A/N: I'm so sorry for the late updates guys! I'll try to catch up to everything this week. Well, I hope you enjoy this chapter! Thanks for reading! :D


Cause Route: Chapter 9 – The Master of Felicity

Saber, Diarmuid, Shirou, and Felicity walked along the edge of the forest that was rumored to lead to a huge castle. Felicity walked by Shirou, while Diarmuid and Saber walked a couple of yards behind them. It was only two days earlier that Felicity and (for an unknown reason to Shirou and Felicity) Diarmuid decided to join their cause. The huge man they called Iskandar was nowhere to be found.

It seemed to Shirou that Diarmuid's mood had increased drastically since the first he had met him. He remembered his cold expression staring at Saber. Ever since then, he wondered what had happened between the two and if they had known each other during their lives. Remembering that Felicity was walking beside him, he looked down at her. Her face wore a small smile, as she looked around at the things around her. The short white skirt she wore bounced, as she walked. She turned around to see Shirou looking at her and smiled warmly at him. The teenager smiled back in reply. He turned his head to look in front of him and looked back down at Felicity.

"I have a question for you, Felicity", he told her, his voice in a serious tone.

"Hm? What's that? I'll try to answer it to the best of my ability", she replied.

"Can you describe what your Master was like, and how you met her and stuff like that?" Emiya asked.

"My Master? You mean Alo?"

"Yeah", Shirou clarified.

"Oh okay, sure. Well, my teacher was very strong – the strongest warrior of all of Katanta, no doubt. She was respected all throughout the country and was known to take any job given to her, no matter what. I learned about her in a studies group that my village offered. Luckily, they allowed girls into the group, because my village thought that women and young girls should have been offered education throughout the world. You see, my village didn't have a school nearby, so we had a study group that taught us the necessary subjects and even told us about events that were happening and the famous warriors of Katanta – and that's when I learned about General Alodine.

One of the three volunteer educators we had that day told us about how Katanta had chosen a female warrior as the general for the highest-rank battalion in the whole army to fight against the neighboring country. At that time, we weren't officially at war; we just fought off the soldiers who had crossed the border to burn villages to the ground. During the discussion, one of my classmates asked what the warrior's name was, to which my teacher replied that her name was Alodine.

I was only ten when I learned of her, and we continued to talk about her for many months after that. We weren't worried about Montalonea, the country we were fighting off, coming to burn our village because of the fact that we were right by the ocean and Montalonea was known for not using or building ships because they costed so much to build and used so much wood. It was also because we were a nameless village that was kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, we were told many stories of General Alodine. The educators even told us that she faced thousands upon thousands of soldiers every day and hadn't lost one battle yet. At lunch one day, my classmates and I talked about how cool it would to meet her and how cool it would be to see her battle. General Alo probably became our favorite thing to talk about within a week. We loved talking about how strong and brave she was.

Then suddenly, we were told not to go to the study group one day and to get away from the village for a few hours, so we did. When we came back to the village, we understood why they told us to get out of the village. We saw Montalonean soldiers entering houses and burning them after killing the people inside. I realized that we were being attacked and ran to my house. When I went inside, I saw my mom on the ground dead – and the soldiers were still in there. They came towards me, and I tried to run but the wall was right behind me and soldiers came from every direction. I got ready to face death.

But before the soldier in front of me could end my life, I heard him grunt and then witnessed his head fall cleanly off his neck. I remember how perfect the cut had been and how my eyes widened in surprise. When the rest of his body fell onto the ground, I could see a very pretty woman in grayish-pink armor behind him holding a blood-soaked, huge axe in her hand. All of the soldiers charged at her at once, but somehow she managed to kill every single one of them with just one swing. It was kind of like dominoes. I remember her looking down at me and saying 'I'm sorry for not getting here earlier, but I was busy taking other worthless lives'. I told her that it was okay and that I understood. After that, I thanked her for saving me.

I didn't know that she was the famed warrior that I learned about in my study group, until she walked up to me when I was with my group. Apparently, they met up after all of the Montalonean soldiers were killed, including the educators. The parents who survived were getting ready to leave the village by packing up food and other necessities. That's when Alo walked up to me. I told her that I wish I could repay her for saving my life to which she cut me off. She told me 'let's go' and started to walk away.

One of my educators, Mrs. Mettian, then got mad at her and asked her what she thought she was doing. I recall her saying that I was now her student and that I would repay her by coming with her to the capitol. That then made her even madder, and she asked who Alo thought she was. At the time, she hadn't even told me who she was yet, so we didn't even know who she actually was. Alo surprisingly didn't get mad, or at least she didn't show it, because she replied to Mrs. Mettian who she thought she was talking back to a high-class warrior of Katanta. Then my other two educators, Mr. Dari and Ms. Selsata, joined the argument.

