"You damned fool." Zelretch said as he sat down next to Shirou as the dead landscape of the Unlimited Blade Works crumbled around them. His voice wasn't raised. He wasn't angry. He was sympathetic. "She was my student, and I loved her like a granddaughter, but regardless of how we feel, the Association can not be allowed to be destroyed. Its continued existence is too important to maintaining the stability of the timeline."
"I… know." Shirou barely managed to splutter. Some of his diaphragm was missing, along with the rest of his body below the naval and one of his arms. He hadn't given the Wizard Marshall any choice but to fight him with all of his strength, and the old man was worthy of his reputation.
Zelretch blinked and glanced down at Shirou's tear covered face with a quizzical look, before understanding settled on him. "I see. This wasn't about revenge. You simply wanted to die."
"...Yes." Shirou Emiya had wanted to die. He couldn't live without her. He couldn't live with the knowledge that he was the reason she was killed.
When the Association had found out about Shirou's Reality Marble, it had sent them into a frenzy, with Shirou having to run off to avoid capture. It hadn't occurred to him until later that they might go after Rin. That they would assume that his lover would have research notes about him, or that they could lure him in with her.
They had taken her by surprise, and after ransacking her lab, they had torchured her for all the information she was worth. By the time Shirou found her… her mind, body and spirit were broken. There had been nothing he could do to her.
He held her for her final moments as she slipped away.
Rin had been the only thing that had anchered him down. The thing that had made him feel human. The one who could awaken his personal happiness and desire. The one who could make him laugh, scowl and blush.
He had long since achieved revenge on those directly responsible for her death, but it provided no comfort. His own life had never had much value to him, but without Rin, he couldn't even bear to keep on living.
But dying was harder than it sounded, when your body was functionally a sword which could be reforged again and again and your soul was fused together with the scabbard of Excalibur. Even in his current condition, he was still managing to barely hold on to life. An ironic result of a will meant curse.
In an attempt to avoid Shirou ending up the same way as Archer, Rin had made him swore an oath to her on his very soul. He had sworn to never enter a contract with Alaya, and to never simply let himself die without a fight, the way Archer had. He also swore to never use Rule Breaker on himself to escape the oath.
The oath prevented him from taking his own life, or simply allowing others to kill him, and for someone like Shirou Emiya, dying didn't come easy. Even when he placed himself in a situation where the odds were against him, fighting against over a dozen Enforcers, he would still come out on top, as the oath forced him to fight tooth and nail to hold on. This often resulted in him using more power than he would have liked, involving innocent people in his personal struggles, furthering wounding his conscience.
It seemed that with every day that passed more people died. The people who Shirou had held close. The innocents who happened to be nearby. Even the bodies of the people sent to capture or kill Shirou started to weigh on him. He couldn't take it. His heart couldn't handle being the cause of it all.
Zelretch had been his means of finally escaping this pain. He took actions that would appear to threaten the entire timeline by targeting the Clock Tower in its entirety, and let the Wizard Marshall do the rest.
Suicide by cop.
He still wasn't fully dead yet. His body, pushed on by his oath, was doing its best to patch itself up, using tiny blades to seal the damage dealt to his major organs and to keep his spinal cord sending messages to his heart, keeping it beating. But after deploying the Unlimited Blade Works, his body was running on nothing but fumes and the Mana he was drawing on from the air around him in order to replace his Od was killing him as fast as it was patching him up. Everything was a barely stable mess, and at any moment, the flaming house of cards would come tumbling down. His hair was rapidly turning white and his skin darkening from the flow of mana inside his veins.
Even though it felt like his entire body was being ripped apart and stitched back together over and over again, Shirou found himself smiling as the world slowly faded.
"Emiya. I do not enjoy being used." Zelretch growled, pulling up his Jeweled Sword and driving it straight into Shirou's chest. Shirou didn't even have the reflexes needed to gasp at the blow.
He mouthed the words, 'thank you', as his soul finally slipped away. His silver eyes sliding shut.
