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)

10. Rust

After that, time passed by in a blur.

That had seemed to be a recurring phenomenon in the last few weeks.

It had felt as if time had been passing much slower before he had come out here again, to the real world. Even after, when he had joined the Navy, it had seemed to move at a crawl. But now, somehow he would wake up and go back to bed before he knew it and whole days would run past at a dash.

His sense of time seemed distorted.

Was it the contradiction he felt between enjoying his time here and knowing it would be coming to an end, soon?

As expected, after the interview debacle he had gotten his way. The Mars posting was a non-combat role and he had been already rather insistently applying for it anyhow. He had also been forced to attend some therapy, but he had played it off with being slow to open up so far. On paper, he would be attending regular therapy for the foreseeable future, leaving him in a position where he was not even cleared to so much as look at a pistol, much less use one.

After the incident, the instructors had treated him with silk gloves, taking every precaution and care. They were in deep enough shit as it was, so none of them had any fight left in them to argue with him.

As long as he had sufficiently high grades, no other higher-ranking recruits were filling up the spot he was looking after, and he wanted to apply for the G-line, there wasn't anything they could do about it. Not really. In that sense, having over-performed in the Shanxi exercise had been rather good for him. After all, there wasn't a single recruit with a higher grading than him right now.

Then again, it was the source of his problem in the first place, so he could hardly credit it for the solution at this point.

He had his pick of any non-combat position as outlined in his contract. The original contract, as his new medical condition strictly cut off any possibility of joining the special forces. That he wanted to apply for Mars when he could have picked anywhere else in the galaxy, didn't change any of that.

The Systems Alliance was rather strict about the adherence to basic humanitarian rights, thus in this situation, they had very little wiggle room. In theory, the system was set up to encourage the best to work hard so that they could get exactly where they wanted, while the rest would be sorted out on an as-needed basis. In practice, he had utterly and completely flipped that system on its head.

As a result of all this, Emiya had become something of an absolute absurdity to his peers.

He had always been distant; the strange guy who never talked to anyone, but didn't drag down anyone either. Then he was apparently the hottest stuff since the discovery of eezo, as far as their instructors were concerned. And now he was treated as if he would shatter at the softest touch.

Shepard had been rather confused once she had heard about what had happened, too, but upon Emiya's reassurances that he was fine, she seemed to calm down somewhat. He told her that as long as he would get to Mars, it would be all fine. But something in the way she looked at him changed after that. A distance between them seemed to erupt - a great chasm that hadn't been there before.

She didn't any longer try to push him or challenge him, as if afraid that he might push himself too far, or push her away. He had considered telling her the truth but finally decided that it was fine this way.

She had come a long way and didn't need him anymore, so an ending like this was fine to their time together.

Like Shepard, Cassani had suddenly no idea how to behave with him, which caused a rather abrupt and total cut-off in all contact between them.

Nothing new to Emiya, he had gotten used to the reaction over the years.

Cassani had gotten pulled along into the rumor mill as well. It made sense, given that he hadn't ever been the best at anything, but had also been given an invitation to the N-school along with Shepard. The recordings hadn't been made available to any of the recruits, not even to the team itself after the exercise ended. But people still talked and knew the rough outline of what had happened.

As a result, it seemed that Franco and his friend Marco Rodriguez had had several arguments followed by a rather boisterous re-kindling of their friendship after a week of constant feuding, since their return from leave. Something about a mutual promise to apply for CIC-duty aboard starships so that they could make use of the unlimited extranet bandwidth in their off-time, or something equally inane.

Already they were back to making their usual and awful jokes, often in the vein of "hey man, it's great we're gonna be E8 soon, eh?", "but it only goes up to E7, though?", "that's cuz I'm gonna be eh-eighta here!" and the like.

Emiya merely shook his head at the two's antics - a rather common solution among the recruits.

He still talked with Shepard, and even as she no longer knew how to behave around him during exercises and training, she still seemed to enjoy their off-hours talks. She would come to talk to him, asking strange and seemingly inane questions deep into the night, often to the annoyance of others who were trying to sleep.

Asking questions about anything and everything had seemed to become something of a habit to her, now. Well, it wasn't really harmful so Emiya hadn't commented about it as her desire for social interactions with everyone and anyone grew at a rapacious rate.

But all good things must come to an end, eventually.

"See you around," she said, carrying with her all that she had not turned in. Today, along with Cassani, Shepard would be leaving for Brazil again. Neither of them had been told anything new about what they would be going into, but that hadn't dulled their interests or expectations at all.

"Sure." Emiya nodded, having nothing more to say to her.

There were no more words that needed to be exchanged. There was a silent moment between them, lasting only a second before she finally turned and left. A strangely anticlimactic end for a friendship that had started as explosively as theirs. The shuttle would not wait longer and she had already resolved herself for weeks for this parting.

It wasn't what I had envisioned when I first enlisted, but I suppose it will have to do, he thought with a nod as he watched her walk away. Somehow, he had expected a more bittersweet parting.

That had been a constant in his life: meetings and partings, usually both more bitter than sweet. Perhaps he had learned something after his death to have managed this well.

It was the rare parting for him that had been on good terms, after all.

---

;

---

Emiya was beginning to get used to the way space-time warped with eezo fields. It had been somewhat disconcerting at first, but he was beginning to be able to sense them rather well.

It was similar to how he was rather sensitive to the World around him, a talent he had more or less possessed for as long as he could remember. It hadn't been helpful all the time, but in the case of overt bounded fields and trying to locate leylines, it had been a godsend back when he had been alive. He presumed it had something to do with Reality Marbles or his sensitivity to spiritual pressures since he had a certain affinity for those as he had later learned.

Regardless, being able to sense these warps in the fabric, so to speak, was rather interesting.

He hadn't had a window to look out through, but he could feel it when he left Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields behind. It was one of the many small things which compounded the strangeness he was experiencing as he began to get a handle on the situation.

The growing feeling that he was utterly out of place in all things. Even so, it didn't change his mission.

Then again... There was a simple method for him to confirm it all. A voice inside of him pleaded for him to simply do it, but he ignored it. A simple search on his omnitool - four characters for a name and a date of execution. It would be so easy to look it all up. To confirm whether his gut instinct was true.

But even if it was true, he was still dead. He had no right to walk among the living.

The shuttle lurched, landing on Mars. The mass effect field powered down, leaving him with a strange sensation of contradictory lightness, considering he had become heavier now that the shuttle had landed. The gravity was only a little above a third of that on Earth, so intellectually it made sense if he considered it from that angle instead.

But taking his first steps and feeling it for himself was another thing entirely.

The subtle difference in his weight and inertia was ironically throwing him off precisely because he was so conscious of them, where most people simply weren't.

He had done many strange and unusual things while he had still lived, but leaving Earth's atmosphere in a starship and setting foot onto another planet was something he would never have imagined happening to him. Even on the moon, inside SeRaPh: the Serial Phantasm virtual worlds connected pell-mell inside of the Moon Cell as simulations of realities, gravity had always been the same as on Earth, so it was a definite first experience for him.

Shaking his head, he walked out onto Mars. His hardsuit had been cleaned and repaired since Brazil and he had done a thorough check before leaving.

It would not do for him to be done in by a suit breach at this point, now would it? After all, Mars lacked a breathable atmosphere.

He frowned as he looked around. It looked almost familiar, though he shook his head at that feeling. Perhaps it was fitting, as Mars had been the god of war in antiquity. That the rust-colored world reminded him of that place was unexpected, but not ill-fitting. It was often spoken of as the red planet, but here on the surface, it looked more like the dour wastelands he had been familiar with for a very long time.

Apparently, the planet only looked red due to the floating dust in the atmosphere, another tidbit he remembered reading now.

"Welcome to Mars, kid!"

"Sir!" Emiya saluted the portly man before him in a face-concealing hardsuit. Still, the markings on his shoulders and chest clarified him as a Lieutenant, which made that point moot.

"Haha, no need for that, uh, Emiya, right? We're all techies down here, no one cares much about rank. You can just call me Henrik—most everyone here does—or Patterson if you prefer," The lieutenant said with a laugh, the short-range comms giving his speech none of the usual lag or distortion longer ranges might have.

With atmospheric pressure at literally less than a single percent of Earth at sea level, sound did not travel very well. In fact, beyond his helmet and suit, Emiya could not hear a single sound. In comparison, his breathing and beating heart, the creaking of his bones and joints, and the coursing of his blood all could be heard so clearly it was almost maddening.

thud—thud

"Understood, sir," Emiya replied politely, masking his disinterest.

"Hah, serious one aren'tcha? Well, that's fine. Come along then." Henrik laughed, turning around to walk away and motioning for him to follow. "See that there in the distance?"

Emiya looked at the outstretched hand, following it to the large city in the distance. It looked rather fantastic; the blued steel and white plastics of the jutting towers and walls created a colorful contrast with the dull butterscotch tan of the planet's soil and sky.

"That right there is Lowell City; the capital of Mars. There's a couple of other cities around, too. But they ain't much bigger either," Henrik explained as they walked towards an open airlock. The base itself wasn't much to look at, little more than a squat rectangular box dropped down into the ground just outside the city itself. "Still, plenty of things to do there once you're off duty, so don't worry about being here. Mars might be a bit of a backwater, but we still got most of the important creature comforts right here. And lemme tell ya, the girls over there love a man in a uniform. Fresh meat especially."

He laughed boisterously at that.

"That's reassuring, sir." Emiya humored the man, able to tell that he was exaggerating a little in an effort to cheer him up. Presumably, most of the technicians sent here were the ones who did not actually qualify for more demanding roles like dedicated starship engineering or even combat engineering roles, while still having the intellect and necessary skill for a technical job.

Most of the people who washed up here were probably little more than rejects, burnouts, and washed-up recruits. No wonder the mood was so lax.

They entered the airlock, the door closing off the view behind them. Air was pumped in as decontamination took place, practically scorching the hardsuits exteriors in a flash. As the green light chimed along with a beep that could be heard outside of the helmet now, they knew that it was safe to open their seals.

Finally, that maddening heartbeat was gone.

Emiya lifted off the onyx helmet and inhaled, noting the gassy and acrid scent of sulfur to the air, along with a slightly chalky—almost sweet—overtone to it. What an interesting scent.

Then the fans began to suck out and exchange all the air, running it through filters to catch all the airborne dust. A common problem was that the dust got everywhere, therefore special measures had been taken to cut out the worst of it whenever anything entered.

Henrik removed his helmet with a wide grin, revealing bushy black hair and a full beard, causing Emiya to blink at the appearance that most certainly did not fit regulations. He had bright blue eyes that seemed to almost shine, piercing in their joviality.

"Haha, welcome to Ares Station. We're not much, but we're glad to have you here." Patterson laughed again, offering a hand as he held his helmet under his other arm. Emiya did not hesitate to grab the offered hand, gripping tightly as they shook hands. "That's a good grip you have, kid. I like you already. See, good custom, that. Proper to do it without a helmet, too. You get a good look at who you're greeting. Get a real feel for them."

"As you say, sir."

Henrik shook his head at Emiya's continued politeness before the inner door opened. The fluorescent lighting reflected off of metal walls and floor, giving the hallway ahead a strangely clinical and inhuman feel to contrast with the more personable mood of his reception.

"Well, then. Let's get you situated and proper. Come along now." They began to walk as Henrik explained about the facility itself. "Usually, there are three to four times as many regulars here than actual fresh recruits. This is more of an Alliance repair station than a proper training facility. See, there's that asteroid ring right between Mars and Jupiter, rich with all kinds of valuable resources. But it's a real risk trying to mine there—not just cause of the danger of flying in and working with all kinds of big explosives and drills, but also cause even if ya find something good there, there's no promise you'll find your way back there with the specialized tools you need—so no big corporations want to take the first cracks at it. So the Alliance incentivizes a lot of new and brave entrepreneurs to take a shot at it."

