Man off the Moon

by FiendLurcher

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

21. Droned Out

Emiya turned to face the fireteam of three asari he could hear coming around the corner of the house. They must have heard the sounds of his clashing with Tela Vasir and coming to investigate.

Or did they have some form of communication tech that he couldn't detect? Spirit Hacking was proportionally useful to how much information could be stored and processed on a given platform, but his ability to affect wireless communications was directly tied to his cybernetics. Something, which was a known quantity to the Special Tasks Group, given that they had manufactured the things.

They knew his specs even better than he did, so developing countermeasures was certainly something they should be able to do, given that they had already developed the cyberbill's signal to track him down.

I need a distraction, something that will force them to break their formation, he thought.

The three came into view just around the corner and he could see their eyes widen at the sight of him through their visors. No doubt Tela Vasir's crumpled form behind him added considerably to their shock at his appearance.

They'll do just fine, he concluded with an unseen smirk underneath his featureless red helmet.

He exploded forward, reaching the three asari so quickly not a one of them had time to react. While he could not dodge bullets that had already been fired from mass accelerators and was vulnerable to being shot if he stayed stationary too long, so long as he kept moving too fast to be aimed at he was practically untouchable.

Slowing down just enough that he would not be clotheslining through them or crushing their internal organs on impact, he grabbed two of the asari by their waists. They had no time to struggle as he heaved both over a shoulder and then burst into a dash again.

They shouted, barely cognizant of what had happened and Emiya felt one trying to instinctively use her biotics on him as they struggled.

But it was too late as he jumped into the air with both and tossed them forward at the peak of his ascent. He looked down, seeing the ocean approaching below. The two asari shrieked, having no idea what was going on and only just now realizing that they were airborne, only to be silenced a second later as all three hit the water and were submerged into the Serrinan sea.

Emiya spiritualized and leaped back out from the water, invisible and imperceptible to the world, making it straight for his apartment without any of the other teams seeing him. Pausing at a tall rooftop where he could look around freely, he observed the happenings for a few seconds.

The third asari of the team was running towards the sea, where she had seen him running just now, loudly shouting for others to back her up in a panicked voice.

With this, they think a dangerous combatant is in the sea at the edge of their perimeter, forcing them to break open their formation for fear of being flanked again.

They didn't seem to have enough numbers on the ground to properly contain more than one combatant, despite the claim of the Serrice Guard having been involved.

Tela Vasir must not trust them as much, keeping them at arm's length.

He looked up, blinking as he realized there was a formation of four gunships heading this way now, flying high up in the sky. It was only one of three other similar formations he could see and in the distance, he also spotted swarms of combat drones moving to encircle this part of the city, of completely unfamiliar but distinctly un-asari make.

That would be the STG then. They must have satellites and starships in orbit looking down too, even if they aren't in contact with the ground teams. I should treat everything as if I'm being watched at all times.

He could see another ship coming low and slow from another direction. It was obviously a civilian vessel, unrelated to the gunships as it was trying to come closer. A newscraft, he realized as he spotted the channel logo on open display on the craft's side. It was intercepted and turned away by one of the Serrice Guard's gunships a few seconds later, still some 3 kilometers away.

Looking around he could tell that people were being evacuated from the nearby neighborhoods, too.

All omnitools and terminals in the area he could hear were broadcasting the same message to evacuate and get to a shelter.

They must have expected a quick operation, but they had also drawn up a plan for a longer confrontation as well. While it was refreshing to know he was in the company of professionals who would not cause meaningless collateral damage in their pursuit, it also worryingly hinted at there being more in store for him as well.

Looking around, he mentally counted the combatants he could see, overlaying them with a mental map he had of the streets and houses, noting who was covering what angle and where they were moving to patch up the holes he had created in their enclosure. In the distance he spotted at least seven sniper teams as well, the three he had noticed before included. None however were covering the front entrance directly, he noted with some amusement.

That Tela Vasir certainly had confidence to spare. Or did she want that much privacy? Hmm…

Now, given how she had been taken out, they were scrambling to reinforce the front entrance under the assumption that the 'Justicar' had been trying to create an opening for him inside to get out. That was fine, it left the bedroom balcony completely open.

The only ones who could cover that angle were airborne units and they were focusing on the sea right now. Numerous drones swarmed the coastline, in perfect synchronization and formation. He knew a drone swarm when he saw it. But that was only possible if they were all connected somehow.

They don't seem to be using any form of wireless signal I can detect, but that level of cohesion and synchronization must mean they are connected somehow. Is it merely a matter of distance or...

With three prodigious leaps, he crossed the distance and intercepted the drone in flight, landing on top of it into a crouch. His weightless spiritual form not so much as shaking the drone as he made contact with it.

Extending his palm against the top as he crouched, he spoke, "Alright, let's see what makes you tick. —Trace, on"—begin insertion;

Emiya sank inside of the drone, opening his eyes as he flipped around and landed atop its virtual facsimile inside of the dive.

Compared to the drone, he had shrunk to a size where the actual hardware of the drone—a small discus-shaped computer in the center of the orange glowing sphere that was visible outside—seemed like it could have been an actual flying saucer large enough to carry him. Crossing his arms, he looked around, the sensors and cameras creating a surreal projection of the outside world that overlaid with the digital grid he had grown used to long since.

"I see. It communicates through a laser tightbeam, with four separate VI handling layered functionality and cyber-defense in quarantined parallel, so even if the communications unit were hacked it shouldn't affect the rest of the unit." He nodded. "Then, this is a test run to see if I can hack something like this. They're feeling me out."

Which meant that he shouldn't hack these things, not just yet anyhow.

That way it would give the impression that he couldn't and if he ever needed to then he still had that option available to him.

How thorough, he noted with some grim amusement. I must have made an impression the last time. Well, it can't be helped then. At the very least, I should wait until most of the civilians are safely out of the combat zone before I make another move.

It would give them more time to recuperate and reorganize, but it couldn't be helped.

Looking around he exhaled, dropping down into the house and back into his body. Opening his eyes, he noted he had not been disturbed in the ten or so seconds he had been out by either of the asari in his apartment.

That was just fine - he had not planned to be out so long that it would raise too much suspicion out of the two. Still, this situation was beginning to look rather grim. Fighting against an entire city, or even the entire planet was not something he could very well do.

Unbidden, the comparison to his previous life rose to the forefront of his mind.

Isn't this just how it ended back then? The threshold for my freedom rises too high and I accept the judgment of society for what I have done? I haven't killed anyone here and now yet... But it's likely I will have to if I want to get off-world. Is that cost worth it? Didn't I decide to end my life this time around the same way?

He exhaled again, rubbing at his temples.

Somehow, despite the fact that he had been just as active both in scale and effect of his actions, it did not feel the same as that time. He had done what he had thought right, but without the suffering and despair of others in clear sight, it did not feel like he was actually doing anything.

At least, nothing that qualified for the title of a Hero of Justice. He had once again simply been someone useful, rather than someone who could save others from despair.

Perhaps his 'hacktivism' had simply been too shallow?

But as such, their reaction to him was just as dissimilar as his actions had been the first time around.

At the conclusion of his life he had been executed with much fanfare and pomp, with numerous crimes and inhumane acts cast at his feet as he was painted into a grand villain of unknowable proportions. Here, they were holding back way too much for something of that nature to be afoot. If they wanted him dead, they would not have sent in Liara and Tyra. They could have simply set up Hosin's orbital station to blow up or shot him with a starship the moment he came through the Mass Relay into the Parnitha system if that was their goal.

That meant they did not want him dead.

Rather, they wanted something from him. Most likely his cooperation; his ability to hack anything, he guessed, but only for their benefit rather than their detriment from now on. The obvious conclusion to his being captured was that they would interrogate him and be coerced to join their cause, one way or another. If he did everything right, then perhaps he could continue helping people, just working for the Council.

Perhaps he could demonstrate his worth and character, even becoming a Spectre for their cause? Or some other organization, with close ties to them but less public.

His worth was certainly great enough to allow such exceptional circumstances, by his own analysis.