He was ready for his oblivion.
A light.
There was a light at the end of a long dark tunnel.
How strange? Shirou had been under the impression that souls were broken down and recycled after death, save for those who were copied into the Throne of Heroes, or something similar. So why was it that he was conscious, and could see a light ahead of him.
...Could it be that there really was a Heaven?
No. That couldn't have been it.
Even if there was a Heaven, Shirou was certain he wouldn't have been allowed through the pearly gates, not with how much blood there was on his hands. Perhaps it was the fires of hell that he saw ahead of him.
But if it was Heaven… was there a chance that she would be there? That he could see Rin again. She would be furious with him, but at this point, he would gladly accept the beating across the head she would give him, just so long as he could hold her again once it was over.
Moving around felt awkward, but he shifted himself, squirming towards the light as best he could, trying to reach out for it, until his face pressed through and…
The light would have been blinding, even if Shirou's eyes had been working properly. He couldn't understand anything around him as his senses were assaulted, but he could vaguely feel something like a giant pair of hands, cradling his body and lifting him up. ...Then he was held upside down and received a smack on his butt, causing him to cry out in shock. His own voice was shrill and whiny… almost like a...
"Congratulations, Mrs Leywin. It's a boy."
Shirou's heart sank as he started to figure out what was going on, his vision clearing enough to see a man wrapping him in a piece of cloth before handing him off to a young woman with bright red hair and golden brown eyes… his new mother.
Though she showed all the signs of having been through a horrible ordeal, she smiled down at him with love and affection, her bell-like voice welcoming the reborn Magus to his new life and telling him his new name. "Arthur Leywin."
...Zelretch, you dick.
Shirou wondered if even his new name had been a joke set up by Zelretch, especially as his parents immediately shortened his name from 'Arthur' to just 'Art', which could have been a shortened version of Arturia as well.
The idea that the man hadn't played any part in things and that he had naturally reincarnated into this world didn't even occur to him. Not only because he now shared his name with Saber, but because everyone around him was speaking mostly modern English, with some out of place Japanese words like okaa-san sprinkled in, while living in a medieval western fantasy world.
The place couldn't possibly be more weeaboo.
The odds of that being a coincidence were so astronomically low as to be laughable. Though he supposed this is what he got from trying to involve a pandimensional troll like Zelretch in his suicide. Now, not only was he prevented from taking his own life by the oath he made on his soul, he was in a situation where it would be next to impossible to get someone else to kill him. After all, he was just a couple of months old baby, and with his patch of red hair and bright blue eyes, he was completely adorable. It would be difficult to find someone willing to steal candy from him, let alone kill him.
Plans of escape from his mortal suffering slowly died, and with time away from the manhunts and killing that had come to characterize his old life, he had the chance he needed to come to terms with Rin's death, even if he hadn't completely forgiven himself for his part in it or the deaths of the hundreds of others.
The cursed oath had been meant to insure that he didn't end up beating himself up for all of eternity, so it should have been obvious that she wouldn't have wanted him to beat himself up for the rest of his life. As hard as it was, she would have wanted him to move on, to keep chasing after his beautiful and stupid dream of saving everyone, without having to sacrifice himself in the process.
The fact that his attempts to escape the cycle of deaths that surround him almost perfectly mirrored Archers had been a bitter pill swallow, once it occurred to him.
It was mostly guilt at the worry he was causing his new found parents that convinced Shirou to give life another shot. Strange as he found them, Alice and Reynold weren't bad people. So for them, he decided to try to act like a normal baby… as best he could anyways.
As it turned out, being reverted back to a baby hadn't come without effects on his mind. Mostly it was a loss of motor skills, but he also no longer had much of an attention span as he used to, and his tolerance for boredom was almost completely gone. He honestly couldn't say how much time had passed, but after he started gaining enough coordination to be able to control the flailing of his arms, he had started to crawl about, trying to find things to do.
He hadn't realized that he might be jumping the gun a bit.
