Emiya froze.

He stared at the bed for a moment, before he inhaled and calmed. The other serviceman was still asleep in his own bed, across from Emiya's as if he hadn't even noticed the disappearance of his roommate.

Is this Archimedes' doing?

Like this, returning to the Moon would be essentially impossible. No, that wasn't exactly true. This way his return to the Moon Cell became limited to but one - by allowing this self to run out and vanish without leaving a trace, and then being re-summoned within SeRaPh by the Moon Cell.

Perhaps that had been the plan all along.

Emiya materialized over the bed, frowning as he stared down at it.

He wasn't a person in the sense of a human being anymore. He was an instance of a person being run by the Moon Cell. Even if he perished right here and now, it would not affect anything in terms of his existence. The memories he had accumulated so far would probably even be appended to the next instance spawned, completing the transition seamlessly.

With that thought in mind, wouldn't it be easiest to simply expunge all his remaining magical energy and simply disappear? He had completed his mission, hadn't he?

thud—thud

With a scowl, he threw that line of thought away.

Exhaling to calm down again, he extended a hand to the bed and analyzed it with his odic force. No traces of body heat, no one had lain in the bed for hours now. Not very helpful, he mentally complained as he frowned and pushed deeper.

Beds weren't swords. Thus in terms of sympathizing with them, his ability was only first-class rather than curve-breaking. His body had been here, but then it had been removed, and whoever or whatever had done it had not directly touched the bed itself. The intent involved was too far-removed from him to make any guesses beyond that. He inhaled, cutting the Structural Analysis and looked around, noting that nothing else had been removed. His closet was still locked: its contents untouched.

The bunk hadn't been made after his body's disappearance, either.

No attempt had been made to make it seem as if was still here or that he was merely temporarily away. He flipped the blanket aside.

Nothing left behind, he noted, distinctly remembering that he had gone to bed wearing clothes. Which meant, what? That the body simply hadn't evaporated or turned to dust? That should have been relatively obvious from the beginning, even as the mental image had made itself known to him in the back of his imagination.

He sighed.

It's a good thing I limited myself to only around twelve hours of operational time. Now I still have seventeen hours to live, far more than I had accounted for. Never act while committing all your forces; always keep something in reserve.

Emiya looked around, making a list of things still left behind. His body should be wearing only a shirt and boxers at the moment. And one more thing: his omnitool was missing even though he had gone to bed with it.

He had been going to bed with it to keep up his facade of night terrors plaguing his sleep, in case someone was keeping an eye on him. This would have been his last night as a part of the Navy, so it wouldn't have mattered anymore, but he had opted not to take it off in his haste to leave, not wanting to change his habits right before his mission and tip anyone off.

Frowning, he walked over to the still sleeping roommate's corner of the room.

He opened the locker and took out his omnitool bracelet, turning it on without bothering to actually put it on his wrist. That should cut out most of the passive sensors from getting an imprint off of him in case someone later did a check. He wasn't even sure what it could read off of him, but he wanted to avoid that anyhow. Technically the active sensors could still have analyzed something off of him at this distance, but considering that it was a rather energy-intense operation, it would not be on right now, even as a precaution.

He turned on the haptic interface, only to pause as his finger went straight through without anything happening. Right, no interface gloves. Emiya reached in and borrowed a finger stud from his roommate, meant to be used with haptic interfaces when only one finger was needed.

Trying again, the omnitool responded to his touch.

It wasn't locked - terrible habit to have, Emiya noted with a smirk.

He pinged his omnitool on the comms, remembering the factory code and ID from memory. Nothing on short-range, no response on direct ping. He sent a mail, but it went through without trouble. He frowned, putting back the omnitool and finger stud, closing the closet again quietly as he leaned against a wall, arms crossed.

So his omnitool was still registered to him and his mail had not been deleted, but his omnitool had been deactivated, turned off or contained somehow? No, no. He didn't know nearly enough about cybersecurity to make any conclusions. In any case, he had no proof that it was still on his person, either.

It was a dead-end, for now.

Turning around and dematerializing, he looked at the door. He knew there was a camera right outside in the hallway. That would be his second lead. Emiya phased through the wall again as he scoured the entire facility in his spirit form.

There had been some hope as he discovered someone in the infirmary, but it hadn't been his body, just someone with a broken leg. He found the security center, where the night watch remained on duty, quickly enough. There was only one way inside, with a heavy steel door that required ID-authorization and an iris-scan to pass through.

Emiya phased through the door without slowing down.

The security center was well-lit, despite lacking any other entrances or windows. There were dozens of screens of various sizes laid on three of the walls of the room. Some showed one large camera feed, while others had divided the screen into four, six, eight or even more, smaller feeds. On the last wall, by the door's side, was a large weapons locker and a vending machine.

One extremely large screen appeared to show every single camera feed at the same time, along with an overlay of the Virtual Intelligence running analysis on everything happening.

Emiya hadn't interacted much with the programs, but everything he had read stressed that they weren't actual Artificial Intelligences. Merely somewhat smart and adaptive programs for specialized tasks. It probably wouldn't be a problem, doubtfully even truly self-aware, merely assisting in sifting through all the data from the cameras and other security systems.

Someone walked through the hallways, his body overlaid with a red rectangle that followed his motions as a smaller green square focused on his face. A small ID blurb hovered next to the walking person, along with the notification that he had clearance to be up and about this late in the night.

Or rather, this early in the morning - dawn was fast approaching.

There was one camera in the room itself as well; pointing at the door and covering half the room at the same time. There were two people in the room, operating two terminals as they lazed about. There wasn't anything of interest in this place even for the Navy, but someone still had to remain on night watch anyhow.

Emiya walked to the middle of the room and crossed his arms, still invisible.

I can check the footage from here, but I need to be careful. With that in mind, he decided to observe for now. Fifteen minutes of good intel-gathering could be worth hours of meaningless fighting.

He looked at the various screens, trying to figure out where they were located in Ares Station. To be able to effectively use a CCTV-surveillance system, one needed to build a mental map. Without it, as soon as someone moved off one camera, you would become utterly lost if you did not know which camera feed to go to next to keep following them.

And since not every spot was covered, it also required the ability to read and predict a moving person's movement and path-finding; to know which cameras to look at next and how long it should take.

That hallway camera leads to this junction camera. This mess-hall can be entered through these two monitored entrances... In thirty seconds, he had a rough understanding of the layout as he created a mental map. He then began to observe the guards themselves.

MPs - Military Police. The section of the army that handled crimes committed by military personnel along with being in charge of internal security. Neither seemed particularly skilled or strong or even alert, which boded well. But he needed to be able to learn how to use this system from them before he tried it himself.

There might be unforeseen security checks or traps for unauthorized users that would trip him up.

That was simple enough. He looked at one of them, noting that he was lazily staring at one monitor that showed a hallway. The man was probably half asleep out of boredom, simply staying aware enough to be able to react if something out of the ordinary happened, having cultivated the necessary fingertip feel for knowing when nothing was amiss.

This was just a night like any other, it seemed. Even if one of their own had vanished from his bed in the middle of the night.

Still, he needed to create a disturbance. At this rate, it could take hours before either even touched their terminals again.

Emiya moved, disappearing from the spot and appearing in that same hallway that was being monitored in under a second. He willed his hand to be able to act physically as he reached out and tilted over a stack of boxes. It made a loud clatter, as parts and pieces of metal scattered all over the floor.

He moved again, returning to the security room in a blur.

"Huh, what was that?" The guard stiffened and sat up straight, immediately awake and aware. He frowned as he looked at the hallway camera, his eyes scanning the nearby camera feeds and the VI activity log of the area.

He blinked, reaching for the haptic interface and typing away to bring up the rewind function as he looked over what had happened. As he realized that the boxes had seemingly simply fallen over by themselves, he muttered under his breath, "What the hell...?"

Shrugging, the guard noted the time and added an entry to the night log about the occurrence. He couldn't find anything suspect beyond the sudden poltergeist event, so while he had thought it strange, he did not take any further action. Things sometimes did just fall over on their own.

Emiya stood by him the entire time, looking closely at the guard's every move and action, observing and memorizing.

He now knew roughly how to rewind a specific camera and how to find when and how his body had disappeared. The lack of any further security checks in the system was also a good thing. Then again, it made sense. This deep inside the facility, one more layer of cybersecurity would be more of a hindrance and a needless speedbump to the Military Police personnel than it was worth.

Anyone who could get this deep into the facility without notice wouldn't have any trouble with anything that could be put in place while still expecting night guards to be able to use it.

Right, haptic interfaces. Emiya noted, frowning as he looked at his ghostly hands.

Using the omnitool always required him to wear his hardsuit, a special glove or a small finger stud to be able to use the holographic interfaces. The haptic adaptive interface relied on the microchip embedded in those to actually transmit the data to the omnitool itself.

The physical buttons on the bracelet were simply to turn it on and off and a sensor which read the way the arm's muscles were tensed to call up the haptic interface. This allowed you to wear it beneath your hardsuit too, usually keeping it much safer as a result.

Which meant that touching the controls barehanded wouldn't achieve anything. Not unless you had had such chips surgically inserted into your fingertips. Franco had often loudly and proudly declared that he only went 'bare skin' and that the rubber only dulled sensations.

Shepard hadn't been impressed by the boasts, either.

Emiya looked at his hands, covered in the extended diamene weave from his vest. He could use a guard's hands or even just a hardsuit glove to use those interfaces, but it felt like an unnecessary complication.

He could do better, after all.

'—Trace on,'—begin projection; he intoned in a voice no one could hear as he closed his eyes.

Microchips—microcontroller units, in official terminology—were simply silicon dioxide transistors, silicon oxide insulation and electrically conductive polysilicon to create logic gates. Not very complicated stuff, really.

Simple parts like this hadn't needed to advance much in the hundred years since he had been walking around, either, mostly only becoming more compact with time. He didn't actually have a whole chip memorized—or even understand the functionality, design or purpose of every part without spending some time poring over one—but he did have multiple examples to reference right in front of him so it didn't exactly matter.