Well, until he tried to resist too much or grew too headstrong and they weighed the possibility of him running free, perhaps even seeking revenge on them against losing out on whatever they thought he could give them. Sooner or later the balance would tip and they would seek to remove him. They would try to learn how he had been able to hack into everything he had, discarding him the moment they no longer needed him or his value sank too low.

It's that, huh. Before, I struck fear into the hearts of people with my actions. This is different, for all I've done is bother and inconvenience those in power by forcing them to punish those who have wronged. My life was ended at the hands of those who feared me, but now I am but the object of greed.

Remaining on Thessia he had for the most part relied on local authorities to handle the bulk of enforcing justice. He had cut no bloody swath through the unjust and corrupt but had simply pulled off their covers of secrecy, revealing them to the world and forcing those in power to clean up the mess.

Strange, how being so desirable did not make him feel any better.

Emiya could even imagine it: accepting some bargain with these people in exchange for his continued relative freedom. They would seek to dominate his physical body if he made some deal with them, only allowing him to continue acting as he had to keep him in line. He would have the upper hand there, with his freedom of movement as a spirit who was only possessing this body, but it would be a shackle nonetheless.

Something of that nature wouldn't have stopped him for long and it might even be the least bloody end to this situation, yet...

There was something that repulsed him about the idea of working for them.

If he for example managed to become a Spectre, how long would they stand by his actions? The Council at its core was not corrupt or evil, but neither was it particularly good. They merely maintained the status quo, while maintaining an appearance of balancing the playing field for all. But they were lukewarm in his eyes. They were too conservative and centrist in both policy and ideals.

Someone like him - a dyed-in-the-wool extremist who had died with a smile on his face for his ideals, could never reach equilibrium with a group like that.

In him, they saw a useful bloodhound that could be tamed and leashed to their cause and benefit.

But once they realized just how sharp his scenting was, how relentless he would be in the pursuit of his goals, and how uncompromising he was… They would realize that they had not discovered a hunting hound at all, but a mad dog that would tear off its own head to keep pursuing its prey, wholly heedless of any leash, collar, or master.

He ground his teeth at that thought; the very idea of accepting a muzzle like that.

Like the Justicar did.

Perhaps he was still simply immature and simply unable to accept the price of his goal. Perhaps he should accept the means, whatever they may be, in the pursuit of his goal? Perhaps that was the root cause of his downfall, originally. That he could not accept any losses, stubbornly running forward until he fell to the ground, dead and lost to all others in his own delusions. He had accepted but one collar and that one had been without a leash; its only restraint that he serve in death.

And even then, arguably he had utterly broken free from the Moon Cell.

If the omnipotent God's Eye could not reign him in for long, then how would a measly Council of three?

Getting up he dusted himself, just in time to hear someone walking up to the bathroom. Splashing some water on his face as the door was opened he turned to watch as Liara stood there with an expectant expression. It was obvious she still believed their conversation to be unfinished.

She opened her mouth to say something, but he forestalled her by pulling back a leg and then kicking at the ceramic tiles beneath the sink once, twice. On the third kick, the tiles came loose, shattering and giving way to his hardsuit's boot.

"What are you doing?" Liara asked, obviously taken aback by his sudden burst of violence against the bathroom wall, all other thoughts utterly forgotten for now.

Crouching down, he looked into the darkness of the hole he had made. There, just at the edge of where the light could reach, was something. Reaching in, he went all the way to his shoulder before he reached the sealed container there that he had hidden years ago between the various pipes. Pulling it out, he had to widen the hole in the wall he had created to actually get it out completely.

"Getting my grenades. Why?" he asked as if it had been the most obvious of answers.

"Grenades?" Liara repeated, taking a step back with obvious surprise. She looked like she wasn't certain whether they would explode from being merely stared at.

"You have grenades? Is that why you're so good at throwing?" Tyra asked from the doorway to the bathroom, where she had been quietly watching them for a while now.

Emiya had to blink and look at her, causing her to flush slightly.

"...That's actually possible, I don't remember being particularly good at sports in school." He shrugged, grabbing the box and walking to the kitchen. "Never actually tried kicking one, though. Well, a few live ones aside when the situation called for it, but those weren't planned."

Tyra snorted at that despite herself as some of her usual mien returned through that exchange, while Liara looked at them strangely. Dropping the box on the table, he began to open the seals with a knife he took out from a drawer. He had a pretty good selection of black market goods that he had been able to intercept and appropriate over the years here.

A few teargas grenades, some fragmentation, mostly 'flashbangs' which were only relatively useful when it was this bright outside. There were even a few smoke and chaff ones, but given the level of sophistication available in high-end omnitool and personal hardsuit scanners and sensors he suspected they had, those probably wouldn't be all that useful.

While the chaff did work, it was not potent enough to counter the filtering and predictive functionalities of good combat support VI. Really, they were only useful as distractions right now.

Going through and mentally cataloging a useful selection, he considered the situation.

I still don't know why these two were sent in. It seems rather naive to think I would reveal something to two young asari. At least something that would later help with getting me to speak up during interrogations. And the reverse hostage situation seems convoluted and unnecessarily complex, as well.

"Hmm, a false flag?" He considered. If they were trying to set him up for something, then that could make sense.

"What?" Tyra asked, looking at him.

"Why are you here?" he immediately continued, ignoring her question.

She blinked. "Umm, didn't Liara already tell you?"

"You did. And it seems rather farfetched. Speaking of - I can't say I am impressed with you two coming here. You should have thought it through properly, instead of simply barging in like this into such a dangerous situation."

The two asari blinked at him as he said that.

He raised a chiding finger to them, as he put his other hand on his hip.

"You might think you're invincible because you are still young. But you really shouldn't be so quick to jump into dangerous situations. You should think about yourselves with more care. When a Spectre comes asking you to be voluntary hostages for a wanted criminal there should be some red flags going up. You should have refused, outright and utterly. You said you were convinced that I was innocent—but now that you're here with me and realize that I am in fact a wanted man—do you realize how horribly naive that was? You two should have displayed more care. What if I hurt you or really did take you hostage? Did you think about that?"

Tyra and Liara looked at each other, both utterly nonplussed by his sudden lecture.

Still, he felt it ought to be said.

"But you wouldn't hurt us?" Tyra half-said, half-asked. She seemed confused by his attempt at lecturing them, more than anything.

"You don't know that. Coming here was reckless and foolish. And that goes for you doubly, Liara. Did you think of the possibility that you might have aggravated me into violence in a stressful situation like this? I understand the desire to be right, but just because you're right doesn't mean you're correct."

Liara frowned, shaking her head as she affirmed Tyra's point. "No, you wouldn't do that. And what did you just say...?"

"Tela Vasir didn't tell us it was going to be like this, at all. She said you were a hacker; that there wouldn't be any danger; that you wouldn't be armed and... And that we would be helping you and her at the same time, that way. And, and you wouldn't do that, anyway." Tyra was rambling now, obviously growing annoyed.

"Yes. She said there would be a team outside coming to arrest you, but there had not been any talk of anything like this," Liara said nodding as she gestured towards the door. "I mean, she did point a gun at us, but… She put it away immediately."

Emiya sighed, turning more acerbic.

"You aren't getting it, because you're cocky kids with no sense of danger. I get it, you've got a thousand years ahead of you, so the thought of your own mortality seems utterly alien. But that's no excuse to be an idiot."

They both seemed to get offended by that, huffing at his characterization of them.

"I don't think you have any room to talk about being 'cocky' or an 'idiot'. Or of being too young to understand anything. I'm not the one who just kicked a Spectre in the face, or, or hides explosives in the bathroom!" Tyra shouted at him, crossing her arms with obvious displeasure. "And, I'm like thrice your age. At least."

She was glaring at him now.

He sighed, rubbing the spot between his eyebrows as he tried to understand why these two simply did not understand.

Was it their biotics? Did they think they were that invulnerable because he did not have that talent? Was it the culture on Thessia? While it was peaceful, it wasn't like it was entirely sheltered. There was something about their actions that he couldn't quite place a finger on.

Even if they had been deceived and surprised by this situation, they had not once tried for the door.

It was as if they felt no fear towards him.

"And, you wouldn't do that! How many times do I have to say that!" Tyra said again, this time seeming to grow quite agitated as she spoke. "You, you're weird and strange and you won't tell me anything… But I know you wouldn't do that!"

