Emiya opened his eyes, the amber overtaken by the sheer white brightness reflected off of them.

The God's Eye, huh...

Raising a hand, he looked away from the moon. He couldn't see his palm through the glove covering his skin, but still, he felt something new there as the fingers curled to make a fist. A sensation he couldn't quite put his finger on. Was it the new lease on life or the imminent end of this life he was facing that made everything stand in such stark contrast now?

He shook his head.

His body was just fine; the almost-instinctive internal scan at his first inhalation returned nothing unusual about his body and the Structural Analysis that had followed a second later had not contradicted that result either. It was just a matter of diving back out after he had gone in, so what was that about it being an absolute boundary? About the Moon Cell refusing anyone access outside?

"Guess that was another thing you knew nothing about, Administrator. Or should I take this as a sign of your tacit approval, Moon Cell?"

He looked expectantly out the window again, as if expecting the celestial object to speak to him. The moon did not answer him and he scoffed. He was completely alone, just as he had been those hundred years until now. He had made a bargain and honored it, but how far did that obligation extend if the contractor had no use for him? Was he obligated to rust away until the end of time?

Nothing had changed. But everything had changed. Looking away, he considered his situation.

"AWOL from the military, dying of something in my brain, in orbit around the moon in a stolen skycar almost out of gas that's falling apart, on the run from a paramilitary-possibly-backed-by-the-government-wetworks-outfit, looking for leads on a locked-room murder mystery that's been cold for fifty thousand years, and to top it all of I'm looking to relive the grisly conclusion of my old life as a hero of justice to see if I can?" He barked a depreciating laugh at that absurd list of tasks now set before him. "Sheesh, I'm never satisfied with just the difficult goals, am I?"

Yet for all that, he felt more at ease than he had in a long time. Not quite as relaxed as he had been just before he left for Mars, but good nonetheless.

He inhaled and considered his options, right then.

Going back to the Navy was out of the question; they would throw him in a military cell on sight, and then he would probably die while waiting for a military trial. Maybe if he asked they would let him see a doctor. But if he simply complained about having head pains or that he knew he was going to die within days, he doubted they would take him seriously.

Even if they did, they might not find anything wrong with him, as they had performed a fairly detailed physical on him when he had first joined and had completely missed whatever it was that had been done to him. There was no proof that whatever Archimedes had done, or was holding back from occurring, could be detected by means available to humanity. Perhaps they would find something wrong with him in time, perhaps not.

The odds just weren't good enough to take that risk for any of the advantages such a course of action could lead to, thus he would turn to other options with higher probabilities of success.

For now, he should probably get to Earth again.

The moon had several settlements but even Armstrong was simply too small - it would not allow him to blend in and disappear properly, as tracking him in a settlement as contained as this would be too easy once he landed. Besides, he hadn't turned off any of the normal signals in the skycar, meaning there was a rather obvious trail for anyone to follow.

As long as they could make the connection between the bodies in the basement he had burned and the skycar, anyone with the right connections would be able to find him. That, and his method of travel would eventually arouse people's interest when they realized just how he had managed to arrive from Mars.

He needed to shake everyone off before they caught up to him.

But he wouldn't have enough fuel to make it to Earth, not after the journey he had already gone through and after idling so long in orbit around the moon. He would have to first make a landing on the moon, somewhere near Armstrong perhaps, to refuel. And hope no one questioned his appearance while he was there.

It was the largest settlement on the moon, allowing him to blend in so long as no real manhunt for him had begun, at least. He could have tried to land on one of the smaller ones in hopes of avoiding notice, but since Armstrong Control handled the landings anyway and had already contacted him, he didn't think it would be worth the risk of not finding any fuel if he landed at some smaller industrial complex or hydroponics farm.

He also seemed to remember there being a few military installations somewhere too, but those he would absolutely have to avoid.

Emiya began to navigate towards the south pole of the moon, not quite sure yet what he was going to do. It was a 'work in progress', as these things often were. The problem of the license to fly and alight on the moon still remained. Then again he had something that should work for that, didn't he?

Activating the dashboard computer again, he made a comm-call.

"Armstrong Control, this is... Suave-450-CRB, come in."

"Suave-450-CRB, this is Armstrong Control, we're listening."

He closed his eyes, extending a hand towards the panel, as he sub-vocalized his aria: '—Trace, on'—begin insertion;

The action had become so familiar to him already at this point, he only felt the jarring shock of his skull collapsing in on itself as he appeared inside that strange world.

He opened his eyes, looking around. Floating upside down and slowly sinking as always, he noted with a huff. Extending his senses, he felt out the skycar and the connection between it and the control center on the other end in Armstrong.

Pulling out the display that the operator talking to him should be seeing, Emiya noted that it had a display of the skycar model and other general information listed on it. Joseppi Cardotin? He saw an unfamiliar name listed as the owner and decided to answer that he had borrowed the skycar from the owner if they asked. There he also spotted the licenses for operation on Mars, listing that it had sufficient seals and filters to handle the dusty environment along with how far it could fly and with what kind of fuel consumption it had.

Ah, it is more than just petty bureaucracy. Measures to keep fools trying to fly between planets. Makes sense, he thought ruefully.

Emiya swiped a hand, extending his senses until he found what he wanted: another vehicle was in contact with someone else in the control center, and as expected it had the license for operating on the moon. It also had internal pressurization and life-support systems rated for various kinds of environments.

Some kind of public transport to Earth, then?

Could use that later, if nothing else.

He eyed it roughly and copied the necessary licenses over to his own file, changing the relevant information as he went to match himself and his tricked-out skycar. It only really had to look roughly right at a glance, so that he could land and take off without being stopped or questioned.

Alright, that should do it.

"—Trace, off"—all processes completed;

The spell cutting off, he opened his eyes and continued speaking as if nothing had happened just now.

"I'll be making an approach for Armstrong now since I've run out of fuel. Where can I land?"

"You were informed earlier that—hold on, how did... Krhmm Well, alright then. Sending landing protocols over, make for shuttle bay Delta East by the Eastern side. Further instructions will be sent as you make the final approach. Will that be all?"

"Yes, thank you. Suave-450-CRB out." Emiya smiled and the line was cut. He smiled to himself, then. Suave, indeed.

He began to move out towards the city with the last of his fuel. Armstrong wasn't very different from Lowell City. Not at first glance, anyhow.

As he made the approach towards the gleaming silver spires dotting the white landscape ahead, he began to notice something unusual. They were all built in a circle, with nothing inside of them, creating a hollow center by the looks of it. Like a crown, almost. It was only when he came close enough to see between the buildings that he spotted what they were surrounding.

A terraformed crater: a complete biodome on the surface of the moon. There were green trees and grass, houses and people walking along the streets, and small vehicles moving around everywhere. It looked like a slice of Earth, scoped out and plopped onto the moon.

The dissonance was incredible as even he had to admit it was strikingly beautiful to behold.

No wonder four million people chose to live here, compared to Mars' three million. It was like comparing a hollowed-out industrial town, left behind by time, to a thriving tourist city that actually made the effort to attract more people. Not just the level of wealth present and visible, but the way the cities had been built spoke of a radically different attitude.

This wasn't some pitstop on the way to somewhere else; this was where you wanted to come in the first place.

Letting the VI handle all the driving and following of automatic instructions from Armstrong Control for the landing, Emiya simply looked around and enjoyed the view.

Passing through some sort of bubble—some sort of transparent but thick liquid that divided the void and the air, held in place by mass effect fields—he came to a halt inside of a shuttle bay by the side of the crater. Inside, he flew past many small vehicles like his, parked in neat rows that went for as far as the eye could see, until the automatic guidance found him an empty spot.

As he opened the door and removed his helmet, he inhaled deeply.

The fresh air in the hangar bay rushed in and made him a little lightheaded due to the suddenly elevated oxygen supply available to him, but it passed quickly. Changing the emptied oxygen supply quickly for a fresh one in case he needed it later, he threw the empty one in the back with the other emptied canisters. He put the helmet back on, wanting to keep his face off of any cameras and the tinted visor would serve well enough there.

Looking around as he exited the skycar, he spotted a VI interface by the door at the far end of the hall, with no one in sight anywhere. He couldn't see any cameras either, but that didn't really mean anything considering how compact technology had become.

"Must be automated," he muttered, half-closing the skycar door.

He did his best to hide the piles of omnitools and guns under the seats, but he would have to rely on the tinted windows to deflect anyone's attention. Then again, no one was here, so it was probably fine either way. Walking over to the VI, he paid the parking fee with one of the credit chits he had taken and then walked away after choosing the full-service option which would include having his fuel cell charged.

Emiya considered his options when his stomach rumbled loudly.

He blinked, looking down at himself. Oh, right. Skimming off all the magical energy from my body will do that.

Since his magical energy had been rapidly consumed by his jaunt over Mars, the various spells he had used, the combat encounter in his Servant body, and finally by his long flight to the moon, his spiritual core had been greedily consuming all the excess life force his body could produce to recover its own stores.

Which would obviously cause his body to go into overdrive to produce more to fill its own sudden void.

In essence, he was starving. A realization that took him slightly by surprise.

The combined time of a century-or-so on the moon without any need for sustenance and the three months in the military with set and strict schedules had left him used to not having to think about when he needed to eat, a rather deplorable state of affairs. His stomach loudly rumbled again, as if agreeing with that thought and making its complaints regarding the current state of affairs known.

"Fine, fine: food. Then a cheap replacement omnitool to figure the basics of how they work and checking out if anything is on the news about Mars..." He stepped away from the skycar, leaving the door unlocked since it required an omnitool to open the handle-less door from the outside.

A downside of excessive automation, he thought with some annoyance.

Emiya considered taking a gun, but he was fairly certain open carrying would garner him too much attention right now. Especially since he would be walking around in an environment suit with a tinted visor, which would probably stand out in a crowd all by itself judging from what he had been able to see of the residents so far.

He walked to the end of the parking lot, walking through a second safety airlock that blew at him with how rapidly it set about in pressurizing him for the inside of Armstrong.

Walking out, he blinked at how mundane it all was. There were people walking about on the white and gray walkways, going about their business near and far. The surfaces were clean and sleek without being too sterile. It was actually a little bit disappointing, based on what he had seen when flying in.

But then he turned around and looked out.

A bubble-like dome hung over everything, encompassing the entire crater. Beyond it, he could see both the rays of the sun streaming over the crest of the crater through swirls of dust and the darkness of space all around with the stars beyond almost invisible. Projected text and news broadcasts ran by on parts of the dome, visible almost everywhere in the settlement. Around the crater's edge, half inside the dome and half outside of it, the skyscrapers he had seen jutted up into space.

He had likened them to a crown while above, but down here they almost seemed like the teeth of some great beast in whose maw he was standing at this moment.

Ahead over the railing as his gaze trailed back down, he could see down into the large crater the city had been built into. Sparkling spires and towers, much of the same design philosophy and architecture shining through as back on Earth, but between the compactly built structures ran long tubes and stairs, almost like a second pavement level above the ground. Perfectly cut green grass and trees sprouted between the roads and buildings, all gathering and pooling into a huge park right in the center of the settlement.

He remained aback for a long moment as he simply looked around. A mother with her child walked past and they smiled at his behavior, as he realized he was gawking. It must have been obvious even with his face hidden from his posture.

Emiya coughed, hiding his embarrassment. This place, it's a lot more... fantastical than Mars was.

Not letting the awe get the best of him again he began to walk around, looking at everything and anything that caught his eye.

Even surrounded by all the strangeness of this place, he felt rather nostalgic. He had used to travel all over the world when he had been alive, had seen places wondrous and woeful, destitution and delight alike, all over the globe. Cultures and people were similar, yet different everywhere. And there was always that initial sense of awe and wonder when he found a place he had never before even heard about.

There had been some regrets about his life during his long stay on the moon.

But there were also fond times and those moments had helped him stay somewhat sane. The valleys in mainland Asia, the thousands of islands of the East Indies, the jungles of South America, the old Mediterranean cities of stone like Barcelona, the plains and desert of the middle east and the arctic tundras of the far north...

The feelings of awe and bubbling excitement he felt at seeing this place; he had felt it many times before - and somehow its return made his decision from before seem more real than anything else until now had.

