Chapter 41

Chapter 41

Emiya

He knew this wasn’t real.

This porch of polished wood he was sitting on, overlooking a spacious backyard full of sand and greenery. The old shed he’d spent many sleepless nights in, ‘mastering’ magecraft in the most obstinately boneheaded way possible. The familiar walls enclosing the place.

One of the many mundane things Emiya had been allowed to reexperience on this deployment was sleep.

Counter Guardians didn’t sleep. Never got to. Spirits had no need for it, and Humanity was always so very eager to eradicate itself that Alaya could hardly afford to let her dogs lie.

Well, she probably could; but why would she?

It had never been a point of discomfort, or even consideration, but the newfound novelty of sleep hadn’t quite worn off even after thirteen years. Perhaps that was why he could always tell when he was dreaming.

Emiya looked up at the night sky.

He knew which moment of his life this was, even if the Moon was absent.

The company was very different, too.

“If I must dream about the blonds of my past, why does it have to be you?”

“Oh?” the man tilted his head with the faint amusement of someone indulging a particularly dull court jester. “And whom would you rather dream of? Surely not Saber. I believe I made my position on that clear an eternity ago, mongrel.”

Instead of Kiritsugu, who should have been sitting beside him, the King of Uruk leaned against the support beam in all his golden glory. His gleaming armor looked wildly out of place in front of a traditional Japanese household. The perpetually smug expression on his face also didn’t fit the peaceful atmosphere.

Frankly, Emiya found his very presence here offensive.

“Then again, if your broken mind is struggling to conjure shades of the faded past, who but I would survive the eons intact? As lovely as Saber is, even her radiance pales beside mine.”

It would be just his luck. He could no longer accurately picture the color of Rin’s eyes, yet Gilgamesh had carved himself into Emiya’s brain with perfect clarity.

“You are being awfully arrogant for a figment of my imagination.” Emiya gave him a flat look. “I’m fairly sure I can erase you with a thought.”

“Can you?” the Servant asked, arching one flawless golden brow.

Nothing happened.

Gilgamesh’s lips curled into a mocking smirk. “Be it a Servant container, flesh and bone, or even the pitiful refuge of memory—the King remains the King. Remember that, mongrel.”

Emiya sighed. It looked like he was stuck here for a while. “I still find it confusing that my mind would reach for you instead of literally anyone else.”

“Some sort of unsightly attempt at self-flagellation, no doubt,” Gilgamesh said, waving one golden gauntlet dismissively. “I had your measure from the start, and you know it. Now that your hollow ugliness has become apparent even to yourself, you have returned to partake of this King’s wisdom. Though why you’d think I’m inclined to grant you this boon is beyond me.”

Probably because the real Gilgamesh was in love with the sound of his own voice. Always eager to give his opinion on everything, always talking slightly louder than strictly necessary.

“...So you’re here to berate me?” Emiya came to the only possible conclusion.

“Naturally. It is not as if there is anything to praise. There never has been.”

“Right. I don’t see how taking advice from someone who wanted to burn the world because it offended his sensibilities is a good idea.”

“Says the hypocrite.” Gilgamesh scoffed. “Do you not feel offended by the ugly world you have found yourself in? When you see false heroes strutting past the crying masses, do you not feel the urge to fix it, even knowing the world will react?”

“No.”

“Lies!” the King declared. “All you ever did was steal from me. My treasures. My Gates. Even my coiffure. And now, my attitude.” His smile sharpened dangerously. “Does the gaping void inside you yearn so desperately to be filled, mongrel?”

“Slicked-back hair also belongs to you now?” Emiya asked in disbelief.

Gilgamesh looked at him like he was an absolute dimwit. “A golden crown is a symbol of kingship. Why do you think that is?”

Emiya groaned.

The ego. The sheer, unfiltered ego. The world revolved around him, and he would hear nothing to the contrary.

He really did remember Gilgamesh.

“So my brain is telling me I want to burn the world. That’s it?”

“It would be commendable if you did.” The Servant’s smile dropped. “Instead, you waste your days grousing at children like an old man, bitter and jealous. You pretend your hollow ideals are no more. You pretend nothing bothers you. Then you dare accuse others of mockery? The stench of your hypocrisy is nauseating, mongrel.”

“Funny.” Emiya’s mouth twisted. “You, of all people, should be pleased I’m not trying to be a hero anymore.”

“There is nothing pleasing about your grotesque existence.” Gilgamesh’s blood-red eyes settled on him with absolute contempt. “You were wretched before, Faker, but at least you were something. Now you are nothing at all.”

Emiya scoffed. “Well, we all have to grow up eventually. I have a sister now. I have to be responsible.”

“Oh?” Gilgamesh’s smile returned, bright and cruel. “You have had a ‘sister’ before. Did it end well for her?”

Emiya went still.

“Dolls are not meant to know human happiness, yet you gave her exactly that. The pitiful thing should have expired fulfilling her purpose—full of malice and spite, perhaps, but absent regret. Instead, you fed her sweet poison.” His voice softened, which somehow made it worse. “A whole year she drank from that cup, only to find bitterness waiting at the bottom. All the things she was never meant for, you gave her.”

Gilgamesh tilted his head.

“Do you think the doll was happy in the end?”

Was she?

Emiya... couldn’t quite remember.

“Another woman. Another who was a sister to you. You promised to return, to stay in touch. The next time she heard your name, it came from a screen announcing the most reviled man in history.” Gilgamesh’s smile thinned. “For all the wrong reasons, of course. Still, I wonder how kindly they treated the woman who raised the villain of her age.”

...No. Taiga would have done the smart thing. She would have distanced herself from him.

Right?