"Hmm, what's the problem with finding your way back? Dropping a signal beacon should take care of that, right?" Emiya asked, mildly curious.

"Yeah, maybe for a while. But since everything's crashing and tumbling around out there, it often ends up being broken or jostled loose sooner or later. Usually sooner. Anyhow, big corps usually prefer to harvest H-3 on Saturn or Uranus if they can help it. But since there's a lot of good stuff there anyhow and it is cheaper for the Alliance to buy it locally, they want to get as many folks into that ring as possible."

"...I'd thought the asteroid ring had settled down, long ago. It's been there for billions of years." Emiya raised an eyebrow.

Henrik seemed to grow sheepish, looking away and rubbing the back of his head.

"Celestial objects are rather delicate things. On places like Earth and Mars, where the planet has a definite atmosphere, the air resistance helps 'cushion' against sudden impacts and slow it all down eventually. Like meteors making entry: most of that stuff is burned out before it even hits the ground. Not so out there—problem is that the quickest and easiest way to check up an asteroid and to find out if there is anything inside, and then to get your hands on it, is to just crack it open. Some people use small mass accelerators, others use shaped charges. The results are usually the same. It's like a billiards table up there, that only never stops."

Emiya blinked at that and Henrik must have sensed his reaction as he shrugged.

"But... The asteroid field is huge."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is. But we've been on Mars for over half a century now."

"No, I mean, the amount of matter in the ring is less than the entire moon. Spread out over a much wider area. I don't see how that's possible." Emiya frowned.

"...Look, you're a smart kid, so if anyone asks, that's the official story." Patterson half-whispered, his discomfort becoming obvious. "See, there's a lot of less than wholesome folks who just sit and wait, looking for someone who hasn't good cybersecurity, so that they can swoop in and get a slice of the pie when they leave. Or even before, under the pretext of having been mining another asteroid and sending debris flying... But since that kind of behavior is skirting the borders piracy and theft, and with the legalities of the asteroid ring being what they are..."

Emiya nodded, huffing with amusement as it clicked into place. It was the new age's gold rush, with Wild West lawlessness and all.

"So it's an all-out brawl up there, but the Alliance can't be bothered to deal with it?"

"Pretty much," Patterson muttered quietly with a hand rubbing at his cheek.

"But people still go there? It's worth the risk?" Emiya asked, pulling the Lieutenant out of his thoughts.

"Hmm? Oh yeah. Even with decades of industrial mining, it's still a treasure trove up there. Nowadays the big thing is to just find a nice juicy rock with modern sensors and to pull it back into Mars' orbit and work it slowly there. Still a lot of people breaking their backs out here, looking for that rock that'll make their lives," Henrik said, the grin obvious from his voice.

Emiya nodded. "And ships get busted up and broken, which forces them to come in for service. Service which the Alliance provides cheaply to reap all the benefits possible?"

Henrik grinned at that.

"Sharp one, ain'tcha? That's about right. Alliance has this service running pretty cheap, gets a minor profit, has a good place to train folks for all kinds of stuff, and then also gets to buy minerals for cheap. Pretty good deal, huh?" Henrik said, before stopping after a long walk through the nondescript hallway. "Well, here we have the mess hall. You'll find the kitchen personnel rather grumpy so I do recommend avoiding talking to them. They're here to make grub and not much more, hahaha."

And like that, the explanations continued as they toured most of the facility.

It was larger than the outward size had led him to believe, both in the sense of there being more rooms and separate spaces inside, and in that the structure had been partly dug underground as well.

There were numerous open hangars and smaller workshops. Tools and storage rooms were everywhere and most people seemed rather relaxed and languid. The only armed people he could see were some patrolling military police personnel, who handled the security of the facility. But given how low priority the place was in the grand scheme of things it seemed that they too seemed rather laid back.

Which suited Emiya rather well, since he was only biding his time until he would be shown to his bunk. No point in putting off what needed to be done any longer than necessary.

After the tour was over he was put to work almost immediately, being handed off to another gruff-looking technician. The older man grumbled about being weighed down with a newbie, when told to explain to Emiya what he was doing while performing their repairs, but did as ordered. They began with fixing an old model omnitool that had been brought in by someone.

The day went by rather slowly, and Emiya had to hold himself back as he resolved himself to only listening and 'learning', rather than simply getting his hands on the things around him. Despite his earlier listlessness, he was growing rather curious, almost feeling that old tinkering spirit roused as he beheld the piles and piles of old equipment, gear, and tools all around them.

He almost felt like that kid again, sitting in that dark shed on the floor while trying to get a microwave working.

thud—thud

It was strangely nostalgic, but he quenched those thoughts as he pretended to listen while the technician droned on about how to run a diagnostic and a checklist for errors, how to find out what kind of resource or manual he should be referring to and how to figure out if someone had tampered or fixed it before without adding a notification into the logs about it.

A lot of the time, the technician simply complained about the job, doing his best at what seemed like trying to dissuade Emiya from the line altogether.

"When the lights stop working, who do you think they send to crawl in the damn pipes? Us. It's tight, hot and you get scratches everywhere. And the dust. It's everywhere in the pipes. You think outside is bad? You like clean clothes? Too bad, get used to being dirty all the time. And that's the good part about this job. It's the people who are the worst. Every-damn-time something breaks, they look at you. Don't matter if it's lunch or off-duty, they all expect you to just jump up and get to it and with a smile on top of it all.

"Doesn't matter what it is, either. I'm a damn certified eezo welder; I make a hundred-and-fifty-K a year. I could work literally fucking anywhere in the galaxy. But people still come over and ask me to reset their damn extranet routers when they see me. No respect. And hell, don't get me started on the brass. This one Admiral would always send someone to wake me up in the middle of the damn night when his extranet stopped working when I was stationed on his cruiser. 'Oh no, my extraflix subscription ended!', 'I was logged out of extube!' and worst of all was that one time where he went 'I keep getting this picture of a sad panda on exhentai, what am I doing wrong?'

"God fucking damn it. I hate this shitty ass job so fucking much. Hand me the fucking pliers over there, yeah? Nice, got it in one. Right, like I was saying—"

Overall, while the subject interested him somewhat, the droning voice of his teacher left him rather disinterested. Then again, his thoughts were elsewhere for the most part for the whole day. He doubted he would remember any of it later.

---

;

---

"Lights out!" Was announced over the intercoms and a second later the lights dimmed until it was almost pitch black.

Ares Station followed a 24-hour cycle, almost the same as on Earth, which meant that just like back in training they would all be ushered to bed and sleep on schedule. Even with the laxer discipline here, that much hadn't changed, especially since there wasn't a need for keeping someone constantly posted and ready, unlike some more critical jobs in the Navy.

Emiya laid down onto the bunk.

Unlike in basic, he had gained finally some privacy here as he had a closed-off room. Unlike on starships, space was not a premium resource here, thus it wasn't a problem for nearly everyone to receive private quarters. However, as the youngest member, he was still forced to share sleeping quarters with others. A rather spartan room with four bunks and four closets, in pairs. However right now, only one other serviceman was sharing the room with him, which left it only 'somewhat lacking in space' rather than the full-blown 'sardines in a can'-treatment in terms of the usual personal experience.

He closed his eyes, inhaling once. And he stepped out of his body.

The body he had been in was nothing more than a borrow corpus, after all.

A vessel to provide him with an anchor and life force against the rigors of the real world. All living things burned through their life force in every second of their existence, but that expenditure usually did not eclipse their production. Similarly, he could still act outside of it by using his stored magical energy in the capacity of a manifested Heroic Spirit. Which meant that right now he existed as a spiritual body that through its core could also create another physical body for itself.

The soul projecting itself into the material world.

A near-application of Heaven's Feel, in other words. As expected of the Moon Cell.

As the sudden appearance of a tall, dark stranger by his bedside would be more than a little cause for alarm in the facility, so he settled for remaining in his astral form for now, invisible, immaterial, and intangible.

It's been a while. Emiya noted, inhaling and able to smell and taste the air even in his non-corporeal state through minimal exertion of himself into the physical. Pushing it a little further he opened his eyes and gained sight, looking over the body in the bed. It almost appeared to be sleeping; the subconscious processes taking care of it in his absence. Really though, it was closer to a coma or a vegetative state, since it lacked a mind and a soul right now.

"First things first—trace on,"—begin synchronization; he incanted, awakening the power within himself for the first time proper in months, his magical circuits coming to life.

Running od through his body, he tried to see if anything unusual happened. He would have preferred doing it with a physical body in conjunction with meditation for a full systems check, but this would have to do for now. He wasn't expecting combat, exactly.

Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he continued.

Then, he performed a simple Reinforcement on himself, seeing if everything worked as it should. Finding no issues with anything, he closed off his circuit and let his body normalize.

"—Trace off,"—all processes completed;

"No problems."

There had been a minor worry that due to the foreign soil, he might not be at his full potential. Magi family could lose all of their carefully hoarded power if they were careless about things like that, for example. Moving to hostile lands or breaking long traditions. Of course, due to his reality marble being the internal foundation for his magic, that exact issue wasn't really a worry for him.

Even in the era of waning mana, he had continued to use his mysteries without problems. In his lifetime it hadn't been enough to attract notice given the generally rudimentary nature of them, but had he lived for another decade it would have surely raised some eyebrows.

But it seemed like Mars did not possess an awareness of any kind, nor an Ultimate One to worry about. It made things much simpler in the short run, but it raised some worrying implications.

It effectively confirmed all of his suspicions.

Not the time.

Emiya turned around and walked out of the room, straight through the wall. He thought for a moment as to how he should walk out of the facility, before shrugging and simply leaping through the ceiling and appearing outside on the roof, only making himself material enough not to fall through again.

As the day cycle was nigh-identical to Earth's, it was similarly dark now outside. Aside from the muted nightlights of Lowell City in the distance and some of the watchmen on patrol inside Ares Station, it was truly the dead of night.

He looked up at the night sky, half-expecting to see the moon as he did. Instead, he spotted the two moons. Phobos and Deimos, he remembered before shaking his head. There were other things, too, beyond merely the lighter gravity and lower atmospheric density he had observed prior. He had wondered what it would be like to stand on another planet as the shuttle had first taken off, and he had been somewhat disappointed when he had walked off it. Even now as he extended his senses, the world felt muted and dead to him.

Another stark reminder of what he had been ignoring until now.

Looking at himself, he considered his apparel. His alternating diamene weave equipment—the black sleeveless top—and his reinforced pants, and his jackboots which were as much steel as they were laminated resin-infused graphene plates.

And finally his red mantle: the holy shroud that was bestowed upon him by a friend, long ago.

I wonder, is she still alive? I doubt she's here, anyhow... Emiya thought, a sudden melancholy filling him then. He shook his head, turning south and jumping off the roof of the facility. This task... This isn't something worth wearing it for. He thought, storing away the red mantle that usually adorned his arms and waist.

It was as much symbolic to him as it was something he wore for practical reasons. While this task wasn't disagreeable in and of itself, it wasn't proper for him to be wearing that for something like this. A mere courier job for a man like Archimedes. Not like he would need it either. Though he was now bare-armed, it hardly mattered even on the surface of an inhospitable planet.

He wasn't exactly wearing any kind of breathing apparatus, either.

His light leap casually cleared a distance of over a hundred meters, shooting through that distance nigh-instantly and landing softly, he continued his movement through the air with another leap. His destination was the subterranean Prothean ruins, located near the south pole of the planet. Specifically somewhere near the Deseado crater.

He had long since plotted out this path, using satellite images and maps to familiarize himself with it, before he had arrived.

Emiya started out slow, as it took some getting used to the movement here.

He had been slowly adapting to the gravity that was about a third of that on Earth. Upwards motion behaved entirely differently, to the point where even a regular human could do things like one-handed hand-stand push-ups for double digits. Well, as long as their balance held anyhow.