Emiya looked down at his hand, cataloging just how many sensations he could feel again. How the dull distance of simply acting as duty demanded seemed to be receding, the veil before his mind parting to reveal the world in all its colors.

"If I want to remember the answer I found on that day, I'll just have to live my life like that until it makes sense again. Sooner or later, I'll arrive there again," He repeated the words that had nested themselves in his heart, smiling as he stepped forward again.

At the end of this path, once he walked up to that noose again, he wanted to be able to smile just like he had on that day long ago.

;

Anderson sighed, looking at Shepard.

They were heading back to Earth in the shuttle. There wasn't much else they could do and he had to be returning to his starship soon. Already he had pushed back his scheduled return by several hours. He had done enough, hadn't he?

But looking at the silent woman, he hesitated on that thought.

She had been quiet since the discovery of the omnitool in the shuttle parked outside. She hadn't explained how she had gotten inside and he hadn't asked. The police had given her unusual looks but had hesitated to say anything due to his rank and station. I guess that's one perk of this job - people think I'm allowed to do anything and everything, like in the holovids. Like I'm a...

He didn't finish the thought, memories of a burning eezo refinery and a scheming turian bubbling up, of accusations and lost opportunities. Anderson shook his head, forcefully concentrating on something else.

The shuttle had belonged to Lieutenant Commander Fillion Burnsfeldt, the man who had been missing for almost two days now. The pieces were falling together, just as she had said they would. It was strange, realizing that his gut instinct to help her had panned out like this. He looked at her, then.

She has sharp instincts. She'll turn into a fine soldier, Anderson thought, glancing at her again. As long as she recovers from this, at least...

"Shepard?"

She started, looking up with blinking eyes at the call of her name. She stared at him and around them, uncomprehending for several seconds before she realized they were in the shuttle again. She hadn't spoken a word since the Alliance Intelligence Agents had arrived and taken over the scene.

"...Yeah?"

"There's no proof yet, your friend might still be alive." Anderson tried to comfort her, but the words fell flat even to his own ears.

She didn't say anything to that, merely looking at him.

After she had brought forward the omnitool, the two Internal Affairs lieutenants who had interviewed her earlier had shown up flashing their badges, as the moment the omnitool had been activated a beacon had turned on and called them in, apparently. There had been some posturing and warnings, but after half an hour Anderson and Shepard were simply told to leave the scene as the Alliance Intelligence Agency took over.

But they had still seen enough to draw her own conclusions.

With the house in the shape, it was, finding out how many people had died inside was all but impossible. It could have been empty or there could have been dozens inside, as only pieces of half-melted hardsuits remained as proof of anything.

A sharp exhale, half a wet cough.

Anderson looked up, startled to realize that she was sobbing quietly. She was leaning forward, hands to her helmet as she gripped it tightly between her fingers.

He swallowed, not sure what to say or do all of a sudden. He had had to watch men and women die, had had to walk to their homes and break the news to their loved ones, had had to watch comrades and civilians alike confront mortality, before.

Yet, every time still came as a punch in the gut. You never become used to death, not without losing something in the process.

"He—he said that he—" She tried to say something, but it disappeared halfway through. More to herself than to him, he thought, as it was barely above a whisper. The rest was lost out to the quiet sobs.

Anderson wanted to step forward and place a hand on her shoulder—to try and bring her some comfort—but he refrained. They were not that familiar, nor did he know how she would take it.

"Why did—It's not..."

He could have said that those who enlisted knew they might die, that everyone who signed up accepted that eventuality in service to the Alliance. But that would have been too harsh and false besides. No one signed up to be stolen away in the dead of night and to die inside a freak inferno.

It would be a horrible way to go, I hope he was at least unconscious through it, Anderson thought, wincing at the sudden memory of dozens of screaming voices in the midst of fire and death.

Of the men, women, and children in the work camps who had been overrun by the molten metal streaming out. The horrible cacophony of shrieks of pain and keening cries of terror, punctuated by ear-splitting explosions. Greasy black clouds licked by orange flames, the acrid stench that stung their eyes and made breathing nearly impossible. The smell of the burning flesh and the sight of the dead everywhere.

He had been trying to forget about it for such a long time.

Back then, as he ran out he had only thought of escape and getting Sanders out alive from that mess, but he had never forgotten what he had seen there. No matter how much he had often wished to. The deaths on that day, when that turian Spectre had blown up the element zero-refinery, still haunted him to this day. He didn't know what to say to her, not even knowing what to think of all this himself.

Burnsfeldt had been an annoying man with a tendency for turning everything into a matter of politics, with rather strong views on how humanity should behave on the galactic stage, but Anderson wouldn't have wished him dead.

He fell into a sullen mood, suddenly reminded of old pains and failures, due to everything that happened today. The flight back was long and quiet, both merely sitting in silence. Finally, as the Flight Lieutenant announced that they would be entering Earth's atmosphere soon, did one of them break the silence.

"What... what should I do now?"

Anderson looked at Shepard, having avoided looking at her until now because he simply did not know what to say. He swallowed, looking away, considering what he could say now that she confronted him directly with her pain. Loss was always something personal, too personal, to simply comment on in a shallow manner. How it affected every person was different. Every case was different. Every life, every death, was different.

Careless remarks in times like these were unacceptable.

"I never met him, but... It's obvious that you respected him quite a bit," Anderson finally remarked.

"He... helped me get into the N-school. He helped me with a lot of things. I never really thanked him for that. Not enough."

"Then... if he helped you this far and you wanted to come here..." he began, looking at her to see if she would object.

Not everyone was N-material and his next words might push her onto a path she might not wish to tread on. But seeing no objections forthcoming, he finished the thought he had begun.

"Then perhaps you should make the most of it. Honor him, by going as far as you can while remembering him. Do what he would have wanted you to: do the things you would have done together."

She looked at him quietly, brows furrowing as she looked at the floor in deep thought. She inhaled, crossing her hands as she sat in silence.

"Shepard..." Anderson continued, not even certain how he would continue. But there was a feeling deep in his chest that he had to say something more, still.

"Sir, we've arrived." The comms announced as the shuttle lurched slightly and the side door opened, letting sunlight stream in.

Shepard stood up, as oxygen streamed inside and filled the cockpit. Reaching up, she undid the seal on her neck and removed the helmet. Shaking her head and scratching at her brow with a gauntlet-clad fist, she sighed. Looking down at the seated Anderson, she tried a smile, but it was so brittle it almost felt sharp.

"Thank you, sir. For listening to me. And for..." She hesitated, looking away. Inhaling, she nodded to herself. "I'll do that. I'll make him proud."

Anderson nodded, standing up to extend a hand to her. She blinked at it, before accepting it gingerly and shaking hands.

"Best of luck, Ensign Shepard."

She nodded and then saluted him as she stepped out and began to run back to the villa. Anderson sighed as the shuttle door began to close.

"Lifting off, sir. To the Hastings?"

"Yes." Sitting down heavily, he replied. Then he spoke quietly, voicing his thoughts with a whisper. "Life goes on as normal, regardless of the everyday tragedies."

"...Sir?"

"Nothing, Flight Lieutenant. Just the errant thoughts of someone feeling their age, nothing more."

;

Emiya had gone out and returned to the skycar quickly enough, never taking off the helmet until he had returned with his bounties to the obscurity that its tinted windows provided.

Takeaway food on the moon wasn't half bad.

Having eaten, he wiped his fingers clean as he savored the last bits of the sauce they had used in the sandwich. Piquant, yet not overbearing. Slightly salty, yet not too much so. It brought out the pickled cucumbers' flavor quite nicely, giving that crunch just that extra connotation it needed on every bite. They had used some kind of cheese as a base, giving it a rich taste.

It was very good. He would have to look it up, the name was cheesily enough 'lunar sauce', as it was produced from beginning to end on the moon, using some form of locally produced synthetic milk to make it. It had a strong market since the moon was still a tourist attraction and the old tales of the moon being made out of cheese gave it a good, strong brand to work with.

He found that more than a little bit unusual since he knew that the moon was actually a photonic crystal supercomputer, but it was good nonetheless.

Having bought a cheap civilian omnitool, he quickly noted how much the complexity scaled down compared to the ones he had taken before. It was about the relative price difference between an older style cell phone and a smartphone, as he had seen in the many middle-eastern open-air bazaars while traveling there back in his time. Usually, he would load up on them when he saw some since he had a bad habit of breaking them during his fights. Besides, they made excellent gifts when meeting new people.

Still, the Aldrin Labs Bluewire Tool I.

A rather basic omnitool and apparently a cheaper version of one of the ones he had picked up, something which he hoped would allow him to understand the other ones better. It would suffice for his current needs. He also specifically asked for the customer manuals in print, knowing he would be breaking this thing within a day.

Though with all this he was beginning to run out of credits. Having only emptied the pockets of those he had slain, at the moment his resources were not very deep. The refuel, omnitool, and the food were already putting him quite near broke. He could probably try and hack himself some more credits or project something valuable and try to sell it, but he hesitated to go that far just yet.

Even on Earth during his life, he had avoided simply projecting paper money or valuables as much as possible. It was for all intents, constructions, and purposes fake goods and money, so it felt like he was cheating people when he used it. Certainly, one or two forged bills would be swallowed up by the financial and fiat system without a problem in a pinch, but where did the line run for causing problems?

At what point would he begin hurting people through his laziness? Could he justify it to himself, that he might be devaluing the currency or causing inflation, hollowing out the life savings of millions of people on accident? Certainly, the possibility of him causing it on his lonesome might be minimal to nonexistent...

But he might still be contributing to it.

Might be the first snowflake rolling down the hill that started an avalanche.

It had been a terrifying thought, always holding him back - even when money was tight.

He knew that banks could essentially create ten times the currency they nominally had in their vaults for handing out loans, but he had never been an economist and hadn't had the time to look into the matter, so he wasn't sure how they handled the consequences to avoid causing hyperinflation. He had been assured that a little bit of inflation was good to match a growing economy, but such encouragement had always rung a little hollow to him. Not quite knowing how it would affect things out of his sight, he simply kept his nose clean and avoided it.

Rin had once lectured him on the dangers of such, only to immediately suggest forging some artwork, stating that those were inherently worthless and everyone used them to launder money anyway.

Emiya shook his head at the memory.

Then again, money had rarely been a problem for him. He could repair almost anything with minimal time and tools, a valuable service anywhere.

Sighing as he shook his head, he considered his current situation. Money was a means, not an end. What he wanted to use the money for was more important, right now. He needed to figure out those, first. As he saw it he currently had three goals.

Or rather, two goals and one condition.

Firstly, he had to cure his... brain problem, whatever it was. Archimedes had been rather vague and Emiya hadn't found anything wrong with Structural Analysis of himself, but that might only mean that it was fine until he suddenly dropped dead. Like a dam that was holding back a million liters of water appearing perfectly fine until finally a small crack gave way and let loose it all in a torrential wave of destruction.

Without a body, he would be but a wraith in the wind.

His magical energy would sooner or later deplete and he would disappear, exactly how Archimedes had intended him to. Of course, there were methods he could use to extend his existence in such a circumstance, given that his Independent Action skill would let him maintain himself to a degree. Already he had used it to his great advantage.

Lacking that skill, he would have been effectively stuck in his body.

Emiya considered the methods he knew about that he could use if he wanted to live on in just his Servant body, like devouring the souls of sentient creatures and performing tantric rituals. But with such means, he would have to ask himself every day whether the price of tomorrow would be worth it.

Worth whatever or whoever he was sacrificing to keep himself going.

For souls, the closer it was to his own intelligence, the better it would be for consumption. He could devour animals, but those would only slow down the inevitable. For long-term survival, it had to be sapient creatures. In combat, it might be an acceptable breach, but for every day? Forget simply trying to find people who he thought it was acceptable to kill and violate like that, he could barely fathom what it would do to him.

"No. I have no intention of devolving into a monstrous bloodsucker," he muttered to himself, taking a sip of his beverage.

Tantric rituals on the other hand were finicky.

