Saying 'old' in the context of these trees was like calling a hurricane 'refreshing'. Ancient would have been a better fit, perhaps, but to truly approximate their age, one would have to recourse to terms like 'antediluvian' or 'primeval.' Their branches were so thick, Shirou felt he was walking on footbridges rather than plants, and they had grown so wide that it was nearly impossible to tell where a tree ended and another began as their branches entwined and mixed high over the flooded jungle floor.
Looking down, he could see enormous reptilian monsters that looked like nothing but updated dinosaurs waddling next to brightly-coloured terror birds, venom-spitting scorpions the size of tanks, and snakes so large he could cook an egg while waiting for them to move past any given point. And yet this particular clearing in the flooded jungle was completely devoid of life. Not even nesting birds.
He considered the terrain. He suspected that some of the hills were younger than the trees, as he could almost see the way some seemed to 'flow' around the massive trunks like molasses that had run into an immovable obstacle without even tilting the primeval thing. And yet such massive trees bent and struggled under the massive coils of the brobdingnagian snake that had begun moving towards him, emerging from some cavern whose entrance was hidden by the muddy waters and slithering its way to the tree he was standing on, its muscles rending tree bark the thickness of a bike's tire with accidental ease.
"I'm gonna need a bigger tree." He congratulated himself on the joke. It was either that or soil his pants, so he went with jokes.
The thing opened its mouth and lunged forth, and it felt as if a cargo train had suddenly decided he looked delicious. Thick as the branch was, there was nowhere to dodge to, so he just dropped into the flooded jungle. He could still feel the ancient thing's breath.
Against all logic, it was fast. It lunged after him, ignoring the projections Shirou bombarded it with, its own mana repelling the blades with but scratches to show. It wouldn't be that easy. This thing could have been a dragon and it would have still qualified as 'stupid large'.
'A dragonslayer.' He thought while moving between a tree's towering roots, hoping the snake would at least be slowed down by them. Much to his dismay, it simply ploughed through with nothing but the strength of its muscles to snap the bear-thick roots as if they weren't even there.
In most worlds, he'd think of it as an ultimate trump card, something to do in desperation, knowing it would leave him gasping on both a physical and metaphysical level due to the strain of channelling magical energy beyond his means. In this world, however, it wasn't even overkill.
He didn't need to search for it within his soul, because it was right there at all times. The elegant miracle that the faeries made for his beloved Arturia.
As the sword came to be, it was the snake's turn to pause and consider. Deciding that its prey was still as soft and squishy as before despite the sudden pressure coming from it, it lunged. And a blade of golden light bisected it and the swamp it had ruled over for ages of the world like it had all been but a fadinf dream.
Shirou rolled to his left to dodge the inertia-powered train of dead muscle still coming at him to no avail, and was rammed head-on through the roots behind him and into the hillside. A wet crunch announced the fate of his organs and bones, yet as soon as his body went limp, Avalon kicked in, healing his wounds so fast it was downright agonising as it competed with his own soul in a race between swords and mending flesh. Blades poked out of his torso as if it was the back of a porcupine, and flesh flowed back together against them. His body's flesh was cutting itself against the blades it had projected half a moment ago to keep itself together. The pain was so absurd he died twice, and yet Avalon restarted his heart every time, until he fainted into blissful forgetfulness, the pain symphony that was Shirou's existence sinking into the dark. The jungle was quiet.
As the golden light that heralded the tyrant's death rippled through the flooded jungle, slavering reptilian beasts the size of elephants ran away in terror, then trotted, then walked, and finally collapsed in exhaustion for hours on end. Nothing dared approach the spot where the monster laid dead at the feet of an unconscious young man.
It took a full day for Shirou's body to finish mending, but unfortunately for him, it only took him half as much to wake up.
Trembling with pain, he looked at the thing. It had chased him up and down a tree larger than a cathedral and along the flooded jungle, yet some of it remained submerged underwater, clearly announcing that he hadn't seen the whole of the beast.
'No point letting all that go to waste.' The redheaded young man drew out his skinning knife, one of the first works he was happy about after upgrading his tool set from iron to steel. 'I wonder what everyone is doing at home.' He tried to distract himself from the pain and the enormity of the task at hand, then sighed, and got to work.
It took him so long he wasn't even in pain anymore by the time he'd finished. Instead, he was genuinely confused when he found the key, identical to the one he'd found inside that End Of All Hope-sized spider on his first week in this world. At least that was back in the desert, so with a clear line of sight in all directions, he spotted the thing from a literal mile away, perched atop a mesa and screwing with his sense of distance. It almost looked like a regular spider standing on the end of a finger before he realised what size it was and just nope'd right there and then.