He could only guess how much it would affect conventional warfare.

Usually, it was a matter of staying low or in cover and acquiring a target. If possible, flanking or advancing was performed by dashing in and out of cover, possibly by running and jumping prone if nothing else was possible.

But with gravity this weak, such a jump could end up being far longer than one expected, overshooting where you had intended to land or causing you to stay airborne for so long that you were shot before you landed. A person's 'airtime' on Mars would be thrice that of on Earth, after all.

On the other hand, climbing and moving vertically was much, much easier.

Which changed how cover, terrain, and obstacles had to be considered. On Earth, one could hide behind a house and scan around the corner and that was enough most of the time. On Mars, you also had to keep an eye on the edge of the roof right above you, as anyone could simply get on top of the house and shoot down at you while you were busy slicing a pie.

Not that it mattered right now.

These were a mere idle curiosity to him.

Lowell City, the capital of Mars, was located near the equator of Mars. Based in Eos Chasma, the distance to the south pole was in the magnitude of a thousand kilometers. He had done some rough calculations, based on the information he had found and he estimated that in a straight run it would be at least 4000 kilometers one way.

For the trip and back, he would essentially have to travel the distance between the north and south poles of the planet. He had considered taking a shuttle during a day off or something, but after running the rough numbers in his head he had come to another conclusion.

He could just run all the way and have plenty of time to spare.

Of course, Mars and Earth were not the same sizes, but the idea that he could run from somewhere like the Mediterranean Sea to the Antarctic was a rather startling one, even when he had intellectually known his abilities had sky-rocketed after his death.

Emiya landed again, this time he falsely inhaled as he focused and put actual effort into leaping forward. He wanted to minimize upwards movement; keeping it in a straight line forward would minimize the waste of motion. Not that it would be a problem. In his astral form, the expenditure was minimal even as he began to pick up the pace.

Had he had a physical body, his steps would have shattered the rock foundation he walked on and kicked up immense clouds of dust. He was casually breaking the sound barrier, after all. Well, he would have been if Mars had a proper atmosphere.

This isn't even an exertion, he noted as he leaped again to clear a small mountain. It must have been over a hundred meters tall and three hundred wide.

Emiya cleared it with a single leap.

The biggest challenge really was keeping his airtime as short as possible, keeping his gait as a run rather than a bouncing stride, as if on some inflatable fun-house fair.

It was striking, realizing that he could essentially run around the entire planet in less than a day. Less than half a day. Less than less than half a day. Hell, during the designated lights-out time on Ares Station, he could run entire laps around Mars. Around an entire planet.

It felt like such a ridiculous thought, that realization. He had fought in this form several times in SeRaPh and he had gotten somewhat used to it with enough time. But this, this was something else. The direct contrast to his standards from his life. Even inside of the Moon Cell, in SeRaPh he had never had cause to really push himself like this.

Push myself? Hah, he thought as he increased his speed twofold again.

He landed with a crouch, coiling like a spring and exploding forward like a rocket. He soared through the air for several seconds before landing again without leaving a single mark on the ground. Had he had a physical body, the crater from the impact would have made even a car crash look like a child's accident.

At least he was making good time.

Occasionally, he stopped and looked at the night sky above.

He couldn't bring along an omnitool or a map, but that wasn't really a problem. He only needed to look up at the stars to keep his heading as he kept moving forward, and as long as he could spot one or another landmark on the horizon he could tell where he was at the moment, having memorized three dozen distinctive mountains.

One of those mountain ranges stood before him now, yet he did not even bother to look for a way around. He simply went over it, in three lazy leaps. Shepard had liked the view on top of the hotel. Now he could casually leap ten times that height with a single bound. I wonder if she would like this view?

He scowled at that thought.

This world. He did not like it. The crimson sky, covered in stormy clouds. The dull brown sands beneath his feet. The rusted swords planted into the ground—Emiya wheeled around as he came to a complete halt, looking back.

He blinked. There were no swords.

Emiya looked around, blinking as he shook his head. There wasn't anything around him that could even be mistaken for swords. He resumed his running.

The valleys and hills, the dead world around him, the dark sky...

He ground his teeth. He did not like this planet. At all. It reminded him of that place where he had arrived at the end, too much. He landed and took three steps to slow down, the first crossing a hundred meters, the second fifty and the third twenty before he came to a halt.

Emiya looked around.

Left and right, the desert and cliffs extended as far as the eye could see.

He closed his eyes, almost able to see the rusted grave markers planted into the barren earth and the cogs in the ever-burning sky, hearing their titanic rumble and turn echoing even through the near-void. He opened his eyes again, the night of Mars greeting him yet failing to dispel the similarity.

It was off.

Materializing onto Mars again, he incanted into the barren landscape:

"—Trace on,"—begin synchronization;

His boots sunk into the topmost layer of Mars as he stood there. He looked up at the sky and at the stars for a long time. The lack of an atmosphere wasn't all that much of a bother he noted distantly.

Aside from the complete lack of sound.

There was nothing wrong with him.

thud—thud

Except that.

The wind was picking up, tickling his bare arms and moving his hair. No, that was wrong. Lacking an atmosphere for something like wind, this was something else. Not a gas moving around, but thousands of small dust particles. It was a dust storm on the horizon, he realized. A massive front: a dozen times larger than even the biggest hurricane he had ever seen before.

A true monster, at least when it came to size.

But since atmospheric pressure on Mars was what it was, it was nothing to be concerned about. Even for continent-spanning storms, top wind speeds might reach a hundred kilometers in an hour, but in reality, a lot less stuff was being moved which meant that it was something of a paper tiger.

He stood in place, looking at that massive monstrosity rolling in towards him in the distance. He would have to go through it anyhow, so there was no point in trying to avoid it. Great bolts of lightning arced and raged about, as friction charged the advancing behemoth.

The flashes of light, the jagged arcing bolts, looked like massive teeth. Something that befitted a monster such as this storm.

Emiya distantly looked as another bolt of lightning arced through the air, well over a hundred kilometers long before it struck the ground.

There was no sound. No thunder. Only—thud—thud

He grimaced, gritting his teeth. It would not stop.

That infuriating sound. In the absence of all other sounds in this nigh-vacuum, sounds that traveled through other mediums could be much more easily heard.

Mediums, like his blood and bones. Sounds, like his heartbeat.

thud—thud

He roared then, telling it to shut up. To be quiet. That sound which denied his rationalizations and resolve. But no sound escaped his throat, his cries too stolen by the void. That nothingness that told him he wasn't dead also laughed at his weak denials. The storm rolled in, standing well over a hundred kilometers tall, it loomed far above like a tsunami before an ant.

Emiya did not move, tiredly staring up at the storm front.

Listlessly, he wondered why he felt so exhausted.

This dead world of rust. He closed his eyes, seeing his internal world. The burning sky, the giant cogwheels hanging high above, the countless rusted and tarnished swords planted into the dead ground. The kingdom of rubble inside of him. Grave markers for all those who he had failed and betrayed with his weakness.

He could do so much now.

thud—thud

His eyes shot open, as he had to look away. A bolt of lightning struck some hundred meters in front of him at that moment. The light was blinding, yet there was no thunder.

Emiya stood unmoved.

In his life, he had never called out that name. His internal world - his reality marble. He had always wielded it as his strength, since he was a child and first began to put his father's teachings to practice, it had been what had been there right alongside him and growing with him. But he had never actualized it in his life.

Unlimited Blade Works.

Perhaps it had been a lack of magical energy. Perhaps it had simply been the lack of a final resolve to finalize his mantra, to speak aloud those words which would set in stone who and what he was. Whatever it was, this was the vision he saw on that last day, as he had walked up before that crowd. He had dreamed of that place inside of himself, for decades.

But only when he stood alone at the gallows, did he truly understand what that place was.

thud—thud

Perhaps in accepting that deal with the Moon Cell; in accepting his death at the hands of those he had saved, had he finally completed his reality marble and himself. Perhaps it still to this day hadn't been wholly completed, as he had never had cause to call it forth.

Whatever the case, he suddenly remembered that day clearly.

One step. Two. Three steps. Hands bound by rope. Rough cloth on skin, the cheap garb all that was spared to a dead man walking. A crowd assembled to watch. The hanging noose before him, looming. Fourth step, onto the pedestal that would be kicked beneath him as the sentence would be carried out.

No. He'd tried to avoid thinking about it. He didn't want to remember this. He didn't want to remember—

Looking through the noose. Seeing those faces. Some familiar. Many strangers. They looked at him with distant eyes. Fear. Mistrust. Hope. Disgust. Hatred. Excitement. Accomplishment. Satisfaction. None would stand beside him; none would have spared him. He was a strange creature: a useful tool that had broken its leash and lashed out on its own. An 'indiscriminate demon of justice' as that friend had called him right before he set up a trap to turn Emiya in to those they had been fighting all along.

He had accepted his death as a natural consequence.

He had killed and killed. His hands were drenched in the blood of countless, guilty and innocent alike. He had grown drunk on his ideals and worked himself to the bone. He disparaged the strong and defended the weak. He cut down the corrupt and reached down to all those who had been trampled upon as he continued to delude himself further and further away from man.

It was natural that people would grow to shun him. Natural that they would rally against him, even as he represented the justice they all believed should have existed.

So he accepted their judgment and did not fight back.

Emiya could see him there, in the crowd, now. A partner. A friend. A confidante. Resolved. Certain. Serious. Lacking regret even as he mourned the loss of his friend to the gallows. He had considered what to think of that. He had been betrayed, after all. Yet... Yet there had been a strange feeling in his chest. In those long hours of isolation—both alone in his cell and during the trial surrounded by everyone too busy playing their roles to even see him—he had thought strange thoughts.

Even now, he could remember it.

That final moment; so painfully clearly.

It wasn't just the resolve to accept the sins cast upon him for killing all those he had. It wasn't just the understanding that he would serve after his death for a greater cause still, as a guardian. Those thoughts had come and gone long before he had walked out to face this finale. Even before he had been dragged before a kangaroo court and made a patsy for political gains and convenience.

He could remember the moment clearly, yet that last thought...

He pushed his head through the loop of rope, feeling the coarse material tightening around his neck. He inhaled, feeling his throat pressed against the restrictive material. He looked at that sea of faces, all intently gazing at him. At his final moments.

He remembered a smile.

Lighting struck him, throwing him back a step as the shock ran through him. He fell on his back; thrown back several meters. Hands grabbed onto the red sand as rock pressed into his back, almost certain that he had once again fallen over in a sea of blood and on a mountain of corpses.

Drenched to the bone in death and suffering, just like he had always been.

A thought. A realization. A resolve. An absolution. He accepted his death. He accepted their hatred and fear. He hated no one here; he thought no ill and wished no retribution upon any of them. Thus, he had to reflect that truth in his heart. He realized that —-—-—. He looked out at them, one more time and he smiled. He closed his eyes and then the chair beneath him was kicked out. He fell. The rope went taught, the sensation strangely distant and slow. His neck broke instantly. Emiya Shirou died.

He gasped for breath, even as there was nothing to inhale beyond dust and the scream that would not escape his throat. He remembered that smile, but he could not understand it anymore. Why had he smiled in that last moment? What had he forgotten? Why had he smiled?

Grabbing for his head, he squeezed at his temples.

Why?

As a thousand lightning bolts ravaged the world around him, Emiya screamed into the void. His fist pounded the bloody sands beneath him, not losing out at all to the continent-spanning rage of the storm enveloping him.

Yet no one could hear him as the void denied all sounds. All, but—

thud—thud

---

;

---

Shepard chafed in the dress uniform but held back from letting it show too much.

She found the seeming lack of discipline a bit odd, but she realized that for all the lack of overt order, the expectations placed on everyone there dwarfed anything she had faced before. Everyone was competent enough that tight regulations over everything were presumed to be unnecessary henceforth. But they also had to be competent enough to make a difference on their own.