Reaching to hover his hand over the guard's, he simply copied the chips embedded into the guard's gauntlets.

Emiya went through the design in his head, noting and comparing schematics. It wasn't like copying a picture or a simple object by hand, small errors weren't acceptable when replicating something as delicate as this. Every part, every detail, was vital to its functionality. Thus he pored over it in excruciating detail, until he was a hundred percent certain that he had copied it perfectly.

He bound the illusion and made it real, the tiny chips beginning to appear between the layers of his diamene fabric at the fingertips instants after he spoke out his aria. Clenching his fist and noting that it did not feel weird, he nodded to himself.

Now to simply take out these two and to—

"I'm going on patrol. Gonna go check out that hallway and see what kind of mess it is. I know some techies gonna be shouting at me tomorrow, so might as well it do it by the book so that my ass is covered," the guard said as he stood up to leave.

The second nodded at him and turned to the console. "Right, I'll log it in."

Emiya blinked, as the second guard opened another screen which showed his own face as he made a quick report log followed by writing it in the first log. Emiya might have almost revealed his face to a camera he hadn't seen, just now.

He shook his head, cycling another slow breath. Focus.

The solution for that was simple enough, his circuit still active.

He projected a simple full-face closed helmet on his head to hide his identity. He went with a simple design, going more by free-form memory than any specific reference he could have used. The design basis was a simple matte black motorcycle helmet, covering his entire face with a smooth dark visor. One that would not open at all and with increased thickness, adding in polarization to the material.

Assuming that the cameras could pierce through tinted glass, this would throw in an additional layer of obfuscation.

Slimming down the design and removing all the padding, he made it about the same size as his Onyx hardsuit's helmet. The material he used was the same as all of his hard plates: shaped, compressed, and resin-laminated layers of alternating diamene weave. The bottom he rounded and sealed off into the rest of his clothes as if it were all a sealed environment suit.

It should pass off for a hardsuit helmet, even if it did remind him more of an epee mask.

Or rather, he looked almost like some leather-head biker now, clad from head to toe in black without any of his skin visible. He tested it out, moving his head left and right, up and down, checking his sight and hearing, modifying the shape a little around the neck, and adding small perforations to the side to improve his hearing. It'll work. It's not like I actually need it airtight, he concluded as the first guard left and the door behind him closed.

Emiya noted the location of the cameras and then assumed that there were probably more of them. The only probable blindspot he could think of would be directly behind the guard. But, so be it. He crouched behind the office chair and then became physical once more.

Soundlessly he rose up behind the guard, like a dark wraith stepping out of his shadow. He snaked a single hand up to the guard's neck before he could react, and with a pulse of magical energy knocked him out.

The guard slumped like a sack of potatoes in his chair.

Emiya pushed the office chair to the side, accessing the terminal without minding any possible cameras anymore. Either someone was looking at him right now or they would only find out later if they reviewed the footage; it didn't matter to him in this instant, as no alarms had seemed to go off.

He chose the camera feed right outside his room and began to rewind the footage as he checked the VI activity log. Nothing and no one had been there since lights out, aside from the regular patrols by one of the guards on the hour. Emiya frowned, continuing to rewind the footage.

With this level of sophistication of monitoring technology, he could easily rewind at 128 times speed and only lose a handful of frames. Normally this was for VI analysis programs, but with his senses, he could review it just fine like this.

Nothing.

He stopped the footage as he saw himself leaving the bedroom in reverse when he had gone to sleep. He played the footage forward again.

Nothing.

He took a step back, straightening from where he had been leaning down over the terminal. Did this mean it had been the Moon Cell's doing? For his body to simply vanish like this.

It shouldn't be possible, normally.

But if it was the Moon Cell, it was hardly out of the realm of possibility.

Nothing really was as far as he knew. But he hadn't been told anything. If the Moon Cell commanded it, he would obey. He had reached out for a miracle on that day so long ago and it had been granted to him in a fair bargain, and in return, he pledged himself to its purpose. If the Moon Cell wished it then he would end his life here and return to those gray days of never-ending ennui and remembrance.

But was it the Moon Cell?

He had already once died. On that day, he had been at peace with his end. Serene and accepting. He had smiled at the end, even. It had been a life he could remember and look back at without regret so long as he remembered where he had come and why, or so he had thought as he walked up to the gallows, even if that final thought eluded him.

But now...

This ending? Simply dissipating like morning dew at dawn? In a place like this? After all that he had done to get this far and what he had seen down in that abyss? It did not sit well with him. His gut rebelled at the thought, his heart pounding again.

thud—thud

"I'm not done."

It wasn't over. Not yet. Not until he knew exactly what was going on.

He leaned back down, his finger tapping rapidly at the terminal as his mind raced. He accessed logs and charts, noting everything and finding nothing again. He reviewed the footage again, but it revealed nothing new.

But he did not give up.

Finally, he found something. A chart showing power consumption in the facility. The electrical bill, essentially. It went into the range of deciwatts and specified by section of the facility.

There, he found an anomaly.

Just when the patrolling guard had finished his round at two in the morning, there had been several small increases in power usage throughout the entire facility. So small that they were barely a statistical blip. Starting from the entrance and going all the way to his quarters and then back to the entrance, the sectional report stated.

Yet the VI-log studiously insisted no one had been there and that nothing unusual had happened. That there was nothing going on power consumption and that all was according to standard. As the guard on patrol continued walking, Emiya compared the power usage of the automatic door opening and closing to the records.

It matches. Someone hacked the entire facility and ghosted inside, stealing away my body without anyone noticing a thing? He stood up, crossing his arms as he considered that. But why? And who?

For all the questions this revelation posed, it gave one definite answer to Emiya.

This wasn't the Moon Cell's doing. Hope almost bloomed in his chest, but he squashed it violently.

He shook his head, having done all he could here. Now he needed to disappear without giving too many clues to his true nature. Already he was on record on at least one camera, which was less than optimal, but something he had to simply accept. He simply lacked the skills to hack this kind of system without leaving traces as most of his technical skills only extended to the physical side of things.

The microchips alone had been pushing it.

But as long as it was not traced back to him and the Moon Cell, it should be fine.

Rolling back the guard who was still out cold, Emiya put a hand on his shoulder and pushed through with magical energy. The guard snapped awake as if an alarm clock had gone off and he groggily looked around, Emiya crouching back into the blindspot and astralized once more out of the material.

Moving through the facility he arrived at the same entrance he had arrived through a day earlier. The lights were out and there was no one here. During daylight hours, a military policeman would also be stationed here to vet and control who entered and exited these parts of the Ares Station.

But during the night, when the facility operated on a skeleton crew, the entrances were nominally locked down making the need for human personnel to be stationed here moot.

He passed through the closed airlock, coming back outside into the nearly-nonexistent atmosphere of Mars.

He crouched down, looking at the sand on the ground. It was lightly packed and often tread on, but it wasn't entirely impossible to read, as another interesting skill he had some measure of talent in was tracking.

At its basest, tracking was about taking everything in and filtering out all but the relevant details. About simulating and understanding what had happened based on tracks and marks left behind by someone's passing. About imagining how something had happened and played out while being able to discern past false trails and ignore all others.

Really, it was just a mundane equivalent to Structural Analysis.

He moved, left and right in a crouch as he looked around and scanned through the various tracks, sifting through three dozen trails with each step. Finally, he found something promising after moving around in an expanding perimeter from the entrance for thirty meters.

A set of tracks that looked relatively fresh, going by the amount of dust erosion.

They went towards the compound and back out from it. And on the way out, one of the tracks looked much heavier. As if the weight of the person had suddenly doubled.

My hardsuit was still there. Did they take me out into the open without any protection? He had to consider the possibility that his body had already been killed. It did not make much sense considering the trouble they were taking, but neither did anything else that had happened so far.

Emiya followed the tracks until he found that they lead to a deeper and wider print. The marks left behind by a landed shuttle.

Damn it. I can't track something that flies.

Then again, he might not be able to find himself if he simply followed the tail.

When tracking, it was always better to follow the 'head' rather than the 'tail'. If you simply followed in someone else's footsteps, it would be difficult to overtake or surpass them. So, it was important to understand what the point was and to cut across directly using other means to compensate.

That was one lesson as a Faker he had taken to heart.

He considered what he knew and tried to parse some sense out of it again, but to no avail. He sighed, considering his options. Someone had kidnapped his body, for unknown purposes by unknown means. They must have taken the body somewhere; a shuttle would not be a very good place to conduct any kind of interrogation or investigation.

It was a small-ish model. With how many tracks he had noted, indicating at least eight people plus himself, it would be a rather tight fit. They would need someplace to go back to and to continue whatever it was they wanted.

He looked to the horizon.

He only had one hope at this point. In the distance, the gleaming city shone and sparkled. The angle of the shuttle on the ground meant nothing, really. But it looked like it had come from the settlement in a straight line, based on some of the dust imprints.

"I guess I get to experience the Lowell City nightlife, after all."

;

Emiya had no proof that whoever had taken his body would come here, but it was the same as with the water tower, before.

Inaction was unacceptable, widening his search more would make it impossible to achieve anything in time, and there was a possibility that the shuttle had come here. Between certain failures and small chances, it was never a choice. He reasoned that since they had come in a single squad, using a small shuttle, that this was a small-scale operation.

It was too red team, too black ops, for there to be a starship in orbit or anywhere nearby for the shuttle to dock into. That would leave much too obvious a trail, with too many people brought into some level of know, considering how well the Ares Station had been infiltrated.

Larger starships were more difficult to hide, especially since in space there was no such thing as stealth. Not this close to settled planets. But a shuttle could hide by virtue of being so common and small that few cared enough to keep a closer eye on them. Something easier to slip past any logs and records once the Navy began investigating his body's disappearance.

But, for all that, the range and speed of a shuttle were much more limited, thus he reasoned that it should be entirely possible, even probable, for his body to be here in the city.

