Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

  The moment Baiyi stepped onto the castle’s grounds, the dark-skinned loli controlled her Berserker to use its Noble Phantasm to dole out a swift, lethal attack at him. The dark-skinned loli watched with glee as the bolts of green lightning destroyed the intruder’s body before converging into a gigantic pillar of blinding light. This was the final stroke of her Berserker’s Noble Phantasm.

  “Ha!” The dark-skinned loli exclaimed haughtily. “Who called him a ‘powerful and mysterious’ magician? Faced with the power of my Berserker, all he could do was die! Victory in this Holy Grail war is ours , without a doubt!”

  Out of habit, the dark-skinned loli spread her arms open to hug her Servant, but when her arms were inches away from the skin of the Servant, the dark-skinned loli lept backward. She looked as though she had just received a mild electric shock even without skin contact.

  “Gah, it burns!” The dark-skinned loli yelled.

  “If we cool her down first, your fingers won’t burn on contact with her,” a voice helpfully said.

  “Ho, that’s smart! I’ll go get us some snow!” The dark-skinned loli’s ears perked up, and she began to run in another direction; however, she froze after a few steps and turned around mechanically.

  Her gaze fell on a bizarre-looking suit of armor, and out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her ‘mighty’ Berserker standing within a large chunk of ice. The suit of armor waved at her, and a smile broke out on its face mask as it said, “Hi.”

  The dark-skinned loli had fallen into stunned silence.

  “Tell me everything you know about the Holy Grail, including the method used to construct it, the magical system behind its operation, and how it brings the unreal to reality,” Baiyi asked directly. The dark-skinned loli was levitated into the air; at a time unknown, Baiyi had bound her with a Binding Spell, and soon, her eye was level with his. The Binding spell that Baiyi had used on the dark-skinned loli was a special one; every time she struggled, a wave of pleasure would assault her body. Hence, after struggling for a bit, the dark-skinned loli was completely red.

  However, she remained unyielding. In answer to Baiyi’s question, she spat at him. “Ptui!”

  “A tightlipped little girl you are, huh? I guess tearing down your beloved Berserker, piece by piece, would be the most effective way to convince you,” Baiyi replied. He punctured the chunk of ice and grabbed the Berserker’s arm, and with a hard yank, he pulled it straight out of her shoulder.

  The dark-skinned loli’s face darkened as despair overwhelmed her. She knew that spirits could use their magic to recover from all forms of injury, but she could not bear to watch the Berserker, her only friend, get tortured this way. The stranger placed the arm back at the hole on the Berserker’s shoulder, and when the arm fused back into the shoulder, he yanked it off again. He did this over and over again, and the little girl could only watch.

  Soon, the dark-skinned loli gave in and told him what he wanted to know — the directions to a secret chamber in the castle, where centuries worth of knowledge was stored.

  When Baiyi reattached the Berserker’s arm, he said in admiration, “Man, this is a pretty slick marionette. Look how effortless it was to detach and reattach its body parts……”

  This was when the dark-skinned loli realized that the Berserker was technically an artificial human — the kind that had detachable limbs. 1

  “Alright, let us go get ourselves some books to read,” Baiyi said in a singsong voice. He hoisted the dark-skinned loli over his shoulder, inciting a moan from the little girl. The chunk of ice containing the Berserker, which he controlled with his mana, soared into the air after Baiyi, who was headed towards the secret chamber.

  “Who—aah~! Are you—aah~!” The dark-skinned loli tried her best to speak despite the waves of pleasure surging through her body.

  “Your lord and savior,” Baiyi replied calmly. “Fun fact: you can make your Servant talk just by changing her bridal gown into a swimsuit 2 . It’s true!”

  The dark-skinned loli looked confused. What does one’s ability to talk have to do with what they wear?

  Whilst chatting with his newest abductee, Baiyi effortlessly decapacitated each and every guard he came across, and soon, he arrived at the basement. He was greeted by the sight of a library of books, scrolls, and various other items used to store information.

  Baiyi placed the dark-skinned loli down at a corner of the room and began to rummage through the books. In an attempt to distract herself from the discomfort that her damp clothes brought her, the dark-skinned loli asked, “You didn’t kill any of the maids 3 *, did you?”

  “I do not relish murder,” Baiyi answered in a low voice.

  A short while later, Baiyi had cleaned out the secret room. He hoisted the bound dark-skinned loli back onto his shoulder and left with the floating chunk of ice, returning to the workaholic’s home.

  \r \r \r

  Baiyi had almost finished what he had set out to do. The only Servant left to capture was the Archer-class servant. This class was famous for its ensemble of powerful, game-breaking units [1]. That was enough to make Baiyi apply the maximum amount of vigilance that he could.

