"Serviceman Emiya, Serviceman Cassani, Servicewoman Shepard. You will be team Charlie-4." The Lieutenant Commander before them said, not even bothering to look up from his datapad as they walked up to him. "You will be heading for shuttle 14, over there. Your liftoff is in fifteen minutes. On-site, you will receive your primary objective and on the way there, you may attempt to fulfill the secondary objectives en route as you wish."

"Will they affect our score, sir?" Franco asked, hesitating for a moment as they had never before had to directly deal with an officer.

But the Lieutenant Commander did not seem to care one whit about the recruit's hesitation. He looked up, his dark complexion that hinted at various ethnicities quite eye-catching. He had dark eyes, dark short hair, and high cheekbones that made him seem more than a slight bit intimidating.

"Obviously," he grunted. "Besides that, you are judged as a team based on how many objectives you are able to accomplish. That is, if you are able to complete any at all. The main objective is imperative; the secondary objectives will not be counted towards your final score if it has not been completed. If one of you is taken out, that will bring penalties to the rest of the team's score, but mostly to that person who got hit. But points can easily overturn that," he droned on, before looking back down to his datapad.

"So... If we all get back in one piece but completed no objectives, we will all be penalized? Compared to if only one of us makes it back after we accomplish several objectives, do we get a much better rating that way? Even the ones who have been... taken out?" Shepard asked.

"Yes. That's about right. A lot of things go into the final tally, but mostly you will be observed in how you handle yourselves in the field. Just remember that you aren't the only ones out there," he answered, nodding towards the valley behind him. "This is a field exercise with participants from several fleets along with your batch. You'll be moving through several other active operation zones."

They were standing on a mountain-top, below them they could see a city that had been half overtaken by a jungle that had encroached on it slowly over the years. A ghost city, once home to tens of thousands, now completely abandoned and left for nature to reconquer.

Gunshots and engines of vehicles in the distance could be heard, echoing over the rooftops and around the alleyways and street corners of the crumbling buildings.

"Your weapons will be set to minimum power like all the guns in use within the city, your kinetic barriers will also be set to record if you have been shot by someone else. The sensor will recognize the shot even as the round will bounce off harmlessly, and the internal servos of your armor will lock up to simulate damage. Your heads-up display will show a relative health which reflects how damaging a shot would usually be," he continued, droning on as he did. This must have been his dozenth team to debrief by now. "Thus, taking off your armor or firing upon someone out of armor is prohibited. There should not be anyone wandering around here, but you can never be too careful. We will be monitoring your progress and internal camera-feed, but if something does happen, contact us with your omnitools before something actually goes wrong."

"Yes, sir," they answered.

"Are they our allies, or will they be shooting at us down there too, sir?" Franco asked, nodding toward the valley's side, from where a large artillery-like gun was peppering one of the buildings. No matter what they might have been told about safety, it was hard to believe they would come out unharmed from that big of a mass accelerator.

The NCO looked up from his datapad, regarding the recruit with disinterest.

"I could not say. It will depend on your mission and luck, I suppose. Worst case scenario? You'll be the main objective of some real tough guys. Lucky them, then," he said, with a malicious grin.

"So worst-case scenario is that we run into some N7's," Emiya noted with dry humor, making Franco and Shepard blink at that thought.

"H-hey, that can't be right, can it? We can't handle something like that?"

The officer smirked at that, saying nothing.

Franco laughed nervously, deciding that perhaps he didn't want to know any more.

"Right... we'll just have to find out on our own, huh." Shepard shrugged, though a small smile seemed to be gracing her lips. It was complete chaos down there, from what she could see. The terrain could change entirely within a single city block, as trees and undergrowth had taken over wherever they could, causing buildings to collapse and tunnels to collapse.

At places, trees could be seen growing out of collapsed buildings even.

This should be fun, she thought.

"If the power of our pistols is scaled down, do we have effectively larger ammunition capacities?" Emiya asked, patting at his pistol. "The gun should overheat less per shot right now, if I understood you correctly."

The chief blinked, looking up and regarding Emiya with some interest.

"No, they put on a shot-cap and simulate overheating with the software. Same thing with your Onyx armor. One shot in simulation represents one shot in reality. Basic equipment as usually used, they just handle all of the simulations with alternate software settings."

They all blinked at the implication.

"We haven't installed anything like that, though?" Franco muttered, drawing his own pistol and regarding it curiously.

"It's centrally handled - a whole host of virtual intelligence make sure everyone's guns and suits are set to simulation while keeping track of you. It's safe enough, we've been doing this for years without problems. You can't even be down there with an active eezo core without triggering a flag somewhere in the system that checks that you aren't using something dangerous," he reassured her.

"Doesn't that mean that anyone could theoretically hack a gun?" Emiya asked, seeking confirmation.

In his time cell phones had been banned by many active forces for how easy they were to subvert. But then what of their guns and hardsuits, all powered by much more powerful and interconnected computers?

The chief grinned, nodding at Emiya. "Hope you don't run into any combat engineers down there. Suuure would suck, that. Hehehehe..."

"Aww... Fuck this shit, man..." Franco cursed under his breath as he clipped back on his pistol, only audible to Emiya who glanced at him at that.

"Isn't this a considerable vulnerability? Why not lock down the gear from such attacks?" Emiya asked, frowning.

It seemed like a massive weakness to him, and none of the literature he had access to properly addressed how it was handled. Just that it was done centrally and higher up, just as their omnitools were. But an omnitool was like a cellphone in his time; a useful tool, sure. But one they could live without.

Not like the pistols and hardsuit, which were absolutely vital parts of their kit in the field.

"Sure, but then you'd lose all your smart functionalities; the HUD data from your gun and your smart-lock might turn off since it no longer recognizes you as the owner of the gun. No aim assist, no running diagnostics, no predictive algorithms, no communication masking or clearing... Running completely analog's been proven to just not be worth it, so we stick with it despite the risks. Besides, the Alliance takes its cyberdefenses very seriously. This only works because they've literally got the backdoor key to all your gear," he explained animatedly, for once seemingly actually interested in the three standing before him. "Anyone looking to do that has to contend with the Alliance itself. They're not just facing you, they're facing whatever mainframe supercomputers we've got nearby, too."

Perhaps it was unusual for new grunts to be asking questions like these. Shepard and Franco certainly didn't seem to have any clue what they were talking about.

"That makes sense, I suppose," Emiya said, nodding at the commander.

"Heh, you've got a good head on your shoulders. Thinking about becoming a combat engineer?" He grinned, whipping out his omnitool and bringing out a floating, glowing sphere from it. "The Alliance could always use more drone controllers and tech saboteurs. It's a part of our general doctrine after all."

Emiya considered that, before shrugging.

The Lieutenant Commander turned to the two others.

"Nah, I'm good at running and gunning and not much else. Can't wrap my head around any of that," Shepard said vaguely, frowning as she crossed her arms.

Franco seemed pensive, though.

"Well, just keep your mind open to it. Your flight just arrived over there." The chief nodded at the shuttle with a grin and a thumbs-up, much warmer in demeanor now than he had been at the start.

"I'll think about it," Emiya said noncommittally. "But—Is this really all? I would expect there to be more rules, beyond just what you've told us."

The Systems Alliance Navy's doctrine was to treat its cogs like idiots, after all. Everything was outlined and everything was in writing. No room for interpretation, no space for fucking up.

"Don't worry about it. First-timers don't need to know anything; you'll do fine regardless. Or rather, there ain't much room for you to fuck up. You should get running along now, your shuttle's waiting." He paused for just a moment. "And... good luck out there."

Emiya nodded, before turning to leave for the shuttle as he thought about those words.

It seems they don't expect us to be able to do much at all. Is it a deliberate shock they're hoping to induce, to see how the recruits handle a chaotic battlefield and being left to their own devices; a kind of stress test? Emiya considered that before a small smirk threatened to show on his face. But doesn't that conversely mean that we are allowed to do just about anything since they haven't forbidden it for once?

With those thoughts, Emiya boarded the shuttle.

The NCO huffed, looking down at his datapad with interest after following the shuttle taking off and flying into the city.

"Emiya, was it? Should be an interesting fellow." He considered for a moment, before deciding that he 'might as well', as he brought out his omnitool. "No one will mind if I just plug into the network and watch their progress, right?"

;

"Touchdown in fifteen seconds!" the comm sounded inside their helmets and they shouted back their acknowledgment.

The three all wore the same gear, the equipment they had been drilled in the use for the past few months; Aldrin Labs Onyx light armor and a Hahne-Kedar Kessler pistol. All in all, as Emiya saw it, a considerably anemic load out for what was ostensibly an active warzone.

Hopefully, their mission and the resistance they would encounter would scale to match that.

A notation regarding a new message to his omnitool blipped in Emiya's HUD.

"Team-leader Emiya, have you received your mission parameters?" The comms asked and he replied quickly.

"Yes, sir," Emiya answered, slightly annoyed that due to his generally high scores he had been assigned as team leader. He didn't really need to perform well here, but now that he was here he felt a slight obligation to not simply coast along. And a part of him, which he did not quite want to admit to, felt his old heart beginning to beat a bit more rapidly at the thought of action again.

Especially since this was all just playing around, not real combat.

"Good, then team Charlie-4 is cleared to go!"

"Aye aye, Sir!" They all answered as the shuttle touched down. Franco took point, his pistol sweeping their surroundings. Emiya and Shepard followed, jumping to touch down on the roof.

As soon as everyone was on the ground, the shuttle took off and flew away.

They stood on a flat rooftop. Around the edge ran a rusted chain-link fence, bent and torn in places. Behind them stood a rotten and broken water tank and what looked like an old utility shed or transformer box. To the right lay a closed hatch, presumably the best way down from the rooftop. All around them, houses of similar height and proportions could be seen. They weren't quite in the center of the city, but they were near the middle of the eastern quadrant.

Emiya motioned for them to gather up around him.

"What's the mission?" Franco asked.

"Not yet; the shuttle would have been noticed landing and the map doesn't ping any allied forces nearby. We need to move first," Emiya answered.

Shepard blinked, taking another look around them and peering for any hidden enemies with a squint. "Right, let's go."

They opened up the hatch to get to the top floor, making their way down all the way to the third floor of the building at a relatively brisk pace, until they found the stairway collapsed from that point down.

"Can we jump down?" Shepard asked, peering down the edge while feeling tempted to kick a loose pebble over. She was fairly certain that a drop this high wouldn't be pleasant, hoping that they would not have to try it out.

"Let's not," Emiya replied.