“A broken heart. An empty bed. A grave.” Gilgamesh counted them off like tarnished coins. “Need I continue? You spread pain and misery to all whose foolish hearts grow fond of your pretense, yet when you slipped your neck into the noose, was even one of them present in your mind?”

Emiya said nothing.

“No,” the King accused. “You smiled, content with the pitiful performance that was your life. Ugly and selfish to the end.”

The King of Heroes shook his head, his distaste for Emiya seemingly overshadowing his sadistic delight.

“How will you fail this one, I wonder?”

Emiya had had quite enough of this.

Truth or not, he had no desire to hear it from Gilgamesh of all people.

“You know,” he said, forcing a smile that was all teeth, “when you listed everything I stole from you, I couldn’t help but notice you forgot to mention Artoria.”

Gilgamesh sniffed. “We have not had enough time together for Saber to overcome her shyness around me, but you she rejected.”

“Maybe.” Emiya jerked his thumb back toward the house. “But at least I scored with her. Twice. Once under this very roof.”

It was crass and juvenile, but whatever shut him up.

The next moment, a hail of swords pinned Emiya to the wall.

Steel punched through him in a dozen places, crucifying him against the familiar wood before he could even blink.

“I’ve had my fill of your insolent tongue, mongrel,” Gilgamesh’s voice echoed darkly, his golden form blurring at the edges as the world began to dissolve around him. “Do not dare dream of me again without my permission.”

The swords burned through every nerve he had.

The pain was surprisingly deep.

Soul-deep.

***

Emiya opened his eyes to a white ceiling.

The steady beeping of a heart-rate monitor and the sterile scent common to all hospitals told him where he was.

Beside his bed stood a pale girl, staring at her palm with wide eyes.

“Panacea?” he called, recognizing her.

“Shit!” she yelped, snapping her hand behind her back. “You weren’t supposed to be waking up yet.”

“What happened?” Emiya asked, already trying to reconstruct the missing pieces. How did he end up here? He woke up this morning and started making roast beef for bento, then something about his clothes and...

“You don’t remember?” Her eyes flicked over him, suddenly clinical despite the visible exhaustion. “You’re still concussed, but there shouldn’t be any memory loss.”

Concussed?

School. The attack. Bombs.

Pieces of memory snapped back into place, and Emiya jerked upright, already searching the room for other beds. Other patients. A familiar head of gold.

“Where’s Tanya?” he demanded.

“Gone.”

His heart stopped.

Panacea grimaced. “Not gone-gone,” she amended. “Frozen in time. Permanently. Some Grey Boy shit.” After a beat, she added, “Vista’s fine, though.”

Emiya stared at her, still trying to process her words. At the back of his mind, he could practically hear Gilgamesh’s mocking laughter.

Panacea’s left hand rubbed hard at the shadows beneath her eyes. “Look, it’s a horror show out there. I’ve been dealing with critical cases for the last twenty hours and will be stuck here for the foreseeable future. Makes me cranky. Let’s try this again.” She paused for a moment, visibly struggling to come up with something to say. “She was a psycho, but I guess she did the right thing in the end from what I hear. Protected the school, jumped on a grenade for you, so... My condolences,” she finished a tad insincerely.

She...

Did...

What?

“Right.” Panacea rubbed her shoulder. “We... need rooms for other people caught in the bombings. You can sleep off your concussion at home.”

He could feel the healer’s desire for him to be gone, stat. She didn’t need to ask twice. In the blink of an eye, Emiya was in his armor and through the window.

***

Armsmaster

Colin studied the face of the blond girl frozen into a rictus. Wide eyes, bared teeth. He couldn’t tell if it was fear or fury, but certainly a threat response.

There were a hundred better uses for his time. Bakuda was still loose. Lung had been freed. Krieg was missing. Brockton Bay was hemorrhaging emergencies, and every minute spent standing here was a minute not spent narrowing search patterns, coordinating with response teams, or preventing the next bomb from detonating.

And yet, for the last quarter of an hour, Colin had simply stood in the middle of an empty schoolground, looking at the time-locked Ward.

A very small Ward.

For some reason, he couldn’t get that detail out of his head. Argent was short enough that the top of her head barely reached Colin’s waist, and the cowlick only added another inch or so.

When it came to capes, physical parameters rarely meant anything. If they were big, they were dangerous. If they were small, they were still dangerous. That was doubly true in Argent’s case, whose innocent appearance belied her capacity for wide-spread destruction given adequate equipment. Even without, her lethality was limited only in scope, not efficacy.

But right now, she did not look dangerous. Right now, she looked like a snapshot of a child; desperate and vulnerable.

Colin didn’t know why he was wasting time here. All the data had been gathered, and his first priority right now should be tracking Bakuda’s workshop.

The HUD alerted him to a passerby taking pictures of him, triggering sensors installed in his armor. Looking over his shoulder and through the gap in the tarp they had erected around Argent’s time bubble, Colin saw a family of three in the distance. The teenager in the middle had his phone pointed his way.

Sloppy.

Annoyed at himself, Colin’s eyes flickered, activating automatic clean-up protocols. The connection took less than a second. Without his input, the phone’s storage opened and the images were erased. All images.

The visibly excited kid already had a messenger app open – to share juicy cape pictures with his friends, no doubt – only to find the gallery empty. His head shot up and his eyes met the impassive gaze of Colin’s visor.

Color rushed to the boy’s face. A moment later, he was scurrying away, dragging the two adults with him, while Colin closed the gap in the tarp.

He couldn’t help but wonder: had the teenager simply been taking a picture of a prominent Protectorate member? Or was it something more?

Argent and Armiger had compromised their secret identities by acting openly in front of the whole school. No one would fault them for it, not under the circumstances, and the PRT would take measures to contain the damage.

But word must have already spread.