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do!" She was shouting at him now, balling up her fists as she glared at him. This was the angriest he had ever seen her and probably the angriest he had ever seen an asari become, in fact.

He sighed, then.

It's like they have no self-preservation instinct against me. Do they trust me that much? They barely even know me.

"Never mind, it's becoming increasingly clear that I don't understand asari at all," he groused half to himself as he turned to look away from them.

Liara nodded as if he had only said something incredibly obvious just now. "Then let us return to the subject at hand. You said, 'sixth age onwards', as if it had not been their end?"

He sighed deeply then, realizing that there really was no distracting her for long when it came to the Protheans.

I might have to actually shoot her to end this conversation.

Then again, perhaps he should tell her. If something did happen to him and as he suspected his memories would not return to the Moon Cell in the case of his perishing, then perhaps he ought to share his findings with someone else. She certainly would spare no expense in uncovering that mystery, once brought into the fold. If nothing else, it ought to get her off his back at least.

"You said 'sixth age onward'," she pointedly repeated, walking right up to him as he said nothing. "What did you mean by that?"

"Just that," he said as he made up his mind to tell her. Of course, that didn't mean he had to be polite or easy about it.

Liara shook her head. "No, no. You're implying there was some form of 'seventh age' by saying that. That's just a myth - a bad vid tale about Protheans going into cryosleep to hide from some great catastrophe, or some such other nonsense. The sixth age's end is defined as the end of the Protheans. End of story."

"A bad vid tale? You mean like the theory that the Protheans didn't build the Mass Relays?" Emiya asked with a raised eyebrow. "As I recall, talk like that is just as frowned upon in the academic circles."

"That's—that's different," she shot back, obviously annoyed he wasn't letting that slide.

"Oh? Is it really?" he questioned.

"The Mass Relays are..." She hesitated, not certain of what to say. Or how much she could say. Finally, she settled on something she thought she could say. "The design and structure of the Mass Relays are such that it is possible for them to continue working in perpetuity. There are several Mass Relays that are believed to have been created by the Protheans, but most of those are of vastly different form as if they were... imitations. When looking at the bulk of evidence, it…" She paused as if coming to terms with what she was saying just then, herself. "It does make sense to consider the Mass Relays to be something that they discovered, just as we all have."

It seemed like something she had great difficulty saying as if there was a great mental struggle involved in speaking such things out aloud and acknowledging them.

"But how would you know that?" Emiya blinked at that, frowning. "As I remember it, the Council barred investigations and other such attempts on grounds of laws regarding tampering with religious iconography. An objection spearheaded by the Asari Matriarchs if I remember correctly. I looked into this before: the Asari Republics have been vehement in their refusal to allow any study of the Mass Relays. They cite the possibility of another Rachni War and other kinds of catastrophes occurring. So what are you basing this on?"

"I..." She licked her lips, turning away. Finally, after a long moment, she said: "...My mother is a Matriarch, who receives a lot of attention and has access to a lot of classified materials and reports... Well, some decades ago, I may have... borrowed her secure access codes and... never told her about it?"

"Ah. And she hadn't changed it since?"

Somehow that did not surprise him.

Liara at first had struck him as a rather awkward and distant person, but he was beginning to realize that it was more of a self-imposed isolation than anything else. At heart, this was an exceedingly headstrong and bullheaded woman who would balk at nothing when she set her eyes on something.

"No, no she hadn't," she said with downcast eyes.

"And this was recent? Since our last discussion?"

"Yes. It was... not something I would have done ordinarily, but I had some questions that would not rest until I found answers." Liara shook her head at that, giving him a second's glare before exhaling. "I found several things I do not know what to make of - but the most important find were the results of an independent study by a certain Matriarch, made into the structure and function of the Mass Relays. She received quite a bit of censure for that, it seemed, too. I copied those files over and had planned to show them, but..."

"I said I'd take you for your word."

She sighed, nodding, grateful for that nonetheless.

"If the Protheans did not have to build the Mass Relays or travel conventionally between systems, then certainly my theory is bunk." He nodded. But that kind of answer could only raise more questions in the end. Such as: "But then, who did build the Mass Relays?"

"That's..." She frowned, turning silent once more. "I do not know. It is quite disheartening to find out that perhaps all I know of the Protheans might be wrong. Perhaps that is why such attempts have been forbidden? Goddess, I cannot even imagine what the hanar would think, were this to become publicly known."

"Who knows. But," he answered, before deciding to push on. "As for the 'seventh age'… What would you do if you found circumstantial evidence of the Protheans having lived past the sixth age?"

Liara hesitated, swallowing as she considered his words.

"...I do not know. Something of that nature would change... everything. But you do know something, obviously. Is that also why you are so convinced of their nature being so... brutal?" She narrowed her eyes at him.

Well, it's difficult to consider them gentle protectors, given the numerous test subjects on Mars. Perhaps that's just another human-specific gripe. Perhaps among the Protheans, something like that was simply normal.

"Guess I'll have to break another wall, then." He shrugged, turning around and walking towards the living room.

He walked, brushing the wall with his fingers and palm as if he was searching for some hidden sign or clue on the surface. Of course, it was all theatrics and a distraction. There was no actual stash there since the thin walls would have been so easily scanned through, but she was not going to realize that.

Probably, anyhow.

"What are you doing?" Liara asked, following him with her eyes.

He found a spot where he knew there was a hollow between the support beams and pulled back his arm, letting it loose as if it were an arrow. The punch went through as if it had been just plaster, causing both Tyra and Liara to blink in surprise.

Reaching in, he exhaled and spoke under his breath.

'—Trace, on"—begin projection;

The Prothean gunblade appeared inside, hidden from view from the two others and he pulled it out as if it had been there all along. He had brought it forth in the condition he had found them; old and non-functional. But that would only lend credence to his claims here.

Turning to Liara, he smirked at her eyes boggling at the sight of the gun. With a casual disregard, he tossed it at her. "Here, catch."

She almost tripped in trying to catch it, her eyes wide and her hands shaking as she juggled it for a second before finally getting a good grip on it.

Liara stared at the gun, blinking and mouth agape before looking up at him again.

"You have Prothean artifacts just lying around in your house?! And you threw them around like, like! You—"

"I don't think you have much room to talk, given your complicity in secret digs and your, ah, reading habits." He smirked at her, crossing his arms.

"That, that's different! We take extreme care to not damage those sites in any way, nor do we steal priceless artifacts and hide them in our house walls!" Liara replied vehemently, turning her attention back to the gun as she inspected it. "The dust damage alone could have been catastrophic—the effects of modern compound materials interacting with the porous handle material—not to mention what moisture could have done to..."

Emiya rolled his eyes. "I didn't steal it. I..."

He paused, considering his words as he tried to find the right word.

Saying that he had forged or replicated it would give her the wrong impression; it wasn't in any better or worse condition really. It should be just as valuable as the real things as an object of study, he reasoned.

"Yes?" Liara asked, raising an accusing eyebrow at him.

"Hmm, well. I borrowed it," he said with a smirk, finding his choice of words rather fitting.

She did not seem impressed by that, rolling her eyes at him with obvious exasperation. Even though he had thrown her own words right back at her, she had no intention of letting him have the last word. However...

"There's hundreds more where I found it, so it's not really a big deal if I have one or two here, anyhow." He shrugged.

That one sentence was enough to cause her to completely freeze, all arguments completely draining out of her. She almost dropped the pistol herself, then.

"Y-you found a site in such good condition?"

He nodded. "And that wasn't all. Dead Protheans—I think, anyhow—in recognizable condition. Vehicles, research and work stations, hydroponics farms, and more."

Her jaw dropped as she simply stared at him. "That's, that's the historical find of the millennia! Wh-why haven't you gone public with this?"

"Well... It's complicated," he said, shrugging.

Why would he go public with it?

Tyra jumped in at that. "No, no. You said that already before and I let it go, because—because of all of this!" She gestured around the house, or perhaps she meant outside of it. "But even I understand how big that is. You have to explain something like that!"

Emiya ignored them.

"I'd rather not. Not right now anyhow since it would take too long. And I should be moving out, anyhow. Tela Vasir and the others have probably been evacuated already, and they're only going to hit harder after this."

