This Was Supposed to Be Tsukihime's Set?

Shirou Emiya had actually answered by applying templates from the Clock Tower, the Jewel Mage, and Brisan.

Little did he know they had been talking completely past each other.

Charlotte had been planning to keep probing, to see whether Shirou Emiya belonged to the Yaqi Eight Families, Japan's mixed-blood clan.

But halfway through typing, she was stunned to find that Emiya had sent a message saying he had something urgent to deal with and would talk later, then logged off.

You ran off again!?

Looking at the lone silhouette avatar that had already gone gray, Miss Charlotte puffed out her cheeks and stamped her foot in frustration.

Hmph. Even if I haven't inherited my seat on the board yet and my authority is limited, I'll dig up your secrets sooner or later.

Having escaped the young lady's pestering, Shirou Emiya let out a long breath.

Whew... an illustrious alchemy family... Whenever that came up, he always thought of Gordolf, the chubby director from Fate/Grand Order. His specialty was alchemy that "turned rotten meat into marbled beef," and he came from the Clock Tower's Department of Law.

But he had an awful impression of the Clock Tower, that massive yet bloated institution of the Mage's Association, and did not want to say much about it. In the FGO timeline where the Humanity Crisis occurred, the Mage's Association's other two major organizations had each shown their capabilities, while the Clock Tower alone had performed disastrously.

And the Clock Tower would even issue a "Sealing Designation" for "rare talents," dispatching Sealing Designation Enforcers to capture and "recover" them.

What counted as a rare talent?

If Shirou Emiya honed Projection Magic to its limit in the future and, as a human, manifested the Reality Marble: Unlimited Blade Works, he would fall into that category—no, he might receive a Sealing Designation the moment he could project Noble Phantasms.

Therefore, even though the Clock Tower had established schools and branches across the world to recruit students, it was hard for him to feel any goodwill toward it. If anything, he ought to regard those Western powers as hypothetical enemies.

However, Shirou Emiya's hurried logout this time had not been entirely an excuse to slip away.

Because he had received an encrypted call from his bounty hunter teammate, Old Tang.

"Old Tang?"

"Haha, it's me. Brother Emiya, there's news about the ancient swords you were looking for last time, 'Ganzhiang and Moxie'!"

Pure American English and an eager tone came through the phone. The image of a man with drooping brows and an oddly cheerful face immediately rose clearly in Emiya's mind.

Old Tang's full name was Ronald Tang. He seemed to be a Chinese American who had dropped out of high school and lived in a Brooklyn slum, making a living by taking bounty hunter jobs.

Old Tang claimed that he was not particularly capable, but that great fortune protected him. Even during dangerous ancient tomb and ruin exploration jobs, others would often come back covered in injuries—or suffer a total wipeout.

Yet he, despite being directionally challenged, somehow managed to pull off unbelievable plays through blind guessing, then leisurely walked away intact after finding ancient treasures. His peers often cursed him for having freakishly good luck.

Shirou Emiya had met Old Tang during their previous mission. Seeing Shirou casually craft alchemical weapons by hand, Old Tang had been utterly awestruck. Grinning, he said that if they handed those shabby antiques to his brother here for processing and then resold them after packaging them as "masterpieces excavated from some ancient site"... they could make a fortune while lying down.

Then he clapped his hands and laughed, saying that in the future, Old Tang would dig up treasures while Emiya made fakes. Once his brother's output increased, he would find connections in the hunter circle, open an agency, bring in a few more brothers, and jointly take on such jobs. Everyone could make money together.

"I provide the men, you provide the labor. Digging graves, seeking treasure, opening coffins, getting rich. The road is wide beneath the sky, and we each walk our own path. We all have a bright future."

Old Tang had painted quite the rosy picture. Emiya merely complimented him with, "Impressive, impressive. Let's encourage each other. Also, 'the road is wide beneath the sky, and we each walk our own path' doesn't mean that. You used that Chinese proverb wrong."