Armsmaster’s children had defended their school against a horrific attack and been taken out of commission.

It was... good for his image, he supposed.

As unproductive as standing here was, being seen beside Argent’s time-locked body fed neatly into the fictional narrative of the ‘Arms-family’ that had done such unexpected things to Colin’s popularity metrics. From the outside, he must have looked like a grieving father.

The thought made him frown.

Passively allowing the family-man image the Director had saddled him with to work in his favor was only practical. The decision had been made without his input, and Colin suspected the Director had done it to show her displeasure for haggling over the budget, but it had proven itself decidedly beneficial. Polls were on the rise and the latest survey conducted by Image had shown the increase in merchandise sales. Even people who were mainly interested in Argent or Armiger bought Armsmaster’s posters and figurines because all three were considered part of a set.

Colin would have preferred to rise on his own merit, but refusing a freely given advantage was illogical, not to mention inefficient. All metrics were taken into account when promotions were considered. He would make use of whatever he got.

But even then, using Argent’s functional death that way felt... monstrously improper.

Any parental feelings he might have had on the subject existed only inside other people’s imaginations. Colin was not the girl’s father. Their lack of biological relation had nothing to do with it; his standing regarding Armiger was much the same.

Following Dragon’s suggestion, Colin had tried interacting with them, if only to validate her faith in him and because Armiger immediately proved himself a massive force multiplier. As expected, there was nothing. No parental instincts triggering, no immediate bond, no... He wasn’t even sure what Dragon had expected to happen.

If anything, Colin had found himself in the uncomfortable position of reminding himself of his own parents—driven, successful, career-oriented. Perfectly willing to provide resources, structure, and carefully defined behavioral expectations, but not particularly interested in the child attached to them.

Arguably, Colin was worse. He had not even done that much.

But on the other hand, there were no set expectations for emotional investment. No one expected him to provide warmth, attachment, or whatever intangible mechanism was supposed to transform proximity into family.

Which meant there was no subsequent... confusion when all parameters had been met but the expected results never came.

And they were all better for it.

Colin could not imagine Armiger taking kindly to him attempting anything like the relationship Dauntless had described with his own son, especially after the loathsome Trump had ambushed him after a meeting. The boy had disliked Colin even before Colin tacitly admitted to the circumstances of the children’s posting.

As for Argent...

His frown deepened as his eyes trailed over the girl’s face for the hundredth time.

If her brother had been passive-aggressive in his dislike, making it abundantly clear he would rather have nothing to do with Colin, Argent had shown an active—if inexplicable—interest in him, and in ways that mattered.

His service records. His postings. His major projects. The highlights of his career.

She hadn’t done it through idle chatter either, which would have been annoying. Instead, Argent did her research and lulled Colin into conversation by trying to educate Armiger, using Armsmaster’s career path as an example worth emulating and learning from. It left Colin opportunities to add commentary at his own discretion. Opportunities he found himself taking more often than he would have expected.

Argent had a way with words.

Colin knew enough about signaling theory to understand what she had been doing. Building ties with the leader of a Protectorate team earmarked for promotion was simply good sense. Beneficial for her own prospects. Smart, even. Connections and quid pro quo were intrinsic parts of any organization, and the Protectorate was no exception.

And while a short foray into the former had never yielded much for Colin, the latter he understood very well.

It had not escaped his notice that the only reason Armiger even bothered dragging himself into Colin’s lab—aside from the boy’s own mild interest in tinkering—was Argent’s insistent prompting.

In fact, the girl had made certain to signal that part rather loudly.

He mentioned it to Dragon once, when she asked how the relationship with ‘his children’ was developing, and got laughed at in response.

In Dragon’s opinion, Argent’s behavior was simply that of a girl trying to get along with a new parental figure. The fact that she was acutely aware of their lack of blood relation – made evident by the level of formality in their interactions – only supported that interpretation, for a multitude of plausible reasons Colin apparently failed to appreciate. Dragon even teased him about settling into the parental role, what with him projecting his own behavior onto Argent.

He wasn’t so sure. Colin was aware of his own limitations when it came to interpersonal interactions and Dragon had shown herself surprisingly well-read on child psychology, but in this particular case her interpretations sounded off the mark. And it wasn’t like he was criticizing the girl. It simply meant Argent had her priorities straight.

In a strange turn of events, Colin’s interactions with her had been more positive than his interactions with his biological family.

That still didn’t explain what he was doing here wasting time.

Losing colleagues was nothing new.

In this line of work, you were expected to lose one familiar face every year, on average. Being the longest-serving Protectorate Tinker, as Argent had put it, Colin had been through this more often than most.

Letting it disrupt his work was too strong a reaction.

When was the last time something like this had happened?

...Near the beginning of his career, most likely. Back when Colin was still a green member of the Protectorate strike squads, unused to the realities of being a hero. A soldier.

Of his old squad, Glorfindel, Vanquisher, Magmanat, and Farsight hadn’t lived to see the new century. Bonds forged on the battlefields of those early days of chaos and uncertainty had a way of bypassing one’s personal inclinations toward socializing. When someone saved your life multiple times, their death left an absence. Even if you were not inclined toward sentiment. Even if you were not inclined toward people.

As a result, each time one of them died, there had been a period of... perhaps not mourning, but processing, shortened with every KIA notification he had received. By the time Warchief and Serenade burned at Lyon, he’d simply gotten used to it.

Now all of them were gone. Gone and forgotten, amounting to little more than files in the Protectorate archives, a few old newspaper articles saved in some library, and maybe a tape of an interview no one would ever watch again.

They didn’t even have their own wiki pages.

Just a mention on Colin’s own, typed by his own hand.

