2014 Fanfiction Challenge Entries

[Kat]

Wow, it's funny coincidence how both got 57/100.

[Ayakashi]

Should we call conspiracy there?

[Seika]

Yeah, he's conspiring with himself.

[Ayakashi]

How truly devious.

[Megas]

Tbh, it really wasn't a conspiracy or anything.

Until I actually added everything up I thought I was giving After Night the higher score.

Then I summed the scores and they wound up being the same.

[Dullahan]

He's subliminally advertising for delicious Heinz tomato ketchup. 57 Varieties, people.

[Megas]

_______________________________________The Cursed Hand


Hook: OK, so about this, the set-up here is compelling and the characters are kind of neat. I'm somewhat interested in the grudge the predecessor has against the successor's savior, and how the successor will bring the grudge to its inevitable conclusion. The evolution of the young man into the Hassan-i-sabbah in Heaven's Feel is something that catches me, in that I want to see some of the defining moments that transform him into who he becomes. (Especially on how he becomes extra attached to his darts/knives )


However, I'm not terribly attached to anyone else's fate in this moving forward. My interest in this is pretty wholly centered on the main character and there's not a lot making me curious as to how this all turns out for anyone here. It's kind of a strange thing, I'm invested in the journey, but I'm not terribly excited for it.

I'm giving the hook 31 points, it does a pretty good job, but it's lacks a sort of energy going forward.

Set Up:

Point 1 is pretty well displayed from the very beginning for one side, but not as much on the other. While I'm sure you could show it from the other side over the story, I didn't see it quite as clearly when going through this.

Point 2 is very well shown and I can see a strong connection from what is written here going into the rest of the story.

Point 3 is.... strange, and I'm not sure I see it at all. It's possible it will happen, but I didn't see any evidence in this passage directly outside of the last few lines.

Giving you 19 points for the set up.

Accuracy:
Like Jorm, I had to read Siriel's review to actually realize "Oh hey, that's Astolfo." Which is kinda cool, and he seems relatively in character from what I see here.

I'm not really a history buff, so whatever crazy time travel shenanigans needed to happen for this are lost on me.

There's not really a lot else for me to comment about because everyone else pretty much might as well be OCs.

I could give you a 7 for this to maintain the sacred balance of 57s, but while there wasn't much here, nothing wrong screamed out at me.

So I'm giving you 10 points instead.

Thus bringing the total to 60/100. There was enough decent dialogue in there to edge out the other two thus far.


Next up,






___________________________________Wings of Freedom

Hook: There's something potentially deep with Ougi's duty that could......

What the hell am I reading here?

The hook gets Coconut Ice Cream

Set Up:

Uhhh................

What?

The set up gets Chocolate Sprinkles and fudge.

Accuracy: ......yeah, I guess I don't really think it's accurate to anything.

It get Diced Pineapple.

So overall, I have to give this story Pineapple Fudge Sunday/100.


OK no, it totally gets a 0/100 and I have no idea what the heck I just read.

[Kirby]

wings sounds delicious

[Seika]

Breakdown of the Holy Grail War

Thousand Word Commentary

From the beginning it was a completed world. In that sense it would not have mattered if this was the beginning or the end, for it would be obvious that there was no change. The black fires that crowned the monolith only a few weeks ago were extinguished and now even the slightest tremor would be out of place. Once again, this completed world resembled that of the surface of the moon.

Better use of commas would improve sense and flow: "From the beginning,"; "In that sense,"; the 'black fires' sentence would look much less like an unharnessed run-on train of thought if there were a comma before the 'and'.
I don't like the 'for' in your second sentence. This isn't Ancient Greek, and you can't spam γάρ/GAR in every clause. It's too formal and is too heavy-handed on the connection where you don't need to be. I'd cut it and replace the comma with a colon.
The tenses are weird. I'm going to be generous and assume it's deliberate, because there's just enough in here to hint at that being intentional, but it puts me on guard.

However, that was only as far as the five senses were concerned. If one were to look at this world a few weeks ago and compared it to the world of today she would notice something else. And if one were to ask her if she had noticed something she would linger for a moment before saying “nothing.” A lie. However the correct answer, the answer that happened to be on the tip of her tongue which propriety let slip away, was that she was merely not sure what that something was. In short it had seemed as if all the life, all the energy in the completed world was gone as if it had simply vanished.

'One' is very deliberately ungendered; if you're going to segue into 'she', a more indefinite 'someone' would be better. This is so haphazard ("if one were to ask her if she"), that I still can't tell if it's a deliberate attempt to reflect a confused mind or if your own mind is confused.
Your tenses are getting weirder and weirder.
My advice to 'fic authors is always that you don't get the benefit of the doubt. There are too many bad writers out there for that. If you want to be playful and clever with your writing by messing with fundamentals like grammar, you need to signpost it first and/or show that you're capable of the basics.
'Merely' is often a red flag for me. It crops up too often in purple prose written by uncertain thesaurus-divers, and too little in simply competent writing.
Speaking of thesaurus-diving, propriety makes some sense here, but I'm really not sure if you mean it. We only have two very very very vague people involved here, both of whom seem pretty hypothetical at the moment. Propriety doesn't seem likely to apply.

If one visited this place a few weeks ago she would have noted that this world seemed like a womb, a self-contained cradle that was ready to give birth to an infinite amount of possibilities. But if one were to ask the same person today, she would answer that this was nothing but a world of death. And why was that important?

An infinite amount of possibilities is just waffle. Infinite possibilities.
Since you doubled up on 'noticed' in the last paragraph, I don't like 'noted' here. Just said is fine - you've been avoiding that simple word.
I don't like the last sentence. You've provided a huge contrast between two worlds of life and death, so it's weird to say, "Oh, and why do we care?" That seems like something we care about already.

Because if this was still a world of life one would have no way of sensing the white scrambling among the crannies and crags that still litter the bottom of this cave. The human shaped whiteness which puts one unsteady foot in front of the other sometimes retreating whenever the ground is too unstable, other times merely poking around to find a foothold. Either way, she slowly crosses what could be considered a sea of stone. Her destination towers above her; a once colourless giant blackness.

Your punctuation is really bad in this paragraph. That second sentence is incomprehensible on a first read, and you really can't get away with that last semi-colon. Semi-colons separate independent clauses or objects in a list which began with a colon. This is neither of the above: 'a once colourless giant blackness' doesn't stand as a sentence by itself. (Or 'a once-colourless, giant blackness' if it were written as I prefer it). I'm going to try to leave out punctuation errors that aren't egregious after this point, but consider yourself to have admonished over basically every paragraph for them, because they're really consistent.
Why 'what could be considered a sea of stone'? Your language to this point has been full of unnecessary prevarication, and this is the worst example yet. I like the image 'a sea of stone' (though my memory is saying it might be stolen from HF), but why dilute it like this? What's the point?

Once upon a time knights fought magi fought raging warriors fought assassins for this two hundred year old relic. Named after the cup that received the blood of Christ, this currently underwhelming sight is called a Holy Grail, a wish-granting machine.

The climbing girl knows that; however she does not have a wish. Even if she did, the Holy Grail is not something that could grant it. After all, just a few weeks ago, the same time this completed world died, she rejected the Grail itself. Astoundingly ironic, if only one knew the identity of the girl then it would seem as if the universe or rather this completed world itself was a mistake. So then, if this girl’s goal is not the beacon of hope, the Holy Grail which still lingers in this world of death, what could she be looking for?

There's a distinct ESL feel to some of this ("this currently underwhelming sight is called") and I wish people wouldn't try to imitate translated text or imitate styles so closely across genre boundaries. In 99.99% of cases, it just reads badly, and this is no exception.
To my mind, you're also drastically overstating the contrasts you've been trying to set up in the writing so far, continually repeating information to shout "look at how much work I've put into the themes here". It just ends up being very unsubtle and feels dreadfully padded. It's a fault I know I'm guilty of in my writing, too, so you're hardly alone, but that doesn't merit any forgiveness.

The girl’s soft palms grip into the uninviting rock as she pulls herself up a cliff which groans in response sending trails of gravel tumbling into whatever is below. Now, with one knee on the ground the girl closes her eyes and takes in a series of short, shallow breaths while wiping her brow against her wrist recalling this morning’s events.

Speaking of subtlety, this is an awfully clumsy way to introduce a flashback.

When she woke up she didn’t feel any different. Her maids made breakfast and she ran alongside her beloved brother as he biked to school. Another ordinary day; the very thing she had fought so hard for. However, if there was anything different it would be the note she found in her backpack while at school. The contents? A badly drawn map that led here. Rather, it merely guided her to the Buddhist Temple in the area, but the girl understood exactly what the writer was trying to convey. After all, she would be able to recognize that horrible handwriting anywhere. The type that made one wonder if the writer even had hands.

"If there was anything different" implies that you'd have to work at thinking the difference up, which is a bad way to put across the thing which brought Ilya here.
That's not how you use the word 'rather'.
This final image is startling and peculiar. Handwriting without hands is so bizarre that I want to like it.

A few weeks ago, the moment that this cave turned from a world of life into that of death, a parting was had. A parting that just now refused to be permanent…

'A parting was had' is an incredibly unnatural way of expressing this.

‘Ah, that voice, that expression, who else could it be but you?’ The girl smiled to herself and, “Ruby.” She almost painfully squealed in delight as the star shaped figure flew into her arms.

It has at times been the fashion online to try to sort quoted thoughts from quoted speech by using single marks instead; I don't like it. It's simply not intuitive enough, not common enough, and not clear enough.
How does one squeal painfully? Who feels the pain here? And why on earth did you consider the 'almost' necessary?

“And I missed you as well.” How could one describe all the emotion, feeling, weight in that one sentence? Wars had been fought, friends had been lost, enemies had taken their places, and among all that a bond had formed between and girl and a talking star shaped toy with two wings. As ridiculous as this scene seemed no one could doubt the authenticity or the sanctity of such a bond.

Hm. Well, it's a conceit, I suppose. Fine.
'Sanctity' is really not the word I'd use here. Again, this smells of thesaurus use.

“I thought you went back to London with Rin-san and Luiva-san? After all Sapphire is gone now.” The girl was the first to break the silence; however, even if she spoke, the mention of Ruby’s sister would create an even more oppressive silence.

Typo of Luvia.
I see what you're trying to do with that last sentence, but it's direly constructed and another example of your ham-handed attempts to force contrasts on the reader. This is certainly not how you should be using 'even if'.

“Ahhhh~ Naïve, Ilya-san, just because I went back with those two doesn’t mean that I would never come back. After all, didn’t I say so when we were fighting that lightning woman? You are my first and last master.” However for Ruby that was never an option in the first place.

Ooh, naïve with a diaeresis. A charm point.
Your continued use of 'however' is beginning to grate. It's not this common a word.
The last sentence is ambiguously written. What's the 'that'? Ruby never returning? Ilya becoming its master? Specifically its first and last master?

“Yes, it’s really good to see you again,” he continued, his red eyed figure moving into the bio-light that the multitude of plants, once flourishing, created. A full figure but the scruffy cloak covering him had made it seem as if he was homeless and that staff by his side only added to that impression. However, the girl’s sharp intake of breath was due to a feeling rather than an impression, the same type of feeling that allows one to tell the difference between a land of life and one of death. The instant the girl laid eyes on this seemingly homeless man she knew that he was not human.