He nuked it with Caladbolg II. Twice.
'...another one. Who's storing legendary weapons in the middle of nowhere? It makes no sense.'(2)
Looking around, he smiled as he spotted the chest half-hidden in the knots of a baobab's trunk. It held a legendary bow called [Eye of the Khan].
'Alright then.'
He felt a bit guilty about it, but as amazing as the legendary bow is, he'd probably never use it. He didn't just favour his black bow, he needed to keep it materialised to help burn off excess magical energy that would otherwise make him sick.(3)
~O~
Luvia walked downstream, following the river while looking around at the mesas, cliffs and enormous rocks that so thoroughly dominated the landscape. Vegetation along the river shore was abundant, true, but it was clearly bound to the immediate vicinity of the river, withering into nothingness as soon as it dared to grow further than the river's water managed to filter into the sand. There were palm trees and cactii, thin trees and plenty of bushes, but nothing she could recognise as fruit hung from any of it.
She chopped at an aloe plant and stored its leaves in her bracelet's wondrously convenient extra-dimensional cache, plucked some yellow lotus, and plucked some fat grubs and bugs to use as bait for her fish traps. She saw some bees and thought about following them to their hive and capturing the queen.
The bracelet's knowledge included plans for a beehive, but she doubted they (Rin and herself) would linger in the area for long enough to make such an endeavor worth pursuing, so she kept walking...
...and promptly realized something. Sun came back, smoked the bees out, stored the honey away, and finally resumed walking away.
'No point on letting it be.' She mused. 'I bet Rin will love it. It will be a surprise.'
She was smiling at the thought of Rin with a silly smile, some honey sticking to the corners of her mouth and fingertips.
'Hm. I wish we had flour of some kind. I will ask ms gori- ...I will ask Rin to experiment with different plants.' She corrected herself.
It looked like this shore of the river was tamer than its opposite, from what little she had seen so far. True, there were a few of those awful brutish things here and there, but they were laughably weak, individually. Hyenas were exceedingly rare, though she did find at least one more. Crocodiles are actually the biggest threat, it seems, and they seemed content to chase her off the immediate vicinity of their nests before turning around and returning to guard them.
She was beginning to think humans were the most dangerous thing in the area when the wind started to pick up.
'Oh no...' She turned around, and sure enough, the storm was coming. 'I am much too far from the cave.'
With no shelter behind her, all she could do was run forth, and hope something would present itself. It was as the storm began catching up to her that she spotted a massive mesa. She ran, and thanked whoever was watching that there was a deep crevice at the feet of the rocks.
Losing no time, she dived in. The storm caught up to her, and began showering her with sand and bits of trash as it raged barely two feet overhead, howling with unnatural malice and rage.
'There is just no way this is a natural storm.' She thought, not for the first time. Covering her lower face to keep sand off her mouth and nose, she could do nothing but wait as the calamity strolled over the area, a body of gale winds, sand and malice walking on legs of lightning.
Once it was through, she emerged and sighed in relief. The storm had pulled water off the river and sprayed it some distance away. She had wondered how plants managed to live beyond the mud, and now it seemed quite obvious.
The storm had never shown up twice on the same day, so she felt safe exploring some more. She didn't want to wander too far, though, so after thinking about it, decided to cross the river and make her way back along the other shore.
Just a few minutes ahead, there was an island in the middle of the river, so she walked as close as she could, and swam to it. There wasn't anything of note other than 'shellbacks' (as the locals called the giant turtles) and their nests, so after nabbing a couple of eggs, she looked for the closest point to the other shore, and swam forth.
There was a moment of fright as she noticed a crocodile she hadn't noticed, slid into the water in front of her. Looking back, she was closer to her objective than she was to the island, and there was no way she could outswim the beast.
She reinforced her everything, took a deep breath, sunk into the water, and reached for the spear in her back. Determined to not tell Rin about it if she managed to live through it.
The river was surprisingly busy, with plenty of fish in all sizes, long wide algae (she made a mental note, these could probably make great ropes), and a massive crocodile moving straight to her at a steady pace, its muscular tail pushing it through the water like a torpedo.
She grabbed the spear as firmly as she could, and the moment the crocodile opened its mouth, jammed it through the beast's palate. Or that was the plan. She opened a deep wound along the crocodile's palate, but didn't pierce through and worse yet, lost her spear when the animal snapped its jaw shut and, thinking it had her, started rolling underwater.