The sensors pinged again, alerting him to another piece of his tech entering sensor range. Ever since Armiger had demonstrated the ability, Colin had needed to calibrate his systems to account for cloned signals.

Soon, the tarp was thrown aside, and the boy entered in a hurry, blue sash flapping behind him. He moved past Colin without so much as a glance and stopped dead in front of the time-locked figure of his sister.

That’s what I get for dallying.

The timing really was incredibly unfortunate. No doubt what followed would be a predictable emotional outburst. Tears. Anger. Screaming. Maybe all three in rapid succession. Understandable, given the circumstances, but Colin really had no time to deal with that.

...But at the same time, simply leaving felt wrong.

So he stayed.

After a full minute of silence, the stillness started to become uncomfortable. Colin had been bracing himself for a barrage of accusations, if not a complete breakdown. Maybe even an attack, depending on how much the boy blamed Colin.

Instead, Armiger just stood there, lost somewhere in his own head.

Having nothing else to do, he idly wondered if that was how he himself had looked to the earlier passersby. Image had really gone out of their way to establish a throughline between their costumes. They weren’t exactly the same, but the colors matched, and the boy’s helmet was a silver copy of Armsmaster’s, save for the completely impractical protrusions.

At a glance, they must really look alike.

...Should he say something first? If only to speed things along. But what?

Comforting people was absolutely not something Colin was good at. Armiger would see through any half-hearted platitude immediately, and most likely react poorly.

Thankfully, Armiger broke the silence first.

“I am the bone of my sword. Steel is my body and fire is my blood. I have created over a thousand blades.”

Spiking the readings of his sensors, as well as his confusion, Armiger raised his hands and started... Colin wanted to say chanting, given the boy’s proclivity to use occultism as a shorthand for the mechanics of his power.

The point became apparent when he projected a crimson spear. Normally, his power expressed itself as a swirl of blue motes coalescing into the transparent image of a resulting object which eventually solidified, but this time the process was accompanied by arcs of energy discharging everywhere.

Greater power requirements or instability? Chanting as a mnemonic tool? Colin didn’t think Armiger would go for flair. Not right now.

The spear stabbed forward. The gleaming tip clinked uselessly against the edge of the time-locked space.

For a few moments, Armiger simply stood clenching the weapon. The silence returned with a vengeance, so much so that he could hear the boy’s grip tightening.

Prompted by a sudden impulse, Colin’s hand awkwardly reached for the boy’s shoulder.

“What happened here?”

Swiftly withdrawing his hand, Colin was only too happy to discuss sitrep. “The ABB executed a series of attacks throughout the city with the objective of drawing out the Protectorate response. With our forces tied up, Oni Lee struck the PHQ and freed Lung.”

“A diversion, then.”

“Yes, though this particular attack was retaliation for Lung’s capture. Bakuda released a statement claiming as much.”

“Then why are you here instead of trying to capture her?” Armiger asked, still looking at Argent. “Don’t tell me the PRT is doing nothing.”

“We aren’t doing nothing,” Colin argued. “Our response has to be carefully considered. Bakuda has taken a large number of civilians hostage with implanted cranial bombs.”

“The suicide bombers...”

“Yes. The ABB uses them in that capacity, and Bakuda warned the PRT that if she dies, all the bombs go off. She also claims to have built a superbomb capable of destroying the city and frying electronics across neighboring states. It’s her deterrence against possible Triumvirate intervention.”

That hadn’t stopped the Director from calling in reinforcements, but for now they would have to do with capes from the neighboring offices being sent over. And bounty hunters – Bakuda’s kill order had already been signed.

“Currently, we are tracking her location for a surgical strike. I came here to gather more data on the aftereffects of her bombs and see if anything can be done for Argent.”

Armiger finally looked at him. “And?”

“...I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You worked Dennis’ power into your halberd. You worked with this technology before.”

“I made a directed stasis field generator based on my scans of Clockblocker’s power. This,” he gestured at the bubble, “is a persistent temporal anomaly. They aren’t equivalent.”

Replicating the effect of Clockblocker’s power was one thing, but undoing something like this?

Chrono-tech was one of the most capricious fields of study on record. Capes who could stop, dilate, compress, or even outright rewind time weren’t exceedingly rare, not in the grand scheme of parahuman powers. Tinkers with relevant specializations, however, could be counted on one hand, dead or alive.

And even those rare Tinkers were somehow never as impressive as the concept suggested. Always limited in scope or bounded by very specific and oftentimes crippling conditions.

Colin’s stasis field was energy-intensive and existed only until the power source ran out. Everything he knew of tinkering told him that a time-locked bubble like this should have required a power source, but that was clearly not the case. How had Bakuda managed to create a stable atemporal field like that?

He had no answer. And if Bakuda was a Chaos Tinker, as the breadth and meteoric development curve of her tech suggested, she possibly didn’t have an answer either.

As far as he knew, Argent was well and truly gone.

“The effect is localized,” Armiger observed. “Something like that... if it has a boundary, then it stands to reason that breaching it would collapse the field.”

“The data supports it,” Colin confirmed. It was an intuitive solution to dealing with a ‘bubble.’ Not incorrect, either. In layman’s terms, with no separation between them, the normal timestream would flood the anomaly until it popped. If Armiger’s spear had managed to pierce the field, then it would act as a bridge between two timestreams, and the ‘bigger one’ would invariably win. “The problem is, time-locked objects are completely isolated from force and energy. Even nanothorn won’t work.”

Armiger said nothing.

Just as well. Colin had no idea how to console a child. Perhaps Dragon would. Or better yet, perhaps Dragon could console Armiger herself and spare everyone involved the discomfort of Colin attempting it.

“I need to get back to work,” he eventually said, turning to the exit. That was true, but Colin also wanted to escape feeling useless. He could not do anything for Argent, and he could not do anything for the boy. Better to take his leave. “Get back to the HQ when you’re... finished here.”

