AN: Alright, on to chapter 2 . . . lets hope I do better on this one. My third person leaves something to be desired at the moment. Hopefully it will improve when I get to more character dialogue . . .
Also, to those of you thrown off by the Metric(Read: Americans) sorry, I figured that since Shirou's Japanese I should use the system he's be using. The be honest I'm more comfortable with imperial to, so if you ask I'll can put the imperial measurements in brackets next to the metric in later chapters.
Also, I repeat my warning from the last chapter about my habit of using lot's of OC's. Shirou's going to reference a lot of no-canon character's this chapter, who won't be introduced for a while yet. Sorry if that bother's you.
Shirou groaned, head pounding as he slowly regained consciousness. His whole body felt uncomfortably warm, like he had a fever, and his prana circuits felt like they were vibrating inside of his body.
Shirou didn't move for several seconds, his mind feeling sluggish. Finally, he clenched his teeth and forced his eyes . . . only to immediately squeeze them shut again as the sun shone straight into them.
The young magus rolled unto his side, grabbing the sides of his head as the pounding increased. Between the pounding and his circuits throbbing, he decided to stay motionless until he felt a little better, and curled up on the ground, fighting of the drowsy feeling he was getting.
It was not to last, however, seeing as something slammed into the ground beside him with a loud 'smack'! Instinct born from several years of getting sneak attacked while he was in bed kicked in, and he was on his feet roughly ten feet away in an instant, drowsiness forgotten under the influence of the adrenaline rush.
Almost immediately, he was hit by a wave of vertigo, but fought through it, putting his hands on his knees to remain balanced and his head spun.
It took a few seconds for the vertigo to clear up enough for Shirou to see what had disturbed him, during which he remained as on guard as he possibly could considering his current condition(Which admittedly, wasn't very much). Once the dizzy spell cleared up, he slowly opened his eye's, taking in his surroundings.
He was in a rather large cavern, roughly rectangular in shape, with several Greek-looking stone pillars scattered around it's edges. The floor had a thin coating of grass, and in the centre of the room was a large bed of golden flowers, that looked somewhat like fat buttercups.
But the thing that really caught his attention, was the white-clad body laying only a meter or two away from where he had been dozing a few seconds before. It seemed that same combat homunculus that had been following him for the majority of the morning was now laying rag-doled across the floor of the cavern, dull eye's staring seeming sightlessly at the cave ceiling.
Trying to take stalk of the situation, Shirou began to slowly walk a circle room, making sure to always keep the homunculus in his line of sight, while still getting a feal for the chamber's layout.
The chamber was roughly ten to fifteen meters across, and the pillars he had noticed earlier seemed to be strictly decorative in nature, seeing as they didn't actually hold anything up. He was unfamiliar with the kind of rock it was made of, however, which was a shade of what Shirou would consider dark lavender.
Of course, he supposed it could have been painted, but even the cracks showed the same purple colour, so it would have to have been painted recently.
In one corner of the room was a hallway, which appeared to have a doorway with some sort of symbol above it, but he couldn't seem make it out without getting closer due to the low light level.
Now having a potential escape route, the boy returned his full attention to the Homunculus with a frown.
He couldn't have been down the hole for more than three minutes for it have caught up so recently, and he was already feeling enough better that he could at least move, so assuming that the Homunculi would recover at a similar speed to himself, it would be a bad idea to stay in the same room as them.
On the other hand, the fact that they had fallen through a bounded field, and a rather exotic one at that, showed that wherever he was was most likely dangerous. Bounded fields don't go up by accident after all.
Meaing, it was quite possible that he was currently within the territory of some unknown magus, or had stumbled upon something that someone was trying to hide. Really, the best option would be to leave the same way he had come in, the hole.
Walking into the middle of the flower bed, he lood straight up the pit that had brought him their, judging it's height. It was a long way up, but not to far for him to throw a hook, as long as he didn't hit the walls.
Nodding to himself, he prepared to trace a rope-hook and make his escape . . .
. . . Except his circuits were still feeling . . . staticy, for lack of a better term, and said feeling turned into a painful electric shock when he tried to open them. Thus, he couldn't project anything, and he didn't have a hook anymore, having lost his a few days before.
