Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain
Sheathed Against Injustice?
Story Starts
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Chapter 5.1
The Days Between
The aftermath dragged through the false dawn of the eighteenth floor's crystal ceiling, now mimicking daylight. Rivira smouldered. What the monsters hadn't torn apart, the charges had gutted. Skeletal frames of buildings stood like broken teeth against the blue-white glow, their interiors scorched black and hollow.
Rienne Arvel leant against a supply crate at the edge of the evacuation staging ground, watching her Familia disassemble their camp. They moved with practised efficiency—tents folded, provisions packed, wounded secured on makeshift stretchers—but exhaustion sat heavy on every set of shoulders. Seventeen members had descended to challenge the Goliath. All seventeen still breathed. That alone made this expedition a success, despite everything that followed.
"Captain, we shall begin preparation to leave with the Guild staff," Aura Moriel said, interrupting Rienne's thoughts.
"Thank you, Aura." Rienne turned toward one of their younger members, her eyes following where Aura was looking.
The direction was obvious. Across the clearing, near one of the few intact structures on Rivira's northern edge, a red-haired human knelt beside a cookfire he'd brought out as his establishment was one of the few things that survived. He was heating something in a battered pot—broth, from the smell—and distributing bowls to anyone who wandered close enough. Adventurers and Guild staff. He served them all with the same unhurried, methodical pace he'd used at his establishment the previous evening. As if the night hadn't happened. As if he hadn't spent hours on a rooftop raining blade-shaped death on monsters at ranges no archer in the Dungeon had any business reaching.
Aura hadn't looked away.
Rienne understood why. She'd felt it the moment she first approached him whilst her Familia members were engaging the Goliath. His presence carried something—a resonance that settled into the chest like deep roots finding purchase in old soil. It wasn't magical. No enchantment, no spell, nothing her own considerable sensitivity could identify or quantify. It was subtler than that. A feeling. The kind that crept up on you between one breath and the next, so gradual you only noticed it when you were already wrapped inside it.
It felt like their forests. An impossible sensation to encounter in a human.
Rienne wanted to ask about it. The question had been sitting on her tongue since last night. But each time she considered voicing it, something stopped her. Not fear. Something closer to the instinct that told you not to reach for a wild creature that had chosen to rest nearby. You didn't want to startle it. You didn't want to break whatever fragile equilibrium allowed the moment to exist.
It felt rude. That was the simplest way to put it.
She watched Aura's brow crease, a small frown pulling at the younger elf's features as she stared at the human's back.
"You know you could try and approach them."
Aura's cheeks flushed pink. She shook her head once, quick and sharp, mumbled something about checking the stretcher bindings, and excused herself. Her retreat was brisk enough to qualify as a tactical withdrawal.
Rienne chuckled as she watched the elf walk away. Aura Moriel. Twenty-three years old—barely more than a child by elven reckoning—and possessed of an earnestness that bordered on the aggressive. When she'd first joined the Familia, Aura had fixed her attention on Filvis Challia. They were roughly the same age, or close enough that Aura had decided they ought to be friends. She'd approached Filvis with that same determined energy, attempting conversation at meals, offering to partner during training, even leaving small gifts of pressed flowers outside Filvis's tent during expeditions.
Filvis had ignored every attempt. Not cruelly—Filvis didn't do cruelty, or warmth, or anything that required acknowledging another person's existence with more than the bare minimum of social function. She simply didn't respond. She ate alone, trained alone, fought alone, and slept alone. A closed door that never opened regardless of how politely or persistently you knocked.
Aura had taken it personally. Of course she had.
Rienne didn't know the specifics of Filvis's situation. She wasn't the type to pry into her members' private lives—not unless they came to her first.
But she smiled now, because the scene unfolding across the clearing was something she'd never expected to witness.
Shirou stood over Filvis, who sat on an upturned crate clutching the crown of her head with both hands. Her dark hair was dishevelled, her expression caught between outrage and bewilderment, and the red welt on her forehead from the sandbag round had darkened overnight into a spectacular bruise that dominated her face like a third eye.