Frankly, Armiger should still be in the hospital, and if not, it was an all hands on deck situation. But... the boy clearly needed time for processing. At the very least Colin could give him that.

On his way to another bombing site, Colin opened his wiki-page and started drafting a new entry. Argent’s career had been cut tragically short, but the girl had contributed to the creation of nanothorn and to Armsmaster’s victory over Leviathan.

She deserved to be remembered.

***

Emiya

Caladbolg II would have worked.

Almost certainly, Emiya thought, traversing the rooftops with the halberd in hand.

The modified sword of Fergus mac Róich was his greatest success in altering Noble Phantasms. Emiya was neither a legendary blacksmith nor even a good alchemist, enchanter, or what have you, but he was the only person in history capable of reproducing Noble Phantasms at will. Given enough failures, enough revisions, and enough things exploding in his face, even a third-rate magus could eventually produce something useful.

Such was the statistical power of the brute force method of trial and error.

If the word had gotten out, Emiya wouldn’t have been surprised if some disgruntled academic had put a hit on him out of sheer principle. Even Rin couldn’t quite contain her frustration at times. Talented magi starve for research material while a third-rate bumpkin uses priceless mysteries to go boom! Which was a ridiculous thing to say, considering she wasn’t starving for anything. Rin knew exactly what would happen when her hard-won research time in the Clocktower vaults was shared with Emiya.

But yes, it took quite some time before his half-blind fumbling resulted in an iteration that didn’t immediately blow up. Only half-blind, because Rin had lent a hand, teaching him and even securing him several private tutoring sessions with Lord El-Melloi II – thus his proficiency with Alteration.

When it came to Alteration magecraft, form and function oftentimes went hand in hand. Doubly so for something as ephemeral as a crystallization of legend. Compressing Fergus’ greatsword into a smaller, sleeker form allowed Emiya to focus its destructive release into facilitating the primary concept.

Rotation.

Stone, steel, flesh, magecraft, even space itself. Everything yielded to Caladbolg’s turn.

In more practical terms, directed rotation along a limited area amounted to nothing less than a Noble Phantasm-grade spatial drill.

His best arrow when it came to flight distance and magical defenses.

Still, being the shoddy creation of a third-rate magus, it wasn’t without its kinks.

For starters, the sword’s original purpose hadn’t gone anywhere.

Eliminating a target with a clean shot was an elegant solution to many problems, but there was nothing elegant about Caladbolg. Or Fergus. Or his foster son.

Noble Phantasms were heavily affected by their owners’ legends, and as such the Spiral Rainbow Sword yearned to move the earth out and away. Plow the soil. Rock the world.

Emiya was half-convinced The Great Rotation of Heaven and Earth was a Gaelic innuendo.

Normally, it wasn’t a problem. Unless Emiya specifically chose to Break it, the destructive release remained contained by the modifications. Unfortunately, those same heavy modifications made Caladbolg unstable.

Downright fragile, relatively speaking.

Break the sword, and all the repressed might of its legend would come out at once in a fiery explosion. There was simply no way around that. Emiya could alter the expression of a legend to a limited degree, but he couldn’t simply cut the legend out and pretend the weapon was something other than a tool for a wholesale landscape rearrangement.

Most of the time, that didn’t matter. Few things could offer any meaningful resistance to the working end of Caladbolg II.

Emiya just wasn’t sure frozen time was one of them.

If the time-bubble had been the result of a spell, he would have been one hundred percent certain there was nothing to worry about. The thaumaturgical framework keeping time halted would be the first thing to unravel, and without that framework, there would be nothing for Caladbolg to break upon.

Only it wasn’t a spell. Gae Dearg had done nothing to the time-bubble.

That left three possibilities.

The first, and least likely, was that Caladbolg would fail to penetrate entirely, turning the school into a crater while Tanya remained suspended in the air.

The second, and most probable, was that everything would work just fine. The bubble would pop and his sister would be free.

What troubled Emiya was the third possibility. The middle ground. The bubble would collapse, yes, but offer just enough resistance in the process to trigger detonation, leaving Tanya free to burn in the middle of a rainbow-hued inferno.

It wasn’t a risk he was willing to entertain.

He was angry. At the PRT, for letting the ABB situation simmer until it boiled over into this mess. At Tanya, for saving his useless hide and paying the price instead of being a smart girl and leaving him to his fate.

At himself most of all. For missing the bombs. For letting it get to that point.

Those thoughts were what led Emiya into an alleyway inside ABB territory, where he dismissed his armor in favor of his usual clothes.

Stepping into the Asian market, the first noticeable detail was just how empty it looked. There were literally no people perusing the goods, and half the stalls weren’t manned. The rest... were old people. Hyun-woo was listlessly sorting pickled goods. Yamada-obaa-san stared into nothing. Old Choi didn’t even have the stove on. All of them wore the same look of despondency on their faces.

The market looked dead.

Emiya made his way to Ichirou’s counter, only to realize he’d been mistaken. It wasn’t just old people. A familiar pair of twin-tails hung over a red coat in front of the stall.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, interrupting whatever Ichirou had been about to say.

“Starving,” Lisa replied casually, not looking up from whatever she was doing. Writing something. Her cheery disposition was very out of tune with the heavy atmosphere of this place. “Old man wouldn’t even serve me a glass of water.”

What in the...

“You should leave. It’s dangerous out here.”

Lisa shot him a look. “Look who’s talking.”

“Why are you here, Danvers-kun?” Ichirou asked tiredly. “Haven’t you been watching the news?”

Emiya raised an eyebrow. It felt like Ichirou was questioning only his presence, not Lisa’s.