Seeing as how he couldn't escape the hole for a while, and the tunnel was off limits until he had more Intel(if he ever did) the best option would be to tie up his hunter while they were still out and wait until his prana circuits calmed down enough that he would be willing to risk opening them.
Except, same problem as earlier, he had nothing to bind her with. He had used all the nets that Cline had given him during the raid on the Einzbern Mansion. He would normally just project one, but again, but considering the state of his circuits that wasn't an option.
And nothing else he had access to would be able to hold a Von Einzbern combat Homunculus for more then a few seconds. After all, what kind of material could counter the power of a being whose strength famously surpassed that of the average dead apostle by a rather large margin, and could even rival that of a physically weak servant like assassin. Really, it was a miracle that Cline had been able to make anything capable of holding one at all.
Seeing as tying her up was out, that left only three options. Take the tunnel, which had all sorts of unknown potential risks, wait in the chamber until he could use his circuits with the homunculus, which risked it recovering and capturing him, or finally . . . kill the homuculus.
The first two options were far too risky to seriously consider, and the third one was . . . more or less physically impossible for him. How could he, a eleven year old boy, kill a VON EINZBERN COMBAT HOMUNCULUS? They could wade through machine-gun fire like it was a squirt-gun-fight, tank missiles like they were water-balloons, and treat a group of assault vehicles like a litter of naughty puppies.
It was impossible. If he had his weapons, and was able to use reinforcement, he might be able to kill her, but at the time being it was simply out of the question (Shirou told himself as he ignored the bitter feeling at the back of his throat).
It was at that point that Shirou caught a glimpse of silver glistening in the edge of the flowerbed about a meter to the right of the homunculus. Staring at it for a moment, Shirou glanced back and forth between it and the woman several times. She was still gazing senselessly at the ceiling, eyes blinking at random every one to three seconds.
Shirou inhaled deeply to calm himself, before approaching the shining object to confirm his suspicious. Sure enough, it was the Homunculus's halberd, the beautifully crafted weapon laying in the dirt with it's head buried into the earth.
Shirou spared a moment to be glad that the massive weapon hadn't landed on top of him, before crouching down next to it. He took one last glance at the albino woman to confirm that she still hadn't moved, before reaching down the grab the handle of the oversized weapon.
With a heave, the pre-teen wrenched the axe-blade out of the dirt and lifted the halberd up to chest level (using his legs, not his back, of course). It was almost scary how easily he lifted the pole-arm. Even in spite of the weapons incredible weight, which was roughly half of his own, he lifted it with about as much effort as the average boy his age would us to lift a garden hoe.
Looking over the weapon, Shirou saw that, to no surprise, the halberd was undamaged. He took a moment to wipe the dirt off of the blade, admiring it. Even is spite of the unnecessary decoration of the artistically designed blade, it remained an absolutely devastating weapon in the right hands (Mostly because of the enchantments place on it to increase it's durability).
He gently ran the fingernail of his ring-finger over the blade, noting how a deep furrow was left in the keratin despite the negligible amount of pressure he had applied. He was certain that if he had use the slightest bit more force, he would be bleeding.
Between the magically maintained sharpness of the blade, and the shear weight of the blade, he was certain that even an untrained civilian would be able to cut through steel bars as if it was nothing with this axe, no matter how sloppy the swing. In the hands of someone stronger and more experienced, this halberd could cut through even magically reinforced materiel with little resistance.
Shirou was sure that even without reinforcement, he'd be able to appositely pulverize the body-armour he was wearing with a single one handed swing. With a full force two handed swing he'd probably be able to . . .
Shirou's eye's drifted to Homunculus, and felt a pit form in his stomach.
While he had discounted the possibility of killing her less than a full minute ago, thinking more deeply on it, was she really at full strength right now?
The source(or at least a large part) of a combat's Homunculi's incredible physical strength and durability was the layers of ether clumps running over and through their muscular systems.
Ether clumps were, at there core, a clay like liquid that formed when the fifth imaginary factor failed to properly bind itself to an element, and it's primary use was as a mana-conductor. Assuming that the Homunculus's prana-flow was as shot as his own, it was possible that it's durability was no longer at their normally inhuman levels.
Swallowing the thick layer of bitter tasting saliva that was building up in the back of his throat, Shirou slowly walked up beside the woman who had spent the better part of the morning chasing him down.