Too much could go wrong; even assuming that it was safe from booby traps or ambushes, jumping down would be too dangerous. In the worst-case scenario, it could break the floor they landed on and even cause the rest of the building to collapse down on them.

"There's another stairwell at the other end of the building. Let's go."

"Gotcha." Shepard nodded, turning to slowly lead the way with her gun held in her hands.

Many of the windows had been broken already, but though some were still in one piece if dirtied to the point of opaqueness by the passage of time, giving them an occasional view of the outside street and adjacent houses.

They saw no one outside, hearing only the distant sounds of turmoil reverberating in off-beat staccato through the empty buildings around them. The 'frontline' of the battle raging in the distance, somewhere to their east. At least two klicks from their position.

There was another sound that did not belong, almost lost within that far-off cacophony. The discordant noise, came from below them. So quiet that it could not have been more than the scraping of a chair against the floor, or a rusty door hinge creaking. But he had definitely heard it.

Emiya halted, putting his hand on Shepard's shoulder. As the team leader, he was walking in the middle while she took point. She did not turn around to look at him, merely kneeling down against the wall as she kept her eyes open and watching their front.

Behind them, Cassani had been handling the rear and he came to a halt next to them.

"What's up?" he whispered, glancing at Emiya while lowering his pistol.

"...Someone's below us," he stated quietly, furrowing his brows as he tried to picture the layout of the building. Based on the floors they had already walked down, he could make a fairly accurate guess. He could also use Structural Analysis to get the entire building's blueprint into his head, but...

It could have been anything, really.

The combined radar readouts of their suits and omnitools weren't picking up on anything. But he knew what he had heard.

In his experience houses were the worst kinds of place to be when you were engaged in open warfare, though. Urban combat was the thing of horror stories, of ludicrous mortality rates, and of battles that bogged down for weeks and months on end as no one could gain a decisive advantage.

Urban combat was the meat grinder where armies went to die.

Inside of any given house, there existed over a dozen places one could lay in wait for someone, turning each room into a potential death trap. Behind every door, below every window, under every piece of furniture could lay a gun in wait or bomb rigged to blow, just waiting for the opportunity to ruin your day. Every crook, cranny, and corner could be an ambush.

In pursuing his dream of becoming a hero of justice, Emiya had naturally dealt with such circumstances countless times and he had methods for safely clearing a house of any mundane hostiles.

But those methods were not strictly usable right now. This was not a fight for their lives, this was a heavily monitored and recorded military exercise. He couldn't simply whip out his magic whenever he needed a quick solution, lest he reveal his supernatural abilities. And this wasn't merely a matter of maintaining the secrecy of magecraft as had been necessary during his life; he had been specifically told to avoid making waves by Archimedes, which meant that revealing the existence of magic to the Alliance military was about as catastrophic a failure as he could imagine.

Besides, it felt like cheating. Not the exam per se, but rather himself. He had gotten this far without pulling those stops - why break away from that now?

Still, that meant he had to rely on what he had been taught in the months prior for the most part. Which meant going through the house room by room, door by door, corner by corner the difficult, slow way. He could not hesitate either. If someone was below them, they were either setting up an ambush or moving up to intercept them already.

"Change of plans - we have company," Emiya said. "Shepard, take us to the west end. We'll jump onto the nearby rooftop through the window. And once we're on the ground, we run like hell."

He had seen the building next to this one as they had landed. At this height the adjacent roof was only a few meters below them, thus it should be entirely feasible for them to jump down. Hopefully, it would allow them to avoid the ambush he suspected was being set on the floor below entirely.

Unless the shuttle's flight plan had been known or this was someone's base of operations already before they landed, he had to assume that whoever it was down there below them had rushed over to set it up in the scant few minutes since their landing.

That implied a very skilled and formidable team; someone they did not want to tangle with. Not with their current resources at hand.

"...Seriously? You just said jumping down was bad," Shepard asked, turning back to look at him with wide eyes.

"It was. Now it's better."

She blinked at him and then shrugged. He was the team leader after all.

"Alright." She got back up as Emiya raised his hand from her shoulder.

They turned around, moving at a much quicker pace as they backtracked through the hallway they had just cleared.

Opening a door as quietly as they could, they entered some sort of office space at the west end. An old desk and a broken office chair lay on the floor, with the walls long since stained brown and black by the weather, the windows shattered and spread all over.

They closed the door and then lifted an old desk over to barricade it while Emiya scanned the streets and buildings around them. He stayed low, keeping back from the window to remain shadowed, as breaking the straight lines something like a window frame created with your silhouette was one of the best ways of being spotted from a distance. He saw nothing moving, which was a good sign.

Turning around, he froze as he heard another sound, moving closer to them, just as Shepard and Franco were done with their make-shift barricade.

"Damn, they're—" Emiya tried to speak, but by then it was already too late.

A shot rang out, punching a small hole clean through the wall at waist-level. It hit none of them but surprised the other two so much that they flinched at the sound and flying debris. Leaving a fist-sized hole through the wall, Emiya could see the stairway through it.

—fast! Emiya finished in his head, his eyes widening as time began to slow down in his perception. They already realized we wouldn't be coming down? They have some kind of superior tracking equipment? We can't face them head-on!

"—WE NEED TO GO!" Emiya shouted, changing what he had been about to say as he turned around and vaulted out of the window. Holding onto the edge, he let loose and fell down onto the roof one floor below him.

It was actually a fair bit further down than he had thought, but it was still a doable jump. Especially as they would have to face an attack from the rear if they stayed.

The impact was sharp and the corrugated metal made an awful noise, but he rolled with the landing and managed to keep himself unhurt. Looking up, he spotted Shepard and Cassani on the ledge and about to jump down—though, the latter seemed much less willing to follow.

"Come on! Jump!" Emiya shouted, turning around and jumping down from the roof onto the pavement. They needed to be gone before whoever that was on their tail actually got a bead on them.

The two came down, landing more or less intact though far less gracefully than he had. A second later a bright light and a deep sound exploded inside the room they had been in. They shot through the wall to make a hole for a flashbang grenade, Emiya thought clinically, approving of the tactic. If the combination had been done faster, it would have absolutely overwhelmed his team. Not dealing with experts—they're still rough around the edges.

Shepard rolled and grabbed the edge of the roof she had landed on, making her way down to the street as Cassani looked up, his eyes wide as his eyes went back to the room he had just vacated.

"What the—"

"No time! Let's go!" Shepard shouted at him and it only took Franco a moment to realize that she was right.

As he too jumped down with a heavy 'oomph' at the impact, the sound of the door and table breaking in the room they had been in chasing them. Someone had rushed inside, and—

"Clear!"

"Clear!"

"Clear!"

—three almost simultaneous shouts could be heard a second later. They're trained to breach: dividing the room into parts and being able to count on your team enough to not react to anything outside of your slice-of-the-pie requires considerable training and trust.

Nothing they covered in basic training.

"Cross the street, around the corner!" Emiya shouted, kicking off at his top speed.

Behind him, a second later Shepard and Cassani followed.

"They're outside!" They heard in the distance over their own rough breathing, sprinting at breakneck pace for cover. If they remained out in the open streets, their attackers would have the cover and height advantage, almost like a shooting gallery.

Halfway to the other side, Emiya felt a cold chill run down the back of his neck. A danger sense of a kind - the ability to feel bloodlust and killing intent had saved his life on many an occasion during his life, and even the ability to sense someone's attention on him had been a saving grace many a time.

He jumped to the side the instant he felt the danger, moments before he had even heard the sound.

A gunshot roared in his ears from behind.

But the limitations of this body, unenhanced and un-Reinforced—merely human—meant that it was too little too late. Human beings could not dodge bullets after they were fired, that much was obvious. Someone up on the second floor had gotten their sights on him and he had only been able to react the moment just before the trigger had been pulled thanks to their spiking intent.

Emiya could only mitigate it, trading a direct hit for a glancing one.

He stumbled, feeling something but not quite what he had expected, he recovered and kept going. The realization that there was no pain and that he hadn't been knocked over by the shot, even if there was some stiffness, came another second later. He jumped and rolled for cover behind the corner of a building, as the gunshots continued echoing.

No, not cover. Their guns, even at the dialed-down state could still easily chip away at the walls and windows, a piece of glass shattered from a ricochetting piece. It was merely concealment, something which prevented the shooter from getting an accurate shot on him.

Emiya raised his pistol, reaching around the corner and blind firing at the windows to give covering fire for the two others, still lagging behind. Shepard and Cassani came a second later as another duo of shots ricocheted off the ground, cracking pavement and kicking up a small cloud of dust.

Neither seemed wounded.

Shepard had seen him get and begun taking evasive action, running in an unpredictable manner to avoid getting hit and Cassani following her had followed suit as well as he could. It had been enough to prevent the shooter from getting an accurate bead on either of them. That and the covering fire from his blind-fired pistol had seemed to work as a distraction, too.

Even around concealment and without direct line of sight, he could hit a man-sized target at least a few times.

Stilling the moment, he analyzed his own 'wounds'.

A single-shot weapon that hits several times with a wide spread; a shotgun, then? Emiya noted distantly as he recovered his breathing, eyeing the HUD readout for his simulated damage. Makes sense; suitable for breaching action, but it appears to scatter heavily even at medium-range.

"Are you okay?" Shepard asked, running up to him and patting at his body. "Did you get hit?"

"Yeah," Emiya noted and turned around, nodding with his head to motion that they should keep going. "The HUD is telling me it was a glancing blow; wouldn't have punched through the armor, but it would have bruised my hip, so the servos are locking down to simulate a blunt-force trauma."

"You okay?" Shepard asked, licking her lips as she ran alongside him.

"It's fine. You guys? Did either of you get hit?"

They shook their heads to indicate a negative.

Emiya nodded. "Good. Shepard: we need to find a place to hide - thick walls, they have better sensors than we do."

"Okay, leave it to me. I can find a hundred places to hide in a city like this!" Shepard nodded with a determined look in her eyes as she took point again.

They ran for two minutes, turning corners and cutting through buildings and yards wherever possible.

Ideally in urban warfare, you never wanted to be on the streets; the shooting galleries where they would have no idea where they were being fired upon from. They had been taught two methods of moving through cities. Either you set up two or more teams and moved in rotation, so while one team was advancing the other was in cover and kept an eye out to return fire on any attackers until the moving team found a good place to hunker down, at which point the roles switched. Like your two feet, left-right-left-right... Alternatively, you tried to move inside houses and other abandoned structures that broke line-of-sight as much as possible, breaking walls whenever possible to stay out of the open while slowly digging forward.

Regardless, it was slow going if you wanted to be safe.

