Man off the Moon

by FiendLurcher

A rusted hero let loose in a galaxy of myriad grays, walking the familiar steps and seeking answers beyond death at the end of that long, ever-winding road. (Currently editing ch22, took a break last month cuz of flu&brainfog)

7. A Shot in the Dark

Emiya jogged, keeping a good pace as he held the assault rifle in the low ready, scanning the surroundings using the drills he had been shown in the past month, even though he was more using his sense of hearing to maintain awareness.

But this was about plausibility again.

He was going through the motions of someone still figuring out how to use a long gun using the things he had been taught with the pistol, practicing with the safety, raising it to high ready, modifying his grip and posture, and aiming at various targets. He never pulled the trigger, maintaining some measure of stealth as he moved.

Because the firefight for the APC had escalated more than a little beyond what he had been hoping to portray. The first few shots he had taken had been normal enough, especially as he had lined them up with more than sufficient care. But everything after he was elevated above the treetops was so fantastic that it would no doubt be noticed.

So better to lay some grounding work; see, now I'm fumbling with the rifle using the muscle memory from basic training.

If they asked about it, along with his apparent familiarity with forests, he would say he had lived in the forest some time with an old rifle. He would have to figure out the biggest, most plausible forest to where he had signed up for the Navy at some point, though, because he had never caught a name for the city while still there.

Then again, a certain level of ignorance would better suit a street urchin...

Regardless, soon enough he found the solid purchase of old asphalt beneath his feet, as old buildings began to surround him. Though the ground beneath his feet was cracked and worn all over, the shelter the buildings had given it over the years kept the worst of the wear away.

Turning to skirt around the edges of the city, he made his way toward the water tower he could see in the distance. Along the way, he could see the building marked as their RV-location, marked on the rooftop for their pick up at 19:45.

He gave it a cursory scan as he moved, slowing down slightly to double his purpose here.

The surroundings looked undisturbed and unfortified, assuaging the worry that they would need to fight past an embattled enemy. But just because a building did not appear fortified did not always mean it was not garrisoned, as in these conditions the veil of anonymity would serve as even better protection than massed fortifications and kinetic barriers would. For all the broken windows and doors hanging wide open on rusted hinges, promising easy entry, he could foresee a dozen things going wrong if anyone was lying in wait inside.

They would have to make their final approach there with extreme care, he concluded and picked up his pace down empty back alleys again.

Three blocks later, a great hill revealed itself far in the distance. Upon its crest stood the water tower - a large concrete monstrosity that seemed to have been built by someone with either exceedingly poor taste, or at least a fetish for flying saucers.

After all, it looked like a UFO of 1950's popular culture on top of a stick.

Certainly, he could see that it had plenty of volume for storing water, but the design seemed unusual still. Well, perhaps there was a story there he wasn't aware of. In all other respects, it seemed like your perfectly average water tower. Maybe construction methodology had changed today, but it seemed to fit his knowledge of their workings fine.

Since building a hundred pumps for a hundred homes needing water was excessive and wasteful, the usual method was simply to find a suitably elevated location and to build a reservoir there. That way, you only needed one large pump to get all the water there and then let gravity handle the distribution to the hundred homes.

The pump would have to be larger and need a backup in case of breakdown, but overall it cut down on service and maintenance costs considerably. The larger your water network, the larger the reservoir had to be and the higher up it would have to be built. Since to distribute over a large area, you needed more water pressure. Which meant that for this city, which had been a buzzing metropolis at one time, the water tower needed to be absolutely huge.

Even at this distance, he could tell.

How old is this city, anyhow? It must have been abandoned for decades already, at the very least.

He had known of eccentric rich people buying old water towers and turning them into homes or novelty businesses, like restaurants or wall-climbing centers, but it did not seem like this one had received such treatment. He was still half a kilometer away, but already from here, he could judge that the water tower could have housed easily an entire platoon. And that was without even considering the top of the actual physical structure. Anyone on top of the tower would have an uncontested view over the entire city, barring a broken line of sight due to other buildings or foliage.

Hell, if he had been here in his normal capacity, the first thing he would have done was secure it for himself. Or perhaps second, after he familiarized himself with the city.

Emiya scanned his surroundings again as he eyed the radar in his HUD. So far it had not once warned him of anything, but it might still surprise him. Progress had been relatively quick so far, so he could take his time with scoping the water tower from a distance.

Choosing an abandoned house, he broke in and took to the stairs, looking for some elevation to work with. On the top floor, he found an old bedroom with a broken window that would serve as a secure vantage point. The doors and windows were all loud in their poor condition, the floor and stairs creaked with every step, ensuring anyone entering would make plenty of noise before they could find him. That, and he had found an old fire exit that would like break, but would suffice for an emergency exit strategy.

Outside of someone shelling or using explosives on the building from the outside, he should be safe.

Placing the assault rifle on his second Van der Waals-strip on his back, he reached over and took the sniper rifle. He would want the scope for this, more than the gun itself. He expanded the rifle and sat down on an old kitchen chair, straddling it backwards and using the back arch as support for his sniper rifle, well away from the window to ensure he remained in the shadows to anyone trying to look in.

He ticked up two magnifications on the scope, taking his first proper look at the water tower. Like everything else, at first glance, it seemed abandoned, but he still took the time to scan it properly.

A broken and rusted chain-link fence ran around the premise, with a notable lack of any tall trees or buildings inside the premise drawn. Waist-high grass had overgrown it all, hiding the ground entirely. An old ramshackle house stood at the base, presumably for maintenance, control purposes, or for housing the pumps at one time. No windows or markings anywhere on the tower itself and it had only one door at the bottom of the tower, otherwise entirely austere concrete from top to bottom.

He would have expected some trees to have sprung up after however long ago the city had been abandoned, but perhaps no seeds had been carried there by the winds. Still, what was already growing there would give him considerable cover and concealment once he got past the chain-link fence.

Sneaking in wouldn't be all that difficult, then. But the yard would probably be trapped or set up with sensors to detect intruders, assuming the structure was manned. Which only made sense to assume, given that a communications relay was supposedly set up there.

Emiya hunched down in the chair to move up the scope, checking the top of the water tower. He couldn't see anyone there, despite it overlooking the entire city. It was a perfect location for a sniper or a mortar team; giving them range and visibility over the entire theater of operations.

He frowned at the height and curvature of the tower's top. Due to the angle, he couldn't see the actual top of the tower, merely some of the edge of it. He tried looking for anything; a rifle sticking out over the top or perhaps some sensors or cameras. But he found nothing.

Then again, it would have also drawn hostility to the water tower if someone was up top.

It might endanger the relay if they were shooting at people and making themselves known. Thus, perhaps that was reserved as only a last defense measure, should the opposing force push too close. Assuming they had access to the inside from the top, or that men had been positioned there beforehand and were in contact through their comms.

Then again, why had there been a side mission objective for it anyhow? Telling them straight up where it was hidden? Had it been presented only to specific people? Did others know? Could they not reach it or did they know something that he didn't?

Emiya shook his head, returning his attention to the water tower.

Too many questions without answers would get him nowhere.

An old ladder—rusty and questionably usable—was visible on one side of the tower. It could be possible to get up top if he sneaked through the chain-link fence and the overgrown grass, but that represented such an easily booby-trapped route that he hesitated truly calling it his "in".

By the base of the water tower, there was the old and rusty entrance, apparently used at some point at least, judging by the blown open lock and the half-ajar door. Inside was probably a stairway, a ladder, or an elevator to the inside of the saucer-like top, though it was too dark to tell from here. He doubted that any elevator would still be functional, unless it had been repaired by an engineering team, anyhow.

Nonetheless, it represented a complete death zone for anyone attempting to break in, should anyone have chosen to garrison the tower.

Depending on how exactly the insides were designed, any number of fortified chokepoints could be set up to hold off all attackers in perpetuity - at least so long as munitions lasted. And if an attempt was made to push through forcefully, then suitably anemic grenades—so as not to break the concrete walls, as even a 15 kPa burst could damage and break the aged structure and cause a collapse—could be lobbed down freely at the attackers.

With no room to maneuver, trying to bust in through the front would be nigh-impossible.

Really, the only way he could think of safely taking out a structure like that was through a ranged explosive. A rocket-propelled grenade or a broken phantasm, for example. But he didn't have anything like the former and he was fairly certain he wasn't supposed to be blowing up buildings with Systems Alliance personnel potentially inside anyhow.

Or be revealing that I'm perfectly capable of blowing up buildings even without any equipment, for that matter, Emiya thought wryly.

Maybe Shepard could run down the tower with the car? No, even with the quick calculations in his head, he doubted the APC could damage the concrete enough to cause a collapse.

Hmm?

He noticed movement, his scope zeroing in immediately at something near the open doors at the base of the tower. A man, stood there with his omnitool activated. He swiped it left to right as if scanning the perimeter, looked up and gave a lazy glance, and then he went back inside.

Emiya followed the man unfailingly with the bead of the rifle but did not pull the trigger.

Taking out one man at this point would only alarm everyone else inside of his presence. Besides, the man had been wearing the heaviest armor he had seen so far. He estimated its weight in the excess of 50 kilograms; a true behemoth of heavy armor. There was no guarantee that this rifle would even be able to scratch it.

As far as he could see, he had three options.

One: Sneak up to the tower and climb up top with the rusted ladder and see if he could do anything there. Which leaves me vulnerable to traps and alone inside hostile territory.

Two: Try and force his way through the inside, picking off people on the inside slowly and carefully in a prolonged gunfight. Which will take time, and is extremely unlikely to pan out.

Three: Pull back. Honestly the best, and really, the only reasonable option here.

As an additional consideration, either of the first two options would necessitate abandoning their car and slash or getting Cassani to the RV first. Emiya sighed, raising his eye away from the scope as he eyed the water tower in the distance with his bare eyes.

This was merely a long-distance reconnaissance—a tentative and careful first look for initial estimations—and already it was looking bad.

And he was sure that the closer he got, the more would be revealed and the worse it would continue getting. Besides, did he even know if the relay was there beyond a mission objective stating so? Perhaps there was a simple decoy device inside, meant to simulate an ambush, and going inside was actually a trap meant to be detected and defused as the actual objective in terms of the simulation?

For all he knew this wargame was based on actual battles, with the objectives only being there to ensure certain kinds of behavior.

Or were some of the other squads fitted with dummy explosives and the real job was simply to get close enough to be able to bring down the tower like that?

He lacked entirely too much information right now.

I could pretend to be thinking; jump out of the body and take a look in my astral form. Five seconds. No one would notice...

Emiya shook his head, collapsing the sniper rifle and switching it with the assault rifle again as he got out of the chair. He had spent five minutes getting here and an additional three scoping the tower out. He still had time to relocate and try from another angle, if he really wanted to.

But he was already fairly certain that they wouldn't be able to accomplish this.

He pulled up his omnitool, hesitating for a moment as he pondered contacting Shepard to call it all off. Why was he hesitating, now? Why was he putting in so much effort for this? It didn't matter to him at all. The G-line accepted anyone who applied, as long as they weren't complete idiots. He already had all the necessary credit to apply.

It wasn't like they could refuse and send him to something less popular.

Then again, even if he did fail here, he would still probably be able to apply just fine. So it wasn't like him rolling the dice on something like this would really hurt his actual objective that much. Still, there was no reason for him to be bothering with all this. There was nothing to be gained from all this.

But he was putting in the effort and he was looking for a way to help her.

Emiya sighed, pulling up the list of side objectives on his omnitool and scrolled it down again. He looked through the various objectives available to him, trying to see if there was anything that he had missed. But while parts of it had changed, nothing else looked like it would be actually realistically doable for them.

