Touko's Grand Plan

Touko Aozaki was undoubtedly a person of astonishing talent.

In just two short years, Touko had attained the rank of Grand at the Clock Tower. The reason was that she had used cutting-edge puppetcraft to create a body identical to her own. In other words, if she died in an accident, her consciousness would transfer into the new body and replace the original one, without any loss whatsoever.

Outsiders did not know whether Touko's replica technique merely transferred memories and created a copy of herself in the world, or whether it could continuously and seamlessly transfer her consciousness and soul in their entirety into a new body. Thus, quite a few magi, including Cornelius Alba, scoffed at Touko's achievement. They believed that even if a new Touko replaced the original Touko, she would no longer be the same person. However, only Touko Aozaki herself knew the truth.

Therefore, if she had not been so fixated on the Aozaki family's Magic, she would not have eventually earned the nickname "Scarred Red." At the Clock Tower, she would have been a top-tier super genius with an excellent reputation.

Besides her extraordinary accomplishments in puppet magecraft, Touko had also reforged the foundation of Rune magecraft in the modern era, allowing Rune magecraft—which had nearly lost all effectiveness along with the passing of the Age of Gods—to shine once more. It was even said that she possessed several Rune stones from the Age of Gods...

In short, after achieving so many remarkable feats, Touko decided to run away.

One afternoon, shortly before her escape, she loaded the C4 plastic explosives she had bought into small spider puppets of her own making. She also used the spatial expansion effects of Imaginary Number magecraft inside them, ensuring that the explosives possessed sufficient yield and destructive power. The technology used by the spider puppets themselves did not involve any of Touko Aozaki's publicly disclosed proprietary techniques; they were the kind of things anyone could buy with enough money.

That night, when Cornelius Alba returned to his bedroom after a busy day, a violent explosion occurred. Mr. Alba, once regarded as the promising future head of the Shpinem Abbey, was blown to death in his own home.

The Clock Tower's Department of Law immediately dispatched an investigative team, but they found no trace of Cornelius Alba having been assassinated by a fellow magus. If they had to name a possibility, there was a mage killer named Kiritsugu Emiya in the Middle East who had often used similar methods combining modern technology and traditional magecraft to assassinate magi in recent years. He had even earned the title "Magus Killer," forcing the Department of Law to suspect that someone had paid Kiritsugu Emiya to do the job.

Touko herself was naturally among those who could never be suspected, because aside from speaking with Alba a few times, she appeared to have no connection to him whatsoever. Unless Zelretch himself, capable of traversing time, conducted the investigation, her crime could never be discovered. As for why she had chosen this method of assassination, it was precisely because Aoko's letters had deliberately or casually mentioned Kiritsugu Emiya's exploits before, and warned Touko to be careful of that man...

As for accidentally making Kiritsugu Emiya take the blame, Touko did not care in the slightest. She had looked into it a little beforehand and discovered that the leader of the enforcement team when Kiritsugu Emiya's father, Norikata Emiya, had received a Sealing Designation was Cornelius Alba. What she had done could be considered revenge on Kiritsugu Emiya's behalf, so what was wrong with making him take the blame?

In short, Alba was dead, and the burden in Touko's heart had lightened considerably.

On the day Lord Barthomeloi proposed placing Touko under a Sealing Designation, Touko greeted her teacher that morning, then fled the Clock Tower that afternoon with all her belongings, heading for the place she had planned.

Touko believed that her sister knew enough about her by now, and that her combat strength was by no means weak. If she wanted to defeat her younger sister head-on, she had to make sufficient preparations—for instance, acquiring a powerful enough familiar to deal with her sister's overwhelming barrage of magic bullets and those strange self-developed "spells."

After two years of uninterrupted searching, she had already found a target. Touko believed that if the intelligence she had gathered was true, then even if her younger sister had completely mastered the Fifth Magic, she would still have the strength to fight her with this "familiar."

Touko had once found clues to her target in a precious record. It was a pure Phantasmal Species that was still alive, a remnant left behind in the present world when Mystery vanished from the surface of the earth.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a golden infant was born in a werewolf settlement somewhere in Europe. The villagers of the werewolf village regarded the golden infant as the golden beastliness of the forest god, placed great hopes upon it, and named it "Lugh," meaning "sun."

However, as time passed, the villagers discovered with disappointment that the infant did not grow at all. After taking the form of a human or werewolf around ten years old, it never changed again, and it had no gender whatsoever. The werewolves finally realized that this thing was not a werewolf at all, but some other existence disguised as one.

Touko speculated that this Phantasmal Species had likely achieved part of the Third Magic, existing through the "materialization of the soul." If she could make this golden wolf her familiar, then with the degree to which it had returned to the Age of Gods, modern magi would be completely incapable of affecting it. In that case, she could not possibly lose to her younger sister.

Touko had actually obtained this record long ago, but because she took Aoko's prophecy about her as a warning, she had never devoted enough effort to verifying the record or locating the werewolf village.

She sent her younger sister a letter of challenge: eight months later, Touko Aozaki would return to her loyal Misaki Town and reclaim everything that had once belonged to her.

Of course, Touko knew that none of this would be easy, so she needed to obtain that golden wolf as soon as possible. Then, following the itinerary she had prepared, she would make a circuit around continental Europe. It would improve her strength while also allowing her and the golden wolf Lugh to become familiar with one another and train their coordination.

Sitting on the train, Touko's lips curled slightly upward. As she gazed at the natural scenery of a foreign land beyond the window, her mood could not help but grow light and buoyant. The thought of her smug little sister pitifully begging for mercy before her one day thrilled her beyond measure.

As long as she obtained the golden wolf and defeated her younger sister, everything would naturally get better, wouldn't it?