Shirou's mouth was moving. From this distance, Rienne couldn't hear the words, but his posture told the story well enough. Arms folded, chin tilted down, weight shifted forward onto his leading foot. Lecturing. Again.
This had been happening since last night. It had started when several of the younger members—Aura included, despite her usual shyness around Filvis—had fussed over the black-haired elf after the fighting subsided. Filvis had sustained the twisted ankle, the forehead welt, and a collection of cuts and abrasions from her solo excursion outside of the barricade. Standard injuries by Dungeon standards. Nothing that warranted attention.
Filvis had treated the concern the way she treated everything: she'd sat still, let them fuss, waited for them to finish, and then stood to leave without a word.
That was when Shirou had appeared. He'd been passing with an armload of recovered blade-arrows, and he'd stopped mid-stride to watch Filvis turn her back on her worried companions.
Then he'd bonked her on the head.
Not hard. An open palm against the crown of her skull—more sound than force. But Filvis had frozen as though struck by lightning, and every elf in the immediate vicinity had gone rigid with shock.
"Don't be rude," he'd said.
The silence that followed had been extraordinary. Filvis had turned to face him with an expression Rienne had never seen on her before. Not anger, not blankness, not the careful emptiness she wore like armour. Genuine surprise. Her mouth had opened, then closed. Her eyes had widened by a fraction—barely perceptible, but for Filvis it was equivalent to a full theatrical display of emotion.
"I—" Filvis had started.
"They're worried about you," Shirou had continued, his tone flat and matter-of-fact. "The least you can do is tell them you're fine."
Another silence. Then, stiffly, each word forced out as though the syllables were unfamiliar in her mouth: "I am fine." A pause. Then a glare. "Except for someone who shot me on the forehead."
The tension had cracked. Laughter rippled through the gathered elves—startled, disbelieving laughter, the kind that escapes before you can stop it. Shirou's mouth had twitched.
"Fair enough. Is she always this much of a handful?"
Maren had snorted. "You have no idea."
"Right." Shirou had turned back to Filvis. "I can offer your Familia a bulk discount on blunted arrows. For correctional purposes."
More laughter. Even some of the members who rarely spoke up had joined in, their shoulders loosening, the grim weight of the night's losses lifting—if only for a moment. Filvis had stared at the human with that same stunned expression, her hand drifting unconsciously to the bruise on her forehead, and said nothing more.
But she hadn't left, either. Though she did glare at him whenever permitted, he always gave her a mocking smirk and a cocked brow.
Rienne watched the current iteration of the dynamic with quiet amusement. Shirou had apparently caught Filvis doing something objectionable—ignoring a direct question, perhaps, or refusing offered food—and was delivering another measured reprimand. Filvis clutched her head and glared up at him, her jaw set, her violet eyes burning with indignation.
Shirou said something else. Filvis's glare sharpened. Then, grudgingly, she accepted the bowl of broth he held out to her and took a sip.
Rienne shook her head, still smiling.
The smile dimmed as a half-elf woman in Guild uniform descended on Shirou from the direction of the staging ground. Sophie—the receptionist from the Guild Headquarters, one of several staff members who'd arrived with the rest of the Loki Familia reinforcements once word of the aftermath had reached the surface. She was short, animated, and appeared to be giving Shirou a thorough dressing-down. Her hands punctuated every other sentence, gesturing at the ruins, at his bow, at the scattered evidence of his night's work.
Shirou stood and took it. His shoulders drew inward by a fraction, his head ducking slightly—he'd been through this particular ordeal before and knew that resistance only prolonged it. Filvis watched the exchange from her crate with visible interest, sipping her broth. If Rienne wasn't mistaken, the ghost of satisfaction flickered across the elf's features each time Sophie's voice pitched upward.
Around them, the aftermath continued its grim procession. Guild staff catalogued the dead—seven adventurers confirmed killed, eleven more injured, and an unknown number of Evilus operatives whose bodies had been collected and separated from the rest, which wasn't too bad, all things considered. Stretcher teams moved wounded toward the seventeenth-floor passage, where a relay of porters would carry them to the surface. Loki Familia members—the contingent led by Riveria Ljos Alf—had established a perimeter around Rivira's remaining intact structures and were conducting systematic sweeps for additional charges.
