[Complete] Ch 6.5 Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain Sheathed Against Injustice?

Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain 

Sheathed Against Injustice?

Story Starts

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Chapter 6.5

The Gale’s Justice

Demands a Stakeout

"Shirou!"

"Woah, Shirou, you didn't tell me you were on a first-name basis with the Dea Saint," the elven Guild receptionist teased, her voice tinny through the resonance crystal now lodged in every ear of their Familia.

Astraea peered through the gap between two loose bricks in the parapet her children had carried her up to—carried, because apparently a goddess in a trench coat could not be trusted to climb drainpipes, no matter how often she insisted otherwise. Beside her, Ryuu kept a watchful eye on their target, spectacles pushed up her nose, mouth a flat line of professional suffering.

Below, in the amber wash of the evening lamps, a young woman in the white and silver of Dian Cecht Familia had planted herself squarely in front of Emiya, Rose, and Sophie. Silver hair, gentle face, hands clasped over her heart as though he'd returned from a war rather than a shift at a noodle cart.

"Agent Anvil!" Alise's voice crackled over the comms.

"Yes!" Two voices answered in perfect unison. Iska and Maryuu.

"You lot should really figure out who's who," Lyra sighed, her exasperation thick enough to butter bread with.

"I was so worried," the Dea Saint's voice came through the listening device Kaguya had clipped to Emiya's collar during a masterful shoulder-bump outside the Guild. "You haven't been buying potions lately—I thought the worst had happened to you."

"Okay, roll call," Alise whispered, cheery as ever. "Let's see which name isn't in use. Petal!"

"Yes!" Celty.

"Needle!"

"Yes!" Noin.

"Whisper!"

"YES!" Asta bellowed, at a volume that made her call sign a legally actionable falsehood. Somewhere to the west, a pigeon took flight.

"Ember." Alise paused. "Ember?"

Silence.

"So one of you is answering to Anvil twice," Lyra said, "and neither of you is Ember. Incredible. Truly Orario's finest."

"Right," Kaguya cut in, crystal in one hand, wine bottle in the other. "Iska, Maryuu—work out amongst yourselves who is Ember and who is Anvil, and clear the comms."

"Rock, parchment, blade?" Iska offered.

"Best of seven," Maryuu countered.

"CLEAR. THE. COMMS."

And as she said this, Kaguya tipped the bottle and poured Astraea another glass of red without spilling a drop, without looking, without her expression shifting one degree from courtly serenity. Multi-tasking, Astraea had long ago decided, was Kaguya's true magic. The katana was merely a hobby.

Astraea giggled into her glass.

"Look, we've missed loads," Alise complained from two rooftops over, where she and Lyra lay flat behind a chimney stack like a pair of badly disguised gargoyles. "What did the pretty healer say? Agent 007 requests a full transcript."

"Denied," said Lyra.

"You can't deny my request, you're 133—"

There was a soft thump over the comms, followed by a muffled "ow."

When Astraea looked down again, the scene below had gained a participant. Whilst everyone had been arguing over the comms, the door of the Blue Pharmacy across the lane had banged open, and a young chienthrope with brown hair had marched out mid-argument, sleeves still rolled from the workbench.

"—what do you mean you'll supply him potions below market because he saved you?" the Dea Saint was saying, and there was steel under the gentleness now.

"Yes." The chienthrope's voice arrived smug through the crystal, enjoying every second of it. "As thanks for saving members of my Familia, our god Miach has recently partnered with Mr Emiya. Exclusively." A pause, savoured like the last bite of a good meal. "Sorry."

"If that's the case, then our Familia should also partner with Shirou! He saved me as well!"

"No. We already partnered with him. Also—" the chienthrope's ears flattened "—why are you calling him by his first name?"

"Why are you standing so close to him?"

"I work here. This is my shop. You're loitering."

"You know," Sophie's whisper carried through the device, dry as old parchment, "what exactly is the point of Rose guarding your background like the Guild vault if half the important people in Orario greet you by name in the street?"