That was his gut feeling and conclusion, at least.

The alternative was that they had a starship somewhere else, which...

One possibility at a time.

At a distance, one could only see the tall skyscrapers gleaming against the dull horizon. As he approached he could see a multitude of smaller buildings along with what looked like a street below them. Upon closer inspection, he could see that through some unknown means, people seemed to be walking on the streets without any kind of hardsuits.

There must be some sort of atmospheric control by the ground level, he reasoned as he came to a halt near the edge of the city itself.

It wasn't a very large city. Quite small in comparison to some of the older metropolises on Earth that had had time to expand in every direction over many lifetimes. But it was still a considerable settlement. Some three million people lived on Mars, most of them right here, he knew.

Surprisingly, it did not look all too different from normal modern cities at a distance.

There were the taller buildings he had seen from afar and the smaller and more blocky apartment buildings in what could best be described as the center of the city and the downtown area. The further you strayed from that, the lower the buildings seemed to become. At the edges of the city, you could see those prefab buildings that must have been made in some factory elsewhere and then simply been dropped here or connected to make larger 'buildings'.

Even as a mass producer of fakes and counterfeits, there was something distasteful about those buildings, and not merely to his sense of aesthetics.

He shook his head as he leaped forward. It only took him another two leaps to make it to the top of one of the skyscrapers, where he crossed his ephemeral arms and began to look around. There weren't many shuttles going around at this time of the night. Most of the late-night party goers must have already gone off to sleep, as the streets seemed to be cleared.

It was the quiet hour, between those who woke up early and those who went to sleep late.

Sighing at finding nothing, Emiya dropped down to the street.

One or two people, no more than five at any one time, seemed to be walking around. None of them wore any kind of protective gear and Emiya could tell that some kind of field was being maintained at about four meters' height which kept the oxygen in and the radiation out.

Despite his hurry, Emiya still took the time to admire the city for what it was.

A settlement on another planet.

This place would have fit right on the covers of a pulp science fiction novella from the early 20th century, with flying saucers and bulky rayguns. There was a certain charm to this place, even though he could tell the city was not exactly doing all too well at the moment. None of those he had observed seemed to share his appreciation.

It was likely that were a thousand other settlements just like this, and he too would eventually tire of the novelty of inhabiting other planets. But for now, he took it all in on its own merits.

He doubted very much happened here in terms of economics or events. It reminded him of the old towns he had sometimes visited. Old mining and factory settlements, hollowed out as times changed and their lifelines ran dry as the rest of the world marched on without them.

Those kinds of places usually attracted a strange sort.

Emiya looked at some of the clearly inebriated people walking around. Slouched over and leaning for support where they could and swaying about where they couldn't. These weren't people who were celebrating - they were simply trying to forget.

Shaking his head, he ignored them.

How could he find himself? That was what he needed to concentrate on right now. A police shuttle drove over his head and he smiled. That was a place to start, as good as any. Leaping up and away from the streets, he bounced from the side of a building to another building as he followed the police shuttle.

Like ground traffic, there seemed to be some 'lanes' that the shuttles had to follow as they flew around this close to the city. They must have been represented on the onboard computers of the shuttles, as he could not see anything while following them. As the police shuttle stopped at a crossing to let someone else drive before them, he leaped and landed on top of it.

He exhaled as he settled down to sit with his feet on the bonnet, crouching down to stare inside at the two policemen as they talked. He could read lips and he understood some of what they were saying. Inside, neither of the policemen seemed to notice a thing as they continued flying. Shaking his head, he moved through the windshield and went to sit in the back of the shuttle, where those arrested would normally be held.

Emiya furrowed his brow as he began to listen to them, hoping for anything of note.

Finally, after ten minutes Emiya shook his head and decided this wasn't getting him anywhere. They had simply been patrolling, handling some drunken patrons, and checking an occasional alarm from a storefront while receiving only reports of minor trouble on their comms.

Nothing useful or pertinent, as far as he could discern.

But he had found out the location of the police station while listening in on them. That seemed like it could be useful to check out

Dropping out of the car, Emiya phased through an entire building as he kept moving. There was a slight hesitation at going through buildings at first, but given how tightly packed this city was, he would just be wasting time going around. So he simply jumped and went through them all.

He found the station quickly enough, landing in the reception area. He ignored the drunks and the officers on duty by the desks, simply moving through restricted areas without a care. He had thought up another lead he could investigate. Or rather, he had found a way to pick up one he had lost earlier.

Traffic Control.

Something must have been communicating between each of the shuttles. Just like with water towers, having a thousand shuttle computers all vying for dominance in traffic was not optimal. Instead, building a single central hub and then slaving all of the shuttle computers to that one to make traffic safe and orderly seemed much more reasonable.

He walked on and up, reaching one of the highest floors of the skyscraper when he finally found the place he was looking for. It reminded him of something between a busy office, an airport control tower, and the pictures he had seen as a youth of NASA mission centers. Dozens of people, poring over screens and terminals. Even during the night, it seemed that Mars needed constant control over its airspace.

Given that there was always someone out mining the asteroid field, it did make sense.

Looking around, he tried to get a feel for the system. But this wasn't just a single facility, stretching a few hundred square meters, with a mere hundred cameras and doors to worry about. This was not just the entire city; this was the entire local airspace control.

That meant everything within thousands of kilometers of Mars, he realized as he looked at the scale of the short-range active radars nearby. People were trained for this job for months, judging by the complexity of work he could just see at the moment.

Emiya frowned.

He wouldn't be able to get anything out of this system, even if he did know exactly what he was looking for.

There were too many people around. He could not simply take out one and then take his time, trying to haphazardly find his way forward. People were constantly moving in and out as they got coffee and went to take short breaks, there were no doors to lock to keep people out, and just one shout away there lay an entire police station looking to make trouble for anyone trying to get into their system without the proper authorization.

Emiya sighed, walking around as he looked at the people working. It would be a waste of time, his energy, and possibly of lives if he tried to force his way through here. Even if no one could truly resist him here, they could just shut it all down to deny him access that way. And even if that didn't happen, there was no guarantee that he could even find what he wanted here.

He stared at the unused terminal in front of him; it taunted him with the bouncing screensaver as he considered his options.

Maybe if he projected a disguise somewhere else and simply walked in and sat down here? It might buy him enough time to look things up. But he shook his head at that.

He knew very well that his own appearance did not lend itself to blending it.

His bright white hair, tanned skin, and his build and height usually made people notice him everywhere he went.

Besides, there seemed to reign an overwhelming sense of camaraderie here. They all seemed to know each other. He would stick out as an unknown even if he changed his appearance to be far more mundane. There must be a duty roster somewhere, too. They know who should and shouldn't be here, probably.

He considered trying to appear as a superior officer or boss of some kind, or perhaps a janitor or a new arrival. Someone who could reasonably show up and get access here, without raising any alarms despite being an unknown person. He could even look around for examples of what kind of paperwork he would need to fake to get in—Oh, right. No physical paperwork of any kind anymore. I would have to hack the credentials first. A Catch-22 right there: I need to hack myself in so that I can hack myself in.

Additionally, that kind of scheme would require days if not weeks to be pulled off safely. Time, which he did not have. And he would leave a massive trail behind himself, especially since he was so unique looking even in the 22nd century.

He sighed again, rubbing his brow with a hand. A positive side to being astral and ephemeral was that he could, in fact, rub his brow even through the helmet he was wearing.

Emiya looked around, turning to notice the people coming in and leaving.

Even without the worry of detection he would have had his hands full here. It wasn't like the Ares Station security system, which was designed for jarheads who did not know binary from binoculars.

But for this system, they had dedicated personnel, whose sole job was to understand and use it to its full potential. He could not simply match that kind of training with his Structural Analysis-fueled cheating, his quick thinking, or with stolen skills and techniques from weapons he had replicated.

He crossed his arms, tapping a finger on his bicep as his annoyance grew. Realizing that he was getting stuck in a loop as he was too focused, he took a mental step back.

What can I do? he asked himself, furrowing his brows, and began to list out things he could do but hadn't considered yet, lacking in immediate applications he could think of or knew about.

He could project any number of items and weapons. Before that had been useful for rapidly changing disguises and copying keys or even key cards, but today all access was digital and stored on omnitools, limiting the usefulness of such measures considerably.

He could stay astralized; avoiding sight and detection until his existence expired from his core destabilizing. In the astralized state, he could interact with objects if he focused a little. He could move very quickly and remain unhindered by obstacles. He could create a body using the Servant-class container's specs to appear in the world as physical existence, able to masquerade as a living, breathing human being, but only as who he had been during his life.

Wait...

Something about that stood out to him. He considered his own memories. Heroic Spirits. Servant-classes. Legendary heroes and monsters, dead and falsely reborn. They had appeared in his lifetime as Servants in that battle royale in his youth.

A ritual that could have led to the end of the world, had things gone differently, created by three magi families to re-enact and recreate an ancient spell.

Heaven's Feel - the manifestation of the soul.

Immortality to those uninitiated, ascending to a higher plane of existence to those who understood the full implications. Something about that was sticking out to him. It was on the tip of his tongue; a realization he hadn't considered yet. It had something to do with the alchemists, he thought. Not those Einzbern who dabbled in material transmutation and trafficking of curses.

Bur rather the mentalists of the middle east.

In his world, there had been a breed of specialized hackers. Those especially who favored the mental and spiritual alchemical disciplines had sought to make use of the increased potency, availability, and use of information technology as an extension of their own abilities.

They had long been thought of as the weakest faction of the moonlit world, even if they certainly had a world-shattering armory of weapons and tools which could put down most anything. But when they refused to ever use them, in practice it meant that those creations did not matter beyond their ability to gather dust in the Titan's Pit.

He knew of two methods they had developed, allowing them to use computers to a degree that dwarfed all others in their effectiveness and speed. Both were based on the techniques developed by the Eltnam family: Etherlite. Connecting the brain to a computer to receive directly the information as input and connecting one's sense of touch to be able to manipulate the data directly as output, completing an I/O System far more advanced than anything else during his lifetime.

