Let's rewind.
Because every story needs its missing piece, and this Holy Grail War's missing piece was a twenty-two-year-old construction worker named Damian who had the worst timing in the history of interdimensional kidnapping.
See, transmigrating was supposed to be cool. Every isekai story, every system novel, every power fantasy ever written promised the same thing: ordinary guy gets plucked from his boring life, dropped into a world of magic and power, and handed the tools to become extraordinary.
And when the system notification had appeared in Damian's vision — the rules, the countdown, the crimson Command Spells burning into the back of his hand — his heart had done exactly what you'd expect. It soared. Pounding with excitement. Surging with possibility. The chosen one. The protagonist. The man destiny had finally noticed.
His mind had immediately begun running through the summoning possibilities. A gorgeous sorceress with dangerous curves and a protective streak. A tiny, sharp-tongued prodigy who'd call him an idiot while secretly adoring him. A fierce warrior queen with smoldering eyes and a sword as long as she was tall. An elegant, ice-cold swordswoman who'd gradually warm to his sincere personality.
Then the summoning circle had fired.
And out stepped three and a half meters of pitch-black muscle with a bald head, a gold tooth, and a roar that rattled Damian's fillings.
...Must be an illusion.
"ROAR!!!"
Not an illusion.
It took Damian exactly 0.01 seconds to accept reality.
This was, honestly, one of his better qualities. Maybe his only quality. As an orphan raised by his grandparents — no parents, no safety net, no backup plan — Damian had learned very early that the universe didn't care about your expectations. It dealt you a hand, and you played it. Period.
He'd accepted his own mediocrity. Accepted his grandparents' passing. Accepted that the girlfriend he'd dated for three years had left him for a guy with a nicer car. Accepted all of it, every time, because what was the alternative? Screaming at the sky? The sky didn't listen.
So: Berserker. Giant. Black. Terrifying. Couldn't speak in complete sentences.
Accepted.
And honestly? The situation wasn't as bad as it looked.
Because unlike some Berserker-class Servants — the ones who'd had their minds completely shattered by Mad Enhancement, reduced to howling, mindless engines of destruction — Damian's Berserker had only lost the ability to speak. His thought process was still intact. His intelligence was still there. He could understand orders, follow plans, and communicate through gestures and expressions.
After about thirty minutes of increasingly elaborate charades — Damian miming, Berserker grunting, both of them occasionally drawing stick figures in the dirt — they'd established a working relationship. Then a friendship. Then something approaching genuine mutual respect.
And then Berserker had handed Damian a ring.
A gemstone ring, heavy and warm, pulsing with magical energy. Some kind of mystic code from his legend — an artifact that generated its own mana supply, enough to sustain a Berserker-class Servant without external support.
Which meant Damian didn't need to visit the Holy Church for startup cash. Didn't need to interact with the other players at all. He could operate independently, self-sufficiently, completely off the grid.
Who said getting a Berserker was bad? Damian had thought, admiring the ring on his finger. This is actually kind of amazing.
The affinity summoning system had done its job. The Servant's personality synced with the Master's — that was the rule. And Damian, for all his rough edges, was fundamentally a decent person. Raised right. Raised kind. The sort of guy who'd give you his last cigarette and never mention it again.
So when he'd been standing on a rooftop the previous night — watching the battle at the docks through a pair of binoculars he'd bought at a convenience store — and seen the Captain's ship open fire on the bridge where Amber and Archer were standing...
Damian's sense of justice had ignited like a match dropped in gasoline.
A sneak attack. An ambush. On two people who hadn't even been part of the dockside fight. Just — boom. Full broadside. No warning. No declaration. Just a wall of cannonfire aimed at a bridge with a girl standing on it.
Damian had seen enough.
"Berserker," he'd said, pointing at the ship. "Sink it."
And Berserker — grinning that terrifying gold-toothed grin — had been happy to oblige.
One leap. That was all it took. A single, explosive jump that carried three and a half meters of muscle across a mile of open ocean and directly into the keel of the Queen Anne's Revenge like a ballistic missile made of flesh.