Bio-light is simply not a thing. Bioluminescence, or simply the light that the plants (isn't it actually fungi?) produce. This happens in a few cases through the passage, where you seem to get caught between higher and lower registers and end up in an ugly and unnatural in-between.
Seemingly seem seemed. It's been overused from the start, and now it's really started to get my goat. It's totally unnecessary, so stop padding your writing with it.
I'm unconvinced by your semantics here; this is not an intuitive division.
You've said this man had seemed to be homeless, yet he remains seemingly homeless later in the paragraph's narrative. Make up your mind.



Extra Commentary
There's no significant variance from these first thousand words for the rest of the passage. The prose is clumsy, appallingly punctuated, and often outright un-English in construction. A few extra really bad errors cropped up too.
(Something that isn't technically an error but which I don't want anyway is this idea: "any right-minded lady wouldn’t mind swooning so he could catch her." It's regressive and annoys me).


Judging
Hook
How interested am I? How much do I want it to continue? This is probably where I'm going to throw the massive penalty for the prose at you, because it's really bloody hard to get interested in a story where I'm mentally stopping short to correct it at least once a sentence. If this were a 'fic I'd just stumbled upon, I'd have abandoned it easily 500 words before the end of my initial commentary presented here, never mind finishing the chapter or continuing further.

The problem of this starting off rather in medias res has to be mentioned too. This doesn't feel like a prologue: rather, it's a middle-of-the-book scene, presenting the twist which will define the rest of the story.

To be fair, the eventual end isn't a bad set-up, for all that. I am kind of interested in what happens with a resurrected Justica corrupted by AM, as well all the Founding Family heads gathered together. Some points gained for that.
9/60


Set-up
The identity of a magus - somewhat prepared, I guess. Despite the note that Mahoyo was a story of Magicians and Magic, instead of magi and magecraft, you certainly looked enough at that here too. And while there was some reflection on the magi - including one of the actual better bits of writing in this, about choosing how they'd die - it was less about what it meant to be a magus generally, and more about a specific reaction to specific circumstances. Eh.

No Shirō - OK, sure. But this is a simple enough gimme that you can't get much credit for it.

Magus stereotype and magus weakness - meh. Very little was done on the behavioural front, and I frankly don't see that your magecraft was any more impressive than a lot of what we saw in F/SN. Nor am I particular sure that making bigger explosions is needful or worthwhile as a goal, but I don't think I'm allowed to deduct points for disagreeing with your goals.

Narrator - you had a third person narrative voice, which fell into an ugly chasm between limited and omniscient, and which you want to give more of a character and to develop over the story? Except you also went to first person? This is very very weird, somewhat nonsensical, and I don't see that it was prepared at all.

Doing justice to a magus war, and avoiding turning it into a Holy Grail War - one supposes you should be given credit for not involving Servants, because you didn't? Again, kind of a gimme. As for justice to a magus war, I'll repeat my comment about bigger explosions being neither needful nor worthwhile. Another point I want to make here is that Nasuverse fights, and particularly magecraft fights, are so very often battles of concepts, where affinities for and against your opponents are enormously important. I saw very little of that here, which I think has to count against you somewhere in here or in Accuracy, and I preferred to include it here.
11/30


Accuracy
It's not mad. There are some minor issues, and I'm really not sure how the Prisma cross is actually meant to work, but there's nothing that makes me want to scream.
6/10


Final Score
26/100

[Seika]

Fate/After Night

Thousand Word Commentary

“The Einzbern Forest hasn’t lost it charm at all.”

Its. Oh joy, a typo in the first sentence. I'm looking forward to this.

Vocalizing a snide thought to herself, Tohsaka Rin continued her stroll amidst this sea of lifeless trees. There wasn’t a single animal in sight - bird or insect, there was nothing, absolutely nothing that belonged to the living in this scenery. Rin’s only companions were the song of the wind, heralding the coming winter with its cold current, and the agonized cries of the dead leaves littered across the ground, crackling under every step the Crimson Magus took. The moon shone brightly in the nightly sky, bathing the path she that she followed with a fragile, ephemeral light. As the dead leaves and moonlight wove together, a golden resplendence spread across the forest’s floor, giving it a lively essence, contrasting with the bare trees and heavy atmosphere that filled these eerie woods.

The natural assumption from 'lifeless trees' is that the trees are dead, not that there is no animal life in the forest. Trees are still alive in winter, you know.
'Stroll' seems too casual for context.
'The song of the wind' is outright purple. And so is anything to do with bloody leaves giving agonised cries.
'fragile, ephemeral' is far too redundant. Cut one.
What does a forest floor having a 'lively essence' mean?
Like Breakdown, you're being too heavy-handed with your contrasts here. More showing, less telling.

All in all, a rather unusual sight for Rin, as during all the previous times she had been through this place, the forest’s canopy was so thick that no light could filter through the blanket of leaves.

Flabby prose. All in all is unnecessary and that third clause is severely overwritten.

A voice spoke up inquisitively behind Rin. It had the flow of a gentle stream, but there was not only gentleness in it - an untold strength lurked beneath that voice, like a great predator concealed below the water’s surface. It was a beautiful but powerful; something admirable, enjoyable, soothing, yet at the same time, it was something that filled whoever heard it with a sensation of wariness and even, alienness.

Still filled with fat and blubber. I guess at this point I'm giving you credit compared to Breakdown for at least being consistent and not inventing new ways to write bad prose.
'Inquisitively' is unnecessary: he's asked a question, so of course it's inquistive.
You don't need a triple set of adjectives like 'admirable, enjoyable, soothing'. Speaking of threes, you've described the contrast in the voice three different ways, and frankly none of them are different enough to merit even two. So much of this should go.

“Beautiful? I… guess so,” Rin answered back, rather hesitant at using this adjective to describe the scenery. “I suppose that it has a charm of its own.”

You've used an ellipsis; you will use the word 'suppose'. Hesitantly is a given. Cut.

On these words and not really knowing why, Rin inhaled deeply, her eyes closing as if she had entered a state of meditation. Moonlight immersed her visage with a soft glow, casting further light upon the woman’s distant memories, upon memories of the last Holy Grail War. She delved into a reminiscence of these events of ten years ago that had occurred in these very woods -- being captured and held hostage by her own Servant, the ensuing rescue by Emiya Shirou and Saber, Berserker’s and his Master’s last stand, and then Emiya Shirou’s faceoff against Archer, or well, Emiya Shirou’s faceoff against Emiya Shirou himself.

'On these words' would much more usually be phrased as 'with these words'.
Like Breakdown, I'm docking you for a ham-handed introduction to your flashback.
'Moonlight immersed her visage' is so purple. At some point we're going to move out of the visible light spectrum and I'm going to have to call this prose ultraviolet. Really, does light immerse anything? What was wrong with the word 'face'?
Why 'these events'? There's no reason for a deictic: it's just 'the'.

Rin let out a weary sigh as she remembered ‘The Ally of Justice’, both the Servant that had entrusted the young man to her, and said young man who was now overseas, pursuing his quest of eventually becoming one that can continue his father’s dream.

I'm on the edge with the purpleness of 'quest'. I'll let it slide because this is in association with Shirō, who makes consistent and unironic use of the word 'superhero'.
'Pursuing' already gives you the sense of a continuing and unfulfilled action. You really don't need anything about 'eventually becoming'.

“It’s as if it all happened yesterday… I can’t believe that ten years have already lapsed since that time.”

Digging up what had been buried beneath the sands of time was sufficient for Rin herself to get drowned in it -- before she knew it, a hand came to gently rest upon her shoulder as if to pull her out of this cesspool of remembrance.

... There really wasn't a point to that flashback. Information gained: Shirō is overseas (a present condition); it's been ten years since the Fifth (a present condition). There are easier ways to convey that without messing with the narrative time.
Drowning in the sands of time is purple.
'Cesspool' has far too negative connotations to be appropriate word choice here.

Rin let out a little ‘eh?’ as she was brought back to reality. The very appearance of the one standin there had the Crimson Magus reconsider wherever this was truly reality in which she was; it was simply too absurd to have someone of such an indescribable and beautiful physical appearance…

I really don't like the easy use of the word 'very' here. Again, it's a trait of purple rights. Nothing wrong with 'just the appearance'.
Standin -> standing
Even correcting that and turning 'wherever' into 'whether', the first clause of that second sentence is utter gobbledegook.

He was a beautiful being clothed in a simple yet graceful white robe, having materialized after prana gathered together, the lucent emerald particles forming this body of his… a body that held an ineffable fairness. His face was filled with youth and elegance, and his physique was refined, of a beauty untold - yet because it was of a beauty untold, not even the term ‘beautiful’ could possibly be used to describe it. In a sense, it was an appearance that was most disturbing, while being at the very same time, most mesmerising. It could be said that just like his voice, this being simply wasn’t fit for human descriptives, rather, they were above said descriptives, and any attempt to brandish an identity upon this person’s features would only result in inevitable contradictions.

I note that you've said his appearance is indescribably beautiful (and restate it here), yet you've decided to describe it. Maybe think that one over again.
Basically, this paragraph makes me want to throw up. We've hit ultraviolet, and are starting to edge dangerously toward X-rays. 'Lucent emerald particles'. Are you kidding me? This is worse than my writing. This is worse than my writing before I've edited it. You don't ever want to be there.
You don't mean 'brandish'. You maybe mean brand, but that's still not a very sensible choice of vocabulary.
Yet is everywhere. It's not just a substitute 'but', so please don't use it like that.
'said' as an adjective is always a warning sign.
Oh, and some needless authorial prevarication as well: there's no point to 'in a sense' or 'it could be said' here.

Rin shook her head to straighten her thoughts, after which she turned around to properly address her Servant. His blonde hair bordering on the spectrum of light-green, radiating silkiness as smooth as the finest fibers; it all swayed with ease and grace under the breeze’s gentle caress.

Rin has just been reconsidering her connection to reality based on Enkidu's appearance, but only now she turns around to face him? I sort of see how this works, with her turning her head first, and her body now, but it's really really unclear (you never mention the head turn). This stopped me dead in my tracks while I tried to figure it out, which is not at all good.
How on earth does hair 'radiate silkiness'? How?

“You could say that, Lancer,” Rin began, answering with a distant gaze, “I treaded the grounds of this forest during the last Holy Grail War… and here I am once again, doing the very same, and with another Holy Grail War looming on the horizon…”

'trod', not 'treaded'
Rin's getting an outbreak of ellipsis-itis - two within the same sentence, even. Not good.

“There is not as much uniqueness in that as you would like to think, Master. Would you not believe that it is a very similar development to the one these trees and leaves experience? The seasons pass, only to return after every year, but under a new and rejuvenated form. As the beasts of this forest slumber and rest, as the trees weaken and fall asleep… eventually, a new spring comes, and the wheel of life is spun all over again.”

There certainly is a kind of seasonal aspect to the Grail Wars, but this isn't the way I'd have put it. It's pretty strictly a temporal thing, while Enkidu phrases it as it were part of a natural order - and, of course, it isn't. I can see that being ignored for the sake of poeticism, but it's a pretty big issue. Mmph.

“Lancer…” Rin lingered, looking at her Servant with eyes that held a mix of both admiration and amusement. Rin thought that her Servant certainly possessed a flowery speech typical of a Heroic Spirit, yet it went beyond mere embellishment of the words, and Lancer’s romanticism was something that Rin could only qualify as endearing. She wasn’t very sure why, but seeing Lancer express himself and his notable love for nature and life… it brought back a smile to her. A confident one, pushing away the longing and loneliness that had somehow snuck up onto her visage.

Flowery speech: you're not bloody joking there.
'notable' is a very odd vocabulary choice here. 'evident', perhaps?
You see how 'and his notable love for nature and life' reads awkwardly, with the conjunctions like that?
I'm going to give you a minor ding for 'snuck' instead of 'sneaked'. It's not common enough slang for my spellchecker to accept it, so I don't have to tolerate it either.
'visage' again. Still purple, especially when you pick it up again in the very next sentence.