"Hn!" Her hands felt on fire as the spear's shaft turned in her grip.
She let go, and against her every instinct, swam closer to the animal. A gandfr had about as much impact as a 50. cal, but underwater, that amounted to nearly nothing. Her golden hair floated behind her as she reached forth and briefly pressed her hands on the spinning beast, then shot as many curses at literal point black range as she could, causing the animal to buckle and spasm and begin to sink towards the bottom of the river.
Satisfied, she swam after it and recovered her spear, then considered dragging the croc ashore and skinning it, but...
'I should get out of the water. Can always shoot gandfr at them while they're on land.' She just swam up and ahead, reaching the river shore and coming out of it dripping and with sore hands. 'I am definitively not telling ms Tohsaka about this.'
Having heard an effeminate yet bestial chuckle, she turned to the side and saw three spotted hyenas running at her. She easily gandfr them to death, then skinned them and stored their furs away before starting to walk upstream while keeping an eye out an about.
'Much better prey on this side of the river.' She noticed as she saw two magnificent antelopes with long, screw-like horns fighting each other while a small herd of females and calves watched from a safe distance. Furthermore, though by no means lush as it moved away from the river, vegetation continued to exist as far as she could see, and she even spotted huge boulders that her bracelet told her were iron and coal.
She reinforced her stone pick as much as she could, and did her best to get as much iron as she could comfortably carry before continuing on her way.
'Surely, Rin will like having this to play with.' Luvia remembered how Rin had decided to to craft weapons and tools, so she'd be likely have a use for iron. Little by little, Luvia had begun to notice that she enjoyed the brunette's company as a friend, rather than just an academic or romantic rival.
She could tell Rin was bothered by her currently weak state, and the knowledge that it was in coming to her rescue that the girl had gotten herself half killed stung at her conscience every time the brunette whimpered in pain or got angry at how 'useless' she was. So absorbed was she in her thoughts, she almost missed the hyena sneaking towards her from the side. Almost.
Swift skinning later, Luvia was ready to go across the river again, when she noticed another antelope herd. She already had more than enough turtle and rabbit meat dishes to last her a lifetime, so intending to add some variety into their menu, she began stalking the herd... just for the antelopes to spot her almost immediately and scramble away at unlikely speed.
It was almost ridiculous how fast they went, jumping rather than running, speedy and unpredictable targets she didn't even try to gandr down. Besides, eating cursed meat sounded like a surefire way to get sick, anyway. She would just have to find a way to catch them by surprise, but despite current appearances, Luviagelita Edelfelt knew next to nothing about outdoor survival, and that definitively included hunting. It would be weeks before she associated the direction of the wind with the rate of her success in the hunt.
As one of the antelope veered away from the herd and uphill, a tight canyon, Luvia decided she just may have a chance at catching it if she followed after it, when something she saw made her stop, turn around and go home.
~O~
"Ah.." Rin winced as she sat down. She rubbed her thighs, and laid down to rest.
Her wounds had healed without leaving any scars, but she had to spend an entire week immobile before being able to roll around on her own, and another ½ week before she could use the shell on her own, and finally two more days before she could stand. Her healing accelerated henceforth as her body had to mend less and less damage at the same time, and it only took her a single day to go from 'able to stand' to 'walking around.'
All the same, the short walk from the bottom of the cave to its entrance was enough to wear her out. If this had been her native world, any doctor would tell her to take it easy, and that it would take months of rehabilitation before she could restart her lifestyle.
This wasn't her world, and they couldn't afford to wait for months. Sun reinforced her body again, stood up, and climbed up the short ladder leading to the hidden trap door in the floor of Luvia's hut.
It was blocked.
"Luvia, are you there? I can't get out." She called out in an elegantly calm voice. Conversational, even.
As silence was her only answer, she sighed. "Luvia, the door is blocked, I can't get out."
The blonde did tell her she usually kept the trapdoor hidden under a rug with a low table on top of it in the hope it'd be missed by any intruders that happened to break in while she was gone. It still felt wrong to Rin that she was basically living as Luvia's secreted-away prisoner, even if her opinion on the blonde heiress of the Edelfelt family had taken a sharp turn for the better over the last few weeks.
She considered blasting through the trapdoor, rug, table, and whatever else was on the way, but only briefly. It wasn't as if she enjoyed depending on the blonde, but giving Luvia extra work seemed wrong to her, so she slowly climbed back down the ladder and made her way back to their little homely corner in the back of the cave.