“I have questions I need to ask you. Though it’ll have to wait until I get Lisa to safety.” He grabbed the blonde’s arm. “Up. Come on.”

Lisa didn’t budge an inch. “Bakuda’s location, correct?” she asked. Her finger tapped the counter in response to his surprised look. “Amazing what you can learn with a map of the Docks and a talkative local.”

Looking down, there was a map lying on the polished surface, with marks and notes scratched all over it. Before Emiya could take a closer look, Lisa’s hand darted out and swiped it away, vanishing the paper into her coat.

“I was under the impression that the PRT was throwing all its resources at finding a madwoman who threatens to blow up the city,” he said slowly, still not releasing his hold. “And you’ve managed to one-up them with Ichirou and an old map?”

Lisa flicked one of her tails, giving him a familiar smirk. “I’m a genius, Danvers-kun. The smartest girl you’ve ever met. And the PRT are morons who couldn’t find their nose with two hands.”

“You are a cape,” Ichirou accused.

“Tch. Thanks, old man. Believe it or not, he almost bought it.” Lisa turned back to Emiya, not looking particularly bothered by the unmasking. “Fine, I have powers. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Just tell me where Bakuda is.”

“You really are a simple kind of guy, aren’t you, Danvers-kun?” she deadpanned, tugging his hand to bring their faces closer. “You see, I fucking knew you’d come here. Read you like a book! Which is how I know that if I give you the intel, then instead of bringing it to the PRT like a smart boy, you’ll run headfirst into a heavily fortified workshop of a bomb Tinker.”

Ichirou stared at Emiya as Lisa ranted, astonishment slowly overtaking the exhaustion on his face.

“Hasn’t the recent fight taught you anything? A little trick with implanted bombs and you’re out cold. If not for your psycho sister, you’d be dead! You are not invincible!” Her green eyes peered into his own, searching for something.

Emiya wouldn’t have called cranium bombs ‘a little trick’. He’d recognized the assailants’ sudden charge at him as a suicidal attack – the look of fatalistically resigned determination clued him in – but he hadn’t spotted any vests or bombs on their bodies. As such, he’d assumed their goal had been to tackle him to the ground to be gunned down together.

A miscalculation, but surprise tactics reliant on unusual capability, while extremely effective, only worked once. A major reason Emiya preferred to keep his own arsenal hidden.

Still, he knew what to expect now.

“Oh, but who am I kidding?” Lisa’s mouth twisted. “You still believe you are. Behemoth could get the drop on you, and you’d still think death is something that happens to other people!”

Emiya had no idea what came over Lisa, but he had neither the time nor the patience to figure it out.

His hand simply slipped under her coat and fished out the map. A flick of the wrist unfurled it... only for him to find that it made no sense whatsoever. Scribbles, symbols, out-of-context words; no arrows, no circled areas, no arrows, no circled areas, and certainly no convenient cross marked as ‘Bakuda’s here’.

The smug girl gave him a very un-Lisa-like smirk that made her face look rather vulpine. “Two steps ahead of you, Danvers-kun~. Also, you touched my boob; are you going to take responsibility?” she asked slyly, batting her eyelashes and pretending to cover her smirk. The effort at distracting him was slightly undermined by her sharp eyes flickering all over his face, searching for a reaction.

Emiya couldn’t find it in himself to even give her a flat look. As far as distractions went it was sloppily done, and he doubted it would have worked on an actual thirteen years old in similar circumstances.

A master manipulator Lisa was not.

Her grin widened slightly and a flicker of satisfaction flashed in her eyes, which Emiya moved to dispel by turning to Ichirou instead. “Where?”

“I have no idea,” the man sighed. “She asked me questions about what I knew and saw, but how it all connects is beyond me.”

Emiya turned toward Ayame—

Lisa’s grin dropped into a frown.

“Where is Ayame?”

Ichirou’s silence said it all.

Emiya saw red.

Plan B, then.

He turned away from the stall, only for Lisa’s hand to catch his shoulder and pull him back around. He allowed it.

“Where do you think you are going?” she demanded.

“If you aren’t going to spill the beans, I’ll find Bakuda on my own.”

“By grabbing the closest ABB member and beating the answers out of them, right? Won’t work. They fear Bakuda more than they fear you. At worst, you’ll kill them. She? Oh, she was very creative when showing the goons who’s in charge. I’m talking ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’ kind of creative here.”

Unfortunate, if true. In his experience, intimidation was the best interrogation tactic. Pain worked, but only to a degree. Past a certain threshold, people started losing lucidity, and their memory became unreliable. Cross-referencing could work, but it was time consuming.

No matter, he would just—

“Starting shit to draw Bakuda out won’t work either,” Lisa cut into his musings. “Lung’s back in charge, and he’d rather send Oni Lee to defend his turf. He has tinkertech bombs now, by the way. Think you can take him on by yourself?”

Yes.

Not in close quarters, but yes.

He’d never managed to get past the ridiculous login protection barring the PRT database—a convenient excuse Emiya kept in his back pocket for when Tanya finally blew a gasket—but he had learned about Oni Lee’s power through sheer osmosis. What appeared to be an instantaneous line-of-sight teleportation, or close enough to make no difference. No meaningful delay between activations. An aftereffect that duplicated himself and his gear, which included frag grenades. Now tinkertech.

A troublesome opponent, and by all evidence, an experienced one.

Not unbeatable by any means, of course. Unfortunately, deliberately drawing Oni Lee’s attention meant giving up initiative and opening himself to a coup de grâce. If the Demon was competent, he would pull the pin on a grenade and teleport in at the last possible second, leaving Emiya with no time to react.

He would have to approach this carefully.

“Holy shit...” Lisa threw up her hands. “You’re actually thinking about it! I can practically see the gears in your head turning!”