"Evacuated?" The two blinked at him.

Should I leave them here? The house will still hold up to a lot of abuse. It would draw the heat away from me, probably. But if Tela Vasir had plans for these two, then that might just get them killed, he thought with a frown.

"Is that why you're escaping from the Council? You know some hidden plot that they're trying to cover up? Do you know why the Protheans went missing?" Tyra asked, and her eyes seemed to sparkle as she stared at him.

"That's ridiculous," Liara said with a huff. "They... Well, no, but... No. That's ridiculous." She shook her head, moving back as she had calmed down from his revelations just now. "So, what there made you so certain that the ruin is from the seventh age?"

"There were human remains there. In what looked like test tubes, or exhibits, maybe. From several stages of our evolution, including one that was very late. I compared it afterward and it matches a skull that had been dated to 30,000 years ago, in rough features," Emiya explained, crossing his arms as he leaned back and began to list out some features he had noted with one hand. "High rounded cranial vault, nearly vertical forehead, very small brow ridge and jaw protrusions."

"That's..." Liara nodded once, processing what he had said. "I know very little about humans, but... Is it possible that such humans could have lived before the disappearance of the sixth age Protheans?"

Emiya shrugged.

"Maybe. I'm not an expert, but it looked like a modern human's skull; something that shouldn't have existed before the Prothean's disappearance. Overall, it possessed features commonly considered unique to modern man from a very distinct era and geographical location. The cranial capacity was also rather large... So far, not a single specimen has been found with features to match it that is older than fifty thousand years to my knowledge. Maybe they were doing something that caused it to evolve early, or maybe it was an outlier specimen or perhaps older remains have not simply been found. There's a lot to account for."

Too much for him to attempt that line of investigation.

Even today, there was too much uncertainty and debate among experts of human evolution; that angle would only lead to endless speculation and would not be playing to his strengths at all. No, Structural Analysis and working with materials were more efficient, especially given how clear the memories in the pistols he had found were. As long as he could crack the Prothean logos, he was sure to learn more than even a century of conventional study could offer.

If it turned out that the remains he had found on Mars were from an earlier era, then that was fine, too.

Liara nodded, looking down at the pistol in her hands.

"Have you dated this?"

"No, I couldn't." Emiya shook his head.

She frowned at that. "What do you mean, you couldn't? You have been here for years, have you not? Goddess, you hide it in a wall when the Serrice University museum is so near…"

He blinked. "Oh, you mean like with a laboratory and..."

Suddenly, he felt like slapping himself. Even if it was a projection of his it should be right all the way down to the finest details. Probably, anyhow. Perhaps it was in the same condition as it had been five years ago, but it was definitely something he should have thought of doing himself years ago.

Well, that settles it. She should definitely know about Mars, he thought with a nod.

"What other way could you possibly—" Liara began to ask but was cut off.

"Alright, that settles my plan of action," Emiya said, nodding to himself. "Now the only question that remains is... What to do with you two."

"Huh?" The two asari blinked at him.

"You're not taking us with you?" Tyra asked though she did not sound particularly relieved or confused. Rather, it seemed to her as if he was doing something very roundabout."Like, umm, as hostages?"

Shaking his head, he explained "No, that wouldn't work. They don't want me dead, so I don't need you as shields. And at the threshold where they begin to use lethal force against me, your presence won't matter much at all either. So really, you'll just slow me down if I take you along once I actually leave."

Tyra seemed almost offended by that, but he ignored her, considering she still didn't seem to understand in what danger she was.

"But, I could take you somewhere that would be safe," he said.

---

;

---

Miranda looked up, frowning at the incoming message.

What is it now?

With a secure omnitool, she no longer had to worry about the Citadel's interference or surveillance; the dual boot methodology ensuring that only encrypted messages would pass through the surface installation. Parts of the countermeasures were her own design and work, too. Still, they had to use the MMO for communication, but at least with the program she had written up to handle the nitty-gritty conversions it was much quicker now.

Learning from the Armstrong incident, Cerberus has heavily invested in deniability wherever possible. Where before they set out to create a base of operations that could serve as anything and everything between a military base and a meeting ground for their operatives, now they simply opted for using intermediaries and putting enough walls in between them that none of their own personnel could directly be implicated in anything.

But it was only the beginning of what was to come, she knew.

Pressing the haptic interface, her eyes slid over the text before she inhaled. She closed the holographic screen, packed her things, and moved out immediately.

Shirou Emiya had been discovered.

She cursed under her breath as she hastened to make it to the meeting - she had taken such great care and gone to such great lengths to ensure that she did not reveal herself after finding him. Yet, so soon afterward, Shirou Emiya had been found. Parnitha system was in a state of partial lockdown, with all physical traffic being re-routed to the numerous orbital stations for the moment. Even data traffic was being heavily monitored, the only reason Cerberus had been able to realize anything was happening was due to a message to the Council being intercepted by a Citadel middleman.

Damn it, did they find him through some other means or was it the blackout, after all?

She jumped into the VI-driven X3M cab and opened up her omnitool as she resumed her work.

But her previous zeal and efficiency were all but gone, as numerous thoughts and worries warred for her attention. She had been called in along with the status update she had received, informing her of the situation but telling her nothing of Cerberus' intentions. They would not simply wait this one out; she knew that in the last few years the hunt for Outis had only intensified with each passing month.

Something big was going on and that man was at the heart of it.

Stepping out of the vehicle, she briskly walked to the sushi restaurant, nodding at the receptionist who bowed at her and immediately moved to escort her to a room as she spoke the cover name of who ought to be waiting for her. Nothing more than an everyday meeting for a busy corporate worker, that's all.

Opening the door to the private room, a head turned and for a moment Miranda almost drew her hidden pistol.

It was an instinctual reaction to the stare she was receiving from a dark-haired man who had turned to look at the door. Icy blue eyes met dark ones and for a moment the world seemed frozen around them as they simply judged and weighed one another.

The seated man was the first to relax, leaning back with a smirk as he eyed Miranda from head to toe.

"Took you long enough, heavy traffic?" he asked curtly, before looking at the man who had led her there. Raising a cup, he inclined his head and spoke. "Refill and bring some beer too."

"Yes, sir. At once." The man behind Miranda bowed to him and again to her with a: "Please be seated," as he left.

"Transmission delays. I thought the Citadel had been declared a non-operational zone due to security concerns?" she asked, eyes narrowing.

He shrugged. "We're just passing through. Waiting for you, in fact. Would have been easier if you'd have a known address, could have just picked you up myself."

"And leave a trail for others? I don't think so," she replied with a sniff as she eyed him down the length of her nose. "'We'?"

He smirked, nodding with his head towards an unseen corner in the private room.

Miranda walked in, closing the door behind her and letting her eyes roam until she spotted Rasa sitting in the corner. There was another tense moment, but as neither spoke a word the dark-haired man chuckled.

"I see you've met."

Miranda broke the stare, glancing at the man who seemed to be taking extraordinary pleasure out of the sudden tension in the room. They all knew each other by reputation, yet none of them wanted to work with one another. Then again, their wants were of no consequence here.

What the Illusive Man wanted, he got.

Getting up, the man smirked again as he extended his hand to her.

She inhaled slowly, accepting the handshake after a moment. A small pad on the omnitool's physical component—the thin bracelet directly against her skin—vibrated slightly on her wrist, giving her confirmation of receiving a file transfer from the Asian man.

Looking up, he let go of her hand and clenched it once as he stared at it.

"Soft hands," he judged with a shake of his hand. "Try not to slow me down too much."

She said nothing, releasing the hand and making the effort to wipe her palm on the table cloth in as obvious a manner as possible, even though she was wearing gloves over her skin. He merely rolled his eyes at her effort.

They only shook hands for the protocol exchange.

With Citadel growing heavy-handed in their surveillance, other means of communication had to be established. On all Cerberus standard omnitools, there was a partitioned section for files that should be shared with other Cerberus standard omnitools. Then by way of a discrete physical handshake, a file transfer and update would occur allowing both parties to quietly and quickly handle mission briefings and updates without worry of leaks from conventional networking.

It was based on a system that had been in use among the Alliance Intelligence Agency's field operatives for years, modified for Cerberus' needs as times changed.