The numbers could have been far worse. Rienne knew that. Without the advance warning from Shirou and the rapid response of the combined Familias, the death toll would have climbed into the dozens. Perhaps higher. The stampede alone would have overwhelmed Rivira's meagre defences if the barricades hadn't held, and those barricades had only held because the archer on the rooftop had broken the monsters' momentum before they reached the walls.
Which brought Rienne back to the question that had been gnawing at her since the first blade-arrow had punched through a minotaur's magic stone at two hundred medr.
Where had Shirou Emiya learnt to shoot like that?
The Dungeon didn't produce that skill. It couldn't. Combat in the upper and middle floors was close-quarters by nature. Corridors, chambers, transitional passages—the architecture compressed engagement ranges to fifty medr at the absolute maximum, and most fights happened at ten or fewer. Even on the larger floors, the presence of allies, civilians, and labyrinthine terrain made long-range archery impractical. Bows saw use, certainly. Rangers and supporters used them for harassment and initial volleys. But the sustained, precision shooting Shirou had demonstrated—picking individual targets from four hundred medr, threading shots between friendlies, adjusting for elevation and the chaotic movement of everyone in real time—that wasn't Dungeon fighting. That was something else entirely.
Rienne turned the possibilities over in her mind.
The surface nations. That was the obvious answer. Orario held a monopoly on the Dungeon, but the world beyond the walls had its own conflicts, its own battlefields, and its own traditions of warfare. Open-field combat, siege warfare, border skirmishes—environments where ranged mastery could develop over years of practice against human opponents at genuine distance.
Rakia was the most logical candidate. The militaristic empire maintained the largest standing army outside Orario, its culture built around martial prowess and territorial expansion. Ares, their patron deity, prized combat ability above all else. An archer of Shirou's calibre would be an extraordinary asset to the Rakian military—the kind of specialist who could shift the outcome of a battlefield engagement single-handedly.
And that raised another question. What Level was he?
He couldn't be lower than Level 2. The journey from the surface to Rivira was seventeen floors of increasingly dangerous Dungeon terrain, and he'd made it solo whilst hauling those baskets of noodles and potions. A Level 1 would die on the middle floors regardless of skill. The monster density alone would grind down anyone without the enhanced physical parameters that came with levelling.
If the Rakia theory held, his Level 2 status made a certain kind of sense. The empire didn't have access to the Dungeon. Their adventurers—those few who received Falna from Ares—gained excelia through surface combat, monster hunts in the wilderness, and military campaigns. The process was slower by orders of magnitude compared to Dungeon diving. A Level 2 from Rakia represented years, possibly decades, of accumulated experience. They were rare enough that the empire would go to considerable lengths to retain them.
Which meant Shirou had either left willingly—unlikely, given Rakia's possessive attitude toward its strongest—or he'd never been Rakian to begin with.
Rienne frowned. The theory had gaps. His cooking was distinctly Eastern in style, drawing on traditions she associated with the Far East rather than Rakia's continental palate. His name gave it away, but his features didn't match what she'd expect of someone from the Far East, either. And his weapons. Those swords repurposed as arrows. She'd examined one of the recovered blade-arrows during the night, and the steel had been unlike anything she'd encountered. Dense, balanced, bearing marks of craftsmanship that followed no school she recognised.
Then there was that presence. That forest-feeling that every elf in her Familia had noticed.
Humans didn't feel like forests. They didn't carry the resonance of ancient growing things in their wake. It wasn't a matter of personality or temperament—it was something deeper, more fundamental, as if the man's very existence had been shaped by contact with something sacred and green and impossibly old. A spirit, perhaps?
'Who are you, Shirou Emiya?'
Rienne didn't expect an answer. Not today. Perhaps not ever. But she would mention him to Lord Dionysus when they returned to the surface. Their Familia could benefit from good relations with his establishment. The Dungeon was dangerous enough without making enemies of people who fed you.