Sunk.
Of course, if you asked how Damian reconciled his "sense of justice" with the fact that Archer had also launched a sneak attack earlier — blasting the Swordsman into Lancer's face with a cannon shot from the bridge — well...
Damian had arrived too late to see that part.
Very convenient.
Now, there was one thing about Damian's evening that needed to be addressed.
His timing.
Because the reason Damian had arrived at the docks so late — arriving only during the final stages of the battle, well after the Assassin ambush and the Lancer-Saber duel — was that he'd been extremely far away when things kicked off.
Specifically, he'd been in a bubble bath. In a spa. In the city center. Roughly an hour's drive from the waterfront, even without traffic.
The reason for the spa visit was... complicated.
Damian was a construction worker. Had been, in his original world, for three years. And on the night the system had snatched him, he'd been at the spa because his foreman — a senior guy from the site, the kind of uncle-figure who took the younger workers out on weekends — had dragged him there for a night of relaxation.
They'd been having a perfectly nice time.
Then reality had folded, and Damian had found himself in a parallel world with Command Spells on his hand and a three-and-a-half-meter Berserker for company.
He tried not to think about it. About the foreman, probably still sitting in the spa wondering where the kid went. About the life he'd left behind — modest as it was, unfinished as it was.
He could go back. The system had promised that. Win the war, return to the real world. All he had to do was survive.
So to soothe the particular ache of spending half the night standing on a frozen rooftop in the sea breeze, waiting for Berserker to finish his little ocean-floor marathon and come home, Damian had decided to treat himself.
He'd found the highest-rated café in the city center on his phone.
The Maid Love-Love Café.
And it was fantastic.
The maid assigned to his table — a girl named Saki, with big eyes and a smile that could cure depression — had made him an omurice with a ketchup heart on it and called him "Master" in a way that made his ears turn red.
Life was good. Life was great.
The only problem was the obnoxious middle-aged man at the next table.
Loud. Slovenly. Dressed like a disaster. Talking at full volume about some kind of military strategy while his dining companions tried to shut him up.
Damian had been doing his best to ignore it. Eating his omurice. Watching Saki glide between tables. Minding his own business.
But the conversation at the next table kept getting louder. And more specific. And increasingly familiar.
"...Berserker's base stats are all A-rank or above..."
Damian's fork paused halfway to his mouth.
"...Lancer takes the front... Archer provides long-range support..."
His eyes narrowed.
"...find the opponent's Master... cut the supply line... the Berserker collapses..."
He set the fork down.
And turned around.
Holy crap.
The thick-browed, broad-shouldered giant sitting at the next table — the one who'd been casually discussing battle strategies between bites of cake — was the same man Damian had seen on the bridge last night. Standing next to that girl. The one who'd been targeted by the cannonfire. The one Damian had defended.
The Emperor.
Archer.
And he was sitting here, in this café, planning an attack on Damian's Berserker.
With the pirate. The same pirate whose ship Damian had sunk. The same pirate who'd launched an unprovoked assault on the bridge.
They were allies now?
Damian's blood pressure spiked.
I treated you like a friend, he thought, staring at the back of Archer's head. I sank a ship for you. And you're sitting here planning to hunt me down?
A calmer person might have paused. Reconsidered. Thought about the possibility that the situation was more complicated than it appeared.
Damian was not, at this particular moment, a calm person.
He stood up. Pushed back his chair. Wiped the omurice from the corner of his mouth. Walked over to the alliance's table with the steady, deliberate steps of a man who had made a decision and wasn't interested in unmake it.
And spoke.
"Well said. But you won't get the chance."
Every head at the table turned.
"Berserker — take them out."
What happened next was chaos.
Not battle chaos. Not the controlled, tactical chaos of Servants engaging on a battlefield. This was maid café chaos — the specific, unique, utterly unprecedented chaos that occurs when a three-and-a-half-meter Berserker materializes inside a restaurant that was, until thirty seconds ago, a place where girls in frilly aprons drew hearts on omurice.