  “My sources informed me that you only kidnap Servants! Why did you bring me along?” The dark-skinned loli asked.

  “How long do you expect to live if I don’t bring you with me?”

  A long period of silence was his answer.

  When Baiyi arrived at the workaholic’s house, which was now his safehouse, he met the other girls sitting in a circle, eating a variety of cakes whilst talking about their escape plan. This time, Blanket was sitting with them, and she was scowling as hard as someone whose neck had been stiff since birth. Despite wearing a scowl, the girl was wolfing down cakes and other snacks, and her lips were covered in butter. This was akin to a person that had held themselves back for too long.

  When Blanket saw Baiyi walk in, she tossed away the cake in her hand, licked her lips clean, and slinked back to the corner of her room, after which she glared at Baiyi. [2].

  “Master, you have returned!” The violet-haired girl walked forward and greeted him. She pulled down the dark-skinned loli from Baiyi’s shoulder and looked at her carefully. The velvet-haired girl immediately noticed something different about the girl in her arms. “Huh, isn’t she human? Is she the Master of the Berserker-class servant? Um…… It feels a bit off……”

  “She is probably a Homoculus* that is supposed to be a vessel for the Grail,” Baiyi explained. “If I leave her alone, she’ll probably end up dead a few days later. This is why I brought her back…… I can’t bring myself to see that happen.”

  *A kind of artificial human; a “fully functional lifeform created through alchemical formula without using a womb”.

  He melted the ice covering the chunk of ice covering spell the Berserker, but the Servant remained motionless. She had expended too much power using her Noble Phantasm earlier, and since her connection with her Master was severed immediately after, she had not been able to replenish her energy enough to move.

  “I’ll be upstairs to do some reading. I want to see if there’s any other way to end this Holy Grail War. In the meantime, you girls are free to entertain yourself. You may call me when you’re hungry,” Baiyi said before going upstairs and locking himself in a room.

  The violet-haired girl nodded obediently and handed the dark-skinned loli a towel, indicating that she go wash up. After that, she and the other lolis carried the motionless Berserker to the couch and placed her there.

  The violet-haired girl looked at the other girls and said, “There’s only the Archer-class left now.”

  “According to the intel my family obtained, the Heroic Spirit acting as the current Archer-class Servant hails from an ancient legend. Will your master be able to defeat them all by himself?” The dark-skinned loli, who was cleaning up with a towel, said. Her face was still a bit red from the ‘torture’ she had undergone earlier. “No offense, this Archer-class is several leagues beyond us losers.”

  “If it’s my master going up against them, then I have no doubt in the outcome. Since the Age of Gods. 4 I have never seen anyone who displays the amount of power he does,” the violet-haired girl solemnly replied.

  “Did that knave really steal all the information regarding the Holy Grail wars, something he said he would do? Does he really intend to try and end this war in his own way?” Blanket asked with an expression of doubt. “If this is what he desires, then how shall he wish for it?”

  “Maybe he isn’t the wishing type,” the violet-haired girl softly said, after which she returned to sit with her friends. “As his Servant, I feel that he has no wish or desire to present the Holy Grail, or rather, his wish is not of our world to realize.”

  “Is that not wasting a great chance?” Santa asked with a sour expression. ‘If I had the chance, I would wish to be the most perfect Santa Claus ever, and watch the sea with all of my friends!”

  “I wanna return to my mom’s tummy.”

  “I want to mature as soon as I can so that I will worthy of the crown and the trust of my people.”

  The girls had veered of topics and were now stating their wishes out loud, including the dark-skinned loli. As Baiyi skimmed through the books he had plundered, he could not help but say, “Gees, the kids here are a lot more behaved than the ones back home, huh?”

  That remark did not age well. Late at night, when normal people were expected to be asleep, the ‘well behaved’ girls began to enact their plan.

  “Do you swear that THAT is the source of the big meanie’s power?” Santa, who was standing in front of a cabinet much taller than her, asked whilst staring at a feather duster atop the cabinet. It was this feather duster that Baiyi had used to ‘educate the loli assassin. After that, he saw no more use for it and placed it up there.

  The assassin loli, on the other hand, was now obsessed with that object that had brought her so much pain, and she had decided that it was a very powerful weapon.

  “Believe me, that weapon deals a lot of damage when it strikes the body!” The loli assassin whispered. “But if we manage to steal it from him, we’ll have the power to fight him!”

  “That cabinet is very tall, though, and we are very short; how are we going to get it? We barely have enough magical energy to move around, let alone use our Noble Phantasm,” The purple-haired loli, acting as the current Rider-class Servant, asked quietly.

  She had introduced herself to the others as Anna. Although she had joined them to feast on the confectionaries, she did not participate much in the girls’ discussion. The moment the girls decided to enact their escape plan, she volunteered to help.