And if Dionysus happened to have insight into the man's nature, well. Rienne wouldn't complain.
She turned back toward the clearing.
Sophie had apparently finished her tirade, because she'd moved on to interrogating a pair of Loki Familia members near the stretcher relay—but not before reminding Shirou of their date with Rose, winking at him before leaving. Which got him some whistles from the adventurers around him. Shirou remained standing where she'd left him, looking faintly wilted, but he quieted them with a glare that held no real heat. Filvis sat on her crate three medr away, her bowl of broth held in both hands, watching him with an expression that had settled somewhere between wariness and reluctant curiosity.
Shirou said something to her. Filvis's eyes narrowed.
He said something else, and gestured at the bruise on her forehead. Her hand rose to cover it, a protective reflex that was almost childlike in its speed. Her mouth moved—a retort, sharp and clipped. Shirou's expression didn't change. He held out his hand, palm up, and waited.
A beat. Two. Filvis scowled, reached into her belt pouch, and produced a small jar. A salve of some kind. She dropped it into his hand without ceremony.
Shirou uncapped the jar, scooped a measure of the pale cream onto his fingertips, and reached for her forehead.
Filvis flinched back.
He stopped. Waited again.
Slowly, with the rigid tension of someone fighting every instinct screaming at them to bolt, Filvis leant forward. Shirou applied the salve to the bruise, his touch brief and clinical. Two fingers, a single smooth motion, done. He recapped the jar and handed it back.
Filvis took it. Her cheeks had coloured, though whether from embarrassment or anger, Rienne couldn't tell at this distance. She stared at the ground, her jaw working.
Then she muttered something. Quiet enough that Rienne couldn't hear the words, but Filvis's shoulders had drawn tight with the effort of forcing them out—whatever she'd said had cost her. Shirou's expression shifted in response—the barest softening around the eyes, there and gone.
He nodded once and walked away to check on the broth.
Rienne filed the interaction away for later consideration. Whatever wall Filvis had built around herself, the red-haired human had found a crack in it. Not through patience or gentleness—through blunt, unceremonious refusal to let her retreat. He'd treated her isolation not as something sacred to be respected, but as a behaviour to be corrected. Like a bad habit.
Whether that approach would hold or shatter remained to be seen. But for the first time in Rienne's memory, Filvis Challia hadn't walked away.
Movement from the western approach caught her attention.
Two figures crossed the open ground toward Shirou's cookfire. The first was unmistakable—Alise Lovell, Captain of the Astraea Familia, striding forward loose-limbed and grinning, still running on the high of having survived. Soot clung to her red hair and a bandage wrapped her left forearm, but her posture was relaxed, easy, as if last night had been an inconvenience rather than a crisis. Her sword hung at her hip. She looked like she was heading to a festival.
The second figure drew Rienne's spine straighter on reflex.
Riveria Ljos Alf walked half a step behind Alise, her jade hair swept back, her staff held loosely in her right hand. The Nine Hells. High Elf royalty. The most accomplished mage in Orario since the fall of the Zeus and Hera Familias, and vice-captain of the Loki Familia. Even battle-worn, with dust on her robes and fatigue shadowing her eyes, she carried herself with an authority that redrew the geometry of any space she entered. Behind them trailed a loose cluster of Loki and Astraea Familia members—close enough to overhear, far enough to not intrude.
Rienne's gaze sharpened. She pushed off the supply crate and moved closer, keeping to the periphery. Riveria didn't make social calls. Every action the High Elf took was deliberate and purposeful. If she was approaching Shirou, it was because she had questions—and Riveria Ljos Alf's questions tended to produce answers whether the subject cooperated or not.
Alise reached Shirou first, her voice carrying across the clearing.
"There he is! The hero of the hour!"
Shirou's shoulders stiffened. A micro-flinch, there and gone. Rienne noted it. He turned to face them, his expression settling into polite neutrality.
"Ah, the wings of justice," Shirou said.
