One step remaining. The Journey to get here was long.

Now, this could be a simple "Look I reached bond lvl. 9. Is this cool or what?" post. However I would like to use this chance to tell a little tale about fgo history, a F/SN fan, and just a bit of salt.

Bulgroz's #2000contest backstory time! (Or how I learned to start liking the Keika)

This story starts a couple of months after JP server was starting. At that time I already knew about the Fate franchise and was a big fan of it. I had played/watched/read anything that had been translated to english at the time.

So you can expect my excitement when I learned that fgo had launched, a Fate game which you can fight with pretty much everyone in the franchise and some new Servants to top it off. There was, however, one small problem.

You can't play FGO on a Nokia brick.

The struggle

So, I went and researched about how could I play the game and finally managed to play it on an emulator on PC (which was a thing you could do back then), and that's how I got into the game. Not one of my proudest moments but I wanted to play the game dangit!

While looking at information of the game I found out it was a gacha game and that in the beginning of the game you got one random servant besides Mashu. Yes, you read it right, ONE.

For those of you that didn't know, the jp server had some huge issues at launch. You probably heard of the tales of endless maintenance or rolls full of black keys. But let me tell you some of the lesser known facts:

-Each roll did cost 4 SQ. A 10 roll 40 SQ.

-The daily quests were way worse than now. 40AP quests did not exist, the ones that did had worse drop rates and EXP gathering quests only happened on certain days of the week (and not during weekend either).

-You could only use five embers at a time when leveling.

-Lack of Master weekly missions and Quartz fragments.

-Start dash help almost inexistent.

-No slots. The leader of your current party was the only servant your friends could use as a .

-And most imporantly, at your first roll you would always only pull one servant from a limited pool. It wasn't even guaranteed to be a gold one. You could get stuck with S.Gilles as your only servant 3*-or-above besides Mash.

A fateful decision.

I could go on and on about the issues this game had at launch. But the point I'm trying to ilustrate is that it was WAY harder both to get new Servants and to level them, and if you were F2P you were stuck with what you had for real. It was so bad that bronze embers were even somewhat useful at that time (not much still, but it was something).

Back to the main story, since I had learned all of that before playing the game I decided something: In the vein of the original F/SN, I would have it so I would stick by the first servant I got. No rerolling allowed. They would be MY servant and I would work on making that servant as useful and powerful as possible.

Beginning of the journey

My first reaction upon rolling her was: "Who the heck is this?"

My second reaction (upon research): "So a failed assassin, huh? That is... neat?"

My third: "Oh wait, I watching once a chinese movie loosely based around that story called "Hero". I really liking that movie. Ok, I'm on board with this."

And fourth: "Wow, that NP is awesome and that's a lot of damage! Wait. Did she just kill herself with her own NP?"

So yeah, it was not off to a great start, but I stuck with her as there was something really charming about her.

Bond levels (Warning: Very cheesy)

On one hand for an early-game servant her NP looked cool as heck. That fade to black and white, that little poem she recited beforehand, that darkened blood gush afterwards, that Damage (for early game). It made me want to put her as my party leader as much as possible, specially in the Orleans singularity.

Then I learned more of her personality when her lines and profile got translated. I found them to be really interesting. A carefree woman that enjoyed the small things in life yet as sharp as a blade as things get serious. Someone able to give it her all with air of ephemerality around her, and fail and still be able to smile. Someone that takes things as they come fights for them with fervor when its necessary and lets them go when its time to say goodbye is something I really ire.

The salt

I kept playing. I loved the game and slowly improved my servants. I made all kinds of strategies to fight with what I had at the moment and it was fun. I even had some decent luck, rolling Herk after a month and Drake after three, things looked like they were starting to look up.

So, after New Years I had a decent team of level 50 something servants. Herk and Drake were great, but I felt like I needed something more powerful to face my future enemies.

Luckily for me, there was a banner that included four servants I really wanted at the time: Gilgamesh, Scathach, Karna and Arjuna. I would use all the Quartz I had saved up to get any of those servants. Whichever I got was fine.

I have been quite lucky until now, surely it wouldn't abandon me now right? R-right?

The hiatus

So, after only getting D'Eon as my only gold servant in my roll spree, and also due to unrelated, real-life issues, I decided to stop plating fgo for a while. This while turned to weeks and those weeks, months. Before I knew it, emulators had stopped working for the game. It seemed that I would never play it again, yet I still kept my recovery code safe because I couldn't bring myself to delete it. Call it sentimentalism as I couldn't delete the only link to those servants I left behind and specially a certain Assassin I had grown fond of.

Back to the fray.

Fast forward a year and I met a group of people in my university that later became my friends. Many people played FGO there so my curiosity was piqued again. I had been gifted a new phone that Christmas so I ed it and tried to use my old code thinking that it was probably useless. I mean it had been more than a year, and my was not from japan. There was no way it would still be usable.

It turns out not only was still usable, but also the one greeting me on my late return was... Jing Ke herself. It seems that in my last quest before the hiatus I put her as my party leader, and during all this time she had been the only servant in my s and in MyRoom as the main representative of my Chaldea.

Since then, Keika and I have been to many quests together, including, but not limited to, many pillars, a certain multiplying boat-leaping lady, a "horny" girl and even the "last boss" of the game whom she took a respectable part of its health. Those who have played jp know who I'm referring to. She's also one of the only two servants I've ever given a grail, the other being my favourite F/SN heroine Sakura/Parvati.

And that's the story. Thank you if you are still reading this. I hope you enjoyed it.

Background by Nikame: https://www.pixiv.net/stacc/chikin-627