Michael found a bench and sat down.
He opened the book.
That was two hours ago.
He was still sitting there.
The book was insane. That was the only word for it. He'd flipped through maybe three hundred pages and covered summoning circles, mana theory, catalyst classification, Servant class breakdowns, Noble Phantasm registration, contract mechanics, mana transfer methods. All of it written clean and simple like someone specifically wrote it for him to understand.
He tried to find the last page.
He couldn't.
He flipped fast. Kept flipping. His thumb ran along the edge and it felt like the pages just kept going. Five minutes of flipping and he still hadn't hit the back cover. He stopped and counted from a random middle point. Lost count somewhere past eight hundred.
He tried again from the front. Got bored at four hundred and just jumped ahead. New content every time. Servant lore he recognized from the games. Stuff he didn't recognize at all. Historical records. Ritual variations. Regional summoning adjustments.
The book did not end.
He finally gave up trying to find the last page. It clearly didn't want to be found.
"Okay," he said out loud. "Fine."
A pigeon near his feet looked at him. He ignored it.
He went back to the summoning section. He'd already read it twice but he read it again. The basic ritual was straightforward. Draw the circle with the right configuration. Place the catalyst in the center. Recite the summoning verse. Supply mana.
The mana part was the problem. The book said most people didn't naturally have mana circuits. But it also said the book itself would compensate during a Master's first summoning. Like training wheels. After the first contract the Master's circuits would begin developing on their own.
That was convenient. Almost too convenient. But this whole situation was too convenient so he decided not to think about it too hard.
He looked at the catalyst section again.
Catalysts had to have a connection to a specific Heroic Spirit. A physical object tied to their legend. Their weapons. Their belongings. Something from their era. The stronger the connection the more reliable the summoning.
He looked around the park.
Grass. Trees. Pigeons. A jogger going past with headphones in. Two kids throwing a frisbee forty feet away.
He didn't have a catalyst. He had nothing. His grocery store uniform, his shoes, and a book that didn't end.
He looked at the tree next to the bench.
A small branch had fallen in the grass below it. Maybe eight inches long. Thin. Dry. Just a regular stick.
He picked it up.
He turned it over in his hand.
The book had said weak catalysts produced unpredictable summonings. The Servant summoned would be whoever had the strongest available resonance with the object. Random. Could be anything.
He looked at the stick.
Then he looked at the summoning circle diagram in the book.
Then he looked around the park. The jogger was gone. The kids were far away. Nobody was watching this corner of the park.
"Fuck it," Michael said.
He got off the bench and crouched in the dirt patch under the tree. He used the end of the stick to scratch the summoning circle into the dirt. The book was open on the bench behind him, diagram facing out. He copied it as close as he could. It took about fifteen minutes. His knees hurt. He was pretty sure he looked insane.
He placed the stick in the center of the circle.
He stood up, looked at the verse in the book, and read it out loud.
His voice was flat and a little embarrassed.
"Let silver and steel be the essence. Let stone and the archduke of contracts be the foundation. Let rise a wall against the wind that shall fall. Let the four cardinal gates close. Let the three-forked road from the crown reaching unto the Kingdom rotate."
The air did nothing.
He kept going.
"I hereby declare. Your body shall serve under me. My fate shall be with your sword. Submit to the beckoning of the Holy Grail. If you submit to this will and this reason then answer."
The ground cracked.
Not literally. But the dirt around the circle started glowing. Orange-white light, thin at first, then brighter. The stick vibrated. The light climbed up from the ground and the air smelled like burning wood and something older underneath it, like earth after heavy rain and iron left in the sun.
The light exploded upward in a column.
Michael stumbled back two steps. His arm went up over his eyes. The heat wasn't bad but the brightness was intense, white-green at the center, and the sound was like wind moving through a massive forest all at once, leaves and branches, a full canopy shaking in a storm, even though he was standing in Central Park in March with barely any breeze.
Then it stopped.
He lowered his arm.
She was crouching in the center of the circle with one knee in the dirt and her head down, dark green hair falling forward across her face. Wild hair, the texture of it thick and uneven like it had never once seen a brush and didn't need one. It stopped just past her jaw on one side and her shoulders on the other, completely uneven and completely intentional somehow.
Then she looked up.
Her eyes were yellow-green. Sharp. Pupils thin. Her face was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen in appearance, small pointed features, a nose that turned up slightly, a jaw that was delicate but set hard right now. Her ears came to soft points through her hair. Not human ears. Cat ears, dark-furred and slightly flattened, reading the situation.
A tail moved slowly behind her. Same dark color.
She was short. Maybe five-two on a good day. But her body was built like something designed exclusively for speed and violence. Shoulders narrow but corded with lean muscle. Arms bare except for green arm guards that covered from her wrists to her elbows. Her top was a short green half-jacket, belted, showing her stomach, which was flat and tight with visible muscle along the sides. Her hips were narrow. Her thighs, visible below a green skirt that barely qualified as a skirt, were the thickest part of her, runner's thighs, built for chasing things down across miles of rough ground. Scratch marks, old and healed silver, ran from her left hip down across the outside of her thigh and disappeared below the hem.
She had a bow on her back. Enormous relative to her size, dark wood, already strung.
She looked at Michael.
He looked at her.
This Master is very young, she thought. And he smells looks really confused. He does not look dangerous. That might mean nothing.
"You're the one who summoned me," she said. Her voice was flat. Not unfriendly but not warm either. Direct.
"Yeah," Michael said.
"With a stick."
"Yeah."
She looked at the stick on the ground in front of her. Then she looked back at him. Her tail flicked once.
"I am Atalante," she said. "Servant. Archer class." She stood up in one clean motion, her hand resting on the grip of her bow without pulling it. "You have established a contract. I can feel it." She tilted her head. Her ear turned slightly, reading sounds behind her without her eyes moving. "This city is not any city I have walked before."
"Yeah," Michael said again. He realized he kept saying yeah and stopped. "It's New York. It's complicated. I'll explain."
She studied him for a three-second stretch that felt much longer.
"You do not look like a proper Master," she said.
"I'm really not," Michael said honestly.
That seemed to satisfy something in her. She dropped her hand from the bow, turned slightly to look at the park around them, and her yellow-green eyes moved fast and efficient across everything she could see, cataloguing it, filing it, deciding what was a threat and what wasn't.
Michael opened the book to a fresh page he hadn't seen yet and starts reading while she watches the treeline.