The Captain of the Astraea Familia grinned at the title, but behind her, several of her Familia members flinched and shot Shirou matching glares. He ignored them.
Alise dropped into a crouch next to the cookfire and peered into the broth pot. "Is that for everyone, or—"
"Help yourself."
Alise was already reaching for a bowl.
Then, as if she'd only just remembered, she waved her spoon between the two. "Oh yeah—this is Riveria Ljos Alf, vice-captain of the Loki Familia. And Lady Riveria, this is Shirou Emiya. He usually sells noodles in the city."
Riveria's brow rose for a fraction of a second.
Shirou offered a small bow—measured, unhurried, the kind that acknowledged status without conceding ground. "A pleasure."
His tone was respectful. It was also entirely absent of deference. Not rude. Not challenging. Simply... level. As if High Elf royalty was a category of person he'd encountered before and knew how to navigate without adjusting his own standing. Rienne had seen Familia captains trip over themselves in Riveria's presence, their respect curdling into awkwardness. Shirou simply greeted her. Whatever hierarchy existed in the space between them, he didn't seem to consider himself on the lower end of it.
Riveria stopped two medr from Shirou and studied him. Her gaze moved from his face to his hands—calloused, scraped raw in places, stained with soot—then to the bundle of blade-arrows propped against the wall behind him, then to the bow slung across his back. Her expression remained composed, analytical. Rienne had seen that look directed at Dungeon anomalies and tactical maps. Never at food vendors.
"Emiya," Riveria said. Her voice was cool and precise. "I recovered one of your arrows during the engagement last night." She produced a blade-arrow from within her robes and held it up between two fingers. The weapon caught the crystal light—a repurposed sword, its blade narrowed and weighted for flight, its edge still holding despite penetrating monster hide and embedding itself in stone. "Steel construction. Reusable. An elegant solution to the Dungeon's limitations on conventional archery."
"They serve their purpose."
"They do rather more than that." She turned the blade-arrow slowly, examining the fuller. "The metallurgy is exceptional. I couldn't identify the forging tradition. Neither could Alicia." She paused. "I also couldn't identify any enchantment. Though there's some residual mana within it."
That last detail landed differently. Rienne straightened. Every forged weapon carried some echo of its creation—hammer strikes, quenching, the particular heat of the forge, and the magic from the material imbibed by the forger. Magical sensitivity could read those traces the way a tracker reads footprints. A weapon whose tradition couldn't be identified wasn't merely foreign. It was something Rienne didn't have a framework for.
Shirou's expression didn't change. "I make them myself."
Riveria regarded him. The silence stretched a beat longer than conversational. "You forge weapons? So you have the Blacksmithing skill."
"I do."
Riveria studied him for a moment, her expression unreadable.
"Archer, blacksmith, and cook—clearly, since you make swords, it is safe to presume that you are not unfamiliar with how to wield them in melee range."
Shirou inclined his head.
"Shirou, you know how to fight with a sword?" Alise asked.
"I can manage," he replied.
Riveria lowered the arrow and extended it toward him, hilt-first. "Your property."
"Thank you."
Riveria held his gaze a moment longer before releasing the blade-arrow. Then—and Rienne nearly missed it—something shifted in the High Elf's composure. Not her expression. Her stillness. A fractional pause, as though she'd walked into a room and found the temperature wrong. Her fingers tightened on Magna Alfs—the instinctive grip of a mage whose senses had just reported something her intellect couldn't categorise. Her eyes narrowed by a degree, and her gaze unfocused for a heartbeat before sharpening again.
She'd sensed something. Rienne was certain of it. Whatever Riveria had perceived, it had given her pause in a way the blade-arrows hadn't. But she folded it behind her composure without comment.
"I also wished to express the Loki Familia's gratitude for your assistance during the defence," Riveria continued, her voice betraying nothing. "Your suppressive fire from the northern rooftop disrupted the initial monster wave before it could breach the barricades. By my estimation, your intervention prevented the stampede from overrunning the settlement."
"I happened to be in the area."
