"Th... thank you."
A frail child's voice sounded beside him. Sovell looked down and found his little Master thanking him.
Looking at Sakura's young face in the moonlight, Sovell couldn't resist reaching out to rub her cheeks...
They felt lovely.
Sakura was a little stunned by this sudden "attack." She stared blankly at the smile on Sovell's face, then smiled along with him without knowing why.
"You don't need to thank me, Master. I'm your Servant. Protecting their Master is what a Servant does."
As he spoke, Sovell slowly moved his hand to the top of Sakura's head, hoping to give her a sense of security.
"All right, it's getting late, Master. Time for bed."
His words carried a suggestion spell, and drowsiness gradually enveloped Sakura as she slowly returned to her little room.
Seeing how tightly she clutched the half-scale in her hand, unwilling to let go, Sovell smiled helplessly and gently closed the door.
The moment he turned around, the smile vanished from Sovell's face, replaced by a grave expression.
Between the knowledge imparted to him by the Greater Holy Grail and the fragments of memory he had glimpsed in Zouken Matou's thoroughly decayed soul, Sovell had gained some understanding of his current circumstances.
It was now roughly fifteen hundred years after Camelot's founding, or the year 1993 by the current calendar.
He was in Japan, an island nation at the far eastern end of Eurasia.
And what existed here was not his original self.
Instead, he was an incarnation recorded after death through his legend in a "Ghostliner" on the Reverse Side of the World, then summoned and confined here through a "Class."
Strictly speaking, he was a kind of familiar.
Since Morgan, in her fairy persona, had sent both his body and soul to Avalon as