Alone with another

Shirou adjusted the large bag on his back as he and Trin walked east back to Chiaroscuro, They had done what they said they would and were returning.

He wondered if Trin's letter had reached her or if she was not in Chiaroscuro yet. Either way it would be good if the civil war was done with quickly, if the archive Nereth had spoke of could only be safely accessed after the war, Shirou would see it done quickly.

Trin's thoughts were diffrent, A few silent prayers were being said to thank the dragons for causing the Anathema Rin to run after her demonic sister. He had hoped that the reveal of that demoness would have made Shirou realise that he should fight her or at least abandon her. But he had looked so determined to follow the sisters into hell. It had been Rin herself that stopped him, why? Did the demons not want his help? With how noble he still seemed, corrupting him should have been a high priority to them, but they didn't

It all confused Trin. He had been told the Anathema were wily monsters who hunt with intelligence so it might all be one big trick. But was Shirou the target or was it Trin?

They walked for days in close to silence, occasionally they would talk a little while resting but most of those conversations were short and didn't result in anything.

One such night, Shirou had gone to practice his magic. He started with a projection of a simple sword. In his hand appeared the blade he had thought of but it glinted strangely in the light. He held and examined it before striking it against a nearby stone. It began making a cut before his imagination fell apart and it shattered back into magical energy.

He tried again with a simple spear, again the metal in the spear head glinted slightly wrong, regardless he threw it and it flew well. He had never learned much about usign the spear however as most of the time he was using a traced weapon that told him how it was meant to be held and wielded.

He tried projecting a few more weapons before he reached the final test, he would try to trace.

Judging the concept of creation, he let his mind's eye rest upon a simple blade, no magical properties so it wouldn't take much to attempt. It was a classic English longsword, likely pulled from his dreams of Saber as most of his mundane blades were.

Hypothesizing the basic structure, he thought about the blade and made a blue print.

Duplicating the composition material, bloomery steel strangely enough. It was the first process that could create steel and yet according to legend, Saber was alive around 500 AD, about half a millennium before bloomery steel was invented. Curious.

Imitating the skill of its making, he understood the bloomery steel process then added the talent of a medieval blacksmith.

Sympathizing with the experience of its growth, something stopped him here. He could complete all previous steps but here was the roadblock. For the first time however he would try to leave out this step to try and finish the trace.

Reproducing the accumulated years, Shirou gasped down breath while imagining the decay the blade went through, not too much however. It was a mostly new blade when the memory had seen it. Something seemed off about it though, something was missing.

Excelling every manufacturing process, strangely this went even smoother than normal, each step in the process done the moment he thought of it. The pieces clicked and he attempted to draw the blade into his hand, when he did he immediately dropped it.

The blade was strange, he tried to pick it up again but the moment he started to practice swordplay with it, it slipped from his hands and hit the sand again.

It could be held but not fought with, was it then even a sword? Additionally keeping it in the world was taking more effort then his traces had taken even before exalting. It was trying to fall into pieces.

He sat down to theorise the issue. steps five and six normally to do with the ability the weapon possessed. All of a legends powers come from those steps. What then was causing the issues here. The increased cost was obvious, without stage 5 all that stage 6 could do was accumulate damage without any positive legends to reinforce the blade it might want to simply rust away.

Step 5 was more confusing, but it made a strange kind of sense. From the traced sword's perspective, this was the first time it was being wielded. It had no experience of battle.

So was that the block, the issue was that the weapons' histories could not be properly read. Why?

He kept practicing but eventually just decided to look at himself instead of his weapons. The Exaltation process had restructured his soul, it might have damaged the circuits that deal with the history of a weapon.

It turned out worse then that. The process had burned away all of his circuits. He even did a test to make sure. When he was projecting and failing to trace he was applying some pockets of magic inside his soul, those pockets were like half-formed charms designed to "Manage" his old magecraft. It wasn't doing a very good job though clearly.

He swapped out a few processes, He had a charm that strengthened a target object so when performing projecting he tried swapping out reinforcing for the charm. It kind of worked but in a flawed way; the created blade was stronger but apon testing it blew itself up like a broken phantasm.

Shirou lay down to rest wondering if he would be able to develop a charm to help with the tracing issue.

End of chapter

I'm sorry if you didn't enjoy this one. the original notes only had the first four paragraphs and I had to add something else to make up space so I decided to add the reason for the debuff to his magic. This sort of thing is true for all of the characters from fate but it is less of an issue for the others as their magecraft wasn't exploiting a tiny possibility to work correctly.

At it's most simple; imagine the soul was a computer system. A magus's soul contains all the features needed to run the spells. When they exalted however, the exalted soul doesn't have as many features. As the exalted don't normally get weaker when they exalt I had the idea for the Exaltation shard to basically be running an emulator for Magecraft. it works in most cases but Tracing and UBW are very difficult to emulate so Shirou is having issues. Learning more charms is the answer.

He still has his reality marble of course, it was damaged slightly by the exaltation but by now it is almost fully repaired (With slightly diffrent properties than the original UBW), the moment Shirou regains access to his advanced Magecraft it will be ready to use (Assuming he can make a new Aria for it)