  “If that tall person in the white dress had agreed to help us, then this would not a problem!” The loli assassin muttered, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in her head, and she said, “I know! Let’s make a human tower!”

  The girls moved immediately. Santa, who had more brawn than the others, was the base of the human ladder; the shy Anna formed the middle section, and the top of the ladder was the loli assassin.

  Unfortunately, the cabinet was still taller than their combined height. Even with her toes strained, the loli assassin found herself barely touching the feather duster.

  “J-Jack? P-please hurry, I can’t hold this for much longer,” Santa said quietly.

  “You can do it! Hold on a little longer; I just need a little…… more……” The loli assassin stood on her toes whilst raising her tiny hand as high as she could, trying to reach the feather duster.

  Anna was the first to lose her strength. “I-I can’t do it anymore!” Her knees gave way, and she fell backward. The loli assassin also lost her footing and fell. Both girls crashed into Santa, and the cabinet soon followed after them.

  Ke-rash!

  “Oww! Ahh!”

  There was a flurry of steps as Baiyi shot down the stairs. Upon seeing the three girls knotted together, he asked, “What are you girls even doing?”

  Anna was the first to recompose herself. She instantly grabbed onto the fallen feather duster and pointed it at Baiyi, growling, “Big Meanie! Your weapon is no longer with you—you can’t control us now! Release us at once!”

  Baiyi was so amused that he said nothing. Instead, he pulled out two more feather dusters from his storage pouch and wielded each on his hand before brandishing them like swords. “What was that?” He asked loudly. “What did you say? Louder please!”

  He started walking towards the girls slowly. The girls, in return, burst into tears, thinking that he was really going to kill them.

  Unexpectantly, though, he merely bent down towards them and poked on their puffy cheeks. “I’m doing my best to find a way to end this world without having you girls pit against each other, you understand? I’m too busy to play games with you,” Baiyi said gently. “Now, can I expect you girls to be a bit more understanding so that I can do my work in peace? Or do you girls really long to kill each other in the Holy Grail War?”

  The three lolis gave a quick glance at each other before hanging their heads.

  “Alright, now go play,” Baiyi said, ruffling their hair before starting back up to the stairs.

  “Aww…… Big Meanies is so…… nice! B-but that’s not how he acted when he caught me—he was horrible back then! I’m so confused……” Santa was the first to break the silence after he left.

  “I heard from Black Chloe that even when he was capturing her, he did not kill anyone either. All he did was taking the books with him. In fact, I think he didn’t kill anyone when he caught me too,” Anna added sheepishly.

  The loli assassin, who was the first to be captured and the only one who had ever tasted the power of feather duster, lowered her head silently.

  Just like that, the lolis stopped trying to escape, which relieved quite a deal of troubles off Baiyi’s shoulders enough to focus more on his research. Sometimes, he would go out and buy more snacks and even little girls’ favorite plush toys home, treating these little trips as his breaks.

  He wanted to play these little girls, but time was running out fast, and the knowledge concerning the Holy Grail was a larger academic endeavor than he had expected.

  Fortunately, the captives seemed to be at peace with her new lifestyle by now, especially since instead of thinking of ways to kill more effectively or their fate in the Holy Grail War, they could just play, eat and sleep however they wanted as if they were a rich woman’s pet piglets. Well, it was not exactly a bad way to live, was it?

  Sometimes, and quite understandably, the girls wished they could go out of the house since staying at home all the time could be pretty dull.

  There was also an arguably minor yet a bit upsetting issue too — Black Chloe was quite a little pervert. With the excuse that she knew everything the most just by being an Einzbern 5 , she kept trying to give every girl a kiss on the lips6 . For that, Baiyi had given her quite a few painful lessons.

  Baiyi finally made some headway in his research by the fifth day since he arrived. He gleefully went downstairs to announce the good news to the girls only to find Black Chloe pressing Blanket on the edge of the couch, her hands caressing the latter as her lips closed in……

  “Aah oww!”

  The dark-skinned loli rubbed her forehead — which had just been assaulted by an ice pellet — with her hands as she scowled at Baiyi, “You ground me here in this house and now you keep stopping me from having fun? What do you want for me?”

  “I would like you to play something more holistic, like them,” Baiyi said as he pointed at Santa and Anna immersing in video games. “Look at that! Now that’s holistic love!” [3]

  He had barely finished his sentence when he suddenly felt that something had attacked his home. Telling the lolis to stay safely within the house, he bolted out of the door — in time to see the Hero of Justice, his Woes-Be-Me pops, his stepmom, stepsister, and two of his classmates who each shared a complicated relationship with himself.

  They were standing right at the gate to the workaholic’s house with daggers in their eyes.