'Take control of central point A4', 'close off node C5', 'capture bridge between sections db-1 and dc-6' and more like that. Those would all require manpower and firepower they didn't have. Even with their bigger guns and new ride, they were still horribly under-geared for direct conflict of this class.

This had been the simplest one available, but even as he had suggested it he had known there must have been a catch.

An easy fish would have been reeled in early, which meant that there had to be something strange with this objective. Perhaps it was too far from the main lines. Perhaps mission control had hidden it from everyone else. Perhaps everyone who had tried had already been summarily taken out.

It was impossible to tell. Emiya shook his head and returned to the ground floor. He would check the place out from one more angle and see if anything stood out.

He moved through the empty houses like a ghost, his eyes picking out spots on the ground without any rubble that would give him away as he ran. As he stepped, he moved with the heel first and rolled with his entire foot to minimize the sounds of his passing.

He stayed low, hugging walls and moving through cover and concealment whenever possible, jumping in and out through windows of houses to avoid being out in the open. Finally, as he had moved two hundred meters in two minutes he found another suitable apartment complex for an alternative vantage point.

The floor inside was dusty and covered in all sorts of rubbish. Dead and dried leaves, shards of glass, and pieces of the crumbled walls and ceiling littered every surface. He felt fairly certain that no one had disturbed this place in years, as aside from the highest floors and rooftop giving you a decent view of the water tower, he couldn't think of any tactical advantage it offered that one or another building adjacent to it did not offer better.

Still, he cleared the corridors and stairway one by one, moving to the rooftop at a quick pace. In the distance, the sounds of battle had resumed. There had been a lull starting an hour back but now it was in full swing again. The center of contention had moved further south, though, away from him and hopefully the rest of his team.

That would hopefully reduce their chances of being found again.

But hope wore thin quickly on the battlefield.

He found another broken window through which he could observe the water tower. From this side, he couldn't even see the ladder clearly, though the door would have only just been visible if the maintenance shed wasn't in the way. He switched the assault rifle out and expanded the sniper rifle to make use of the scope again, even as he ran through mentally his exits.

Outside the window is a fire escape, it's rusted but will let me get to either the roof or the floor below. The next room loops around through the kitchen, allowing me to get to the front door.

Emiya looked through the scope, resting the tip of the barrel on the window frame since there wasn't any suitable furniture to rest it on inside, taking a knee. It was a sub-optimal firing location, as were he to fire, his muzzle flash would immediately reveal him to anyone on the lookout. If he wanted to fire, he should pull back into the room to let it contain most of the flash and sound.

That would give him time for another shot or two before he had to relocate. But, he wasn't intending to shoot anything at this time, so really it didn't matter.

Stilling his breathing, the swaying of the scope disappeared. He adjusted the zoom to the max and scanned the water tower again, but found nothing new. Even at this higher elevation than the previous house, it wasn't enough to see to the top of the water tower.

What if the relay is on top of the water tower? Emiya suddenly considered. It would be hidden from view, it wouldn't be enclosed by walls around it that would weaken the signal, and if someone did break in it would act as a final layer of defense, since the intruders would still have to get all the way up to the roof to access it.

It made some sense, as a water tower generally had to be as high up as possible to deliver water to as many places as possible, with any taller structure wanting water needing its own separate pumps. The closest building of anywhere-near-comparable height was at least kilometers away, making it very difficult—if not impossible—to use as against the water tower.

By conventional wisdom, at least.

Those inside would be on the lookout for controlled detonations and parabolic mortars shot into the sky. Or perhaps smart, homing explosives of some kind. Hell, the artillery would do just fine, too, which suggested that they belonged to whichever faction was currently in control of the water tower's communications relay.

But where does this leave us...?

He sighed, collapsing the sniper rifle and putting it on his back again.

Moving away from the window, he sat against the wall, deep in thought. He brought out his omnitool and pulled up the map of the city and studied it closer. But no matter how he tried, the resolution simply was not sufficient for getting a closer look at the top of the water tower.

It merely looked like a smudge of gray, black, and white.

It would be a little bit too easy if the map itself showed the exact location of the relay. Emiya thought with a flare of amusement.

But still, the assumption that the relay was on the roof was quite an attractive one.

Getting inside was impossible: their paper-thin kinetic barriers couldn't handle any kind of concentrated fire, they had no grenades, had fewer guns besides, and a prolonged firefight was off the list anyhow due to the possibility of reinforcements coming in and taking them from behind. Perhaps if they had a few months to slowly case out the patterns of those inside and sneak bits and pieces of information through thorough surveillance... But no.

Their deadline for the rendezvous was fast approaching, mere hours away.

The only way they could get at it was if the relay was on the top of the water tower. If it was inside, then it was flat-out impossible to reach. But as long as he assumed it was on the roof, then he could perhaps improvise some—if not reasonable, then at least merely improbable—method for taking it out.

Emiya blinked, considering the map he had been sent again.

He closed it and changed to another program, trying the extranet connection. It worked: he had access to Rio de Janeiro's extranet hub. But that was simply a civilian resource. It wouldn't offer him any up-to-date intel, especially not on an abandoned city that was on lease to the military for live-fire exercises.

Besides, this city had been dead for decades by now. Who could possibly care enough about this place to have any kind of documents or footage, and specifically of the water tower? Well, perhaps some enthusiastic conspiracy theorists might have an interest in the place, but he doubted they would have the information he was looking for either—Or perhaps, he merely had to ask the right questions?

Making a thoughtful sound, he entered several search words and after a few attempts and changes, he actually found what he had wanted. Looking for a flying saucer water tower had helped him narrow down considerably the location and name for this city.

He smirked and then began to look around for archives and data dumps. This city must have still been around back then and judging by the architecture of the water tower it too must have been built back in those days. With some luck...

"Found it."

' TheRealTruth dot xtr: The biggest forum for Alien Truthers! The United States had contact with alien crafts in the early 2000s! Proof that the UN was led by the alien Illuminati in 2031! Videos evidence of the existence of mass effect technology on Earth before the Mars Discovery! Proof of parasitical lifeforms added to water supplies!'

Emiya nodded, this looked about right. It was just the right kind of paranoid site, where the right kinds of eccentrics would gather.

He scanned through the various hyperlinks and documents until he found something useful. One of the advantages of the extranet was that the capacity for information storage had grown exponentially. Thus, people with a tendency to hoard information and archive everything they thought strange could be found much more easily. And given sufficient incentive, people with too much time on their hands would accomplish miracles, given the sheer amount of information available to them.

Even during his day and age, he had sometimes used online hangouts, imageboards, and forums as analysis hot-spots and think-tanks during his downtime, though more often he left it to his companions. He was pretty sure he had run into more than one government agent shitposting with anime avatars during those days, too. His friend had used to mock them viciously online, making a game of spotting letter soup agents by their posting style and shallow anime or cartoon preferences.

Emiya shook his head at the memory, concentrating on his search.

He had never been the most tech-literate of people when it came to information technology, but at least he understood the basics. Hell, he had fixed more than one computer before he had turned eighteen. Another memory popped up; the face his second magic teacher had made when he had compared her jewel magic to hard disk drives in functionality. He laughed at the vivid memory of her expression, still clearly etched into his mind.

"So far so good."

'Archive of entire google earth map from the year 2084! Donation link below! Join me on—'

He ignored the rest of the text and opened up the data file. His omnitool complained about the format and he had to download a converter program, but soon enough he had the entire world's map as it had been available to every civilian with online access in the year 2084.

Including this city. He wasn't interested in road maps or anything like that, as he switched to real photograph composite maps.

He had to assume that the relay would be fairly big.

Perhaps it wouldn't have a big antenna dish as had been necessary during his time, but it still made more sense to assume that it was fairly sizable to be able to serve as a relay for all the communications of a whole faction. So similarly, there would have to be a suitable space for such a contraption there, along with access inside the water tower, for operation and maintenance of the relay.

So, he was looking for a wide, flat space and a hatch or door leading down into the water tower, rather than merely for the rounded UFO-doming to continue over the whole top.

Like in many major cities of the time, it was possible to zoom in a considerable amount, as well as switch between points-of-view from satellites to company cars with mounted cameras taking in the streetviews, and to most importantly, flying drone cameras.

He zoomed in, looking at the hill from all angles and then zooming in at the top of the tower as he found a good angle.

"It's there."

He smirked, zooming in as much as he could on the omnitool.

A tall lattice radio antenna looked to be bolted onto a section of flattened concrete on the very center of the dish-like rooftop, with what looked like a guardrail around it and a large access hatch. The domed tower top sloped down all around the rails, maintaining that strange flying saucer-like shape. The area on the roof sectioned by the safety rails was something like 3 meters times 3 meters, by his estimate - a much smaller area than he had previously assumed. Even if you had to fire blindly, hitting something there was entirely possible as long as you knew the exact angle.

Especially if...

The lattice antenna looked to be at least 20 meters tall in the old drone pictures, though it was difficult to accurately estimate it from the omnitool's screen without a good reference, like the hatch and the height of the rails for the area they covered. But, it should have been eminently visible over the top of the water tower, no doubt once equipped with a red light beacon just for airplanes as well.

But it wasn't there anymore.

Had it been removed at some point? The map was about a century out of date...

He closed the omnitool map and grabbed his sniper rifle again and returned to the window. The scope roamed the grounds around the water tower, poring over the thick swaying grass, looking for—There.

The rusted remains of a crooked lattice antenna, lying in the grass and slowly withering away. It has been removed and had fallen down over the edge, bending with the impact. But by whom, and when? Could it have been the Navy, wanting to securely install their communications relay and not have to worry about it being moved or falling due to winds or rain? It made sense - this exercise was a regular thing.

That would narrow it down considerably. Trying to hit something on the roof blind would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But in narrowing it down to just that section, it would be as if most of the stack had been removed leaving them with just a handful of hay to go through.

This was actually possible.

Still, this is all assuming it is on the roof of the water tower. It's a risk, but it's not a gamble. Even if there's nothing there, we won't incur any losses or penalties just by trying... Emiya thought, putting away the sniper rifle and pulling up the omnitool.

Time to comm the others.

"Shepard, come in."

"Right—here." The static was considerable.

"I might have something. Let's meet up in five," Emiya said as he made his way down the building again. He would have to find another place to shoot, as the angle here was all wrong. But first, he would have to join up with the others and share his findings.

The shot will probably require an arc. Even the tallest building in town won't be high enough for any straight line to be able to reach the top of the water tower, he realized. That would take some work, as well.

The comms remained quiet for a moment.

"That's... good! Still.. somewhere around the tower?" she asked and Emiya blinked, realizing that he had heard assault rifle fire through the comms, along with tires loudly screeching as if she had been drifting. "We're heading that way now, get out onto the streets and we'll pick you up!"

The signal quality was getting stronger by the second, he noted.

"...Okay, I'll be by the red apartment building, the one that's made of bricks." Emiya only hesitated for a moment before kicking off into a sprint down the stairwell.

"What's a brick? Never mind, I see it," Shepard replied and already Emiya could hear the sounds of an approaching car along with rapid gunfire.

Kicking open the door, he sighed as he went to crouch by the house corner in front of the street. Trust them to find trouble in the ten minutes he was gone.

The Mako came to a screeching halt in front of the entrance of the building and Emiya ran up to it, jumping inside in less than a second. Cassani had the rifle ready and was holding it backward and aiming with the side mirror as best he could while being strapped in on the front seat.

"Welcome back! You better strap in - roads pretty rough." Shepard greeted Emiya breathlessly, as if she had been laughing just now. She turned around and floored it, the sudden acceleration causing his back to get pushed all the way into the seat as he was about to reply.