Already, wearing a new dress uniform and expected to attend this party, she was feeling out of place again. She hesitated for a moment.

Shepard wondered whether she would be able to keep up here.

No, that's not right. If he was here, he'd be wearing his usual stoic face while thinking about something completely irrelevant. She couldn't help herself then: she smiled. But it quickly disappeared. Or would he? He had been suffering that much and he didn't tell me. Or anyone.

Every time they talked, for all his smirks and rare smiles, there was some kind of block. Like he had to overcome an initial resistance before he could do anything beyond the bare minimum.

He really didn't want to do any of the stuff I asked of him, did he?

She shook her head, trying to dispel the memory of waking up to find him on the floor next to his bunk. He had been drenched in sweat, he looked like he had been on death's door. Had she really pushed him that hard? Had he felt that he had to do all that, even with the consequences they had had?

He had told her he was a pacifist, once. She had laughed at him then, thinking it a joke, and then she had been told he had been taken off of combat rosters due to excessive mental strain from the combat.

Emiya had reassured her that he was fine, but...

"Well, you've listened to me ramble on enough. How about we bring in one of our most esteemed graduates, instead. Listen, and listen well! This man stands at the forefront of humanity, as a symbol of what all of you should be striving for here. The first N7 to graduate from Arcturus Station and one of the most decorated officers in all of the Systems Alliance Navy - a man who needs no introductions!"

Shepard continued to ignore the talking man up by the stage, even as he brought out someone and everyone began to clap up a storm.

She had more immediate concerns, such as trying out all of the proffered foods. There were long tables, garnished in beautiful white silk tablecloths and decorated with dozens of silver plates, all full of food. She had never ever even seen half of this stuff, but she was damn sure that she would at least taste all of it now that she had the chance.

The half she had already tasted were fantastic.

She looked up, glancing sideways at the robust man walking to the stage where the speaker had been talking into the microphone for a while now. Somewhere along the ten-minute mark she had lost all interest, earlier.

Sure, she was honored and happy and humbled and lots of other things to be here at the N-school, but most importantly she was also hungry. Besides, if no one was very strict on protocol here anyhow she figured it was fine to eat while listening. Some of the serving staff in fancy clothes had thrown her dirty looks, but she'd walked up to them and looked them straight in the eye until she could smell the fear on them.

Then she'd said the food was great and thanked them for the service while walking off for more.

"Well, I've never been much of a talker. But I'll see what I can do for you all. At least, I will keep it short, so don't worry about that," the guest of honor in a crisp blue uniform said as he laughed. Judging by his shoulder markings, he was a Staff Commander; one rank below a Captain. A lot of her new peers seemed to be rather intently listening now, so she figured it might be worth half of her attention as well.

More than that wasn't going to happen though: there was food to be tasted.

Overall, the man didn't look like much for a supposed legend. In good shape, but hardly that tough-looking. I could probably take him. Emiya would eat him for breakfast—whoa, this is goooood!

She turned to look at the new server, who seemed to be on the border of sneering at her. "Hey, what's this stuff? It's like, really, really good."

The server sniffed, his oiled black hair glistening in the light as he considered her for a moment over his up-turned nose.

"It is foie gras, madame."

"Fire grass? Awesome. I love it." Shepard said, taking several more and stuffing them in her mouth as the server blinked at her in total and complete confusion.

She continued eating and drinking, enjoying the 'shindig', or whatever it was. Some of the others had used that word, so she figured it meant whatever this was. It was nice, but she couldn't help but feel like it could have been better.

Her appetite soured a little at that again.

I'm sure there could have been something I could have said back then. Maybe I could have helped or... No. I don't know anything about what he had been going through... Maybe I should have gone with him to... No. No way. I don't get any of that techie stuff. She sighed explosively at that, setting down her small plate and taking a glass of the sparkling, yellowish drink. She chugged the whole glass down, feeling the bubbles burning her throat at that and fighting back the tears as she set down the glass.

It was still damn tasty.

Behind her, the server sighed. She turned around and gave him a suspicious look, but he studiously pretended to have seen and done nothing.

"Well now. Look who we have here." A strangely familiar voice spoke up and Shepard blinked.

She turned around, spotting the source. Lieutenant Commander Burnsfeldt approached her, wearing a fine-looking textile two-piece and carrying a glass of the yellow-ish sparkling water in a long glass of his own.

"Sir." She blinked, almost greeting him on reflex before his smile told her it wasn't necessary.

"In events such as these, it is generally considered fine to ignore the trappings of rank. For the most part, anyhow. This party is organized for you, anyhow. What fun would there be in a party where the heroes of the hour are made to jump hoops?" Burnsfeldt asked, settling near her as he looked around.

Shepard blinked. "For me? Oh, you mean all the new N1's?"

He nodded at that, smiling as he took a sip of his drink and looked around, taking in the many faces around them as he listened to the music all at once with practiced experience. Shepard had found the group sitting in the far corner carrying around a bunch of weird items to be quite suspicious at first, but as they began playing she realized they were there for entertainment.

A rather novel realization that music had to come from somewhere, not just the omnitools and screens she had seen before, and she had to admit that the music wasn't bad.

She could also tell just by looking at Burnsfeldt that he was an old hand at events like these. The way he could move through the crowd; how he looked around and made eye contact for seconds at a time and knew just when to nod as a greeting when he was spotted; how he seemed to ignore everything she found fascinating about this place as if it were the dirt beneath their feet...

It reminded her of what Emiya had said about him, then.

She realized that this man was from such a different world from her, that she had absolutely no frame of reference for him. He could have told her 'good morning' and lied twice and she would not be able to realize it until she looked out the window. It put a lot more stock to the warning.

"Oh my, where are your companions. While you won't be able to rely on them throughout the training, making connections and maintaining friendships at this point can be very useful. There are a lot of people who would love to meet you three here, after all," Burnsfeldt said suddenly, smiling at her.

She blinked. He didn't know?

"Umm, sir. Emi—Serviceman Emiya didn't come here."

He froze for a second, then. He blinked, looking at her like she had suddenly grown another head and begun to speak in tongues, summoning forth turians with every syllable.

"Pardon, what did you just say?"

"Err... He went to Mars, sir. To general engineering, I think." she answered, peering at him as he seemed to rock back at that. A bit of his pleasant mask was gone now, she realized.

Burnsfeldt blinked again, before inhaling deeply to reassert his calm. "What? But..."

Shepard hesitated, wondering whether she should do something as he did not look entirely well right then. Burnsfeldt then looked at her sharply, before relaxing and assuming his former, casual and relaxed mien.

But the first crack in his mask remained visible to her.

"Well, more the fool him. G-line? Really now..." he said, huffing with amusement.

Shepard frowned, feeling her hackles rising at that. This man—regardless of what he had done for her—did not have the right to insult Emiya. No one did, not right to her face with impunity. She ground her teeth.

"Well, perhaps he simply grew afraid and decided to settle for something easier. No matter, I suppose." Burnsfeldt continued as he regained himself, scoffing.

"That's not true," Shepard said forcefully, now aware that her fists were clenched and she was glaring at him.

"Hmm?" He murmured, realizing that she was in fact rather upset at him. He blinked, confused at that reaction for just an instant.

"Making friends, as usual, Burnsfeldt?" A new voice broke into the conversation and Shepard wheeled around to look; if she was going to punch him, she had to make sure no one would be standing behind her. She wouldn't let anyone stop her, her anger doing nothing to dull the tactics and lessons she had observed from Emiya budding in her head.

It was the man who had been introduced before on the stage who had said that as he walked up to them.

Shaking his head and giving Shepard a polite smile, he settled next to the two to complete the three points of a triangle. He had dark skin and short hair, with a wide nose and naturally frowning mien which contradicted the placating smile he wore at the moment.

"Don't take Burnsfeldt's words too seriously, miss. He's known as something of a firestarter," the Staff Commander said, taking a sip from his own drink to hide another smile.

Shepard blinked, realizing that he wasn't on Burnsfeldt's side per se. For a moment, she wondered whether she ought to salute this man. He was pretty high up on the food chain as far as she could tell, and the last guy around this rank she had met had been Maeda and he had been pretty hard about protocol.

The Staff Commander smiled at her then, not merely politely but gently. Oh, he doesn't mind.

Realizing she needed to calm down, she centered herself. She inhaled counting to five, holding her breath to a count of five, and then finally exhaled to a count of five.

Just like she had seen Emiya do.

The N7 seemed to realize what she was doing, then. "Box breathing? They sure do teach interesting stuff to the new recruits these days. Jane Shepard, was it? I heard a lot of talk about you in the last few days."

She blinked, relaxing as her temper subsided a little. Box breathing? What?

"Ah, umm. Thank you, sir."

"Staff Commander, a pleasure as always, sir." Burnsfeldt offered his greetings, seeming much stiffer all of a sudden, which Shepard noticed and noted immediately.

The older man looked at the Lieutenant Commander, huffing slightly at that but nodding a greeting in return nonetheless. But it was obvious that there had been something much less polite on the Staff Commander's mind for a moment there.

Burnsfeldt coughed, clearing his throat.

"And as I was saying, anyone who turns down the chance at the N-school is a fool. Even if you do not intend to continue, it will be nothing but a glowing recommendation on your service record to have even attended a single exercise. It takes a special kind of man to be too cowardly to even fail, there," Burnsfeldt continued and Shepard felt the heat return.

What had she been thinking, before? Defending this man to Emiya? And she had questioned his siding with that Major?

"Emiya was absolutely right about you - you are an untrustworthy asshole," she declared.

The Staff Commander, who had been in the middle of drinking from his glass, snorted with surprise. The bubbly drink sprayed out through his nose, causing him to cough and laugh at the same time as he raised a hand in a panic to his face to wipe away the dripping liquid.

Burnsfeldt, on the other hand, looked like he had been sucker-punched.

At first, he seemed merely surprised, but upon seeing his senior's reaction, his face began to turn red.

The N7 got himself under control again, wiping away the drink from his shirt and chin with a tissue as he laughed. "She's got you there, Lieutenant Commander. You are certainly flighty at the best of times."

That seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back, as the man scowled and turned on his heel, stomping away. Shepard blinked at the exit, before looking sideways at the older man. She felt bad about the timing of that now. She hadn't expected him to react like that, but still.

"Sorry. About the... I mean—"

He laughed. "No worries. A little champagne through the nose never killed a man. Rather refreshing, actually. I might have to take it up more often, to spruce up these occasions. Never was one for these stuffy parties, but at the same time the N-school has something of a special place in my heart and I can never quite refuse the invitations."

"Oh yeah, you were some big shot, right?" she asked, before realizing her mouth was running on its own again as she clamped it shut with a click of teeth. She looked at him with wide eyes, hoping beyond hope she hadn't shot herself in the foot just now.

He laughed again, seemingly lighting up at her candid words. His refreshed smile almost made a few of the wrinkles on his face disappear, as if years had sloughed off of the man's shoulders.

"Something like that, I suppose. David Anderson." He offered a hand to her.

She blinked at it, before accepting the handshake. Anyone who didn't like Burnsfeldt had to be a decent guy, right? "Shepard. Jane, too, I suppose. Though no one calls me that."

She made a slightly sad face at that last part, realizing she might never hear him call her that. It was a strange thought. No, that wasn't right. She would meet him again; she knew she would. She smiled up at Anderson, who had been watching her rather intently.

"It's great meeting you, sir," she said with her best grin.

---

;

---

How many times had he walked these wastelands?

One step after another. Just continuing to move forward, one foot at a time.

Once, he would have had to worry about food. Water. Heading and distance left. Regardless of the spirit, the body could only do so much. Now, he could keep performing at full potential until the moment he simply ceased to exist. It was somehow a fitting afterlife for a man who had been like a machine in life.

He felt so empty.

Visibility was nil - the storm raising the density of dust particles in the air to such that the world turned to rust.

