The following day, Shirou found himself back in his usual position at the front of the stall, frying batches of prepared potato puffs and tending to hungry customers early in the morning.
It might have just been his imagination, but the teen noted that the number of people stopping by seemed to be steadily increasing ever since he took up the job.
"Well would you look at that," an impressed whistle came from the back of the stall. "I don't think I've ever seen us do this well in a while, you must be some kind of lucky charm frying boy, Emiya!" his pudgy animal coworker spoke up in admiration.
"Unless…" she narrowed her eyes in mock-suspicion "You wouldn't happen to be slipping anything funny into the food, would you?"
Shirou rolled his eyes in response. "Of course not miss, I'm sure it's all thanks to your quality work and care," he dryly shot back.
"Bwahaha! Flattery won't get you a rise, but keep up the good work anyway!
"Sure thing." The teen let out a wry smile, and continued to fry croquettes and greet customers.
As several more buyers arrived and left, Shirou eventually came across a familiar face in front of the stall.
"Hello dear customer, may I have your order please?" He asked with a knowing grin.
"One creamy red bean croquette please," came the somewhat-expected reply from the blonde haired swordswoman.
"Coming right up!"
As he received a pre-prepared croquette from one of his coworkers and placed it on the pan, Shirou stole a glance at his current customer. She had on her usual unreadable expression, but the male teen swore that he could see traces of bewilderment and… was that disappointment?
Dismissing those thoughts from his mind, the auburn-haired employee finished frying up and preparing the potato croquette, and then handed it to the waiting customer's hands. She absently looked down at the snack, before taking a single bite.
"Thank you, and enjoy your meal!" he said warmly, before grabbing the used pan and turning around to have it washed.
However, a set of unexpected words interrupted him.
"...No good," the girl muttered, as if inadvertently blurting out her inner thoughts.
"…Huh?" came the befuddled response of Shirou, who immediately turned around and gazed at his newest creation in disbelief.
To find out the reason for the auburn-haired teen's current astonishment and inability to respond, one would have to look at the history of this self-taught cook.
Shirou was the product of an unfortunate upbringing environment, in which not a single one of his guardians knew how to properly cook.
In order to save his family from the dietary horrors of having to consume fast food and cup noodles for every meal, and to save his own house from being burned down by the horribly executed culinary experiments of one Kiritsugu Emiya, the then-seven year old boy took it upon himself to learn how to legitimately cook.
The child didn't have any particular talent for cooking—at the very beginning, the only skill he could hold over his surrogate father was his ability to boil an egg, without setting half of the kitchen on fire in the process.
But through sheer determination and the authentic desire to lead a healthy life, the child managed to build up his culinary technique to an acceptable level, after which he steadily refined those skills over several years.
By the time he reached 17 years of age, Shirou had unknowingly transcended into a higher realm. The creations shaped by his mystical hands were works of art that could subjugate even the deadly combination of a ferocious tiger and a regal king.
Just to be perfectly clear, the auburn-haired teenager wasn't someone who took excessive pride in his hard-earned culinary skills, but neither was he someone who was used to hearing people outright reject his cooking.
So, all he was currently feeling was the surprise that came with experiencing something for the very first time. The self-taught cook was in no way reeling from the merciless annihilation of his non-existent pride.
Yep, not at all…
Towards Shirou's increasingly despairing expression, the girl finally seemed to notice her verbal blunder, as she frantically tried to console the chef that she almost murdered in cold blood.
"Ah, no, um…" Her naturally quiet disposition did the girl no favors here, as she struggled to find the right words to repair the damage with.
"Um, it's not that it was bad, it was still better than usual. But compared to last night, the one that you made yourse-" her words immediately had an effect, but not an expected one, as Shirou forcibly broke out of his trance, and desperately dived across the counter to cover the girl's mouth with a hand.
Leaning in close to the bewildered girl, Shirou urgently whispered to her.
"Please don't say that out loud! I'm not allowed to prepare everything by myself yet. They'll kill me for sure if they find out what I did!"
The girl's eyes lit up in understanding, and she quickly nodded her head twice.
"Oi Emiya, you're meant to serve our customers, not assault them! Hurry up and get back in the counter right now!" came the enraged shout of one of Shirou's coworkers.
Hurriedly taking his hand off of the girl's mouth before pulling himself back in, Shirou apologized to the coworker before turning back to face the girl.
"Sorry, but I can't do what you're asking for, you'll just have to put up with this for now," he earnestly requested.
The girl looked like she was about to argue, but then lowered her head in resignation, and started to walk away.
'This is for the best,' Shirou told himself.
As a responsible adult, he had to follow the rules. Last night was just an exception, something done out of impulse. He couldn't afford to lose his job just because of a single girl's pleas, no matter how much it pained him. This was the unshakable decision that Shirou Emiya's rational side declared.