"Look at him go, only four months old and already a crawler." Reynold said, seeming close to tears.
This was apparently early for a baby to be learning how to crawl, not that Shirou… or rather, Arthur would have known that. Reynold was the one who was assigned mandatory reading by his wife after he started trying to get Shirou to say 'Dada' within minutes of having been born.
He was a bit of a goof, in the same manner that Taiga had been a goof. Arthur already could tell that he was going to be the one wiping the man's butt in the near future, but he didn't so much mind. For all his flaws, of which there were many, he was at least a good man who cared for his wife and child as best he could, giving up on his life's work as an 'adventurer' so Alice wouldn't have to live with the stress of not knowing if her husband would return home or not.
Still, it felt awkward to think of the man as being his father. Almost like it was a betrayal of Kiritsugu. Kiritsugu might have had a pretty lengthy list of faults, and Shirou hadn't had a chance to get to know everything there was to know about him before he passed on, but he had been the one that Shirou had called father. Plus, Reynold was still so young himself, barely more than twenty by the looks of him. He would have been six or seven years younger than Shirou himself.
It was also just hard to take the guy seriously.
Luckily, Alice had a better head on her shoulders.
"Don't just stand there Rey, help me make him some space and be careful that he doesn't hit his head on the corner of the dresser." Alice ordered the man, stirring him to action.
At first, Shirou thought it was unnecessary, but upon reaching the dresser, and finding that turning was harder than he remembered it being, he suddenly found himself stuck. His attempts to shuffle his limbs around only resulted in him falling over onto his side before flipping over onto his back, his legs and arms uselessly batting at the air above him.
"Well, it was a good first attempt!" Reynold started to laugh at the display and reached down to scoop Shirou up, saving him from his embarrassing position. "I can't wait for you to grow up and we can start your training." The man said, as he bobbed Shirou up and down a little too fast, causing the baby's self-preservation curse to trigger, making him reinforce his neck to make sure it didn't snap.
"Rey, stop it! You're going to hurt him!" Alice shouted at her husband, surprising him, and causing him to spin around.
Shirou let out a cry of pain, as he was a little too slow to fully reinforce his leg before it was slammed into the dresser by his careless father, who really didn't know his strength. Though, because of his reinforcements, rather than his bone shattering from the impact, he was only given a large cut. Still, for his baby mind, it really hurt, and he couldn't stop crying.
He could have probably turned off his pain receptors in the leg, reinforcing the nerves until they were too stiff to transfer the signal, but he thought better of it, as a baby that didn't cry at this would have probably concerned his mother even more.
"Now look what you've done! Quick, give him here!" Alice said, quickly taking Shirou away from the embarrassed Reynold. The reason he was only embarrassed instead of worried was because his wife was there to make anything better. "It's alright baby. Mama will make the owee go away."
Holding Shirou close to her body with one hand, she placed her other over his cut knee. The young woman's hand started to glow a pale white and the pain receded as the cut quickly closed itself. The entire thing didn't even take three seconds.
It hadn't been the first time something like this has happened, but it was still as impressive as ever.
Shirou had learned early on that his parents were both capable of performing a sort of magecraft. His father had once been an 'Adventurer', which, as far as Shirou understood, was a type of hunter who specialized in hunting magical creatures. Shirou wasn't sure if these were just creatures with magical energy or full blow Phantasmal Beasts, but he figured it was probably the former. Though his father's practice exercises in the backyard, where he attempted to show off for the sake of Shirou and his mother, had proven that the man was capable with self reinforcement, with a high degree of skill, he wasn't on the level to hunt true Phantasmal Beasts, and Reynold was supposed to be fairly capable.
From what Shirou had gathered from their trips into town, 'magic' wasn't a secret in this world, though not everyone was able to use it. But, this revolution was less sensational than the exact nature of the magic.
As his mother hugged him close, after having healed his leg, Shirou couldn't help himself, he used his structural analysis on the woman's body, to try to see it once again, to confirm that it was really there. A ball of energy within his mother, dark orange in color and soothing to the touch.