They had called themselves spirit hackers if he wasn't mistaken in memory.

There hadn't been many and they had not achieved anything noteworthy in his time, even as information technology had begun to explode. But there had been something more. There had been theories about there being something beyond even that. Rumors. Ideas. For a method for directly inserting not just the mind into a computer through a fake clone that relayed information, but also the soul—

It clicked inside Emiya's head.

Heaven's Feel was the true magic relating to the actualization of the soul in the real world, allowing one to act and affect one's surroundings directly without the need for a Corpus or anything else, allowing for truly independent manifestation of the self. Servants had been brought forth in the Holy Grail War of Fuyuki, using a flawed application of this method that required them to be empowered with magical energy to remain in the World.

He could not be certain due to his lacking knowledge in the exact field... But did the Moon Cell not do the exact same thing with its own Servant containers? As far as he understood it, the Moon Cell must have copied the concept from somewhere to use it itself.

So even as a guardian, he was still an Archer-class Servant.

SeRaPh is simply a virtual world, isn't it? Doesn't that mean...

Emiya opened his eyes and stared at the vacant terminal before him. Just as he could possess a body and operate it, could he not possess a computer? No, not possess. Jump into, to change where he was manifesting. He hesitated. He had never heard about anything like this before, it was completely unknown territory for him.

"Hah. What am I getting cold feet for?" he mocked himself as he extended a hand to place it on the terminal.

He wasn't actually putting it against the computer itself or any of the data ports, simply the screen before him. But that was important, he reasoned. For the mental image involved. For a human being, the screen was the 'portal' to the digital world, much more than the data ports or sensors were. He wasn't trying to manipulate it from the outside - he was going to do something completely different.

Emiya inhaled, closing his eyes as he focused.

He created a mental image and perfected it. It was the most natural thing for Emiya Shirou to perform an action in his mind and then recreate it in the real world. He mastered it in two heartbeats as he began to replicate it in the real world with an exhale, riding down to his heartbeat.

Even with his eyes closed, he could see the terminal screen before him. His outstretched hand and opened palm between it and his image.

It was the barrel - he was the bullet.

"—Trace,"—begin

The hammer inside his head was pulled back, loading the bullet inside the chamber as his circuit flared to life in preparation. This would not be Reinforcement—synchronization, nor would it be Gradation Air—projection.

No, this would be something entirely new: Diving

"On," —insertion;

Everything went black.

It felt like a gun had been put to the back of his head and had blown out his brain through the front of his skull. But instead of dying instantly, it felt like his entire existence was sucked in through that hole and pulled through a straw somewhere else.

The self broke, the self reformed.

Opening his eyes, he gained awareness of his surroundings an instant later.

Emiya was hovering in a void.

There was nothing except him. He could see nothing. Hear nothing. Feel nothing. He blinked, not seeing what he had expected at all. He had thought it would be like a game, somehow. Where he could see the screen perhaps in a different way? Like he was inside of it. Or that it would be like those old movies with the dark flat worlds, where everyone wore glowing spandex? Or maybe even a waterfall of constantly shifting green numbers and letters?

In an instant in response to those thoughts, everything changed. Suddenly he was floating upside down above a black world, where a glowing grid of blue lines extended as far out as the eye could see. On the horizon, something pixelated was falling down, like stars.

Almost like in those movies.

This was certainly more impressive, but it wasn't helping him interact with the computer.

Then the floating display—a perfect copy of the terminal screen he had seen—appeared right in front of him alongside a second floating screen showing numerous lines of green code, floating by and rapidly shifting constantly. Did they mean anything, or had he willed them forth through expectation?

"Huh," Emiya muttered, adjusting himself so that he was floating at least the right way up. Probably, anyway. The thing below him could have been a ceiling for all he knew.

Looking left and right, he couldn't find anything of note in the virtual landscape. It was just a flat black plane with the blue grid extending as far as the eye could see. The starfall pixels were somehow separate from it, not really connected to the landscape.

He looked at the screens before him, trying to understand what was happening.

The screensaver continued to taunt him. Instantly it disappeared, revealing the logon screen that asked for his login credentials. Emiya blinked, glancing at the second screen. It was still continuing to throw numerous green characters at him. It was rather distracting in fact.

Catching on, he willed it to disappear and it immediately did.

"'Perception is reality', huh." It somewhat reminded him of his reality marble, yet not quite. More like a marble phantasm in its malleability, perhaps? No, that wasn't right. He wasn't effecting change on the world, merely changing the way he perceived it, still.

No, well he had essentially brought the one screen out of the screensaver mode.

That meant he could affect the computer. He had Input and Output. Question was, would it be enough? The spirit hackers of his era would have still been stuck at the login screen if they did not have access to anything else, as despite their skills they were still limited by the logic of the machines they operated with.

He focused on the now single screen before him as he descended to stand on the plane below him. He tried to perceive it as something that existed in the virtual world, as something more than a mere screen that reflected the terminal's screen in the real world.

Suddenly, he was enclosed by four walls. He blinked, before jumping over the wall. Looking back at the screen, he could see he had gotten access to the system as the login screen disappeared.

"Hmm..."

I can work with this. But I don't want to alert anyone, so... He willed the screen to log out again and for the screensaver to resume. Closing his eyes, he willed the screen to disappear and instead focused solely on the world around him.

It was entirely false; a projection created by his mind as an interpretation of what he perceived as the world around him. But that was fine, he could work with that. He inhaled and then opened all his senses anew. Now that he knew what to look for, suddenly objects began to spring up all around him. He focused on an object in the distance and he knew that it was a registry of those working the night shift in Traffic Control. It was overlaid with all of their login credentials and all the processes they were running at the moment.

Emiya shook his head; it was irrelevant to him right now.

He willed and the virtual world obeyed. He could have been moving, or the world could have been moving around him. It did not matter as perspective was so skewed here. He simply called for the relevant data to appear before him, similarly to how he called swords inside of his own reality marble.

None of this would probably work in the Moon Cell without some form of Administrator access, but in lesser systems such as this, he was fairly certain he could do whatever he wanted.

There.

A log of all shuttles in the airspace around Lowell City.

He focused on activity roughly around two in the morning, sifting through the overflowing amount of information in moments as he began to cross-reference those who had exited the city and then entered it again. If he could find someone who had left the city limits before his body had been kidnapped and who had then returned afterward, it would be a probable match.

He found thirty.

Creating a list, he began to cross-reference again with traffic camera footage. Rewinding the records from earlier today, he could look through and identify each one. He looked at the shuttle models; how many people were inside; which direction it had come from. Slowly, he narrowed down the list to but one possibility.

A slim, black shuttle with dark tinted windows. It had left and entered the city limits in the time frames he had outlined, though according to its flight plan it had not been anywhere near that part of Mars. And while he couldn't see anyone inside of it, but he could say that its dimensions fit the print he had found outside of Ares Station.

Found you, he smirked.

He followed it as it moved through the city. At times it disappeared off of the grid, but as long as he forwarded the footage on the various cameras it would eventually pop up somewhere again. Until it didn't. Somewhere around a higher-end residential district, the shuttle had stopped appearing.

Which meant that it had most likely landed somewhere around there.

He grinned, bringing up the last camera feed and locating it on a map of the city. He noted which way to go from the police station as he nodded to himself.

I need to get there, he thought as he willed himself to pull out of the virtual world. His circuits—which had been running constantly at a low hum reporting to him of a small, but constant drain on his reserves—began to shut off as he dived back out into the real world.

It was like going through a layer of scalding hot oil, followed by sub-zero flash-freezing liquids. He realized that those sensations had been there on insertion as well, but he had been too distracted to notice the first time. Then he broke through the surface and he was back in the real world.

Gasping for breath, he panted and blinked in confusion as he looked around. This isn't the police station.

He was where the camera had last been looking at; exactly where he needed to be. Turning around, he could see the half-dome of the traffic camera behind him.

"How convenient," he grinned again, before turning around and beginning his search.

Emiya closed his eyes, pulling up the mental map of the city block within which the shuttle must have stopped. It wasn't large, so he began by leaping into the air and looking down from above for any matches.

A few shuttles and other vehicles were parked outside or on top of buildings, here and there. But nowhere did he see the black shuttle. Landing, he turned and began to go through buildings, one by one. He ran through them, finding the largest airlocks through which a shuttle could have been flown through, as he cleared garage after garage.

Finally, as he moved onto a nondescript and plain-looking house that looked like it had never been moved into, did he find a match.

Entering through the garage-airlock, Emiya spotted the black Cord-Hislop Aerospace Suave-model shuttle with tinted windows immediately.

He nodded to himself, placing a hand on the shuttle. It still bore the golden brown dust on its bonnet, a telltale sign of having flown outside of the city limits. That by itself wasn't much, considering Mars in general. But the piles that had found their way in between the cracks on the bottom told him that this shuttle had been parked down in the sand.

Good enough for him.

Emiya turned around and walked through the door, leading to the house proper. Quickly going through the first floor of the house, he scanned room after room.

Nothing.

Placing a hand on the wall, he inhaled and closed his eyes.

"—Trace on,"—begin synchronization;

He used Structural Analysis to grasp the entire house in a fraction of a second, acquiring a wireframe model inside his head of the three-story building. It was the 22nd equivalent to a nice and quiet suburb house with a white picket fence. Ah, that would do it. There was a basement, too.

Dropping down, he listened intently and noted the amount and position of people. Reinforced floor and walls... it would act as soundproofing against even a bomb going off.

Almost immediately he found himself.

Emiya Shirou sat in a chair, strapped by the arms, legs, neck, and waist in place with a pair of drips going into his arm. The limp body seemed unharmed and still breathed to his sudden and overwhelming relief.

He felt as if the weight of the world had suddenly come off of his shoulders, and he blinked at the sensation. And there it was: the thought he hadn't wanted to acknowledge.