On the other hand, as he stared at the depressed girl slide away with a hunched back and heavy footsteps, the side of Shirou Emiya that wanted to be a hero of justice cried out in furious protest.
In the end, his irrational side won out—no surprise there.
"Hold on a minute, miss!"
The girl turned around, and Shirou—while physically suppressing the impulse to rush over after he glimpsed at her dead expression—continued shouting.
"If you come by again at the same time as yesterday, I might be able to do something for you!"
The words seemed to have an immediate effect on the girl, as her expression instantly brightened up. She gave a small smile and nodded once, before heading off in the direction of Babel Tower, back straight and gait firm.
Smiling wryly to himself, the auburn-haired teen made preparations for the next customer.
During his break shift, Shirou found himself sitting on an empty stool, absently chewing on an original flavored croquette that served as his lunch.
All of a sudden, a pudgy arm came out of nowhere and latched itself around his neck, pulling the unfortunate teen off of his stool completely.
"W-what are you doing?" Shirou said as he gasped for breath, towards the animal woman employee who currently had him in an arm lock.
"Damn boy, you work fast! It's only been two days since you arrived here, and you've already got a girl stuck under your thumb—and the Sword Princess of all people!"
"It's a misunderstanding, I haven't even known her for that long!" Shirou frantically placed down his potato puff—which was genuinely in danger of falling from his hands—and continued struggling, but an unfamiliar term caused him to pause. "Wait, Sword Princess?" the teen curiously repeated.
"Yeah!" The animal woman enthusiastically replied. "Strongest female adventurer, world famous figure. You really know how to pick em', don't you kiddo?"
Shirou's only response was a confused tilt of his head.
The animal woman's teasing expression gradually disappeared, being steadily replaced by a look of uncertainty.
"Um, Aiz Wallenstein? Level 5 member of Loki Familia? Rumored to have gotten a thousand marriage proposals and shot down every single one?" she uneasily said to him.
Shirou just continued to stare at her with a blank look on his face.
"Wait, no way," the woman spoke in horror as she grasped her forehead with a hand. "Does the name 'Sword Princess' not ring any bells with you?" she asked in trepidation.
Shirou shook his head. "I used to lived in a pretty remote and far away place before ending up in Orario," the teen admitted, while internally berating himself for not trying to obtain more information about the new world he found himself in.
"Well damn..." The coworker absently muttered, while keeping her hand on her forehead and using the other to steady herself on the table. "Must've been a village built into the side of an underwater volcano in the middle of an ocean, can't believe you've never heard of the Sword Princess before," the coworker repeated in a stupefied tone.
Shirou just shrugged his shoulders in response, not willing to continue with that line of conservation and risk opening up a bigger can of worms.
"Wow." The animal woman continued to stare blankly at him in a daze. "So you honestly just grabbed the attention of Aiz Wallenstein, without even knowing who she really was?"
Silently noting down the name of the girl that he never got to know until now, Shirou just gave another casual shrug of his shoulders.
"I guess so."
The animal woman gave him a look of uncertainty, as if she couldn't decide whether to consider him suspicious, or to consider him crazy.
It seemed that the latter sentiment won out in the end, as she proceeded to let out a loud laugh.
"Bwahaha! I think I'm finally starting to see what kind of person you really are, Emiya!"
"Wouldn't be the first time someone's said that to me," the teen dryly remarked.
"That's pretty amazing though," the women complimented as she got her breathing back under control. "I thought for sure that only a strong adventurer who happens to meet her in the dungeon would ever have a chance of attracting her attention, what on Gekai did you do to catch her eye?"
"I have no idea miss, you'd have to ask her yourself if you wanted to know," the teen replied as firmly as he could, before standing up and attempting to return to his duties, in an effort to avoid having to explain how he actually managed to grab her attention.
"Oh right, almost forgot," the animal woman spoke up, moving on to a different topic, much to the guilty party's relief.
"There's a shipment of ingredients currently waiting to be picked up in a farming village a couple miles north of here," the woman stated, as Shirou listened intently.
"A lot of the guys that we normally send out on these errands aren't free at the moment, so we're a bit shorthanded. I know you're still new to this and all, but would you mind heading out with the group tomorrow afternoon to lend a hand?" she somewhat guiltily inquired. "It'd be a great help to us."
"Sure thing," Shirou unhesitatingly replied. The teen reasoned that he didn't have much to do aside from his stall duties anyway—and to begin with, Shirou Emiya was never someone who could just brush off the requests of others without a second thought.
"Great!" the animal woman happily stated. "We've hired a bunch of adventurers to guard the convoy, so there shouldn't be any need to worry about safety."
The way she casually talked about hiring bodyguards—implying that there was a danger involved—made Shirou feel slightly disconcerted, but since the woman said that there was nothing to worry about, he decided to just let that little detail slide.