His eyes moved back and forth from the dull eyed face staring up at him and the halberds gleaming axe blade, feeling a surge of nervous energy shoot through his arms and legs like an electric shock. His jaws clenched together as he swallowed again, throat dry, a thick coating off foul tasting liquid covering his tongue.
For the second time that day Shirou found his heart beating a mile a minute, this time for a competently different reason.
Shirou spent almost half a minute just standing over the Homunculus woman, shivering slightly, before slowly moving the halberd into a resting position over his shoulder similar to that of someone preparing to chop wood.
Tightening his grip on the halberd, he griped it with his left hand near the base, and his right hand as close to the blade as possible. He continued to stare down at the Homunculi's face for several seconds, stomach rolling. He noticed for the first time that their was a thin stream of tears dripping down from the corner of her eye. 'She looks like she's in pain.' he couldn't help but think.
Shirou closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. Holding his breath for a moment, he slowly exhaled. When he opened his eye's there was a hard look to them.
"I can't let you recover." Shirou said out loud, looking the Homunculus right in the eye. She didn't respond.
"If you do, you'll drag me back to the rest of the Von Einzbern, and the we'll be back to wear we started." He continued. "I'm sorry, I know that your just following orders, and that that's basically all you can do, but . . . "
He stopped and breathed in again, clenching his eye shut. "I need to at least try. I need to try . . . I NEED TO TRY!"
With an burning fire of DETERMINATION burning it's way through his chest, Shirou exploded into motion. His muscles uncoiled like over-stressed springs, right hand moving down the handle to meet his left at the base, sending the halberd into a blurring overhead arch. The air seemed to explode around the blade as a sonic boom sounded out, Shirou's eye's practically burning as the halberd raced towards it's owner's exposed neck.
'What am I doing?'
And then, just as fast as it had appeared, the fire in his chest burnt out, and Shirou threw his whole body-weight to the right, the halberd turning so that it slammed into the ground a full six inches above the head of it's initial target, sending a small blast of dirt flying into the air and filling the chamber with a cloud of dust.
The homunculus didn't even seem to notice.
Shirou just starred at the crater for a second, before he slowly began to hyperventilate. With a jerk, he pulled himself away from the halberd as if it had burned him. Falling unto his rear end, he began an almost panicked crab-crawl backwards until he collided back first with the wall of the chamber. Bracing his back against the wall, he took his head in both hands and shivred as tears began to well up in his eye's.
'What am I doing?' He thought to himself, whole body quivering like he was cold. "I can't kill them. I just . . . can't."
He sat their for several minutes, slightly shivering, feeling lightheaded. No matter how hard he tried to fill his lungs, he still felt like he wasn't getting enough air. He wanted to trace his favourite sword and just focus on it's calming aura. He wanted to smell flowers that Conery had planted in their yard. He wanted to lay down on his futon at home. He wanted to hug his dad.
Slowly, Shirou shifted until he was sitting on his knees, doing calming breath exercises in order to slow down his heart rate. Slowly, he wiped away the liquid built up at the sides of his eye's with one of his sleeves, and it hit him just how physically and mentally exhausted he really was.
Getting blasted off a cliff, running from amoral mages and their superhuman maids, sleeping in cold forests(If he got to sleep at all), crossing rocky crag after rocky crag in a mad scramble, fighting through thick undergrowth with hardly a moment to just stop and think, it was all too much for him.
Yes, he had outright ridiculous endurance, especially for a pre-teen, and yes, he was far more capable than any child his age had any right to be, but that didn't mean he was made of iron (no matter what his origin had to say about the matter).
He was struck by the sudden urge to lay down and just fall asleep, but fought it off, dragging himself to his feet.
"I'm still in danger." he reminded himself out loud. "I still need to get out of here."
He looked around the room one last time, eye's focusing in on the crater under and around the homunculus head. Slowly, he walked up to her, grabbing the halberd from were it sat buried next to her head, and quickly retreated to the other side of the room, where he hid it behind a pillar. 'Now, if she comes to her senses, she'll at least have to look to find he weapon . . . not that she really needs one all that badly.'