"She's not kidding, man. Oh, yeah and we're being followed by two other cars, but she's honestly more likely to get us killed right now." Cassani helpfully offered, his one free hand holding onto the seatbelt in a death grip.

Emiya turned around, looking through the rear window as Shepard began to drive. She swerved a corner, the rear of the car hitting an old and rusted lamppost and snapping it in half with a loud screech.

"Whoops, that wasn't the brake."

Emiya frowned at her, considering whether he should take the wheel after all. He hadn't driven a vehicle like this before, but at least he had had a driver's license before, in another life sure. And several of them, in fact.

As if she had been reading his mind, she glanced at him and spoke.

"I'm starting to get the hang of this," she said cheerfully, completely oblivious to the stares of her two passengers.

"I can see that," Emiya noted dryly as he continued to peer at their rear. Finally, he caught a glance of someone chasing them. A large car; six-wheeled and white, just like theirs. "Same model as our APC, or do they have guns?"

"Same model, but they have a bunch of toys we don't," Shepard grunted as she vigorously turned the wheel to turn another corner, with more than a hint of annoyance.

"Like?"

"Oh, they can jump. Like, over entire cars," she said with a deliberately flippant tone that did nothing to hide her envy.

Emiya nodded at that, turning to look forward. "Probably something this car has too, but we just don't have access to."

"Huh, I knew I should have pressed that doc harder. Oh—" Shepard began to say, but as a second APC came screeching in from the left in front of them, she was forced to swerve and turn the car at full speed to avoid them.

Emiya saw it all in slow motion; the car cutting in from the right on the junction ahead of them; the widening of the eyes of the other driver as he realized they were about to crash head-on; the clenching of Shepard's knuckles over the wheel as she reacted by making the sharp turn.

"—weeell!" she called out, entirely too happily over Cassani's screaming.

The APC that had been coming at them went careening past, and Emiya was sure he saw the other driver panic and close his eyes in preparation for a head-on crash, pulling into a screeching halt past them as all the brakes were pulled; its six tires grinding against the pavement in protest to the sudden stop as he tried to minimize the impact of a direct collision.

She crashed into a building and drove all the way inside of it, its street-front had once been a glass terrace, perhaps for a coffee shop or a restaurant at one time. Now, it was nothing more than rubble and shards as their armored car plowed inside in a hail of debris and exploding glass.

Emiya held on, regretting not strapping in properly yet as he had almost slammed into the door at the sudden maneuver.

Thankfully though, Shepard's quick driving had spared them a direct collision. Or rather, a direct collision with the other car. They'd still driven right into a building.

She grinned, flooring the gas as she turned the wheel and burst out from the building again in another hail of crumbling plaster, glass, and wood fifteen meters ahead from the previous spot. The five tires screeched on contact with the pavement, kicking up pieces of crumbled road and other debris as the car shot forward.

Emiya looked back, realizing that Shepard's joyride had utterly destroyed the side of the building on the first floor. It was already sagging from before and he could see in slow motion how it was now starting to fall over and collapse onto the street.

He winced, turning to look forward. Hopefully, they won't get buried beneath all that.

"Where the hell did you learn to drive?!" Cassani shouted, holding on for his dear life as the glass and concrete washed off of their windshield.

"Behind the wheel, duh?" Shepard answered immediately and only Emiya could see Cassani's eyes bulge at that answer, as the man realized no one had taught her the first thing about vehicular safety.

Shepard's grin had not faltered one bit throughout all this. Taking another turn, the wheels struggled to find purchase on the pavement and for a moment they slid sideways until they hit another wall with a rough impact. Shepard didn't even seem to notice, slamming the gas again and shooting off at full speed down the new road.

Emiya held on to his seat, having learned from the earlier turn already, using the lull in excitement to reach out and open the rear window so he could try and take a few potshots at their next pursuers. Only to stop as he found the window had gotten stuck again, probably due to Shepard's rough driving.

He shook his head, grabbing a hold where could and giving the window another good kick. This time it only took two, but he almost got sent sprawling through it as the car hit a bump and he was lifted into the air for a moment with one leg dangling out through the open window.

The next car showed up, hot on their trail.

"Try and keep steady, I'm gonna take a few shots at them." Emiya half-shouted and Shepard threw him a thumbs up without bothering to look back.

He pulled free the sniper rifle and expanded it, judging the greater burst potential to be of better use here than the rapid-fire spray of weaker shots. They had been obviously ignoring Cassani's attempts at suppressing fire for a while now.

Setting the muzzle outside the window to keep it from deafening them all with its loud retorts, Emiya inhaled calmly and began to line up a shot. Finding a target as it pulled up behind them, he pulled the trigger.

—boom!

The rifle roared, the majority of the sound echoing thankfully outside the car, and was drowned by the roaring of the engines. A blue flash shimmered and deflected the shot, the APC that had been gaining on them only swerving a minute bit in surprise at the attack.

"Their shields are working - couldn't take out the wheels," he noted, though knowing that as long as he could get their shields out of play with a shot or two, he could still take out all their wheels just fine.

Though, the sniper rifle had felt a little weaker just now. Was its potency being reduced at these short ranges?

For a moment he wondered how this was supposed to work as a simulation anyway. He had managed to shoot through this Mako's shields with his sniper rifle before and put some physical damage to the vehicle, but now that wasn't working at all. Had the car been in some kind of low-power stealth mode in the jungle, or were the kinetic barriers just stronger on the front? And if he shot out a wheel on that car while it was in pursuit, it would surely swerve into a wall, so how would the mainframes and overseers judge the safety of any of this?

This seemed like another time where they were skirting the rules again. They were definitely wasting Alliance money by breaking materiel right now. There will probably be hell to pay once we get back...

Then again...

"Chief Thomas only said not to break this Mako."

Shepard, hearing that remark laughed merrily as she swerved again, the tires squealing loudly, their traction just enough for her to retain control of their movement. She's getting a hang of drifting. Joy. He had to push with one foot against the ceiling to keep from being jostled around overmuch as he held on.

Emiya considered the situation for a moment. What are they trying to accomplish? They are clearly not trying to shoot us, for whatever reason. Do they have some other means of making us stop without harming the APC?

"Shepard, do you think they're tracking us?" Emiya asked, shouting from where he was laying on the floor in the back of the APC.

"Huh?" Shepard shouted back over the roar of the engine as she gunned it again.

"Yeah! They seem to always know where we are!" Cassani jumped in, turning his head to look at Emiya.

"They keep finding us, even after I lost them for a while with some tricky driving earlier," Shepard agreed as she turned another corner and drove over what remained of an old fence, crushing it beneath their tires.

Emiya held on as he considered their options.

"Have they tried to shoot at you at all, or just tried to box you off into a dead-end or something? What have they been trying to do?" he asked, collapsing the sniper rifle, as it was just in the way.

Cassani blinked, looking at Shepard who was still paying attention to the road.

"They've just been following us. Told us to stop over the comms, but I just shut them out after it got repetitive," Shepard said.

"They're probably still mad about you shooting that guy you took hostage." Cassani chimed in with a shrug.

Emiya nodded, considering that. It still didn't make much sense. Not the part about them being mad, that made perfect sense. But what they were trying to do seemed somewhat contradictory.

"Oh, now I get it!" Shepard shouted, snapping her fingers at Cassani. Turning to look back hastily before looking forward again, she licked her lips. "The medic started up the car with his omnitool, it's why I didn't want him to turn it off. I saw it before with higher-end cars, back when... Well, it doesn't matter. Anyhow, they can turn off the car if they get close enough!"

Emiya blinked, processing that.

It must have been some kind of program that had to be activated in the near vicinity then, not some kind of continuous "shut down"-signal, since their pursuers had driven right past them when Shepard had driven into the building earlier. It must have been something they thought of once they realized the antenna had been ripped out.

Like a remote keyless system from his era that worked once the keys were anywhere inside the car, Emiya realized.

"How close do they need to be for it to work?" he asked.

Shepard shrugged, "I've no idea - I've just seen rich guys start their car before they sit down, so they can drive off right away. Should be pretty close, though? It would be hilarious if your car turned on and then drove off on its own without you if you touched the wrong button."

She laughed merrily at the idea, looking over her shoulder for any pursuers again.

That seemed a little bit too lucky for Emiya's tastes. They had disabled the systems he had found with a quick readthrough of the physical manual, but realizing that there could be countless other methods was always annoying. Perhaps there was some reason for the cyberdefenses being so particular. Whatever it is, I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Okay, so now we know what they want. How do we use that?

"Cassani, can you hack them? Or do anything to distract them, like what you did to my omnitool?"

"You knew—? I mean, that was all Rodriguez's idea! I just—"

"Don't care, focus. Can you do anything to them?" Emiya waved his hand and Franco calmed down after a second.

"Uh, no. We just kind of messed around with some scripts and the basic functions of your omnitool through the shared controls settings of the chats. The APCs are a completely different story. Like, you have to be pretty much inside of them to use your omnitool to connect to it—probably the reason why they're having trouble, too. I don't even know where to start with something like this, anyhow." Cassani said and as he slowly rambled, adopting a more thoughtful look as he went on.

Emiya let him, turning around to scan their rear as Shepard continued with her reckless driving. Their tail was gone again, for now. Which must mean they're looking at the maps and looking to cut us off ahead.

"Shepard, they're coming up ahead. Change direction."

"Right-o!" she shouted and Cassani's eyes shot wide as he grasped for anything to hold onto as she suddenly pulled a 90-degree turn at full speed again. The wheels screeched and their tail-end busted an old park bench, but they didn't slow down much at all despite the violent turn.

The bench, however, was sent flying through the air, embedding itself into a wall some ten meters away with a violent crash.

"God daaaaamn! Fuck!" Cassani cursed unable to stabilize himself with his legs, as he was at the mercy of Shepard's driving in an entirely different way than Emiya was. The man in the passenger seat breathed heavily, before inhaling deeply and collecting himself. "Yeah, no. It's no good. Sorry."

"It's fine. On to the next topic. Here's some stuff I found." Emiya said with a nod, transferring the maps and technical manuals he had while he had been away.

"Uh... What's all this for?" Cassani asked and even Shepard glanced sideways at them curiously.

"We have to assume that the communications relay is set up on the top of the water tower. If it's inside, we can't do anything about it. But it's not only possible for it to have been hauled all the way up there - it's also very likely, since it's the highest point in the city, ensuring optimal signal coverage and strength," Emiya explained.

Shepard perked up at the mention of the relay, dividing her attention between Emiya and her driving.

"Uh... okay?" Cassani asked, hesitantly. "So what's with the 'Avenger II User's Technical Manual and Specifications v3.501' file?"

"That's for the sniper rifle I have. It has the aim assist and correction calculations formula and range specs along with how to access the advanced settings." Emiya continued, pointing at a page he had pulled up himself. "It says that the effective firing range is two kilometers, but that's only because after that the bullet drop is so big that the automatic adjustment can't compensate for needing to aim so high."

"Sure...?" Cassani agreed, checking the page himself.

"But that means if you actually fire considerably above a faraway target, the bullet could still hit as it arcs through the air," Emiya said, using his finger to demonstrate the arc. Like an arrow, you aim above and the arrow drops onto the target at an angle, rather than in a straight line from the archer.

Cassani furrowed his brows at Emiya

"So if there is something on top of the water tower—even if we can't see it—we can still shoot with that curvature," Emiya finished. He raised his hand up and down, as if to show the vertical plane involved as his other hand drew an arc. "As long as those numbers are crunched and fed into the computer, it should be a possible shot."

I could pull off that shot, after all, Emiya thought with confidence.