What she had received earlier had only been the briefest, most surface-level of messages, partly due to the limitations of the MMO communication method and partly due to the sensitive nature of the information. What she had received just now was the true meat and bones of what was going on in Thessia; the mission dossier and relevant status reports that would truly tell her what was happening.

"Were you followed?" Rasa asked, staring at her as she stood up.

"Of course not. Were you?" The two women stared at each other as the tension in the room spiked up again.

The sliding door behind Miranda opened up again as the restaurant personnel returned. He walked to the table, setting down a clay bottle of some kind, along with a more common-looking beer bottle.

"What was this?" The Asian man nodded, grabbing the clay bottle.

The server looked up, blinking as he smiled politely at the question. "Sir, it is a salarian import. There has been in recent years a great deal of interest in various rice wines on Sur'Kesh. We have a great selection of—"

"Thought so," the dark-haired man said with a sneer as he grabbed the bottle. It fit into his palm easily, his fingers wrapping around the whole of the bottle without issue. He looked at the server who had politely stopped speaking, waiting for him to continue. "It tastes what you'd expect those swamp lizards to cook up. Rice wine? More like fetid piss and vinegar."

"I... Sir, I apologize—"

He thrust forward the hand over the server's head and with ease crushed the clay bottle. The clear liquid with just a hint of amber tone to it ran freely through his fingers, causing the server to flinch and blink as he was soaked.

Bringing down his arm, Kai Leng smirked and tossed the shards at the server's chest, shards clattering as they impacted and fell to the floor.

"Don't expect to see me back." And with that he walked out, grabbing the beer bottle on the way out as he did.

Miranda glanced at Rasa who uncrossed her arms and stood up, moving to follow after the Asian man without a word.

Sighing, she glanced at the server who was bowing and apologizing profusely at them as they left without a word. They took another skycap, with Kai Leng pointedly taking the front right seat as he crossed his arms and ignored the two women while sipping his beer, bringing them to the commercial docks where they boarded a merchant vessel listed as owned by a salarian-turian joint company.

However, the whole of the crew was human, and their loyalties lay decisively elsewhere from their paycheck's source. Inside, an unfamiliar man sitting in a wheelchair gave them a scowling greeting.

"You're late."

Kai Leng shrugged as he walked past the seated man, "Had to pick up the ladies, you know how it is."

Receiving only a grunt in reply, the Asian man seemed to almost smile. The wheelchair turned around and began to roll away, with all three moving to follow.

"We've wasted enough time. The ship will be leaving in a few hours for Thessia, during which time you'll all have to be brought up to speed."

The omnitools of all three suddenly vibrated, signaling them that they had received a packet update, like the one she had just received from Kai Leng. Miranda froze for an instant, but instantly controlled herself and pretended that she had not been taken by surprise just now.

That system is extremely short-range, how did he...?

"Read those when you can, it's the mission briefing with the most recent updates. For now, Miranda Lawson is assigned team leader."

Kai Leng immediately protested. "What? This is a hot infiltration! It's obviously my area of expertise!"

Glaring at the seated and unmoved man, the dark-haired man ground his teeth.

And for all his loudness, it was obvious that his distaste for that decision did not lose out to Rasa's one bit. The silent woman glared at Miranda for a short moment before pretending that she had not been itching to pull her pistol just now.

"Shut up." The wheelchair stopped and all three had to stop as the man turned around just enough so that he could turn his face and address the standing man directly. "This comes from the top, so just do as you're told."

Kai Leng ground his teeth, glaring at the other before inhaling slowly and nodding with grudging acceptance. "Fine. But I want—"

"Not my problem." The wheelchair turned, and the man resumed moving forwards. "Read your mission briefing and keep it to yourself."

The dark-haired man blinked, before grunting and moving to follow after the wheelchair. Miranda rolled her eyes at the byplay, as she eyed through the packet update she had received.

It was completely legitimate. At that range? He must have some sort of specialized system in his wheelchair for it.

As Rasa walked past her, Miranda moved to follow.

"The ship will only make the circuit to one of the orbital stations to unload its cargo. Security will be too tight for you to get to Thessia through normal means, thus you'll be taking the new Injectors and will be dropping directly to Thessia. After you land, make clear of the pods before the remains of the prototype eezo core self-destruct. What happens after that has nothing to do with me, so read the mission briefings thoroughly."

Miranda perked up at that, realizing that this was the man who had been assigned to spearhead Cerberus' research and development into stealth in space.

"Injectors? You mean the stealth landing pod system?" she asked, walking up to walk parallel to him.

The man in the wheelchair looked up, before finally nodding. This close up, and looking for it, she could see something running beneath his clothes. As if a cable that connected the man to the chair was laid bare against his spine, for some reason.

"You developed it? You're here to test the models, then?" she asked again, frowning as she realized that she was being set up as a guinea pig.

The man smirked, knowing she had quickly realized what was going on. "Indeed. There's only so much of the exotic variant eezo left, after all. This will be the first test in a hostile monitored system, which will make or break this system. Try not to fuck it up."

Kai Leng piped up at that. "Exotic variant eezo?"

"Five years ago, in an incident known as the 'ghost-ship of '72', a skycar managed to fool the entire space surveillance grid of Earth," he began, before pausing at the frown the dark-haired man was giving him. "Yes, it wasn't just some conspiracy theory - it actually happened. Cerberus took great care to memory hole that incident and bury it entirely. It's now been mostly dismissed as a freak solar wind interaction with the Van Allen-radiation belt. Weird aurora interacting with a dark comet that then burned up in atmo, nothing more."

He chuckled at that, shaking his head.

"The skycar was recovered, correct?" Miranda asked, motioning for him to continue. "You managed to reverse engineer that process?"

"Indeed. Inside of the engine, something peculiar was discovered. Someone had modified the engine to fit a much larger eezo core than strictly necessary. It was what allowed the vehicle to achieve such ridiculous accelerations and fool all of the sensors the way it did. That lump of eezo was taken out and studied very closely for years... Know what they found?"

Miranda said nothing, waiting for him to continue though she did have some knowledge of that case.

"They found that the eezo was disappearing. Slowly, but surely. A little at a time, just going somewhere else. No one knows where, but it's vanishing a lot quicker than regular eezo. But as a result, it behaves unusually, even for element zero."

"Whatever." Kai Leng scoffed, slowing down as he ignored the wheelchair-bound man.

"And that is the basis for the proposed stealth system, then?" Miranda suggested, paying the brooding man no heed.

"Correct. Thermal sinks have been tested before, but the problem with heat has not been so simple that it can just be solved with a few years of research," the man answered, smirking. "Well, not until we discovered that EVE can also be used to vent out various forms of heat and electromagnetic radiation as well."

She had to blink, frowning at the implication. "Vent where?"

The man in the wheelchair smirked as he shrugged

"Somewhere where sensors can't pick it up, more than that I don't know and Cerberus doesn't care. But I do know it can be used to make a small craft utterly invisible. Electrical, thermal, even visual can be handled once the excess heat from the cloaking system is no longer a problem. Even an active scan can be partially absorbed and dissipated."

Miranda nodded with wide eyes, making a note to look closer into the subject later.

"So that's how we'll get onto Thessia?"

"Yes. You'll be placed into a small craft and then lanced out from the merchant starship some ways from Thessia with stealth turned on, allowing you to land undetected on the planet. I'm here to record the data and see how well it works, primarily."

Rasa finally spoke up, walking up to them as she did, "And this is where this 'Shirou Emiya' comes in?"

"Yes." The man in the wheelchair nodded, turning thoughtful for a moment before he continued. "He has ties to the entity known as 'Outis' and is suspected to know about where the exotic variant eezo came from. Given that we only have limited amounts of the matter, if we wish to make strategic use of it in the future we will need to find the original source. And given what it could offer us... Make no mistake, this mission is vital to the future of humanity."

"So, we're here to find some pencil-neck researcher?" Kai Leng asked, clearly not amused. "Easy job, then. As long as we make it to the ground, at least."

At that, the wheelchair completely stopped. Turning around to look over his shoulder, the man eyed Kai Leng for a silent moment before giving him a mysterious smile.