But they didn't have time right now for either method and after another minute of desperate running, Shepard banked and chose a large house. The lowest floor, where she entered, looked like it had been a cafe once, with large windows and plenty of space in front of a sturdy counter. She vaulted over it, disappearing behind the stained wood and shattered glass.

Emiya and Cassani followed after her, jumping for cover, the latter stumbling at the sudden drop behind the counter, where it fell into a lowered recess of some kind, leaving them below ground. Like some kind of half-cellar level, where your standing head height would be just enough to see the pavement outside.

They all leaned back against the darkened and weather-beaten wood as flakes of old lacquer came off at the contact, taking deep breaths to recover from their sprinting, keeping an eye on their radars. The sun had been shining all day on the wooden counters and floor, making it sticky to the touch of their hardsuits as they tried not to fidget.

Thirty seconds later, running footsteps could be heard.

They held their breath, lying as low and still as possible.

Their pursuers passed by well over fifty meters away, judging from the sounds of their shouting. Shepard reached up to pull herself to peer over the counter for a look, but Emiya grabbed her arm and shook his head at her when she looked at him. He raised a finger to his mouth and then lowered his hand down, signaling her to be quiet and to stay down. He didn't know what their sensors worked on, so even if this cover broke their radar, that didn't necessarily it would break their pursuers'.

Better to wait and listen, than try their luck just yet.

Emiya raised a hand, signaling them both to keep quiet and stay on guard for a moment. As they nodded back, he opened his omnitool and began to look into all the information he had received now that he had a moment to spare.

A map of the town, the main objective, and a list of secondary objectives. He raised his eyebrow as he looked at the latter list. It was several pages long and constantly changing. One mission would disappear, another would appear, in one the parameters would change abruptly as if it was moving fast.

The overseers who are monitoring all of us must be updating and controlling them in real-time.

He sighed as he read their main objective: arrive at a rendezvous location marked on the map for extraction at 19:45 this evening. They had to survive an entire day in this chaotic battlefield? He almost laughed at that. For a team of fresh recruits, they certainly weren't being handled with kiddie gloves; no, they had been thrown straight into the mix.

Add to that the fact that they were completely alone, specifying to treat all other active forces in the city as hostiles.

It was certainly doable, but given that they knew nothing about what was going on around them, and that they had to cross the city to get there, it seemed more than a little bit too challenging for a team of fresh recruits. Not only were they lacking in training—well, the other two more so than him, but he was an outlier here—but also in equipment and weapons. That much had been obvious from the sole encounter they had had so far. Better guns, specialized grenades, sensory equipment, and who knew what else?

He glanced at the side missions before dismissing them as worthless distractions.

The freedom they offered the recruits here was to observe how they behaved once alone and under pressure in a boundless environment. To see what they were really made out of, he guessed. Who would get cocky, who would accurately read their situation, and who would go after the bonus objectives anyway...

As they had been told, the main objective was the only one that really mattered. And he had no interest in showing off.

So, just the safest route through the city...

Wasn't that what they had trained for all month? Hell, Shepard was practically a prodigy at that stuff.

Emiya closed his eyes and listened. Even without using Reinforcement or other kinds of mysteries, it was possible to hear surprisingly accurately what was going on all around you if you simply know how to listen. It wasn't necessary to recognize each sound, merely to recognize their bearing and distance. Then, if anything stood out, you could start trying to classify it.

Mentally filtering out the far-off firefights and the echoing clashes, he exhaled slowly. He couldn't hear anyone nearby. Which meant that at least it should be safe to talk.

"Right. Our main objective is simply to survive until the evening and to make it to a rendezvous location across town," Emiya whispered.

Shepard seemed surprised while Cassani seemed exasperated.

"Oh yeah, shouldn't be a problem so long as we don't run into anyone. Oh wait, five minutes in and we almost ran into a death squad! Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Shepard glanced at the cursing man, hitting him lightly with the back of her hand to keep him quiet. "Don't worry, we're good as long as it's just a couple of guys looking for us. I can find a dozen hiding places along the way, no problem."

"Well, there's that at least," Cassani replied with a defeated shrug. "Until they start throwing more grenades at us again. We haven't even gotten to grenades yet. What the fuck is up with that?"

She shrugged, though there was an annoyed set to her brows. She wanted grenades, too, Emiya reckoned.

"We'll be better off getting out of the city and into the jungle. We'll take the long way and circle around all the heavy fighting. Better to stay away from all that, since we would just get shredded. Other squads will be the least of our worries, if we walk onto the wrong street," Emiya said, shaking his head.

"What do you mean?" Shepard asked, furrowing her brows.

She was used to cities, having lived all her life in them, so the thought of abandoning its familiarity for the jungle left her more than a little uneasy. Did he even know how to navigate through a forest, she wondered silently.

But at the same time, she trusted his judgment.

"Can you hear... that?" he asked, raising a finger as he spoke the last word. A deeper sound rang through the air, much lower in pitch and louder than other ambient gunfire. "That's not just any small arms mass accelerator. That's the artillery Cassani pointed out earlier."

"Huh?" Cassani blinked. "Shit, I completely forgot about that thing."

Emiya nodded in understanding. You started to forget about things you really shouldn't when you were put under too much pressure too quickly, your mind barely keeping up and unable to properly process it all.

"We need to stay away from that thing at the very least, but we have no way of knowing where it's set up. So better to get out of the city and into the forest. They say that infantry is the queen of the battlefield, but artillery is the king."

"Ah." Shepard nodded, understanding Emiya's point. She looked at Cassani who didn't seem to understand, tilting her head. "What does the king do to the queen?"

"...That's a really good point," Cassani said as he nodded nervously. He looked at Emiya, gesturing with one hand. "He makes a good point. Big guns are bad, yeah? I really don't think our hardsuits rated for that stuff."

Shepard frowned still at the thought of leaving the streets, considering it for a moment longer before she nodded.

"You have a plan?"

Emiya shrugged. "Not so much a plan as a... 'let's see what happens and hope no one shoots us'."

"I'd like the sound of that." Cassani nodded, still babbling.

Probably the first time he's been shot at. He's forgotten it's just an exercise already.

Shepard huffed but did not protest. Emiya took a deep breath, then stood up and began to peek out in the street. Scanning left and right, he looked for anything unusual outside on the streets or in the buildings.

He crouched back down again, looking at Shepard, "Looks clear. Take us east and we'll get into the forest there. After that, I'll take point."

Shepard nodded and rose up, pistol held at the ready as she looked around a second time. Not that she didn't trust Emiya, but the law on the street was to always verify yourself too.

"Alright, follow me."

;

They continued quietly through the abandoned city.

To Shepard and Cassani the broken down and overgrown ruins must have seemed like a visage from a distant world out in the stars, but to Emiya it was far more familiar than the barracks and Navy headquarters had been. Both the architecture—closer to a more familiar time—and the forms of decay were something he was accustomed to. The cracked asphalt and shattered blocks of concrete lying around. The potholes and bullet marks dotting the scenery. The ad-hoc barricades and roadblocks. And on top of that, the havoc wrought by the sheer passage of time.

The strange tension in the air as every house, hole, and street around them stood silent and hollow, like gaping wounds.

In the distance receding behind them, they could still hear the sounds of heated combat. Sometimes a more powerful gun could be heard, along with explosions and other stranger noises. It was so just far away that it felt like an entirely different realm, yet it never abated enough to allow the strange mood of the abandoned city to settle into a complete lull. It still pressed against their senses, where he might have fallen asleep to it like an old lullaby.

He had been through many places like this in his life.

"How much further?" Cassani asked as they continued to jog.

Emiya looked around for some reference points, then glanced down at the map that had been uploaded to his omnitool. He had a mental image of it in his head, but there had been a lot of changes in the city since this picture had been taken, that kept him from relying on the map too much. Streets had been blocked off as buildings had collapsed and sewers had crumbled, causing other cascading collapses that redrew entire blocks.

They must have been given old intel on purpose to reflect how quickly the terrain could change.

"Half a klick and we're in the suburbs. Another two and we should be good," he said. As long as we don't run into anyone on the way, he added to himself. So far had been so good.

"Who do you think those people from before were, the guys with the grenades I mean..." Cassani asked, again.

Shepard shrugged in front off them.

"Probably a previous batch, who have already gone through basic and chosen their career lines. Can't be too experienced though, given how they dropped the ball on that first attack." Emiya answered quietly. "Just speculation, though."

Shepard inhaled sharply, sounding something between pissed and impressed. "Like a hazing or... induction ceremony?" Then muttering more quietly: "Yeah, I can see it."

"Huh?" Cassani asked him, not seeing her point. "Why?"

"Throw the fresh recruits into the meat grinder and see how they react. Weed out those who can't handle the stress, while letting the older, better trained and armed boys bully us around a little for experience. Gets us used to getting our teeth kicked in, and to see who of us can keep our heads on straight..." Emiya paused in his explanation to give Cassani a smirk. "Which gets us humiliated and angry. Then, when we've gone through and graduated from basic, we get to do the same on the next recruits. Deferred payback - a good cycle that feeds itself." Then he shrugged."It's what I would do, anyhow."

After that, Cassani didn't ask any more questions. Perhaps the thought of facing off against their seniors made him thoughtful. Or perhaps it just made him want to keep quiet, so as to avoid any other encounters. Which was just as well.

They went through hollowed-out buildings and through narrow alleys whenever possible. Though those were more easily booby-trapped, it was still safer than running out in the streets and being spotted half a mile away. And generally, traps were only placed once the combat continued for prolonged periods of time. This field exercise had only started today, even for all the other groups.

And while there could have been more traps left over from previous battles stretching on, he didn't see the Alliance skipping out on such an excellent clearing exercise for those corps that specialized in cleaning up battlefields and rebuilding. He supposed it would be the combat engineers, since they had the technical understanding necessary and specialized in the use of relatively expendable drones.

So he justified their haste with those thoughts.

Emiya's suit's internal medical apparatus, which had been re-purposed to simulate injuries through a software update, did not actually slow him down all too much. It wasn't like he had actually been injured, it merely clamped down on him to give resistance to his movements. It felt slightly strange, as if someone was hanging off of him and keeping his hip from moving freely, but he powered through.

As long as he adjusted to compensate for it, he could keep up just fine. At this level, it would just be draining his stamina.

At one point, there didn't seem to be any way forward, so they had to backtrack and jumped over the roofs of some dinghy houses to continue onward. After one building almost collapsed under them, they finally hopped back down, even if they had been making good time that way, and got back down to the street level.