Even with the target obscured, with what he knew, he could still pull off the shot. With bow or with any sufficiently powerful gun, though adjusting the amount of grain in the bullet would have been tricky, requiring more calculations. But with the built-in computers on their guns, this should be a much easier matter to get right. They shouldn't even need to break out a scale and manually load the bullet.

Shepard turned around, taking her eyes entirely off the road as she grinned at Emiya; a vicious and gleeful look of excitement plain to see.

Cassani, on the other hand, was frowning at the files, going through them with care.

"It's possible. But even if you get it right, you wouldn't know where to shoot horizontally, so why—" He moved his hand left and right, before blinking. "Right, but we could just sweep it degree by degree. If something is there, we would hit it sooner or later. But it's still a pretty wide area—oh, right if it's just this smaller area, where the antenna was, then..."

Cassani seemed to be taken in by the idea before he frowned. "Wait, you want me to do those calculations?"

Emiya nodded with a smirk. One of the perks of authority was delegating duties. Cassani licked his lips, hesitating.

"I-I wouldn't even know where to start, I mean..."

"It's all right there. Start with the broad strokes and don't get bogged down in details. Solve it one problem at a time, without thinking whether it's even possible - simply do it," Emiya spoke, slowly and quietly. Yet both of his teammates in the front seemed to naturally absorb those words. "Start with finding us a tall enough building. That should be easy."

"Right. Right."

Shepard looked up, using the rear-view mirror to stare at Emiya for a long moment, before she realized with a jerk of the wheel that she needed to continue looking forward if she wished to drive without crashing into things. Behind them, their pursuer appeared again.

"That's my cue," Emiya said, reaching over and expanding the sniper rifle again. But after three shots, as the kinetic barriers were looking ready to collapse, the APC pulled away to recover.

They're getting more confident again, Emiya thought as he collapsed the rifle. Well, they would have to hurry anyway as they had less than an hour left until they needed to be at the RV. For now, they needed to lose their tails.

"Hold on," Shepard said, with the casual tone of voice one might use when noting it was about to start raining.

Emiya blinked, only having a moment to react before suddenly the entire car was in the air. He realized a second later that she had just driven over a fence and gotten considerable airtime out of the makeshift ramp. Just enough to mostly clear a small park.

Mostly, as in the squealing of bent metal beneath their car still heralded their landing. Must have been another bench or fence.

"Whoops," she muttered, gripping the wheel as the car shook.

Emiya looked back, spotting the second car hitting their brakes instead of trying to make the jump themselves. They backed off, tires squealing on asphalt as they turned to go drive around it.

"Heh, chicken."

Emiya turned to raise an eyebrow at Shepard, then. "Just curious, but mind telling me how many times you've had to drive away from the police?"

"Hah, not telling." She grinned as she performed a sharp turn and clipped a half-rotten telephone pole in the process. Behind them it crashed down, pulling with it the remains of dead electrical wires to half-block the route their pursuer would come from, as they sped away.

Emiya shook his head, putting away the rifle. He had thought he would need to come up with an elaborate escape plan to buy them time, figuring he could shoot something to make it collapse on top of their pursuers. But it seemed she had it well in hand.

Now if only she would stop cackling.

---

;

---

"We've got thirty-five minutes," Emiya said as he jumped back into the APC.

This time, he opted for the front seat, though he would probably have to jump into the back again if their pursuers came too close for comfort.

"Franco good?" Shepard asked before gunning it. She had stopped here earlier just long enough for Emiya and Cassani to get out and then came rolling around to pick Emiya up as she made the circuit. The calculations Cassani was handling weren't anywhere near done, but he could continue with those near the RV anyhow. Keeping a 'crippled' man with them would only slow them down if they had to ditch the car and run.

Emiya nodded and she grinned, rounding another corner as behind them the following APC began to catch up again. They must have noticed that Emiya had jumped off earlier, which would have raised some flags in their pursuers' minds.

Hopefully, the hiding place is good enough to last, in fact, they might even think we're both still there. Emiya thought as he expanded the sniper rifle again. If their pursuers had men in reserve, it would make sense for them to investigate what Emiya and Cassani had done, but if their interest lay solely in the APC, then perhaps they wouldn't diverting their attention. At least for half an hour. There's too much ground to cover and they can't have any teams ready nearby given how wildly Shepard has been driving all over this sector.

"Alright, let's gun it and see if we can't get it done," Emiya said as he eyed their rear and front, turning his head to keep track of both as best he could. Shepard nodded and made another turn.

"Take a left here, we need to get to this building." Emiya transferred the map location to her omnitool

"Huh? I can't read that thing while driving," she complained.

"Fine. See that building over there?" He said, pointing out to the west.

Shepard leaned forward, peering through the window as she looked at what Emiya was pointing.

"That big-ass building?" She asked, blinking as she looked at how far up it seemed to rise even at a distance.

"Exactly that one."

"Can do!" She grinned and she made a sudden turn into an alley. A rusted fence gave way beneath the massive car as she forced her way over it.

Behind them, their pursuers shot past the alley as they had been closing in at the straight road.

"On our six again," Emiya called out.

Shepard only changed gears as their car bounced around and crushed something beneath its massive wheels that looked like a rusted trash can. Not simply content with taking one crazy turn, she immediately took another, causing the Mako to drive over another fence and an overgrown bush into something that looked like an old playground.

The second for the day, Emiya noted coolly, holding onto the rails to keep from bouncing around inside the car.

The wheels kicked up gravel and dust as she accelerated enough to build speed for the overgrown hedge on the other side, where the sun shined enough to let it grow without restraint. He raised an eyebrow, throwing aside the sniper rifle as he grabbed onto something with both hands as the entire car bounced over the hedge as if it had been a ramp. Again.

For a moment they were in the air, and then they were in freefall, followed by a mighty impact and bounce as the car landed on a park bench. She turned the wheel so hard as she made another turn that Emiya swore he could feel two of the wheels come off the ground as they tilted to the side.

She had managed to switch roads, forcing their pursuers to stop again. They would have to back up and find a way onto this road as the one they had been on previously lead to the center of the city while this one went on straight.

He glanced at Shepard, who seemed to be grinning as widely as humanly possible as she continued to work the wheel and pedals, changing gears rapidly as she drove recklessly towards their destination.

Feeling his stare, her grin only seemed to grow wider. She's enjoying this, alright.

"Cassani, come in. Give me an update," Emiya spoke, raising his omnitool as he held on with the other hand, sniper rifle now between his legs.

A second passed and then the quiet voice responded from the other end.

"Still working on it. No one seems to be around here looking for me, but I can't really see from here so who knows. Give me fifteen more minutes and I'll have something more hammered out, uh, out."

"Keep at it and call in once you have something, out," Emiya said and closed off the comm. He looked at the time. They had made it this far in two minutes and would be there in another three and a half, he guessed. After that, they would have fifteen minutes at most for shooting and then they would have to start legging it back to the RV to make it for their shuttle.

Especially since they would probably have to go back on foot. Of course, it would be faster if they had a car, but he knew that was too optimistic to plan around. They would have to ditch the Mako once they got there and there was little chance of getting it back after that.

Shepard leaned forward, peering through the dusty and dirty window. The Mako would need a good wash after all this was done, among other things.

While he was somehow hoping to avoid being held responsible for all the vehicular damage he had indirectly and directly wrought, it also remained a distinct chance to get a closer look at the inner workings of a Mako in a more sedate environment.

If he was told to fix what he had broken, he could even ask for an electronic manual for it. He figured if they made him work on repairing it, he would have all the cause in the world for getting his hands on all the specs and details. Those systems they hadn't unlocked seemed particularly interesting and worthy of some study, if only he had the time to spare.

Well, that was just a possibility for the future, not something he should be thinking about right now.

"Shepard. That's a house," Emiya noted.

Shepard hummed at that, not bothering to answer.

"Shepard—" Emiya repeated, but then had to hold on with both hands again as she only stepped on the gas and accelerated.

They blew right through the small two-floor wooden once-upon-a-time-home that exploded into bits of rotten wood and plaster, as she cruised on through.

"Hah, knew it. Cardboard house."

Emiya turned to look at her, before thinking better of complaining. She would only take it as encouragement.

"Heads up, new contact 4 o'clock," Emiya noted as he noticed the approaching car. As expected, with their location being known, even taking a shortcut through concealment wouldn't be enough for them to disappear. And it appeared more personnel had come to find them, which promised nothing good.

"New? There's three of them now?" Shepard frowned, before shaking her head.

"Yeah, the two cars from before coming in from 8 and 10. They're boxing us in."

"Shit, there's another one coming at us from behind, too." Shepard cursed, looking at the rear-view mirror and noting someone had been determined enough to follow in her tracks after all. "Good thing we're there. Four would be a little bit tough to keep running from."

"Just a little?" Emiya asked, with amusement plain in his voice. Shepard shrugged with a grin as if stating that she stood by her words.

She frowned, eyeing their destination ahead. She turned around to look at him and then said, "This is going to get rough, so hold on."

Emiya collapsed the sniper rifle and put it back on his back as he jumped to sit down and get himself secured. He wasn't sure what she was planning, but given her usual driving and the fact that she had thought to even warn this time, he was sure it would be really something.

She slammed down the pedal to the metal, downshifting at the same time, and the feeling of sudden acceleration was undeniable as suddenly his back was glued to the seat. The engine roared, the RPM rising as the velocity increased and the torque it needed to exert on the ground evened out. The car continued to accelerate, reaching higher and higher speeds until it capped out in the highest gear. Then, she took a small turn left followed by a sharp right as she slammed all the brakes. In effect, the car was suddenly skidding sideways towards their destination in a complete drift.

She really was practicing drifting the whole time, wasn't she! Emiya realized with a start as he held on.

The building looked like an old high-rise hotel; the fancy double doors and with even the lowest windows way above head height, it would have intimidated and impressed most anyone who had never stayed at such a place before. Even the passage of time hadn't robbed the entrance of that.

Too bad Shepard didn't care one whit - she just wanted to ram the car right through those doors.

The impact with the double doors was like a thunder-strike from clear skies. The two-ton APC rammed itself halfway through the door, causing it to be embedded into the building as the entire front of the building shook. At least one nearby window shattered from the impact.

Emiya shook his head, getting his bearings.

His right ear was ringing slightly, but he ignored it. They had slowed down considerably with the drift and the armor had held up against the impact: he should be fine. Additionally, the 360-degree impact suspension system he had read about seemed to have worked just fine, too. Marvelous engineering.

"What a terrific all-terrain vehicle..." Emiya muttered, getting his belt off and trying the door and found it jammed from the crash against the wall. He guessed at a glance that pulling out the car would require several hours of work and tools no one in the city would presently have.

Well, not that he wanted to open the door anyhow as it led to the outside. They wanted in. But at least this would mean no one on the outside should be able to open it either.

"Yeah, I want one of these," Shepard answered a second later as she shook her head as well. "Everything okay?"

"Fine. Door's jammed, try your window."

Shepard reached over and put a finger onto the automatic window roller. It went down without any problems, causing her to make a noise of pleased surprise even as dust came loose and got into her nose as a result. She sneezed twice, getting her seatbelts off. Getting herself free, she jumped out through the window and rolled onto the floor inside.

Emiya followed suit a second later as she had taken a knee and drawn her assault rifle to scan the perimeter of the hotel lobby. She was having some trouble holding it, trying to support it like a long pistol with both hands, moving the stock back to her shoulder, and trying to find a comfortable position to hold it in.

"We're inside." She sounded almost surprised that her maneuver had worked.

Emiya wisely chose to ignore that as he dusted himself off. He looked around, finding the inside just as empty as every other building around here.

"Right, and with this, the front entrance is mostly blocked. Unless they can open the windows and crawl through, this way is blocked." Emiya said, looking around. "Let's get up top."