Only occasionally a red bolt of lightning would streak by somewhere in the distance, lighting up the sandstorm in a haze. There was no thunder, even now. But he could feel the impact through his skin as particles of dust seemed to sway away from where lightning struck in a rippling shockwave.

He walked on.

I want to go back.

Go back where?

Why did I come here?

Was it purely because of the job, or had he wished for something more all along?

Why did I accept this job?

He questioned his own weakness and hesitation.

At this rate, staying behind and rusting in the Moon Cell would have been better than this.

He walked on.

The endless desert an illusionary wasteland of blood-soaked sand beneath his boots. There were no answers here. Only more questions and doubts.

He sped up, seeking to leave it all behind. But even as he shot through the storm like a bullet—gathering static electricity and causing great arcs of light to explode off of him—none of it would be left behind, stubbornly clinging onto him. He would now forever be hounded by that question.

He remembered a smile...

How long had he been sitting and being worn away from within in the Moon Cell? Did it matter if it had been one, ten, or over a hundred years, for that matter? Because in the process, he had forgotten something he had learned at his end. Something important.

Why had he smiled, then?

Was it because he had reached that place at the end? No, that's wrong.

He had reached that place because he had smiled, not the other way around.

Emiya leaped forward again, putting all of his strength into his feet with every step. The very earth beneath him shattered and exploded in the wake of his passing as if someone had been carpet-bombing the ground with thousands of bunker busters in a straight line, sending ripples throughout the storm.

He increased his speed twofold. Threefold. Fourfold. There seemed to be no end to his physical might.

Clearing the storm, he exploded out of the dust front in a great gale. Like a balloon that was pierced, the side bulged outwards and exploded as he cleared it in a single bound. He landed, the ground cracking and shattering beneath him as he leaped forward without slowing down even a bit.

He continued for another 40 kilometers, slowly, absently, bleeding off his speed before he stopped.

He came to a halt, on top of a small mountain. Looking around, he considered his location. Looking up at the stars above and the valleys below, he referenced his mental map. Emiya frowned, realizing he had been turned around, thrown completely off course by the storm. Or more perhaps by the storm inside of him.

He gazed out into the horizon, sighing. Having traveled at such ridiculous speeds he had gone off course far towards the east. Despite only running for some two hours now, he had literally run through the night towards the rising sun. The sun that had only just set in the west when he had gone to bed in his body, scarce hours before.

But here he stood on the top of a mountain and witnessed the sun rising from the east to herald a new dawn. The burning horizon; the cloudy sky; the rusted landscape all around him. It all served to remind him of his internal world ever more strongly.

He sighed, shaking his head. What a mess he had become.

thud—thud

You be quiet, he thought with tired annoyance.

Something that simple and minor had thrown him off so much. How pathetic. He spoke, but no words came out. But that did not matter since he was only trying to convince himself with an inward mantra, the resolution however fragile and momentary, would carry him through the night for now.

"I died a long time ago. Even if this beating heart would deny that now it changes nothing. Those who are gone have no right to walk among the living."

He shook his head once more, smirking wryly at his own foolishness.

It was an ugly, crooked thing adorning his face

Dismissing his selfish thoughts, he astralized again and disappeared from the mountaintop. Only the dust that had clung to him and dropped down suddenly as he vanished, remained of his presence for a moment longer as the winds erased even his footsteps from that hill.

---

;

---

Emiya soared through the air, invisible and immaterial. The skies above were dark, so dark that the ground below looked more like ash than rust, now.

A change which he actually preferred, somewhat.

He leaped once more, landing on a cliff lightly. Not a single speck of dust was moved out of place. The difference in resource consumption between staying astralized and running physically wasn't very large, but it was something he still noted. Compared to a fight, where he would have to actually strain himself, continuously running at high speeds was nothing.

Stamina had always been his thing, he supposed.

Not that this weariness he felt was affected by either state.

Even while lacking a proper anchor for his unstable existence, he could still function somewhat normally thanks to the Independent Action skill in his Servant container's spiritual core, allowing him to manifest under his own powers for a single day without issue. But it was still better to remain astralized, as the moment that timer ran out, he would be placed under immense stress.

Like a candle out in the howling wind.

Or a dead man walking, who did not know when to rest. Perhaps it would be best simply to allow himself to be blown out?

Focus.

He beheld the facility in the distance. Squat, blocky-looking buildings built around a canyon of sorts. White prefab walls and chromed steel, with large reinforced windows and airlocks adorning the sides. A rather boring-looking place; something he doubted he would have any personal interest in if he did not know it was the research station built around the Prothean ruins.

It was utterly dark here. The ruins were located to the east in relation to Lowell City, so it made sense. Night arrived here before it did at Lowell City, as would dawn eventually.

No, that wasn't right he realized. This was already within the polar circle. Just as on Earth, due to the tilted axis of the planet, on both the south and north poles existed a single long day and night. On Earth, within the polar circles, the sun only rose and set once a year. A winter of unbreakable darkness. A summer of never-waning light. It was a strange and magical place, at times.

Here on Mars, he realized he knew nothing of how long it might take for the sun to rise this far down south. He knew that a Mars' year was 687 Earth days long. He also vaguely remembered that the tilt to the axis of rotation—which facilitated the changing of seasons on both Earth and Mars—were mere single degrees in difference. Would this research station thus be coated in darkness for over an entire Earth year's time, every Mars year?

He sighed, realizing that he would not be able to assume that everyone inside would be already asleep. Then again, with his astral form, it might not really matter.

Emiya leaped forward, reaching what looked like the front entrance to the facility. There was a clearing for shuttles and starships to land right outside, from the looks of it. A large ramp led to an airlock just as wide, presumably to allow supplies and machinery to be transported with greater ease.

He walked casually through the airlock, not even feeling the difference between near-void, solid, or pressurized internal artificial atmosphere as he moved forward in his astralized state.

Looking around, he spotted a guard booth nearby. A man was there, sitting and looking at his omnitool while monitors continued playing footage from around the facility. A clock on the wall told Emiya that despite his detour in the storm, it had still taken him only three hours to get here.

Continuing to walk around, he eyed the insides of the research station with disinterested eyes. It was similar to Ares Station, in how dull and how lacking in personality it all seemed. Something about the prefab plastics and steel simply did not speak to him in design or purpose.

Walking through the entire facility, he realized there was a tram system to continue to another building. He understood then that this was an external facility, probably meant to separate the researchers and support staff from the site itself.

Keeping control of access to such a historic site was most likely a grave concern.

Emiya leaped through the walls, clearing the entire tramway's length in a single stride. He sailed up through the walls, arcing over the tramline and phasing through the wall on the other end.

Looking around, he advanced further.

There were some people around, but less than he'd expected. They must have been following something resembling the normal Mars day cycle here as well, then.

He continued walking until he arrived in a large room, where, in the center was a ring of reinforced glass. Inside this massive tube of sorts, was a strange-looking rock formation with large glowing patterns on top of it.

Emiya frowned, looking at the numerous teams of researchers, poring over their displays and screens while nursing cups of heated beverage. He took a whiff with an exertion into the physical, recognizing it as the modern equivalent of instant coffee. He huffed with amusement; there would always be those who would burn the midnight oil for their passions.

He had been a man like that too, once.

But right now, it was an annoyance. What little he had gleaned of the codecast's function, he knew it would not be so discrete as to remain below these men's notice. Even as occupied as they were right now.

Sighing he walked around, looking at the artifacts in the center of the great room. It appeared they were some form of data cache, based on how computers seemed to be hooked up to them and the lines of light running through them seemed to pulsate in rhythm and synchronization with the researchers' actions.

It still looked like a huge rock.

He considered for a moment whether the data cache was constructed of photonic crystals, like the Moon Cell. But he dismissed that idea immediately.

"Ridiculous. This facility already houses all that could be necessary for a research team of Protheans, dated long before their disappearance fifty thousand years ago. We found numerous starships and caches of eezo and technology here which are dated to that era as well. If they were researching humanity in our earliest days, what possible use could they have for a second facility, buried even deeper at some later date? Even assuming they returned after the date of their dated disappearance, what reason would there be for a second facility?" A man raised his voice, scowling at another standing in the circle.

"Yes, yes. But the infrastructure and energy distribution net suggests that it was modified much later to facilitate such a reconstruction. That the second facility was built after the original Prothean research team abandoned this outpost is just a possibility since the dating suggests that, but it's not conclusive of anything. What we should be doing is attempting to find out if there really is a second facility." The second man argued back, just as vehemently.

"Hah! And for what reason? Preposterous. Besides, your theories would require us to uproot half of the current facility and to bore through numerous layers of the existing ruins, which could cause untold damage to the priceless sites!"

Emiya did not bother listening anymore, having heard enough. He looked down and stared. Willing himself to fall, he went through the floor.

He moved through the ground as if he had been falling through the air and for a moment he wondered what would happen if he fell all the way to the planet's core. Picking up speed, he continued to fall. Already he must be at least a kilometer below the surface. How long would it continue?

Maybe I'll get to rest in the Martian underworld since the Moon kicked me out, he chuckled grimly at that thought, but then shook his head as suddenly he was out of solid and back into an atmosphere.

Materializing himself just enough to slow down against solids, he landed on a flat surface. The floor of this space.

It was pitch black, even to his senses. He could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. Either this was a cavern some thousands of meters below the facility above him, or he had found the second ruins they had mentioned.

Either way, it was empty.

Still, there was a strange intent to the air. He frowned, trying to understand it better even as it eluded him. Just beyond his senses, dancing at the edge of nothingness. It felt familiar, yet wholly strange.

He shook his head, focusing on his physical senses.

Nothing existed here, he judged as he materialized fully with his arms crossed. He noted how cold it was, but was not bothered by it. He was rather near the south polar cap of Mars. Temperatures could drop to -150° C there, from what he remembered reading. Even this deep underground, without artificial warming it was deadly to humans.

Emiya thought that he had read about Mars' possessing a molten core, but it must have been much smaller if it wasn't radiating any warmth here. He knew the planet lacked tectonic plate movements and that there had been no volcanic eruptions on the surface in eons. In any case, the endothermic warmth of the core did not seem to be reaching this place deep though it was.

He inhaled, controlling his breathing to warm himself up in response. It was unnecessary, given that his body could handle it just fine, but it was a habit he had learned from operating in cold climates. Raise body temperature to expend more energy and to survive with less clothing.

His bare arms still turned to goose-flesh and tingled painfully and he scowled even if it wasn't a problem yet.

"—Trace on," —begin projection;

A sword appeared in his hand. It ignited with warm yellow light, throwing back the darkness sufficiently for Emiya to look around and chasing away the cold with its fiery glow.

A dull hallway: empty, dark, and lifeless.

But smooth and geometrical.

Artificial, constructed by someone, he judged instantly. Though the architecture was slightly strange, which helped him remember that this was a facility of alien design.

He shook his head and incanted: "Codecast: Archimedes' program."

A glowing blue ball shot out of his being, stored in his spiritual core until now, vibrating and then exploding into a million smaller lights that shot off into every direction. Like a great cloud of blue fireflies, they spread into every direction and began to map out and scan the facility.

Emiya walked on, observing the codecast doing its work silently before an involuntary shiver went through him.

He frowned, looking down at his bare arms. He wasn't cold per se, but something in him—perhaps some of his old human sensibilities and nothing more—was telling him to put on something more to ward off the chill. He considered his shroud but dismissed the thought.

This still was not a duty worthy of that.

The flow in the circuit inside of him re-oriented, the spell still active from before as he synchronized with the gear he was wearing and extended his senses within it with his magical energy.

Alternating diamene weave—once the top of the line when it came to materials as far as he knew and could imagine—was based on graphene, one of those wonder materials that were set to revolutionize the world back when he had been alive. He hadn't even bothered to check, but no doubt it had been eclipsed by a dozen other artificial materials since then.