A Magic Core.
Admittedly, it wasn't anywhere near as large or pure of a core as what Saber had, but it was still a Magic Core. Even with the impurities within the core, it was capable of containing more Od than Shirou's Magic Circuits had, even after years of training had brought them up to snuff. And his mother wasn't the only one with it. Reynold had one as well, though his had even more impurities.
This was a world where Humans had the potential to develop Magic Cores. Something that blew the little Magus's mind.
...However, he should have known better than to look long.
"Huh?" Alice said in surprise as she looked down at her baby boy. "I thought I felt. Hm…" Shirou panicked, realizing he had been caught, trying to put a cap on his Magic Circuits to cut off the flow of energy, but as Alice focused her own magical energy back on him and gasped. "Rey, I… I can feel… Little Art has magic energy flowing around in his body!"
"Ha ha, very funny Alice. Even I know that Art isn't a Mage yet." Reynold said, rolling his eyes.
"No I'm serious! While he doesn't have a Mana Core, his Mana Veins and Channels are already moving magic around inside his body!" Alice shouted at the man.
"Wait, are you serious!?" Reynold shouted in shock.
"It isn't much, but it is definitely there." Alice said as she cradled Shirou close to her body.
"Is it even possible for someone to control magic energy without a Mana Core?" Reynold asked, looking slightly worried. "I mean… is it safe?"
"I don't know." Alice said, biting her lip in worry.
Seeing her like that made Shirou feel uncomfortable, so he reached up and started to pat the side of her head with his barely coordinated arms while making baby noises.
Alice blinked in surprise and looked at her child's almost blank, but still concerned expression. Smiling back she started to stroke his head. "Don't worry sweety, everything will be okay."
Shirou made a play of laughing as his mother showered him in affection, before he was eventually returned to his crib so that his mother could go make dinner.
Shirou was actually glad for the nap. A body that was one twelfth the mass of his old body meant one twelfth the size of his circuits. That, along with a hit to their quality from being reborn, meant his reserves had never been lower.
Even performing simple reinforcements on his body was taxing.
So Shirou's eyes were closed and he was nodding off as his parents left the room.
"What do we do about this?" Reynold said nervously after they had left Shirou to his nap. "What if this is a health risk for him?"
"I don't know. I've never heard of anyone having a mana flow without a Mana Core before." Alice said, biting her lip in worry. "Is… is it okay to talk to a doctor about this?"
The question hung in the air between them.
Mages weren't too rare in this world. One in every hundred individuals would eventually awaken to magic. However, Deviants, who's magic strayed from the norm were far more rare, and sometimes gained the eyes of less desirable people.
Reynold would fight tooth and nail for his family, but if a member of high nobility took an interest in their son, they would be in trouble.
"Maybe we could try someone else first. Someone we know we can trust." Reynold mumbled.
"Angela is pretty good with magical theory. Maybe we can have her take a look at Art." Alice suggested nervously.
"Yeah! That's a wonderful idea!" Reynold said, immediately perking up. "It would give us the chance to introduce him to the old gang too."
Alice chuckled at her husband's enthusiasm. Trying to push away her own worries as well.
"Oh my god, he's so precious!" Angela Rose squealed as she dragged Shirou's head into the dark rift between her G-cup breasts. The beautiful young blond with long wavy hair had been a little too excited to meet Rey and Alice's baby boy.
Shirou was reminded of Rin's insistence that large breasts were dangerous, and was starting to agree as his six-month-old brain started to scream out for air.
His survivalist curse kicked in, opening up his circuits in order to use magical energy in place of oxygen as he flailed his tiny limbs around, hoping for rescue. It came just in time, as a man who must have been seven feet tall plucked Shirou from the woman's grasp.
"You'll hurt him if you squeeze him like that." Durden said calmly as he returned the baby to his mother's arms.
'I thought I might have died again there.' Shirou thought to himself with a mental sigh of relief. Rin would have never forgiven him if he had died to boob, no matter what the circumstances were.