After finishing off his lunch, the teenaged employee quickly got back to work.
Later in the evening, Shirou was making preparations to close down the stall, when he saw an expected figure making its way towards him.
"One creamy red bean potato croquette, I take it?" he inquired, already expecting the answer as he started getting the ingredients out.
"No, I'll have one green tea flavored potato croquette, please."
The male incredulously looked up in response to the unforeseen answer, silently conveying his disbelief to the girl.
"I eat other things too," she pouted in slight annoyance.
"Right, right. Sorry about that," Shirou laughed as he gave a swift apology, before taking out a different set of ingredients.
The next few minutes passed by in relative soundlessness as Shirou directed his attention to completing all of the necessary steps, and the girl watched him intently with the same level of focus as the previous day.
It was while the croquette was being fried that someone finally broke the silence.
"Aiz Wallenstein-san…was it?" Shirou timidly asked.
That seemed to be the signal for the girl to snap out of her own unresponsiveness, as she looked at Shirou in confusion.
"Um…yes?" she absently replied to his question with another question, while pointing at herself.
Sighing in relief when he realized that he didn't just inadvertently refer to a person by the wrong name, Shirou gave a quick apology.
"Sorry, it's just that I never got your name until a while ago. I come from a pretty remote place, so I had no idea you were so famous."
"Ah, okay then."
The male teen sweatdropped upon seeing how easily the girl took that claim in stride, but was internally grateful that she didn't question him about it, like his coworker almost did.
"Then, what's your name?" she asked, after a short pause.
"Oh sorry about that, Its Shirou Emiya," the male teen replied, while berating himself for his lack of manners in not giving out his own name beforehand.
"Shirou…Emiya," Aiz quietly repeated, showing a hint of unfamiliarity while pronouncing it, which he reasoned wasn't surprising considering how the name originated from the other side of the world—if an equivalent of Japan even existed in this world.
"So you're new to Orario?" she asked inquisitively
"Yeah, I just got here 3 days ago, so everything's still pretty unfamiliar to me."
"Hmm, is that so." The girl seemed to silently ponder. "Why did you decide to come here?" she inquired after a few seconds of thought.
It was at this point that Shirou was starting to have second thoughts about the unnatural direction that the talk was currently headed in.
The way Aiz was just randomly firing questions at him just screamed out loud that she wasn't a person who was used to holding long conversations at all. It gave him the impression of someone desperately blowing at a candle to stop a rapidly dwindling ember from burning out completely.
The blonde-haired girl in question seemed to notice this fact as well, as a faint dusting of pink started to color her cheeks, while he was taking the time to figure out how to deal with this situation.
In the end, Shirou decided to throw the poor girl a lifeline, as he went about thinking of a way to respond to the question.
"Well," he started to formulate his answer. "I didn't come here entirely of my own choice, but there is something that I want to do, a dream that I want to fulfill," he hesitatingly admitted.
Aiz looked like she was trying intently to digest his answer, as she looked at his eyes, looked down at the currently frying potato puff, and then back up to his eyes.
"To create the ultimate jagamarukun?" the girl innocently questioned, with a slight sparkle in her eyes.
Grabbing the side of the counter in an effort to withstand the unintentionally brutal conclusion of the honest airhead, Shirou replied back with a strained voice.
"N-no…Despite what my current situation looks like, this isn't how I plan to spend the rest of my life," he said with a tense smile.
"Ah, I see." Despite Aiz's airheaded disposition, Shirou noted that the girl was surprisingly sensitive, as she seemed to notice his unwillingness to share any more of his thoughts, and stopped commenting further.
Taking advantage of the momentary lull in conversation, Shirou decided to ask a few questions of his own.
Just a while ago he had been made painfully aware of his own lack of proper knowledge on Orario and its surroundings, so he figured that questioning one of the strongest adventurers in the city would be as good a starting point as any to fill in that gap.
"Wallenstein-san, you've been to the dungeon plenty of times, right?" he asked.
"I guess so," she replied in a relaxed manner.
"What's it like? Exploring and fighting down there."
Her next response came quickly, almost as if the answer was something that was always lingering in her mind, no matter the situation.
"It's a dangerous place," she uttered with a distinct tone of finality. "A single miscalculation can mean getting hurt, a single misstep can mean death. In the dungeon, it's kill or be killed."
Towards the unexpectedly grave words, Shirou was taken aback. He knew beforehand that the dungeon was a place where one had to fight and risk their lives to some degree, but to hear such a menacing description of it, and from one of the strongest dungeon explorers no less, went beyond his expectations.
"But…" As he was busy contemplating on this new detail, Aiz's next words directed his attention back to her.
What he saw was an expression that he had never before witnessed on the typically aloof girl's face. Focusing intently on her, he glimpsed a strange, unexplainable glint buried within her golden eyes, almost like the flickers of a black flame.
