DxD:the fake Dream

He dreamed of that man again that night. The man that he condemned with his childish dreams moments before his own death. He watched that man's story once more unfold before him. Growing up stern and tall, faithfully following the dreams that he inherited from his father without question.

He watched as the man, as a teen fought and learned, pushing his way forward to help others without asking for anything in return. His friends and loved ones, who could not see things the way he did abandoned him as time went on, but he did not falter forging his path to become a hero, helping and saving everyone that was within his sight, not once truly valuing himself.

'Was it so wrong?' The man often thought to himself as people distance themselves from him. 'No… there is nothing wrong about wanting to help others…'

Yet before long he was alone. His selfless deeds were deemed too suspicious by the world. Surely a man who constantly put himself in such danger so frequently had some agenda. No sane man would be that selfless…

But the watcher and the dreaming hero both knew that he was… for the hero in this story was an empty human. He could find no sense of happiness from within. His only joy came from helping others.

So much was his love that the man had… after arriving at the scene of destruction that could only have been caused by some sick accident… made a deal with Alaya, the spirit of Humanity. In return for becoming a counter guardian and protecting the planet after his death, the lives of the 100 odd victims would be saved and restored…

If only he had known what he had truly condemned himself to at that time… for counter guardians were mere clean up spirits, summoned when the earth was on the verge of destruction and required a massive overwhelming force in order to counteract the threat. They were the cure…

And humans were often the disease. Time and time again after he was betrayed and murdered by one of the people he saved and put to death, the man's spirit was called to commit genocide against humanity. Guilty and innocent, man, woman, and child… so long as they were somehow involved, all who came across him were eventually put down in order to somehow protect humanity as a whole. He could not control his actions for his spirit now belonged to Gaia… all he could do was watch as his beliefs slowly eroded away, washed in the blood of those he had murdered until he became cold and bitter… desperate to escape the hell that he had condemned himself to unknowingly…

Despite the fact that the odds of it happening were borderline nonexistent… he deduced the only possible way to save himself…

Kiritsugu woke up to Shirou constantly nudging him with his foot. "Come on. Wake up already old man. I need someone to calm Fuji-nee down while I cook." The boy sighed.

"I'm up. I'm up." Kiritsugu grunted as he slowly picked himself up. "Taiga's here already?"

The boy pouted. "Already? She got here late if anything. You slept in again."

For good reason too… The man mentally commented as he rubbed his eyes. "I see. I'll be out in a moment, just… go ahead."

The boy sighed before walking outside the room again. "Please hurry up dad… you know how Fuji-nee gets when she's hungry and bored."

"Don't tempt me to take longer Shirou." The father laughed lightly as he waited for Shirou to get far enough away for him to do his next few tasks in private.

When the coast was clear, Kiritsugu reached for the notebook, which had evolved from that single piece of paper, from underneath one of the tatami mats in his room. It had been 3 weeks since the dreams started, and even though they occurred roughly every 2-4 nights the man had already discovered and deduced an extremely significant amount of information.

He determined that he was watching roughly 4 different potential routes of the 5th war. The first 3 were focused from Shirou's perspective… though on occasion he saw possible decisions or actions made in those 3 routes that ended in his son's rather unpleasant demise. It was fairly amusing… and disturbing to him when he realized that each of these 3 routes involved the boy… getting familiar with a different female, especially when he realized that one was his old servant Saber, and the other two were the daughters of Tohsaka… he could dwell on his son's potential love life later…

The 4th route however intrigued and terrified the man to no end. It did not cover the time of the war itself, but what happened afterwards. After this night's previous dream, he had no doubt that the enigmatic Archer of the new war was indeed a potential future of the boy he was taking care of. A counter guardian with the potential to be a heroic spirit in this day and age where heroic spirits were all but an impossibility… he didn't know whether to cry for joy or for remorse at what his son had become. To possess so much potential…

He shook his head as he continued to write his notes down. He had after a few dreams managed to train himself somehow into retaining all the random information he got while sleeping, and the results were not disappointing in the least.

He now knew how to train Shirou when it came to his offensive magic, and he learned a few other things about the boy in the process as well. His future method of projection and analyzing the structure of objects… Tracing… was in his own words absurd and brilliant. Because in his dreams the boy had focused on nothing but training in structural grasp and reinforcement for so long, he had developed his own advanced form of projection that was borderline sorcery if a real magus actually took the time to look at it. Being able to make borderline perfect copies just by looking at the original…

Other than Shirou's immediate combat potential, Kiritsugu learned some other things as well. Shirou's origin and element for example, were both 'sword'… which probably explains all the sword fighting and creating he had seen, yet he was unnaturally skilled in archery as well. He had made a mental note to have the boy train in both as soon as he could… preferably using Taiga as his trainer when it came to the bladed weapons.

The girl was downright relentless…

Shirou also had a surprisingly strong sensitivity for nearby magic. Most mages experienced this 6th sense by substituting it into one of their basic 5 sense in a way, most commonly by touch or by sight. Shirou on the other hand was able to "smell" nearby sources of prana to such a degree that Kiritsugu had on more than one occasion claimed the boy was part dog. The assassin was already thinking of training methods he could use to enhance the boy's skill with his senses in order to work with it more efficiently and quickly in times of danger.