"Well, I don't mind if you think that. Your death won't matter much in the scheme of things, I'm sure. As long as he is brought in alive, everything else can be handled."

Kai Leng looked at the man through lidded eyes, and for a moment it seemed like a fight might break out. The wheelchair turned ninety degrees and a hatch automatically opened. The wheels of the chair went over the raised ledge between the two compartments seamlessly as he entered another section of the ship.

They moved to follow, coming to see the needle-like black crafts before them as they entered.

"These will be your rides down to Thessia. I'll show you how they work, as soon as we're on the way. For now, read your files and gear up. You know where the armories are." And with that, the man in the wheelchair turned around and left the same way he had come.

Kai Leng clicked his tongue, rolling his neck with clear and barely-restrained aggression radiating from his body language.

"Are all N7's so clipped?" Rasa asked out aloud, causing the dark-haired man to glare her way.

But then he seemed to realize that she hadn't been talking about him at all, causing him to stare at the doorway with something resembling respect. "So that was the butcher, huh."

Strangely placated by that realization, the man turned on his omnitool and began to read through the mission briefing without another word.

Miranda eyed the two for another second before turning on her own omnitool's display. She needed to not just know this mission in and out, but all of Thessia as well, she reasoned. Given how Outis had reacted the last time she had visited, there was no doubt that he would be appearing in person this time.

Sooner or later, he would be within her reach.

And when he was, she intended to blindside him at the best possible moment and take him down. She smiled at that thought as she immersed herself in the graphs and reports before her.

---

;

---

"Of course, that all depends on what you want to do right now," Emiya said, placing a hand on his hip as he tilted his head. "I have no intention of forcing you anywhere - if you want to stay behind, then that's up to you."

"…Do you think we should come with you?" Tyra wondered.

"Is it really necessary for us to leave?" Liara asked, frowning at him. "She may be a Spectre, someone who has been given the authority to act as she pleases by the Council, but… I cannot believe she would do anything to hurt us."

Emiya grabbed four canisters from the box, checking the labels before he nodded. "Then, can you think of a reason for her to have sent you in here? You said you didn't see any of the others before she brought you here. Does that mean she was hiding them from you, or that she was hiding you from them?" he suggested, crossing his arms as his eyes drifted.

Liara sniffed but seemed to accept his reasoning. Or perhaps she was simply too tired to argue. There had been a manic energy to her but it seemed to have been drained from her now. "Very well. I am… I am not entirely sure what is going on. While this does not seem like the best of ideas, I think I can trust you to not hurt us, at least."

"Yeah, Saiga wouldn't do something like that," Tyra said, nodding. "If you think it's important, then… I'll come with you."

She looked at him with determined eyes, nodding twice more when their eyes met.

"Alright then. Now that that's settled - time to make our exit," he said, nodding in return as he uncrossed his arms. It was good that he didn't have to start negotiating with them; saying something like 'I'll only tell you where I found this if you come with me' in regards to the Prothean pistol, or something.

With a smirk, he tossed a pair of grenades into the air and grabbed them mid-air with the other hand.

"What are those?" Tyra asked again.

"Chaff and smoke grenades," he answered, walking to a window and looking out.

Unable to see anyone nearby, he opened the latch, pulled the pins of two grenades and dropped them right down, and then closed the window. Immediately they began to spew smoke and fine particulates into the air and in less than five seconds the whole window had been covered and darkened by the rising silver cloud.

"Uh, that doesn't really explain anything?" Tyra complained, peering around him to look at the window with obvious curiosity. "What will that even do?"

"It'll blot out weaker sensors. It's essentially a cloud of tinfoil confetti, mixed with a chemical solution that reacts to oxygen and begins a slow burn. That produces lift which lets the small pieces of metal remain in the air for longer while causing them to reflect the heat everywhere while dispersing most direct measurements," Emiya explained, opening another window and throwing out another two grenades. "Basically, it blinds sensors. Well, personal lower-end hardsuit and omnitool based ones, anyway. Any decent starship has enough room for one that can just filter the noise out and see through it, as do higher-end personal sensors. But it'll still work as a diversion. Well, the other was just teargas. I only have a few of the chaff ones, after all."

"Wait, what?" Tyra blinked, looking at the two canisters he had taken and lobbed out through the kitchen window. One of them rolled and settled against the front door and a salarian shouting to get to cover could be heard as he closed the window.

Must have been trying to lockpick the door and eavesdrop.

Well, it wouldn't matter. They knew he was trying to get out from before already.

"And how does that help us?" Liara asked, obviously curious as well as her attention was drawn away from the pistol she was holding.

"It'll draw their attention. Long enough at least for us to get away."

"What do you mean? That Spectre is still out there, isn't she?" Tyra pointed out, looking out through a window and trying to peer through the rising smoke. She curdled her nose at the stink after a second, taking several steps back and sneezing.

Emiya pulled her back, looking at her as he frowned at her face. "What part of 'teargas' don't you understand? Good, none of it got in your eyes. Stay away from the windows."

Tyra was blinking at him, one hand raised to her face where he had touched her chin.

"How did you even get this stuff?" Liara asked, crossing her arms.

"You'd be surprised what they're willing to ship right to your doorstep," he replied, glancing at her quickly with a knowing smirk.

She peered at him suspiciously, obviously not buying a word he was saying. Of course, the delivery companies had had no idea of the actual contents, but he hadn't lied exactly.

"Come on, let's go," he said, grabbing the rest of the box and walking to his bedroom.

The two asari hesitated only for a second and moved to follow after him without complaint as he took the lead. At several of the windows, he threw out a few grenades with audible reactions from outside. Turning to the two, he took three grenades and put them in his pockets, holding onto two more as he eyed them.

"You bring everything you need?"

Tyra blinked before going through her pockets and his bag that she had taken for some reason from, nodding afterward as

Liara gave him a level stare. "Where exactly do you think we'll be able to go from here?"

She nodded at the balcony right outside on the other side of the glass door.

It was built such, that it did not offer a direct view from anywhere on the ground as the hillside the apartment was built on sloped down, nor could it be accessed directly without climbing up the side. Not so far in the distance, the ocean could be seen and heard as it offered an undisturbed view of the Serrinan sea.

The only way down was to jump.

Emiya smirked, pulling the pins on the two flashbangs and throwing them out through a window on the opposite side of the room, before turning to the balcony door. Outside by the front of the apartment, the two flashbangs went off at the same time as his cybernetics reached the skycar and turned it back on.

It hummed to life immediately and responded to his connection without any problems, now that the sabotage had been rooted out. Bringing it over the apartment and landing it on the veranda, he turned to look at the blinking Liara and Tyra, the smirk still on his face.

"What do you mean? The car's right there."

"How did you...?"

"No time for that now - get in." He opened the flimsy-looking balcony glass door, ignoring the flattened bullets lying on the ground and the small cracks spreading around it, though his two companions most certainly didn't.

As he did, the car doors swung wide open on that side. With an exasperated shake of her head, Tyra hastily walked into the skycar, Liara only two steps behind her as she eyed him. Stepping out, he closed the glass door behind him, the light click of the lock telling him that it closed shut behind him.

No point in giving them an easy way in.

There was a sudden flare of a mass effect field on the other side of the house. Suppressed firearms started going off and someone was thrown up into the air with a burst of biotics on the other side of the apartment block.

A third party?

Someone was trying to breach the encirclement from outside, he judged. Well, he was leaving so it had nothing to do with him beyond a convenient distraction.

No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth

Emiya could hear footsteps pounding the ground, coming just around the corner of the apartment as he stepped into the car. Getting in the front of the skycar with the two asari in the back, he closed the door and tossed the rifle and backpack to the front passenger seat next to him.

The skycar jerked into the air as soon as his buttocks hit the seat, eliciting surprised startles from the two in the back.

"Alright, let's hope they don't just shoot us down," he said, inhaling as he turned the hovercraft around and began to head for the city center.

"What?!" Tyra grabbed both front seats and jumped forward to look at him as she shouted. "What do you mean shoot us down?"

"Hmm? Don't worry about it, a slip of the tongue."

"No, no, no, what do you mean shoot us down?!"

Emiya looked up through the windshield at the skies above. "See those gunships?"

Tyra blinked, looking in the direction he was pointing.