Shepard nodded, taking point as she ran forward. They didn't have time to clear the building safely, as those four APCs outside would not simply disappear. Time was of the essence, so they simply ran. He reached over his shoulder and grabbed his assault rifle, following her five strides behind as she headed for the stairway.

Being a part of the inner city, this building had been relatively sheltered from the elements and encroaching jungle. Thus, it remained in mostly recognizable condition. The stairways were a bleak and miserable thing, as the building had used to run mostly on elevators, leaving the stairs as an emergency fire exit for the most part. That was normal; few people wanted to go up and down dozens of floors by stairs every day.

Emiya's eyes scanned doorways and offices through broken and battered doors as they continued ascending, one floor at a time.

It was still well-lit outside, even as the sun had begun to slowly dip. But inside, where no window let the natural light through and the electrical systems had long since deteriorated away, it was pitch-black.

They ran in the lights of their omnitools, panting as they made up floor after floor. Somewhere along the way, she noticed how he was carrying the assault rifle, stealing glances and adapting to her own gun. He pretended not to notice as he kept silent count of floors, and they made it all the way to the 35th floor before Shepard began to slow down. By the 40th, both had to slow down and they stopped to rest and drink.

Quietly, they listened and stared down the stairway, trying to see if anyone was making pursuit in their tracks.

"How tall is this place?" Shepard asked as she began to get up again, whispering quietly as they rested without their omnitools' lights.

"45 floors, on paper. In practice, the rooftop is at about where a 60th floor would be on most other buildings." Emiya answered, equally quietly.

"That's pretty high up."

"...It is. You can usually see pretty far away from that high, depending on the weather," Emiya said. He had never been particularly afraid or enthusiastic about heights, but as a magus, there was a certain strength in being able to handle them.

He had often relied on superior vantage points before too, especially given how he preferred to fight.

"You've been to the top of one before?" Shepard asked, raising her voice as her curiosity and surprise took over. She had only ever seen them from the distance; those structures sparkling on the horizon. They had never been a part of her world. Not until now.

Emiya blinked, realizing it might not fit his cover story as an urchin to have visited such a place after all. He frowned, thankful that the darkness concealed his face and gave him an additional second of time to think.

But hadn't he been doing that for a while now?

Revealing things that didn't fit who he was? As a team of fresh E6's, they should have simply been desperately running away, yet he had done quite a bit more. It started with the sniper; his decision to push more instinctive than anything else during that encounter.

But since that point, he had simply gone with the old flow. He had felt like he had gone back in time, back to those days before everything weighing him down. Before he had struck a bargain with an omniscient alien quantum-supercomputer in the sky. But gone was the desperate tension and struggle; leaving behind only the exhilaration and excitement.

"...Yeah. Security tended to be pretty tough," he finally said, composing himself.

Why was he putting in all this effort? Even more so making it seem like wasn't something more than he was. It was entirely unnecessary for the mission he had been given. But this had never been about some mission, had it? Not this... This thing he had allowed to grow, between himself and Shepard.

This friendship.

"Hah, I can imagine. I can't wait to see it," she said, obviously excited.

He felt an urge to correct her that they wouldn't be going on the roof, as shooting from one of the top floors would be enough and would give more concealment and plausible hiding spots from a search party. He hadn't gone on the roof on either of the two other buildings when he had staked out the water tower, either...

But he hesitated. It wasn't like the other forces had air superiority and there wasn't anything really to be lost by going all the way to the roof, either.

Emiya got up, shaking his head. "Let's keep going. We've rested long enough."

"Yeah, lead the way, Emiya," she cheerfully replied, getting up and turning on her omnitool's light at a much lower radiance than before as she moved to follow after him.

"And remember to keep one eye closed even when we get outside," Emiya noted.

"For dark vision, right? You got it." Even in the dark, her grin seemed impossible to miss.

---

;

---

"Whoa..." Shepard dropped her rifle to her side, her arms hanging limp as she gasped.

A strong wind blew, messing up her hair and blowing it in her face, forcing her to close her eyes as she braced for support. But as she opened her eyes again, her expression of wonder and amazement had only doubled.

It's fine, Emiya thought as he walked out after her, looking back down through the stairs they had walked up. He looked around, taking in all that they were surrounded by. On the roof, there were old air conditioning units, electrical transformer boxes, a relatively large water tank along with the small access-way to the top floor they had used to come up through.

Yeah, it's fine. The stairs present a better defensible point than one of the rooms on the top floor would anyhow, he told himself as he inhaled.

"You haven't even seen the view yet. Go closer to the edge so you can see down. Be careful you don't fall, though," Emiya snarked as he walked past the still form of Shepard. She blinked, realizing she could only see the horizon past the edge of the roof from where she stood still.

If she got closer, she could see the entire city around them - see everywhere they had tread this whole day far below her, stretching out yet so small it could fit into the palm of her hand.

She ran up to the edge, getting lower as she got closer until she was almost crawling as she made it to the edge. On all fours, to keep her low enough that a sudden wind wouldn't knock her over and to keep from leaning too far over the edge, she looked down.

"Whooaaa... It's so far down..." she whispered as she peered down at the three APCs parked outside the building. For a moment, she considered spitting down but then thought better of it. She crawled back away from the edge, breathing in deeply through her nose and mouth to smell and taste the air.

She smacked her tongue, as if tasting the air and finding it slightly odd.

"Yeah, it's a little bit different," Emiya said. It had taken them three minutes to get to the roof, a rather impressive time all things considered. They still had some time, but honestly, the schedule was beginning to grow a bit tight.

Yet he didn't have the heart to tell Shepard that she needed to get focused again. The expression on her face as she stared around them, drinking in the sights near and far, measuring the jungles and mountains with her palms and fingers as a reference, reaching out upwards to the setting sun as if she could grasp it...

Somehow he felt it would be improper to break her out of this moment.

Instead, he began to set up the sniper rifle. It didn't come with a bipod, so instead, he used an old pipe to support the bottom of the barrel as he began to settle down. He didn't go right to the edge of the building, rather he set up about five meters away from it. It gave him a perfect view of the water tower ahead, without leaving him at the mercy of the winds swirling upwards near the edge.

He inhaled slowly, eyeing his far-off target.

Even from here, it was impossible to see the rooftop, thus this too remained a blind shot. He considered using magical energy to Reinforce his eyes; it would be a minute thing, hardly more than a blip of body temperature on the records...

But no.

That was the line he had drawn. He admitted that this had been fun. He admitted that he enjoyed working together with someone again like this. He admitted that he might have been letting loose within the limits of human ability. But that was all. He might have given it his all when it came to planning ahead.

But he would not use magecraft.

That was a step too far, crossing the line.

He exhaled, even slower. His heartbeat already calmed down considerably from the run up the stairs. His hands were shaking a little bit from all the exertion, but it would pass in another ten seconds as he focused his breathing. Though nominally the aim assist program would handle any and all corrections necessary at a distance like this, it was an old habit to calm down. And it would still help.

The more stable the platform, the better the shot.

"...Do you think it's really there?" Shepard asked, walking up to and kneeling beside him.

"Only one way to find out."

She didn't say anything to that, simply standing by silently as he continued to try and find the optimal position to fire from. The problem was the lack of bipod support and the slightly different weight of the sniper rifle compared to what he had used before.

It wouldn't be as stable, he knew. Usually, the mass effect field generator inside would compensate by making the weapon heavier at the moment of firing to let the increased mass absorb the worst of the recoil. But he suspected that Cassani would draw upon the energy used for that stabilization to power up the shot, since he needed all the juice he could get.

They were a long way off from the water tower, after all.

He wasn't sure how the modified sniper rifle would behave when he fired it, and he needed it to be as stable as possible. He would only be really pulling the trigger, mostly just keeping it stable as the program Cassani was working on would fire each and every shot based on the calculations and script he wrote.

Emiya's job was to keep the sniper rifle from moving, to ensure that the spread would cover the entire width of the water tower's top. Not the entire top, of course, only the spot where the lattice antenna had once been on the flattened area near the access hatch. That was what they had agreed upon and if it did not work, then it couldn't be helped.

Yet still, Shepard seemed hesitant. She had asked him to do this, hoping it would be enough to let her apply for the N-line.

Yet if this failed—or even in the case of success—and they came late to the RV, it would backfire on him more than her, or so she thought. If she did not get into the special forces, all that reasonably remained to her were the marines who took anyone who was willing to join and could keep up. And as was before, she had been headed for that place anyhow.

But he had performed above the mean across the board. He could apply for anything now, as long as they got to the RV in time. She wondered what he was thinking about, having accepted her request even as time continued to run short.

Then again, even in her wildest dreams, she would never have considered that Emiya was planning to head to Mars.

"Six more minutes and then we leave," Emiya announced, looking at his omnitool.

"Yeah. Got it," Shepard replied.

His tone hadn't been apologetic or pitying. Merely a statement of fact. And she hadn't let her trepidation color her own voice either. Even if nothing came of this, she would always remember that he had been willing to go out of his way for her.

"You should go back to the stairs," Emiya said, turning to look up at her.

"Huh?" She blinked.

"Here, take this, too." Emiya took his assault rifle and hand it to her and she received it with a nod.

"You think they'll follow us all the way up here?" she asked, turning serious.

"We certainly did aggravate them enough to warrant that, yes. The stairs should be a good choke point. Keep it and we can stay here for as long as we want to," he said, nodding to her.

She nodded. "Right, I'll give them hell."

With that, she jogged to the stairway and took position, going prone herself as well. With the low penetrative power of mass accelerator weapons, especially now in their dialed down settings, she could rely on the thick concrete beneath her to offer cover for a while at least.

Emiya took another deep breath, centering himself again in silence.

He exhaled fully, until his natural respiratory pause between the exhale and inhale came and there he centered the scope's aim on the water tower. With the aim centered, he could even close his eyes and get the shot roughly right if it came to it. Now it all came down to whether or not Cassani would pull through.

A minute passed, with only the wind to keep them company.

Another minute passed and slowly Emiya could feel that Shepard was beginning to grow anxious. She kept looking his way, her index finger tapping the side of the rifle.

Five minutes passed and Emiya sighed.

He had given himself limitations which he refused to budge on. If it wasn't meant to be then it couldn't be helped. Already, they had accomplished a fair bit. Who knew, perhaps she would have what it takes to get to the special forces as it was.

"...One more minute, yeah?" Shepard asked. There was a tone of pleading to it. Not quite asking him to extend the timeline; she understood that one well enough. Rather, she was hoping for Cassani to make it in time. She probably wanted to comm him and ask him what was taking so long, yet knew that it would only be a bother.

"Yeah," Emiya answered after a moment.

Forty seconds left.

Finally. Something happened.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

"Contact stairs!" Shepard reported and a second later the sound of rapid gunfire followed. It started out as a lone assault rifle, but soon a shotgun echoed alongside it and then there were three other guns until it was nothing but a cacophony of conflict and ricocheting bullets.

"How many?" Emiya asked, not getting up. Shepard would block the lone way onto the roof; the choke point was a good enough defensible location for her to handle alone. He had his own role to play and leaving it to go support Shepard would only anger her, he knew.

But he still needed to know, as they would also have to fight their way down from the roof.

"I got one good: he's down at the bottom of the stairs. Saw another three, I think. I can hold them pinned. I got this!" She sounded confident, projecting the thought that she didn't need any help, that he should just stay right there with each word.

He smirked, how little did she think he trusted her?

"Got it."

Emiya waited, ignoring the fight behind him as he stared at the water tower in the distance through the scope. The sound of gunfire waxed and waned until a grenade went off somewhere behind him.

"No problem! It's under control!" Shepard shouted at him so loudly he could hear it in stereo through both the comms and from the distance.