"It's also the best place to grow stronger," she concluded, with an ambiguous tone.
Amidst the continued sizzling of the frying pan, another period of silence came about between the two, but with an atmosphere completely different to that of the previous moments of awkwardness.
As the croquette gradually transitioned closer to the golden-brown color of its finished state, Shirou decided to forcibly change the subject, in order to dispel the tense atmosphere that surrounded the both of them.
"That's right Wallenstein-san, I almost forgot to tell you," he started, in as natural of a voice as he could muster up. "Sorry, but I won't be free to make this for you over the next two days. I'll be heading to a village north of here for a delivery I was asked to help pick up."
Thankfully that seemed to do the trick, as Aiz's normal expression quickly returned to her face.
"Ah, okay then."
Shirou inwardly expressed relief that the previous somber mood was washed away, and also that his current customer seemed to accept his future absence understandingly. He wasn't sure he could have kept his promise to the animal woman, had the blonde girl decided to sulk the same way she did earlier.
"North…that's where Beol Mountains are," Aiz muttered to herself.
"Beol Mountains?" Shirou parroted back.
"Yes. You'll probably have to pass through them on the way."
Pass through a mountain? His coworkers' earlier warning about possible danger during the journey now made some sense to Shirou, but he still wasn't sure what use the convoy had for bodyguards—maybe there were bandits?
"A lot of monsters stay there. Be careful," the girl casually said.
If Shirou had any liquid in his mouth at that moment, he would have likely done a perfect spit take. As it was, the auburn-haired teen only managed to splendidly choke on thin air.
"Um, are you okay?" Aiz worriedly asked the violently coughing male.
"Y-yeah, d-don't worry about me…" he managed to get out in between ragged breaths.
After a few thumps on his chest, Shirou finally got his breathing back under control. "So, monsters huh?" he said, with a strained smile on his face.
"Mhm," the girl replied, not noticing his current bafflement. "I heard from Riveria that a lot of them that escaped from the dungeon at the beginning ended up there."
Now that was news to the foreign teen. From what he could tell based on what was just said, the dungeon seemed to be home to actual monsters. If so, Aiz's earlier statements about the dungeon would certainly make sense, if there were living beings held within it that attacked people on sight.
"Well, I heard that there will be bodyguards to protect us," Shirou tentatively recounted what he was told.
"Oh, then it should be fine. The monsters there aren't that strong," Aiz replied back with confidence.
Still paying attention to the pan, Shirou noted that the croquette was finished frying. After taking it out and carefully wrapping it up, the cook passed the completed snack over to the girl's waiting hands.
Aiz took a moment to silently stare at the croquette and take in its enticing aroma, before dropping a few valis on the counter and expressing her thanks.
"No problem Wallenstein-san, I'll see you later." Shirou said, as he gave a brief wave of his hands.
"Yes, be careful," Aiz replied, with hints of concern evident in her otherwise flat voice.
Watching the girl walk away while intently savoring the treat in her hands, Shirou idly wondered to himself whether that concern was directed towards him as a person, or him as a source of food.
Letting out an exhausted sigh, he started stowing away everything in preparation for finally closing down the stall.
Just as he was about to take his leave, Shirou cast his mind to the journey that he would be taking the next day, pondering—with no small bit of anxiety—on what things he would encounter during his first trip beyond the walls of Orario.
Author Notes:
Bit of a short(er) chapter this time, since I felt that this was the best place to end it at.
Hopefully it's enough of a consolation to you guys that there will probably be action next chapter, because lets face it—when it comes to Shirou Emiya, Murphy's law is always in full effect.
Anyway, I'm pretty amazed at the response my first story's been receiving so far, makes me kinda nervous to be honest. Hopefully I don't fudge up my first fight scene enough to make everyone instantly nuke this fic off of their alert lists.
I noticed some people having some queries about the Shirou I'm using, what abilities he has as of now, and whether or not he's too OP for the danmachi-verse (God forbid Fate!Shirou ever ends up being the definition of OP).
I just want to clarify that the Shirou I'm using is specifically from the original Fate route of the VN. He's not the Deen/Stay Night version, not the Ufotable ubw version, and sure as hell not the Miyuverse version with his wanky-ass projections of freaking divine constructs.
This Shirou is the lowest of the low. He has only managed to project Caliburn and Avalon due to special circumstances, cannot project Kanshou and Bakuya, has unconsciously recorded the blueprints of some of Gil's weapons, but cannot project them regardless.
All he has going for him is structural grasping, reinforcement, and very basic projection, as well as full access to his crappy circuits, courtesy of Rin force-feeding him a prana-infused gem—but that doesn't mean he's incapable of improving from this point onwards.
Anyway, that's it for now. You guys know the drill: Follow and favorite if you feel like it, and keep those comments coming, they're my lifeblood!