Alise choked on her broth. "You 'happened to be in the area.' You had a basket of swords and a siege bow on the roof of a noodle shop."
"I keep emergency supplies."
"A basket of swords is not—"
"Alise." Riveria's tone was mild, but the Astraea captain fell silent mid-sentence. The High Elf returned her attention to Shirou. "One of your arrows struck a sword stag that would have reached me during my casting. The shot was from approximately three hundred and fifty medr, through smoke and moving bodies. A clean hit to the magic stone."
Shirou said nothing.
"That level of precision is not developed in the Dungeon," Riveria continued. "The engagement ranges here don't permit it. You trained elsewhere."
A statement, not a question. Shirou met her gaze steadily.
"I did."
"Where?"
The word was quiet, direct, and carried no particular weight. It didn't need to. Riveria Ljos Alf asking a question was its own form of pressure—not social, not political, but something more fundamental. The quiet certainty that answers were owed to the person who'd identified the right question.
Shirou held. No flinch, no deflection, no reaching for humour the way he had with Alise. He simply looked at her and said, "Nowhere you'd have heard of."
Rienne's breath caught. Not at the refusal—at the quality of it. He hadn't dodged. He hadn't been evasive. He'd told the truth and offered nothing more. There was no apology in his tone, no discomfort. He was a man who'd been asked difficult questions by powerful people before and had learnt exactly how much silence he could hold without it becoming confrontation.
Riveria studied him for three heartbeats. Four.
Then she nodded. A single, clean motion.
Not acceptance, Rienne realised. Recognition. Riveria had found the shape of what she was dealing with and decided that this wasn't the place or time to press further. Which meant she intended to press further. Later. Elsewhere.
"Very well."
Riveria turned to Filvis, acknowledging the Dionysus Familia elf with a formal incline of her head.
Filvis set down her bowl and stood. Her bow was stiff, correct, almost militarily precise—formal etiquette learnt and deployed like a shield. Her hand did not rise to cover the bruise this time, though the effort of restraining it was visible in the tension of her fingers at her side.
Riveria's gaze lingered on the bruise dominating Filvis's forehead. One elegant eyebrow rose by a fraction.
Filvis's hand shot to her forehead. "It's nothing."
Alise, who had regained her grin, pointed at Shirou with her spoon. "According to her Familia he shot her."
"With a sandbag round," Shirou clarified. "She wouldn't retreat."
Riveria looked at Shirou. Looked at Filvis. Looked at the bruise.
"I see," she said, and something that might have been amusement ghosted through her expression before vanishing behind her composure. She inclined her head once more to Filvis, then to Rienne—who returned the gesture—and turned to leave. Alise drained the last of her broth, tossed the bowl back to Shirou with a "Thanks for the meal!", and jogged after the High Elf, her Familia members falling into step behind them.
The clearing settled back into the ambient noise of recovery. Hammers. Shouts. The grinding scrape of rubble being cleared.
Rienne watched them go. Then she looked back toward Shirou.
He'd already returned to the cookfire. The blade-arrow Riveria had returned was propped against the wall with the rest of his collection, indistinguishable from the others. He was adjusting the broth—adding something from a pouch at his belt, tasting, adjusting again. Filvis remained on her crate three medr away, watching him with the same wary, reluctant attention she'd worn all morning.
Not two minutes ago, this man had held composure against the most accomplished mage in Orario without a tremor. Now he was arguing with Filvis about seasoning.
The gap between those two realities was something Rienne couldn't reconcile. A man who deflected High Elf royalty and scolded stubborn elves and served broth to strangers in a ruined settlement, all with the same unhurried steadiness. As though none of it—the battle, the questions, the scrutiny—had touched whatever lay beneath the surface.
She didn't know what he was. She wasn't sure she needed to. But she knew, with the quiet certainty of long experience, that their paths would cross again. The Dungeon had a way of drawing people together, and Shirou Emiya sat at an intersection of too many threads to remain on the periphery for long.
Rienne pushed off the crate, straightened her armour, and went to help her Familia finish packing.
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End
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