"Hello, can you hear me?"
This was a phone call from Japan to Britain.
"Ah, Mr. Kotomine."
The voice on the other end was steeped in exhaustion, sounding as though its owner had suffered through thirty consecutive hours of work.
The person on the other end was Waver Velvet, also known as Lord El-Melloi II.
"You don't sound too well. How did it go? Has the Grand Assembly concluded?"
Kirei Kotomine asked with a smile.
No reply came from the other end right away.
Only after a long while did Kirei Kotomine hear II sigh.
"The mess left behind by the former department head has finally been properly cleaned up. In every sense of the word, that man was utterly outrageous."
"He spent so long trying to overturn the world of magecraft. In the end, his fate suited his ambitions perfectly."
"So Heartless really is dead, then."
There was no emotional fluctuation in Kirei Kotomine's voice.
Heartless had been the previous head of the Department of Modern Magecraft before Lord El-Melloi. The adopted son of the Noriz Family, he had never held the rank of "Lord," but there was no denying that he was an exceptionally talented magus.
Yet alongside that talent, he possessed certain rather extreme ideas of his own. That was why he had caused such a tremendous upheaval in Europe over Spirit Tomb Albion.
It seemed that the matter had now been settled—by his successor, Lord El-Melloi II, the current head of the Department of Modern Magecraft and the true bearer of the title [Lord].
Though weak in terms of personal strength, the influence wielded by this weakest Lord was no less than that of any other Lord.
Kirei Kotomine did not know how he had ultimately dealt with his brilliant and powerful predecessor, but he was