Luvia had taught her how to use the bracelet by example, covering the cave's rough stone floor with polished-smooth sandstone flooring, raising a few low walls between their living area and the cavern's uneven walls (they made sure to extract every single last crystal first), then added rugs and some rather beautiful 'aquilonian-style' furniture, including a table, a divan, two surprisingly comfortable heavy chairs with leather seats, three large decorative jars in blue and white, and even a white stone bust of herself half-dressed in a coquettish tunic.
Rin almost made some nouveau riche jokes when she saw that last one, but bit down on her lower lip and endured. She did let out a tiny, barely perceptible snort, though she did at least cover her mouth with a hand first.
And more importantly, their shared sleeping bag had been replaced with a bed. An actual, honest to God double bed with a solid heavy frame and an actual mattress. Well, the mattress was just a 3" tall pile of furs, though, but Rin thought it was heavenly. It was firm without being hard, and incredibly warm to sleep on.
The hemp sheets left a lot to be desired, though, but neither of the girls said anything about it.
She and Luvia had been quite pleased to find that the bracelet was deceptively useful. Not only did it allow them to understand this world's languages and taught them to craft useful mundane things, it even assisted with the crafting of 'simple' Mystic Codes (4), such as the wooden boxes currently stacked in their bedroom and living room, each full of materials Luvia had dumped into them for Rin to play with and for her to not carry around anymore, including literal tons of rock and wood, both raw and processed.
Rin did pause as she went through a flashback involving Zelretch's Treasure Chest, though.
Rin had taken a sample of the spring's water and fed it to one of the rabbits they were keeping(5) (they decided it was obviously easier to keep living rabbits than building a fridge) in a long cage, and when nothing seemed to happen to it after a day, she ventured a sip herself.
Luvia had actually shouted at her over it. Rin felt genuinely awkward upon seeing how worried the blonde was, so she obediently apologised. On the plus side, now they knew they could use the spring both for drinking and bathing. In fact, Rin swallowed her pride and begged the blonde to build her a bath.
As a japanese person, she did not regret it. Not one bit.
They talked about the slow way in which the bracelet shared skills with them, and decided to distribute them as evenly as possible. Luvia would go with construction, decoration, and survival, while Rin milked it on how to make armours, weapons, and survival. That's because 'Survival' was a surprisingly wide category that included alchemy (which they both wanted) as well as farming, cooking, food preservation and a boatload of other specialties, including raising animals for multiple uses.
They took a hard pass on slave-binding and an even harder pass on religion. All but one of the local gods were big into human sacrifice, and all of them were 'dead' in their own timeline anyway.
Rin never thought she'd be grateful to have house chores dumped into her, but it was genuinely nice to know she was contributing (and she probably would have lost her mind if she had to lay down and do nothing for another day.)
She made her way into 'her kitchen,' feeling a bit conflicted about it. On the one hand, having Shirou and Sakura fight for the right to cook for everyone in the household had long since blown away any shades of sexism that may have once tainted her impression of the act, but... being barefoot in the kitchen while someone else had to provide for her was not doing any favours to her self-steem.
'Rin, you are still recovering, it can't be helped. Plus, you know Shirou would be more than happy to take your kitchen from you." She reminded herself. 'Just think of it as a valuable chance to learn to cook and raise your girl power. Yes, just think of Shirou's smile as he tries your home-made meal for the first time...'
That actually worked, though she waved her hand to dismiss the image the moment she noticed Luvia's very faint figure sitting and enjoying her food while sitting next to Shirou's much clearer one.
"Well, she's the one providing the ingredients. Its only fair." She told herself with a smile she didn't know she had.
"What is?" Luvia asked from right behind her.
"Eee~p!" Rin felt as if her heart had just climbed up her throat. She found she had raised her hands in front of her shoulders, and forced them down before turning around to find a mildly amused Luvia.
"A~ah... I was just thinking you should get to taste-test, that's all."
"I will gladly do so." Luvia nodded as she moved to the storage boxes and transferred the results of her gathering into them. "My nanny used to let me lick the spatula whenever we baked. Aah... childhood memories."
"Sorry, I have no idea how to make flour. I am pretty sure we can grind some grains for it, but you do not seem to have found any."
Luvia nodded, and moved to sit into one of the leather chairs.
"What is it?" Asked Rin.
"Just waiting for dinner."
"Cook your own fo-!" Rin stopped herself. "I apologise. Please wait, alright?"
"I did not meant to offend, miss Tohsaka." Luvia apologised while looking away, seeming genuinely uncomfortable. "I can try and prepare something if you are not feeling well en-"
"Let me do it!"