Extra Commentary
Other errors and issues occasionally appear: bathos is an expected consequence of such a purple style, and it duly reared its head. But at least there wasn't anything as bad as that sodding 'lucent emerald' paragraph.


Judging
Hook
Some points for making me give up later than Breakdown. You've worked out the paragraph that killed it, I'm sure. But, yeah, I'd have abandoned this, so you take a big penalty too. (Now, to be fair, your prose is at least technically much stronger than Breakdown's, so reading onward after that point was only taxing instead of infuriating).

Other than that litmus test (which I hope doesn't have to apply to many more entries), how much did this interest me? It's not outstanding, but it's not too bad either. It's Yet Another Sixth War Fic, and too many existing Servants were recycled for my liking, but there was some pretty good chemistry going on, and I thought Nobunaga seemed fun. Fair execution on an uninspiring premise.
19/50


Set-up
Apocrypha-esque Team War - unlike the other judges, I'm willing to extend this one some credit and say it's close enough to an idea instead of a plot point that I'll mark it seriously. So it gets severely downmarked for not actually telling us that this is an Apocrypha-esque War. Very minor credit for setting up a Waver faction, but it's very minor because we already knew he was going to have a faction for this War from CM3.

Varied Masters and Servants - not only is it less than clear that this qualifies as a 'direction, idea or theme' rather than straight plot, it's incredibly vague in itself. Worse, I don't actually think you showed off any hint that the Masters and Servants would be more varied than in other Wars. Negative points.

Unusual antagonist and something nebulous about the war's progression - yeah, straight plot again, and anything that looked like it might not be plot in your outline you did nothing with. Penalty imposed.
5/35


Accuracy
I'll buy Fuyuki going Apocrypha, sure.
I guess I'll allow Enkidu to be summoned like this.
Nobunaga ... I don't want you to use a Koha-Ace Servant, but I don't think I can really mark you down for just that, and she seemed reasonably enjoyable as a character, so it passes.
Waver's OK, but not great.
Astolfo is just good enough to get you a few more marks.
Aoko's dialogue wasn't dead on target, but it was close enough to make me sit up and take notice, so some points there.
I would have preferred a slightly more detailed examination of why Rin and Shirō aren't together, this being a UBW follow-up. It got glazed over too quickly, I think.
9/15


Final Score
33/100

[Seika]

The Cursed Hand

Two Thousand Word Critique (that's still shorter than the 1ks because I don't have to continually argue with the author)

I don't have to pick up amateurish mistakes in the first few paragraphs. Thank you.

He cried.

The boy cried silently and slowly, shedding one fat tear at a time. He felt it roll down his cheek, past his mouth, and to the tip of his chin. When it dropped, splattering upon the dirty sand below, another tear escaped the corner of his eye to start the cycle anew. No other noise signalled his weeping. He did not scream at the injustice of the world, nor did he sob and shrivel up.

A minor commendation for that very short and stark lead-in to this. The form isn't especially original or inspiring, but it does show you actually have an understanding of prose writing and tempo.
I do quite like the subsequent detailing of the crying too. A nice little change-up, and it isn't all that common.
That said, 'fat' tears are a bit cliché. Not so bad that it's an immediate red alert, but ... keep an eye out.
'one fat tear at a time' implies plural tears eventually, and has more of an indefinite feel than is implied by your immediate assumption of 'it' to denote a single and specific tear in the next sentence.

The boy stood, held his mother’s hand, and cried as he watched people being herded into ramshackle wagons pulled by cows and horses and whatever pack animals the invaders hadn’t killed and eaten. Mothers clutched sons and daughters to their bosoms and held the hands of those old enough to walk. Most of them cried. The boy had never known there were so many ways to cry before that day.

I'd have left out the horses and cattle, and kept it just at pack animals; I think it works better only talking about that worst case. They also each irk me just a little: horses are valuable enough to an invading Crusader army that this doesn't seem like a use to which they'd be put, and cattle might be recruited to pull wagons, but cows are less likely.
I think adding 'infant' before 'sons and daughters' improves the sense of this. It doesn't come up with any weird pictures of teenage/adult offspring being clutched to bosoms, marks the contrast against those able to walk more clearly, and encourages a little more pathos out of the sentence.
I like the 'ways to cry' sentence. Good tempo, nice idea, strong image.

The line moved slowly but steadily. A man was marched forward, his sins were read, a holy symbol was carved in blood onto his forehead, and a spear pierced his heart. The man died and was thrown onto a different wagon that smelled of blood and urine and feces. Each time, the man who talked proclaimed that such was the will of God.

I think this is good at simultaneously getting across the cruelty of what's happening, particularly in the description of the wagon, while maintaining enough distance to convey that this is an almost industrial, impersonal process - a deliberate massacre.

But this God was not the boy’s God, because the boy knew his God would never allow something so cruel to happen without reason.

But what if there is a reason, as yet incomprehensible to those who suffer? That is the argument often advanced to explain the problem of evil, alongside free will and mindless natural suffering (both in themselves related back to the plans of God in the creation of humanity and the world). I can see this thought coming back to our protagonist later, probably in the body of the story rather than in this chapter.

The boy saw his father climb on to the stage. His father had fought harder than any, and bore the wounds to show it. His eyes had been cut out and his arms couldn’t hold a sword, but his legs had been left intact. The boy’s father silently marched forward until he was jerked to a stop.

This is a paragraph where not naming your protagonist actually starts seeming to cause you issues with your circumlocutions. To help, I think you would have been fine just pronouning the boy's father for the last sentence. The subject of 'he' would have been very clear after all the 'his' already in this paragraph.
It is quite a simple paragraph, which I think could have done with more variation in the sentence construction. Everything begins with the subject, which is a small little thing that can have a real impact on the reading experience.

As another tear rolled down the boy’s face, his father became yet another corpse.

Maybe 'yet another tear ... yet another corpse'. I think it comes off as a good bit of anaphora, rather than too on-the-nose. Your leaner sentences help this sort of thing come off better than Breakdown or After Night.

“The Baron? I don’t remember the Baron speaking with God,” the knight said. His fingers tightened, and the spear was broken in two. “If someone as old and stupid as him could manage something like that, then surely someone as beautiful as myself would have been able to do the same. Since I haven’t met God myself, your Baron is definitely fibbing.”

Ha. Nice humour.

Charlemagne has more important matters to attend to.

Charlemagne. Sending men to the Crusades. You what?

Send reparations, too. I was looking forward to having lunch here, and if it’s such a depressing place, old Cali will get antsy. Do you want him to get nervous?

Caligorant. This is Astolfo. What. What is this?

Hah! Ask one to slay a dragon and you’ll see how full of hot air they really are!

Astolfo's coming off as needlessly dragon-obsessed by this point.

The knight swallowed, expression turning sour.

“Whatever you want.”

A well-written ending to the scene: works on your themes, hits the right emotional notes for both characters, and is just a good finish. Again, you're showing that you can handle punchy, unelaborated writing well. Maybe the best part of your writing so far, so an excellent way to close out your first scene.


Extra Commentary
The prose remains fundamentally sound; I like your dialogue as we go on; this is basically Well-Written. The style became more fairytale-like as it went on, which I thought worked very well with the subject matter and the idea of an origin story, so that's good work too.
I did note this before in the thread, and I'm sure you saw it, but the problem with this is that it's so straightforwardly competent that I don't have enough to comment on. Sorry, I guess.


Judging
Hook
Mmm. Yeah, this feels like a one-shot rather than an introductory chapter. Were it really introductory, it feels like you'd have spent more time on this build-up, rather than skipping so quickly toward the beginning of training. (The relative brevity with which the 'desert' trial was handled again counts against you here).

I think some of the 'one-shot' feel also comes because you didn't do so strongly on your set-up - I think some of your ideas weren't expressed strongly enough and so didn't seem to leave the threads hanging to be picked up later. Obviously, this is something I'm going to mostly dock you for in that category rather than this one, but it deserves a note here. Plotwise, Astolfo's picture at the end did some work to compensate for the thematic concepts not sticking, but not quite enough.

(I would still absolutely read on from this, mind you. And docking points in set-up means more about you missing the requirements of this challenge than it does a quality failure in absolute terms).
34/45


Set-up
Zealotry - yeeees, but pretty shallowly, without the angles you were hoping to develop. Obviously, there's only so much you can do in a short space, but I'd still liked to have seen more work with this. Perhaps an issue with the relatively low word count.

Power - yep, and this was the one that really worked for me. Nice discussion with Astolfo, angles that I could see were ripe for exploration later in the putative 'fic, good stuff generally.

Identity with an organisation - I think this would have been better served just as a theme of 'identity'. Not only do I think the more general idea has more ways to approach it with Hassan, there were relatively few times when organisations were foregrounded in this introduction. Its viewpoint being anchored closely to Hassan meant even the Crusaders were defined more on a personal basis than a group one. Unlike Siriel, I will however give you points for not naming Hassan, because you did add that line about his name being lost to the sands of time and that was cute of you.
26/40


Accuracy
The timeline madness immediately slaps you with a pretty heavy penalty, because really? You had to go with Astolfo?
(I'm going to sneak you a few points for using Caligorant, though).
I was wavering on docking you points for some of the exact details of Protection From Wind, but then noticed that the CM3 entry still hasn't been translated anywhere readily accessible, so you weren't to know the background and I can't fairly penalise you.
8/15


Final Score
68/100

[Seika]

I'm informed this is a joke.

Help.

Jokes are alien to my nature and sap my power.

I can't do anything.

Help.

I'm going to sort of pretend this is mostly serious, because I don't know what to do with it otherwise. You get what you deserve for a joke entry, I guess.

Perhaps this will entertain you, or other readers. I hope so.


Thousand Word Commentary

I hate you for making me work through your entire thing by submitting something under a thousand words.

His eyes were completely blinded by the enormous explosion that had just occurred before him.

In medias res. OK, sure.
For something you've condensed down to one sentence, this should be much more concise, powerful and impactful. 'that had just occurred before him' is a really long-winded way of saying what you want and doesn't add anything actually interesting.
In general, more use of the senses would improve the description. Ears ringing, blazing heat on the skin, &c. &c. &c.

“Ju-just what is this!?”

Clichés rampant.

Before he could even begin to look the world was in flame. The buildings in front of him were completely engulfed.

Repetition of completed from very recently.
Your prose is very abrupt and short, which I don't like.

“Those monsters… What have they done…”

Clichés rampant.
Where are your question marks?

This was the last straw, he couldn’t let this stand anymore. He new that whatever was going on was way over his head. He knew that he very well might not live to see tomorrow if he went through with this.

Comma splices - learn about semi-colons.
new -> knew, particularly since the next sentence has it correctly.
Clichés rampant.

But it was his duty. He was trained to do whatever it took to protect the homeland whether that be through orders or even his very life. And that was exactly what he was going to do. For all the people who suffered at the hands of these mad men he would finish this once and for all.

Rather, I think this should be 'through obeying orders'. You mean him to be a subordinate character, not one that hands out commands.
Clichés rampant.

With the late memories of his former best friend and fallen hero he hardened his resolve and then charged straight into the hel that awaited him.

Clichés rampant.
Hel is Norse.

“This is for you buddy…”

Part of the joke appears to be that each line of dialogue is as cliché as possible. This does not register on my humour scale. Admittedly, my humour scale is broken.

Almost immediately the pain shot through his body. As the air sizzled with heat the ground itself boiled with a sickening blackish hue as if it were pure death itself.