Have I grown this attached to living again?

"Anything?" a voice asked, impatience obvious.

Emiya turned away from his body, looking at the person to distract himself from the storm of emotions inside of him. It was a familiar face, but not one that he had expected to see ever again.

Lieutenant Commander Burnsfeldt.

"No. I have no idea why he's not waking up. It's like he's in a coma. Maybe it was a bad reaction to the sedatives we used on him... But I'm not seeing any of the usual correlative symptoms there. All the lights are on, but no one's home," another answered. Both were wearing hardsuits—medium weight from the looks of it—and were standing on the other side of the room.

Burnsfeldt nodded with a grimace. "I knew it was a good idea to get him... there's something wrong with all this. Damn it, this whole affair's already blown up in my face on the Navy side, so I need something out of him. I have to leave soon, too, or I'll attract notice for my absence."

The second man shrugged.

"If he does have some genetic modifications pre-dating his enlistment like you guessed, we might be able to find out something with a biopsy. But we can't perform that here."

Burnsfeldt sighed, disgusted and annoyed.

"Fine, whatever. I have no idea what to do with him, so just make sure it won't be traced to me and I'll be glad to have him out of my hands. Maybe you can recruit him with some of the long-term conditioning programs? They've been showing good results lately, I hear."

The second man shrugged again. "Those methods are still being developed, but... a reluctant control subject might be useful. Well, only after a proper interrogation, assuming he wakes up at all."

Emiya looked around, walking closer to his body.

There were several marks on his neck, from what looked like some sort of syringe. He couldn't be sure. Perhaps from when they had first nabbed him? Tranquilize and extract, then neutralize the effects off-site for an interrogation. But when he failed to wake up, they tried other things.

There was probably an absolute cocktail of chemicals and drugs in his body right now.

But, if he wanted an immediate grasp on the situation without revealing his hand, he would have to play the game by these two's rules. But he had no idea what kind of stuff might be swirling about in his body. Was it really a good idea to possess it in a time like this?

He could just materialize somewhere out of sight and break in and out, simple as that. Just move in quickly enough to kill everyone before they could do anything to his body and then burn it all down to maintain the secrecy of the mystical in all this.

But then he wouldn't have any idea what this was all about. If he did jump into his body, he was fairly certain he could get out of the body and be fine again, but he had a distinct feeling a drugged-up brain might choose to say something entirely different than the mind had intended. That and he had so far he had managed to avoid killing anyone, a rather refreshing turn and one he did not particularly want to swerve out of quiet yet.

Maybe, just maybe he could still get out of this peacefully?

Sighing, he shook his head. No risks, no rewards.

Besides, at the very least it would reset his core's internal clock again, giving him another 24-hour lease on existence.

He sank into his body. Immediately, his mind was enveloped in chaos and turmoil. His gut roiled and his senses swam. He heard all the colors of the symphony as his heart beat so slowly that he might have been frozen alive.

Emiya pushed through it all and opened his eyes.

"Guhhhh... I hannn't this feeel shizz sinnce I took a dip in the grail...Fucking Kotomine..." Emiya frowned internally. He had rambled a lot more than he had intended.

"What?" Burnsfeldt said, turning around and staring at Emiya. "How is he awake?"

The other person walked up to Emiya, raising a glowing omnitool as he began to scan him with furrowed brows. "I have no idea, this..."

Emiya shied away from the light, growling involuntarily as he tried to get a handle on himself. He tried to put on an act; slurring with every word even without having to try.

"I schwear, I havennn't drunk anything, orificer. Shir," Emiya garbled out, biting his tongue more than once.

He worked his jaw, blinking rapidly and then tried to spit out the sand in his mouth. He realized that was just his saliva, as it dripped all over the floor and on Burnsfeldt's legs.

"Ugh, damn it...!" The Engineer scowled, jumping back and glaring at Emiya as if he wanted to hit him.

"I don't know why, but he's back to normal. Or, drugged-to-hell-but-present, at least. Do you want to interrogate him now?" the second man asked, lowering his omnitool with a shrug.

Burnsfeldt frowned, considering it for a moment.

"Yes. I've waited the whole night. Might as well get the satisfaction if I'm going to get shat on when I get back anyway..."

Emiya peered up at him, working to make the blurred edges disappear as he controlled his breathing to try and impose order on the chaos inside of his body. It would not be enough to make a difference in the short run, but in the long run perhaps he could flush out all the chemicals faster this way and hasten his recovery.

Burnsfeldt slapped him, rocking Emiya's world in white as half of his vision disappeared for a second. His left ear began to hear a strange and far-off chime that rose up and fell down in tune every second.

"Who are you?"

Emiya considered that through his haze. No point in lying this early.

"I'm nooo one."

The second had his omnitool up again, looking at some readings as Emiya spoke. He looked up, nodding to Burnsfeldt.

"It's working: go ahead."

"Who are you working for?" Burnsfeldt asked, holding Emiya's head with his hands as he peered into his eyes.

"Sysh... Sstemms all in navy?"

Burnsfeldt frowned.

"We know about the churches in Barcelona. Tell us where the rest of your cell is. Who is your contact?"

Emiya inhaled and paused his perception of time. The world came to a halt - everything freezing in place as he disconnected his mind from the body.

That was interesting. And told him nothing at all. Barcelona? Churches?

He had gone touring the locations for a number of reasons, primarily for the architecture and for another arrow to his quiver against the Alliance Navy trying to ship him off into the special forces. He had sought the faithful in hopes of converting, so that he could claim his religion expressly forbade violence, citing himself as a pacifist.

Caren had often enough cited the Bible at him and while he had never found it a bother, per se, he had thought to finally get some mileage out of those verses.

Only as it turned out, in the last years the Catholic Church's policies seemed to have radically changed. Pope Leo XIV believed that humanity ought to assert itself more in the galaxy and that all those who he had spoken to on the subject of his trepidation after enlisting had encouraged him to stay in the Navy and to hold steadfast for the good of humanity.

The ideological possession was plain to see on them.

He could smell the internal takeover from a mile away, even before he heard about the sudden death of Pope Clement XVI, the previous head of the Catholic Church.

Finding no help there, he had abandoned that line of tactics. Besides, he was certain the Navy had their own religious figures who were more than happy to assist one of their flock in finding the righteous path anew, against whatever arguments he could have concocted.

But back to the present... That meant, what? Burnsfeldt is connected to the current ruling bloc of the Catholic Church, and thinks I'm an operative of the previous Pope?

But what would they want in the Navy? And what could I possibly want in the Navy in that case? And specifically on Mars? Is there something I'm completely missing, or is he just prodding me? He seems to be overreacting. For now, I should try to get my body functional by playing for time.

Emiya let himself sink back into the sea of chaos. He blinked again as time began to move in his perception.

"Wha?"

Burnsfeldt ground his teeth, looking to the side at his second who shook his head.

"Fine. Did you receive any gene therapy before joining the Navy?"

"Whaat?" Emiya repeated, slurring even more.

Burnsfeldt sighed with disgust, turning to his assistant again.

"Get him sober. I can't talk to him like this."

The second nodded and began to fiddle with his omnitool, taking out a hypodermic injector gun and giving Emiya two shots, before measuring him again with the omnitool and disconnecting the two drips.

"Give him ten minutes," he said and Burnsfeldt nodded, before walking out of the room.

Emiya let his head loll as he stepped out of his body, following after Burnsfeldt as he kept an eye on his body.

Closing the door behind him, Burnsfeldt nodded at the two armored men standing guard right outside. Ahead on the way to the rest of the house, there were four more just as heavily-armed guards.

Eight in total, then.

And these men weren't wearing stock Onyx hardsuits or the mid-range protection some of the Navy personnel in the Shanxi had been able to afford. No, they were wearing heavy armor, fortified and protected with hard plates, layered fabrics and more. No doubt a single kinetic barrier from among them would have outperformed the combined barriers of three of his old hardsuits.

And he could only guess at their weaponry, unable to recognize a single one of their long guns.

There was only one way out of the basement room and it was heavily guarded.

Raising his omnitool, Burnsfeldt began to comm someone. Emiya stopped, standing inside the closed door so that he could with the turn of a head keep an eye on both Burnsfeldt and himself.

"Fillion," The voice on the other end of the comm greeted and Emiya raised an eyebrow at the tone of voice.

It was paternal; expectant, with just a hint of disappointment. Not what he expected from some black ops operative's contact. Was this some more personal relationship? At the same instant, Burnsfeldt's entire body language changed; he stood straighter, looking ahead at the omnitool, and even seemed to be smiling a little bit wider.

Conditioning, they said? Looks pretty successful from where I'm standing, Emiya noted with a frown.

Especially as this was obviously no Alliance Navy contact. He had considered it being some form of internal black operation, given the Lieutenant Commander's rating in the special forces, but something still felt off about that conclusion.

"Sir, as outlined in the earlier update, I have him in custody. Only, he has woken up now. Do you wish for me to continue here or should I move him to the nearest Cerberus base of operations?" Burnsfeldt asked, keeping his voice quiet enough that the armed personnel could not hear.

"I must confess to some disappointment with you, Fillion. You should have brought this up with me before acting. As it stands, we may never know what our guest was searching for on Mars."

"But, sir, I did not wish to wake you—"

"I do understand—and share—your concerns regarding him. His actions show few tells, but the big picture reveals a truth hidden from those who do not have the eyes to see it. Nevertheless, now we may never know his true designs for Ares Station."

Burnsfeldt swallowed, obviously growing nervous with the chastisement he was receiving.

"But, we must endeavor to overcome our mistakes. Is that not right, Fillion?"

"Yes, sir," he replied quietly, head hanging.

"For now, tie your loose ends up and have him brought in. We shall have him shipped to the tertiary Ganymede base, where we have facilities suitable for further questioning and permanent holding. As for the other two, keep your eyes peeled but stay your hand, lest we tip off those who would seek to work against us. I have complete faith in your abilities in that regard."