"Shut up," Rose muttered. Her voice had gone very low, the way it did when her paperwork multiplied before her eyes, and the crystal faithfully picked up her grumbling about the headache of an adventurer she'd been assigned.

Emiya could only give Rose an apologetic smile, which somehow made the red-headed werewolf blush, which was then followed by more grumbling.

Astraea took a long, contented sip.

The wine was good—Kaguya had excellent taste—and the evening air atop the warehouse was warm, and beneath the wide brim of the fedora Athena had insisted upon, Astraea found herself smiling at nothing in particular.

Or rather, at everything in particular.

'It's been too long,' she thought, watching the light from the setting sun catch on Ryuu's spectacles, on Kaguya's liberated wine glass, on the rooftops where the rest of her children crouched in identical coats like a plague of very earnest moths. 'Far too long since we did anything silly together.'

She remembered the early years. Before Orario. Before quotas and casualty reports and the smell of smoke that never quite left the city any more. She had come down from Tenkai with nothing but a name and a purpose, and she had walked Gekai's roads on mortal feet, looking for the souls that shone the way she needed them to shine.

Alise had been first. A scrap of a girl in a port town, red hair like a struck match, standing on an overturned crate and lecturing three grown smugglers about the moral weight of their life choices whilst holding a broom. Not a sword. A broom. The smugglers had been so bewildered that the town watch arrived before any of them thought to simply walk away. Astraea had laughed until her ribs ached, and then she had offered the girl her hand.

"Agent 007 to all units," Alise's voice announced, entirely too loud for someone maintaining what she insisted on calling radio silence. "The target is a heartbreaker. I repeat, the target is a heartbreaker. That's two additional confirmed. Requesting permission to update the operational threat assessment."

"Permission denied," said Lyra.

"You keep denying things you have no authority to deny."

"And yet the denials keep working, don't they?"

Kaguya had been next. Not found on a road at all—she had arrived in Orario the way storm-wrecked ships arrive at harbour, and the Gojou name had meant nothing to Astraea then. It meant something now. Fifth of the nine houses that served beneath Amaterasu; nobility on the surface, and beneath it, the Imperial Court's blade for the work no one acknowledged in daylight. Kaguya had been raised with silk on her shoulders and blood on her hands, and at twelve years old she had learnt precisely what her house's justice was worth—and what her goddess would take from her to enforce it.

She had knelt before Astraea in perfect seiza, bowed with perfect courtesy, and asked in the most refined court dialect Astraea had ever heard whether a goddess of justice would accept a child whose hands were unclean.

Astraea had accepted her on the spot. Justice that turned away the wounded was no justice at all.

It had taken three years before Kaguya spoke of any of it, and Astraea had never once asked. Some wounds surfaced in their own season. It was enough that the girl who had been made into a blade had chosen, entirely on her own, to become a person instead.

"Blade beats parchment," Iska's whisper drifted over the comms.

"Blade does not beat parchment, parchment wraps blade—"

"That's rock. Parchment wraps ROCK."

"Why would paper defeat a rock, that has never made sense—"

"MUTE," said Lyra, Noin, Celty, and Asta, in ragged chorus.

Below, the argument in the lane had escalated to hand gestures.

"Our high potions restore forty per cent more Mind than theirs," the Dea Saint said, producing a vial from her satchel as though drawing a duelling pistol. "And our dia frater has no bitter aftertaste."

"Our potions," Naaza countered, arms crossed, "are made with love. And desperation. Which is basically the same thing, and it's cheaper."

"I'll match any price they offer."

"You can't. Your god would sooner eat his own beard than lower a price—"

The door of the grand establishment further up the lane crashed open, and an elderly god with a beard like a frozen waterfall thrust his head out.

"AIRMID! What is the meaning of this racket—" His eyes narrowed. "Is that the Miach brat? Are we undercutting Miach?" A long pause followed, the old god visibly torn between two hatreds—losing money, and losing to Miach. "...Undercut her. Undercut her to the bone. But raise everything else by five per cent to compensate!"

