Authors Note:

Alrighty guys, so the formatting of this fic is going to be a little bit weird for a moment until I get everything sorted out. I'd like to leave the initial bit that I've last posted as kind of a reminder to myself of where I'm going with this story, and also as a story sample of what happens later to give people a taste of what's to come, but now I'm bringing the story back to it's beginnings. What was previously written can essentially be ignored for now as we're not that far into the story at this point, but eventually we'll be built back up to that moment. Here's a short snippet building up into the prologue. Hope you enjoy, and as always, I welcome any and all criticisms that can help to improve my work.

Five years ago, two truths were made very apparent to me by my father. The first is that being a hero, saving the world; these things were impossible. The second is that it is my duty to succeed regardless. He was a man who was betrayed and broken by the very ideals that he had sworn to uphold; his dream of becoming a hero proved to be insurmountable. Nonetheless, even if he wasn't able to save the world, he was still a hero to me. He had saved me, when nobody else could. So with that in mind, wouldn't it be the duty of the child he saved to maintain his legacy?

He would always tell me; "It is the duty of the hero to abandon the few to save the many. A superhero can only save those who he choses to save. If I have to abandon five-hundred to spare a thousand than I would; every single time. More lives were saved than lost... That is the ideal." It pissed me off whenever I would hear him talk like that. I knew even as a child that he was right. It was the best, most efficient method of salvation, and I'm sure I myself was saved through much the same mindset. But even still, a superhero is somebody that stands against those same insurmountable odds, and prevails regardless. A superhero is somebody that will always stand firm in his resolve to save everyone, even if it proves to be impossible.

Taking that lesson and that ideal to heart, I made it my goal to become a superhero where he could not. "I'll make your dream a reality," I told him on our last night together. In hindsight, I'm sure the man wanted to protest. He must have wanted to shake me and say "No, Shirou. This isn't something you can do." He must have wanted to explain to me, how broken the man before me was, that strived to fulfil that dream. He was a warm and loving father, who had always tried to deter me from learning magecraft or continuing his legacy. But something happened in those final moments. He looked me in the eye and considered for a moment before saying; "Yeah... I'm glad... I can rest easy now."

And that was that. He had passed on; and those were my fathers last words to me. As such my fate was set in stone from that moment forward. In a way, you could say that was the first and only selfish act Emiya Kiritsugu would ever perform. Instead of correcting his child, he saw the opportunity to keep his ideal going... And keeping his ideal alive was the best and most efficient way of saving as many as possible. For that brief, final moment, he had reverted to the man he had been so many years before. He probably died cursing his inability to turn away his child from the Hell he had created for himself; but even so, I never cursed or blamed him. In fact, I never even considered the absurdity of the mission he had given me. I figured it was just something that I had to do, as an Emiya.

So as I child, I was given an impossible task. With no direction given to me, and no idea where to begin, I simply began to train both my body and mind, for the day when my opportunity would present itself.