Hm. Uses of senses other than sight. Not awful.
Awful purple prose.
Clichés rampant.

But he was a soldier, he would not let his training go to waste. He trudged onwards regardless of the madness he saw before him.

Comma splice.
Clichés rampant.

“KILL”

Hey, I appreciate that a joke entry bothers with formatting.

A torrent of madness wrecked his body but yet he continued onwards. He had to find these terrorists and put a stop them. Before they could do any more damage than they had already done.

It feels like you meant 'wracked' instead of 'wrecked'.
Clichés rampant.

“KILL KILL”

Yes, shut up, Avenger.

The people around him were already too far gone for him to be of any use. Ougi remembered when a fire broke out a few years back. A a gas main had erupted in a nearby business, a lot of people were severely burned beyond recognition and many of them died they had lost the will to live and Ougi stood there helpless about the entire situation.

Alright, a Fuyuki gas main explosion actually elicits a snigger.
Bad use of polysyndeton because you have no idea how to handle multiple clauses in a sentence. Don't chain ands like this without it being targeted at a real effect.
Clichés rampant.

Back then he could do nothing but this time would be different. This time even if it cost him his life he would help in any way possible.

Seriously, where did your commas go?
Clichés rampant.

“KILL KILL KILL”

Nobody cares, Angra.

As it became harder and harder to walk with every step he trudged onwards. His feet had long ago become numb with pain and his breathing began to get heavier and heavier with every movement of his body.

The causal meaning of 'as' makes this oddly ambiguous. I would replace it.
The interceding part about the feet makes the parallel comparatives less apparently parallel than they should be for full effect.
Clichés rampant.

“KILL KILL KILL KILL”

Alright, alright. In a minute.

He recognized the man even if only for a glimpse. Somehow this man was involved in all of this. It didn’t take long for Ougi to finally come to the conclusion. No matter what it took this man needed to be stopped. No matter the cost.

'From a glimpse.'
'didn't take long ... finally' rather works against itself.
'the conclusion' is a little oddly worded. It feels like it wants an adjective in there, or to change the article to something else.
Clichés rampant.

“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL”

I said "in a minute". Sheesh.

That boy, he was doing some sort of evil black magic to that poor helpless child.

Adjective overload.
Suspect punctuation.
Clichés rampant.

He didn’t even hesitate, his instinct took over almost instantly. Before he could even think the 9mm SCK standard issue pistol was already in his hands. Standard issue to the soldiers in defense of the motherland he always carried it with him even under different circumstances such as these.

Why only 'almost'? What's the use of that qualifier?
Your punctuation's gone walkabout again.
Overuse of 'even'.
I think you mean something rather stronger than 'different'.
Clichés rampant.

“Foul terrorist, this ends now!”

Ha.

“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL”

Fine. Look, he's dead. Are you happy now?

The bullets aimed straight for his unsuspecting body tore the man to shreds. Unreacting to the situation the man fell to the ground quiet and unmoving.

'Unreacting to the situation' doesn't sound like English.
Too many adjectives with 'un'. It reads weirdly.
Clichés rampant.


Okay, I'm bored, and the thousand words minimum critique is a totally arbitrary limit I set myself. Stopping now.


Judging
Hook
Your writing is bad. I didn't even stop the closed commentary for Breakdown's prose, but I could not be bothered to trudge through this pile.

I might care about this guy if we'd gone through your supposed plot beforehand, or if your characterisation had been expressed in anything other than rampant cliché, or if it had been interesting at all. But you did none of that, so I'm really not interested in ploughing on through what you think passes for prose.

If there is a joke, it's not apparent. I won't say if it's funny or not (maybe it is - maybe it's hilarious, though I rather doubt it) because I can't even see it.

I would be tempted to give you a consolation point for a backstory/plot summary with potential, but I can't put it under Hook because it didn't appear in the story, and I can't credit you under Set-up because that's not what the category's meant to cover.
0/43


Set-up
This is background and plot summary. It could be interesting, but it's not what you entered for your story, and it's not what you were meant to enter for this section.
0/42

Accuracy
Consolation point for gas main explosion. Otherwise there was very little Nasu in here to care about, though what was there was you treated very trivially and carelessly. This is how you deal with Kiritsugu? Really?
1/15


Final Score
1/100

[Seika]

Optimae medicae amor et vinum sunt.
Tempo aut abundantia omne abluere possunt.
Anonymous, c. 121 AD

The best medicines (nurses? ambiguous) are love and wine.
With either time, or sheer volume, they can wash away everything.

Hmmm. That conditional beginning to the second sentence weakens the power of the first one. I'd have rather this were a whole, with a proper quae or whatever. But the elisions do compensate reasonably for an otherwise potentially troublesome set of nouns when you're relying on possunt to supply a subject, so that's intelligently done. I can't find this on the net - was it made up, or do you have a source?

There are no shifting shadows on the earth. No creeping half-circles drawn around the sundial.

Very poetic and all, but there are plenty of shadows under a full moon.

Somehow, it seems, as the humans have advanced, their nights have only grown shorter.

By contrast, however-

-vampires' nights are long.

OK, nice.

What concerns us was far removed from the grand upheavals of the era, in almost every way worth mentioning. Far to the south of all this upheaval,

The 'all this upheaval' is surely redundant here, given what it follows. Also, I'd have put a paragraph break at 'what concerns us', because you are making massive, chunky blocks of text on my screen, and it's not easy to read. Literally three paragraphs is taking me over my thousand word count.
(To be fair, if you did put the paragraph break there, maybe it would be correct to keep the link intact. I'd still rather at least rephrase to avoid such close repetition).

To the north, where the headland met the mainland once more, there lay the town of Cassis, long ago made a trading port under the reign of Antoninus Pius, but it was here – on the high west-facing cliffs, the Falaises de Soubeyrannes – that our story took place.

Your prose has a very distinctive style here - in various respects, but the most obvious is this reliance on dashed parentheticals. Four of the last five sentences in this paragraph have one, and it's not going to get much less frequent in any of the rest of your descriptive paragraphs. It obviously allows for lots of depth to your writing, but it feels like you're resorting to them very easily, without trying to vary your sentence structure at all, when there are certainly ways either to incorporate the sense of these asides more closely into the sentence or to lose them altogether. I would encourage you to think about branching out: so much of this paragraph has a similar tempo and rhythm that it ends up sounding inflexible, constrained and just same-y. Even if you're going for a deliberate stylistic choice, it's too heavy-handed.

It couldn't be seen, of course, but it was there. Were you to press the argument, it would simply respond that it had a very nuanced definition of 'there', and leave it at that.

A nice use of personification, and a slightly heavier touch of the understated humour already apparent, in an appropriate place for it.

This was something decided in part by their inherent nature, and in remainder by the inherent nature of the castle's occupant.

Hmm. Not that I think this is particularly impactful, but I'm interested by the choice of 'in part ... in remainder' over 'in part ... in part'. Very slightly more precise, I suppose. (As it happens, the end of this sentence is where I'd add my paragraph break in this one, by the way).

a coastal villa of a style not easily describable

'of a style not easily describable' is a tad awkward as a phrase, fittingly. The usual construction would be 'a style which defied description', but that's probably too usual. Think about finding a happy medium.

suffice to say that both a man alive at the decadent height of the Roman Empire and a man alive over a thousand years later would regard it with a kind of extremely uncomfortable familiarity.

Why's the familiarity uncomfortable, let alone extremely so? I don't see what you're going for here. I could maybe see the parts that aren't so familiar of this in-between style being uncomfortable, or the melding of familiar and unfamiliar, but not simply the parts that are recognisable.
Speaking of the extreme discomfort, that part's phrased a bit unfortunately. You've got the moderating description 'a kind of' right next to the very immoderate adverb 'extremely', and it undermines the effect of both parts. Worse, a casual read may (even unconsciously) interpret a 'kind of' not as a 'variety of', but instead as 'a bit', 'sort of', 'kinda'. Which exacerbates the problem noticeably.
I'm not sure about providing the specific era to begin, and then taking just a measure of time from there; I think this might go better if you had two defined periods, mentioning the time between as well if you have to.

in the mind of some architecturally-inclined descendant of Tiberius asked without ever having seen them to imagine the pleasure-palaces built on Capri by his infamous ancestor of an Emperor.

On the one hand, Tiberius is, of course, a good emperor to associate with decadence and so forth. Nero is another obvious choice, but that'd be rather too cute in my eyes. On the other hand, it's not the cheerful kind of decadence your set-up ideas would lead me to believe. More, you know, really creepy paedophilia. So ... I'd have chosen a bit differently.

clustered near the edge of the cliff, bordering it, with only a long, elegant stone balcony at the edge of a terrace daring to jut out over the sheer drop to the sea.

Conjures a very clear and powerful image: good.
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.

And how naïve to think it ended there, with what could be found on the surface.

This is almost a dare to the reader to say, "I'm bored with the bloody architectural descriptions - can we see a character at some point?" I don't know if I respect you for making that dare, or just think it's imprudent.

Beneath the would-be villa, there lay a vast labyrinth, carved deep into the cliff by inhuman hands – a huge, Byzantine accretion of rooms, corridors, staircases, mezzanines, wide galleries and narrow passages, spaces that could be as large and open as a cathedral or as confined and cloistered as an attic, or anywhere in between, with all of it built up – lovingly – chaotically – over countless years, so that every turned corner, crossed threshold, opened door, or even a single room, through a unusual yet seamless fusion of styles and eras, might span centuries or even millennia of architecture.

Sodding hell. Look, respect for reflecting the enormous and Byzantine architecture with an enormous and Byzantine sentence (over 100 words by OpenOffice's count), but I really think this is too far. People write miniature stories in 100 words. Actually, this wouldn't be too bad as one of those, which I suppose is some credit to the sentence.
I quite like the carving of the cliff by inhuman hands, because that's a known metaphor but one which could just about be the truth in the Nasuverse.

and so many more that to describe to describe each and every one would make for a novel in and of itself.

Not that lacking a novel's worth of space has held you back from much so far.

This was a hidden place, and rightly so. It was, as I said, a labyrinth, and labyrinths should never be entered into lightly.

Alright, I like this conclusion of the description by drawing it all down into an idea of 'labyrinth'. I was initially unsure that this was the best place to put the first 'I' of the narration, but I think it's smoother than most of the other points you could have dropped it, so it passes.


Extra Commentary
The present 'is' in the middle of the description of the ship's scent is intrusive, however justified by the framing device it may be.
Voices are realistic and distinct: as ever, an invaluable writing skill.
The description of Rita awakening is excellent.
I like the idea that she totally fails to seem anything other than angelic in appearance. Again, a nice conceptual bit of writing.
Your stichomythia is evening primrose is my favourite part of this 'fic, especially the ending of the second section, about Rita's love of art and it not loving her back. Very very well written.
The virtuoso imperium parts only stop being far too list-y in their prose when that prose becomes dialogue.
Look at this sentence again, and repent your horrible abuses of punctuation and syntax: And to think it stopped with that; no – instead, it seemed as this...this oddity, this singularity of a Dead Apostle...had made herself so at home in the water – that the water had made itself such a part of her – that it took her songs to function on land in any capacity worth mentioning.

So people understand that the author's cheating on that painter quote:

ἦ καὶ τὸν ζωγράφον δημιουργὸν καὶ ποιητὴν τοῦ τοιούτου;
οὐδαμῶς.
ἀλλὰ τί αὐτὸν κλίνης φήσεις εἶναι;
τοῦτο, ἦ δ᾽ ὅς, ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ μετριώτατ᾽ ἂν προσαγορεύεσθαι, μιμητὴς οὗ ἐκεῖνοι δημιουργοί.