"Yes, sir," Burnsfeldt answered as he stood up straight once more. The line cut off and he sagged, before inhaling with new purpose and turning to the man who had been silently assisting him until now. "Is the facial scan VI working?"

"Yeah, but you're gonna have to let him cool down for a bit, still," the man said, looking at his omnitool.

Burnsfeldt blinked, frowning at the man. "Why? I thought you'd get him clear enough to talk to?"

"Yeah, but with that mix of tranqs, stims, and the truth serum along with the scrubber I just gave him, he won't be in exactly the best frame of mind for this. He'll still tell the first or second thing that pops in his mind, but whether that thing is what we want to hear is something completely different. You'll have to keep hammering the question until he thinks of the right thing in response," The man explained, waving his hand.

"Right. Repeat questions, keep him off-balance, and don't let him get a word in edgewise when he's not saying anything I want to hear. Basic interrogation. Did you get a baseline on the VI-analyzer from the earlier footage?" Burnsfeldt nodded, crossing his arms.

The man shrugged. "Not yet. It's working, but the material from the Brazil helmet cams isn't the best. It's like he's wearing a mask the whole time. Plus the helmet covers most of his microexpressions there. Hard to make a good baseline, but you keep hitting him and I'll keep seeing what he throws back at us. Fifteen minutes and we'll know the truth of everything he says."

Burnsfeldt smiled then, a vicious glee apparent in his eyes.

He would make up for his gaffe and regain the trust and expectations placed on him. He turned around and began to walk back to the interrogation room. "Alright, let's go. Time to see if our guest is coherent enough for us."

Emiya hopped back to his body and inhaled deeply as he tested out if anything had changed.

Several minutes had passed and he could at least feel most of his bodily sensations having returned to normal. He inhaled, beginning to circulate minute amounts of magical energy in his body with every breath. This wasn't a magical malady that could be flushed away with effort. But, by subtly Reinforcing himself he would be able to act, once it became necessary.

Next, he began to insert magical energy into the bindings, using it as a method for slowly weakening the material so that he would be able to break free when he needed to. Magical energy was a form of conceptual poison when used carelessly, after all.

Still, if he just stood up now he was certain he would fall over.

Buy as much time as possible.

He considered simply fighting again as his Servant-self, but then dismissed that as he had no idea what kind of surveillance might be on the persons' of the two who were in the room with him, if the Lieutenant Commander had been able to call his boss from here. He might be done with his mission, but that did not mean that he would screw that up so late in the game.

Burnsfeldt returned, slamming the door behind him and Emiya winced at the sound as the sound seemed to echo inside his skull.

Not that recovered yet, then.

"Well then, coherent are we? Good. Good," Burnsfeldt said, stretching the O out with a smile. Gone was the servile and chastened boy, in his place was once again that dandy and smug man who always seemed to be so sure of himself. It was like he had gotten his 'hit' again, just as he had begun to suffer from withdrawal.

Emiya looked up, holding one eye closed. "S-sir?"

That made the Lieutenant Commander smile even more widely. A reminder of his authority would placate him for a moment and keep him calm, Emiya reasoned. Keep the man thinking he had full control. Emiya looked around with bleary eyes.

"W-where is this? What's going on...?" he asked weakly as he looked up at the looming Burnsfeldt.

"None of that, serviceman. I will be asking the questions now. What is your name?"

"You... already know that...?" Emiya asked as if confused. He's playing the officer now that I'm coherent again? Is that meant to make me think this is sanctioned by the Systems Alliance? Is 'Cerberus' actually some wetworks operation or cell of the Navy?

He didn't have enough information to go by right now, to make any definitive judgments.

"Do I? Tell me, where did you come from?" Burnsfeldt asked, raising his hand and bringing up his omnitool.

"Sir? I don't understand—"

Burnsfeldt hit the table next to him, cutting Emiya off. "Answer the question, serviceman!"

"...What's going on? None of this makes any sense, sir—" Emiya continued resisting obliquely; he wanted Burnsfeldt annoyed enough to reveal something.

Answering questions and letting his interrogator dictate the flow of the conversation would not achieve that.

"What doesn't make any sense here is you. Where did you receive your genetic enhancements? Nothing showed on the original tests, but those can be fooled. At first, I'd thought you were some fundamentalist of the old guard. But that was too obvious. And then I realized it. This is a ploy by someone to allow you to infiltrate the holdover of the Catholics. It will allow you to claim purity to their cause. Was it the STG? They would certainly have the technology to account for such things."

"The what? Who?" Emiya asked and Burnsfeldt hit him then, right on the mouth. It was somewhat painful, but Emiya merely let the pain wash over him. Ah, the body changing to resemble my true self too rapidly must have been noticed. The gene mods should take years to affect me, normally.

He had been keeping the contact between his true self and the corpus to a minimum, but even so, something would leak through. At least his hair hadn't started turning white yet.

That aside, what is this 'STG'?

"The salarians are well known for their work in genetics for all that they're quick to condemn others, so I would not put it past them to have reverse-engineered humanity's work to such a degree," Burnsfeldt spoke as he pulled up two displays from his omnitool. "After all, one does not turn from this to this in the space of a single month."

Emiya blinked at the pictures; his enlistment picture and photo of him from basic, when he had already begun to grow out into a healthier shape.

"This? This is the kind of transformation explicitly banned by Alliance law. Your appetite drew attention, especially with how quickly you were able to 'put on the pounds' as it were. What did they do, splice some of the krogan genome into you and hide it as non-coding DNA, hidden behind all that garbage you tried to pass off as your actual genome? Did you seriously think anyone would buy you having no gene editing anywhere in your genome? It was ballsy, I'll give you that. But stupid. Entirely too stupid! Did you use some form of a retroviral carrier to turn it back into coding DNA after the tests? No matter, we will figure it out, soon enough."

Emiya blinked, utterly at a loss as to what this man was saying.

"Sir, I—"

"Who sent you? What were you doing in Barcelona?"

Emiya feigned confusion, though he didn't have fake it much. This man was rambling all too much. "Wha—Barcelona—I didn't do anything there!"

Did he do something to Cassani?

Not that he could do much about that, even if they had.

The drugs they had mentioned were starting to wane off, as his mind was clear and his speech regain itself. Still, he had no measures against a facial analyzer and no guarantees he could bluff through it. Glancing at the other man who was frowning at Burnsfeldt, Emiya wondered how quickly they would be catching on.

He had to keep this short. Hide my excited breathing as confusion, warm and limber up...

Even bound up as he was, he could still tense his muscles up to get the blood flowing and prepare for a fight, his heart rate spiking as he primed the fight-or-flight responses.

He still didn't know what any of this was about, but the time for questions would soon be over, so he had to choose his next answers carefully to get the most of out his questioners.

"Bullshit!" His interrogator shouted, stabbing him with a finger. "We have records of you going to five different churches and talking to the personnel while having left behind your omnitool, even though leave regulations state that it ought to be worn at all times. A man of your character, noted for his fine understanding of the rules, would surely know not to do such a thing. Not unless he was hiding something." Burnsfeldt raved, his speech becoming more and more rapid until he was talking a mile a minute.

"Who were you meeting in Barcelona?!"

Emiya tried to answer, in a shuddering voice: "I—"

"How did you fake your heart attacks? They all happened within two hours of you going to bed? That pattern is far too revealing!"

"I didn't—"

By now even the second man appeared to weigh whether he should step in.

"Who are you working for? Who taught you to shoot like this?" Burnsfeldt shouted, bringing up footage of Emiya's combat footage from the Shanxi exercise.

Emiya shook his head, repeating his denials and he held back a frown. They really do monitor everything. I'm not getting anything out of him, now. He's running too hot right now, I can't even get a word in edgewise to trip him up.

Perhaps that was for the better, as he could already feel that most of the numbness had receded, and the man who had been administering all the drugs and observing him through the omnitool was starting to look as if something was amiss with the readings.

Then again, I have a new trick I can use for information gathering.

Emiya inhaled sharply, deciding that he had wasted enough time on this nonsense, whatever it was supposed to be, now.

It was obvious that whatever Burnsfeldt was doing, he was doing it on the side from the Alliance. None of this fit in with anything of how the Navy worked, not at least in accordance with anything he had seen up to that point.

He looked down, breaking eye contact and rolled his shoulders as much as the restraints permitted without breaking, lining up the bones and primed muscles, getting ready to spring.

He just needed an opening.

Well, that's easy enough.

"I'm going to break your nose when you lean in," Emiya too whispered quietly to be heard.

"What was that?" Burnsfeldt asked pausing his torrent of questions, and Emiya mock-whispered it again, just as quietly as he kept looking away from Burnsfeldt.

Shaking his head and leaning just a tad bit forward, just far enough to be safe from any attempts from the bound up Emiya, Burnsfeldt chuckled. "You'll have to speak up if you want to be heard now, serviceman."

"I said," Emiya looked up, smirking at the man who had come within arm's reach and thought himself safe due to the restraints. "'I'm going to break your nose when you lean in.'"

Burnsfeldt blinked, staring back at Emiya. There was just a single moment; of confusion; of disbelieved amusement; and just a touch of worry in that space of the blink of an eye.

Then Emiya exploded into motion.

The restraints tore like wet tissue paper as he sprung forward, grabbing both of the other man's arms by the elbows, pushing forward and smashing his forehead into his captor's nose in a vicious headbutt. He heard the crack of cartilage and the warm, wet sensation of blood on his face before he could smell it.

Dazed and contused, Burnsfeldt took half a step backward with a wet gurgling noise, not out of any conscious effort but from his body simply trying to stay upright while blinded by the pain.

On his feet, Emiya let go of the elbows and raised his hands and brought them together behind the neck, pulling the other's face down again in the same instant as he sprung up with a leaping knee kick.

The crossed-together hands and the rocket-like knee kick met with Burnsfeldt's head caught in the middle, making the sound a sledgehammer on bone might make. The Lieutenant Commander of questionable loyalties managed another wet moan of agony as he was let go, crumpling bonelessly onto the floor, dead to the world.