If the city center had been dilapidated, the suburbs were little more than rubble and piles of refuse around the trees and undergrowth that had come to reclaim the abandoned lands. Encroaching from the outside in as the plants did, and due to the less sturdy construction materials used, the widely spaced and smaller houses had been already mostly eradicated.

Again, to Emiya it was nothing new.

Though the combination of the scale of the city, the climate, and the length of time the city had been left to rot was novel, he was still familiar enough with places such as these to find the old habits within himself without too much patina. In his time he had seen the ravages of disease, war, famine, fires, natural disasters, and much, much more.

But to Shepard and Cassani, who Emiya gathered had always lived in the bustling and ever-awake cities, this was a landscape from their wildest fever dreams.

Expensive houses and wide plots of land where the gardens might have once stretched out; places they could probably only dream of having lived in, completely destroyed and abandoned. Large manses, smaller homes, garages, and the unrecognizable remains of other buildings littered the landscape around and beneath the stubborn flora. They even saw a gazebo that had been lifted completely off the ground by a tree that had sprung up beneath it.

Nowhere in sight could you see the bare ground, as wherever there was even a hint of free space, a plant had grown up to take advantage of the sunlight.

The waist-high undergrowth swayed in the wind, like a green ocean as they walked through. After a while, a light canopy of treetops began to form above, as the taller growths began to appear more densely with the branches and green leaves stretching out to cloak them in the thin formless shadows of leaves dancing in the wind.

Shepard began to falter and slow down without even noticing herself, staring at everything they passed by with wide eyes and a slacked jaw, so Emiya took over as point man, recognizing the point where his experience began to eclipse hers.

He let the two gawk and wonder for a while as he consulted his mental map again.

At this point, he had little more than a top-down picture and a topographical map that showed the elevation relative to sea level, since the trees above hid everything else from a satellite view. Not much to go on, but that was jungle-warfare for you. The fog of war stretched everywhere; a neutral veil of uncertainty for everyone. Even people who lived in a jungle knew that the terrain was ever-changing and ever-treacherous and that few maps were worth anything past a month or two.

You simply had to know the rules and take every step as a first into unknown territory. Already twice Shepard and Cassani had almost stumbled as the ground—hidden from view beneath swaying green waves of undergrowth—was actually not as flat and level as the foliage might have made it seem.

Once they got underneath the ancient trees where the canopy blotted out almost all of the sun, they wouldn't have to worry so much about the undergrowth with each step. With no sunlight, the smallest of plants could not compete, underfoot to the mighty giants that stood tall in the distance. Of course, if they went further in, they would run into vines and other things that would require a machete and hours of time to pass through.

But they wouldn't go in that deep.

"It's been a while..." Emiya sighed almost nostalgically, wondering whether those primeval giants still stood in those far-off jungles he had trekked through in another life. He could clearly still remember, how perfectly straight they seemed; those dark looming pillars of ages past and beyond, natural cathedrals that stretched as far above as the eyes could see.

"Did you say something?" Shepard asked, walking up to his side.

Emiya blinked, realizing he had spoken out loud just now and shook his head.

"Sorry, just musing."

"...Musing?" Shepard tilted her head at him curiously, as if she had never heard the word.

"Thinking back. Or something like that," Emiya said with a shrug, thinking that it would be enough to end the conversation.

But Shepard only seemed to grow more curious, noting that he did not seem nearly as lost as they were and that he even seemed familiar with this place.

"About?" she asked, leaning in to stare at him as they walked.

Emiya felt slightly taken aback, not expecting her to continue questioning him, but he didn't let it show on his face as he continued staring straight ahead.

"Well, I'm grateful for this hardsuit right now. It wouldn't be anywhere near as nice here without it," he said, half-deflecting.

She didn't seem to understand what he meant, frowning at him.

"You might not realize it with just your face bare and feeling the wind, but it's hot and humid out here. Normally, we would be sweating buckets by now," he said with an amused smirk, pointing up at the glaring sun. She frowned again, turning thoughtful as she looked up.

She wasn't sweating, but it was hard to tell given how much her body had been changing during training.

Before, being sweaty had been something she had immediately noticed about herself, but some time during the past few months, she... simply stopped noticing. Or caring perhaps. She had to actually focus on the sensations to recall they existed now. Only her face felt particularly warm, but not enough to bother her. The suit really did feel comfortable on her: neither too hot nor too cold, seeming to be regulating itself to a comfortable level to allow her to keep moving without discomfort.

"Huh. Yeah, I guess you're right. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like walking around without the suit," she said, grinning a little.

Emiya made an amused huff but did not say anything more. He too had noted how little they sweat, which threw his internal checklist for rest and hydration times into conflict with his internal clock. He didn't even feel thirsty yet, despite all that running and climbing earlier. Quite different from what he had been used to from life. It almost felt like he was in some measure a Servant, who needed neither rest nor sustenance.

Not that he was complaining.

They continued, arriving at a strange flatland as they began to circle the city towards the RV point. The ground must have been paved for miles in thick asphalt, as only the toughest of weeds had begun to grow through the cracks. A thick, swaying sea of green undergrowth grew everywhere around it, though. Collapsed buildings dotted the landscape, like some ancient beasts' skeletons as young trees grew here and there as the prelude for what was to come.

It looked like some old industrial area, with storage buildings or hardware facilities all around them.

In ten more years, Emiya wouldn't be surprised to see this area having turned into the beginnings of a jungle, like the terrain they had passed through earlier. It wouldn't resist the return of nature any better than the suburb had, it was only a little bit behind on schedule. Still, with the remnants of solid asphalt crumbling underfoot with each step, their pace grew considerably.

It stretched on for at least half a kilometer, Emiya judged as they moved from cover to cover. To avoid being detected from afar by the naked eye, it was essential to consider the basics of camouflage; the silhouette and shape they cast against the background; any colors standing out from the background; unnatural reflections of light from metal or plastic; stark shadows standing out; sudden motion and the sounds they made, could all reveal them even to someone quite afar.

Thus he took care to choose routes that hugged collapsed buildings and large bushes, walked through shadows and shade, went below the highest peaks of small hills and crests as far as the flat terrain permitted. All in all, it was a rather pleasant walk outside on a beautiful day, even if it snaked up and down.

But as pleasant as their walk was, it had to end eventually.

Whizzzdzzts—

"Huh, what was—" Shepard perked up at the sound past and behind them.

—boom

Emiya's eyes widened, his hand reaching out for Shepard and grabbing her wrist as he fell down. She made a grunt of complaint, as all the air in her lungs was pushed out by the fall, wresting her hand free a moment later to reach for her pistol.

"What the...!" Cassani called out from further back, falling over with a thud and oof.

A second later, the second shot came over their heads, whizzing past. The sound of the gun followed a second later.

—boom

"Missed," Emiya noted, checking his own kinetic barriers, and then the status of the two adjacent barriers noted in the upper corner of his HUD, for Shepard's and Cassani's status, as they had all linked up their omnitools earlier.

Shepard was fine, but Cassani was in the red.

"Wha—What's going on?" she asked, noticing only now Cassani's blinking kinetic barrier.

"A sniper," Emiya concluded.

"Huh?"

"The delay between the shot hitting Cassani's barrier and the disproportionately loud gun report suggests a long-range sniper," he clarified distractedly. For a moment, he wondered how it was shooting in the first place. Their guns had to be tuned down in order to not risk their shields failing, but that would mean that the minuscule bullet they fired would not be able to hit anything at a distance due to loss of energy and dropping arc.

Not unless the gun's computer was automatically ranging and performing calculations for velocity correction, still keeping it just fast enough. He had distinctly heard Cassani's kinetic barrier crackle before he had heard the shot, which meant a supersonic projectile.

A weapon with that kind of power would still punch through their armor and kill them at closer ranges.

"Cassani, you okay?" Shepard asked out, crawling towards the fallen and still form lying on the ground.

"Uh, kinda can't move here. Says I've got a 'shattered spine, minor internal bleeding' here. That's bad, right?" Cassani spoke up, quietly, as if someone was sitting on his lungs.

"Yes. Congratulations, you're crippled for life," Emiya answered easily, still keeping low. "Well, for the duration of this exercise anyhow. I'm surprised you aren't dead."

"Oh... Well. Shit."

Cassani sounded fine, Emiya noted with amusement as he turned his attention back to the distance.

The projectile must have been shot with enough energy to carry it all the way here, but not so much that it would punch through their kinetic barriers.

So the sniper rifle shot at a higher velocity than the other weapons so far, but because of the distance it was used at during this simulation, it would still slow down enough not to be a problem against the hardsuits and kinetic barriers? That must mean some sort of automatic range calculation took place - probably a part of the software they used for the exercise.

Could be those mainframes they mentioned doing the heavy lifting and keeping us all so very safe...

Which should mean a lag in firing when switching from long to short distance. He could use that.

Glancing at the radar, he found nothing except their three signatures. Out of range, obviously, as he had already judged from the sound of the firing gun. He didn't know how supersonic the round was, but it still had to be some ways off for him to notice the difference.

"Shepard, get Cassani. Stay low and drag him over there with you," Emiya said, pointing at the remains of what had been once a fairly nice two-floor house, painted yellow with a red tile roof, once upon a time. Even as new those walls wouldn't have provided any protection against a mass accelerator, but it offered enough concealment that hitting them would be difficult. "Call me over the comms once you're done."

Shepard nodded and began to crawl, staying low enough that she could not be seen as she made her way to the downed Franco.

This left him with some time to think.

Perhaps if the sniper had long-range sensors or set up area control measures, the concealment the walls would offer would be useless, but given that they hadn't been shot through just the grass yet, that seemed unlikely. He's got roughly the same level of sensor suite as we do, then.

Now, what to do...

They were down one man and being engaged by an enemy with a superior position and weapon. Ambushed. They should disengage and retreat according to conventional wisdom. But Emiya didn't much fancy that, since while only one out of three in their unit was down, in practice their combat ability was down to below even a third, since one of them had to drag Cassani around now, completely breaking their formation and combined sensor setups.

Mobility, ability to detect enemies and concentrate fire, to disengage and spread out to cover more ground and perform flanking maneuvers... Their fire team was effectively dead in the water.

They needed something to even the odds. Something like a nice sniper rifle.

First of all, he would need to get to the sniper.

Well, that wasn't a problem. With his experience when it came to long-range combat and the two shots he had heard, he had had plenty of information to make a few educated guesses as to their assailants' location. He had already been eyeing the terrain around them as they walked, noting good locations for ambushes, traps, and firing locations for various kinds of weapons anyhow.