The ceiling cracked. Not because Berserker hit it — because he was simply too tall. His bald head punched through the ceiling tiles like they were tissue paper, sending a shower of plaster and fluorescent lighting raining down on the tables below.
"AHHH!"
"AHHH~!"
"AAAHHHH!!!"
Screams erupted from every direction. Saki. Airiri. The customers. The kitchen staff. The guy who'd been quietly eating a parfait in the corner and was now wearing it.
Because this was a Berserker. Three and a half meters of obsidian muscle, materializing in the middle of a pastel-colored café like a horror movie monster crashing a children's birthday party. The sheer wrongness of the image — those massive, rippling arms next to the decorative cat-ear headbands on the wall display — was enough to short-circuit the human brain.
But then — in a moment of bewildering gentleness — Berserker seemed to realize the effect he was having.
He stopped.
Looked around at the terrified faces.
And smiled.
It was, in his mind, a kind smile. A reassuring smile. The smile of a gentle giant trying to tell everyone that he meant no harm and they didn't need to be afraid.
What it actually looked like was a three-and-a-half-meter nightmare baring a full set of gold teeth in the flickering light of a half-destroyed ceiling.
The screaming doubled.
The café emptied in seconds. Through the door. Through the windows. One person attempted to flee through the bathroom and was heard crashing into things for several seconds before finding an exit. Saki sprinted past Damian with an athletic ability that her maid uniform had done an excellent job of concealing.
Damian sighed, gave Saki a reassuring wave as she fled, and turned back to the alliance's table.
Where he was met with a very different scene than he'd expected.
The Captain and Archer were both standing, both armed — the Captain with a flintlock pistol, Archer with a smaller sidearm that had materialized in his grip. Both weapons were aimed at Damian's head.
But neither of them could move.
Because Lancer was standing between them, and his hands had slammed both of their gun-wielding wrists flat against the table.
The wood cracked under the force. The guns were pinned. The Captain and Archer both wore expressions of surprised outrage — the universal face of men who'd just had their plans disrupted by someone on their own team.
"No firearms," Lancer said. His voice was iron. "Not here. Not with civilians still in earshot."
The Captain sputtered. "He just sicced a Berserker on us—"
"And the Berserker hasn't attacked yet." Lancer's eyes were locked on Damian — or more precisely, on the massive figure looming behind him. Reading the situation with the speed of a warrior who'd been in more fights than he could count.
The boy had announced himself instead of ambushing. The Berserker had refrained from attacking the civilians. Both of them were standing there, waiting, rather than pressing an advantage they clearly had.
This wasn't an assassination. It was a challenge.
And challenges, Lancer understood.
"Outside," Lancer said.
Damian met his eyes. Nodded once.
"Fine."
So instead of the clean, clinical decapitation strike the alliance had planned — find the Master, eliminate him quietly, avoid the Berserker entirely — the situation had devolved into something far more dramatic.
Three Servants. One Berserker. Broad daylight. A public street.
As Lancer led the Captain and Archer out through the café's shattered front door, Crystal stayed behind with Damian, and for a moment — just a moment — the two Masters stood across from each other in the ruins of the Maid Love-Love Café.
Crystal's expression was complicated. Awed, mostly. And something else — that particular, irrepressible look she got whenever she was in the presence of a Servant being heroic.
Lancer stopped them from cheating. Lancer insisted on a fair fight. Lancer is SO—
She caught herself. Slapped her own cheeks. Focus.
I'm definitely going to make it up to him tonight. He is NOT escaping this time.
The predatory gleam in her eye made Damian take two involuntary steps backward.
And he wasn't the only one retreating.
Several miles away, in a church that smelled like coffee and old books, a priest who was not actually a priest nearly dropped his mug.
"You're telling me," Maverick said slowly, staring at the Hassan fragment who'd just delivered the report, "that Archer, Lancer, Rider, and Berserker — four Servants — are about to fight each other. In the street. In broad daylight. In public."
"...Yes."
Maverick stared.
The Hassan stared back.
"...This is going to be a very long week."