Behind him, the second man who had been using the omnitool had pulled his pistol despite his shock and was drawing a hasty bead on Emiya.

Excellent reflexes and training, he noted.

In his shirt and boxers, a mass accelerator round would definitely put him down with one shot. But he was one step ahead, surging to cross the floor in a dead sprint, almost parallel with the floor in his whipcrack dash.

— Pffftzzz!

The trigger was pulled and Emiya felt something tearing the skin of his right shoulder, but nothing more; his right hand having snaked out and backhanded the drawn pistol just as the trigger was pulled, leaving the shot just off and useless. The man's eyes widened as he tried to step back, but Emiya kept pace and more, closing the distance between them with the rest of his body.

Even on equal ground, moving backward was never as fast as running forward. And right now Emiya was performing at truly superhuman levels, the magical energy buzzing in his veins like angry lightning.

The man tried to pull back his gun, but Emiya followed with the hand that had reached out, grabbing a hold of the wrist and holding on to follow with the man's own momentum. The man tried to raise his right hand to break free, his other hand shooting forward in a desperate grab to free his gun arm, but Emiya's left hand shot out and struck with an open palm at the elbow of the gun hand.

The man yelped as he was turned on his feet, the elbow functioning as a lever to his entire body and leaving him facing the door now.

Emiya stepped past the man's right foot, slamming his hip against the man's hip now from behind with full momentum, an arm shooting in under the man's arm and up to his open hardsuit collar across his torso like a seatbelt.

"Fuck—!" The man tried to get loose as he realized he was about to be slammed into the ground headfirst, but Emiya left no space for resistance, turning with his entire body weight and performing a picture-perfect hip throw.

The man had a fraction of a second time to feel the momentum of his feet flying up from beneath him before the back of his skull cracked against the hard floor, bouncing once as Emiya brought his own weight and momentum into the fall. The sound of the impact was enough to tell that this man was going to die in minutes from internal bleeding and swelling of the brain, too.

Emiya rose up, dusting himself.

The floor was rough and cold, feeling less than comfortable against his bare shins and feet. He looked at the two hardsuited figures and sighed. Kinetic barriers seem worthless in a melee fight, as I'd suspected. Luckily neither had their helmet on.

He let out a disgusted sigh, looking at his hands.

He had killed again. Of course, it came naturally to him at this point. He avoided baring his sword until the final moment, the precipice after which there was no going back precisely because he knew that once that threshold was crossed, the only recourse left would be death. His or theirs.

An arrow once loosed could not be recalled.

Emiya looked around, noting the room again. It was bare, the chair he had been in, the table with the various medical supplies, and the two unconscious and dying men aside. He knew however that on the other side of the door, six more men were waiting.

Six more, heavily armed, men.

Emiya considered the two on the floor.

He frowned, moving to take their omnitools and physically disengaging the power supply before he put them on his wrists, lacking pockets at the moment. That should allow him to analyze them later if he wanted to, without worry of them being used against him. He only had the underwear and undershirt he was wearing right now, what was in this room, and on the two unconscious men to take out six right outside in an entrenched position.

The only gun in the room were the two pistols, neither of which he had any user privileges for, he suspected.

All it took was one pressure grenade and he was dead; they wouldn't even need to throw it in or near him. With their hermetically-sealed hardsuits, they were specifically protected from pressure and environmental changes of that kind, meaning they could probably just detonate a few in their hands and let the overflow of pressure disable him from across the hall, inside this sealed and narrow basement.

"There are limits, even for me."

He sighed as he sat down cross-legged against the wall and closed his eyes.

And then he stepped out of his body. His black full-body alternating diamene weave would have contrasted sharply with the stark white walls of the basement, had he been physically present at that moment.

First things first...

He put a hand against the door and inhaled.

"—Trace, on"—begin projection;

The door was an automatically opening one, which could be opened and locked through omnitools or the interface on the side. But that all hinged on the door actually being physically able to open. He projected a sword inside the mechanism that opened the door, jamming it completely.

This door would not open until the sword was removed, sealing him in completely.

Emiya walked through it and considered the men on the other side. I can't get out without going through these men. A fight seems inevitable.

Crossing to the other side of the hallway in his spiritual and incorporeal body, he noted that the men outside were spread out over the length of the entire hallway. They were all wearing helmets, with guns held at the casual ready and standing attentively even as they discussed something in low voices, still unaware of their dead companions.

He looked at them, listening in as he walked past them.

"Think Burnsfeldt's right about this one? Seems like a long shot to me," one said, raising a hand to point at the door with his thumb.

None of them wore any kind of identifying marks or insignia, simply clad in black, white, and gray armor with the occasional gold highlight.

"Lunch seems like a long shot to you, shut the fuck up already."

"Fuck you, I don't take shit from you—"

Emiya shook his head, he wouldn't learn anything from these grunts either. He noted that none of them had noticed what had happened in the room just now. It seemed that the soundproofing extended to the walls and doors as well.

What thorough craftsmanship, he complimented with grim humor.

He walked back into the room with his body and the two he had knocked out. Frowning, he looked up. Maybe he could go through the ceiling to the first floor? He consulted the wireframe in his head, before sighing. The floor is too thick, they would hear anything I could do to make a hole, defeating the purpose entirely.

Fake a call to retreat with the omnitools he had? No, they had previous orders and they must know Burnsfeldt was already running late somewhere else. They would realize something was up.

That left fighting as his only way out.

Emiya placed a hand on the wall, extending his od into the house's walls again. He found all the major power lines and then put just a little bit too much effort into it. As a youth, he had long struggled with Reinforcement due to his unique element. As one's magical element affected how the Reinforcement magic worked, his rather... volatile nature of 'sword' tended to destroy things quite easily.

Annoying when you were trying to fix a broken heater's electrical wiring for the school.

But useful when you wanted to weaken bindings and break free from a chair. And it allowed him to become something of a broken phantasm specialist, too. He had been shattering wood and cleaving hard stone with his failures a mere two years into his magical studies, which was rather impressive considering his utter lack of talent.

All the lights went out instantly, as all power in the house was cut.

It was pitch black, but that hardly bothered him. The layout was simple and all of his enemies were wearing creaky armor and heavy boots. He could fight blind in a situation like this just fine.

Lowering his hand and materializing, he walked over to the two unconscious men on the floor. He sighed, the breath tickling his eyebrows inside his mask, and made an ugly expression as he resolved himself to again break his ideal.

"Time to clean this mess up." He raised a foot and brought it down onto the neck of one and then the other. Both died instantly, suffering no more.

He wasn't completely sure what their affiliation and purpose were, but he felt fairly certain that they would only come back to haunt him again if he let them walk away here. Moreover, Burnsfeldt was much too close to Shepard for his comfort. A failure here would only hurt those with whom he had spent time, judging from the man's character and affiliates.

Besides, the man had already bared his teeth and Emiya had drawn his sword in response.

Hesitating at this point would be meaningless and immature.

Turning around to the door, he called forth his blades; his fingers grasping hilts as he took the last step and kicked forward at the same time as he dispelled the sword embedded in the door earlier. Shock and awe would serve him best here. Besides, with the power out it could no longer be opened.

The doors caved out and exploded out of its tracks in a way it was never supposed to move, taking down two of the armored men behind it. They were blown backward where they had been standing, as if they had been struck by a sudden runaway car, limbs bending the wrong way and wet gurgles on their lips.

Four.

Flashlights at the ends of assault rifles and shotguns swung his way, lighting up his dark form in the newly opened doorway.

"What the fu—"

One tried to shout as he raised his rifle, but Emiya had crossed the distance and sunk his curved black blade between ribs, piercing armor, flesh, lung, heart, and spine in one smooth thrust. The man died three seconds later, unable to understand what had happened, the edge so keen he had not even felt it as his legs failed beneath him.

Just like a Holtzmann shield; move slowly to slip in the point and nothing goes off. Like this, they can be pretty good shields, he grimly thought, turning his focus forward again. Three left.

Switching to reverse grip, Emiya kept the sword embedded in the man as he raised his white blade above his head and over the body's shoulder.

"Open fire!" someone shouted and two others hastened to respond with weapons raised.

Rifles roared, lighting up the darkness, the bass of the shotgun punctuating their staccato song.

Bakuya flew forward from his hand, shooting out like a white dove through the air and embedding itself into a far wall, and a second later the sound of a kinetic barrier going off and collapsing crackled followed by the thud of a head falling to the floor, blood spurting out from the now headless body that chased it down a second later.

Two.

Emiya strode forward with smooth steps, keeping the ad-hoc body-shield raised as he advanced calmly against the hail of automatic gunfire now that the shotgun was gone. In this narrow hallway, flanking wasn't an issue, and so long as he pushed they wouldn't have time to use their grenades either.

The body he held worked as a shield, first absorbing the hail of bullets with its kinetic barriers, then with the armor on its back, and finally with the body itself and the armor on its front as he advanced. It twitched and rattled in his hand, gunfire sending splatters of blood flying everywhere, but remained an unyielding barrier.

Having closed in enough, he pushed forward the body with his free right hand.

It slid off of his blade even as it kept taking bullets for him, and he kicked it forward before the dead body could fall down, letting it bounce into the closest of the two remaining men, entangling and knocking him over.

"Agh!" the man shouted as he fell and a second later Emiya's foot came down and snapped his neck in a sickening crack, leaving him limp on the floor.

One, just in time.

Emiya stood over the body, looking down before he slowly turned to look at the final enemy who stood in paralyzed shock with his overheated rifle. He kept pulling the trigger, starting to backpedal until he hit the far wall, the chiming beep of his rifle all to be heard.

Emiya turned around, letting blood drip off of his hanging black sword as he stared at the last man.

beep-beep-beep-beep

—drip

beep-beep-beep-beep

—drip

beep-beep-beep-beep

—drip

The hallway had been completely changed in the space of ten seconds, still lit by the fallen guns' lights.