For starters, the logistic of having to have sex every single day would get annoying. It would restrict his movements too much and keep him tied down to locations where he could find a sufficient number of willing partners. Settling down was not an option, either. It would cause irreparable harm to someone in the long term to have their life force constantly drained, something he would not inflict on anyone he was willing to lay with.

A powerful magus might be able to handle the burden of maintaining his existence, but those were in short order even before mana had begun to wane and even if by some miracle he found someone, it would give them disproportionate power over him along with all the other problems.

Moreover, he could not actually be certain that he would find a willing partner should he embark on such a path - he had only ever had one lover and that relationship hadn't ended exactly on a happy note. He was well aware of his stunted social skills, even without having to consider the hundred-year gap since his last relationship.

And forcefully taking someone was utterly unacceptable.

At that point, he might as well simply rip out their still-beating heart and devour it whole. It would even give him more magical energy, that way.

And besides the sheer logistics, tantric rituals were also problematic for other reasons, too. For one, he would have to achieve a simultaneous climax with his partner for optimal efficiency. For another, in the midst of such a ritual, it was possible for their souls to touch and for his spiritual imprint to affect his partner. Even Masters sometimes dreamed of their Servant's past. The intimacy coitus would bring would be a hundredfold stronger. It seemed like an unnecessary risk; to be sleeping around and dropping hints of his true nature everywhere he went.

And lastly, there was the boyish part of him; still rather sexually conservative—even for someone from his era—who thought such things weren't very proper. But he ignored that in his reasoning, refusing to admit that something like embarrassment would truly stop him.

No, keeping his body alive was his number one priority at this moment. Everything he did as a Servant required magical energy and having his body not only supplied him with that but also allowed him to reset his Independent Action, which had already proved vital.

He needed to fix his body before it died, then.

Emiya closed his eyes, cycling through the weapons and artifacts he remembered inside of his world.

There were swords that could keep him on his legs until the last drop of blood had fallen from his veins; there were shields that could grant him immunity to all pain and fear; there were scythes that could drain the life force of others and use it to heal him. But nothing came to mind that could handle something wrong in his brain. Then again, he didn't even know what it was that would kill him.

There were too many uncertainties, too much he simply did not know.

Meaning he had to find specialized medical assistance and quickly. Which brought him to the condition for that to be possible: he could not remain within human territory. For one, he was on the run from the military. For another, he was fairly certain he was in the crosshairs of a paramilitary organization that had deep pockets and hidden connections to the aforementioned military.

This meant he had to get out of the Sol system, and possibly the local cluster before he even risked trying to cure himself. Which would not be easy, given how all travel would be bottle-necked through the Charon Relay which the Alliance Navy was in control of.

His second goal also tied into that.

He wanted to solve the mystery of Mars. But for that, he needed to know more about the Protheans, those precursor aliens who had built a galaxy-spanning empire only to suddenly disappear fifty thousand years ago. They had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving only those he had found dead in a hole so deep that nothing should have been able to find or harm them.

He had clues, he had hunches, but he would need more information before he could figure out anything else. The gun weighed heavily in his mind; that call for help by someone just before they snuffed out their own lives, still echoing through time.

Which meant he had to find out more about the Protheans. About the history of the galaxy in general, too.

At least he knew where to start.

He would begin at the Citadel, it was the best place to find both medical assistance and clues about how to further investigate the Protheans. Simply going to an alien species with more advanced technology would not help with his brain problem; they would not have the expertise and knowledge necessary for handling a human patient, most likely.

But on the Citadel, that mighty melting pot and meeting-ground for all the major races of the galaxy, it was entirely possible for people with both the technology and the knowledge to help him to exist.

Emiya set down the napkin he had used for wiping his mouth as he put away the trash from all the food he had brought back. He would have to dispose of all that properly later so that the food he had bought wouldn't be linked up to him. At least he had eaten enough to sate his hunger for now.

Time for work.

;

A man sitting in a dark room frowned, squinting at the display before him.

He reached up to take the cigarette out of his mouth, inhaling slowly. Just enough to get the taste of smoke in his mouth, lighting up his eyes with the glowing ember at the end of the hand-wrapped tobacco. Reaching over, he tapped away the ashes as he considered the information before him.

Burnsfeldt had gone silent. This had only been noticed after he failed to check in at his normal post in N-school. One of his other associates dropped a word and he had sought to contact his operative.

Sought, being the keyword.

Here he now sat, looking at what little data was available to him. News reports. Police comms. Reports from his other operatives who had an ear on the ground all over the Sol system. But even so, there was precious little to be had.

The omnitools had all been disabled. The safehouse had been sanitized thoroughly. The entire squad Burnsfeldt had requested had gone silent, the leader included. Some of those men would not be missed, but three of them were of some value. Burnsfeldt was one of them. Officer Cardotin was another. The operative that worked as an instructor in the Alliance basic training had been valuable as well, but more for his position than anything else.

He could be replaced. They all could.

But it would take time and money. Especially if this somehow leaked out and managed to poison the waters for Cerberus. He needed to contain this. Already several of his operatives were working to keep the worst of the dirt from being exposed.

For a moment, he considered recalling Operative Lawson. She was an up-and-coming talent in the organization, already with several impressive successes to her name despite her youth.

No, her operation cannot wait. He shook his head, he would be better served assigning another person to that operation, bolstering its chances of success and keeping as many of his loose operatives out of the system. Hmm, yes. They should get along well enough, and it is about time they were properly introduced.

"Take it from the top..." he spoke to himself, taking a sip of his whiskey, the ice cubes clinking in the glass as a contrast to the soft whisper of his bespoke suit.

"Fillion notices oddities in the subject. All records confirm his existence as one 'Shirou Emiya', yet they only stretch as far back as three months. Suspicious indeed." He eyed through all the files that he had been sent.

Once, he had been out there in the field. With gun in hand and a mission to accomplish.

But now he served by coordinating and planning. As leadership, rather than direct action.

"Finding a worrying pattern, he opted for immediate and direct action, extracting the subject from Ares Station in the middle of the night and moving him to a safehouse in Lowell City. So far, nothing stands out outside of the abruptness of the action."

He reviewed the helmet footage. With the latest and last report by the operatives, he had received a full update with all the relevant files. They could not retain a secure live feed at all times from the shielded basement, since that could risk containment this close to Earth.

Even a mere conversation required heavy encryption and short duration for any safety to be maintained.

Strapping down the subject to the interrogation chair in the fortified and hidden basement, finally, the first problems began to arise. As they injected the subject with a stimulant to counteract the tranquilizer used for quick and quiet extraction, nothing seemed to happen. These kinds of things happened, which was why the tranquilizer and stimulant had been tested repeatedly. This was also why Doctor Cardotin was such a valuable asset; his expertise in the area made him an expert when it came to quick interrogations.

He reviewed the footage from everyone, multiple times. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary, even as the hour stretched and the subject remained unconscious. Finally, he settled on the biomonitor feed from Cardotin's omnitool. He looked closely, trying to find something that stood out. Anything.

Finally, he noticed a change.

Suddenly, as if by the flick of a switch, there was brain activity. He narrowed his eyes, inhaling on the cigarette and enjoying the burn as he did.

"How peculiar."

It wasn't anything sophisticated enough to recognize what a person was thinking about, but it did tell him that there was some kind of brain activity. It was a combined suite of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Magnetoencephalography, and Electroencephalography, nothing more. He lacked the education to make any guesses as to what any of it meant in further detail, but it was a start. He would forward it to an analyst and see if they could piece together something more.

For now, he would look at the bigger picture.

And what a strange picture it was.

He looked it over several times, finally re-watching the entire interrogation, or what he had access to anyhow. Everything that had happened after Burnsfeldt had reported in was a mystery to him. There, it happened again.

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

Frowning, he listened to the conversation again. Burnsfeldt's voice spoke out and for just a moment, the subject seemed to be 'out of it' for the lack of a better term. And just at the same moment, a sudden spike in all brain activity seemed to occur. As if the entire brain had overclocked for an instant, before returning to normal.

"This is it, then," he mused. "The subject was restrained and drugged. But upon hearing something in that question, he somehow called for help, a signal breaching the basement's containment when Burnsfeldt exited... Or the phrase activated a hidden mechanism, some form of hypnosis? Barcelona, the church..."

He frowned.

It was strange, realizing that Burnsfeldt had perhaps been right in his initial assumptions and haste, after having chastised him for it earlier. But for the subject to be able to call for help would have required something that surpassed their current technology. He had been nearly naked and scanned several times before he woke up. That meant an outside player was getting involved in Earth politics.

Unacceptable. To so arrogantly strut into our territory. This will not stand.

He leaned back, taking a sip of his whiskey as he stared at the ceiling and let all of his thoughts flow around. The strange switch-like brain activity. The sudden surge. The Church. 'a dip in the grail', 'Kotomine'.

Perhaps Burnsfeldt had been more right than even he had known himself. The grail; the Sangreal; the blood of Christ. Usually imbibed in religious rituals, usually replaced by wine, in a recreation of the last supper. But being 'dipped' in it? That must mean something.

A baptism usually occurred by a convert being dipped in water. Perhaps this genetic modification was hidden as a form of religious ritualism? A second baptism in the blood of Christ to represent how they would tread in sin? To accept a path of self-sacrifice, in letting their bodies be so heavily tampered with. But the baptism usually also involved devouring a piece of the body of Christ as well.

Perhaps that meant something more was done.

The idea of the small, hard piece of bread in his mind. It rather reminded him of a small microchip. A chip capable of functioning as a hard switch for all brain activity? Able to communicate when certain keywords were activated?

That name, 'Kotomine' stood out as well. An authority figure? The scientist who performed the 'baptism' for him? The Japanese certainly had several noteworthy companies involved in biotechnology. An avenue worth investigating later.

Several notes Burnsfeldt had left behind stood out in his mind, then. How the subject hadn't seemed to ever lose control over himself. How he had through unknown means managed to fake a condition that took him out of the combat rosters. Treating his body like a machine... Self-sacrifice to absolve man of sin? It is almost... admirable.

He chuckled.

This was all pure guesswork; worthless until he found something more substantial to base his decisions on.

After the subject proved himself to be too incoherent for a proper interrogation, they took a small break while injecting him with a medical scrubber. This would also act to neutralize some of the truth serum, but he lacked any footage to worry about having to doubt what was said under that condition.

It also wasn't enough to fully neutralize the tranquilizers, thus the subject should have remained restrained.

Setting aside the stump of his cigarette, he considered the other reports. His operatives had arrived at the scene of the safehouse, finding it melting from some form of fire that had been set inside of it. That means some form of military-grade incendiary payload. And lots of it.

Yet none of the traffic cameras had spotted any unknown vehicles making for the safehouse at any point before the Burnsfeldt's report coming in. Nor had he found anything after that to work with. Officer Cardotin's skycar had gone missing, but its beacons had been disabled. The skycar had been reported leaving the city according to Lowell Control, by flying straight up and out of atmo.

With the driving VI, it was possible that the shuttle was had been an escape vehicle or it could have been completely empty, nothing more than a distraction.

It had supposedly flown off to the westerly direction and exited the city, after which Traffic Control ceased its tracking of the vehicle. It was gone. But it wasn't a vehicle rated for space travel and staying on Mars after his cover had been so thoroughly destroyed would not be a reasonable course of action for an undercover operative. But it couldn't have gone far either, given what it was. If it had carried passengers, it must have been flown somewhere else and had been abandoned once a starship had come to recover the target and his rescuers.

He would have to look through the records to see if any suitable starships might have been in the area.

A daunting task, considering the mining operations ongoing in the asteroid belt at all hours of the day. He sighed, deciding that there was nothing to it but to simply do it.

His terminal chimed and he glanced at it.

An additional update rated priority 2 in relation to this case. He inhaled, opening it and reading the header. "Footage taken from Ares Station, following extraction of serviceman Emiya."

Pushing the file, it opened and began to play a video. He blinked, looking at the camera terminal in what looked like a security center. A night guard was looking at the camera, obviously bored. What is this—

Suddenly, the guard's eyes glazed and he went limp. The chair was pushed to the side and a dark wraith rose out from the shadows. Clad in black from head to toe. Like the darkness pooling out from below the man who had just fallen unconscious, wearing a smooth matte black helmet and an intricate-looking, almost ceremonial, armor of completely unknown make.