Even Ichirou looked at him with wide eyes.

“Danvers-kun, I...” the man started, then faltered. “I don’t even know if Ayame still lives. I want my daughter back—but you are thinking about throwing your life away. The Oni was never shy of murder, even before Bakuda started this madness.”

Emiya shrugged. “You are the one who lectured me about putting family first. My sister is in peril, and Bakuda holds the solution.”

“Bullshit!” Lisa spat.

The word cracked through the dead market hard enough to turn heads.

“You are too calm; you aren’t acting like someone at the end of their rope,” she hissed, lowering her voice. “You have a way to break the time-bubble, don’t you?”

He did.

Caladbolg was too volatile to attempt, but Emiya was nothing if not adaptable. Gae Dearg having no effect proved the absence of a thaumaturgical framework, and with it, the absence of conceptual defenses. Not that he would bet on it being a problem even if they were.

But the solution he had in mind was still dangerous enough that he would rather exhaust the list of possible options first.

Besides—

Lisa pointed a finger in his face. “I knew it! You have it, and you’re certain it’s going to work! Your sister being time-locked is just a convenient excuse to play a big damn hero.”

Emiya rolled his eyes. “It requires Bakuda being taken care of either way.”

“How? Why would—” Lisa stopped herself with visible effort. “No. Doesn’t matter.”

She massaged her temples, nursing a headache, and for a moment her composure cracked enough to show the exhaustion underneath. She looked at him with pleading eyes.

“Look, I’ll give you the location; just please, please promise me you’ll bring it to the PRT and not storm the place alone.” Her voice lowered to barely a whisper. “You’ll die, and I don’t want that.”

Emiya rested a hand on the blonde’s shoulder.

“I promise,” he said gently, looking her deep in the eyes.

Blood rushed to Lisa’s face.

“I can see you fucking lying, you absolute...!” she hissed, struggling for breath in outrage. “FUCK! You realize there’s a good chance they are going to send in the Wards anyway, right? The Protectorate is tied up containing the ABB, and Clockblocker and Vista are the dream team for breach and secure. You’ll have the whole team and a squad of troopers to support you.”

Emiya scoffed. “Having children getting in the way will only make things harder.”

“You are as arrogant as Armsmaster!”

No. Arrogance required overestimating himself. Unless there was a Servant, a Dead Apostle Ancestor, or some other monstrosity hiding somewhere, Emiya was working with a level of skill and combat experience no one on the planet could realistically match.

“Argh! This is useless. Whatever I say, you’ll still run off into danger.” Lisa’s chest heaved as she forced herself through a deep, calming breath. It didn’t seem to help much. “Fine, you win. I’ll give you the location; just keep my name out of it. I have no interest in risking my life by playing a hero.” She shot him a meaningful glare.

Snatching back the map, she took a pen to it.

Smart girl.

“Danvers-kun,” Ichirou called.

Emiya looked at him.

“Last time you came here, I berated you. It is shameful of me to ask you to risk your life now, but if you truly think you can best Bakuda...” His grey head dipped in a low bow. “Please indulge this selfish old man’s request. Please save Ayame. Save every innocent taken by the ABB. End this nightmare.”

“...You don’t have to ask anything, Ichirou.” Emiya looked back at the map. “I was already going to do that anyway.”

For Tanya. Nothing more.

***

“What are you doing here?” It felt like he was asking that a lot today.

Emiya stood on a roof some distance away from a nondescript abandoned warehouse deep inside ABB turf. The map Lisa had provided took him along a circuitous route she insisted would bypass the gang’s lookout points.

Very circuitous route. He had to basically exit the area controlled by the ABB only to enter it again from the northern side.

When it came to infiltration, oftentimes slow was fast, so he’d complied.

When he finally arrived, Armsmaster zip-lined onto the roof before Emiya had even finished planning his approach.

“I received an anonymous tip-off that there was credit to be had if I dropped everything and rushed to this location,” the man explained. “Directly to my line. It mentioned Bakuda.”

Emiya looked at him in disbelief. “Someone said ‘credit,’ and you came running like a dog after a stick? You could have been walking into an ambush for all you know.”

“It also mentioned you.” Armsmaster nodded to the halberd Emiya had used to get here. “All I had to do was check the location of my tech to verify.”

Lisa.

It had to be her. The girl hadn’t given up and had sent Emiya running in circles while sending Armsmaster after him.

Well, if she counted on his ‘father’ to talk him out of his plans, she had severely misjudged the man.

“So this is Bakuda’s workshop?” Armsmaster asked, looking in the same direction Emiya had been.

“Presumably,” Emiya grumbled.

The man pointed his halberd at the building. “There are emissions consistent with the exotic ordnance the ABB used in recent battles. The building also isn’t listed as being on the grid, but it has power.”

It really was a pity how thoroughly Armsmaster’s weapon was integrated with his other systems. Emiya knew about the sensor arrays installed in the halberd, but had no way of reading the output.

But even with some functions remaining out of his reach, the halberd was still a beautiful weapon. A veritable Swiss army knife of combat and utility tools, folded into the shape of a polearm. The increase in Emiya’s mobility alone would have justified almost any mana cost, but on top of everything else, the weapon was cheap.

And even beyond that, on a personal level, Emiya could simply appreciate the hard labor, the endless iteration and the obsessive precision that went into every function Armsmaster had packed into the weapon.

He found the man unpleasant, but there was no arguing that his craftsmanship deserved recognition.

“Get back to the HQ,” Armsmaster ordered. “I’ll handle this.”

The halberd in the man’s hand dissolved into a swirl of blue motes.

“You aren’t equipped to handle anything,” Emiya said calmly. “How about you get out of my way?”