"And is also the painter a creator and maker of such a thing?"
"Not at all."
"But what will you say he is in relation to the couch?"
"This," he said, "seems to me to be the most reasonable way for a painter to be referred to: as an imitator of what others make."
(Republic 10.597d-e)

Good work on Rita's dissatisfaction. I find it interesting that not only is completion so painful to her, but that she still completes her work. It's not a matter of being caught up in it, because she sets her work aside in the boxes - so she, to some degree, is consciously inflicting this on herself. It's cool characterisation.
Oh, look, I put this down before we even met Sumirè in virtuoso imperium and she talked about the same thing. This, indeed, is writing. Well done.


Judging
Hook
Passes the 'would I keep reading?' test, albeit the virtuoso imperium style became a chore to get through at times.

As much as I'd like to see sovereign soul continued and can see how it could be, I think maybe you finished dealing with it too far from the end of the chapter, and when you picked it up again in the second chapter, it would take a little bit of effort to slide back into it.

Discussion of etymology, Terence, Plato and Aristophanes appeals to me on a personal level. Slagging off Plato even more so, as a particular bias. (Slagging off the beginning of the Hecyra would have made me happy too, just because it involves Terence whining so much, and also some annoying bit of grammar to do with gladiators and infinitives that I can't recall the exact details of off-hand).

In general, I think your excellence in set-up was by far the best tool in your arsenal for making me want to read on, so you're getting more marks there than here.
29/35


Set-up
Art, artist and reality from an immortal/DAA point of view - placed front and centre. Prepared through use not only of narrative, but also style, which gains bonus points.

Surviving immortality - more backgrounded; there, but I think if you put a focus group to naming things they expected out of the upcoming writing, this would not be a theme you'd often hear from them. It's fine not to put a big spotlight on this yet, though you did have a lot of words to tease a bit more out of it.

Mortal and immortal romance - Not so much. Hitherto, mortals have barely featured, and none obviously ready to further this concept.

Rita, Sumirè and their relationship - obviously, and you've got lots of angles on this which I think would be developed well. I like the splitting of virtuoso imperium and evening primrose in the service of this.
46/50


Accuracy
Not that there were an enormous number of details to cleave to regarding these two characters, but picked up lots of little things and this is probably going to be how I think of Sumirè and Rita from now on.
Minor note that Rita's spatial distortion is easy/powerful enough that it might be infringing on the border of True Magic rather than magecraft. Medea gets to do what she can because she's hopped up on leylines and is right out of the Age of the Gods.
14/15


Final Score
89/100
(Plus point in the eventuality of the a draw - which already seems unlikely - for getting my highest score).

[Seika]

Thousand Word Commentary

Prologue: Death Sentence

For all Sajyou Ayaka knew, she might have only days left to live.

Traditionally a strong sort of opening, but a bit too traditional as well.

It wasn’t that she was suffering from a terminal ailment; by all indications she was physically healthy. And while she had experienced more than her share of trauma in her eighteen years of life and suffered from a deep-seated inferiority complex, she was resilient enough that her psychological problems hadn’t destroyed her, though she still bore their mental scars.

This is a really clumsy info-dump with absolutely no telling, rather than showing. It also manages to hit one of my peeves, which is overuse of concessives in narrative voice. 'While this, that, except the other' weakens your authorial authority, and just sounds like you haven't planned out the sentence very well: you're backing off the point you were originally making and the contrast which underpinned that point.

No, the source of her present anxiety was that any half-competent magus observing Fuyuki City could tell that the Holy Grail War would soon return there, quite possibly bringing with it her execution.

Following on from your excess concessives and the lack of planning, 'No' would be so much better following on from Ayaka's resilience to mental turmoil, rather your allowance that she hasn't got her head on quite straight.
You've also got an issue where you've made a very indefinite subject to your main verb, 'any half-competent magus', and there's not enough disconnect between that and the next clause. It sounds like any rubbish old magus can not only tell that the War's returning, but also that Ayaka specifically is screwed because of it, which I doubt you meant to imply.
You can cut this down very easily while losing minimal impact and meaning. 'present' is unnecessary; 'there' is unnecessary; 'quite possibly' is unnecessary; 'with it' is unnecessary. If this is going to stand by itself as a paragraph, it needs to convey a lot more actual meaning. Doesn't need to be long at all; the first paragraph of this story did well enough and it was a single, pretty short sentence. But a paragraph needs to merit its existence as a unit, and this is anaemic.
As all these notes imply, I think this is a Bad Sentence.

Ten years ago, her talented older sister, Sajyou Manaka, had been on the verge of winning the Fourth Holy Grail War when she had been murdered her along with their father. Ayaka still couldn’t remember how she had gotten there, but she remembered waking to a nightmare at the sound of a gunshot, finding herself in an auditorium stained with blood and a strange, malevolent-looking mud, with her father’s mutilated corpse already on the ground before her. And then she saw Manaka, who collapsed into her arms moments later, mortally wounded. Looking up in shock, she had seen her sister’s killer, a dark-haired magus, standing before her. She had thought he was going to finish her off, but then his accomplice, no – his Servant, a blonde swordswoman, wrenched her
away from her sister’s dying body with inhuman strength. She wasn’t sure what happened next, but the last thing she saw before losing consciousness was a blinding flash of light that engulfed the amphitheater.

Woah, woah, woah. That was so rushed. This is important, to your story and to the character, and it went by so fast that the impact is reduced enormously. This was a place to work in detail - not necessarily length, though that might have helped, but enough description that this feels like something which actually happened. What was Manaka's mortal wound, for a start? Instead, it reads like ... almost a publisher's spoiler-filled blurb.
(As a note of principle, it is a distinctly fanfic bad habit to continually include hair colours as description or epithet, and it's a good way to turn off jaded readers).
And I'm damned if Fuyuki has an amphitheatre, so there's thesaurus syndrome cropping up.
I don't really support your tense use here, dropping in and out of pluperfect without good justification. Why did you choose to say that Ayaka 'saw' Manaka, but 'had seen' she herself was going to be killed? Your pluperfect temporally follows the simple past; it's very weird. You should try to be consistent. (If you can avoid it, your consistent use should not be of the pluperfect because it's such a remote tense, so just go with some normal past tenses).
(Your tenses don't get quite so muddled in the rest of the piece, but there are still some problems. Keep an eye on this factor).

When she had regained consciousness, she had found herself in a hospital, where she learned of the Great Fuyuki Fire that had broken out the night before, leveling much of the residential district and claiming hundreds of lives. The doctors told her it was a miracle that she had been rescued from the epicenter of the blaze with only minor injuries. Except for one boy and the man who had saved who had saved them both, they did not yet know of any
survivors.

Leveling -> levelling.
The prose here is just subtly stilted. Ayaka can just find herself 'in hospital'; one usually learns 'about' instead of 'of'; the whole first sentence is a bit too long and should have been broken up; 'it was a miracle she'd been rescued'; you can lose the 'yet' at the end, because it doesn't do enough to justify itself.
As a general note, it's not a sin to use contractions even in third person narrative, and especially if you're reporting speech as in the case of these doctors.

For reasons she could not comprehend, the same man who had torn her family away from her had risked his life to carry her and the boy, Shirou, to safety.

I don't think this first clause is the best. There's room for you to make this more personal to Ayaka, to dive into her mind and show her confusion more closely. As it stands, it's rather perfunctory and the word choice makes it sound a bit stiff.
The second clause hits you with the word 'her' a lot in a short space of time, to the point of being noticeable. Not great: unless you're doing a gender reveal, pronouns aren't there to be noticeable. (OK, yes, one 'her' is technically a possessive, whatever). Could use some revision, which might trim a bit of excess verbiage out too.

After a day or so of rest, the injuries she had sustained had healed enough for her to be discharged from the hospital, but the pain of losing her family was still fresh in her heart. And as a magus she would be expected to carry on their legacy, even though she knew she lacked same natural talent that her sister had possessed, let alone Manaka’s few but exceptionally potent magic circuits; all she had was an average number of middling quality circuits, and she had to struggle to learn any Magecraft. How could she possibly live up to what her sister could have achieved?

the injuries she had sustained -> her injuries. There's no value in the longer phrase, and it slows your already mediocre pacing.
I don't like moving on from, frankly, the more emotionally important part of Ayaka's loss (her family) without any proper exploration of it, to your examination of what she now has to live up to.
I'd have put the rhetorical question at the beginning of this: it gives a more personal shade to everything thereafter, which I think is necessary if you're going to go with this technical explanation of the difficulties Ayaka faces in being head of her family. (I still think you'd be better served with an emotional slant instead).

It was at this time that she was introduced to Kotomine Kirei, the priest who now ran the local church following the passing of his father. He told her that he had been appointed as the guardian of another magus whose father had died during the War, Tohsaka Rin, and since the Sajyou were also friends of the Church, he was willing to look after her as well, now that she had no surviving family left. The way he said it just twisted the knife in her heart further; her family really was dead, no matter how much she wanted to disbelieve it. She scarcely heard him as he told her that Rin was about her age, and that they could both use a new friend.

I'd prefer more detail about how this meeting with Kirei happened. Ayaka's been discharged, so she's not in an easy public space - did Kirei just turn up to her house? Did she coincidentally bump into him eating mapo tofu? Was there any official slant to it? There's a lot of different angles this could be approached from and which could colour the relationship with Kirei, and I feel like I've been left a bit clueless, as a reader.
The casual knife-twisting comment isn't a subtle way to signpost Kirei, but at least it gives him definition within the story.

In the end, Kotomine had become her official guardian, and soon thereafter oversaw the procedures in which the Sajyou family crest was implanted into her body. Given the condition that her father’s remains had been in when they were finally retrieved from the wreckage, it still seemed incredible to her that Kotomine had been able to save the crest, but then again he was an expert at spiritual surgery. But receiving the crest only made her gloomier still, for it reminded her that Manaka should have inherited it. All her father had ever expected of her was that she Magecraft and eventually marry into another magus family to forge an alliance between them and the Sajyou. And while the fact that they had found her father’s body allowed him to receive a burial at the family grave, no such trace remained of Manaka.

was that she ... learn, I suppose? ... Magecraft. (I barely knock people for missing words; it just happens. Misspellings you could have done deliberately: this is just a minor error).
This is one of your first paragraphs where I actually feel like you've got a halfway decent tone and tempo to the prose. It's not as personal as it could be, but you did home in a little more on Ayaka's feelings, and there's nothing too weird in terms of word choice or placement.

Indeed, they developed somewhat of a bond after having to grow up together under Kotomine.

Somewhat as a straight noun is noticeably archaic. You almost certainly mean something.
Final paragraph is again a giant exposition dump. It's not at all subtle or sophisticated. I'm giving you marks in my capacity as a judge for decent Ayaka characterisation in it (as in true to Ayaka, not as in characterising her any further than canon already has), but as a reader I really don't like it.


Extra Commentary
Just reading at a usual, unanalytical pace through the rest of the 'fic changed my reaction. Namely, instead of going to highlight for the author their clumsy writing (that stunningly abrupt transition out of the flashback) or overexposition, I ended up making some extraordinary involuntary groans and snorts. I suspect my housemates are worried about my mental health. (More than they were already).
Yeah, more tense oddities in the Archer flashback. This seems to be a recurrent weakness you should look at. It makes the transition out of flashback much less clear than it should be.
Less burdened with explanation, the prose becomes stronger and flows faster. It's not great, but it's at least readable.
Caster Lancer is kinda interesting, but Ayaka's mother just happening to have picked up Baz's earrings is hilariously contrived.
Chapter one bogs itself down in exposition so badly. We're moving from character to character seemingly just to have them do long explanations of history and motive. Yes, you had an exciting (end of a) prologue, but this is still so early in the story that you should still be trying to sink your hooks into a reader. Save it for later - especially some of these plot hooks and twists.