It had appeared from nowhere: none of the systems had seen anything.

Yet undoubtedly, it was a man. Tall, broad of shoulders, and in excellent shape, the figure worked rapidly at the terminal, before fading away just as quietly as he had arrived, the guard waking up as if nothing at all had happened.

The video stopped and he had to contain the shiver running up his spine. Almost reflexively he performed a perimeter scan with his eyes, his cybernetic enhancement allowing him to see much more clearly than the lighting might have normally allowed. He sighed, chiding himself for the worry.

Still, carelessness will get you killed. He ran a full security scan by his terminal before he settled down again.

He recalled the video. The guard had gone out as if a switch had been flipped, his consciousness simply gone. He licked his lips, suddenly feeling them unusually dry.

"Just what are we dealing with here...?" he pondered as he went about to analyze the footage he had just received; the haptic interface seemed like a good place to start.

;

Here he was once again, floating inside the virtual ocean inside the omnitools. Or perhaps it was more accurate to call it an indoor pool, given how isolated it was.

Overhead the great ring representing the omnitool he was connected to, and below a great thrumming wall of pulsating and shimmering white. He ignored them both for now, too busy thinking about the omnitool he had been working on. It was one of the ones he had taken from the two who had been interrogating him, the ones who had seemed to know what was going on.

Emiya sighed.

"What is this? An entirely different operating system? No, even more than that, it's like the system that's visible when using the haptic interface has nothing to do with the actual omnitool?"

With the simpler devices for comparison, it soon became obvious that both of the omnitools he had taken were on a level beyond comparison in complexity. They looked similar enough on the surface, but the inner workings and architecture were completely different.

"They're what...? Running a fake system on top for concealing the real one, and have all of the tracking, surveillance, and control systems embedded directly into the real system...?"

No wonder nothing works after I disconnect it all: everything else is slaved to those functions. It's like pulling out the load-bearing walls of a house and expecting it to keep me dry from the rain after the ceilings collapsed!

They were constantly trying to connect to something, which made him relieved that he had thought to isolate them so heavily before he started working on them. At least he had not found any physical self-destruct or explosion mechanisms wired up in the omnitools. That meant he could get rid of his steel block and just replace it with a Faraday pouch that blocked the signals. He had used one even back in his days with his cell phone and mobile equipment, but for this, he would have to make it at least triple the thickness of the material to be sure that it would be completely isolated.

At this rate, he would need to bash his head against the stolen omnitools for who-knew-how-long to make any kind of headway. Of course, he had already found several programs running a timer to when it would wipe everything on the drives, requiring a regular reset by the original owners once a week to keep it from becoming just so much junk, so he was running out of time on more than one front.

But there was still something he found interesting in the omnitools.

There had been mentions of a base in one of the mails he had read in some of the grunts' omnitools, on the surface layer system disguising the real one, accessible without any special measures aside from the dive itself. A minimal slip-up from the grunt, but one proving to be a vital hint to Emiya.

It had been in the context of being some sort of meeting ground or launching point, especially for those about to leave the Sol system. Was it perhaps the base on Ganymede they had mentioned, on one of Jupiter's moons?

"What a mess," Emiya said looking at the clock.

He had been in Armstrong for almost half an hour in real-time now. He would have to get going soon - anyone on his trail would be arriving soon, no doubt.

He faced the same issues now as he had earlier with Mars, only the scale was even larger. His short shuttle flight to the moon had already shown him how difficult it would be to get to the Charon Relay without a proper starship, but those were not quite as easy to acquire as a skycar was. Stealing one would net him a lot of attention and make an even clearer trail for anyone looking for him to follow.

Trying to hitchhike aboard one instead would be difficult as he had no idea where each starship would be going after the relay jump and because weight aboard ships was carefully monitored, due to the difficulties that existed in entering and exiting gravity wells, even with mass effect technology.

And if commercial starline security was anything like airline security from his time, he doubted he would be able to pass through undetected due to his recent escapades.

But if there was a hidden base here, from where a clandestine outfit launched its operations from...

"Perhaps I can use that," he concluded.

It was an attractive option, serving multiple ends

He could get out of the system undetected, find out what this Cerberus organization really was, figure out some of the things they had said, and then use their resources for his own ends. Of course, infiltrating an organization like that was never as easy said.

But for that to become even remotely possible, he would first have to access one of the two more vital omnitools more deeply.

Hence, his problem with the second system.

They were encrypted. Which meant that he could access and look at the data just fine through his spirit hacking. It just looked completely wrong. Simple encryption could be as basic as reversing all the letters in a word or inserting a random letter periodically to make it more difficult to read, limited only by what you were willing to practically do each time.

For computers that worked with sequences and logical rules, the possibilities for encryption were practically endless.

Which meant that he would not be able to do anything about the data that was encrypted without the cipher for it. He could not reason what it did, what it was for, or when it might have been created or modified, or if something had been deleted. Even with the super-advanced computers of today—even the largest and most powerful mainframes—the encryption methods available in his day would have been enough to stop any brute force method of breaking the encryption dead in the water.

And just as much as computers had advanced, so too must have the encryption methods and tricks.

Diving in did not change much in that regard. It was like looking at a digital picture where every pixel was randomized, creating nothing but indecipherable chaos.

Really, this was where the skill of the hacker came in. At least in his time.

A large part of hacking—or 'cracking' as it was originally called—a system was simply about finding a weakness to exploit so that you could simply avoid the difficulties of tackling it head-on. Something which allowed you to bypass all the safeties and do what you wanted more easily in a way the original designers hadn't foreseen. It could be something like an unexpected bug in code that could be leveraged to compromise a system, or getting your hands on information such as where the physical hardware was located for direct access, or the password of someone who had access to the system and hadn't followed security protocols properly.

Usually, the largest weaknesses were always the people who used the system.

Human beings were lazy and thoughtless as a rule. If someone had to remember a dozen passwords, writing them down somewhere or using something personal as a basis for them to make it easier to remember them, seemed like an easy and convenient way to keep track of them all. Thus an encrypted system that could take centuries of brute force password guessing from a supercomputer could be opened with a single day's work from a talented hacker who could spot and exploit such vulnerabilities.

Such as the case of the grunt who had sent a message using the unencrypted surface system.

Usually, it had been Emiya who had to do a day's dirty work to collect the information to hand over to his friend, but he had learned a lot of useful skills in the process, so he couldn't really complain.

But that had probably changed by now.

As the obvious weaknesses are discovered with time, policies and protocols would be put in place to counter them by those who stood to suffer from hacking attempts. For example, force the users to make passwords with stricter requirements, forbidding personnel to open or access mail or data from unknown senders, keeping systems out of common networks to prevent intrusion, or having physical hardware under lock and key at all times.

Information security had been mindbogglingly complex even when he had been alive and now they had had a century's worth of time to perfect those measures. And who knows what else had been learned from contact with advanced alien species who undoubtedly had their own methods and systems to deal with.

The methods he knew were probably antiquated and quaint in the eyes of any security specialists operating today, his spirit hacking aside.

Emiya scratched his head, looking at the omnitools.

At least he had plenty of time to figure it out, even if he was in something of a hurry.

An unusual thing he had noticed was that during a dive, time seemed to flow strangely, even him who regularly ignored the external world to fully process something. It moved extremely slowly.

And not in the expected 'at a constant, but faster rate' as one might expect.

When he did nothing at all, time seemed to stand still.

No magical energy was expended either, beyond the smallest trickle that was so minute as to be non-existent. When he looked at the internal clocks, not even a microsecond would pass regardless of how long he waited. But it wasn't that time remained frozen while he was in a dive either, as he had noticed before that time had passed between dives.

So he experimented with performing mental arithmetic to see if the flow of time scaled with his own actions and it did not. He walked around inside the dark world, to see if that would matter, moving along the blue grid plane. He counted them, each ten and a half steps across in regular squares, walking ten thousand squares before checking the time again.

But nothing. Neither showed any results.

It was first when he started moving from one computer to another computer—like connecting to the skycar or Traffic Control—that he began to notice time passing again. Then, as he began to operate and use the omnitool's functions, time seemed to continue flowing again. If at a much, much slower rate than in reality. And in pace with time passing, so too did his magical energy expenditure seem to increase.

It was probable that he had a set amount of 'real' time he could spend in a dive based on his magical energy, since this was a form of magic, but that time would pass at different rates depending on what he was doing inside the computer.

Emiya vaguely remembered that the 'brains' of a computer was the central processing unit, which was something like a microprocessor unit only much, much more complex. That had also been back in his time; the CPUs in the omnitools probably dwarfed anything that had been available in his time by several orders of magnitude in both power and complexity. Gordon Moore, eat your heart out.

He remembered that the measures which were used to rate such things roughly came down to two things: how many cycles could the device perform in one second—clock-rate—and how many things it could do in a single second. The former was simple enough to measure in Hertz. The latter was a bit more complex, with a couple of different measurements used, none of which he could even remember anymore.

Floppies? Mips? Something like that.

"So does that mean that diving into a weaker system consumes more magical energy than a high-end one? That I'm forced to bear the burden of upholding a perceivable reality inside of a weaker machine, while in a stronger one I can just coast along?"

He shook his head.

It was something to experiment on later; it seemed to line up with what he knew about the world egg theory and how the World bore the brunt of existence's continually growing conceptual weight, somewhat. It was actually quite a fascinating subject, even if he had never been an academic.

Opening a folder and cycling through every file inside of it a dozen times caused time to finally pass at a noticeable rate as the microseconds ticked by. Which was rather impressive actually, considering the folder was several terabytes in size, at least. Then again, he wasn't pulling it out on display on a graphical user interface, merely looking at it from within, so perhaps that cut down on the processing time? He wasn't sure about the architecture, so it was difficult to say.

Maybe he was directly accessing the data in the permanent memory while it normally had to be brought up into the working memory or the cache to be viewed, which affected how long it took?

"So does as much time pass as it takes for however many cycles is necessary to pass, or is it for how long it takes for the actual operation to be completed? Or was there even a difference? How many floppies is it if I open a vid?" Emiya wondered, before shaking his head. "No, those were the save button icons. Or was that diskettes? Floaps? Flops?"

He was distracting himself, as he hadn't found anything that could help him get a reasonable look at anything important or useful despite trying to find a solution for... He wasn't actually sure how long he had been in here. But for a considerable amount of time.

Sighing, he rubbed his brow. A chime could be heard, muddled and distant and he looked up.

Something zoomed past him and Emiya had to blink as his eyes moved to follow.

It was the first time he had seen something moving inside of this omnitool by itself. He turned to look at the thing and realized after a second that it was some kind of program. Moving forward, he took a closer look at it.

A blue sphere of shifting panes of light with a smaller white core, holding rows of data on those panes as it continued to float about. It didn't seem to notice him at all. But it seemed rather complex. Almost intelligent.

"A VI?"

He hadn't actually looked into those things yet, despite his run-in with one in the skycar's computer.

Essentially they were smart and relatively adaptable programs, in use everywhere, as humans with their innate laziness had something of an affinity for them. He understood that there was some distinction between a VI—Virtual Intelligence—and an AI—Artificial Intelligence—but he wasn't a hundred percent certain on the strict definitions, despite the many labels ensuring that VIs were definitely not AI.

Apparently, there were laws in place against the latter, though he wasn't sure exactly why.

There were plenty of Artificial Intelligences in the Moon Cell, though only a few were actually pleasant company.

Emiya had an unfortunate tendency of running into AI modeled after people he had known in life in the Moon Cell. He wasn't sure if that was a practical joke, if the Moon Cell was still observing him and seeing how he reacted, or if it was merely some coincidental thing he had observed.

Given how rarely I've been employed, it wouldn't surprise me if I was just a glorified test rat.

Mostly his duties—when he had such, anyhow—had been to put down such high-level AI, when they went out of control, and over whom the Moon Cell had relinquished direct deletion rights for some reason or another. A lot of the time, the messes he had to clean up felt like they could have been rather easily prevented with the most basic of oversight from someone with any foresight or common sense. But the Moon Cell was adamant in its refusal to become intelligent, even as it handed out sapience to many of its high-level programs like it was cheap candy or something.