At that, Old Tang exclaimed, "Brother, you know Chinese too?"

Shirou Emiya rolled his eyes. I was a bona fide Chinese man in my previous life. On the other hand, he found it rather strange that Old Tang, a fake Chinese who had grown up in America, had suddenly started throwing around Chinese phrases.

Old Tang waved it off and said he had recently befriended a StarCraft player whose IP was in China and whose ID was "Mingming." The other person was young but pretty good with the Zerg, seemingly a match for him, and worth getting to know. So he practiced typing Chinese whenever he had free time. Once their company grew bigger and stronger, they could even expand into China and open a branch there. Learning Chinese had countless benefits.

Emiya did not particularly want to hear Old Tang boast about being "lonely at the top like snow" in StarCraft, because Emiya did not play StarCraft at all.

"Alright, get to the point."

"Sure. The news about 'Ganzhiang and Moxie' depends on this mission. It'll be the two of us teaming up again. Good thing I've been single for years, so my hands were fast enough to snatch two slots, haha... Actually, I used quite a few connections too. The mission site is a southeastern city in China. Rumor has it that it's a Chu Kingdom Ruins from the pre-Qin era, most likely the Tomb of the Three Kings."

The twin swords Ganzhiang and Moxie were Red Archer's most iconic weapons, and the Noble Phantasms Shirou had decided to project first. Legend said that they attracted each other and were extraordinarily sharp. They had been forged by a married couple from the State of Wu using the essence of five mountains, gold from six peaks, and human life, and were ultimately used to assassinate the King of Chu. The assassin and the King of Chu were both buried in the Tomb of the Three Kings.

Old Tang muttered a few more words on the other end of the line, saying he would pull him into a chat group so he could meet the employer—or rather, the mission agent—whom he had connected with through his network.

Soon afterward, Emiya found himself pulled into a... newly created StarCraft chat channel. There were only three people in the channel: Emiya, Old Tang, and someone with the ID "Wa Lord."

"?"

So your connections are gaming connections!?

"What's wrong with games? Being able to build connections through them is a skill too!" Old Tang spoke with little conviction but plenty of confidence, sounding thoroughly righteous.

"See that 'Wa Lord' in the channel? She's the top person in charge of this mission. Arranging teams of several hundred people is just a matter of a word from her. She's also an expert Protoss player—even I have to admit defeat before her!"

Anyone who did not know better would have thought Old Tang was assembling a team to charge into the IEM StarCraft finals.

Shirou Emiya truly could not find any angle from which to play along, so he dryly recited, "Oh, oh, that really is incredible! What about the 'Mingming' you mentioned before? How good is he?"

"Well, Mingming is still young, so he's a bit lacking. He's barely ranked third beneath me, but he has plenty of room to improve." Old Tang's tone was unbearably smug, as though he were gesturing out a universe on his fingertip.

Next, Old Tang introduced his "good brother Emiya" to Wa Lord and praised him extravagantly, determined to hype him up as an unparalleled genius seen only once in a century...

Wa Lord merely watched the messages without saying anything. After a while, she typed a sentence:

"An alchemical talent who awakened his Bloodline Descendant abilities on his own? Which Mixed-Blood Family is he a disciple of?"

"Mixed-Blood Family?" Old Tang was dumbfounded and did not know how to respond. He only counted as half an Underworld Person himself and did not even know the truth about the Dragon World.

"You mean the Non-Human Race, right? In the distant past, descendants born from unions between humans and non-human races were also called 'mixed-bloods.' These Bloodline Descendants often possess physical abilities far beyond ordinary humans, as well as special powers."

Emiya explained in time, but his feelings were somewhat complicated.

The last time he had heard the term mixed-blood was the last time... when he had played Tsukihime in his previous life. The Tohno Family that had adopted the protagonist, Shiki Tohno, was a Mixed-Blood Family descended from humans and the Oni Race.

What timeline is this, exactly? How did I end up on Tsukihime's set?