Bulletholes and ricochet-marks pocked every surface as blood pooled on the floor and slowly spread out from the slain. On the splattered and splotched wall, a long red stripe remained from the beheading with the white sword sticking conspicuously out a bit further.

"Ah—Ah—Ah!" The man finally realized his gun had overheated and dropped it, pulling his pistol instead, raising and taking aim with expert precision that could only be the result of a thousand hours of practice that overrode all of his panic and confusion.

Emiya didn't move, simply looking at the man, waiting.

As the trigger was pulled the sword whipped up and three sounds could be heard almost at the same instant - the gunshot almost drowning out by the gong-chime of bullet-on-blade, with the useless projectile ricochetting into the wall and gouging the paint.

The pistol was almost dropped from slack hands as the armored man stared in abject horror at the upraised sword, which had undeniably deflected the shot without fail just now.

Emiya exhaled, stepping forward the last few meters and cutting through the last man from shoulder to hip in one swing, the blade going through kinetic barrier, armor, skin, flesh, organs, and bone without even slowing down, the burst and flickering of the failing kinetic barrier drowned out by the screeching of tearing metal and the shattering of ceramic plates.

"Guh...!" the man cried as he crumpled, the suit still trying to keep him alive. Medigel was being dispensed into the gaping wound, doing little but prolonging the man's suffering for some minutes more, as no medical help or evac would be arriving.

Emiya looked down, frowning as he kicked down and snapped the neck to end the man's life.

Go for the head or neck; torso hits take too long and make them suffer. Structural weakness in the neck due to enhanced need for mobility, much easier than the torso as well, he noted distantly.

He shook his head, flicking Kanshou clean of any blood still staining its edge, and examined the flat with which he had parried the bullet. No damage. Good. And as expected, the bullets themselves are too fast and too small to be seen. But experts still aim the same way as before, making a prediction for angled parries rather easy... though timing it could be tricky with bursts or automatic fire.

He looked back to Bakuya and the headless man. Kinetic barriers react to my attacks, but can't handle them. Might be different with vehicles.

These swords were his favorites, yet he often called upon them for worthless killings such as these. But that was partly what he so admired about them; that their nature had never changed and that only the love and dedication of that swordsmith couple remained inside them. It helped him stay his course and maintain a distance from the slaughter and suffering around him.

He sighed as he tore out Bakuya from the wall and flicked it once, flipping it into a reverse grip as he considered the hallway.

And once again, I'm back in this place. He shook his head, ignoring the sudden melancholy he felt.

He turned around, walking back inside as he checked that everyone was dead and finishing off those still breathing and trying to crawl away despite only having one or two unshattered limbs. They were tenacious, at least.

Looking around the entire house, he tried to find his omnitool but failed to find it anywhere. Finally, giving up on it, he continued looking around the house for other things he might be able to use, borrowing one of the rifles for its light.

In the garage, as he looked around a second time, he found a strange transparent body bag of some kind with an oxygen supply attached to it. So that's how they got me from the airlock to the car. By the wall near the parked shuttle, there was a closet full of light hardsuits. They seemed to lack any kind of armor or kinetic barriers, but would still protect him from the outside environment and supply him with oxygen.

He would take it: he didn't have anything better to wear. Trying to take one of the hardsuits down below would surely not end well, as they were probably all tagged and tracked somehow.

Might as well take all the oxygen tanks, just in case. And a spare suit, in case this one breaks.

It wasn't as if they were heavy.

Having given up on finding his omnitool, he settled for the gear of the men whom he had killed. Then again, perhaps that was for the better as he would not be able to use the Navy-owned tool anymore.

It was already bright outside: long past morning on Ares Station.

They might just give him a slap on the wrist for disappearing and throw him for a few days in the brig. But if they realized that there was no footage of his disappearance, it would raise questions. That and they would probably somehow manage to tie him with the massacre here.

Going back there was a waste of time, anyhow - he was going back to the moon.

He searched and stripped the armored men of their weapons and omnitools as he made certain to disconnect all power sources and take any credit chits he found since after this point he would not have access to any of his old funds.

I should have treated Shepard to more good food before she left since I knew I didn't need any of it...

Piling up all the bodies in the interrogation room, he projected a simple-looking sword and pushed some of his magical energy into it. It cracked, a long angry red line ran through its length, as if the blade was threatening to burst apart and catch fire. With this, twenty minutes from now the entire basement will be burning. Who knows how long the oxygen will last for a normal fire, but it should be enough to dispose of the bodies.

Down here there wasn't any fire system and the sword was one that would burn even underwater with its malice, so the lack of oxygen would only slow it down a little.

Grabbing his unconscious body, he moved to walk to the garage and then considered it.

He was still in his Servant form. With his short while inside of his body and with the long rest it had been enjoying, his magical energy was topped up again. He could also tell that his Independent Action had been reset, giving him another 24 hours to work with, much as he had suspected it would.

Handy, that.

Still, he couldn't just disappear and leave in his body.

If his appearance and rampage were caught on any recording or broadcasting device that he had missed and then he left without 'himself' in tow, it would be revealing too much. Simply appearing from nowhere and performing at superhuman levels could be explained away to some extent. But revealing his identities as one was giving too clear a sign of his true nature.

In the interrogation room, he had made sure to remove and disable everything that could be recording before he revealed himself and took out the other armed men, but he wasn't sure of the rest of the house. The basement had been practically bare, but the rest of the house was cluttered. Several men lived here, despite how bare and impersonal the outside had looked. Some kind of small hidden base and cache for the mystery organization Cerberus, in all likelihood. Even the garage was bursting over with shelves filled with tools and replacement parts for the shuttle, along with the weapon and armor lockers for no doubt some of the dead men below.

While there were no cameras or obvious surveillance gear anywhere in plain sight.

Still, it didn't hurt to be careful. Too many places to hide stuff in and too little experience with the many tricks of modern fieldcraft.

Now, one final thing before I can leave...

Dropping off his slack and thankfully dressed again body by the door to the garage, he crawled under the parked shuttle. It had a sleek profile and stood a little off the ground, making it look like a sports car of a century past, leaving just enough space for him to make it there. If there were any hidden cameras, he doubted they would be placed to show the bottom of a shuttle. And if there was, he was hoping the darkness would be enough to hide his actions.

Emiya shimmied a hand to the bottom of the shuttle.

Unlike cars, the bottom was the same smooth material as the sides and top; sealed against the dust and near-vacuum it had to brave. The hammer of the gun pointing at the back of his head cocked, the barrel extending and the bullet loaded itself with an inhale.

"—Trace, on"—begin insertion;

He blinked as he appeared inside that same strange world he had dived into the time before. This place looked completely similar, in that the blackness went on for infinity as the blue grid extended as far as the eye could see beneath him. A second later the blue starfall began.

He had somehow expected a different place since this was a different computer, but since it was him merely making sense of them, it probably wouldn't change too much from computer to computer. There was merely a sense of tightness, if it could be called that.

Emiya craned to look up, noticing the plane he was falling towards again.

Sighing and crossing his arms, Emiya let himself slowly sink until he was near the 'ground' again and he flipped to land on his feet. Do I appear upside down here, because I am 'diving' headfirst into the digital world as if it were an ocean? How strange.

Emiya looked around, sensing out everything within easy reach. With how connected everything was, he could not only sense the shuttle he had entered but the house and neighboring buildings as well. Now, how to handle hacking a car... Might as well go with what I know.

He nodded to himself, exhaling and pulling up the wireframe model of the shuttle as he knew it from having seen it. The same blue lines that existed to create the plane beneath his feet appeared to form the likeness of the shuttle as well, further suggesting that they were mere constructs of his mind.

It wasn't as if he couldn't fall through the 'ground' or needed to stand on it, in this place.

Nodding to himself, he made a circuit around the thing as he focused on his senses. This spirit hacking thing was still pretty new to him, but if he took the time to think it through, he was certain he could handle it. Well, so long as he didn't forget about the ticking sword-bomb in the basement.

Subsequently, several things gained his notice. He found two lines extending out and into the distance from the chassis of the car, pulsating quietly. The doors of the shuttle had a blue picture of a red padlock on them, with the top latch firmly shut.

Does that mean it's encrypted or locked? Emiya thought with a frown before he shook his head. He reached out and put a hand on one of the long lines and tried to feel out where it went. It seemed to go on forever, zigging and zagging all over the place. Finally, he gave up and tried the other.

Instantly, the connection to what he recognized as the Traffic Control from before appeared. He blinked at how clear and large the connection seemed in comparison to the previous one.

What, is the other one some hidden tracking signal then?

He considered it, before shrugging and just pulling loose the line and letting it shrivel away into the distance. He waited to see if anything else happened, before accepting that it had seemed to do something without breaking anything on the car.

Moving on, he looked at the doors and the insides. Pressing the padlock once and willing it to open, it turned blue and obeyed, vibrating softly at his touch. He looked inside, considering where the ignition was before sighing and simply willing a button to turn it on to appear before him.

Pressing it, the entire wireframe began to softly vibrate in place. That did something, I think.

Emiya closed the circuit, surfacing underneath the car once more and noting that it was softly humming over him. He smirked, crawling back out and dusting himself off. Noting that the doors were open, he lifted his body inside along with the environment suits, oxygen containers, and all his other loot, and then closed the doors as he sat down in the driver's seat.

Or what he thought was the driver's seat anyhow, until he sat down and looked over all the strange dials and buttons.

He really had no idea how to drive this thing. He sighed, rubbing his brow, only for the gloved hand to be stopped by the helmet covering his face now that he was materialized.

"It's always something..."

;

Thanks to PseudoSteak and Something8576 for proofreading and helping out.

Thanks to Deathwings for cool ideas, which I stole and mutated with abandon :V

Thanks to wellis for helping me with the story and South for pointing out a continuity error following that change.

28.10.2021 edit: whew, internet died in the middle of editing and had the tab die without saving, so I had to pull the damn text out of the RAM with a hex editor. Pain in the butt, I tell you.