Additionally, he could cut it down to just three good places where the shots could have come from since the point of origin for both shots hadn't changed, suggesting the more entrenched options. Assuming the sniper was alone, of course. With blue team operations, there was usually an additional spotter who made it a two-man team.

He's alone, Emiya thought, however, even if he couldn't quite place his finger on why he thought so just yet.

With technology like automatic range finders and sensor suites, most of the spotter's duties could be handled by an omnitool program, but that didn't mean anything by itself. But, a two-man team would have set up to press their advantage in an ambush, whereas a lone sniper should have already moved on to a secondary firing position to avoid being detected and to get a better angle while they were still scrambling about with their faces in the dirt.

But I can't hear anything.

His earlier floating conclusion clicked, a rationale emerging from all the experiences and training he had accrued.

A lone sniper, inexperienced.

He had shot the rearmost of their team to buy himself another second with the rifle while they scrambled with confusion. Generally—if you hadn't drilled specifically for this kind of scenario—if someone in front of you was shot, you would react immediately—if only with shock at first—whereas when someone behind you was shot, there would be that additional moment of confusion from trying to figure out what was going on.

It would give the sniper enough time to aim for the next target, extending the window of opportunity of the ambush just enough to add one, slightly worse, shot on top of the first good shot.

It was textbook. Too textbook.

Cassani had been shot in the gut, blowing out his spine but missing all the organs that would kill him instantly. Why not aim for the ribcage and lungs, or the sniper's triangle to silence the first target if the plan was to not startle them with the first shot? A slow, painful death like the gut was for loud bait, to force comrades to expose themselves in open terrain. Not this grassy meadow where visibility was zero below waist height. There was none of the personal flair that came with experience and skill, the small touches and tactics that reflected the sniper's mindset and thinking.

And even though Emiya had immediately dodged for cover with Shepard, reacting to the ambush as quickly as humanly possible, the second shot had been too hasty and hadn't predicted the second-in-line Shepard's movements at all.

The shooter was new; inexperienced. Probably not much older than they were. Another of the recruit hunters, then. So he would hesitate now. Seconds had passed since the first two shots and no flank or pressing assault was coming, confirming that the sniper was alone.

Of course... It might just all be him reading too much into it. The simulation wasn't guaranteed to simulate a one-shot kill, the sniper might have just been instructed to shoot far below the less-protected face, hitting the torso was much easier than the more mobile upper body... But the kinetic barriers handled all the 'damage' just fine, and he had all the time in the world for that first shot.

He felt confident in his assessment.

But Emiya couldn't just react with all the information he had gleaned from two shots and seven seconds of inaction; that would be too suspicious to anyone who could read the flow of combat. Already his ability to instantly react to an ambush, when such things hadn't been drilled into them yet, would be clearly suspicious. Who knew how much information these omnitools really could gather for the commanding officers overlooking this exercise, besides? So even though he already knew where the sniper was, he couldn't simply act out as if he had read the script beforehand. He needed to play a part to avoid raising further suspicion.

But the omnitools' data gathering did give him an easy out.

Emiya exhaled slowly and felt his plan click into place; fifteen steps, with variations and checks to see if his initial assumptions held true or as things could change. His old instincts began to resurface, the steel re-aligning itself in his bones as he turned back to the skills he had cultivated as a deluded murderer of men.

Four seconds had passed since he had ordered Shepard to go for Cassani, and Emiya turned on his omnitool. He navigated the menu, finding the connection to Franco's hardsuit.

"Cassani, give me access to your interface," Emiya ordered switching to comms, having paused as he was stopped by a password query.

"Huh? Yeah, okay." The answer came back, half-dazed and panting, scraping sounds against the hardsuit coming through muffled.

He continued, going through the other's hardsuit functions until he found what he wanted. A vid-feed from the helmet popped up, showing what Cassani was looking at in real time, struggling to help Shepard drag him. Emiya smirked, checking the options.

Rewind.

"Gotcha," Emiya said with a smirk.

He pulled up the map on his omnitool in another tab, placing a small dot that represented Cassani on it and then aligning the paused vid with how it stood. On the frozen screen, the kinetic barrier flashing as it stopped the bullet was seen - a blue bubble rippling out like the surface of water disturbed by a falling stone. And just like the center of a disturbance could be seen on the surface of the water, it was clearly visible on the kinetic barrier as well.

Drawing a straight line out into where the sniper was hiding, where Emiya had already reasoned out he was.

Based on this could see where the shot had come from, both on the horizontal plane as well as in the vertical. He closed the omnitool and looked around, mapping out a route forward and to the south. He needed to advance diagonally, to force the sniper to move his rifle from its current position and zero its calibration, forcing that lag to work constantly against him.

"Emiya, got Cassani and we're by the yellow rubble."

"Good. I've got a plan," he replied. "On my mark, I need you to start running toward the big ruin on your left. The sniper is to your right, along the other collapsed houses. Get a position there where you can overlook the sniper's position and that big house still standing further ahead." He paused. "You copy all that?"

It would be pincering in the sniper while also checking for any additional hostiles, who might still be in reserve.

"Right. Mark, run up and secure the flanks at the big ruins. Got it."

"I'm moving out. Hold position."

"Copy."

Emiya burst into motion, crawling and monkey-walking through the rubble and tall grass. Contrary to popular belief, crawling was not always a slow form of movement. The key lay in understanding the terrain and how high up you could raise yourself from the ground, using the big muscles in the leg to propel forward and using the hands like stilts, without getting too high up and breaking cover or concealment.

Thus, mapping out a route beforehand was essential to maintaining momentum.

A good side to the high undergrowth was that it offered plenty of concealment, but in exchange, the taller stalks would be disturbed by his passing if he wasn't careful, showing how he moved to anyone on the lookout. while avoiding the taller stalks enough that whatever he did rustle could be mistaken for the wind. He moved methodically and quickly, using short bursts to cover distances and then moving slowly over precarious positions where the undergrowth was just too thick.

Until finally, he came at what he knew was the edge of his suit's sensors - a mere meter further and his radar to start picking out the sniper's signature in the rubble ahead. And vice versa. Nearly a minute had passed since the two shots. The sniper had to be getting antsy by now if he hadn't packed up and run for it already with how quiet everything was.

"Shepard, come in," Emiya called.

"You want me to go?" She asked over the comms.

"On the count of five, go."

"...Got it."

Emiya inhaled, drawing his pistol and getting himself into a position where could stand up.

Two, three, four.

He rose up in one smooth motion to his feet, just high enough that his head and shoulders became visible above the wind-swaying sea of green. Time slowed down; color drained from his vision as he focused. The sights aligned naturally as he relaxed. He couldn't see the sniper from this angle due to a half-collapsed wall, but he could make educated guesses.

Emiya pulled the trigger six times in rapid succession, drawing a line along the sniper's hideout.

Five, six, seven.

Five of the shots were duds for plausibility; only the sixth one mattered. In his mind's eye, the shot punched through the sniper's heads, scattering his brains to the wind, but in reality, they all merely hit the wall with small bursts of rotted wood shrapnel. There was a single muffled crackle of a kinetic barrier and a surprised gasp beyond, indicating the at least one shot drilling through the wall had hit; the sixth shot.

That should have gotten his attention.

He got back down and began to rapidly circle around the sniper's location. But unlike before, he didn't bother with nearly as much effort in keeping the taller reeds from swaying. He was a distraction now.

Ten, eleven, twelve.

"Shepard."

A second of silence.

"Yeah? You okay?" came back her breathy reply.

Emiya smirked.

"Fine. Got him riled up and on my tail now. You see the big house?"

"Yeah?"

"If someone is trying to flank us, they would come that way. Get into cover from both that direction and the sniper's location, and wait half a minute to see if anyone is coming. Engage at will," Emiya spoke rapidly and then went silent, listening to his surroundings anyone's approach.

Nothing. That means no flankers on this side. If anyone is coming, it will be at Shepard's location, like I thought. Doubtful at this point, though.

"Got it. And then?" she asked.

"If no one's there by 30 seconds, run this way and get the sniper from behind. If there were more than this one guy, they would have made themselves known by then. As for the sniper... feel free to go to town on him."

"Heh, you sure know what to give a girl. Copy." Shepard was smirking, he knew it from her tone of voice.

Then again, so was he.

"Over."

"Over."

Emiya took a deep breath and then broke out into a run.

Running straight was bad since it left you open to being shot even as a moving target, but the remains of asphalt here hadn't given away enough for anything to start growing yet and he needed to go forward, even if it was a risk. He could only count on the inexperience of the sniper and his own speed. So it couldn't be helped.

Now.

He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut as another loud boom echoed, the whizz following. Emiya smirked, noting that it was another miss. And given that he hadn't changed weapons to something like an assault rifle meant that he only had a single-shot rifle.

Another boom—whizz, just as useless.

"Sloppy," he remarked as he continued to move along. He stopped, noticing a good rock—one that looked similar enough, anyhow—and grabbing it along as he continued to crawl forward.

Emiya stilled, waiting.

At this point, the sniper had missed so many shots that the pressure must be building up. If there were any other enemies here, he should be expecting some gunfire in the distance soon or Shepard calling in to inform him. Thus he might as well let the sniper stew for a few moments. Emiya calmed himself down but kept his heart beating at an elevated rate. He didn't want to come crashing down in the middle of a fight.

Okay, that was enough.

Can't let him recover his wits, either.

Emiya turned onto his side, judging the weight of the rock with one hand. He decided it should be possible, rearing back the hand and closing his eyes. By now, the shooter must have moved out of the previous firing location. He had been made, so according to textbook, it served better now as a bait for a second offensive from a secondary firing position.

From here Emiya couldn't see the sniper's location over the tall grass—either the previous or the next one—and they were both out of each other's basic sensor ranges. But in his mind's eye, he could still see the location. Assuming a route behind the cover that he couldn't see over, a novice sniper would move there.

He cocked back his hand and then tossed the rock with all his strength. And in its spinning flight, it looked distinctly similar to the flashbang that he had seen tossed at them earlier. Well, only if you glanced at it quickly and had been trained with grenades enough to recognize one.

Which Emiya technically hadn't. But he guessed that this guy had.

It landed with a light thud, skipping twice around the corner of the collapsed house, right into the shadow where the sniper should be hiding.

"Shit!"

Emiya heard the shout in the distance as he got up with his pistol ready. This time, he didn't rise above the swaying plants, merely high enough that his eyes could pierce through the top of the swaying foliage without breaking its silhouette.

Unfortunately, the sniper didn't jump out of cover. He must have realized it was a rock before he made a mistake that big. Or he could have just frozen in place from the surprise; that wasn't entirely uncommon either. But it was enough of a distraction for Emiya to line up his sights.