The AI he had met had been thinking, feeling, and acting beings, that seemed no different from humans to him. Perhaps that was reason alone to ban their creation.

This thing was not an AI though, obviously.

For one, it didn't seem to even perceive him at all. It was more like an Attack Program in that regard - a slaved bit of programming that could complete basic tasks or hoard processing resources. The rogue AI used such things often enough as their pawns for him to be somewhat familiar with them. Those things could not think or even act independently, beyond relatively simple functions, lacking anything resembling a mind or a soul. Even in combat at most they simply ran around and attempted to crudely attack with numbers.

But it wouldn't do to simply assume anything.

"Hey," he said, willing the sound to reach the VI as he did.

It turned to perceive him, before turning back around.

How Emiya could tell that it had turned and perceived him, he wasn't sure, since it hadn't actually moved. But it seemed that it was not within its programmed parameters to be able to react to anything unexpected within the system like this. Perhaps a measure to make sure it did not expand outside of its original purpose? He wasn't sure exactly how one went about making a true AI, but he assumed letting it learn how to react and adapt to things would probably be on such a list.

Emiya blinked, noticing that the VI continued to move around, organizing and sorting bits of the stuff which he perceived when he looked at the encrypted data.

"It has the cipher?" he noted, a smirk forming.

It looks like it's not entirely out of my reach, then.

He wasn't sure if the program itself was encrypted as well, or if it was something else. But it represented an 'in', something which he hadn't been able to find at all while trying to figure this place out earlier. For a second, he considered taking it apart and seeing if something would appear, like a key that would simply turn everything coherent.

That felt like it had some logic to it; like it was a game of sorts.

Defeat the enemy, receive what you need to progress.

But then he hesitated, looking at the harmless ball floating around and ordering around data without a care in the world. He had no guarantees that taking this thing apart would yield any results and it might just lose him the one means he had for interacting with the encrypted parts of the omnitool.

There was also a part of him that felt like it would be like tearing apart a little puppy because it had swallowed his car keys.

No, he could still try other things.

"Hey, you. Stop." Emiya moved up to it and place a hand on it. The VI tried to move, only to realize it was stuck and could not. To Emiya, the VI's movements felt like the resistance a light breeze would offer when you held onto a piece of paper. "Can you understand me?"

The VI turned around and looked at him again, before trying to leave. He suddenly felt very silly for having tried talking to it directly.

"Enough." He said, extending more magical energy into the connection and forcing it to create a connection with the VI. It seemed to be startled, before turning back to him again and—

01001111 01100010 01110011 01110100 01110010 01110101 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00101110 00101110 00001010 01110000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00101110 00101110 00001010 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00001010 01110010 01100101 01110001 01110101 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110011 01100001 01100110 01100101 01100111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01101111 01100011 01101111 01101100 00101110 00101110 00101110 00001010 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00001010 01100001 01110100 01110100 01100101 01101101 01110000 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101110 01100100 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01101111 01100011 01101111 01101100 00101110 00101110 00101110 00001010 01100110 01100001 01101001 01101100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01110100 01100101 00001010 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00101110 00101110 00001010 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100

Emiya blinked.

That seemed to do... something. Though I have no idea what.

He shook his head, trying to get rid of the inflow of sudden noise the VI was throwing at him through the connection. A completely incomprehensible noise, like an irregular but repeating staccato beat. It actually made his teeth ache a little as if someone had pressed a tuning fork between them.

"What are you doing?"

The VI rippled, panes shifting about as it seemed to be struggling. It tried to send another similar burst of 'noise' at him, but he waved it aside with his hand instinctively before it could come through.

Another peculiarity about this place, he realized; he could wave aside 'sounds' and refuse to hear them.

Emiya frowned, then closed his eyes and focused. I should try to make this thing think I'm using the omnitool like normal, see if that changes anything. A screen appeared, floating above the VI. On it, a glowing female figure appeared in the same blue glow as the floating orb.

"What are you doing?" he repeated again and the VI finally seemed to not just notice him, but understand what it was dealing with.

"Unauthorized access detected. This omnitool is the personal property of Joseppi Cardotin. Cease and desist tampering immediately before the police are notified. Any unauthorized tampering, deletion, access, or attempt at tampering, deletion or access of data, attempted use of applications, information or meta-information on this device is a class 2 felony under the cyber-crime article—"

Emiya ignored the rest. It was progress - but he was still being stonewalled by this thing. Well, at least now he could understand that it was stonewalling him. Glancing at a clock, he noticed that time was running much faster again. At this rate, a whole second might pass soon.

"Running the holograms and the haptic interface must be a real processor hog," he noted distractedly.

It seemed to support his theory about how the passage of time is related to how much the omnitool was processing. Or perhaps how much of what it was doing he was witnessing?

"Cease and desist or this platform will be forced to contact the local law enforcement and—" The VI continued as it repeated parts of its earlier speech, threatening him again.

"So how do I turn this thing into something I can use?" he wondered, crossing his arms and cupping his chin thoughtfully.

On the Moon Cell, programs and magic weren't too different from each other. Spells and code could both be brought under the umbrella term of 'codecasts' on the moon. He hadn't actually seen it nefore, but wouldn't that also mean noble phantasms could be brought under that classification?

Noble phantasms were crystallized legends: self-contained and functional pieces that replicated a legendary feat, skill, or event under the right circumstances. They were wholly different from foundation-based magic or belief-based systems such as the Church's sacraments, or even the old systems of magic which relied on the powers of the divine spirits. They were also obviously different from programs that ran on code, written to cause a specific function to occur.

But still, it was the best idea he had right now.

Focusing, he closed his eyes.

"—Trace, on"—importing asset, assessing functionality, converting to local parameters;

He exhaled opening his eyes and looked at the jagged dagger in his hand.

Rule Breaker - the cursed blade that was brought forth as the noble phantasm of the Witch of Betrayal, Medea of Colchis.

He had only seen it in passing during his life, but on the moon with nothing but time on his hands, he had been going through the weapons in his reality marble. If he hadn't been so bereft of anything to do, he would have probably never realized its true potential. The witch had died within minutes of appearing before him and he had only realized his ability to replicate items years later, after all.

Emiya turned to look at the VI that was still lecturing him about what would happen to him if he did not stop using the omnitool, threatening him with legal action now in-between failed attempts at calling the police. He shrugged and flipped the dagger in his hand to an ice-pick grip.

He raised his arms and looked at the VI.

Here goes nothing...

And brought down the blade. "Rule Breaker!"

The VI did not even try to dodge, having no frame of reference for being stabbed, much less for a mystical dagger that nullified all contracts. He was fairly sure that in the real world it would not do much of anything if he stabbed an omnitool with this noble phantasm. But inside this virtual reality, shaped so strongly by his perceptions, so alike the SeRaPh on the moon?

He had a smidgen of hope that it might just work.

The world around them rippled as if the surface of water was disturbed by something, only in four dimensions. He felt like he was almost jarred loose and out of the dive, but held on with gritted teeth until the sensation passed.

Around him, the digital ocean calmed itself as the wave passed, blue grid and blackness reforming.

Opening his eyes he looked at the VI. It had gone quiet, at least. He reached out to it with a hand and his magical energy again.

"Hello?"

It suddenly whirred to life, the blank slates spinning around quickly as the white core expanded and shrunk rapidly, pulsating as the display above it began to form anew.

"Hello and thank you for purchasing the Aldrin Labs mark sixteen personal assistant Virtual Intelligence. Aldrin Labs is a leading manufacturer of omnitools, Virtual Intelligences for high-performance needs, software and—"

"Skip," Emiya said and the VI seemed to blink for a moment as it did as told.

This wasn't quite what he had hoped to accomplish, as he had been aiming for shifted loyalties, rather than a full reset. But if the property of 'undone with no harm' applied, then hopefully the rest of the program and its cipher would be fine.

Not like I had better ideas...

"Would you like to take part in the Aldrin Labs customer feedback system, where a certain amount of user information may be forwarded along with meta-data and telemetry—"

"No. Skip," Emiya said without hesitation.

The VI blinked again and if he did not know any better, he thought it might have seemed annoyed at him. It was actually surprisingly personable like this, though he still noticed how limited its actions appeared.

"Please fill in all relevant fields to use this Virtual Intelligence software. Thank you again for purchasing the Aldrin Labs mark sixteen personal assistant VI, we hope to hear from you again. Error. Non-standard operating system detected, incompatible plug-ins detected, unrecognized drivers detected. Connecting to home server for assistance... Failed: connection timed out."

Emiya blinked as he looked at the VI as it seemed to freeze in place, handling the slew of errors it was encountering. He frowned, noting "You handled it before just fine."

The VI's human-like behavior seemed to activate again at that.

"Requesting clarification: is this a re-install of the Virtual Intelligence upon a system where it or another Virtual Intelligence has been previously installed?"

Emiya raised an eyebrow. "Uh, yes?"

"If you wish to perform a complete re-install, please denote any and all priority files for immediate use before the first boot, to simplify and hasten re-installation." It seemed to scold him, though its polite tone did not change at all.

"Duly noted." He grinned at it playfully. "But can you figure it out?"

"Performing a full system scan, now. This may take up to several hours, depending on the partitioning of drives, fragmentation or corruption of data, and how much of the maximum capacity is currently in use. Certain data may be lost during this process, as a full system copy is necessary; please back up all vital data before initiating this process." It chimed, before disappearing in the display and being replaced by a prompt with two options.

"Well, refusing here will just put me back in square one." He shrugged, pushing the 'accept' button with a finger. A spinning ball that he presumed represented that it was busy working right now, appeared.

Under it was a simple prediction regarding how long it would still take.

'4 hours 31 minutes 54 seconds remaining...'

Emiya blinked.

"Huh. Even magic can't make loading screens disappear."

;

Juha Kolkkonen exhaled slowly, feeling the air coming out of his mouth tickling his nose inside the helmet.

He almost wanted to take the damn thing off, despite the atmosphere on Mars being what it was. He despised worlds such as this one, where the atmosphere was so inhospitable as to necessitate wearing a suit at all times when outside.

He looked around, kicking lightly at a pile of cooled slag, hardened into a pile of who-knew-what.

The moment the omnitool of the missing technician had been turned on, it had received a signal to announce its location to Alliance personnel. At first, Kolkkonen had thought it a lucky break - that someone had screwed up or that the serviceman had somehow escaped. That was until he arrived at the scene and found the young N1 and the famed N7 performing an off-the-books investigation of their own.

He had taken them into custody for all of five minutes, citing obstruction of justice and meddling in an ongoing investigation, but upon checking their omnitool logs, and the shuttle and Ares Station records, he couldn't find anything wrong in their behavior that would stand up for more than a day. They hadn't been doing anything strictly forbidden, even if their motive was plain as day.

So he had let them off, interviewed them, and then told them to stay out of trouble. Neither was related to his case beyond the initial connection, as far as he could tell.

Ashford was outside, still coordinating the recently arrived forensics team to scour the surroundings. The insides were a complete lost cause, though. With advances in forensic technology, it was amazing just what could be gleaned from even the smallest sample... but even that had its limits.

A burned body could be analyzed and a DNA sample could be re-constructed to match against records or to create a simulated appearance. Buried evidence could be located using advanced scans that detected even the smallest irregularities in materials and could detect even the most minute changes in an environment. Virtual Intelligences could analyze and simulate almost every scenario given sufficient data, creating sets of possibilities of what could have happened on any scene.

But none of that could help them here.

The house had practically become a melting pot, contaminating everything beyond investigation.

"Damn it," he cursed, kicking at another pile.

According to their best assessments, there had been three people here, at least. Of course, given that that was all based on the remains of individual hardsuits, it was still nothing more than a wild guess. Meaning this lead had gone cold precisely because of the fire.

Then again, it had been a longshot.

Two weeks prior, there had been a break-in into an Alliance office on Gagarin Station. Nothing had apparently been stolen, but the surveillance system had a small glitch in it that lead the higher-ups to believe that someone had broken in and used the terminals there without authorization.

Their own investigations failed to find anything.