His vest, his trousers, his boots, and all the other protective gear that wasn't metal were made of the stuff in one configuration or another. Overall, the entire set was rather impressive - or so he thought once upon a time, at least. Right now, however, he simply wanted longer sleeves. So he would just use Projection magic to create the parts he wanted and weave them into his existing clothes so that they were essentially sown together as one.

The breath came out slowly, the active spell expanding without the need for further incantation.

—begin projection, hypothesizing the basic structure, altering;

The mental blueprint appeared in his mind's eye.

The top vest was a special design worthy of praise even in comparison to the rest of his gear, but it was not suitable for his sleeves as a material, thus he would settle for the fabric configuration he used for his trousers instead. Half as thin and lacking some of the more rigid protection, it was still tough in the extreme.

Adding sleeves, he did not settle for an open wrist, rather he continued with the material to add fingered gloves to the end, thinning the layers to maintain sufficient fine mobility. This would leave him with a snug layer of protection that would extend from fingertip to fingertip. He almost finished there, actualizing the spell, but...

'Always wear a scarf during winter, that's how you get sick!' A memory of long ago flashed by.

A taller woman with short light brown hair had said as she leaned down over him and put her muffler on him, years ago. He remembered almost drowning in that puffy pink scarf. Both the warmth and scent had been unusual on that cold winter day. He exhaled and shook his head, letting the hot air out in a snaking streaming cloud of steam.

Fine, fine...

He extended the collar upwards as well so that it covered his throat and lower face as well in the work-in-progress design. This would be enough, he thought and connected again with the vest he was wearing and actualized the spell with a thrum of fire through his veins.

"—Trace off,"—all processes completed;

Emiya exhaled hot air and opened his eyes.

Observing himself in the light of the glowing sword, he nodded. Covered from nose-to-toe in black, the top looked almost like a form-hugging polo shirt that had been pulled up to cover his lower face, the sleeves extending up to the fingers and hands contained all in the same piece. Wrist and finger mobility was fine, the palms and tips still had decent sensitivity, and it wasn't wearing down too fast either.

It would do, he noted as the worst of the chill seemed to fade.

Since the material wasn't very stretchy or elastic, it had to be precisely the right size. Getting it on himself the normal way would have been nearly impossible, but that was fine since he simply directly projected it onto himself with his magic. He actually had made most of his casual clothes in the same manner too, before.

A black dress-shirt and pants combination, which he felt looked sufficiently smart casual to get him by in most places. He hadn't ever gotten around to making that full secret agent-tuxedo he had thought about, now that he thought about it. It wasn't like he went into places where he needed one often enough to justify the effort required.

Emiya looked around, noting that most of the codecast 'fireflies' had disappeared, moving onto the deeper parts of the ruin and leaving him behind, though it had been mere seconds since he activated them.

He sighed as he realized he had gotten completely lost in his thoughts again, moving on to follow the way they had disappeared. He was fairly certain nothing would happen, but if something did appear and broke the codecast, he would probably have to return to the Moon Cell to get a replacement.

Which would be less than optimal.

Moving further in, he looked around as he took in the scenery. It was rather spartan and ascetic, lacking any decorations or anything that was absolutely unnecessary. This had been the work of pragmatic craftsmen, someone who valued function over form. It almost made him think they had been in a hurry.

It left interesting implications for why they had been so near Earth.

They must have been here for some purpose, after all.

---

;

---

"What the hell did you do?" Burnsfeldt ground out as soon as the comm-line went through.

"Sir, I—" the voice on the other end tried to protest.

"No, shut your trap, you incompetent idiot! How the hell did you screw up something this simple?! I thought you told me you would handle it? He was on the fast track to N3 already, for fuck's sake!" His shout echoed and a server walking by with a large platter glanced his way for a second.

But at Burnsfeldt's angry glare, the server hastily moved along his way back to the party before trouble found his way.

"Sir, we tried to tell him, but then things changed. Did you receive my mail? We can't actually force anyone to—"

"Of course you can! Did you tell him about the salary? About the benefits and care packages? Or about his prospects following that? About the fucking pension?! How the hell did you screw this so fucking badly? You let him go to Mars? MARS? We send drunks, morons, and retards to fucking Mars!"

"...Of course, we did, sir! But that's not going to work anymore!" The drill instructor said. "Not until a therapist clears him for combat duty!"

"...Therapist?"

Burnsfeldt let out an explosive sigh, rubbing his brow as he investigated the matter.

He pulled out the mail, which he hadn't had time to read until now with everything going on recently. Making preparations on his end and handling all the complaints rolling his way, while trusting those at the basic course to handle that matter, even if it had apparently been a mistake.

He had under the pretenses of the rifle-hack discovery gotten paperwork signed by a sufficiently 'sympathetic' Rear Admiral to immediately get his stake claimed on the trio. That meant that no one else could try and muscle in, allowing him to claim priority on everything and anything related to them, and forcing everyone to forward all requests pertaining to that event and team to him.

He had been busy beating away people with that paperwork as if it were a big stick.

Several times a day, someone or other would call in and tell him they wanted Emiya or Shepard or even Cassani for something or other. And he would always rebuff them, directing them to take it up with the famously stubborn Rear Admiral whose backing he had. Having deep pockets was very good like that, sometimes.

It should have allowed him to keep a close eye on them, once they made it to N-school, where he could slowly grow closer to them while getting a good feel for them. That way, in due time he could influence and convince them to commit to the cause.

Except that Shirou Emiya had gone completely and utterly off the rails even before the first day of training.

Post-traumatic stress disorder. Cleared for non-combat duty only. G-line. Mars.

"Fucking Mars...?" he muttered again under his breath, still unable to believe it.

"Sir?"

"Never mind. I'll handle it." Burnsfeldt hung up the comm on the instructor.

He shook his head, trying to understand.

"What the hell did I miss...?" He leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms.

There was no way an ordinary recruit would pass up a shot at N-school. It just didn't happen. It was the stuff of legends, even among civilians. There were dozens—hundreds of action and drama vids about them just this year already. The Systems Alliance propaganda arm was working day and night and their N-line propaganda had always been popular.

The populace gobbled that stuff up. Who the hell would pass on up the chance of becoming N7?

He pulled up his omnitool, bringing out the footage from the Shanxi exercise again.

This time he focused only on the camera feed from Emiya. He had been there and had followed it live, but at that time he had been only able to pay half-attention to it since he had technically still been working. That, and he had been switching between the feeds of all three, as he tried to keep an understanding of the whole picture.

Plus the occasional rewind from another person's perspective.

And the effort it took to get in touch with the Rear Admiral and convince him to help out, before the exercise had ended and everyone else would become aware of the trio.

But now as he looked at it with fresh and suspicious eyes things seemed to pop out in an entirely different fashion. At the time he had dismissed it, having only been paying attention to the rough events, merely following along in the heat of things and letting it all play out while holding the Gunnery Chief from cutting anything short or trying to put a stop to it.

He had been drunk at the prospect of recruiting them. So drunk he hadn't considered all the possibilities. He had predicted that there would be a massive interest in them by everyone who was anyone, thus he had been hurrying along his play, calling in favors and support.

The support that had hinged on the promises of certain conditions being fulfilled. Conditions, like making use of them properly and directing them later down the line into certain positions and duties. Promises, which now hung around his neck like a rock as he was being thrown into the metaphorical sea by the waves Shirou Emiya was making.

If he didn't handle this, it would be exploding all over his face.

I need to have this checked. Burnsfeldt called up someone, then. Sending over the clipped-out piece of footage, he asked. "What do you think?"

"Hmm? As a sniper, you mean?"

"Yes, obviously as a sniper. What do you think?" Burnsfeldt insisted.

Silence, a few quiet murmurs. Then:

"...He one of your new batch? Prime N-material right there. Must have had some damn good training - his sniping is top-notch. His crosshair doesn't waver at all and his breath control is perfect. Hell, looking at his biometrics output, I can see he's riding his heart like he's been doing this for decades. He get installed with some of those new perception dilation implants I've heard about?"

Burnsfeldt started at that. He hung up the comm-line.

He was right.

He had missed something. Something huge. Shirou Emiya wasn't some fresh recruit. It was obvious in hindsight, but he had been so drunk on excitement and riding on the praise he had received that he had stopped thinking at the crucial moments.

But who the hell was this recruit?

His fingers began to dance; he had clearance to a lot of places with information about anything and everything. And where he didn't his skills let him go around and get what he wanted regardless. Checking the civilian registries yielded nothing. No medicard or identitags, anywhere. Earliest paperwork started at the damn enlistment office. Nothing before that. Absolutely nothing.

"But that's not possible..."

He tried looking through from the beginning that he had material on, reading his performance reviews and the instructors' notes. Average. Quiet. Unsociable, but able to work in a team just fine. Big eater. Started out skinny as a twig, without any genetic enhancements, but buffed up to impressive levels as Burnsfeldt had seen in Brazil within mere months. Read all the time, without preference. Classic novels, old and new; technical literature and schematics; assorted general trivia and information...

He compared the two pictures: the starved street urchin and the stoic sniper genius.

They looked like completely two different people; like a year had passed. There was more to this than just a change in diet and gene therapy. Yet, the eyes were the same. Sharp. piercing even in this still picture. Like they could see right through you and sneered at what they could see.

The more Burnsfeldt read, the less he understood.

---

;

---

Emiya continued to walk deeper and deeper into the underground ruins.

He had already found the old elevator shaft that had led to the primary ruins above, which had from the looks of things collapsed tens of thousands of years prior. Or had been detonated on purpose - it was hard to tell with the passage of time and he was probably jumping to conclusions. He considered it for a while before shaking his head and continuing his walk as he charted the insides of the ruins mentally.

It explained why it had not been discovered before, but at the same time, he felt it strangely curious. Something about it bothered him, but he could not place a finger on what exactly. Perhaps it was simply the difference in wear and tear he was observing.

Walking ever deeper, he began to discover more.

Equipment, broken and unresponsive. Vehicles and guns, whole if lacking in charge and just as dead. Piles of what looked like food, and the remains of what he realized were some form of advanced hydroponics farm and a processing plant for waste.

This place did not make sense to him. At all.

It seemed like a hidden stronghold, not a research station of any kind.

He continued to wander deeper and deeper until finally, he found the tanks. Not ground fighting vehicles or armor, but holding tanks. Great cylinders, full of some strange material that had hardened and solidified many eons ago until it was impossible to see deeper inside it.

Something in his gut told him that it wasn't empty inside—the solidified material aside.

"—Trace on,"—begin synchronization;

Emiya extended a hand to the surface, closing his eyes as he let his odic energy flow out and into the cylinder for a Structural Analysis. The dimensions of the tube filled his mind's eye first; some sort of silicate compound, a non-crystalline amorphous solid.

A super-glass of some kind, essentially.

It was two meters tall, with an internal diameter of one meter. Hermetically sealed and with a mechanism for opening and closing it both above and below to flush out and move around the contents through a set of tubes, controlled by a computer terminal somewhere else, he guessed.

He realized that the solid material inside had once been a liquid. Extending his senses further, he touched the solid gunk inside the glass.

Some sort of biological compound, nothing I can make heads or tails out of... Emiya ignored the physical makeup of the gunk and instead tried to get a feel for when it had been made or when it had become solid.

"Guh... No good."

He sighed, letting out another steaming breath of air through clenched teeth. His specialization had always been weaponry, swords in particular. Other things did not come anywhere nearly as naturally to him. So perhaps it was the simple fact that humanity's earliest swords only dated back to some five thousand years ago, and weapons older than that were honestly a bit muddy to him.

Most of them are god-forged, anyhow. Perhaps it was tied to the concept of humanity acknowledging existence that was the problem. The old question went 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?'

Philosophically, one could answer that in many ways.

For magi, the answer was 'absolutely' as the sound would have been recorded in the Root at the very least.

But for humanity? Emiya did not know.