Four shots in rapid succession.

The reports of the pistol were much quieter in comparison to the sniper rifle, to the point of seeming inconsequential in comparison. But the cracking sound of the debris being kicked up where the sniper was, was anything but; he had aimed at the hard rock on purpose.

He didn't have a clear shot at the guy anyhow and the pistol's power was too low currently to shoot through the wall he had chosen. Sparks were kicked up; small pieces of shattered rock spread everywhere on impact and the sound was like a pickaxe on stone.

Emiya got back down and began to move again; he would flank around while the sniper was busy.

Movement.

Something was thrown out, flying out in the air like a small frisbee. Emiya hesitated for a moment, his eyes tracking the object as he knew for a certainty that he could have shot it, but knowing that if he did it would be too suspicious in the aftermath. So he ran instead. But it wasn't enough as a pulse of something spread out, barely visible as it passed him by.

Instantly his HUD seemed to turn to static and his gun began to beep as if it had overheated.

Emiya didn't hesitate, throwing the gun behind him into the grass as he continued to move. Behind him, the incessant beeping continued as he turned off his HUD and kept moving.

The sniper jumped out of cover, having finally changed his sniper rifle for his pistol as he burst forward at the beeping gun. Some sort of tech-grenade? Miniature EMP, perhaps. Serves dual-purpose of sabotaging my gun as well as revealing my position.

Emiya stayed low, stilling his breath.

The sniper came to a stop as the beeping stopped; the overheating would still prevent the gun from firing for several seconds as it cooled down. The man was wearing completely different gear; it was a half-black, half-green camouflage pattern, with much thicker and robust plates making up the torso and limb pieces.

Medium or heavy armor. The pistol wouldn't have probably worked against it anyhow. Emiya concluded as he began to coil up. As soon as he got a chance; as soon as the sniper showed an opening, Emiya would move.

"Come out! You don't even have a gun anymore, newbie. You're done!" the sniper shouted, sounding something between confident and relieved.

Emiya merely held back a smirk, having felt that a confirmation of his earlier theory regarding who had been hunting them down. The second-timers in these events probably had missions like 'hunt down x amount of recruits'. But the fact that the sniper was facing his general direction also confirmed that the sniper's HUD radar had picked something out in this general location.

That would be a problem. The gun's overheating sounds had distracted him enough for a moment, but now it might not work anymore.

I'll put a voice-playback on my omnitool and throw it over there and then take him down from behind if he falls for it. I can probably joint-lock him and take his gun to finish him off. Otherwise, I'll make a run for it, there's concealment enough for me to keep him guessing at my exact location. Double back for my pistol and try again. Emiya nodded to himself, feeling his heart rate pick up in preparation as the smirk bloomed through on his face.

He was having fun, he distantly realized.

—Pffftzzz, —Pffftzzz, —Pffftzzz.

Three shots rang out unexpectedly from further away.

"Guh, what!" The sniper turned around and Emiya smirked. Nice job, Shepard.

He rushed forward like a loosed arrow, crossing the distance in great big leaps in less than two seconds. His hands shot out and one went to the wrist of the gun as another went to the shoulder in a simple and reliable arm-takedown.

"Ooopphh!" The sniper groaned as he face-planted into the ground with Emiya pressing down on him from above, wresting away the pistol by wrenching against the thumb. He spun around the pistol, placing it directly against the side of the sniper's visor. Much bulkier than mine

"How about we call it here. I'm not sure if the kinetic barrier will work this close, you know," Emiya said.

"Fuck you! It's ID-locked! You can't do shit with it anyway!" was the struggling reply.

Emiya blinked, pulling up the pistol and aiming it at a tree in the distance. He pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

"Huh. Well, I guess we're doing this the hard way then."

"Yeah, what are you gonna do—"

"Shepard, mind coming over and shooting this guy for me?" Emiya asked out loud, and a second later the woman emerged from the bushes with her pistol held up.

She had been holding back from shooting since Emiya had gotten into grappling with her target and made a clear shot difficult. Then again, given that his bulkier hardsuit's kinetic barrier had taken all those shots without a problem a moment ago, she had hesitated for a moment at whether or not her pistol would even be able to punch through before it overheated.

"You can go grab mine if you want to dual wield. It's somewhere over there in the bushes."

"Sure, no problem. Mind if I start with his feet?" she asked with a grin, taking aim.

"Wait, hold on!"

She didn't, shooting 14 shots into his leg and taking a short break to let her guns cool down and then continuing until the sniper's kinetic barrier gave way. She whistled when she finally got a few shots in and saw his leg begin to stiffen after a shot.

"Man, his shields are way better than ours. No fair," she mock-complained, even as she happily continued to work her way up, shooting arm and back while the kinetic barriers were down. Emiya let go and dusted himself as she finished off with his shoulders and torso.

"Think that's enough?" She looked up at Emiya with a wicked gleam in her eyes.

He shrugged with a helpless smile. "Give him two more for good measure. Both arms."

"Can do, Emiya." And she did.

After making sure that the sniper really was 'dead', they finally relaxed.

They raised up the sniper so that he was lying with his back against the ruins he had been hiding inside. He seemed more annoyed and frustrated than anything else, so it seemed like a fine position to leave him in. Even as they asked him questions, the sniper sulked and remained stubbornly quiet.

"Are you alone or do you have any backup nearby?"

The sniper said nothing, but Emiya took the sullen annoyance to mean that he had been alone. If there was backup nearby, a man of this character would have tried to make a racket for the rest of his team or squad to come in and mop them up. Or then start throwing threats like 'you're gonna regret this', or something equally inane.

Emiya took back his pistol from Shepard, testing it one more time just to ascertain that it worked for himself. With some searching, he also found the spinning disc the sniper had used before and brought it back, ignoring Shepard who had been asked questions and glaring at the mulishly silent sniper.

"What's this?" he asked, holding up the tech grenade.

The sniper averted his eyes, ignoring them completely. Shepard rolled her eyes, kicking at his shin lightly. The sniper merely looked up and glared, mouthing the words 'I'm dead, remember?' with inaudible sass.

Emiya huffed and then searched the sniper's pockets. He found a few more of them but realized that they weren't as simple as the grenades from his time had been. Emiya looked at the sniper, who was studiously pretending to not be paying attention.

Raising up the unused disc-grenade, he asked: "Is this ID-locked... or is it activated with your omnitool?"

The man made a smug little attempt at shaking his head to show that he didn't know what Emiya was talking about, but it merely looked like he was having a seizure for a second as his entire hardsuit had been hardened up to prevent movement.

Perhaps Shepard had been a little bit over-zealous?

Emiya shrugged and put them back into the sniper's pouch. Perhaps they could be used as diversions and maybe if he shot them, something interesting would happen. But assuming that they were usable by anyone who knew the key, for example, the sniper's unit could all probably make them all go off inside his own pouches.

Better to discard unusable and unknown items, he figured.

And then looked at the rectangle attached to the sniper's back on the Van der Waals-strip, realizing it was the collapsed form of the sniper rifle that had been used earlier. Finally, when Emiya took it, did the sniper seem to perk up.

His eyes followed the collapsed form of the sniper rifle like a hawk's.

"Yours, or Navy gear?" Emiya asked with a teasing grin. The sniper twitched. "Borrowed Navy gear, then. But you really like it. No, not it. Her. What's her name? She's a pretty girl. Nice smooth lines, no scratches, and a good polish. I can smell the oil, too. Nothing cheap. You must do maintenance on the regular to keep her in tip-top condition."

Emiya smirked as he ran a hand along the collapsed gun, almost fondling it in front of the sniper.

"Fuck you." The sniper glared at him now, finally opening his mouth. "ID-locked, asshole."

Emiya blinked, before thinking better of that snark he had just almost let loose. But apparently, Shepard had thought it as well and was not above some more petty revenge for the ambush before.

"What, your asshole is ID-locked? Do you need your omnitool to go to the bathroom or something?"

Emiya huffed, not so much at the quip; a bit cruder than he had wanted to say but still got the idea across. He was more amused by the confused and then mortified-with-anger expression of the sniper at her words.

"Well, I'll be taking her for a while," He said, standing up with a grin as he patted the rifle. "I'll be sure to be a real gentleman and to bring her home before midnight."

The sniper was now glaring daggers at them both, seething and obviously trying to all-too-futilely break free. Shepard blinked and then let out a guffaw of laughter as she moved to follow Emiya as he started walking back.

They needed to check up on Cassani and then get moving before someone came to investigate the firefight.

;

At least they had gene mods and hardsuits, Emiya thought as he carried Franco on his shoulders in a fireman carry.

Ahead of him, Shepard was scouting and keeping an eye out. For all her speed and toughness, she couldn't carry their 'wounded' for more than a dozen minutes before she would start slowing down. It was a simple matter of weight difference and natural physique, with their wounded's legs hanging down and getting entangled with everything when she carried him.

Even gene therapy couldn't erase that entirely, since the laws were quite strict regarding anything beyond just 'fixing' stuff.

Which meant that it fell on Emiya's shoulders to carry Franco. Literally.

"Sorry about this, man."

"It's fine. If I had been taken out, I'd expect you to be carrying me around," Emiya said with a slight smirk, even as he felt his thighs burning. They had been going at a doubled pace for an hour now, just to make sure that they didn't get caught up in any other groups that might come to investigate the site of their earlier firefight.

Emiya took another sip of his water bottle as he exhaled hot air.

Luckily the servos locking down to prevent movement only affected the internal movements. As such, it wasn't like carrying a frozen stiff human corpse or anything, which would have been a decidedly awkward affair. Instead, so long as Cassani relaxed, Emiya could move his limbs around just fine. This meant that once they got a good position, Cassani could just tense a little and his body would lock into place which made it easier for Emiya to carry him.

Like a weird backpack, with terrible straps and poor balance, and very heavy. Still, it was better than having to carry him than if he had been completely stiff. Be grateful for the little things, it'll keep you from going insane.

At this rate, they wouldn't make it to the recall point in time he guessed. He had been planning to skirt the edge of the jungle where the terrain was still traversable without having to cut down a dozen plants and hanging vines with each and every step you took, but with a man down it just would not work anymore.

"How about you, any changes?" he asked, looking up again as he continued to walk one step at a time.

"Nah. Still crippled and bleeding out. Got 14 hours in me, still. Apparently, anyhow. My nose itches like a motherfucker, tho." Franco said with a halfhearted grin.

"Well, that's something at least." Emiya allowed. "But this isn't working out."