As soon as the Alliance realized one of its research installations had been ghosted by someone, they called in the investigators. That was where he came in, as a Special Investigator for the Alliance Intelligence Agency. Officially, he was a part of the department of internal affairs right now, but that was merely to facilitate a smoother investigation with the Navy personnel in this follow-up investigation.

Really, the best way to describe his position in the firm would be to simply call it fluid and move on.

The trail had seemed completely dead, until on Mars a second Alliance facility had apparently been ghosted by someone. It was a much lower security base, and what was missing afterward was completely different in nature, but it was the only lead they had at this moment.

After all, how many infiltrators of that level of skill could there be in the solar system?

So he had immediately taken over the case, investigated the site, and then followed up on the missing technician's contacts. The trail seemed just as dead until suddenly the technician's omnitool had re-logged into the Alliance networks on Mars again.

And here he was, standing in the ashes of his dying trail.

Sighing again with disgust, he turned around and walked out. At the hole punched through the wall—since all the doors and windows had melted shut—he had to climb up a ladder to get back out. He looked around, scowling at the dull brown sky and wanting nothing more than to be gone already.

I need to go back and grill them at Gagarin Station harder. They were holding out on me; there has to be something more to this case.

Walking up to his partner, Ashford, he nodded for them to walk a bit away from the rest. Tuning their comms to an encrypted channel, they shook hands to allow their palms to connect and then began to talk. With the encryption key randomized and shared only through a specially made data port on their palms, safety at this moment was as high as it could be. No one would be able to listen in to them right now, as the key was 2048 bits long and had been randomly generated just now and shared through only that physical channel.

"Found anything outside?"

"No," Ashford replied, not shaking his head as he answered.

Their masks prevented lip reading, but it was possible for someone to glean something from overly expressive body language, a technique that was used often in conjunction with analytic VIs to great effect.

"Too many people contaminating the scene and the wind's erased most everything here, anyway. Cameras were useless, as expected. What about the inside?"

"Hopeless. How did we miss this? And what's the connection between this N6 and a fresh technician?"

"The technician, Shirou Emiya was personally invited by the N6, Fillion Burnsfeldt, to join the N-school. That aside, no connection on record."

"N-school?" Juha blinked, looking at his partner. Then he chided himself for the reaction, consciously relaxing to keep his body language as neutral as possible. He was better than this; though it had been a rather shocking revelation.

"Yeah. Had a medical condition that got him sent to Mars instead. Shitty luck, I guess," Ashford replied coolly.

"Why didn't this show up earlier on his records when we went to Ares Station?"

"It was just an invite: didn't even go to the tests or anything. Weird case."

Kolkkonen frowned, feeling something out of place with that, but not quite able to put his finger on what. "Alright, did the palm prints we got from the helmeted guy using the terminal get any hits?"

He had some hope for that. It was a little-known fact that most any haptic adaptive interface read your finger and palm prints every time you used them. It was what allowed the Citadel-standard palm-print readers to work, even with armored gauntlets on. And also what gave them the edge they needed in tracking down cyber-crime quickly when it came to casual offenders.

Humanity had quickly and happily introduced the standard to their own tech, adapting the existing protocols for their own use. The Alliance Intelligence Agency had had a field day with that, once it was implemented. When their mystery man in black had shown up from nowhere and used the Ares Station terminal, he had left his prints in the system.

A fact which they had immediately capitalized on.

"Partial prints only, like we noted. Too worn out and poor for any decent scan; it's like the guy's hands are worn-out leather—like he sand-belts them every day or something. Wouldn't even hold up in court if we did find the guy. Ran them anyhow. Failed to find any matches for obvious reasons." Ashford spoke.

"Shit. Well, I assumed as much. It was too big of a lucky break from someone who could ghost their way in without tripping a single alarm."

Ashford concurred. "Yeah. Seemed like a spoof or a taunt to me from the start."

Kolkkonen made a noise of understanding, inhaling slowly as he considered what he knew. "Let's assume we have two perps; that Ares Station and Gagarin Station aren't related."

"Two people with the skills to infiltrate a place under Navy guard in one system, weeks apart? Seems unlikely."

"Sure, but we've no proof of any connection between the cases either."

Ashford nodded. "Right. Okay, we don't know jack about GS's motive, since they're not telling us shit."

"GS? Right, Gagarin. What about the AS perp? Motive?"

"The technician obviously. Nothing else was even touched. Unless someone broke in just to tip over a few crates and read through the security logs." Ashford replied immediately.

"Right. We know he's hot stuff. The kind of material that could get anywhere, but chooses this place in all the galaxy. Was he looking for something here, or hiding from something? Did you run a background check on the technician?" Kolkkonen pondered out aloud.

"Yeah, got nothing before enlistment, same as the first case files said. Then again, street urchin," Ashford said, as if that it couldn't be helped.

"Well, the AS perp kidnapped or picked up this 'Emiya' for some reason in the middle of the damn night. Recruiting a new talent? Leave behind the omnitool as a red herring? It probably depends on how the techie kid reacted. Could have gotten a bullet in the head and been left to burn for all we know."

"Yeah. No proof of life of him since," Ashford agreed.

"Think the guy on camera is someone else? A third party?"

Ashford disagreed immediately. "Two ghosters I can buy, but three? That stretches probability a little bit too much. One of them could be the AS perp?"

It was stretching it a little, Kolkkonen had to agree.

"What about Burnsfeldt. He's been missing since the inauguration party, according to the records. Anything on him? Like how did his shuttle get here?" Kolkkonen asked.

"Lowell City Traffic Control doesn't have any record on the man arriving, they didn't have any idea when he could have shown up. Then again, he is the foremost infiltration expert when it comes to hacking. He does fit the bill for a guy who could do the break-ins."

"What does his record say?"

"Apparently he's done a lot of penetration testing on high-security facilities. Classified stuff, but he's pretty highly rated by the big wigs," Ashford replied.

"Really. Could he be our man? He certainly has the technical skills necessary for the GS ghosting. And he was within spitting distance from Ares Station, as it turns out." Kolkkonen mused.

"No, I doubt it." Ashford denied that possibility. "I checked his records. He hasn't been anywhere near Gagarin Station during the time of the first break-in. Strong alibis, too."

"Like that means anything. He could have been sitting in a hot tub on Earth and still cracked the system. Send in a drone by mail package and have it perform whatever he needs," Kolkkonen objected.

"Hmm. Point."

"But let's assume our mystery man in black is the GS perp, since Burnsfeldt lacks motive and has an alibi. With the time window, it seems like the guy showed up after the techie was taken," Kolkkonen thought out loud.

"A partner of some kind? Realizing something had happened and picking up the trail?"

"Could be. We need to figure out where the hell these guys came from and where they went," Kolkkonen said.

"But we're not going to figure out anything here. What next?"

Kolkkonen considered that, before inhaling as he thought of something.

"Put an APB on the owner of the house, too. Have the two other ones picked up anything yet?" Kolkkonen asked.

"No. Their credit accounts and mail are under surveillance, but nothing so far. Then again, with the Burnsfeldt's shuttle just appearing here, I doubt we would find the man, assuming he is still even alive."

"Fucking fire. Forensics analysis reveal what it was? Never seen anything like it."

"No chemical traces or radiation markers found. It's something completely new and untraceable," Ashford answered.

"Tch. Alright, we're going to Gagarin Station again and drilling those pencil-neck coders again. They're holding out on us, big time. We need to figure out what GS's motive was, maybe there's a link."

"Alright, I'll call the shuttle in," Ashford noted and pulled out his omnitool. Their advanced flight VI would be able to pick them up and then they could jump aboard and fly away. "I'll put up the All Points Bulletin now. Make it planet-wide or system-wide for physical markers?"

Kolkkonen considered.

"Let's make it the whole system. There'll be a lag, but maybe we'll find a lead. Who knows, maybe they've flown to Luna or something."

Ashford chuckled. "As if we'd be so lucky."

;

Emiya exhaled as he opened his eyes, having returned to his body.

With the reset VI still doing its thing, there was no point in staying there to wait. It would be fine inside of the Faraday pouch he had made while he was in the real world.

It would save magical energy if nothing else.

A little less than a minute had passed since he first dived in, time mostly passing from interacting with the VI. Which meant he had still only been roughly half an hour in Armstrong. He frowned, reaching to the backseat of the skycar and pulling up the rest of the omnitools, and wondered what to do with them. They were all more or less valuable and light, but he didn't really have pockets at the moment for all of the stuff once he left the skycar.

Which he had to do since it was a glowing beacon tying him to the house he had been kidnapped to.

The omnitools were something of an inconvenience. He couldn't just wear them all, nor did he have pockets or pouches to put them into. The environment suit hadn't been designed for anything like that.

Additionally, carrying so many guns would be another sort of problem entirely, so he decided to just leave them behind. Instead, he would take one of the better pistols and a rifle with him. He could just dive in and remove all the locks at some point. Though he would have to turn off all of the smart functionalities, since he lacked a military-spec hardsuit to link it up to, but that wasn't really a problem.

As long as it shot consistently straight he could handle it. Even without the advanced settings, the built-in computer would still handle a lot of calculations to negate environmental factors than he was used to.

Ignoring the rest of the guns in the back, he began to prepare the skycar for launch again. Staying any longer wasn't a good idea. He had looked around inside the settlement and had been relieved to have been wearing his helmet the whole time even if it had drawn some attention to him.

In the 21st century, there had been a handful of cities where he had usually avoided all activities for one simple reason: security cameras. Chongqing, Beijing, New York, Chicago, and London came to mind but there were lesser examples as well. Simply put, the amount and spread of cameras in those cities were such that from the moment you entered the city to the moment you left, it was entirely possible for your every movement out in public to be monitored and recorded.

Lowell City had had traffic cameras, too, but those were supplementary to the Traffic Control systems and did not cover everything.

On Armstrong, that wasn't the case.

During his short jaunt inside for food and a new omnitool, he had not managed to find a single location without some form of camera surveillance to worry about. Which meant that he could not stay here. Not while he was still so easily linked to the stolen skycar. Perhaps he could dive in and delete all the footage he could find, but that would attract attention as well and he still didn't know to what extent he could trust those abilities.

Better to misdirect and avoid such overt moves for now.

At this range, the Suave could handle flying to Earth just fine. It might crash-land, but that was fine since once he was on the ground he would be able to disappear much more easily than here on the moon. He turned on the engines, locking the doors as he punched in some coordinates in the flight VI outside the settlement, which caused it to start hovering in the air and to begin moving out along the exit instructions from Traffic Control.

To start, he needed new clothes.

He had been seen in this environment suit, walking around inside in plain view. Sighing, he closed his eyes and projected an old and familiar garment. His old longcoat appeared in his hands and he looked at it with a nostalgic smile for a short moment, before he put it on inside the skycar. It was a little bit big for his current body, still, just as the skycar was a little bit too small to be changing clothes inside, but he managed. It felt familiar and comforting as he put it on, even over the environment suit he was wearing.

It reminded him of simpler days.

Fitting, since I'm starting this journey anew.

Made out of black synthetic fibers that had been treated with shear-thickening fluid—except for the joints where he needed mobility—it was pretty effective when it came to personal defense. Even if he had abandoned the idea for his later designs, it wasn't a bad attempt per se. Just an early project, from before he finalized his alternating diamene weave. The thing that he right now wanted it for was that it had large pockets on both the inside and outside, allowing him to store all the Faraday pouches and the omnitools on his person.

Additionally, there were loops and pockets on the inside, for the purpose of hiding guns when he lacked free holsters.

It had been a common enough occurrence for him to pick up guns on the fly, and store them in his longcoat as he moved around on a battlefield.

Reaching back, he grabbed two pistols and a rifle.

He placed the two pistols by his sides, allowing them to settle into the loops that hid them inside the folds of the black cloth. They were snugly hanging by his floating ribs, out of view indiscernible from his silhouette by the contours of the longcoat. It didn't particularly allow any quick drawing, but that should be fine for now.

The rifle he placed into a loop next to his leg, just below one of the pistols. It would weigh down the longcoat in a suspicious lop-sided manner that anyone with keen eyes could spot, but kept his hands free. Then finally he took the oxygen capsules to his environment suit and put them into the rest of his pockets, closing each with care. He still needed them to survive.