But it was clear to him that when things grew very ancient, their existence grew muddled in humanity's perception of the world. Myth and legend mixed with reality. Things that were real and things that should have been mere stories grow hazy at the edges, blurring together. Imaginary time and possibilities mixed together, creating something that was impossible to definitively understand.

He doubted it had anything to do with his skills, per se.

Even with the difference of a century or two, it did not feel like his understanding of his oldest weapons grew any weaker. Rather, it seemed like there simply existed a cap on a certain point in time, beyond which he could not reach.

He sighed, shaking his head. Focusing again, reaching as far back as he could in trying to put a number to this cylinder. Sweat pooled on his forehead. Where running a thousand kilometers and braving continent-spanning dust storms had failed, this simple magecraft managed to exhaust him.

Emiya was one of the foremost Fakers in all of existence, and here he was pushing this simple aspect of his craft further than he ever had before. Exhaling what had been steam before seemed like fire now. If he could put a number to how far he had gone while keeping the concepts and staying coherent...

"It's been here at least twenty-five thousand years, huh," he sighed, lowering his hand, unable to contain the disappointment in his voice.

The Protheans had supposedly disappeared a span of time over twice that long ago. There would not be any easy answers for him here. Perhaps if he had infinite magical energy and did not have to worry about frying himself to death in the process, it might be possible to peer even further back in time, but he dismissed that idea with a shake of his head.

It sounded like the kind of foolishness some upstart magus might think up in trying to reach the Spiral of Origin. The kind of foolishness that led to a painful, dumb, and meaningless death. He bet that if he staked his life on it, he might reach thirty, maybe forty thousand years, here and now.

That still wouldn't help him much.

Certainly, there were spear and arrowheads older than that and he had no trouble with them. But they did not possess a continuous existence throughout time, having often been completely lost for tens of thousands of years. He knew that they were simply old and might be aware that according to scientific dating they were so and so old, but to his perception, it was simply an island in the middle of an ocean of chaos.

Something unbound from the greater history of man.

Additionally—perhaps it was simply the memories in the weapons that were weakened after such a long time, or perhaps it was due to the lesser cognitive abilities of those who had wielded those primitive weapons—but rarely did such examples have any clear ideology or concept of creation within themselves for him to even read.

He shook his head.

This was getting him nowhere.

But he still hadn't analyzed everything. Extending his od further in, he grasped at the contents of the cylinder. He found something. A rather familiar and well-preserved specimen of—

"What?"

Emiya started as he opened his eyes.

"How?"

He pushed even more magical energy through his hand, this time willing the solidified gunk to turn into a liquid again through Reinforcement magic, slowly turning it transparent once more.

Emiya swallowed, his brows furrowing as he took a step away from the tube. He stared at the humanoid body inside, so well preserved that it might have been alive moments before for all he knew.

It didn't just look 'human'—it looked like a human.

That's... That's not just an early humanoid? When the hell was she brought here? Emiya stared, taking in her features. Dark hair; a short and wide face; a relatively long and powerful body along with dexterous and nimble-looking fingers.

That looks like a completely modern human, he thought for a second.

"No, no. Humans are far older than just 50,000 years. It could have been here since long before the Protheans disappeared..." He shook his head. Yet, that thought would not leave him. Perhaps the Protheans here had been doing something more than merely studying humans. But surely it had been before the supposed extinction of that ancient precursor race.

Yet he didn't believe it. Something about this place had been bothering him for a while now. He turned around, looking at the several other similar-looking glass tubes that adorned the walls of the room.

He went through them one by one, grasping the contents quickly as well. There were humans and hominids of various kinds; even a chimpanzee-like ape in one tube by the far end.

"What the hell is this place?" He asked no one in particular, and the expected answer of silence was all that followed.

Emiya turned around, only absently cutting off the spell.

He had to go deeper now. There would be something deeper still: he could feel it. Something about this place had been screaming that at him all along. 'Come deeper, reach for the deep and you'll find the truth,' it called out to him.

He walked on.

Slow steps turned into a jog that turned into a run and finally, he was dashing through the labyrinthine ruins with his glowing sword held aloft as he scanned every room but for a fraction of a second before he dismissed it and moved on. Frantically, he went through the facilities, moving deeper and deeper. The further he went, the more he felt like there had to be something within this place even as nothing stood out to him.

Until finally, he reached the lowest point.

It must have been at least five kilometers below the surface of Mars - an absolutely staggering depth. He reached a door: heavy gates, made out of an advanced steel alloy that exceeded anything he had seen so far. Like a bunker, he thought involuntarily.

Emiya swallowed, testing a hand against it.

He pressed lightly, both physically and with his od as he analyzed the door. It was meters thick. He hesitated. Breaking this door was not proper.

This door had to hold shut. It must never be opened. Not because of what had been locked in, but what had been locked out. He could taste it in the air now, the intent. The lingering grudges, fear, hatred, and desperation. Suddenly he was reminded of the park in his hometown, lingering with malignance long after the fire that burned it all down had died out and disappeared.

This was not a good place.

Swallowing his nervousness, he astralized and stepped through the door as an immaterial spirit, keeping his eyes closed for nervousness as to what he might see.

Emiya materialized, opening his eyes. His breath stilled as he froze in place. His heart ceased its damnable beating for an instant as his very spirit and soul paused at the sight before him. It was a round chamber, wide and large.

Enough to fit hundreds.

They sat in consecutive rings on the floor.

Some had fallen over. Some leaned on each other. Some remained sitting upright as if they were still alive. Aliens. Two arms, two legs. Only three digits on each hand. A strange, leathery skin visible around a wide head inlaid with four eyes.

They almost looked like some ancient sect of monks, all meditating together.

Aside from the fact that each and every single one of them held a pistol in one of their hands. And to accompany that pistol, there was a bullet hole in each of their heads, right in the middle of their foreheads like a fifth eye.

The intent was at its strongest here. The kind of grudge that would give birth to eldritch gods of vengeance and unbreakable curses that would haunt all who approached it. Yet it lay inert and faded, howling in impotent madness at some enemy that no longer existed here. It was not a rampant hatred; it was focused; purposeful; defiant.

"What the hell..." Emiya muttered.

They had locked themselves in here; come to die together.

He kneeled down, staring at the closest one. It was small. If he did not hesitate to think such things as aliens, he would have thought it a child.

In its opened claws remained a dead pistol.

Emiya picked it up, gently as to avoid disturbing the dead and deceased around him. It was a weapon. Though it was no sword, it was still a weapon, which gave him a slight affinity towards it. Not much. But something. More than the glass tubes at least.

"—Trace," he began, hesitating for a moment. Madness lay beyond. But he could not look or turn away now.

"on."

s Ò̹̮̪̯͇̝͗͊̋̋̒͠B̷̪̬̖̰̭͇̲̽̇͒̇̄E̹̟̺̠̽̋̊ͭ̐̄Y̳ͮͯͮ a re̵si͜s̴ţ ͍͇v B͓̺̞̦̠̖͎ͭ̄ͭ̿̊͂E͇̦̖̱͎͎̤ͫ S̭͎̘͖̜̲̭ͨ͌̍ͩ͑ͥÚ͖͕̤͗̀ͮͪB̟̻͎͈̅̒̑͋ͩͮͩŜ͕͓͖̭̱͚̭̓͗̈ͪ͆ͧU̯̩̰̪̠̲̓́͋͊̚̚M̫̳̜̮̭̰̱̿ͣ́͢E͇̦̖̱͎͎̤ͫḌ͎̰̻̄̉̆͂͛͗ͣ e ̦̾s͘u͝rv͢ive Ś̹ͅƯ͎ͧ̅̔̅̌͗B͇̰͍̤̳̙ͦͨͭ͆̎͊̈͟M̢̼͎̜̗̣ͧ͆ͮI̷̱̳͛̉T͙̝͖ͨ u rega̡i͟ń ̮̰̺ͫ͂̍ͭ͌͐͢U͎̗͔͇̖̖̮N͈̹̞̾ͩͮ̈͌̂͛I̢͚̟F͕͙̻͚͉͔Y̵̹̗͕̦̫ͮ͊ͥͫ̈ s a̴ve͞nge ̙̪̹̗̟̙ͭ͒̿ͦA͇̳̮̻̣͓̬̒̈́ͯS̢ͮ͒͑C̺̞̆̍̂͒̉͋͜E̳̪͖͇̩̲̽ͫͥ͌̾ͬ͋N͙̼̯̈́ͮ̀̾̿̓͂͘Ḍ̶̇̒̍̾̎̓ !

"Gah!"

He tossed away the pistol.

It skidded away on the cold, dark floor until it came to rest in the center of the room.

Emiya panted for breath, backing away as he clutched his head. The weapons had managed to become cursed through their overwhelming spiritual energy and significance to everyone here. The thoughts that lingered were chaotic, almost impossible to understand, burning in their intent and clarity yet incomprehensible to him.

He could only piece together fragments. Of a thousand voices as one, becoming a storm. He looked up, realizing that all of these pistols had in this final moment become a single existence. They were essentially a Noble Phantasm to these creatures.

One was all, all was one.

Emiya could feel something within him lodge out of place and suddenly he felt like retching. It was inside of him now. Somewhere, inside his mental landscape, these ritual suicide tools had been recorded despite all of his experience screaming that it was impossible for something like that to have occurred.

"Ugh..." he spat on the floor as his knees wobbled and his vision swam, hoping that it would erase the taste of bile rising in his throat. "What the hell is this place?"

Shaking his head and calming himself down he took a circuit around the room, exploring every nook and cranny with his eyes. There was nothing else here. It was simply an empty room, aside from the aliens and the g̛̀̕u͝n͠s̛. They seemed to glow in his vision, as he picked each and everyone out in the room wherever they may lay. He shook his head, ignoring them.

Is this some kind of shelter? Or a temple? There's too little to go on by.

He stepped back, taking one more look before turning his back to the dead. He would learn nothing more here. Maybe Archimedes would have answers?

He astralized and started ascending again. As he got halfway back up to where the collapsed elevator entrance lay, he noticed the strange thing finally, returning into being with the glowing sword pushing back the darkness again.

The codecast 'fireflies' were all gone.

That Archimedes, did he plan this? Emiya blinked. He looked around, closing his eyes to listen and to extend his magical detection. Nothing. The ruins were as silent and dead as they had been when he had first arrived. But how am I supposed to return, then? I supposed I could simply disappear and let the Moon Cell handle it, but...

He shook his head. Not yet.

thud—thud

"Fine. I guess I just wasn't worth informing about this bit in the plan." He shook his head, letting the glowing sword disappear in motes of light as he astralized again.

Crouching down a slight bit, he pushed off.

Moving up through the solid bedrock wasn't as quick as moving down had been. As a spiritual body, his capability for fast movement essentially all relied on his ability to simulate physical movements. He kicked off and jumped forward according to his own perceptions, thus he moved forward.

That wasn't exactly how it worked, but it was important for the spirit's visualization to make sense for their own movement. Casper the ghost might be able to float and fly around freely. Him? Not so much. Therefore climbing up was something like swimming upwards from great depths rather than floating, only instead of kicking to displace water he imagined the bottom of his foot making contact and letting him kick off to continue ascending.

Breaking through to the surface, Emiya opened his eyes and looked around. It was still dim due to the polar night, but compared to the underground it was relatively bright. Compared to a human's eyes, his visibility in this setting was actually rather good.

He looked up, frowning at the cloud-cover. Like this, he couldn't see the stars to navigate.

Shaking his head, he simply chose a direction based on the terrain. The clouds seemed to extend as far as the eye could see, but he could see mountains of ice on the horizon in the direction opposite to the one he had chosen to travel towards.

Mars had ice caps; therefore he should be traveling up north with this. Crossing mountains and massive craters at a good pace, faster than even a jet fighter from his era, he only came to a halt once he could finally see the stars again.