"They're... pulling away?"

He nodded. "Which either means they're not going to try anything until we land, not risking any mid-air collisions, or then they're going to shoot us down from orbit with either a satellite or a starship. No way to tell before it happens."

Tyra swallowed at his flippant tone, sitting back almost numbly. He had to roll his eyes, as she finally seemed to understand the severity of the situation.

"Do you even have a plan?" Liara asked, causing him to turn his attention to the rearview mirror to look at her.

Normal skycars did not have such features, since the computer had a proximity sensor that did the same and more, but he preferred having a physical mirror as well. The old habits of glancing up and to the side mirror simply could not be so easily replaced and were handy besides.

"Sure. But, well. If they come down in force it will have to be... fluid."

"I'll take that as a no." Liara nodded, exhaling. "Goddess, what a mess."

You've got that right.

Looking at her through the rear-view mirror, he nodded his agreement with some amusement. Turning his attention forward again, he continued to accelerate. Setting their altitude to such that it would not be safe for them to suddenly fall down, he chose the play that they would not try their luck with shooting him down so long as he continued moving slowly enough that they could keep an eye on him.

Hearing a rustling beside him, he blinked as Tyra crammed to the front passenger seat.

She moved aside the collapsed rifle, looking at it curiously for a few seconds before setting it up on the dashboard and then placing the backpack into the foot-space so that she could sit.

She turned to look at him, sheepishly. "Liara is busy looking at that gun thing, so I thought I'd give her more space, you know..."

Emiya nodded, eyes returning to look around.

Up ahead, a drone wing of five swooped towards him suddenly. They were still well over two kilometers away; they must not have expected him to be able to keep an eye on them at this distance. He frowned as they turned off the holographic outer shell projectors and turned on cloaking devices, becoming invisible to the naked eye - even to his sight at this distance, he realized with some annoyance.

Luckily, he could still sense their mass effect fields without any problems as they began to approach him rapidly.

"So, we... I'm not really sure what to say about, uh, all of this. It's so much, you know?" Tyra said, and he grunted, focusing on the approaching drones.

They were firing up secondary mass effect fields that were not focused on themselves but ahead of them. Another five appeared from their far left, and then a third pentad began to rapidly climb behind them, cloaks engaging on all and making them disappear as well.

They're planning to pull us down, then? Increase our mass so that the engine can't keep up? Or disable it outright and catch us in mid-air?

"I had just thought, that you know, you were this interesting looking guy and we could have some fun. I mean, every time we met, I just kept having so much fun! You know all these weird things and I was always thinking and wondering what you'd show me the next time we'd meet."

"Uh-huh." Emiya inhaled, frowning as the drone pentad from above began rapidly closing in as they created a bubble of increased mass, while the two other pentads coming in from the left and right were setting to flank him from both sides.

"But, with everything that's going on right now, I don't... I don't know if we can keep being friends. I mean, I had a lot of friends on the Citadel and they all forgot about me once I moved. The extranet just isn't the same, you know. It's just, I don't know what to do…"

Reaching for his pistol by his right hip, Emiya exhaled and rolled down his window. At this range hitting it should be possible. Of course, given the distance and the air resistance of the bullet, it might not do all that much damage.

"—so. What do you think?"

"What?" Emiya blinked, looking at Tyra.

She frowned at him, staring at him accusingly. "You weren't listening to a word I just said, were you?"

He blinked again. "Can't say I was, no."

"Unbelievable." She huffed, crossing her arms and looking away from him.

Not really sure what he had missed, he shrugged and drew his pistol. Leaning his head and hand out through the window he narrowed his eyes until he was fairly certain he could see the faint shimmer of a cloaked drone.

Taking aim, he corrected for the drop and wind and pulled the trigger four times in succession. Something in the distance shimmered, as he hit one of the drones coming to flank him. But that was all.

They have kinetic barriers on top of the cloak? Expensive stuff - STG spared no expense.

"What was that?" Tyra asked, leaning to look at the mirrors to see what he was shooting at but unable to see anything.

"Cloaked drone."

"...Oh," Tyra replied, looking around as she grew interested. "Is that what you were looking at?"

"Hmm? Yeah." With twirl, he returned the pistol to his hip and reached for the rifle instead.

With its longer rails, it would have more power and a better chance of taking down the drones, even if they used the same bullets and same batteries. Though, he would have to adjust the firing settings a little bit, first. At this distance and with the kinetic barriers those drones had to go along with their lightness, he needed some serious punch to be able to take one down.

Else he would just uselessly push it back.

It would be like tossing a ping pong ball into the air and trying to break it with your fist: the ball would simply bounce away without taking any damage. To do anything he would need to fire a round at ridiculous velocities, especially at this range and since he would be shooting back from a moving vehicle.

Of course, the recoil would be sheer murder on his arm, but it couldn't be helped.

"You never did tell me where you found this gun," Liara noted from the back.

He looked up, meeting her eyes through the rear-view mirror. "It's a pretty long story, so to make it short and succinct, there's another Prothean ruin on Mars. Do you know where that is?"

Liara frowned before hesitantly nodding. "That was the Prothean outpost discovered near the home-planet of you humans, wasn't it?"

Emiya nodded. "I found it near where the first one is, just a few kilometers beneath the ground. There was an elevator shaft to the upper ruins, but it has collapsed. It's been sealed pretty tightly."

"A second ruin beneath it? That is highly unusual. As I recall, did the surface ruins not possess a wealth of data and functional specimen of technology? Why would there be a second ruin beneath it?"

"It seemed like a refuge or a bunker when I went there," he replied with a shrug. There wasn't any point in telling her now about the deepest level, as she would probably find it herself sooner or later.

She frowned at him, then. "Did you say the entrance was collapsed?"

"I did, but give me a moment."

"Yes?"

He finished adjusting the firing calculations and settings of the rifle through his cybernetic connection.

It was a regular commercial mass accelerator, functioning much the same as any other firearm did; a railgun provided the acceleration to a bullet that was lightened with a mass effect field, while various other fields were used to compress and lighten the considerable ammunition block so that it was more manageable, ensuring fast and powerful rounds and a large pool of ammunition in a reliable package.

But that was not all the mass effect fields did.

One method of recoil control in common use was to raise the mass of the gun at the moment of firing so that the recoil experienced by the user would be lessened. Usually, this could be achieved by removing some of the lightening-field from the weapon, but for extremely powerful shots it was necessary to actually make it heavier as well. But this form of recoil control alongside the actual firing was very energy and heat intensive, draining the power cells quickly.

But if you thought you could withstand the recoil, either by way of being that massive yourself as the elcor and krogan were or by bolting the gun onto a weapon's platform like a gunship or armored car, then there was no need for such measures.

Emiya was despite being superhuman, was neither of those things.

Firing this gun right now would tear off the arm of any living human, hardsuit or not. As for him, it would be as if he had grabbed a hold of a speeding rocket. It wasn't directly dangerous to him, but it would pull him along for a rodeo like a wild bull.

But, he needed all that he could get.

Minimizing all the support and stabilizing systems, he had routed all power to facilitate the acceleration of the bullet and then finally had ramped up the output to maximum. It would overheat the rifle with every shot and drain the battery in a number of shots but that was fine, and furthermore, necessary.

Can't exactly start shooting swords with so many eyes on me.

"Hold on to something, both of you."

The inertia dampeners were on, keeping them in their seats, but he would have preferred actual seat belts as well, now regretting that he hadn't installed them himself before.

"What are you doing?" Liara asked from the back as he opened the window again and jumped halfway out, until he was straddling the door with his feet and his free hand on the inside of the skycar's steering controls, holding on for support. He felt the wind through his hair as he took aim at an approaching drone.

A sudden thought occurred to him and made him smirk.

This rifle is at least eight times as powerful as the sniper rifle I shot back then...

Shooting it inside a city would probably count as a war crime.

Making sure there was nothing behind his target and that the bullet would fly into the distant sea, he resolved to fire. Relaxing his arm, holding onto the rifle with just a loose grip with one hand, he pressed the trigger.

—BOOM!