All my classmates and I actually tried to stop ourselves from giggling at the fact that our educators got so heated up at the argument, while Alo just had a bored expression on her face like she was thinking 'just let me take the kid and leave'. It was actually quite funny. But then when Mr. Dari asked who she was, she replied that she was General Alodine from the highest-rank battalion of the Katantan army. That's when everybody went quiet, and nobody was trying to stop themselves from giggling.

My teacher probably knew that would shut the educators up, because she turned to me and said 'now let's go'. Mrs. Mettian then snapped back to reality and told her to prove that she was indeed the famous warrior. Alo was silent for a while then asked if my educator had heard of any other woman wielding an axe to which Mrs. Mettian stayed silent.

Alo then finally said 'she's coming with me, and that's final'. I tried to ask all of the questions I was holding inside but was cut off by her voice. She told me that she would like to start teaching me asap and then told me the rules I had to live by when learning under her", Felicity said, telling Shirou the story of how she met her Master.

"Do you even remember what they were?" Emiya asked.

"Of course I do. I had to live by these rules for all of the years I trained under her. Number one – never ask her about her past. Number two – never ever question her ways of teaching…or question why to never ask her about her past. And finally number three – always listen to her and Zoal. Those were the three rules that I absolutely had to live by. There were other small rules of course, but those were the main ones. If I broke those rules, I would be severely punished. Oh yeah, there was also a fourth rule that I ended up breaking after she had died", she replied to him.

"And what was that rule?"

"To escape if I had a chance to. Well, that is if a war ever truly broke out. She told me to never become a hero and never try to save Katanta if I had the chance to escape. Like I said, I broke that rule when I was sixteen, almost two years after she had died", Felicity explained. Shirou's eyes widened. He didn't want to think about a sixteen-year-old girl entering the battlefield. Then, another question popped into his head.

"I hate to ask you this, but how exactly old were you when you entered your first battle?" he asked.

"Mmm…a month after I turned thirteen. I commanded my first army at 15", Felicity answered.

"ONLY THIRTEEN?! You must have been in the back, right?!"

"No, I was always placed in the front because of how short I was and for the fact that Alo was always in the front lines."

"That's terrible! Letting a young girl fight on a battlefield?! How could anyone do such a thing?!" Shirou questioned angrily.

"It's not like I was weak. My training was very, very brutal – not even half of the soldiers of the whole highest-rank battalion had gone through a quarter of how brutal my training was. I know it sounds bad, but Alo didn't want me to enter the battlefield unprepared", the girl responded. "I can't even tell you how many times I puked in the first week of training. The odd thing is that I don't even think that my Master showed any emotion at all – no sympathy, no happiness, no sadness, no disappointment, no anger, nothing, absolutely nothing. One time I even asked her why she didn't show any emotion. All I remember her saying is that it was because she had nothing to fight for and emotion can show weakness. I saw her smile a few times, but it was only if she was teasing somebody. I found it kind of sad that she had nothing to fight for. I asked her if she didn't have a family, and she told me she did. And that's when…I broke rule number one – never ask about her past. I asked her what had happened when she was younger that made her not even want to fight for her family. She replied by saying that I had broken one of the most important rules there were and commanded me to go help with moving supplies…in a hundred degree weather I might add. I thought I was going to faint", Felicity told him.

"She made you do that when you were only a small child?"

"Yep, but I knew I should have known better than to ask about her past. The question just slipped off my tongue", she explained.

"I see. So, how would you describe her overall? Like, was she nice? Was she mean?"

"Hmm…let's just say that she was merciless. She was nice too, but I don't think that's how other people would describe her."

"I see. Thank you for telling me this", Emiya said, smiling at the red-violet-haired girl walking beside him.

"You're very welcome", Felicity replied, smiling back at him warmly. They continued walking, continuing small talk. Each time Felicity would say something, it seemed to Emiya that he would only get more and more attracted to the girl. It's sad that she had to go through all of that during her life. I couldn't imagine a cute girl going out onto the battlefield at the age of only thirteen. I wish I could have been there to save her from that terrible life, he thought to himself, feeling sad that he couldn't go back and rescue her himself from the soldiers who attacked her. How could anyone have such a cute girl go through that?


A/N: Well, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. I was going to put a fight scene in here, but I thought that would make this chapter too long, so that'll be next chapter! Remember to tell me your favorite route so far in the reviews, and tell me what you think of the story so far! :D Well, have a WONDERFUL Day! :D