, in a rather cheeky manner, also something less abstract. Such as their capacity to breathe.

The crazy Nazi scientist died without the two DISCs containing his research and his means to put air in and out of his lungs. The latter was destroyed, while the former stuck to me as I walked up to the car distantly waiting for my return.

A single man stood waiting by the vehicle, and I spared him a nod as we both entered the car and left without uttering a single word on what had just happened. At least, not for a few minutes on the road back home.

“I am actually surprised that the Shura’s Den deemed it to be too dangerous of an operation,” Risei Kotomine, ‘my’ father remarked as he was driving us to Split so we could take a boat and return to Italy. “Then again, the Clocktower has been active to cover their tracks. Did you find what you were looking for?”

I slowly nodded as ｢Whitesnake｣ was silently writing down the content of the DISC within the empty notebook I had left for it to use for the occasion. The Stand was writing fast and using the very calligraphy used by the Magus I just killed so that no one could trace it back to me.

“Yes. I believe this will be enough to heal Claudia.”

…

“Son, may I ask you a question?”

That phrase is never the source of good conversations.

“Yes,” I answered quietly and Risei sighed.

“Are you aware that Claudia will be upset if she learns of what you did?”

A fair assessment, but one I was quite uncaring of. “I am.”

“Are you, Kirei? Be honest with me.”

This tone of unease was a bit off-putting and odd, but I held my calm through it.

“She would hate me. She would say I am putting my life on the line for hers even though God has already told her she had to die earlier than others,” I remarked with a hint of ‘irritation’. I couldn’t exactly do a proper irritated tone, but I could damn replicate it if needed. “Yet, we both know such a defeatist tone is unforgivable. I would just take the screeching and keep on being by her side.”

“What if God really wanted her premature passing?”

“Then I would say that’s a lie.”

Risei glanced through the rear window. “Kirei, the Lord only knows when it is our time to die.”

“I would never put that in doubt. But, to say that this justifies the Lord’s interest to see people perish when they can overcome the pain and live long enough to further be blessed by this gift would feel a bit on the nose.”

“If not worse,” Risei agreed, gaining a nod from me. “You still killed in her name.”

“Yes.”

This time, Risei smiled mischievously at my response.

“Would it be fair to say that you love her more than a friend, son?”

What’s with this chat? I thought that the man wasn’t too deep into teasing.

“I understand her, she understands me. It's as simple as that.”

“I can tell…” Risei hummed, and silence followed after that.

He knew that I shouldn’t have done this and that it was going to cost our family some of our favors to cover our butts but… ‘it was all for a good thing’. Once this report was delivered through some of father’s friends to be then ‘discovered’ as something the bastard had failed to pull out of Italy, the research would be used to find a cure to this illness by magecraft. And, once that’s done… Claudia will get better.

And not die. That’s the most important thing.

Despite my unusual conditions, I didn’t seek to change too much too soon. I was too young, too underprepared and there were too many conditions limiting my means to make the difference. At this point, it wouldn’t be too unrealistic of a perspective to accept that the real ‘fun’ was going to start during the Holy Grail War of 1994.

It was going to take a while for that but… I was going to be ready. I had roughly 15 years to prepare for this to counter all serious threats to my goals.

I may be unable to fix myself, but I was going to do an effort to protect those that didn’t deserve any of the shit that was bound to happen in this crazy universe.

—------d-d-d-d—----

AN

So, I was stuck with the idea of making a Pucci or a Kirei SI story so I mixed them both a bit, and now Kirei is interested in claiming the heaven and… fuck with Gaia and Alaya while they can’t see him at all. There’s a reason why the timeline is not getting pruned and… it’s not a Singularity. Or a Lostbelt.

The situation is, reasonably so, more bizarre.