Shirou looked around for a moment, before his eye's settled on a large branch he had noticed earlier, which had several straight, sturdy looking branches. Breaking off one, he crept up to the Homunculus and begingin to prode her with the sick, gauging for a response. After doing the equivalent of setting of a bomb by her ears, he doubted that he would get a response, but better safe than sorry.
He jabbed her gently in the side with the stick, watching her face for any response. Nothing. Taking a chance, he jabbed her less gently in the cheek. Still nothing. Circling around her, he took a chance and grabbed her by the ankles, dragging her until her head was no longer half inside of an impact crater. To no surprise, there was no response.
Shirou, now more confident, walked up to her head and slowly began to dust the dirt off of her face. When she still didn't respond, the boy huffed nervously, grabbed her by the shoulder's and dragged her the still unresponsive woman to the opposite side of the room from her halberd(getting green and yellow stains from the flower on her dress in the process).
He made sure that she was laying in a more comfortable position than the rag-dolled state she had been in before, arms folded on her stomach. He tried to make her close her eye's, but she just kept opening them and going back to blinking constantly. He continued to try for a moment, before he spotted something silver out of the corner of his eye
Walking over to were the homunculus had been laying a few seconds before, he swept his hands through the crushed flowers until they made contact with something wooden. Grabbing it and pulling it out of the flattened greenery, he found that it was the same mining pick he had projected when her first fell down.
'She fell on top of this? Ouch, that had to hurt.'
Shirou frowned, looking at the pick. Seeing as how his circuits were closed, he hadn't even noticed that it was still projected. It wasn't surprising, his mundane projections could last up to a few days if he was lucky, but he had forgotten all about it in the excitement.
Now that he was focusing on it, he could feel the minute connection between himself and the pick. It pulsed lightly at the back of his mind, a thread connected to his circuits would allow him to dissolve it back into prana, reinforce it from a distance or even . . . when had his circuits calmed down?
Realizing that his prana circuits were no longer feeling out of wack, and hadn't for the past few minutes, Shirou felt a rush of excitement. If they were back to normal, then he could project a rope-arrow and climb out of this hole, no suspicious tunnel necessary . . . but what should he do with the homunculus?
Returning his attention to the woman in the corner, he pursed his lips. Just leaving her here may be advantageous. It was likely that she could just climb out on her own power once she had recovered, but he doubted she had much skill at tracking on her own, and with how rocky the mountain above was around the hole, it was likely he could lose her.
. . . assuming she was going to recover, that is.
"Why are you taking so long to recover?" Shirou muttered to himself, looking down on the Homunculi. "I only took a few minutes to start feeling better, but your not even . . . " he recalled a lesson he had received from Conery a few years prior popped into his head. While not all of the lesson was relevant, one part of it in particular stood out to him.
"We homunculi aren't so much clones as we are magic circuits made to have a human form. We're essentially artificial nature spirit's with a physical body. Who's DNA they're grow from doesn't really matter that much compared to the skill of the designer."
"You were built around your circuits. That's what the bounded field affected, my circuits. That's why your taking it so hard!" he exclaimed excitedly, relieved to have an answer.
Walking under the hole in the roof, Shirou looked up to see the sky above them. If the boundary line that they crossed messed with ones prana circuits, then the homunculus was likely suffering from something akin to a seizure or stroke right now.
If that was the case, then leaving her down here may be a death sentence. I would probably be better for him to tie her up and drag her up to the surface after he climbed up. At least then it was more likely that the Von Einzbern would find and repair her.
'Of course, they may also scrap her, but that's still better than leaving her here to starve, right? It's not like I can carry her around until I find the others and have Moritz fix her. Assuming she even needs to be fixed.'
Shirou spared a moment to consider how ironic it was to be showing someone he was just trying to kill this much concern, then returned his focus to escaping.
First things first, he should tie up the homunculus before doing anything else. Meaning he had to trace one of the nets that Cline had made for him a week before. Nodding to himself, Shirou brought up the mental blueprint of the net, opened one of the prana circuits in his arm, and . . . closed it again as several times the expected prana were generated, startling Shirou.
"What in the world?" Shirou muttered, glaring at his hand in confusion. He opened the another circut in the same arm, only for the same thing to happen.
Each of Shirou's circuits could handle a maximum of ten to fifteen units of prana, but well over two dozen units had been immediately generated when he opened the circuit. That . . . made no sense.