He inhaled slowly. Thirty seconds left—

"Emiya! I got it! Sending it now!" Cassani shouted and a second later the updated firing algorithms pinged into his omnitool.

His fingers danced, updating the sniper rifle's aim to function as they needed.

"Chief, by now you should know what we're doing, so if I'm about to shoot someone on the rooftop over there, you better be pulling the plug now," Emiya said as he worked, hoping that the Gunnery Chief was listening.

It took an agonizing three seconds for the program to finish downloading and the rifle to reboot with the new operative parameters. Emiya exhaled, riding his breath down until the respiratory pause, centering the sight again exactly where he'd left it.

He pulled the trigger—

—BOOOMM!

The roar of the sniper rifle drowned out everything they had heard until now, and for a moment he could hear that the firefight in the stairs came to a complete halt, as all parties involved stopped to listen to the sound. After all, a big gun had just gone off. Everyone wanted to make sure they hadn't suddenly received an unexpected and superfluous ventilation hole.

As they realized none of them had been hit, they slowly continued to resume their fighting.

Emiya inhaled, keeping himself steady as the sniper rifle cycled. Or rather, as it loudly beeped in the middle of venting its overheated heatsink. The cooldown was extended to a full five seconds due to all the various changes to the firing algorithms.

He eyed through them as he waited, the script up display on his omnitool.

For starters, the shaving size had been increased tenfold in size to raise the bullet's weight and momentum.

Smart. It made the bullet heavier, which did make it require more energy to propel, but gave them an arc. If they kept the normal shaving size, the smaller bullet would be much easier to propel initially, but that greater initial velocity would also flatten out the bullet's trajectory and make it fly further. But there did not exist a straight path from here to the water tower's rooftop.

He needed an arc.

So the heavier bullet wouldn't fly as far and thus had to be aimed higher, giving its path the vital curvature for it to round over the edge and drop down on the communications relay.

Of course, they could have simply powered down the railgun so that the maximum range shortened with the smaller bullet, giving them the same arc. But that would affect the penetrative power of the bullet. If it did hit something with that lighter round, it might just bounce off, as the lighter bullet would continually shed more energy to air resistance with every passing meter, starting to wobble and lose the coherence of its supposed flight path which also made it deviate more and more.

So it might not even hit.

Thus to have enough power to make a difference on the target, and to fight back against air resistance, it had to be a heavier bullet. Which forced everything else to scale up as well. To propel the bigger bullet, they then had to increase the charge of the railgun.

Which meant a massive drain on the batteries.

But the gun only had so much to give. Usually, a lot of it was used to dampen the recoil by raising the gun's mass at the moment of firing. It didn't feel heavier, because it was only heavier for the moment of the kick, ensuring that the muzzle would not rise too much and that it remained controllable in its user's hands.

Cassani had obviously taken as much as he could from this function, since the rifle had kicked like a mule.

If Emiya hadn't learned the proper form for firing massive anti-materiel rifles before, where you lined your body up directly behind the gun, aligning the bones so that they stacked safely, the sniper rifle might have just gone flying out of his hands. As it was, it had pushed him back a few centimeters along the ground, forcing him to adjust the aim back to where it should be for the aiming algorithm to continue working properly.

Even so, it was an immense drain on the battery.

The HUD was already beeping at him that there was only enough juice left for six more shots at this rate. It would be enough to cover the entire width of the highlighted section of rooftop on the water tower, Cassani had calculated.

Except for one mistake, Emiya noticed as he paused his inhale, holding the breath lightly.

He forgot to adjust for the Coriolis effect - the air pressure, temperature and angle calculations are all on point, he noted as he read through the scripted file through his omnitool, while waiting for the cooldown to complete. The shots are a little bit too much to the left due to not accounting for the spin of the planet, which means if the relay was pushed all the way to the right on the rooftop, it will be not be hit even if I fire all seven shots, the last couple of inches left unchecked...

Not that he would have known how to account for it or had the time to send it back; he could only read the script and glean at the workings Cassani had wrought from some of the numbers.

He had to roll the dice, that's all there was to it.

If I use the pistol's battery, I can get one additional shot. The thought came unbidden. He resisted the urge to shake his head, returning his attention to his breathing cycle.

Emiya began to exhale slowly, seeking to return to the respiratory pause at the very bottom of his lungs.

There were many ways to breathe when shooting different weapons, but he had found that certain methods worked best for him. The ironic thing was, that for his various long-range weapons he had had to learn wildly different breathing methods.

In many forms of ancient breathing techniques, the belly breath's virtues had been oft-praised and extolled to the high heavens. Thus too it was the yumi-bow in kyudo, it was taught that breathing with your chest—or worse yet: shoulders—led to poor shooting and that to learn proper form one had to breathe deeply into the belly.

"Breathe in a circle. Belly breath is healthy. Chest breath is ordinary. Shoulder breath is sick. In the beginning, if you forget about focusing on your breath, you will easily lose concentration. Always keep your breath in center," spoke the 20th-century zen master of kyudo, Awa Kenzo.

One expanded without pause until the moment of release, so that the entire body loosed the arrow as one at the very peak of your capacity. As your sides expand, so too was the string pulled away from the belly of the bow. Not merely the muscles and limbs, but the very skin and internal organs ought to expand to their maximum just like the bow that was drawn to a full moon.

With each of the eight steps, one inhaled at the beginning and exhaled at the finish; infinitely expanding with both inhale and exhale, becoming one with the world around them. Transient. The border between the self and the world eroding. The archer and bow becoming one and in the moment of release, a kiai springs from the full inhale—the image of the draw and the arrow-line so perfectly visualized, that it cannot be anything other than reality—causing the arrow to have already pierced the target without fail before it catches flight, already connected from the beginning.

One released as a whole, the whole as one.

However unlike archery, when it came to guns this technique proved to be completely wrong, as he eventually discovered to his great consternation.

He finished the exhale, riding the breath all the way down until his lungs were fully deflated into the respiratory pause and waited a fraction of a second.

And in between heartbeats and the minimal twitches they caused, he pulled the trigger for the second time.

—BOOOMM!

Five more shots, Emiya thought glancing at the HUD for the mission parameters as he began his breathing cycle anew. Nothing so far, probably meaning he hadn't hit anything. Hopefully, that also meant he hadn't hit someone, either. At the very least, nothing was on the maps behind the hill beyond untold miles of dense jungle.

But you never knew.

Certainly, with short-range encounters, it did not matter as much how you breathed. But as he began to try and learn how to shoot at longer and longer ranges with guns, he came to realize that what the bow had taught him was nearly worthless for the rifle. The three main techniques he had learned for breathing with firearms were to inhale and fire at half-capacity, to exhale and fire at the pause, and finally to exhale fully and to fire at the bottom of the breath.

In each technique, the natural respiratory pause between breaths was crucial.

Only at the moment of stillness between changing from inhale to exhale—or from exhale to inhale—was the body completely still. With a pistol or the assault rifle, any of the three was fine, or even shooting without minding one's breathing worked simply fine, which was why so few bothered.

But with a sniper rifle, where the smallest change could cause massive variance at the other end, it mattered.

Hold breath, ride the exhale down.

Of the three techniques, only the last technique could bring him the stability necessary for these shots.

As you inhaled and exhaled, you rarely found the exact same lung volume with two separate breaths. This meant that as your rifle's butt rested on your shoulder, your aim would rise and drop. Especially in the prone position, lying face down and steadying the rifle as you aimed at that far-off target. So just as you thought you had found the target and prepared to fire, your own breathing would betray you. Even attempting to inhale fully would not work, as the lungs were very flexible and one's 'full capacity' was a very nebulous concept to reach for.

No, the only reliable method he had found for shooting at long range was to exhale fully. To empty himself completely and to reach for the bottom of the self, and to then fire from that stillness.

With the bow, one sought to bring in everything and become one with the world.

With the rifle, you isolated yourself from all and became dead for just a moment.

You emptied yourself of emotion and merely pulled the trigger. As you shot something, you did not become one with the rifle or the bullet. There was no need for a perfect image in one's mind of the self and the target aligning with the arrow-line—the yasuji. It was more mechanical and procedural compared to archery. You simply ranged in the sights, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The only thing that one felt with the pull of a trigger as you killed someone, was the recoil of the gun against your shoulder. Aim with the hand, shoot with the mind, kill with a heart like arctic ice.

Shepard continued with the shooting on her end and Emiya was certain he could hear her switching to her pistol as one of the rifles overheated, even as she cycled between the guns to keep a maximal rate of fire going downrange.

Four seconds passed since his last shot and he repeated the process again as he pulled the trigger, his mind slipping into the zone of perfect performance with practiced precision.

He reached the bottom again, sight aligning exactly.

—BOOOMM!

He repeated this process, again.

—BOOOMM!

And again.

—BOOOMM!

And again.

—BOOOMM!

And again.

—BOOOMM!

"Damn it," he swore as the sniper rifle dimmed completely - its batteries so expended, that even the controls had gone dark. His eyes flicked to the corner of his helmet's HUD to confirm the link to the gun was dead, before his eyes flicked down to the omnitool: nothing. The objective remained unchanged, the numerous others flashing by along the screen.

He had hit nothing.

Time to pack up and keep going; nothing to it. We played and didn't win, but we haven't lost yet. As long as we pull back in time, it's fine, Emiya thought. Yet he didn't get up.

He remained there, lying prone with the rifle as he stared at that water tower over the dead electronic scope.

It could have just been the Coriolis effect.

One more shot. I could make it with one more shot. The traitorous thought bubbled up. There's still that one spot in the right-most corner. If something is there...

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The pistol seemed to grow heavy on his hip, and hot against his skin even through the hardsuit. He could still take that battery and use its charge for one more shot. The relay could still be on the roof, with the error in firing calculation it could still be there.

He could still take that last shot.

But that was the sunk cost fallacy talking a colder part of his mind noted. The irrational belief that because you had already invested so much into a failing endeavor, that you were bound to gain something if you just kept going; the belief that those losses accrued had to be patched over with a victory. He was already down the sniper rifle - the most potent weapon in their arsenal. He would only continue to pile up losses if he kept this up.

Would he be satisfied with the pistol? Or would he go over to Shepard and ask for one of her guns next? She would do it within a heartbeat, of course.

Or would he think of draining his suit, next? Surely, he could just get back to the RV without getting shot once... That was the kind of arrogance this weakness would lead to.

This immaturity... Nothing has changed, has it? Not satisfied with any result that ends in loss? That is exactly the weak and childish stubbornness that caused my life to end the way it did!

He felt his blood running hot again, any and all cold calculation from the moments before disappeared as if they had never been there in the first place.

Yet.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

Shepard was still fighting behind him.

"Damn it," he cursed again. He turned the comm on, "Shepard! We're extending the mission for two minutes! Hold them off!"

"Eh? Wha-Why?!" She shouted back.

"Just do it!" he half-growled, pulling out the pistol and beginning to dismantle it with record speed, even for his own standards.

Because she had asked for his help.

Before, when he had gotten angry and lost control over himself, he had helped her out thinking that he was doing it for his own sake. That he was being perfectly selfish and rational, that he wasn't the same as he had been all those years ago. But that was wrong. He hadn't changed at all. He had only gotten drunk off of his own introspection and doubts, having sat and rusted away on the moon for a hundred years.

How pathetic.

He remembered a smile, gritting his teeth.

Now, here as he stood at the precipice again, he understood that. This time, he would not even bother with excuses.

"One shot."

With all his skill and ability, without relying on anything else short of magic, he would take one shot. After that, who knew what would happen, but he would have cast the die. Not merely acting out a part, but truly investing something of himself in this.