"Sorry, he was just so cute." Angela said weakly, seeming dejected.
"I know, just be careful." Alice chuckled a little.
'This isn't a laughing matter mother! She almost strangled me with those things!'
"You called us telling us that you had something really important to talk about. Don't tell me you just wanted to brag about your baby." Adam said, giving Reynold a pointed look as the red haired spearman stood off to the side.
He was almost immediately hit in the back of the head by a bow from the team's leader, Helen, a tall woman with a lean, almost boyish build and long black hair which she had tied up. Though enough of it was left down to just barely hide her slightly pointed ears from the not so observant. Strictly speaking, Elves and Half Elves weren't permitted to become Adventurers by law. But the guild was known to turn a blind eye so long as you lied in the forms and didn't make yourself too obvious.
Helen herself was only an eighth Elf, and was both fortunate and unfortunate in her inheritance. Luckily, while almost all Elves had blond or silver hair, Helen's was pitch black, making it easy for her to blend in.
"Don't listen to him. We're all glad to come around and meet the little guy." The woman said with a charismatic smile. She then turned her head and looked to the door. "Come on Jasmine, the kid isn't going to bite. Come say hello."
A younger girl, only around twelve years old herself, was peeking in from the doorway. Like Helen, Jasmine had long black hair tied up in a ponytail, but with fiery red eyes, but her ears were completely round, like her human blood.
Even after being called, she lingered at the door for a bit before coming closer, her eyes always locked on Shirou's tiny form.
Trauma from being thrown out of the Flamesworth family when they discovered she was a wind mage, instead of a fire mage, had left its scars on her. She was quiet and reserved in the presence of new people, even a baby.
"Well we did want you all to meet little Art, this also was important." Reynold insisted.
"Angela… could you check the mana flow inside of Art for me?" Alice said, once again holding her baby out to the big breasted woman.
Shirou paled and started to struggle slightly, not sure if he was more afraid of being outed or suffocated.
"Alice, he's just a baby, he isn't going to have…" Angela said as she took Shirou from his mother and placed a hand glowing with green magical energy on Shirou's cheek, before her words stopped. "What in the world…"
"What is it, Angela?" Helen asked curiously, seeing the wind conjurer's look of puzzled shock.
"He… He really does have a mana flow." Angela said, surprising the adventuring party.
"Are you telling me that Rey's little squirt is already a mage before he is even one year old? Get out!" Adam said incredulously.
"I'm serious! He has a mana flow!" Angela said, closing her eyes and concentrating more. "He doesn't have any Mana Core yet, but his Mana Veins are still taking in mana." Then her brow creased even more. "Wait… the mana… it isn't even one of the natural elements. He's not just taking in mana, he's refining it."
"Angela, that isn't possible." Durden said with a frown. "Mana can only be refined within a Mana Core. Even I know that."
Angela didn't even hear him. "Those aren't Mana Veins… But they aren't Mana Channels either. There are 27 of them, each holding a small amount of Mana of their own. What are they?"
'Don't go telling all my secrets!' Shirou cried, not that anyone could understand him.
"This is what we called you about." Alice said, worry clear on her face, causing Shirou to stop crying. "We wanted to know what Angela thought about everything… since we can't exactly let people we don't trust fully find out about this."
"Right. If it gets out that the little guy is able to use control mana without a Mana Core, it could be trouble. Any number of big wigs would be more than just interested in finding out how he works." Adam admitted with a nod.
Shirou's ear perked up, and his heart sank.
Memories of what happened to Rin because of Shirou's 'abnormalities' came creeping back into his mind and he shuddered.
"Are you okay, Art?" Alice said, seeing her child's pale face.
She quickly retrieved him from Angela before placing a hand to his cheek. "I guess all this excitement is tiring you out. We'll let you rest for a bit."