Judging
Hook
I'd have dropped this when we hit Rider going HEY, AYAKA, LET ME TELL YOU EVERYTHING ABOUT THE SERIAL KILLER YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT. Painfully clumsy. So you get the usual big penalty on that front.
As far as the basic premise goes, merging Prototype and Fate (and Zero) is pretty neat, and you ... I'm not going to say you handled it brilliantly, but you didn't outright bugger it up either. One of the bits I think was genuinely well done was Ayaka's initial attitude to Shirō. It had some subtlety, some layers, and some originality to it, in a premise all about recycling things.
And then you summarily removed all/the vast part of the conflict there. That does make me deduct some of the points you earned.
Setting up a possible rebellion against Manaka by her Servants (and making it individual too: Paracelsus' resentment; the sacrificed Assassins) was something that did interest me.
17/50


Set-up
Mirrors/Counterparts - Yes, but not as much as I'd actually have liked. Without going overboard, I think you could have put more emphasis on the contrasts that were there and even perhaps drawn attention to it in other ways. Think of the colour schemes in F/SN: Rin & Archer's black and red; Shirō & Saber's dominant blue and so on. They don't mean anything in-story, but they help guide an audience's thoughts without introducing more plot elements. Trying to do specifically work such a visual element into a non-visual medium could be difficult to make work, but something just along those sort of lines.

PTSD; Ayaka and Shirō - This was there, but somewhat clumsily introduced and currently superficial. I would hope that this gained more depth over the course of the full story, and I can see possibilities for that, so I'm not going to knock off too many marks.

Treachery - Again, one of the ideas that I actually liked in here, which I thought you wrote in well enough with layers and some degree of subtlety, was the treachery of Manaka's Servants. I liked it when I saw this after opening up your set-up spoiler, having read the story.
On the other hand, various of your other moments of betrayal I think got blown too early and too quickly, so this is by no means a perfect goal.
15/32


Accuracy
I'm not super into Prototype, but I think you got Ayaka down fairly well (admittedly, it rather felt like you did this by making a checklist of every identifying feature she had and shoving them into the writing).

In a similar vein, various of your other characters that I could work with - e.g. Kotomine, Ilya - seemed accurate but forcedly so. It was like ... let me make an extended and bizarre analogy. You've got a digital environment set up, and you construct an AI program to live out a life in that virtual world, mimicking someone's real life. You input perfect surveillance footage of your subject as a basis for the experimental AI. And the result is that all their actions are there, all their clear and primary traits, but there's an underlying feeling of superficiality, because the actions don't have a smooth connection with the deeper drives of that person. In the end, they're just mimicked. Is that clear as mud yet?

Oh, and the typo of Ath nGabla as Ath nGablam gets you a minor knock too.
12/18


Final Score
44/100

[Seika]

Thousand Word Commentary

“To seek Akasha is to pursue the knowledge of this world. The motions of the stars, the history of this earth, and the untold millennia of the primal times of the past – all of these outstrip the grain of sand of human achievement in the hourglass of the world’s knowledge. Most feats of humanity are pale imitations of that which the world’s fauna have achieved for millions of years. They are closer to Gaia and its fruits than we could ever become. Therefore, to emulate the beasts of this world – its first and proper inhabitants – is the fastest path to the Swirl of the Origin.”

- Nikólaos Thirioakis, 1st Family Head of the House Thirioakis

I like this. You've given us a lead-in on ideas in your story, on at least one likely character (some member of the Thirioakides), and on your originality. You've worked out a new angle from which a magus family could aim for the Root and, further, kept it very Nasu-ish in its closeness to Tōko's aim at the original human body. Very strong.

The sun shone weakly through a patchwork of grey; grass still limp with melted frost bent and crumpled under the heavy footfalls of the five people walking purposefully over the grassy hills. The one farthest to the left – a short blond woman with light gray eyes – stretched parka-clad arms in exaggerated tiredness and spoke.

I like the little juxtaposition of grass crumpling under the footsteps of those walking over a hill. You did end up using grass and grassy very redundantly in the same sentence, though.
It is nice to have description to set the scene, but I think this paragraph goes just a bit too far. One or two adverbs and adjectives lost would tighten up the pacing a bit.

“Apparently, the Thirioakis family in the late 50’s,” answered another member of the group. The stout man ran a pale hand through mud-brown hair and continued. “During the reconstruction period of Germany after World War II, one of the target’s ancestors diverted funds to build this safe house in the outskirts of Stuttgart. Interestingly enough, Jenna – the report didn’t offer any sources for this section – he might have used unorthodox means to acquire the tools and money for the hotel’s construction involving a-”

Jenna waved a hand to interrupt him and then pinched her forehead in a practiced motion. “Ethan. That question was rhetorical.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Again, good. Some exposition, a bit of self-aware satire that doesn't get too carried away with its own cleverness - as you would usually find a 'fic writer doing - and characterisation worked in to boot.
I think you could well have lost the 'of Germany': you're going to mention Stuttgart anyway.
You've got about the right level of personal description in here - just enough to build a picture, not enough to be too blatant or overwhelming. Far too many people get obsessed with their original characters' appearances and trot it all out at once, when there's no need to do so as soon as we meet them, or indeed ever.

Jenna sighed and rolled her shoulders, causing a package covered in blue cloth strapped to her back to wobble.

“Jesus, cheer up will you?” A large gloved hand whooshed through the air to swat Ethan on his parka-clad back, and the smaller man jumped out of his slouch to face the offender.

“Would you please stop doing that, Franz?” Ethan glared upwards at the tall, dark-skinned man; Franz met his stare with a broad grin.

More commendations for use of physical characterisation too. Not only is it good work on telling rather than showing, it's just an avenue that 'fic writers often forget to use and explore. Dialogue is an obvious tool for demonstrating personality - minor actions like Jenna's sigh and roll of her shoulders sometimes get left by the wayside.
The understated implication that this is a thing Franz does habitually to Ethan is good too. You didn't dwell on it, just put it out there and left it for the reader to pick up on. It's not always easy to trust your readers as an author, so this is a good attitude.

“Orders are orders, Franz. And you know the saying when it comes to these guys. The only crimes a Designate haven’t committed yet–”

Sayings are a nice way to world-build. Not always the most subtle, but you tried to mitigate that by having someone else finish it off. It'll do.

Sebastian – a dour man with stringy black hair and skin like curdled milk – stared straight ahead as he spoke. “It’s over the next hill, to the left of that forest. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if–” He cursed under his breath.

“A hawk just killed one of my scouting familiars. They’re enchanted to repulse natural wildlife.”

He turned to face the rest of the group, a scowl on his face.

“He knows we’re coming.”

Use of minor familiars in the Nasuverse is a cool little thing. We're used to unique powerhouses of familiars, like Servants or Len, so just going back to basics is quite fresh. It also helps get the reader into the right mindset to read your 'fic: you make, without being bluntly crass, the point that you've brought the crisis level down from Grail Wars and the epic battles of ancient heroes to the level of Enforcers, Sealing Designates and magus battles.
I'm also interested in the contrast expressed here - Sebastian used a familiar for scouting, specifically, whereas the Thirioakis has enchanted the hawk. The methodological difference seems likely to express a deeper philosophical one. We'll see how that develops. (Though one wonders how Sebastian can tell the difference between an enchanted hawk and one made into a familiar).

A lone man stood in the dingy hotel room, staring intently at the walls. Once the bearers of cheap paintings by amateur artists firmly mired in mediocrity, the walls were now clad in equations abstruse to all but the most knowledgeable and diagrams of various animals detailed to each capillary. A window formed the majority of one wall, though the thick patina of dust on its paisley-patterned curtains spoke to its use. Adjacent to it was a wooden bed, topped with ratty sheets of faded red filled with holes and a mattress haphazardly punctured with springs. A sturdy table was the final piece of furniture in the room; its covering was a layer of papers, each adorned with machinery and equations, and a small velvet-clad box covered in faintly glowing runes.

Bit of a description dump, but it's in the right sort of place for one and it's mostly good enough to let slide.
You're pretty consistent about not using the Oxford comma, so I can't technically fault you - that's a legitimate English decision - but this sort of situation is exactly why I prefer it. There's a moment of hesitation before one works out that it's absurd to have equations that are only not abstruse to 'all but the most knowledgeable and diagrams'.

The thin man scrawled furiously on the peeling wallpaper, golden brown hands flying across the wall adding to the arcana on the walls. He wore scuffed and faded black shoes, dusty dark brown slacks and a gray sleeveless shirt underneath a black jacket. If one shaved away the layer of stubble across his face, his features would be considered attractive; yet they held a cruelty impossible to truly hide.

Now, this is sort of the part where I think there's a problem. You threw enough talk about the room in that it's momentarily difficult to remember who you mean by 'the thin man' at all. (This part is also possibly a good point for a paragraph break: that might help, since it means you've got a parallel structure where the man is mentioned at the start of each paragraph). It's also possible that you just want to delay mentioning the man at all until you hit this point, where you're ready to describe him.
'flying across the wall adding to the arcana on the walls' is either very redundant and repetitious, or you wrote down two different versions of the end of the sentence and forgot to delete one.
I think there are enough implications around here that you don't need to add an adverb like truly to that last clause.

The man suddenly ceased his mad scrawling, and the constant skitter of his pen – not unlike the crazed skittering of starved rats – faded into the air of the solitary room. He reached into the black curls atop his head and pulled. A strand of hair writhed in his palm before igniting, and then burning into ashes.

We have here some use of the lovely Classical literary technique known as hypallage. At one point it's employed well; at another, not so well, I think. In 'crazed skittering', 'skittering' is itself an action - it has no mind to craze. The rats are crazed, but you've transferred the epithet. This is nicely literary, spaces out your adjectives, and works, overall. But it contrasts with the use of 'solitary room'. The room is certainly not solitary: it's in a hotel. The man within is the one isolated. But because you've distanced him so far from the transferred adjective, that's not the immediate association and it just sounds counterfactual.
I do like the animal simile, though. Good theming always scores marks with me.
In general, the first sentence is overburdened with adjectives and could stand to lose at least one.
Is the understatement of 'not unlike' necessary or effective? What's your purpose in using the circumlocution?
In addressing these last two points, I would be tempted to rewrite the first sentence to make the starved-rat skittering of his pen a metaphor instead of a simile, which probably makes for more concision and puts more emphasis on the animal theming.

Από το θηριοτροφείο, ένα πουλί που πετάει.

On the one hand, this is basically what I get from Google Translate. On the other, I can't find anything technically wrong with it from my very basic knowledge of how modern Greek goes. So I'm allowing it.
(Is που still allowed to be indefinite in modern Greek?)

For the Thirioakis family, this is not the case; its members store the materials of animals within themselves and their crest for immediate usage.

Reasonable little place for an info-dump, I suppose.
It seems perhaps that the difference between familiars and enchanting animals which I thought would be used as a dividing line between Thirioakis and the Enforcers is not to be. A shame; I'd have liked that as a story element.
As I commented on with Kleio, spatial warping is a tricky little thing in the Nasuverse that toes the line of magecraft and True Magic. Teleportation is for magicians, and IIRC the Tōsaka have a bigger-on-the-inside container hanging around that's a gift from Zelretch, but Medea can just about pull off a teleport look-alike when hopped up on leylines, and NPs like Gate of Babylon and Caladbolg do it all the time, and it's a bit of a mess. This is low-key enough that I'm going to let it go entirely. (And would be interested if I've forgotten any basis which you used for this).