If they didn't have time constraints, he was certain that he could keep going until his body literally collapsed beneath him. He had done it before and this time he didn't have to worry about being sucked dry by leeches sticking to every limb by the dozen, or about the constant rain beating down on him like it usually did in the jungle. Franco was lighter, too. Or perhaps that too was just the gene therapy making him stronger. He wondered whether it applied to the immune system as well or whether in the long term he would have to worry about diseases and diarrhea again.

Well, it wouldn't matter right now. This exercise would end before that became a problem. He set down Cassani and recovered his strength by sitting down and breathing deeply until his legs stopped aching. Taking a deep swig of the water bottle, he finished it off till the last drop.

"You can have mine, not too thirsty, what with the excellent service." Franco quipped and Emiya nodded his thanks back. He switched out the bottles attaching his own empty one to Cassani's suit and then giving him a quick sip just in case, to keep him hydrated, before taking another deep mouthful.

It wasn't plain water, either. More akin to a light sports drink, really.

Shepard came back, almost tripping over a thick tree root sticking out from the ground as she did. She seemed to have adapted mostly to the new terrain but still seemed hesitant about moving at full speed as always something seemed to entangle or grab at her.

She looked at them, a flash of worry in her eyes as she sat down and took a swig from her own bottle.

"We're gonna have to change our plans a little," Emiya said simply.

"Yeah? Leaving me behind?" Cassani asked with a little bit of false cheer, though the undercurrent of worry was plain to hear.

Maybe Emiya and Shepard would pass with flying colors if they passed him off dead, but that would no doubt sink his grading for the exercise. Though damned through little fault of his own, it would certainly be natural to consider such a conclusion and worry about it.

She certainly had been thinking it, judging by the way she was looking at Cassani at times.

"Yes," Emiya said, just as Shepard had been about to say something. She blinked, turning to look at him with a questioning stare. "We'll acquire a vehicle and pick you up. There's a hill just up ahead that runs next to a road. We can leave you there and keep the comms open; you can act as our watcher for the road while we try to get an ambush set up."

Shepard paused, considering that.

"Yeah? Not gonna just leave me behind, are you?" Cassani asked, sounding a bit more hopeful, trying not to make it sound like a whine.

Emiya simply stared back at him blankly.

He had hauled too many half-dead and dying men around for real, to care about the peace of mind of this entirely healthy, if minorly inconvenienced, one. It was one thing when trying to save a man for real, to keep them from giving up, but he had a hard time bringing himself to care enough about the future prospects of Cassani to do the same here.

And he also knew that tiring himself out by trying to force his way forward would just blow up in all of their faces.

Work smarter, not harder.

"If we can't get you, we can't get you," Emiya said finally, shrugging.

Shepard mirrored his shrug, as Cassani stared at them.

Their 'wounded' stared between them for a few moments, before he affected a shrug as best he could with his 'paralyzed' body.

"Yeah, okay. That's fair."

;

"Alright. Just give me the generals of what you can see and where, if something shows up," Emiya said, patting at Cassani's shoulder.

He, in turn, gave Emiya a flat stare.

"Do I really have to be in a tree?"

"It's safer. No one is going to look up this specific tree, and you can see further. No problems, right?" Emiya said with a smirk.

"Uh-huh, and what if I fall, huh?"

"Well that's simple. Don't," Emiya said as he nodded.

"That's not a—hey!"

Emiya ignored him and jumped down. Getting their cripple up there was a bit of a chore and had taken some time, but he judged that its benefits outweighed that trouble. With their combined gene therapy and rigorous exercise granted strength, with Emiya pulling from above and Shepard pushing from below, they had managed to get him up there without too much fuss.

Shepard merely stared up at Cassani in the tree and then down at Emiya, with one eyebrow raised. "I thought you were joking before. Still almost do, even with him up there."

Emiya shrugged with an easy half-smirk. "Let's go."

He didn't wait for her answer as started jogging. He could hear her following and he turned up his pace. She must have been surprised a moment later as he began to move about in a strange pattern, instead of in a straight line, as at times she faltered behind him.

It was natural.

In nature there were no straight lines; you had to take the path of least resistance. Of course, seeing where one could easily walk was a skill all of its own, but one he had cultivated to a degree where terrain of this level was reasonably traversable.

Shepard copied his steps, following behind him at her own pace and he matched her so that they did not get separated.

Of course, this way of moving was quite loud. In the forest, and especially jungles, sound was the largest sign of danger to pay attention to. Not just your own movement, but the sounds of the wildlife, too. But it was a relatively short-ranged indicator. With trees growing this thickly around them you couldn't see much past 20 meters, if even that, with sound tapering off into muffled nothingness not much further beyond that at ground level.

Still, as it was, they needed to regain lost time so it couldn't be helped if they made some noise.

Heel-first on hard ground; rolling step. Toes first on soft ground to test it gently, he remembered.

It took a little bit of effort, but soon his gait was the same as after all those years. Well, Shepard behind him made his relative silence a moot point, but it was a good habit to keep cultivated nonetheless.

They made it to the road and he crouched down, by a tall tree that gave him plenty of cover to one side. To make the road, trees had been cleared long ago, letting sunlight shine down enough for some plants to grow here and there at the ground level right next to the tracks. This gave him ample concealment, as the waist-high grass and undergrowth were more than enough to hide a man from sight.

Shepard came to a stop behind him, kneeling just behind him. He leaned forward, low and nearly touching the ground as he allowed his head to break through the grass onto the road. He looked left and right, peering as far as he could.

Reaching out a hand to touch the road, he frowned as he felt the composition and depth of the tracks. It had rained during the night and early morning, and the canopy above wouldn't have dispersed the droplets enough to keep from muddying his reading some... But, several cars had passed by here today, judging by the freshness of the tracks.

"Yeah, this will do."

"What is it?" Shepard asked, leaning to look at what he was doing while staying low enough to not break concealment herself.

Emiya leaned back to cover and he looked at Shepard. "Weren't you paying attention? We need a vehicle, right?"

Shepard blinked at him, not at all amused at the grin.

"So we're going to stage an ambush of our own and rob whoever comes driving down this road," Emiya said, feeling entirely too amused by her annoyance.

"And they are simply going to let us—with our plinky little guns—take their military spec car?"

Emiya's grin only widened. The reason crazy schemes like this worked was precisely because they were crazy. "Yeah, after all... We have this."

He reached over his back and pulled away the collapsed sniper rifle from the Van der Waals-strip. Shepard blinked, the realization clear in her eyes. But then she frowned as she realized the biggest snag in that plan.

"It's ID-locked, though. That asshole seemed pretty sure we wouldn't be able to use it."

"Yeah, which is why I messed with him a little. He was obviously some kind of techie-type, what-with his EMP grenades and stuff." Emiya explained.

"'Techie-type'? Is that some technical term I slept the introduction to through to?" she snarked at him, to which he waved his hand as if to dispel her skepticism.

"He seemed pretty focused on a specific part of the gun, right here. I think I can work something out." Emiya grinned.

It was bullshit, of course. But as if that was going to stop him.

"Right, so we take one thing and use it to take another..." She nodded, if a bit flippantly. "It could work, as long as we can keep the momentum going. If they call for help or manage to keep contact, who knows who will be informed about the car getting jacked. And they usually have some kind of transponder or signal, too. That's assuming you can get that thing to work, too," she mused, turning thoughtful.

He huffed as he knew he had her on board already at this point. "Oh, an expert on stealing cars, are we?"

She snapped, turning to look at him straight in the eye with a dead serious look. He merely smirked at her.

"Oh my, naughty naughty," he said with a deliberately playful tone. He had her off-balance, now he needed to hook her in. She licked her lips in a nervous gesture, considering what to say. Should she deny, deny, deny? Play it off? It was obvious he was touching at a part of her past she wasn't very proud of. But before she could say anything, he continued, serious again. "Think you can take care of any trackers? Obvious ones, at least?"

Extend a show of trust, delegate responsibility based on a shared secret. It will build trust without fail.

She blinked at him and then recovered after a second as she realized he was waiting for her answer. He was deliberately looking away from her as if paying attention to their surroundings. She needed to think her momentary pauses went unnoticed, lest she realized he was playing her. Or rather, he thought of it as a courtesy, allowing her to outwardly retain her dignity.

"Yeah. I can try, at least," she said with finality. As long as you drop it here, went unsaid.

"Good." Emiya nodded. "Alright, here's the plan. I'll be busy with this thing, so you need to find a few things..."

;

"How about this one? It's nice and thick. Would stop any car dead in its tracks." Shepard asked over the comms as she patted at a tree trunk in the distance.

"No, too big and we'll be cutting off the road for ourselves. It needs to have enough leaves and volume to make them panic as it falls in front of them, but not so much as to cause a real issue when we need the road again. Besides, you're gonna have to cut it with your pistol, so think about how wide the trunk is," Emiya replied, only glancing up from his work.

He had taken a wide plant leaf, easily the size of a spread-out newspaper, and begun to dismantle his pistol on top of it alongside the rifle. Normally, it was a terrible idea to spread small parts like these next to each other, when they were so easy to mix up. But he could recognize both guns' pieces by sight alone any day.

"Won't they just drive through it, then?"

"Which is why we're doing this here." He pointed at the road for her to see. "The corner means that they'll probably drive into the ditch if they try to keep going through it without seeing the road and if they open fire we have enough concealment to just slip away and try again, either on them the moment they get the car out of the ditch, or then somewhere else on something different."

"Huh. Well, I guess." Shepard shrugged and continued to look.

"Heads up, a building just fucking collapsed in the north of town. Looked like it exploded and then just fell apart." Cassani's voice broke into the comm-line.

Emiya frowned, making note of that and considering whether it was internal demolition or a stray shot or explosive. Difficult to tell, but would be good to know regardless. He replied absently: "Copy."

After that, he continued to take apart the two weapons while keeping one eye on the road. Shepard walked around, both left and right alongside the road on either side, straying further and further as she looked for a suitable tree.

As he got to the ammunition block in the sniper rifle, he looked at it curiously. There was some sort of text marked on it, proclaiming 'Dummy PHASIC ROUNDS rating II – for field exercise use only!' with large yellow and black letters. He didn't know what that first part meant, so he shrugged and kept going.

At one point, before they were ready, a car came driving by the road and they both scrambled for cover. Some sort of six-wheeled and heavily-reinforced combat vehicle, though it lacked outer guns. As it seemed to be full of hardsuited figures, promising heavy opposition, they wouldn't have ambushed it even if everything was in place. So they both remained low and silent, hoping that they would not be picked up by any of their sensors.