He stared at the rifle; having hooked up the pistol's batteries to the side and moved around, his original position was lost. Even if the sniper rifle's computer hadn't shut down and had to reload the firing calculations, the position he would be firing from would be different - it wouldn't be hitting the area that was left.

The computer couldn't handle this.

No, only he could do this.

Emiya re-took the prone position, his eyes sharpening beyond their natural limits as he exhaled, his life force burning through his veins like fire and steel, as if eager to be back, like it had been there all along just waiting for this moment for him. He took aim, inhaling slowly and fully until he reached a peak where he was one with the world.

Gun - barrel - bullet - building - hill - tower - target - earth beneath and heaven above.

Getting the sight picture on an obscured target he had never even seen before in his mind's eye, he ignored the auto-aim and took the controls all to himself, correcting for the gun's attempts by himself, his body falling naturally into place by itself without action - he began to exhale, riding down the breath and emptying himself.

It was through combining those two techniques—of becoming one with the world and of defining oneself so clearly and distinctly from it—that he had risen to the levels he had and become an Archer. There were many Heroic Spirits of the Bow, among whom were many masters of either bow or gun.

But he dared to argue that he was the only one who had mastered both.

Exhaling all the way to the end, he rode the breath down to the nothingness at the bottom and in the stillness between two heartbeats, a trigger was pulled.

—BOOOMM!

A moment of silence, as the world hung in the balance over a precipice.

Emiya weighed his actions, the moment of reflection and heightened awareness stretching out to infinity. Perhaps someone would realize what an absurd shot this had been. Perhaps nothing had been on the roof after all, and no one would ever even care to know how much this had cost him.

But he had chosen to help someone again, extending his hand out to those who sought his aid. He had thought his death had finally steered him clear of this path, but it was obvious now that Emiya Shirou could never distance himself from that ideal.

He closed his eyes, collapsing the rifle and ripping loose the pistol battery. It didn't matter right now, he would think about it later. He got the pistol into one piece in record time, placing both of the now-dead weapons onto their respective Van der Waals-strips, too frugal and conscientious to leave them despite their uselessness.

Emiya stared at the water tower, then shook his head and turned around. Running to the stairs he arrived some meters behind Shepard and then got down to all fours and crawled next to her as she was firing full-auto down the stairs.

"It's done," Emiya said simply.

"Did you hit it?" Shepard asked, not looking away even as she paused firing.

"Don't know." He checked the HUD. The mission objective was still there. "It probably wasn't on the roof at all."

She remained silent at that, only nodding once to his words after a moment.

"It's time to go, then," she said and he nodded. "But I don't think they'll just let us past if we ask nicely..."

Emiya looked over the pockmarked and torn apart final step of the stairs as she handed back to him his assault rifle. He couldn't see anyone. Even the one enemy who had been shot before had apparently been dragged out of the stairs' bottom.

"Hmm, got any ideas?" he asked offhandedly.

"Sure. I hope you're not afraid of heights," she replied with a grin.

Another head peeked around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. As neither Emiya nor Shepard could be seen just over the edge of the top, the stranger felt brave enough to take another step out into the stairway. He took another tentative few steps, painfully slowly as he strove for complete silence.

He got two steps up before Shepard raised the rifle over the edge and let loose a full auto hail of bullets. He barely got back into cover as his kinetic barrier 'failed' and his leg got locked down by his own suit.

Emiya huffed with amusement. "Enjoying yourself?"

"This is kind of—what's the word... therapeutic," she answered, not denying it one bit.

"Like shooting fish in a barrel." He huffed.

"Huh? Why would you shoot fish in a barrel?" She turned to look at him.

"Never mind."

She blinked at him, eyes turning suspicious for a moment before she shrugged.

"Suit yourself. I had some time to think while you were over there shooting at nothing. When I looked down over the edge earlier, I saw that the floor below had some kind of... platform? Next to the windows. Getting up to the roof from there would be crazy, but dropping down should work, right?"

"You mean a windowsill?" Emiya asked, frowning. He could see it working, but without a rope, it seemed like a rather risky maneuver. The roof hung outwards over the windowsills easily a meter or so, from what he remembered seeing.

"That thing has a name?" Shepard seemed surprised by that, more than his complete lack of reaction at her telling him to dangle off the side of a skyscraper.

Emiya shook his head at her. "Fine, I'll get right on it. You stay here and keep them distracted. I'll comm you to come down once I'm done."

She gave him a thumbs up and a grin as he crawled away, now with a rifle in hand. Once he was far enough away that a stray bullet would not reasonably clip him, he got up and jogged to the edge of the building. Like Shepard had earlier, he got down on all fours and then crawled to the edge of the roof and looked down.

Indeed, there was a windowsill that could easily support someone standing there, but it was at least a 2-meter drop and it was at an angle inward as he had remembered. You couldn't simply hang on the ledge and then let go; that way lay only a sheer drop of a hundred plus some meters.

"Sheesh," he complained, putting the rifle onto his back and shaking his head. It was a crazy plan, but it might just work. Just like how he usually did things, really. He must have been rubbing off on her, or was this her idea of a joke?

No matter.

He turned around and inched backward, first feeling nothing underneath his toes. Then his knees. Then his entire lower body down from the waist, bending down as his stomach rested on the edge while his hands kept him from sliding down. The wild winds blew at his hanging limbs, but he didn't let it bother him.

Finally, he let himself be pulled by gravity so that his elbows held on at the edge and then just finally his hands. He hung by only his fingers, then.

Emiya looked down, feeling his entire body hanging freely. Beneath him, he could see a hundred-meter drop. It would be a painless death if nothing else. Just a freefall followed by a sudden splash at the bottom. Enough of that, he thought as he began to rock his legs back and forth. Not so much that he would lose his grip, but enough that he began to swing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a pendulum, he built up speed until he felt he had enough and he let go as he reached the end of his swing inward.

For a moment, he was completely in the air, holding onto nothing as the windowsill approached beneath him, and then he landed, completely safe against the wall. He inhaled and moved his body flush against the wall to keep the wind from grabbing him.

Not bothering to look down, he moved sideways, shimmying his way until he reached a window. It was still in one piece, despite the passing of time and the beating of the winds this high up. He tried to open it but found it stuck.

Well, this complicates things, Emiya thought. He would have to break the glass to get inside, but that would probably alarm everyone inside. Perhaps it was far away enough that no one would notice?

No, he would still need some covering noise.

"Shepard, come in."

"You're done already? I didn't even hear a thing."

Emiya huffed in amusement. "I'm flattered that you think so highly of me, but no. I need you to take both of your guns and make some noise. Out." Better not to tell her; they could be monitoring the comms. Emiya thought.

"Gotcha, Shepard out!"

And a mere second later the cacophony of gunfire began. Not merely content with the sound of guns firing, she was shouting obscenities and insults while aiming at the loudest bits of wall she could see.

He could hear it all the way down here. It would do perfectly.

Emiya backhanded the window with a single finger, extending the second knuckle of his middle finger like a ballpoint hammer. The window made a light clatter, cracks extending all the way to the edges.

Pushing in the bits, they made a little bit more sound, but hardly enough to warrant notice. He crawled in through the new entrance and drew his assault rifle. "Alright Shepard, thanks, out."

At once the cacophony ended.

Emiya sneaked forward, towards the door of the room as he looked around and found it empty. This must have once been a penthouse suite, sold at a premium, given how large the room was. But right now, it was simply another barren room with nothing left behind. He found it slightly amusing that even the full floor carpets had been ripped out and taken away, whenever it was that this place had been closed down.

He came to a door and slowly opened it a fraction as he kept his rifle raised and ready. But nothing greeted him in the next room. He kept moving through the dark and dusty room until he made it to the foyer and front door that would lead into the hallway of the top floor.

Emiya looked through the peephole, leaning left and right as he searched for anything beyond the door. But it was too dark for anything to be visible. He tried to recall the layout, but they had simply gone up this floor without searching it in full first, so he couldn't really tell where he was in relation to the stairway to the roof beyond just a general direction.

Pulling back, took off his helmet and he pressed an ear against the door, closing his eyes as he listened.

He could hear something over the occasional firing rifle, but couldn't put a finger on exactly what. It could have simply been Shepard shouting, given how far away and isolated he was. And this right here is where I would use magecraft for the entire floorplan and move to take them out one by one by shooting their legs through the walls. With Structural Analysis telling him where something was pressing down on the floor, he could tell exactly where people's feet were.

But one miracle was enough for today.

Emiya shook his head at his own complaints, letting that line of thought go as he put on his helmet again, sealing it around his neck so hastily that the instructors would have chewed him out for. But it wasn't as if he was in any real danger of sudden de-pressurization like on a starship right now.

Reaching for the door handle, he slowly and quietly opened the door. The hinges had long since dried out, making a loud creak as he turned the door, but he compensated by simply going slowly enough that the noise remained at acceptable levels.

For safety's sake, he was crouching down by the floor and using his extended hand to push open the door, staying as far away from it as possible. If anyone saw the door being opened, they would usually try and shoot through it or next to it by the wall at a person's height first.

Keeping the gun's muzzle well away from the widening crack into the hallway, he slowly sliced the pie as he kept his eyes and ears peeled for anything. Though it was tempting to come closer to the door for a better view, he needed to be far away enough that no one could simply grab him and drag him out by his rifle or his hand.

It was a standard corner clearing technique, which was used when faced with a situation where you did not know what lay behind a corner. You could not simply jump out with guns blazing, as if you did that, someone in wait would have more time to react and shoot you, than you did to see and shoot them. Which meant that you moved slowly, taking a sideways inch at a time and making sure to remain in cover for as long as possible and present as little of yourself to anyone on the other side.

This way, you could with relative safety try and see if anyone was lying in wait.

The name came from the way you cut a round pie, taking it one small slice at a time that was easier to digest. There were many techniques for clearing corners in modern combat, and all of them had their ups and downs, but this one was a rather simple and quiet one.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity but in reality was only ten seconds, the door was ajar enough to let him walk on through. But he remained in the hotel room, peering out into the absolute blackness of the hallway stretching out both ways.

He couldn't even tell the sights from the barrel of the gun right now, given the darkness, simply aiming by proprioception.

The HUD in his helmet wasn't exactly helping either, given how bright the various feedback systems and statistics there were. The radar alone was blotting out most of his vision in the lower corner with its radiance. Don't they think about low-visibility ops at all? Light discipline is one of the most vital aspects of a night raid. Isn't there some kind of brightness adjustment? You would think it would adjust automatically...

It was a pity that he did not have a low-light vision-enhancing program in his omnitool or suit, as it would have proved very useful in a situation like this. Or he could have simply Reinforced his eyes. But really, he didn't need it. He had come prepared.

Leaning back inside the more well-lit hotel room, he reached for his omnitool and accessed his hardsuit's interface, and then turned off everything in the helmet, entirely shutting down his too-bright HUD.

And only then did he open his left eye.

He had kept it closed ever since they had gone to the roof, just as he had instructed Shepard to do as well.

Even with evening approaching, the light outside relative to inside was blinding and his right eye was struggling to adapt to the darkness right now. It could take the human eye up to half an hour to fully adjust to the darkness at night, having only really evolved to deal with the slow encroach of nightfall. But, his left eye had been closed since the dark stairway up here and had been held tightly shut while on the roof, leaving it with plenty of time to adjust.

With both eyes now open, the hallway was much clearer.

Suddenly, the seemingly absolute darkness ahead disappeared as his left eye could see light pooling in from beneath the cracks between the various hotel room doors and the floor ahead, casting long shadows from even the smallest piece of dirt and highlighting swirling dust along the floor as the wind outside howled.