Prana circuits did not get stronger, the amount of power you were born with was what you were stuck with for your whole life (barring getting a crest or transplant from a relative). It was possible for the illusion of development to exist if ones circuits had degraded, and you worked them back up to normal condition, but going beyond the limit of ones circuit quality was . . . well, not impossible, assuming your willing to blow said circuit up in the processes, but stupid and risky.
And yet, as Shirou looked, it seemed that the quality of his circuits had doubled, if not tripled, some time withing the last hour.
The only thing he could liken it to was how a circuit tuner could temporarily improve ones output, but the upper limits to that were a 40 percent power increase, which, while nothing to scoff at, was still no-where near the level of what he was currently experiencing.
'Was this what made my circuits feel so weird earlier? The boundary line made my circuits stronger?' He pondered, before a more concerning thought came up. 'If someone finds about this, I'll be dissected!'
He spent a moment panicking before fighting it down. 'I can worry about that latter, besides, I don't even know if this is permanent or not.'
Calming down, Shirou decided to experiment. Activating one of the circuits in his non-dominant arm(the appendage he could most afford to loose), he waited to see if there were any side effects to the power increase.
After counting to one hundred with no sign of problems from the active circuit, he took a risk and traced one of his favourite kitchen knife. Again, facing no issues, he began to trace more and more complex weapons, until he decided to just give up and make the net to hold the homunculus.
Tracing non-weapon objects was always several times harder than the swords and knives he usually worked with (Conery had been quite surprised when he found out that just sharpening the edge of a shield had cut it's trace-cost down by 70%). Thus, Shirou took several seconds focusing on the design of the net, making sure he remembered all the details possible before he started.
Opening his too-strong circuit, a metal ball roughly the size of a soft-ball appeared in the palm of his left hand with a blue-green blaze of light. Looking it over in satisfaction, he smiled. Pressing a hidden button on the top, Shirou threw the net ball into the air right before it burst into a circular wire net roughly ten feet in diameter.
He estimated that, assuming that Gaia's presence wasn't abnormally powerful, the net would last for three hours before it dematerialized. Plenty of time to work with.
Walking over to the humunculus, he checked for any sighs of awareness, waving his hands over her eyes and snapping his fingers next to her ears. When he got no response, he picked her up, carried her over to the net and proceed to roll her up like a burrito, being sure to tie the edges in knots that would be hard to break from the inside.
He then traced a long, light cable, thin enough that he could tie it to an arrow and shoot it from is bow without issue, but still be able to get a good grip to climb up it. He then tied the cable to the net in such a way that it wouldn't be to difficult to haul the woman out after him.
Nodding in satisfaction, he moved on to the bow and arrow. The arrow was made of solid iron, and had several hooks attached to the side's. He tied the cable to the arrow near the base, before tracing his dark grey, camo-painted, carbon fibre hunting bow, and spent a few seconds reinforcing it.
Nodding in satisfaction with his equipment, Shirou turned his attention to his own body. Going to reinforce his arms, he found to his own concern that they were already reinforced.
" . . . What?" He murmured. "When did that happen?"
Putting down the bow and arrow, Shirou structurally grasped his whole body, and found that he was entirely reinforced, the same way he was when doing combat training.
'Thinking back on it, I broke the sound barrier when I swung the halberd. I've done that plenty of times before, but always while I was reinforced, so I had to have been back when that happened.' he thought, hand on his chin. 'But I don't remember reinforcing myself back then. Did I reinforce myself while I was falling, and it just hasn't worn off yet? If the boundary field we're in degrades Gaia's influence, that explain it, but that doesn't seem to be right.'
Shaking his head, Shirou reached down and retrieved his bow and arrow. "I can worry about this later."
Moving into position beneath the hole, Shirou placed the arrow on the bow, pulled back the string, aimed for the edge of the top of the hole, and released.
The arrow flew straight and true despite the excess weight of the cable and the awkward angle, a testament to the bower of the bow. However, in spite of this, it failed to reach it's destination, bouncing off of an invisible barrier some seven meters from the top.
Shirou watched the arrow fall back to the bottom of the hole with an incredulous expression. Looking between the arrow, and the spot it had hit the barrier, then back to the arrow, then back to the barrier, he suddenly snapped. "What kind of screwed up magus makes a bounded field that let's you in but won't let you out?!"