"It's not that!" Airmid and Naaza said, in perfect, furious unison—then glared at each other for the crime of harmonising.

Dian Cecht surveyed the scene a moment longer: his Dea Saint, the Miach brat, a red-headed human standing between them looking like he wanted the cobblestones to open beneath him. The old god's eyes narrowed to slits of commercial calculation. Then he withdrew, and the door slammed.

"He's going to raise the prices anyway," Naaza said.

"He's going to raise the prices anyway," Airmid agreed wearily, and for one fragile moment they stood united in the shade of shared experience, before remembering they were at war.

Astraea pressed her knuckles to her lips. Beside her, Ryuu had gone very still.

"Agent Star Three Bunny," Astraea whispered, because the code names were sacred and she had personally ratified them. "Status report."

"...He hasn't noticed," Ryuu said slowly, spectacles trained on the lane. "Either of them. He is standing between two women arguing over him and he appears to be—" she paused, as if double-checking the evidence "—calculating something."

"Restock margins," Kaguya said, refilling her own glass. "Look at his eyes. That's a man doing sums."

Sure enough, when Emiya finally spoke, the crystal carried his voice up to them, mild and terribly, catastrophically practical.

"Well—if both Familias are willing to supply me, I could carry a wider range. Miach Familia could supply the low to middle-grade potions, and Dian Cecht the higher grades. We share the profits accordingly."

Silence in the lane.

Silence on the comms.

"He did not just say that," Neze breathed from somewhere to the east.

"Two beautiful women fight over him," Lyra said, "and he negotiates a supply chain."

"He turned a love triangle into a trade agreement," Alise whispered, with something dangerously close to awe. "Is he stupid or is he brilliant?"

"Yes," said Kaguya.

Both girls below had lit up like festival lanterns—Airmid's hands flying back to her heart, Naaza's tail betraying her with a single, treacherous wag before she stamped it into stillness through sheer will.

"Then it's settled," Airmid said, radiant. "I'll draw up terms tonight."

"We had him first," Naaza said. "Chronologically. And in every other way that matters."

"That's—what does that even mean—"

"Agent Mercury to all units!" A new voice burst onto the frequency, oily with delight. "Agent Mercury requesting immediate status update on Operation Noodle—did I hear romance? Is there romance? Asfi, they've got romance and nobody told—"

There was a crunch, a yelp, and then Asfi's flat, long-suffering tones: "Apologies. The god has been removed from the frequency. Please continue."

"Thank you, Agent Nursemaid," the entire Astraea Familia said, more or less together. Ryuu was the only one who called her by her name.

Astraea leant back against the warm brick and let the chaos wash over her, and the memories came with it, unhurried, like leaves on a slow river.

Lyra, who had tried to pickpocket Astraea in broad daylight, discovered her purse contained nothing but a pressed flower and a divine apology note, and had been so offended by the anticlimax that she followed them for a week demanding compensation. Astraea had eventually paid her in employment. The prum still insisted, to this day, that she had never actually agreed to join and was merely owed considerable back wages—though these days she'd taken to saying it with a grin whenever the Familia mused upon the past.

Iska and Maryuu had come as a matched set, discovered mid-brawl in a tavern, back to back, finishing each other's battle cries. They had been arguing about who got which nickname then, too. Some things, Astraea reflected fondly, were eternal.

Neze, found half-starved outside a walled town that had turned her away for her ears, who had bitten Astraea's hand when offered bread and then cried for an hour over having done it. Celty, who had followed their little band for three villages before working up the courage to speak—and whose first words, after all that, had been an apology for interrupting. Noin, threading a needle by candlelight in the back of a tailor's shop, whose stitches were straighter than most men's morals. Asta, who had arm-wrestled a dwarf twice her width for the right to leave her clan's forge, and won, and then apologised to the man so loudly the whole hall heard it.