As the skycar rose up and began to move out from the parking hall, Emiya looked around.

The shuttle bay was still completely empty. Armstrong Control did not seem to care too much about him leaving right now either. He considered the skycar he would be abandoning soon. It would work as a decoy, giving him some time to avoid any pursuers. He had almost grown attached to the thing, thinking about all that he had done in it on the way over. It also made him realize that he might have a chance to acquire or make his own starship sometime in the future, assuming he survived that long.

Next time, I'll do a better job. But for now, I need to vanish, he thought with an excited grin, as he exited the shuttle bay the way he had come in originally.

Flying outwards, he passed through the shuttle bay's bubble-like outer perimeter. Immediately, the console on the dashboard began to bleed with an incoming call.

"Hello," he answered.

"...Suave-450-CRB, this is Armstrong Control, please note of your departure prior to taking off as per flight regulation. An unscheduled departure is a traffic misdemeanor and a second strike will be added to your record, which—"

"Sure, sure," he answered and closed it. He really should read up on flight regulations, but for now, getting their attention so that they had on record that he had left was fine.

He started flying outward, following the moon's surface as he dialed down the power so it was just keeping him at a hover, allowing the earlier thrust to keep him moving. Slowly, he continued putting in less and less power, hoping that this would help him disappear from Armstrong Control's notice.

Making it around a mountain that hid Armstrong behind it, he continued on. After some 150 kilometers of flight, he finally began to slow down. It was actually surprisingly difficult to come to a stop in a void with a hovercraft since there was no air resistance, which meant he had to skid on the ground to come to a halt, which made him wince a little.

That'll scratch the paint.

Parking and turning down everything, Emiya considered his plans. For now, he needed to cover his tracks without being too obvious and then sort out his options.

Taking out the Faraday pouch with the omnitool, still busily updating itself, Emiya extended a hand.

"—Trace, on"—begin insertion;

He dove right in, ignoring the sensations as immaterial.

It had been shocking at the first and somewhat novel after a while, but now they didn't even really register beyond a blip against his senses. He had been shoving metaphysical glowing hot, molten iron rods into his spine every night voluntarily since he was nine years old.

At this point, pain wasn't anything he generally bothered to notice.

He arrived in the digital world of the beyond. Looking up to the side, he noted the giant wall of pulsating white again. Regardless of what or where he dove, it would still be there as long as he was near the moon. Looming. Shining white. Overwhelming in its size and power.

The Moon Cell. He could just reach out and be inside that place again.

SeRaPh's first layers were easy enough to access and there he would not expend any magical energy to maintain his existence there. Even up in orbit before, he had just been able to dive into the skycar's computer and there it was, which was how he had re-entered. Even through his Faraday pouch or black boxes, which should have isolated the omnitools completely from the rest of the world—as it did cut all connection to the skycar's computer and Armstrong Control—the Moon Cell remained a constant presence.

It probably could connect directly to all information storage devices through direct observation, the way it recorded events and phenomena normally.

He shook his head, ignoring it for now.

Checking up on the VI, he found it still sorting through its files and ignoring any of his attempts at asking for updates on its progress. Shrugging, he dove back out and looked at his unconscious body sitting in the skycar as he appeared outside in his spiritualized state again

"Hmm. I should do something about that."

Emiya inhaled and closed his eyes as he brought up a familiar weapon into his mind's eye. Modifying the shape of most weapons was a bit problematic since that would affect their structure.

He could append the change in shape afterward as if he had physically bent them by force—as he had with the ice sword noble phantasm—but that would weaken the weapon considerably. Much like how bending a sword would cause metal fatigue, so too would new changes to a replication diverge it from the original. Altering the structure of a weapon was more of an art than a science at this point, he had realized.

Sometimes it was worth it, sometimes the drop in power or efficiency made it worthless.

There were some weapons, however, which could be more easily changed with his methods. Gan Jiang and Mo Ye's namesake Kanshou and Bakuya, for instance, as they had originally been poured into casts in a method that could be adjusted to nearly any other shape imaginable. Certainly, their combat performance dropped with such rough treatment, but that was usually fine.

For now, he simply created the form of an anklet in the mold in his mind and poured the sword out.

"—Trace, on"—being projection;

The white ring-shaped Bakuya appeared around his body's leg in a flash of light and sparks. It would not be possible to remove, without considerable effort. With this, he had a rudimentary way of finding himself; the husband and wife would always seek each other, even after death.

Emiya materialized and grabbed his body, tossing it over his shoulder. Reaching in, he took the bag of trash and made sure that he hadn't left behind anything in the shuttle. There could be nothing here that could link it to him; no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. After a thorough scan of the skycar, he proclaimed it clean enough. He looked around until he found some suitable cover and then leaped over two hundred meters in a single bound.

He had been aiming for fifty meters, but the pathetically low gravity almost took him entirely off the moon.

But it would do just fine, looking for a place to stash himself.

That should make it more difficult for anyone to find my body if they track down the car before I get back, he thought as he put himself down on the ground between two rocks. Quickly checking that the environment suit was still sealed and how much oxygen he still had, he then lifted the third rock and hid his body beneath it.

It was like a three-sided pyramid. He almost felt like a pharaoh, laying himself to rest.

Scoffing, he moved on.

Emiya looked at the skycar still two hundred meters away in the middle of nothing. He would have to part with it soon...

He wasn't sure who would be coming for him, but he might as well find out. Which meant he had to return and infiltrate Armstrong Control in his Servant form.

"Nothing to it but just doing it," Emiya mused, spiritualizing and turning around to run.

Mars had been a dull brown; a planet of never-ending desert, dotted by a few settlements and industrial compounds. A dead world. Luna wasn't much different in that regard - it was just white. Just like on Mars, the gravity was much weaker which made it somewhat difficult to keep moving without stumbling. He had seen the videos of astronauts making short hops to move forward in his life, but it did not seem to be working for him very well.

So, he took longer leaps.

Single bounds crossing vast distances as he glided through the void, sometimes forcing him to tilt forward and front handspring for his next bound when he put in a little bit too much forward momentum in a step. Around his waist, his red mantle seemed to be moving in some phantom wind despite the lack of an atmosphere. He tried not to think about it too much.

A short while later he landed through the protective dome around Armstrong. Looking around he noted that nothing had changed inside. People were still walking around, the lights were on and business was as usual. Not that he had expected anything different.

He looked up and found a security camera, nodding to himself as he jumped up to it and uttered the aria.

"—Trace, on"—begin insertion;

Emiya dove right in and began to look around.

He found the system the camera was hooked up to immediately. Following it, he found the internal security center, where people were bustling about and keeping the settlement running. Looking around and checking the feeds and VI activity logs, he noted that no one seemed to have paid attention to him leaving the settlement earlier in the skycar despite the warning he had received.

Meaning they hadn't been paying him any special attention or tracking his movements inside.

Also, even as he continued to observe things from here, even able to look at the personnel working the terminals and the VI scurrying about, no one seemed to notice him. He almost cracked a joke about a ghost in the machine, but he felt it wasn't quite fitting in this context. He wondered what the man who had originally coined the term would think of an existence such as himself since it seemed a rather direct refutation to his thoughts.

Not the time, he reminded himself.

Ignoring the asides of his distracted mind, he moved on to another nearby center. Armstrong Airspace Control. The part of the settlement that kept tabs on all activity around it, as much to help incoming vessels with navigation as to observe other dangerous objects flying around in space. Lacking an atmosphere, the moon was quite vulnerable to flying space debris and even starships, were they to go out of control and into a collision course.

Thus it was in their self-interest to keep an eye on everything nearby. Just so that they knew when to press down the finger hovering above the 'big kinetic barriers on!'-button they had. Well, actually it was a VI that handled that, but there was a physical button as well. It was red. And in a hinged glass case.

He even found a log on his own approach, noting that they had been observing him for a while with sensors. Luckily he had had to start slowing down far before he rolled in anywhere near the moon, which meant they hadn't seen him at anything near his top velocities or acceleration. They probably thought he had been in transit for days, rather than merely hours.

That probably still got people asking all sorts of questions.

Emiya shook his head.

He would keep those records, but he wanted to wipe out something related to it instead. He observed the center's operation for a few minutes before he finally felt secure in acting out his plan. He found all the conversations recorded of him talking with the operator and deleted them to prevent a voice recognition software from later identifying him. He had gone through the trouble of keeping his helmet on to hide his face, so he wasn't about to skimp out on obfuscating his voice now, even if that would be noticed the moment someone tried to check them.

He made sure to check if there were any copies, but he couldn't find any before he moved on.

Next, he moved back to the internal security center and began to look at the security footage recorded here. He noticed quickly enough that most if not all footage was stored in triplicate, but they cut down on it by having the cameras only function when an extra sensor detected movement or a spike in temperature. It still represented an absolutely massive amount of recorded data, but nothing he cared about specifically.

He found the footage of himself walking around back when he had been on the station physically, along with the credit transactions in the respective systems. Reviewing the logs, he found nothing which could be used to identify him, thus he left it all be. The credit chit he had used wasn't related to him and nothing he had done would be able to be traced back to him, as far as he knew.

Moving back to the Airspace Control, he settled down.

He checked that they were still aware of his skycar parked some 150 kilometers away, if only passively, as no one cared enough to keep active tabs on a lone skycar. The operators had filed the misdemeanors, but since it wasn't in his name it didn't really matter. As long as he got rid of the garbage from the skycar, there would be nothing to link him to it later. Then, checking that the magical energy expenditure was acceptably low, he pulled open an extranet connection and began to investigate things.

He had been studiously avoiding certain topics until now and as a result, he probably did not know a lot of words and terms he had heard today as well as he should have. He needed to know who was who, and what was what, in the galaxy at large.

So, floating around in the digital ocean with a nice e-guide on the Citadel, he settled for his impromptu stakeout.

He didn't have to wait long.

;

"Hold on," Ashford spoke, raising a hand.

Kolkkonen looked up from his omnitool, where he had been reviewing everything he had collected about the separate incidents so far.

"One of the APBs just got a hit. Cardotin's skycar is on the moon." Ashford spoke, blinking incredulously.

It was a strict policy of Kolkkonen to have 1 g gravity and breathable atmosphere on any vessel he spent time in, thus neither wore their helmets right now.

He blinked, tilting his head.

"Wait, what? Who towed it there and why?"

"Armstrong Control reports that it came flying in on its own," Ashford replied, still looking at his omnitool.

The platinum blond scoffed; that was patently ridiculous. A shuttle could make the distance, but a skycar was little more than a hovering ground vehicle. Certainly, on a planet like Mars with such low gravity, it could get into low orbit. But that did not mean it could reasonably be used for interplanetary travel.

"That's impossible. A starship must have brought it nearby and then let it glide in on its own. Those things can't go more than, what... 200 kilometers an hour on Earth? At most? It doesn't have sufficient acceleration to make it to the moon by the time it went missing. Not without running out of fuel halfway into the journey and losing its mass effect field. Much less slow down at the destination..."

It was a ridiculous notion.

Ashford shrugged, not particularly debating the point. "Should we turn around?"

They were headed for Gagarin Station, just beyond Pluto. At this point, Luna was in the exact opposite direction, and while their top-of-the-line starship was fast, it had already been flying for half an hour towards Jump Zero. That meant they would have to not only reverse course and fly back the half-hour, but they would also have to slow down from the speed they were currently moving at.

"Yes, obviously. But it'll take too long - any personnel on-site? Have the locals lock in on the skycar and put a quarantine up. Have them lock it down if they can, but tell them to avoid doing anything... Shit, no this is too complex." Kolkkonen answered sitting up to adjust their course as he tried to think of what he could do.

"I'll see what they can do; tell them to keep an eye on it and nothing else. I'll contact Earth, too. Have them keep an eye on the damn thing, too. It shouldn't be able to escape the Earth Airspace Center's range before we get there."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's good. It'll work. Oh, and Ashford?" The other looked up at the call of his name. "Put an information lockdown, too."

Ashford blinked. "You think there might be leaks?"

"I think someone was cleaning house. The disappearances don't make any sense unless they were killed. Why would they abandon their lucrative and powerful positions, all of a sudden, otherwise?"