Extra Commentary
Just good combat generally. There's tension, there's the possibility of it going either way, and you've got decent tempo on the ground level. Maybe a little rushed in tota, though.
είναι is now a finite form. Modern Greek is so disgusting.
Remembering the costs of magic, like Dimitri's pain as his hands morph back, earns you accuracy points.
There's a startling image: "a madman’s mix of Dali and Monet."


Judging
Hook
Passes the basic "I didn't give up on it already" test handily.
I think you did very well at the end to pull in some known elements from the Nasuverse, which might well catch people who are turned off by all-OC stories. Some would undoubtedly have dropped it before we heard about the Barthomeloi or Baz, but there are enough who'd give it at least to the end of the first chapter.
I liked the idea behind Thirioakis really quite a lot, so that gets you marks.
39/42


Set-up
The purposes of magi - Obviously there in the initial quote, but very de-emphasised in the actual chapter for the sake of action. I don't know: I think you could have slipped this in a few more times.

Nietzsche's abyss - You'd have to be careful with this, since the default magus in the Nasuverse is already a monster, and that's where your audience's expectations are set. Obviously, you're trying to play off that, but I don't think you did enough in this chapter to set Thirioakis apart from his hunters. If you're going to blur a line, that line needs to be firmly drawn in the first place.
A particular point I want to highlight is that after Thirioakis' first kill, you drew attention to the physical pain he felt, when you could have written about the combined physical and mental effects. I can see us turning to an earlier time in his life for a later chapter, but this is not a case where an achronological expoloration will be effective, in my opinion.

Gaia & Alaya - The Thirioakis philosophy and transformations are an obvious lead-in to a conflict between humanity and the natural world, one of the Nasuverse's recurrent themes. This one was readily identifiable to me and gets good marks.
29/48


Accuracy
I'm giving you a pass on the NRVNQSR number/variety of animals limit, because the Thirioakis branches of magecraft seem just distant enough from what Chaos does to avoid it. It's casting spells with stored materials, rather than using factors as a literal part of oneself. Is pretty close, though, and I might expect you to talk explicitly the differentiation as the story goes on.
Oh, you did spell Barthomeloi as Bartholomelloi, which isn't a thing from the katakana, or the romanisation, or any English source that I can remember or find on a Google search. So that is a minor knock.
8/10


Final Score
76/100

[Seika]

Thousand Word Whole 'fic Commentary

Light, heat, pressure. Flying, falling. Crashing, sinking. Severing, binding.

These are the ingredients of a broken heart.

I think you managed to fit Kiritsugu's attributes in here pretty well. With the early transition from nouns to gerunds, severing and binding slot in fairly naturally, where they otherwise might be very noticeably out of place.
Second paragraph is melodramatic. You went for a stripped-down starkness and it ended up too blatant. Also this makes me think of the Powerpuff Girls, which is probably not the association you want.

She thought of the sea, and she could not have told you why.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

This was not the gentle roll of waves, the salty spray of the ocean, the gritty moisture of the beach

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

There was a staccato rhythm, a salty scent and a sense of filthy

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Not sand, not sea

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

What was it? What was happening? Better still, what had already happened?

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

He ejaculated inside of her.

No one would find his body until the next day.

Mmm. Rape as a beginning. Tasteful.
Well, shocking your reader is a valid way to start. It's the sort of thing I'd advise fanfic authors against because, like messing with grammar for effect, amateurs rarely get given the benefit of the doubt. You're much more likely to be thought of as a teenager who just went straight for the rape as THE WORST THING, LIKE, EVER than someone who put mature consideration into it. (For now, I'm choosing to withhold judgement).
Speaking of breaking conventions for effect, I like the missing full stops here. It's obviously deliberate, given that you've punctuated properly around them, and the fractured feel it lends the prose is appropriate to Natalia's state of mind.
You also get points for focusing down on scent and touch, rather than the usual reliance on sight. It again points the reader at Natalia's injured state, and it works with the ... action.
Ejaculation is clinical vocabulary, but this is in no way meant to be erotic, so that passes. You could have gone for a word choice to try to highlight the nastiness of the experience, but that risks tipping over into melodrama and torture porn. This was not the optimal choice, but a safer one.

A dirt path on feet too badly burned to feel the grit.

Familiarity breeds comfort.

She was too tired to care. She slept on the floor.

She sat up twenty hours later and dragged herself to a mirror. Its surface reflected blue eyes, white skin and scar tissue. The aria of hypnosis—self-hypnosis, no less—came next.

I approved before of the fractured and disjointed narration because it reflected Natalia's state of mind and because it was very obviously deliberate. I think this is a fairly good transition out of it, where the slight recovery after sleep is reflected by a turn toward more complex constructions in the writing.
You aren't Oxford comma-ing. See the Stewards review for my general thoughts on that, but I still can't dock you for it until you prove inconsistent about it.

The memories pooled in the base of her skull. She had to go diving to find them. They came up in bits and pieces. And it was in the stitching together that the truth came to light. That terrible, soul-searing light born of a massive explosion.

No, that wasn't right. The missile, the projectile, the weapon only burned her body, leaving it a ravaged mess—but not so ravaged that an opportunist turned away from bare flesh.

She hissed. It wasn't at the pain, not the physical. It wasn't in the sullied gray matter that she lashed together on the strength of willpower and magecraft. It wasn't at the violation of her body. It was at the violation of her trust.

The man in the morgue had paid with his life. The man with the weapon would pay in kind.

The first paragraph (and to an extent, the third) are a touch too simple for your current paradigm of more fully-constructed sentences. They feel pretty basic and don't have a very good flow to them.
Necrophiliac (or close to it) rape. Really wonderful. At least this wasn't clear up-front, because all the would have been an instant drop on grounds of melodrama and just general disgust.
Well, nevertheless, you did draw away from that, to focus on something else. You maybe didn't make everything you could have of the contrast between Natalia's more emotional concern and her physical health, but this is again a case where diving too deeply risks the torture porn feel, so it's the safer route.

Light, heat, pressure. Flying, falling. Crashing, sinking. Severing, binding.

These are the ingredients of a broken heart.

A fair enough place for repetition, but it's long enough that it's likely to get annoying if it continues to be used. This manner of theming is also more reminiscent of a short story than a prologue, I'd note.

“Reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”

He wore a three-piece suit. That was all she would remember of him. Whether the work of a memory-tampering magecraft or her own damaged mind, she would never be sure.

She stopped grimacing when it started to pull at the flower of scar tissue blooming across her face.

“Aren't they always?”

“True enough,” the Second Owner said. “But how could I not be startled to hear Natalia the Great failed to return three of my apprentice's summons?”

She ignored the caricature of a title. She suffered this nobody of a Second Owner, her employer in only one job back at the very beginning of her career, because this was the beginning of her career all over again. She was shaky, shaken. She had been off the radar for too long and with too little to her name with all the safe houses and hidden accounts cleared out.

I enjoy the characterisation of this Second Owner as just kind of a loser, with cliché lines and hilariously direct flattery.
shaky, shaken is very much the kind of wordplay I like.
'with too little to her name with all the safe houses' should probably be rephrased to not double up on that preposition. 'after her safe houses and hidden accounts', perhaps.

“When have I ever been easy to pin down?”

“How did you get those scars?”

She did not deign to answer.

Seems reasonably magus-like in the back-and-forth questions without answers. A bit mysterious, political, unwilling to give up knowledge, &c.

The uncharacteristic probing into personal matters laid aside, Monsieur Anonymous slid her a copy of the front page that was four days out of date. She scrutinized. A passerby might have taken her for a woman greatly enamored by the political scandal unfolding in newsprint. This passerby would have been half-right.

The intransitive 'she scrutinized' is odd-sounding and should probably just take 'it' as an object or otherwise be assimilated into a surrounding sentence. The Second Owner might slide her a copy of the front page for her to scrutinise, for example.
'Greatly enamored' slides toward purple prose, and 'unfolding in newsprint' is too stiff and formal. I would at least cut the adverb and make an 'unfolding political scandal' the end of the sentence.

She did not care for how much cocaine an aide to the Prime Minister was alleged to have snorted. What truly caught her eyes was the tabloid-scented story of four young women at a local university claiming sexual assault from the same, boogeyman-like figure. The story's author gleefully reported the name going around campus, the moniker of one Jack the Stripper.

Nestled between the page of that story and the next was the manila envelope.

Yes, that hits the tabloid feel well.
You have a continuity error, in that the Second Owner has supposedly only slid Natalia the front page, yet her payment is nestled between multiple pages.

Light, heat, pressure. Flying, falling. Crashing, sinking. Severing, binding.

These are the ingredients of a broken heart.

Yeah, I'm not so happy with this. It comes on too strong, and there's no nearby thought of Kiritsugu that helped the last repetition work.

Second-born son to the Quates family, remiss enough to allow non-heir Szilzard to learn the mystic arts.

Second children in magus families are often an interesting thing to explore in the Nasuverse, so I like that you've decided to take up a character like this.

He had taken a liking to making playthings out of women through the use of magical tricks he botched so poorly that the anonymous Second Owner of an otherwise-unassuming French town had detected the presence of mental interference magecraft with only a cursory investigation fueled by one of his rare fits of compassion at the rumors of a phantom-predator stalking his city.

This is not only a very long sentence, but you didn't have the courtesy shown by the Kleio author of at least trying to use punctuation to make it readable.
And you're returning to sexual crime. On the one hand, sex is something a story focused on Natalia would probably want to deal with. But this is too high a concentration in so short a space, I think. It leans the reader towards a juvenile estimation of the author, not one writing for proper effect.

Szilzard Quates, a man fascinated by the forceful penetration of his mind into a resisting woman's, his penis into an unwilling vagina.

Creepy. Which is obviously the emotion you want to conjure, but still. There's a point at which you lose the 'normal' audience and only retain a niche - like horror films or something. This is where you're hitting that point, I think. (Niche work is not worse by default, but does have to be authored - and advertised, even - very differently).
Unfortunately, this is also where the more clinical language, which was doesn't seem to fit. The sentence reflects a very disturbed person's fascination. The lack of emotion in penis and vagina doesn't support that, and you end up with conflicted prose. Either draw back from this (even to the extent of putting off a character like Szilzard entirely), or go full hog and accept that your audience will be those who actually like dark and nasty stories. (And teenagers).

Szilzard Quates, a man who had died when a freelancer penetrated his juggular with a Bowie knife.

'jugular'

She hadn't intended to kill him in such a way. The gun would have done the job just as well, but he had gotten the drop on her.

And yet.

There was a disappointed satisfaction in that karma. In the golden olden days, he would have died by the gun. She wouldn't have even needed the knife in her boot. She would have had time enough to shoot off some very sensitive parts of his anatomy.

How did he get the drop on her? She's out of shape, certainly, but he's distinctly second rate and I don't see a justification in the story for Natalia being out of action so long that she can get this rusty.
This seems like distinctly out-of-character vindictiveness by Natalia. (And, again, shooting off someone's dick is one of the archetypal puerile punishments).

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

The ragged sound of life. A man in the throes of all his primal urges. Fucking. Fighting. Breeding. Dying.

Theming and callbacks: good. The physicality of the gasping noise again had descriptive power, is appropriate to the situation, and works with your digression on primal urges.
The doubling up on sex through fucking and fighting seems unnecessary. One can see a distinction to be made, but this is a broad-strokes sentence (and story, for that matter). I don't think you want it. Plus sex obsession yet again, blah blah.