As radar was beginning to be a problem, Shepard had asked earlier if he had any ideas about hiding from those.

Emiya had been thinking the same, and so tried out some things based on what he knew of the sensors' functions, and after some experimentation, he found a trick.

They both turned off their hardsuits as the car drove past, though the bootup sequence would mean that they would be completely vulnerable if it came down to a firefight. Still, given the difference in numbers and equipment, it wouldn't have mattered either way as he had reasoned, and she had hesitantly agreed. He had found that functionality after reading through the hardsuit's manual and doing some digging through the manufacturer's extranet databases and manuals for various models of advanced sensor suites. The military line was apparently a little bit different with several proprietary technologies, but the basics remained the same.

Of course, given that this essentially meant that their kinetic barriers would not work at all, he was fairly certain he was skirting some rules here. It meant that their suits would not detect any shots—possibly rendering them invulnerable in a sense—and leaving them only to rely on the armor and built-in healing suites—rendering them utterly vulnerable in practice.

Well, the armor would still keep them alive from most shots, so it wasn't all bad.

But seeing as how no one had explicitly denied them from using this function and the rules and regulations available to him did not mention such a scenario, he had simply decided to rather ask for forgiveness than for permission if it became an issue.

After all, it wasn't as if they had taken off their suits, right?

As the car drove by them without stopping or slowing down, they both let out a breath of relief. Both at the confirmation of the ploy working, and of not having to content with a carful of heavily armed enemies.

"Seems like the sensors rely primarily on electromagnetic radiation bleeding from our gear, rather than some sort of life signs..." Emiya muttered to himself. It made sense, as the sensitivity required for the latter would cause such sensors to pick up on anything and everything in this dense environment. Too much information can be just as bad as too little, quite similarly to what a flashbang did to your eyes.

After that, Shepard seemed to be doubly intent on finding a good tree for their use and another fifteen minutes later she returned to where he was working. Without proper tools, he had to adapt a little; using the edge of a cover as a screwdriver, a pair of dry twigs as chopsticks in place of tweezers, and such-like.

Nothing he hadn't had to do before.

He once sutured a man in the field with a fishbone and his wife's hair. Kept him from bleeding out, but the infection that followed kept him bedridden for a long while.

"Are you sure about what you're doing? Wouldn't it be better to just use the guns we know we have?" She asked, looming over his shoulder. "I think we could make it work if we stop their car and then drop another big tree on them. Pick them off from cover."

"No. The pistols just don't have enough power to work. We need more to even the scales."

"Hmm... Well, if you say so. I found two trees that could work, if I climb up and entangle their tops with some rope or vine. One will pull the other down with it at an angle where they fall right on the road, crossing over each other." Shepard said, shrugging.

Emiya looked up, considering it for a moment.

"Sounds good. Do you need any help?"

"Nah, just need to get some vine from back there. But you think it will work?" Shepard asked.

"Don't see why not." He shrugged and then turned back to his work.

The basic idea was to hook up his pistol's computer to the sniper rifle's computer so that it functioned as the basic firing mechanism while overriding the issue of the ID-lock. Of course, he had already figured out three potential ways of doing it, but by now had been forced to discard two of them.

Apparently, he wasn't the only one who had ever had this idea and the built-in failsafes reflected that, using probably serialized parts that wouldn't work unless together. But, he more than anyone else understood weapons. That, at least if nothing else, he could declare with pride. His life might have been that of an empty sham, who only blindly stumbled onto his path, and had never even thought to think through it for himself as it lead him to the gallows...

But at least that much was real: he knew weapons.

How and why they were made; how they functioned as systems, symbols, and tools; how they could be repaired and broken; how they could be made to do whatever you needed...

So, with a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking and some crossed wires, he felt he had something he could work with here. He smiled a little, though noting that the pistol hanging from the side of the rifle made it rather cumbersome to carry and aim in any position other than the prone.

But that was fine; he could take some distance and pick them off at a range. It was a sniper rifle, after all.

"Now, just to test this out..." he said, dialing the power manually to a minimum to keep the sound as low as possible. He aimed at a tree in the distance, standing against a hill. The odds of hitting anyone would be astronomical with that, and with the thick growth of trees and plants around him, the sound would be relatively muffled.

His heartbeat slightly rose, as his finger found the trigger. The moment of truth.

He pulled—boom!

Emiya grinned, laughing lightly as he admired the gun and noting the recoil and line of fire. With his pistol's computer as the go-between, the auto-aim function could not be used, as the pistol's auto-aim was not calibrated for the sniper rifle's output. Thus, it could only use the simple 'eyeballing' aiming mode. But that was completely fine, he could more than handle it.

Nearly all of his experience was with 'dumb weapons' of 'old', anyway. But then he realized the problem.

"Damn," he cursed softly. The tree he had shot had been gouged through by his sniper rifle. The safety program doesn't work; it's working at full power.

He couldn't use this, not in the exercise at least. It would kill someone as it punched right through their kinetic barriers.

"What was that?" Shepard asked over the comms, distracting Emiya from his frustrations.

"Got it working, but ran into another issue. Any problems on your end?"

"You did...? And, uh, no. Fine on this end. Had to be careful with the second tree, needed to shoot out enough of it to make it fall with the other, but still leave enough to keep it steady until then."

"Good. We'll hammer out the final details of the plan, so get back when you can, out." Emiya responded and then turned back to his cobbled-together sniper rifle. "Damn. Really hadn't thought of that."

He disassembled it and reassembled his pistol and tried it out, noting that the firmware was still in effect, which was something of a relief at least. Soon enough, Shepard returned and sat down next to him, watching as he continued to try and figure it out.

"You really like guns, huh..." she said with a strange expression, causing Emiya to completely pause and look up at her blankly.

"What?"

"You always look like you're having fun when you're working on them," she continued, giving him a half-smile.

"No, I just—we need this thing to work, so..." He denied weakly, before trailing off as he frowned at himself.

Shepard merely looked at him curiously, as if analyzing a strange animal. He shook his head, turning back to the inert rifle. It worked just fine when cobbled together. Too fine, as he had already noted. He sighed again, crossing his arms.

"So what's the problem?"

Emiya looked up again, still frowning.

"It's a matter of the firmware. The basic system still works, but it's different between the two guns, so the adjustments like auto-aim and the power adjustment don't work. The mass effect calculations and firing block shaver still function, which means it works. But since the capacitors and rails are bigger the power scales up accordingly, using the... factory settings, I suppose. The calculations and adjustments are probably done through a mainframe using our omnitools as a go-between."

"Uh-huh." Shepard nodded at him with a look.

"It's too powerful."

"Ah...So if you wanted to shoot through a car engine, it would be fine, but shoot at a guy and he'll get killed? Assuming you could even hit either."

"Pretty much. And I could. The problem lies in the software, which would require hacking. But I don't have any clues about how to go about that, especially since I would have to hack through the Systems Alliance's firewalls..." Emiya nodded.

They sat there in silence, as Emiya continued to stare at the guns with growing annoyance.

"So are you going to apply for some Infiltrator-related line? You seem pretty good at all this," she asked, nodding at the guns and at the forest around them.

Emiya blinked again, his line-of-thought about trying to re-calibrate the entire system from the ground up after frying some of the internal sensors getting cut short.

"Well... Something like that," he admitted.

General engineering did technically allow one to apply for Infiltrator training, but the parallels were so minor you would have to re-train yourself pretty much from the ground up afterward anyhow. He was simply going to Mars, nothing after that.

"You always seem so sure of yourself. I'm still not sure what I want. About anything, really," Shepard admitted quietly return, absently looking at the ground. "I mean, I'm only good with a gun and when I'm running around without enough time to think too much."

Emiya looked up, forgetting about the guns for a moment.

"And the only line that's not just the bottom-of-the-barrel, lick-the-dirt-off-my-shoes grunt marines that has that is the N-line Soldier, and I don't have the grades to get there." She sighed, shaking her head. "Well, maybe it would be fine to just spend a few years on some spaceship until I'm done with the enlistment contract, but I don't think I would really get anything out of it."

Emiya looked at her, hesitating for a moment at what to say.

He wanted to tell himself that he had nothing to say on the matter, yet somewhere in his gut, an opinion seemed to be clawing its way out nonetheless.

"N-line Soldier, huh?" He considered it.

She had the right attitude; she would have fit right in with some of the special forces guys he had run into in his life, as he had noted several times before. That bordering-on-sociopathic mania when in the thick of things—the wicked grin she would sport while bullets flew all around her and she had a gun in her hand—along with the complete lack of close friends or family outside the service.

But the N-line seemed to be more than just a wetworks hellhole he had feared she would get funneled into. They were idols, of a sort. Leaders and icons. The image of Shepard in the N7 pattern armor that he had seen in the propaganda reels ran through his mind for just a second.

"Y-yeah... It was a silly id—"

"I think you would do great," he said voicing his honest assessment, going back to putting back together the sniper rifle with the pistol attached to it.

He had something of an idea, that might just work.

"Really?" she asked, looking at him astonished.

He nodded, not bothering to look up. She would either believe him or she wouldn't; it wasn't his job to convince her. Neither said anything after that for several minutes, until Emiya had the botched-together sniper rifle ready again.

"Emiya, can I ask you for a favor? A really big one."

"Hmm?" He looked up at her. She seemed serious. Resolved, even. That was good, he thought. For some reason.

"I don't have the grades to get into the N-line. My written tests went... you know. But if I did well here... Now, if I—we did a lot of side objectives, I think I might be able to qualify for the N-line anyway."

Emiya considered her words, holding her tentative gaze for a long moment.

"...Let's get the car first and I'll see what we can do."

"You got it." She nodded at him, clenching her fist out of his sight. She didn't sound like she entirely believed him, thinking he was only reassuring her, the same way he had tried with Cassani.

He grunted, already thinking of just ignoring the request, only to get annoyed with himself for the thought, and then took a deep breath.

"But first, let's see if I can make this work."

She blinked. "You got it fixed?"

"Nope. But I'm gonna call tech support and see what they have to say about it," he answered with a growing smirk.

;

The next few chapters will be pretty different from the first few chapters. Rather than weeks and months passing between scenes, I've written out a rather detailed and close look on a single day(almost in the vein of say "Maybe I'm a Lion", which I rather like). I started out writing like this in my first fic, too.

Edit: Special thanks to PseudoSteak, Tisaku, Rakkis157 for proofreading.

18.10.2021 edit notes: worked to get the dialogue and actions slightly more in line with the personalities. Drop a review if you don't like it ˋ( ° ▽、° )