The armored Tinker looked stunned.

No doubt he was urgently calculating how much of his tech was currently composed, fully or partially, of Emiya’s projections. The answer was—a lot.

Extensive testing had proved to Armsmaster that Emiya’s projections were indeed inferior copies of the originals.

Technically.

You had to venture into quite extensive performance and destructive testing to even notice the difference, but Armsmaster was all about small inefficiencies. To him, a loss was still a loss.

The size of the gap was inversely proportional to Emiya’s understanding of the object in question, and it decreased the more his understanding grew.

What Emiya personally found amusing was that, even with pieces of tinkertech he had only just managed to successfully project, the loss in performance never exceeded a single digit. With the halberd, it was a fraction of a percent.

Insanely complex or not, they still weren’t products of magecraft, after all.

The truly amusing part was that, for Armsmaster, accepting even that fractional loss was like pulling teeth. Emiya, naturally, hadn’t missed the opportunity to make it worse by mentioning that it didn’t matter to him due to Reinforcement. In fact, whatever Armsmaster built would always perform better in Emiya’s hands.

The Tinker had almost given up on using Emiya’s projections as a replacement for his loadout until Tanya pulled out an entire presentation with charts and graphs showing that whatever negligible loss in gear performance the man chose to accept, his overall productivity would skyrocket.

Basically, she proved mathematically that Armsmaster was a myopic idiot who couldn’t see Mount Tai behind a molehill.

As a result, whether Armsmaster walked or found himself stuck in his own armor was entirely Emiya’s choice.

“You are emotionally compromised,” Armsmaster finally tried to reason. “Tinker workshops are some of the hardest targets to hit. Going in there alone makes no sense.”

“Really?” Emiya drawled. “Because you were about to do just that.”

“I am a Tinker with fifteen years of experience! You are, at best, a Tinker-adjacent Striker who triggered less than three months ago. Zero experience in infiltration or breach and entry. Two real fights under your belt—that’s all you have.”

“Well, my ‘Thinker power’ gives me more skill than you’ll ever have by default.” Emiya’s voice stayed flat. “Trust me, I’m better at this than you.”

That hit a nerve.

Armsmaster bared his teeth and lunged to grab Emiya by the shoulders, the motion sharp enough that he couldn’t have dodged without Reinforcement.

“You are being irrational!” he snapped in his face. “Do you think you are the first overconfident Thinker who got in over their head? Going in alone will get you killed!”

“Look, I don’t give a damn about your insecurities. You can do nothing to stop me, so why don’t you step aside?”

“I’ll call in reinforcements,” Armsmaster threatened.

That stopped Emiya short.

“And lose the golden opportunity to say you stopped Bakuda all by yourself?” he said slowly. “You know I don’t care about credit. Tell the PRT I wasn’t even here.”

The appeal to greed should have worked but, to his surprise, Armsmaster didn’t bite. “This isn’t just about credit!” the man snapped. “If something goes wrong in there, at best, all Bakuda’s victims die. At worst, we’ll have a nuclear detonation on our hands!”

Tch. It would seem even Armsmaster had a line. Blurry and indistinct, flickering in and out depending on angle and lighting, but a line nonetheless.

Just his luck it would show up here.

“Fine.” Emiya shoved the man back and threw the halberd at him. “We do this together.”

Neither of them was too happy with the arrangement, but Emiya supposed that was the nature of compromise. Mutually unsatisfying by definition.

And say what you would about Armsmaster, the man was good at his job. At least it wasn’t the Wards meddling, or even someone else from the Protectorate. What Emiya had gleaned from Shawn didn’t inspire much confidence. Not for delicate jobs.

“The windows are boarded, and I don’t see any sentries, but there are active cameras,” Armsmaster observed. “Most likely, Bakuda bets on this location remaining as inconspicuous as possible. I can disable the cameras along our path with a directed EMP emission, but that will alert her instantly. We’ll have to move fast.”

“Can you take down all the cameras at once? Better to blind her completely so she doesn’t know which side we are approaching from.”

“Over the whole perimeter?” Armsmaster said doubtfully. “It’ll drain the battery and only cover half the area... but I suppose with you here that won’t be a problem.”

Obviously.

“Our main issue is the entrance. Doors and windows are booby-trapped, and I’ll need time to identify and disable the triggering mechanism.”

“We can simply make our own entrance.”

“How?” Armsmaster asked. “Neither of us is strong enough to break through concrete.”

The rest of the objection died when a nanothorn halberd appeared in Emiya’s hand.

“Won’t be a problem,” Emiya said, and threw him a second copy. “We can breach through opposite ends, taking them in a pincer.”

Armsmaster caught the weapon. For a moment, the man looked almost offended by the suggestion.

Emiya knew why. Armsmaster had wanted the nanothorn’s debut to be at the next Endbringer battle. His grand victory over the beast.

The opportunity to singlehandedly stop the destruction of Brockton Bay was too good to pass on, however.

“Fine. Once inside, our first priority is to take down Bakuda. No killing,” Armsmaster stressed.

“The deadman switch, I remember.” Otherwise, he would have fired Caladbolg II and had been done with it.

“No. I mean no killing, period.” The man’s grip tightened slightly on the borrowed halberd. “You are clearly affected by what happened to Argent, and I don’t need this turning into a bloodbath.”

“The city is on the verge of catastrophe, and you want me to pull my punches?”

“I want you to use the skill you keep implying makes you superior,” Armsmaster said flatly. “You are more than capable of non-lethal takedowns without slowing yourself down. The only person there with a kill order is Bakuda, and we can’t kill her. There might also be unwilling conscripts inside. This is not negotiable.”

Emiya held his gaze for a moment.

Then he looked back toward the warehouse.

“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”