And Ryuu. Ryuu she had not found on any road. Ryuu had found them, here in Orario, a forest's worth of anger folded tight behind sky-blue eyes, and it had taken months before the girl stopped sleeping with her boots on.

They had laughed more, back then. Not because the world was kinder—it hadn't been—but because there had been fewer bodies between them and the laughing. Somewhere in the last two years, between the incident reports and the funerals and the smell of blaze rock smoke, the eleven of them had stopped doing things like this. Stupid things. Pointless things. Wine on a rooftop in matching hats, spying on a noodle merchant.

Justice, Astraea thought, warming the glass between her palms, was easier to carry when you remembered what it was for. Nights like this. Children bickering over call signs. A man in the street below, blushing at his shoes because two girls were fighting over him and he'd only just noticed.

"Oh no," Kaguya murmured, leaning forward.

Astraea looked down. Emiya had indeed noticed—the tips of his ears had gone red, and he was rubbing the back of his neck in the universal gesture of a man searching for an exit that did not exist.

"I—look, I'm honoured, truly, but we're actually late for dinner, so if the contract talk could wait until—"

"Dinner?" Airmid and Naaza rounded on Rose and Sophie as one.

"With them?" Naaza's ears went fully vertical.

"It's a work meal," Rose said, through her teeth. "Colleagues. Eating. It happens."

"You're wearing a sundress," Airmid observed, with the precision of a healer identifying a symptom.

"It was WARM."

"She's in oestrus," Naaza told Airmid.

"I am going to have your Familia's Guild privileges reviewed—"

Sophie, meanwhile, had linked her arm back through Emiya's with the unhurried smugness of a cat claiming a windowsill. "We really must be going. We have a reservation in the pleasure district before we head to Mamma Mia's, and Mia holds the good table for no one. Shirou will come back another day. Won't you, Shirou?"

"I—yes? Probably—"

"He said yes," Sophie informed the healers, already steering him away. "You both heard it. Witnesses."

"Star Two to all units." Kaguya raised the crystal, deadpan. "Targets are on the move. The Guild receptionist has claimed the left arm. The werewolf is contesting the right. The healers are regrouping. Recommend all agents reposition along Northwest Main—"

"Agent 007 confirms! Initiating rooftop pursuit, standard leapfrog formation, on my mark—"

"There is no standard leapfrog formation," Lyra said. "You invented it four minutes ago."

"On my MARK—"

"WAIT." Iska's voice, triumphant, cut across everything. "We've settled it! Best of seven! I'm Anvil, Maryuu is Ember! Confirming call signs: Anvil and Ember, operational and ready!"

A beat of silence.

"Nobody cares any more," said Asta, at whisper-defying volume.

"WE CARED FOR TWENTY MINUTES—"

"Comms discipline," Kaguya said wearily, and drained her glass.

Below, the little procession set off up the lane—Emiya flanked and thoroughly claimed, Rose's tail stiff with dignity, Sophie's laughter floating up through the crystal—whilst behind them Airmid and Naaza stood shoulder to shoulder in the lamplight, temporary allies in defeat, already arguing about whose potions he would reach for first.

Astraea held out her empty glass.

Kaguya filled it without a word.

"Stars above," Astraea said softly, to no one and to all of them, the comms still crackling with her children's nonsense, "I have missed this."

Ryuu glanced at her sidelong. Behind the dark spectacles, something in the elf's expression had eased—not quite a smile, but the ground a smile might one day grow from.

"He is," Ryuu said, grudgingly, as though each word cost her valis, "very bad at noticing things."

"Mm." Astraea sipped. "Aren't they all."

"Star Three Bunny, Star Two, Star One!" Alise's voice rang out, bright as a bell and twice as unstoppable. "Targets approaching the corner of Northwest Main! Pursuit formation! Somebody carry the Goddess!"

Kaguya sighed, corked the bottle, and stowed it inside her coat.

"Duty calls," she said, and offered Astraea her arm.

"Ember!"

Both Asta and Iska still answered in unison.

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End

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