Luvia went quiet and waited.
"I tried to go out and walk, but you blocked the door." Rin prepared the wood and kindling, then light the fire by using a crystal to channel magical energy into sparks.
"Hm." Luvia didn't apologise. She just acknowledged the fact. "We can walk around after dinner if you are feeling up to it, miss Tohsaka."
"Would you please just call me Rin already?" She encouraged the fire, and took a step back so she could reach for one of the simple stone slabs they were using as pans. "We have been much too intimate to keep using surnames, I think."
"I... alright." Luvia swallowed down the 'I didn't want you to feel obliged to it,' as it would probably have made Rin feel obliged to it, considering all the care she had given her over the last two weeks.
Rin walked to the spring, filled the copper pot and took it back to the oven so it'd start heating up on the fire, then went and took a rabbit from the meat dryer to work on the meat. Neither girl flinched at it. She chopped it and threw the meat into the now boiling water, then chopped some vegetables and added them in, followed by some spices and a bit of salt she ground beforehand.
"...ah" Rin planted her feet at shoulder distance and placed her fists on her hips, then straightened her back and took a deep breath.
"You are still healing, so-" Luvia made to get up.
"I got this. Just wait." Rin shook her head softly. "Did you anything interesting happen today?"
"I found a nest of spiders on the north shore."
"You found a bridge?"
"I swam."
"Oh. Still, why were the spiders inte- ...they are monster-size, are they not?"
"A body the size of a german shepherd. The legs add quite a bit, but we could make silk out of their eggs and webs."
Rin turned to look at the blonde. They had both been using itchy hemp clothes and bandages for weeks. It wasn't as bad now that there were barely any bandages on her anymore, but still... silk clothes, sheets, bandages, pillows. She also needed silk thread for many of the armour recipes the bracelet provided.
"Are you arachnophobic?" Luvia asked calmly.
"I am not."
"Me neither."
"How hard are they to spot?" Rin turned briefly to check the stew, stirred it, and resumed looking at Luvia.
"Like a dog in an empty room, but I guess deer eyes can't tell the difference between a bush with and without giant spiders on it."
"They took down a deer." Rin's comment wasn't really a question.
"Swarmed it after it wandered into their canyon."
"Just in case, do not go alone, alright?" Rin looked at Luvia in the eye.
"I will not."
Rin nodded, and turned her attention back into the stew as she swayed gently from side to side, thinking of silk underwear and sheets.
Luvia stood up and went to remove her armour while Rin finished the meal. She came back wearing a long, sleeveless hemp shirt, took a seat and crossed her legs to enjoy the comfort of her and Rin's homely life.
1 – I swear I was tempted to write "he wouldn't use it because his body couldn't provide the magical energy required to sustain the magical energy given the shape of a miracle that the raw magical energy of Saber's sword demanded, but this world's magical energy...etc" just as a nod to why the original visual novel translators came up with mana, od, prana and all those other words.
2 – It really doesn't! But that's how you get legendary weapons in Conan Exiles (except when you learn to craft them yourself). Kill a world boss, get key while processing the body, open the nearby treasure chest, acquire legendary weapon (or shield). Dragon hordes at least have the 'dragons are covetous' excuse, plus things other than a closed chest. Thankfully, I'm using a mod that lets you open the chests before you are max level, as my immersion goes to hell whenever I run into these arbitrary game mechanics. If you kill a barn-sized spider called 'The End Of All Hope' in melee, I'd say you goddamn earned that weapon.
3 – I'm not sure if it makes sense for Shirou to be able to project the black bow or not. I need a fate lore expert's opinion on it. If he can't, I guess he'll start using the [Eye of the Khan] instead.
4 – Magic items.
5 – Homestead has to be my 2nd most favourite mod. It lets you keep animals and plants, amongst other things. Its additions just feel so obvious and common sense-like, in hindsight.
Personal Note: It may seem like Luvia is shooting ahead in exp and levels, but Rin originally had a large headstart, plus you do gain exp when crafting anything in the game, and that includes cooking. I imagine Luvia is speccing for Survival, Encumbrance and Vitality, while Rin is probably going Vitality, Agility and Encumbrance. They can reinforce their bodies much better than Shirou can, so it made sense to me they wouldn't pump points into Strength or Agility. As for Grit? True Grit is for MCs! As forgotten and off-camera as they may be! Hold on Shirou, you'll run into them, eventually. Not any time soon, tho!
Also, I really enjoy hearing other people's thoughts and suggestions, so feel free to message me or leave a review, it really encourages me.