Shaking his head angrily, he traced one of the mystic code arrows that Cline had made him, one with a anti-barrier and piercing qualities, took aim and fired again.
This time, there was a visible response from the barrier, with the area around were the arrow struck it turning monochrome for a moment, before the arrow fell back to the ground.
Shirou glared at it for a moment, before tracing another mystic code, this one explosive, and having destabilization properties. When this one hit the barrier, the entire area behind the boundary line turned monochrome before it was hidden by the ball of fire, but the arrow still didn't penetrate it.
"Is it to much to ask that one little thing be easy today?" Shirou asked the sky, shoulder's slumped. Receiving no answer from above, he sighed. "Fine."
Deciding to pull out the big guns, he closed his eyes and brought up the blue-print for the most powerful arrow he had access to.
It was a large, bulky arrow, almost half an inch thick and made of solid steel. Several holes covered it, two right behind the head on either side, and three at the very back near the fletching.
Shirou triggered the magecraft infused into the arrow, and air began to be sucked into the holes in the arrow at such a speed that it made all of the flowers in the room sway violently in the vacuum induced winds.
Unlike most of his equipment, this arrow was a gift from Deylin rather than something Cline had made. The dream magus had created the arrow so that it created a pocket in imaginary number space, sucked air into said pocket, and then expelled it at an extremely high speed, essentially making an arrow that behaved more like a rocket or missile.
Notching the arrow almost the instant it reached full capacity, Shirou pointed it up the hole and fired.
It shot off with speed surpassing a tank shell, and slammed into the barrier spilling like a drill. It ground against the boundary line, making no progress, before Shirou triggered the seconds function.
Unleashing all the remaining stored air in a single large blast, the arrow shattered into a thousand tiny shards even as a shock wave flowed out from where it had been only nanoseconds before.
The barrier was undamaged by the powerful explosion . . . the walls of the pit, however, shattered under the force and began to fall down into the chamber bellow.
It was at that point that Shirou realized that setting of explosions inside a cave may not be the best idea.
Dashing over the the Homunculus still bound in the net, he grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder before jumping to the far corner of the room were the tunnel leading out was, as rocks slammed down on the flower patch behind him.
Shirou watched the mayhem with a grimace, flinching and clenching his eyes shut with each resounding "crash!" as several tones of rocks fell down onto the pore unfortunate flower-patch. The cave-in lasted for roughly fifteen seconds, after which Shirou spent another ten staring into the dust cloud that had been stirred up in a slight daze.
Arching his neck, he tried to get a look up the hole to the sky above from his position in the hallway, to no avail. "Well, now what?" He groaned scratching the back of his head. If he couldn't get through the barrier, then his only option was the tunnel, which was more or less unknown territory. But it seemed that the only way he could go was through the archway.
"Ok, what the hell was that?!" a high pitched voice sounded out from through the door, making Shirou tense. "Did someone sneak past me and start making BOMBS?!" the voice continued as Shirou crept up to the corner, and peaked around, already prepared to trace a sword if worst came to worst.
"I mean seriously, what the . . . Oh, hello there!" The owner of the voice exclaimed in a far to cheerful tone upon catching sight of him peaking around the corner. Shirou meanwhile, just starred at the one meter tall talking plant in a combination of nervousness and confusion.
"I'm Flowey, Flowey the flower!"
AN: Ok, that's it, that's all I'm writing for this chapter! I was planing to have this out on Monday, but it sort of ran away with me. On the bright side, it's way longer than my usual chapter's. Not the longest I've ever done, but probably top five.
I'm not necessarily happy with how it turned out, but I feel that I've improved over the last chapter. At least.
A big problem I had writing this, was that I felt that I may be writing Shirou a little more OOC then necessary. Sure, this is an AU, and Shirou's younger here to boot, but Shirou's shown certain consistency's to his personality, even across timelines, so I wanted him to still be as in character as possible. I don't thing I necessarily succeed, but I suppose that I can just claim that his not himself because of all the stress he's under.
I feel I've gotten a better grasp of Shirou's identity over the past three day's, however, so that shouldn't be as much of a problem in the future.
Now this Author's note is dragging a bit long, so I'll end it here for now. Until next time!