I wonder if the gene therapy included anything for the eyes? Emiya wondered as he looked around, closing his right eye for short moments to let his left eye get used to looking again as he scanned the hallway again. Clear.

He closed the left eye again and went back to the half-blindness of his right eye as he leaned back inside the room. Turning on his omnitool, he checked the radar quickly and found it unchanged, before checking that the application he had downloaded a while back but had not found use for until now, was still there.

So there was an adjustment for brightness, Emiya observed as he looked through the settings of the applications there, setting the hotkey for his program ready, before shaking his head and turning it all off again.

With all the sources of light gone again, he inhaled and opened his left eye.

The dissonance between the darkness of his right eye and the clarity of his left was always slightly strange, but he got used to it quickly enough.

He returned to the door and walked through on soft, rolling steps. Soundless as a ghost, his rifle swept both ways before he pushed onward fully into the hallway. Mentally locating the stairs leading up, he sneaked towards the corner up ahead and kneeled down there, listening for a second before peeking around it.

Seven men were up ahead at the other end, all crouching by the entrance to the rooftop, though far enough away that they weren't in danger of being hit by Shepard or in the range of any potential grenades. Not that she had any. No, there was one more man, lying on the ground. That made it eight, all in all.

Probably the one Shepard had gotten at the beginning.

Rustling and silent whispers; no lights. They must have either adapted to the darkness like I have or used a vision-enhancer or scope of some kind, he observed.

Emiya quietly leaned back, listening intently to make sure his head hadn't been spotted when he had peeked around. Nothing. The whispers continued but did not change in pitch or frequency enough to suggest alarm or surprise. Of course, if these guys were good, they could have had a sign language or a code-by-tapping form of communication for situations like these.

He had used such often enough.

Emiya pulled back away from the corner and faced away like before, switching to his right eye again as he turned on the omnitool; its orange light almost searing in its brightness, despite his earlier attempt at dimming it. If he had looked at it with his left eye, he would have lost all his night vision instantly.

He grumbled some more under his breath.

A burst of rifle fire and crumbling wall sounded from around the corner followed by Shepard shouting obscenities. He ignored it.

Perhaps it was simply due to the prevalence of radar technology and barriers which negated the brunt of an attack, allowing soldiers to survive ambushes long enough to find cover and to recover their shields again that it had come to this. Even here, were he probably another five or ten meters closer, their passive radars would surely be within range of each other again.

Still, coming from an era where the best body armor could provide was protection from a mid-sized caliber bullet, once, and only to the torso from the front or back, it seemed like a glaring weakness to him. They hadn't even been watching their flanks.

A complacency in their training that he would be more than happy to abuse the hell out.

"Shepard, stay quiet and count of thirty and then charge down, expect hostiles, out," Emiya whispered and then closed the comm-line before she could reply. He took off the omnitool and activated the hotkey for the application he had downloaded for just this kind of situation.

Technically it was called the 'party-light app', but he had found it useful enough despite the distinct lack of parties in his life.

He turned back to the corner and counted in his head. In rhythm with the count to thirty he had given, he performed a single set of calming breaths, priming himself for combat.

Fifteen: time to go.

Emiya reared back the hand and threw his omnitool around the corner, the wrist-computer hitting the hard floor with one, two, three clattering sounds of impact against the hard floor, as it skipped and slid almost all the way to the people across the hallway. Heh, wouldn't have gotten it that perfectly if the carpet was still here.

Then, the flashlight turned on at maximum brightness, clearing up the entire hallway instantly with a bright white light.

"Gah!" A shout could be heard as someone must have been looking directly at the sudden object thrown at them in surprise.

Emiya leaned out and fell onto his right shoulder so that his rifle and head barely broke the edge of the corner, keeping most of his body hidden behind the wall as he took aim. His right eye was open, taking in the sudden bright clarity with only some mild discomfort, his left eye remaining closed.

He aimed, lining up the sights at the tightly grouped people, and then pulled the trigger.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

The automatic fire took them all by even more surprise, as the confined area turned the loud staccato into something truly stunning in its loudness. As they scrambled for cover and to return fire, Emiya changed targets as the first one he had been aiming at stiffened and fell over.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

Three, two... Closing both of his eyes, he continued counting in his head. One...

The omnitool went into overdrive; no longer a single bright light illuminating the hallway, it turned into a spastic discotheque of flashing lights, bright enough to momentarily blind and bedazzle someone but not long enough to let anyone get used to it and see anything.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

The flashlight on the omnitool wasn't strong enough to actually blind someone like a flashbang, but like this, when they had gotten used to the darkness or were relying on light-enhancing optics, it would still be stunning for that one critical moment he had been prepared for.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

Even with his eyes closed, he could still blind fire, remembering where they had roughly been. And the corridor presented a rather small area where he needed to aim, anyhow.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

Any and all dark vision they had built up until now would be completely gone. Even if they had some form of vision enhancers, it would not protect them much from the overload of light. Even at this distance, Emiya could vaguely see it through his eyelids as he kept firing.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

Three seconds later, it all stopped, plunging the hall into darkness.

Emiya opened both of his eyes and aimed again. Most of his blind firing had missed as they had thrown themselves to the floor. But that was fine; he took aim through the darkness, his eyes mostly still able to see, aiming at one enemy trying to get up to get to cover at the end of the hallway.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

The man stumbled and fell, leaving Emiya to count the amount of 'slain' opponents. One, two, three, four, were lying motionlessly on the floor. That leaves at least four more. They must have managed to run behind the corner.

He sat up, getting to his feet and away from the corner. First, he would check the other end of the hallway, as any proactive soldier would be flanking him right about now to get at him from behind. He ignored the second timed light show now behind him as he ran away from the corner with the gun held at the high ready, finger on the trigger, pulse in his breath.

The omnitool would perform the second flash show and then stop, with the five-second pause in between where Emiya had just shot down the one man earlier. The pause was timed long enough to make someone fall into a sense of false confidence and open their eyes, thinking they had just weathered through it.

A rather positive side to this smart 'grenade', he found.

Really the app was supposed to be hooked up to a song, where the lights would sync with the beat, but he had gotten it to work like he wanted one lazy afternoon some weeks ago by buying the full version from the Systems Alliance Navy's approved app store

He ran fifteen steps, arriving at the opposite corner with a skid, and began to slice the pie slowly again. Now, given he had had time to look around some more, he had come to the conclusion that the hotel's top floor was designed such that the hallway formed a single simple rectangle, with doors both on the inside and outside facing walls for various rooms.

Presumably, the outwards facing ones were suites, and the inwards facing ones were storage closets or smaller rooms since they lacked windows. If his opponents had come in with a larger force, each door would represent an incredible risk to cross without first clearing, as behind any door countless guns could be just waiting to spring on your open back.

Urban combat was the meat grinder in modern doctrine.

If one ran a full circuit, he would come around to where he had begun. But here, given that the enemies had taken a position on one side and he on the opposite side, it had turned into a strange stalemate.

Emiya peeked around and saw the hallway that ran parallel to the one he had been shooting down not moments before. He weighed what to do: run down and attempt a flank - or stay and wait for someone to try and flank and gun them down - or run back and check that no one was advancing down the other side? If on either side anyone left the cover of the corner and moved forward, they would leave themselves wholly open and vulnerable to being shot down from the corner ahead, but if one tried to simply guard the hallway hoping for someone to try and cross, that left one at risk for being flanked from behind.

And in the rectangle, one had to keep two corners to retain cover, as losing two corners would leave one completely without cover. A combined game of chicken and turtle, in other words. Stay and hope they don't flank, or flank and hope they're on the other end and not waiting for you down the hall on the end you're at.

This was the point where game theorists and strategists would sink deep into mind games, ploys, and counter-ploys.

But Emiya had counted four probable enemies still up and running, which meant that no matter how he sliced it, he was at an absolute disadvantage. They could cover and cross both hallways at the same time and the moment they knew where he was at the opposite side, could rush down for a flank.

But he was used to always being outnumbered.

Which is why he never played these games by the rules.

The battlefield had to constantly change and he had to be that change if he wanted to win.

He went through his immediately available options. He could either trace back his steps and flank outside on the windowsill into another locked room, or go down another floor as before and then either set up a trap for when they tried to descend, or shoot up through the floor as they walked over him...

Thirty seconds.

Oh, right.

Not alone.

"Shepard, go right and take the corner!" he roared back over his shoulder.

A second of stillness. Running steps.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

A rifle went off at the other end and he surged forward like a coiled spring, breaking through to the other end in a scant three seconds as he jumped to slide on the floor around the corner, below where he would be expected, switching to a left-hand grip on the rifle.

He grinned coming to a halt against the wall with his feet as he was greeted by the backs of two enemies, facing away from him as they were busy trying to return fire at Shepard who had just descended from the roof and heeded his shout.

Some of the four had already fallen down, obviously having suffered a shot to the back by Shepard before he had made it there.

—trr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rr'rrtt!

He put both down, their weakened kinetic barriers falling near instantly as he pulled the trigger and hosed them. Both fell over stiffly and he scanned the hallway for the two others, only to spot them already down by the other side of the hallway, right where he had predicted they would be.

They had played a game of two choke points with one against four. But it was three choke points with two against four, and they had forgotten about the first choke point just long enough for Shepard to do her magic.

He got up, dusting his shoulder, side, and back from the dust on the floor. He grimaced at the scrapes and scratches he had gotten from the floor, but then put it out of his mind. It could be fixed later.

"Ho, there!" Shepard greeted him, peeking from the corner by the stairway up.

"Ho, yourself," Emiya replied, walking over the two men he had shot.

She grinned in response, looking around and sauntering through the darkness with one eye and stepping over fallen soldiers who grumbled up at her behavior. As Emiya stopped in front of her, she whistled at him, obviously impressed.

"Nice work," she said, pronouncing the word closer to popping 'noice' for emphasis for some strange reason.

"They didn't account for the both of us, it seems." Emiya shrugged, having forgotten for a moment himself there.

He kneeled down and began to fiddle with a rifle, taking it apart and ripping out the battery pack.

"Uh..." One of the men lying down, able to see all this and peering at Emiya suspiciously. "I know I'm not supposed to talk, but are you supposed to be fiddling with the guns?"

Emiya shrugged, smirking down at the man. "They never told me not to."

Shepard grinned at that as he pocketed the battery and moved on to grab a pistol. The soldier merely raised an eyebrow before rolling his eyes. "Riiight, whatever man. Not my ass that's gonna get roasted."

Shepard kicked him lightly, then. Not really hard, but enough to nudge him a little. "Hey, dead men don't talk, remember?"

The soldier simply rolled his eyes again as others around them muttered quiet complaints of their own.

Emiya walked over to the hallway and picked up his discarded omnitool, turning off the light program and strapping it back onto his wrist.

"Alright, let's go. We're running late already," Emiya said and turned for the stairs as he pocketed the pistol battery. He probably wouldn't have time for putting them in, but it was a good idea to at least prepare a replacement.

"Right on, lead the way." Shepard grinned and followed after him with a skip to her step.

Their footsteps echoed behind them as they left, leaving the hallway cloaked in darkness and silence again.

"Fucking hell, what do they feed the new recruits?" someone complained, but no one had a good answer to that as the two left had already left for the stairs. "Shit, we're gonna have to be here for hours until someone picks us up, aren't we?"

And they did - they were just casualties after all.

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NOTE: The quote by Awa Kenzo is actually two, which I threw together, one after another for editing purposes; it looks better and affects the flow less that way. So technically I'm butchering quotes like a savage, but fuck it.

Thanks to: Zantakio, Amphidsf, Tactical Tunic, Tolack and Tisaku of spacebattles, and PseudoSteak, Rakkis157 and guest reviewer (ffnet) For proofreading.