Alice carried Shirou back to his crib and set him down in it, tucking him into the blankets before heading back to their guests, leaving Shirou alone… save for Jasmine, who had followed behind Alice like a silent shadow and remained after the mother left the room.
The young girl watched Shirou with cat-like eyes for a while before reaching into the crib and gently brushing his hair. She smiled softly as she watched him, though remained quiet.
Shirou barely noticed her. He was too busy thinking about what he had heard.
Because of him, Alice and Reynold, his mother and father, they would be in danger. All because his magic circuits, making him stick out, because he could channel magic energy without a 'Mana Core'.
Well, if the only reason he stood out was because he didn't have a Mana Core, then he would just have to make one. He had already noticed the small fragments of Spiritrons, the stuff that magic circuits were made of, floating around in his body. All he had to do was gather them up at his solar plexus and compress them.
Flicking on his magic circuits, Shirou quickly started to grab onto the bits of Spiritrons and worked to guide them towards his center.
While they would have eventually naturally converged with time, Shirou was speeding up the process using his own Magic circuits to draw the pieces into place.
What should have taken fifteen years took thirty minutes, and as the final piece slid into place, all of Shirou's new Magic Channels opened up wide for the very first time, and the world exploded… literally.
(((
"So, what do you think?" Alice asked Angela and Helen while the boys were busy goofing around with a barbecue.
"I think that Art will be fine. The situation is… unbelievable, but the mana is being refined within his body, so it isn't something that will become a health concern." Angela said, trying to reassure the mother. "Though, Adam is right. It is best if you keep all of this quiet until the boy's Mana Core awakens and he can pretend to be like everyone else."
"Yeah, I know." Alice said with a sigh. Being a rare healer herself, Alice knew all too well that you have to be careful not to draw the wrong kind of attention. "But that isn't going to be easy. He probably won't awaken as a mage until he's at least fourteen."
"Oh come off it, with how talented you and Rey were, I'm sure he'll get his Mana Core a lot earlier than that." Helen said with a cheerful smile. "In fact, I'd be willing to bet it will happen any moment now."
*BOOM!*
The world shook as Rey and Alice's house suddenly exploded.
Helen reacted quickly, boosting her speed before the shockwave reached them in order to drag Alice and Angela to the ground with her before using her limited control over the wind and earth to form a shield to protect them from the flying bits of wood and dirt.
Over near the fire pit, the boys were doing something much the same, only tanking quite a bit of damage in the process.
"You two alright?" Helen asked Alice and Angela as they recovered from the shock.
"I'm al…" Angela started, but was cut off by Alice.
"Art! Jasmine!" Alice shrieked scrambling to move towards the cloud of dust where her house used to be. "They were still in there! They were still in the house!"
Horror welled up inside of everyone as they started to scramble towards the wreckage, but as they came closer they saw the silhouette of Jasmine coming towards them through the smoke, something clutched in her hands… something glowing.
The dust was slowly being blown away to reveal Jasmine standing with little Art in her arms, looking only a little worse for wear from being so close to the center of the disturbance. Mana was blowing all around Art's little body, with several blue lines glowing on his skin.
"I don't believe it." Adam said as Reynold fell to his knees and started to laugh, tears flowing from his eyes. "He isn't even a year old yet."
As impossible as it seemed, the six month old Art had just undergone his awakening.
Not going to lie, I've become addicted to playing 'Among Us' and have basically stopped writing because of it.
How addicted?
I've found myself using the term 'gaslighting' in conversation with my coworkers when trying to explain to them why the statistical models the cost analysis people are trying to feed us are a load of shit.
I get really nervous when my boss asks about what tasks I've completed this week, trying to remember whether or not clocking in was made a common task again and if I should claim to have done it even if I forgot to, just so I won't be sussed for no reason.
And I want to vote out Dr. ***... but I always wanted to vote her out, so that isn't any different.
I swear, she's an importer! She claims she is native Chinese but she can't read Chinese! And what kind of Geneticist tries to insist on face-to-face meeting during a pandemic!? Get her out of here before she ruins us all!