Her boot struck the butt of the knife with every bit as much of the vicious finality of hammer-on-firing pin.

Yet infinitely more rewarding.

Same OoC comment as above.


Extra commentary
Yeah, I ended up saddened by your eventually apparent focus on sex by the end, because I began basically by giving you the benefit of the doubt as an author out to shock and not just being prurient, and the writing ended up trying to undermine me. (This is still just the writing, not necessarily you, since I know this was submitted in a rush, but that's all I have to go on).

What I think could have been good, in terms of avoiding that and of establishing your narrative arc, would have been a meeting with someone who reflected attributes of Kiritsugu in some way, rather than the magical rapist. It gives you a chance to better show off Natalia's wretched and unstable emotional state, particularly where it regards her betrayer, and it gives the story a chance to really set up where it's going.


Judging
Hook
I like the idea of Natalia surviving and going to hunt down Kiritsugu, while we see her doing her job as Enforcer along the way to earn money and prepare for the fight he'd give her. I also think that you're reasonably effective as a technical author - by which I don't mean that very low level of grammar and spelling and sentence construction (mind, you did slip up there a couple of times, which isn't great in this short a piece). Rather, it's in terms of making your word choice and syntax work for what you're trying to accomplish. When you needed it, for example, you were very well able to create a sense of physicality, or trauma.

On the other hand, I'm not impressed by the way the promise of the plot began to unfold. Too much focus on sex seems juvenile and your set-up list isn't especially encouraging me to think we're likely to get away from that.

I did finish this, but I wasn't happy by the end, and probably wouldn't have gone on. It's quite possible that if you'd submitted something longer, I would have stopped around here, so I think you only miss a halfway drop on a technicality. And because I'm not interested in letting people off on technicalities, I'm deducting points more-or-less as if I had dropped it before the end.

Somewhat like Cursed Hand, this feels one-shotty. It's partly the use of a thematic refrain, which is a device particularly of one-shot stories. It also doesn't connect the potential future plot with the protagonist's person very well. You have the brief sentence about how Kiritsugu's going to pay, but nothing else really embedded in the main body of the story, and nothing else with a lot of emotional weight to it.
9/45


Set-up
Primal humanity - Alright, yes. Again we run into the case where I think you did well at working with this on the prose level, but it was ham-handed and juvenile on the plot level. Really ham-handed and juvenile.

Moral Greys - Still rather cack-handed on the plot level, but less supported by your writing. There are interesting ways to talk about good and evil in the Nasuverse, and the concept of an anti-hero, and the morality of killing for a greater cause, and so on. But a necrophiliac rape which just happens to resuscitate someone is hardly the way to begin an intelligent conversation about good done by evil.

Potential - Not really a focus, as far as I could tell. Your writing was very temporally centred at each point, whereas discussion of potential and what might have been requires you to range around more, to see what might have been and what is hoped for.
5/20


Accuracy
This is the first time in the contest that I've made Accuracy really count for something, because I think Natalia was noticeably out of character, and you need to take the hit for that. Your set-up plays up the brain damage much more than the story did, so you certainly should have made that clearer if you wanted it to be the cause of her change in characterisation.
Gain for working in concepts of the Second Owner and the second-born heir fairly well.
To be honest, you're partly scoring low here because there was too little written for me to grab onto and say, "Yes, this is the Nasuverse." Purely writing a longer piece and therefore naturally encountering some more little aspects of magecraft and society in the Nasuverse could have seen you achieve a better mark.
8/35


Final Score
22/100
(And lose a point for tardiness).

[Megas]

Kleio

So, yeah, this was both amazing and extremely tiring to slog through. If I could have had those virtuoso imperium paragraphs be slightly more bite sized, I feel like the tiring aspect. This story was also very difficult for me to judge since I almost felt under-qualified in terms of required knowledge to properly critique it.

The end result is something that looks kind of bare, since I kept adding sentences, then erasing them after realizing that my comment wasn't that valid. Needless to say, this is an excellent story.

Hook:

virtuoso imperium: Ok, I really enjoyed the development of the relationship between these characters, and I want to see it more. Rita's appreciation, or rather inability to have appreciation for her art and Sumire's calling her on it just kept me interested for more. However, I did have to really work to get through to the interactions at times, and the chewing up scenery almost took me out of it now and then.

sovereign soul: I liked the treasure hunting and the pirates. To be honest, whereas I found more interest in the characters of virtuoso imperium, I found more interest in the future direction of this, even though it feels like I got less of it. The pirate set-up reminds me of Tomb of the Sun God in a pleasant way, though with somewhat more of a calm exploration based feeling rather than the action-packed one I got there. While I felt the mentions of labyrinths and monsters were only present in virtuoso imperium, I felt it as almost a foreshadowing for what to see in the future here.

Even though the people themselves don't interest me too terribly much in comparison to virtuoso imperium.

I'll give you 40 points for the Hook

Set-up:

Point 1 was extremely well explored in this, and was put front and center in virtuoso imperium. It was just woven into pretty much everything

Point 2 I can see there, somewhat on Rita side, more on Sumire.

Point 3...... I felt this was kind of missing, and I went back to read it a again to try and find it, but I didn't... It might occur later in the story, but I don't see evidence for it here.

Point 4 Definitely see it to some degree

Point 5.... You did this, but I'm not sure this is actually a point. It's more of a comment.

Giving you 31 points for the set up

Accuracy:

I fully admit that checks for accuracy on anything history related aside from the Plato mentions and a couple other things here is done pretty much on Wikipedia based research. So I can't really deduct points based on anything.

Characters are all OCs or might as well be, and all the Nasuverse details are correct as far as I can see.

Giving you 15 points here




Overall it gets a 86/100. Great story in every way, even if there are a couple things I just couldn't see in the outline and virtuoso imperium was a bit of a slog to get through to the good bits.

I haven't decided on my bonus point yet, but this is quite likely to receive it.

Now, to get out Stewards by the end of the night.

This should be challenging.

[Megas]

The Stewards of Gaia

Hook: So, this story has a pretty good hook. The non-stop action and crazy magecraft battles were really something fun to read, and it just kept escalating through the end. Dimitri's drive towards his objective, the upcoming battle with Bazzet, how Dimitri breaks down as a human the further this story goes on. There's a lot of loose strings that I'm very happily going after here, and Bazzet jumping in at the end had my inner Nasu fanboy jumping up and down rapidly. The only thing I almost want to knock you for was just having Dimitri lay out everyone so fast that I almost felt like I was missing out on some decent fights, but since it served a purpose of steering in Baz sooner, I'll give it a pass.

I'm giving the Hook 40 points. There was almost nothing here I didn't think was interesting.

Set-up:

Point one is pretty well explored with Dimitri's quotes and general thoughts/actions, whereas the enforcers motives are mostly told through the conversation early on in the chapter. I can see a very clear path for this to be fully explored.

Point two is also very front and center here. The quotes and Dimitri's gradually caring less about murder, along with his parting comment to Franz really make this really easy to see. Once again I can see this moving forward.

Point three, is a little difficult to judge. It's there and there's a clear trail for it to continue, don't get me wrong, but I feel like it's almost too close to point two to be explored separately.

I'm going to give you 37 points here.

Accuracy:

Everything seems good here aside from the one misspelling that Seika pointed out to me.

Some of the magecraft seems almost excessively powerful, but on the other hand, it passes the test I usually put forth as the power-level test for average magecraft (said test is me asking myself "Would as servant be able to deal with this with relative ease?").

Like Kleio, this was mostly composed of OCs, so it's hard to judge the characterization based on anything.

Going to give you 13 points here.



Overall: This gets 90/100. Re-reading this, it turned out to be my favorite story, there's some action and some sense of crazy adventure going on that I just absolutely love to read. It for some reason really reminds me of reading the conclusion of The Name of a Rose, especially looking at those set-up points.

Though I realize at this point it probably won't happen, in the event of a tie, I would give this my bonus point.

[Megas]

Fate Proto-Crossing

Hook: So, this hook is kinda meh to me, while I don't know what's happening to everyone, there's no mystery to anything whatsoever. All the servants' identities are handed out like candy, the mystery of what exactly happened to Manaka is found out within the first few minutes of summoning a servant, all the villains and obstacles are pretty cleanly on display here.

It just makes it really hard to care since these established characters, even if they're in a different setting, it's hardly a mystery on what's the general plan of action or motivation for most of these servants.

There's some decent mix-up in the actual setting, but not much of it actually affects the Stay/Night side. Perseus is the only really wild card here at all. Manaka just seems like a poor man's Kirei here, all though that may be accurate to the light novels for all I know of prototype.

I'm going to give this 19 points. I'm sort of interested where this is going, but not for any of the main actors.

Set-up:

Point 1 is there, though it's not really blatant or pervasive. Rather than directly setting off a contrast, most of this is shown in describing how each character dealt with the time after the 4th war or their everyday lives.

It's not poorly done or anything, but it would need to be a little more obvious to actually make up a critical component of the story.

Point 2, going to be honest, having the revelation of what happened to Manaka happen so early on pretty close to killed this one for Ayaka. You did an ok job building up this earlier on, but after that revelation I can't see it progressing much for her anymore. Shirou is another deal, but I can't really see that developing much different than what I saw in canon here.

Point 3, This was done kind of well, especially if you view Perseus going serial killer as betraying his master's wishes. There's also the whole set up for Manaka's little band to betray here.

Giving you 19 points here too.

Accuracy: .....and here's kind of where I need to knock you on the personalities.

Everyone aside from maybe Ayaka and Rin feels at least kind of off, though this is only really noticeable with Ilya and Saber.

Also, there is the whole thing that Archer actually knows that killing Emiya Shirou won't cause a paradox. It's always been about venting his frustration towards his younger self.

Also, when Cu starts taunting Saber with "don't think you can win just because you have high magic resistance" it feels really really weird. Like talking about game mechanics directly weird.

Giving you 10 points here, since while everything sort of felt in place in terms of motivations, it didn't feel as much in place in terms of actual character. At least for the characters that I know.


So this gets an overall 48/100. Needs more mystery and a bit more research on Nasuland characters.

Not a bad job, but a lot of the character interactions really rubbed me the wrong way.



....I know I said I'd get up Wanton Creatures tonight, but it looks like that'll have to wait for tomorrow

[Megas]

Wanton Creatures

Hook: ....OK, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be hooked on, there's not really enough here for me to say there's even a real plot coming out of this. Natalia comes back from the dead via necrophilia.... and???

Really, the only thing that seemed to be emphasized here was the Necrophilia, and that's not exactly a good hook here.

I have to giving this hook 4 points.... I almost want to give it 0, but at the very least there is 'something' going on here with Natalia's revival.

Set-up:

Point 1 is dealt with via the Necrophiliac, but that's really it.

Point 2 is pretty much the same deal, except the second half of the point is pretty much ignored.

Point 3 is flat out not there at all.

I'm going to give this part 9 points. Just cause the first and 2nd points were kinda sorta maybe there.

Accuracy:

Someone tell if I'm wrong, but is there anything indicating that banging a dead mostly-human-succubus-hybrid can bring it back to life?

In any case, Natalia didn't really have much of a character here or at the very least, nothing that reminded me of the little we saw of her in Zero.

The other two characters were OCs, so not really going to judge them.

Giving this 5 points.


Overall, yeah..... this was bad. It's still better than Wings, but at least that had some comedy value in its terribleness.
As someone who already doesn't really love the rape in the actual Type Moon VNs, this was just kinda unfun to read.

This gets 18 - 1 (lateness) = 17/100