"Hmm... I'm a little bit too much to the east again." But judging by the brightness, he had still plenty of time to get back.

Emiya resumed his running again.

Within two hours he had caught up to the storm he had originally gone through and he skirted around it until he was roughly certain of his heading. Then, cutting through the dust storm like one of the massive lightning bolts, he headed for Lowell City.

With a new purpose to his steps, time seemed to go by much faster, as he moved. He arrived near Lowell City before he knew it.

Soaring through the air, he landed inside Ares Station soundlessly.

He rose from his crouch and looked at the clock by the wall. His entire trip had taken less than seven hours. Not bad.

Walking through the empty halls, he made his way toward his bunk.

What would he do now? Archimedes hadn't contacted him at all. The Moon Cell hadn't made a peep, either. He had completed his mission. Originally he had been told to return once he was done, but given that he was currently stuck on Mars...

Didn't that mean that no one really cared what he did from here on in? Couldn't I just...

He didn't finish that thought; those traitorous thoughts and desires anathema to him. Phasing through the wall to his room, Emiya blinked at the sight before him.

Emiya Shirou was gone: the bunk was empty.

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Codex:

[ Akahara Reisou component - Alternating Diamene Weave Chestpiece ]

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Early on in his travels, Emiya Shirou had realized that he needed better protection.

The soft body armors and plate carriers simply were not enough for the conflicts he regularly thrust himself into. This initially led him to focus on hard armors such as plate and lamellar, based on past designs and material he knew to be effective, reasoning that his affinity for metals would give him good results in protective value for their weight and they did.

But there were drawbacks he had not considered. The first time he tried to dodge with a mid-air flip in the middle of a fight, his center of balance had been so off that he had nearly snapped his neck on landing. A medieval knight could certainly perform cartwheels and jump onto a horse in a full suit of armor, but he could not be expected to perform a back handspring into an upside-down pirouette through the air, from whence he could pull his bow at a dime to loose five arrows before touching the ground again.

It was actually a common weakness of medieval plate armor.

With so much steel on their upper bodies, their center of mass was moved higher up, making tipping over a knight to the ground much easier, leading to the prevalence of wrestling techniques on the battlefields of those eras. The daggers that could be used with such techniques probably claimed more heavily armored knights on the battlefields than any sword, spear or bow did.

Regular designs of armor had never been designed for the kinds of acrobatic movements he had incorporated into his fighting style—be it with sword or bow, or both, in hand—and he had struggled for years in trying to find something that truly worked for him.

Especially as heavier armor almost universally pressed their weight down on the hips and the shoulders.

Meaning that moving upside down would ruin any possibility of using the stabilizing maneuvers he had painstakingly learned for controlling his body in mid-air, as the armor would move on its own as well, often falling down while he was upside down. Perhaps ancient warriors could learn how to manage it, but he did not have the talent for such, and had to rely on relatively mundane human acrobatics for that basis of his own agility.

He had tried out various plate cuirasses and lamellar armor designs first, followed by brigandines, jacks of plate, mail and lorica segmentata armor, but none had worked for him as the protective value always scaled with weight and almost always rested on the hips and shoulders. To make a piece of armor that hugged the body completely was to restrict movement, thus special articulation that accommodated the body was necessary which almost always led to its weight on those places. It simply made sense.

He had realized, that to retain his center of mass low enough that it stayed near the natural human point of balance, he would have to strictly limit the weight of any armor borne on his upper body.

Which effectively ruled out all metals.

He also realized that to accommodate the freedom of movement he needed between his various weapons and tactics, it also could not be rigid. As against the foes he had often encountered, losing what little agility he had was a death sentence.

Rapidity was the essence of war, after all.

Thus, he had finally given up and returned for soft materials.

But he could not afford to give up the protection of heavier materials either, in case he did receive a blow. The way modern battlefields worked was that you rarely saw the foe who put you down, therefore protection was still an absolute must.

He had agonized over that problem for a long time. Reinforcement magic helped, but did not quite cut it by itself. Finally, things changed as he discovered something interesting one day by pure happenstance. It hadn't been on a battlefield, but in a chemistry lab during some downtime.

Dilatants.

Also known as non-newtonian or shear-thickening fluids, it had the property of acting soft and pliable like a jelly when moved slowly, but when something struck it hard it would seemingly harden in response and remain unyielding until the source of tension was removed. As far as the material allowed, of course. He had at first seen it with cornstarch and water, which was quite disappointing when scaled up, but soon found a better match in silica nanoparticles and polyethylene glycol for his needs.

It was rather like the kinetic barriers of a later era in how it worked, simply in goo-form.

This allowed him to make use of synthetic fibers like kevlar, nomex, dyneema, spectra, and other para-aramid synthetic or high-modulus polyethylene fibers that were commonly used for protective gear and soft body armor as his new base material for armor.

The soft body armor of his time was really nothing more than a stacked pile of fabrics, much like the medieval gambesons worn for protection. The biggest differences were that the layers weren't quilted together anymore and the materials used for the layers, as natural fibers lacked the protective value to stop modern bullets. At any reasonable thicknesses, anyhow.

Normally they were only rated for protection against pistol rounds, making them mostly useless as primary armor on a battlefield where the common round was at least a rifle-caliber, and even with Reinforcement, the sheer bone-breaking impact behind larger calibers had made them rather unattractive.

However, treating such materials with dilatants vastly improved their performance, giving him much better protection than before, especially following the use of Reinforcement magic on the silica nano-particles and the synthetic base fiber for even more protection.

Conventional designs adapted and modernized hadn't worked for him, so finally he had simply decided to make his own from scratch using these various pieces and technologies available to him, to create soft armor that hardened on impact and spreading any blunt force to a wider area so it dealt less harm, while still allowing him to keep weight and thickness down to manageable levels.

It was just what he had needed.

Against normal foes, anyhow. The first time he tried to trust his vest against a Dead Apostle, his spine had almost been ripped out through his stomach.

Again, he needed a better base. And eventually, he did.

He discovered graphene.

Boasting 200 times the strength of steel for its weight, composed of two-dimensional carbon lattices one atom thick, it was simply put a miracle material. It also had anti-mite, anti-bacterial, and anti-UV light properties, requiring a lot less maintenance and washing, which on a battlefield was a surprisingly large advantage. Of course, he had to always carefully maintain their integrity or dispel them, as breathed into the lungs they were rather unpleasant.

Soon after its discovery graphene gained fame as the material of the future that would revolutionize everything. As soon as people could figure out how to reliably and affordably make stuff out of it, anyhow. The easiest way to acquire the material was to take a chunk of graphite—the material used in pencils, for example—and to use sticky tape to peel off a single-atom-thick layer of the material. What you would get on that sticky tape, would be graphene.

In a useless amount and configuration, but still very much the same material.

In his time, large pieces of graphene had been prohibitively expensive to create, so he had actively sought after samples to work with so that he could replicate the material himself. It wasn't like he could simply take a piece of sticky tape and peel off some small piece of graphene from pencils to work with if he wanted to create armor, however skilled a craftsman he was.

He needed a proper sample to analyze, something which had required him to break into multiple laboratories, more than once each. The trick hadn't been to get inside, it was to get inside and out without anyone noticing so he could keep track of their progress and always come back again.

But once he got his hands on some workable material, everything changed.

With his methods, he had been able to jump ahead in the development curve by decades, easily. He still had to work long and hard with the stuff until he had armor that could handle his needs without slowing him down, taking years of research and development until he became able to make and use the stuff effectively.

Of course, it had its own fair share of problems at first, but he had worked through those.

For one, it tended to crack under impact much like ceramic armor plates, rather than merely deform. For another, getting it to behave exactly as he wanted it to, was rather difficult. It was like trying to cold forge obsidian, with how temperamental it could be. He had conducted tests for months, having a rough idea of what he wanted, until he discovered something new again that finally allowed him to pivot to his final design.

Graphene one had a rather strange property that really stood out, in that when two and exactly two layers of graphene were layered on top of each other when struck they would form something called diamene. It not only retained its toughness in this state but acquired the hardness of diamond, boosting its defensive potential through the roof.

Thus, the trick to harnessing the full potential of graphene was to have two layers of graphene and nothing else. Meaning he could not have his dilatant treatment on the material, nor could he have more than two layers for a material that was only a single atom thick in a single layer.

That left it slightly less than optimal. For one, it was rather chilly.

The solution had been rather simple and had come to him from swords, as many things did.

Simply fold the material with something else and have it in alternating layers. Much like the legendary soshu kitae seven-laminate katana forged by the swordsmith Masamune, or the legendary Wootz Damascene steel of the Middle East, he sought to work with the properties of his materials rather than against them.

The blueprint he started out with was that he had a soft internal layer of material against his skin for comfort, after which he alternated between having the two protective materials; double-graphene followed by a dilatant-treated synthetic fiber. Stacking ten layers of such a combination left him with a thin, light, and extremely powerful piece of defensive equipment, something which far exceeded anything that had been available to him before.

The graphene would harden into diamene blunting hard impacts, often shattering in the process, but the pieces were supported by the synthetic fibers treated with dilatant, absorbing enough of the impact for the additional layers to protect him from further harm, receiving the benefits of both materials.

He called it Alternating Diamene Weave.

Unoriginal, but he had not intended to mention it to anyone else.

The biggest problem after that was that creating even a simple vest with ten layers of this alternation was easier said than done. But do it he did - it took him an entire month of non-stop work to create a simple vest as he carefully Projected, wove and laminated each layer into place. The fact that it was a hollow Projection, empty on the inside wasn't important; he only cared about the material properties which performed just as he needed them to.

But once it was complete and all the small details had been handled?

Then he could simply Project the completed vest itself again when he needed it. Or sheets of the four-layer material that he had created earlier as a proof of concept. Repairing it was as simple as that, leaving him with an incredibly reliable piece of equipment he could cheaply and quickly replace on an as-needed basis.

Though the new armor was not entirely without downsides or kinks, even after this.

As it hardened under stress, it also meant that he could not have sleeves of the same material, as when he wielded his swords there existed a chance of his sleeves hardening in response to his own movements being too quick, or of locking his arm in place following a hard impact. With the torso being stationary and slow within its usual range of motion, it would not suffer from the same problem.

Luckily he had encountered this problem while testing the material early on, rather than in the field where it could have been catastrophic.

The same problem also applied when he created other pieces of clothing, such as his trousers, using instead a diamene layering without a dilatant-treated material, allowing for natural levels of mobility, with dilatant-treatments only applied in select spots. Clothes created fully out of graphene by Emiya also usually fall into this category, lacking the ability to harden or any rigid pieces.

The other pieces of his equipment, such as the jackboots and leg armor are intentionally hardened diamene sheets locked into place with thin layers of resin, maintaining their hardness as armor plates, instead. And given that without the need for other synthetic fabrics to act as dilatant layers, these plates can be compromised of as many as a thousand diamene layers, giving them outstanding performance.

Though despite their hardness, these resin plates do not act very well as deflective surfaces, thus for certain key areas, such as the throat, a rigid steel gorget is used instead.

Additionally, the material does not breathe very well, which combined with the increased body temperatures from extensive use of magic, made heat control a rather pressing concern.

Thus the bared arms in the design are a compromise in more ways than one.

The silver highlights are a personal flair added to the simple black surface after comments from some companions of the time.

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Super thanks to PseudoSteak(the greatest memelord of our time!) and Tisaku for proofreading. They're the best. Thanks to daniel_gudman for re-doing the math for me. Thanks to guest reviewer for pointing out some inconsistencies.

You guys remember that "no one else could keep up with him", bit? Yeeaaah, it's not just cause Emiya was the toughest, hardest never-gonna-give-uppest motherfucker around comparatively. It was also because he kept pulling stunts like his "Oh shit, I have PTSD; send me to Maaaars, guys!"-spiel without telling anyone anything. You know, how he acted throughout the entirety of the UBW route?

Emiya is a blockhead :V