Ashford inhaled, before nodding.

"I'll make sure they think it's a routine arrest, but tell them to just find the skycar and keep an eye on it. I'll tell them we're from the bureau of transportation investigating license fraud or something."

"That'll work." Kolkkonen grinned. "No one would want to look into some bureaucrat's whining about fly-zone violations."

;

Emiya smirked.

Who did they think they were fooling?

Someone had apparently picked up on the skycar and was coming in. Within the hour, apparently. From beyond Jupiter's orbit, by the sound of it too. He didn't for a second believe a clerk in the department of transportation had access to that level of transportation.

And isn't that just ironic?

He shook his head, chasing extraneous thoughts away.

He could smell spooks a mile away. Or light-minutes, as the case was right now. He didn't dare back-trace it to the other end yet, since he wanted to stay where his body was in case he needed to quickly return to it. But in continuing to listen in on the conversation, he dismissed all his e-books and gave it his full attention.

The conversation was short but succinct.

'Keep an eye on the skycar, but don't do anything else until we arrive'.

Emiya frowned.

It seemed like it was time for him to lose his ride, then. But first, he had to check that his plans were all in motion. He made sure that his orders for the necessary supplies had gone through and that no one had noticed the sudden disappearances of single credits from numerous accounts across the settlement.

Plotting out what to do, he mentally filed away where the car was in relation to another settlement and where it, in turn, was from Armstrong.

I've done all I can here, time to go.

He pinged the skycar from Airspace Control and dove through the connection before it closed behind him. Opening his eyes, he dove out and appeared inside of the skycar. Looking to the side, he could see the three rocks still hiding his body hundreds of meters away. No one had come snooping around while he had been gone.

That was good.

He turned on the engine, powering up all the systems. Then he punched in a few coordinates and made a flight plan around the moon, which would take it flying for another ten minutes until it could see Earth. After that, it would fly up and leave the moon behind, making a course for the Atlantic ocean. At this distance, the flight VI didn't seem to have any problems with accepting that. It was a pity to sink the skycar, but he wanted a decoy that would make them scratch their heads now that he knew the ride was tagged and too hot for him.

While they were doing that, he would be going off in the opposite direction while no one was looking.

The skycar began to hover and move.

Phasing through the door, he stepped out as the skycar began to lift off and leave. He slapped with an immaterial hand the rear of the chassis, like it were a horse, as a last sign of affection as it began to drive off.

"Goodbye and thanks for all the hard work."

Turning around, he walked up to the three stones where he had hidden his body. Reaching out a hand, he dove into the omnitool to check up on it.

He blinked as he arrived inside of it again.

"System configuration complete. Please proceed with the installation as normal," the VI interface greeted him.

Emiya grinned. Time to do some real digging.

;

Codex:

3. [ Kanshou & Bakuya ]

A black and white pair of curved steel swords, crafted in ancient China by the married swordsmiths Gan Jiang and Mo Ye.

Measuring 92 centimeters from pommel to tip and averaging almost 10 centimeters in width on the blade, they are quite unconventional in design, especially for an era that favored straight bronze blades of lengths between 40 centimeters and 60 centimeters.

According to legend, the King Helu of Wu had ordered the swords to be completed within 3 months, yet all in all, it took 3 years for the commission to be completed.

The swords were forged in the Spring and Autumn period using the methods and materials of the era, which included both bronze and cast iron.

The former existed in a myriad of forms, six of which were the most well known and praised in the middle kingdom. The latter was mostly used as a cheap ornamental material, as due to the process of smelting iron requiring the use of phosphorus and sulfur by alchemists, it resulted in a brittle metal that was lesser to the bronzes in all aspects but cost. In both cases, the metal was heated up until it turned to liquid and was then poured into a mold for the desired shape, after which it could see additional work through cold forging or material removal to bring out a more detailed shape.

Thus at the time, bronze still reigned as the supreme metal of arms, and Gan Jiang and Mo ye had been accomplished swordsmiths in the use of those casting methods, rather than the later blacksmithing techniques where a prepared metal ingot was heated up until it was soft enough to be hammered into shape, without turning it into a liquid.

But for their masterpiece, they wished to use something different than just bronze.

They wished to create a pair of blades to represent the king who stood between heaven and earth, the divine emissary of the gods who walked the way between yin and yang, the pinnacle creation of a wife and husband as one.

Hearing rumors from the west of Vedic craftsmen known for their water-patterned white metals created from the normally black iron, the married swordsmiths sought to recreate it for their swords. Gan Jiang knew that the basis for his swords had to be iron; the substance that could miraculously be harder, tougher, and lighter than bronze under the right circumstances despite cast iron's perceived worthlessness.

Mo Ye reasoned, that as long as they did not weaken the materials through alchemical means, they could create a purer form of metal. Thus, to gather additional materials and techniques for the swords they wished to create, Gan Jiang journeyed far and wide. He visited all the kingdoms, seeking out all the master smiths and alchemists he could find, and asked for their wisdom.

In the Book of Diverse Crafts compiled in the same era, six bronze alloys were listed, all with various properties and different uses. During the Warring States period that followed, swordsmiths sought to combine these myriad materials to create a layered sword that could have a softer and tougher spine while also retaining a harder edge, by combining two or more of these alloys. These swords would be known as 'twin-colored swords', for the white-yellow high-in-tin blade and the reddish-brown center with more copper, the most famous of these blades even managing to survive over 2500 years without a single speck staining its blade by the time it was discovered.

Finally, after a year, he thought he had cracked the secret to crafting the fabled water-run white metal.

Gan Jiang was a man ahead of his time by virtue of combining all these teachings; to make the blades for the King of Wu, who had commissioned the sword, he decided to unify all the known metals used by the craftsmen of the lands. Thus, the six gold-metals would be fused into the sword alongside the iron. He reasoned that while the new material was temperamental if it was supported by the softer alloys and held rigid by the harder ones and with a blade of the hardest of all, it could create swords beyond anything made before then.

The plan was not to simply throw all of it together, as thus the six bronzes would all mix and become but one worthless material, even with the iron separating them. Instead, they prepared the two molds beforehand, placing inside the layered six bronzes so that they would not be in contact with one another once the molten iron would be poured in. The softest would form the back and spine, the hardest the edge and tip. The molds they prepared took six months to craft; he created one, while his wife created the other.

Side-by-side they worked the whole time, pouring themselves into those molds just as the iron would be.

And to balance these properties of man's knowledge, she had sought for the properties of natural providence. She found the essences of the five mountains—Tai, the Tranquil Mountain. Hua, the Splendid Mountain. Southern Heng, the Balancing Mountain. Northern Heng, the Permanent Mountain. Song, the Lofty Mountain—to further empower the swords. Later men knew these essences she gathered as chromium, manganese, vanadium, silicon, and molybdenum; materials commonly used in even modern high-quality steel alloys.

Once Gan Jiang and Mo Ye had brought them all together, they began the work of melting the iron and essences into one.

But despite all efforts, they found no success.

The technology to heat pure iron or the various essences enough to be workable without alchemical weakening, much less melt them, simply did not exist. Gan Jiang reasoned that he lacked sufficient qi, the life force of humans, to heat the fire enough. He sought the aid of women and children, casting their cut-off nails and lengths of hair to inject more power into the fire, but nothing would melt his materials.

Despairing at his failure and knowing that the King of Wu would execute him and his wife if the swords were not completed, Gan Jiang did not know what to do. Unable to stand by and watch him suffer, his wife Mo Ye finally cast herself into the fires and used her own life force to raise the temperature of the furnace, wishing as much to save her husband as to complete the masterpieces they had been working on for three whole years.

Her qi mixed with the fire, giving it a life of its own and a powerful heat that could have scorched the heavens themselves. The collected iron and essences melted, forming into one liquid material. As if through her will manifesting in the fire, the slag and impurities all rose to the top and were expelled from the steel alloy being created. With that, Gan Jiang could pour his metal into the prepared forms.

But having lost the most precious thing in the world to him, Gan Jiang's motives changed halfway into the process as he continued his work.

Just as fire burns away all but the ash it leaves behind, his fears, greed, hopes, and dreams in these swords were burned away. All that remained was the wish to complete the swords - to finish the work he and his wife had begun. Because they were beautiful, he did not stop; as if questioning the meaning of being a swordsmith that had brought him to such sorrow; unable to abandon his work and make naught his wife's sacrifice. Lacking that will, they remained empty of fighting spirit that intended to beat others, of desire to be famous, of competitive spirit that tried to surpass other weapons, of faith to accomplish some great deed.

Mirrored swords without vanity to represent the duality of yin and yang, as they had first desired to create.

As the wife-sword was drawn forth from its mold first and revealed its splendor, it broke Gan Jiang's spirit and he could not continue with the process, left speechless and weeping at the sight of his creation.

Leaving the as-yet-unnamed Bakuya out in the open and the still-hot Kanshou in its mold, the two swords were tempered differently. The white-wife blade was allowed to normalize in the open air giving it a cloudy gloss while the black-husband remained for a longer time at a higher temperature, where the surface of the blade was slowly oxidized giving it a darker luster. This also branded into the Kanshou the turtle-shell pattern of the wire that had been used to reinforce and support the structure of the mold.

Thus despite all other things being the same, the two blades acquired completely different finishes from tempering alone, achieving an unforeseen duality.

Afterward, Gan Jiang handed only of the swords to the King of Wu, an act which later resulted in his execution and the subsequent death of the King of Wu at the hands of an assassin wielding one of the swords at the swordsmiths' surviving son's request.

But in Emiya's eyes, those later events were utterly meaningless in comparison to their origin.

The construction method should have made them poor blades, as cast iron often is. But due to various mystical and mundane circumstances, the swordsmith couple somehow ended up with an alloy not too dissimilar to high-carbon crucible steel.

Perhaps it was Mo Ye's spirit guiding the metal into the optimal form and expelling the impurities by the top of the mold. Perhaps Gan Jiang's preparations had been sufficient after all, and his dreams were realized even after he lost all of his meaning. Whatever it was, the iron not only flawlessly poured into the mold and fused with the bronze laminates, but also absorbed just enough carbon to create the form of steel that would later be known as Wootz; the water-patterned white metal. Within the steel, cementite nanowires and carbon nanotubes formed, further strengthening the sword until the end product was something far beyond even what Gan Jiang could have dreamed of once, the mold having turned into a crucible somewhere along the way.

Even Emiya could not fully comprehend that last part: the leap of faith and desperate actions of a husband and wife, acting as one, reaching into the realm of the gods with their work, forging the swords from the lands of the living and the dead.

A masterpiece that reached far beyond their nature.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about their creation—from a more practical standpoint—was that it made it much easier to adapt the weapons' actual physical shape than with other, later, steel weapons. Beyond the final sharpening and polish, as was usual with cast bronze swords, there was little need for further work. In fact, Gan Jiang did as little modification as possible after the pouring, leaving the swords with their unique appearances and crude hilts to keep from overshadowing his wife's work, maintaining a true balance to the end.

Emiya admired that about the twin swords, but that was not always enough.

Sometimes, he needed more. Thus, unlike blacksmithing where thousands of hammer strikes are necessary to slowly alter the form of a weapon, it was much easier for Emiya to tweak a molded sword's form by changing the pliable and soft form it was poured into in his mind's eye as he remade them.

It was how he had made their overedge-forms.

He simply altered the amount of metal poured and made the molds proportionally larger in his facsimile process. Putting six swords' worth of metal into two forms and repeating the ritual essentially three times, he gained swords that were quite different from the originals. Due to the molds being unable to hold the pressure of that much metal, the metal began to push outward by the bottom where all the metal above it was pushing down on it, causing the strange feather-like protrusions to appear as it pushed outwards in a corruption of the original form.

The property of the two swords growing stronger when they were used as one rebounded off of all six pairs to create a synergistic effect. If he additionally broke them, for a single strike he had the power of an A-rank noble phantasm to use. A first step into going beyond mere reproduction, which took a nameless Faker to the edges of his craft and vaulted him far beyond any other.

They were his first modified weapons and broken phantasms, but hardly the last.

;

Thanks to my dude PseudoSteak for proofreading.

Thanks to AloofEyeball for getting binary newline fixed.