The sound was deafening and the force of the gun firing almost tore the gun from his hand as his arm was thrown completely up. But he held on with his other hand, giving way with his arm at the shoulder to keep the gun from pulling him out through the skycar's window, simultaneously pulling the whole vehicle into a roll around itself allowing him to bleed out the massive recoil with the entire skycar.

The asari inside screamed in surprise, scrambling to hold on at the sudden aileron roll-maneuver.

In the distance, the cloaked drone suddenly reappeared in a hail of sparks and shattered metal as it rained down from the sky.

"Saiga!" Tyra shouted, and he could feel her grabbing his leg.

Leaning back to look inside, he nodded at her. "It's fine, you don't need to hold onto me."

"B-but—!"

Ignoring her, he took aim at the second drone as he waited for the gun to cool down. Even with the disappearance of the first, they were not taking evasive actions yet. Rather, it seemed that they were merely compensating for the hole in the formation and were programmed to assume it was a fluke.

Well, not that he was complaining about sitting ducks.

"Hold on."

The two asari yelped inside, Tyra's grip on his shin turning tight.

Taking aim at the second drone, he repeated the action again. The recoil and deafening sound were no lesser than the first time, but he had changed slightly how he held the gun, allowing him to control the recoil more easily as he relaxed his arm and aileron rolled the skycar sideways to disperse the excess force again.

In theory, he was doing the same thing as he had learned in parkour.

Turn linear momentum into a roll and bleed it off at a more manageable, longer distance. Here, where he could hold onto the skycar with his legs and one arm and he had the entire mass of a hovercraft to work with, it was actually quite easy.

This was one of the techniques he had figured out early on when he had been trying to modify weapons to suit his needs in fighting supernatural beings. Normal guns simply did not cut it and the recoil from souping up such things was not kind or gentle.

Though there he had simply learned to roll his arm or his body, not an entire vehicle.

But who said old dogs couldn't learn new tricks?

At the fourth shot and roll, he noticed that the battery of the rifle was running low. Pulling himself back inside the skycar, he reached for the pistol where he had another battery at the same time as he placed the one from the rifle into the skycar's power dock. That way it would siphon from the car's power generator and would be usable again in a couple of minutes.

"You're, you're not done yet...?" Liara asked weakly from the back and he only grunted in reply.

But in looking out to continue shooting again he noticed the drones were pulling away.

"So, they can adapt. Someone must have a tightbeam communicator of some kind," he said wondering whether there was someone with a laser pointer trying to hit one of the drones to send it commands.

"Was that all of them?" Tyra asked, trying to appear as if she was not shaken, even as she still hadn't let go of his coat.

"No, they'll be back again."

She blinked.

"Oh."

But the rest of the flight was uneventful, as the gunships kept their distance and the drones kept a wide moving encirclement around him as he kept flying towards Serrice University.

But once they descended again, they would undoubtedly be all over him to force him to land.

Which meant it was time for some more creative maneuvering.

"Alright, hold on again," Emiya said as he began to approach the University of Serrice parking hall.

"Uh, okay?" Tyra said, reaching over and grabbing a tight hold of him with one hand and of her seat with the other. In the back, Liara let out an annoyed huff as she nodded in understanding and took grabbed the back of his seat.

Much like automated parking systems back on Earth, the Serrice parking hall was actually a massive underground conveyor belt of a sort. You simply landed onto a specific spot above ground and the system would move it underground and spit back out a digital ticket for you that would allow you to reclaim it later. This method of moving a parked vehicle allowed people to save space and removed many of the vehicles from the roadsides, keeping the vistas clear.

In fact, parking on the streets without an exemption permit was a heavily fined offense in most of Thessia's larger cities.

The system was entirely automated, too.

Because no one wanted to sit around all day and write digital tickets on Thessia.

This meant that no one was ever supposed to be inside of the actual vehicle storage since the space where each had was stored had been specifically minimized so that the maximum amount of skycars could be parked inside. In fact, the system would disengage itself if it thought someone was inside of a parked vehicle to ensure no one was trapped inside. There were no lights or ventilation down below, much less personnel exits.

Looking around, he could see numerous vehicles still moving around the area. The number of gunships following him at a distance had tripled and there were probably just as many orbital crafts keeping an eye on him. Simply put, as long as he remained in this vehicle, there was no way for him to give his pursuers the slip. Thus, the first step to disappearing was to ditch it and to break their lines of sight.

It was time to go underground.

His cybernetics would have much to work with, he would have dozens of potential exit points he could use, on top of which his pursuers would have very little room to maneuver against him inside the parking hall.

"Well then, time for some imaginative maneuvering," he said as his two passengers gulped.

With a smirk, he pulled into a sharp sideways dive, altitude dropping three hundred meters in a second, before pulling into a sideways flight into an alleyway that was too narrow for the skycar to normally pass through. Immediately the pursuing crafts adjusted their course and speed to match him, several rising higher to keep track of him while others tried to keep up with him.

"Whoa, whoa! Watch out for the walls! Watch out for the walls!" Tyra shouted, holding on with a clenched fist to his coat as she tried to lean as far away from the building they were sandwiched by on one side, a mere arm's length away from her.

He rolled his eyes, coming out of the alley and leveling the skycar as he brought it in towards the parking hall entrance, where he always landed when he came to the University of Serrice. It was nothing more than a flat space on the ground where there were several outlined glowing haptic measurements for skycars by weight and size.

By parking into it and connecting to the local signal, one could access the parking system. Depending on the external dimensions and the weight of your vehicle the system would hand you an hourly fee for storing the vehicle. It was a useful and reliable system and most of the University staff and attendees used it as far as he knew, which meant that it had to store thousands of vehicles every day.

It was massive, having been rebuilt and expanded multiple times during the University's existence.

Through his cybernetics, he connected to it as he came into range.

They haven't turned off the power grid, so the system is still online. This close to the University labs and the hospitals, they must have hesitated. That's good, he thought as he at range accessed the system and opened one of the sixteen parking spot shafts.

The insides of a glowing guidance rectangle began to slowly sink, revealing that beneath the thick surface lay a dark underground space. Normally you were supposed to land and then exit the car before the skycar was moved underground, but he was cutting corners and saving time by starting the platform's descent before landing, hoping to get out of sight before they could stop him.

Emiya spotted something coming in at an angle from the sky.

By going through the alleyway, he had hoped to keep them off of his back long enough to be able to alight.

But it seemed like he had been too shallow in thinking that just flying through some buildings would prevent them from firing at him.

This low to the ground, forcefully disabling the skycar would not hurt them too much or risk the surroundings. That meant they must have felt compelled to act against him before he managed to vanish - compelling him to burrow even more.

A pentad of drones from his left and an incoming high-speed projectile of some kind coming in from behind.

It was too slow to be a kinetic bullet and too small to be a proper torpedo warhead -looking at the side-mirror, he realized it was a homing missile of some kind. It looked like a stripped-down drone and it had active cloaking and it was simply too fast to be outrun.

Realizing he was pincered, he cut the mass effect field keeping the skycar in the air at the same time as he reversed thrust and pushed them down to duck the high-speed drone coming in from behind.

But it immediately adjusted course in response, hot on his trail and gaining.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the rifle and leaned out to shoot it out of the air. He barely got the gun out through the window, forcing himself into an awkward position as he pulled the trigger before it reached him. The recoil of the rifle tore it straight from his hands and sent it flying to the street below, as the shot struck the closest drone head-on. But it hit a blazing kinetic barrier, only slowing the drone down for just a fraction of a second, before it continued on as if nothing had happened.

They adjusted the kinetic barriers to withstand my shooting already?

They had a second before the drone struck and attached itself to the back of the skycar's chassis, with a deep thunk, magnetically locking onto the vehicle.

"Hold on!" He had just enough time to shout before their new attachment went off. As he had expected it was an electromagnetic pulse; the skycar's electronics immediately dying and going silent, all systems completely fried.

Worse yet, he did not go unscathed either. A wave of nausea hit him like a sledgehammer and his senses swam as he felt like his head was being used as a blacksmith's anvil. The world turned into blur and static for a moment and the next he could not comprehend anything as it grew worse by the second.

Grabbing onto the steering wheel, he tried to focus on his sense of touch, but it disappeared into sensory chaos an instant later, Tyra's shouting sounded distant and queer to his ear as he grit his teeth, focusing on his breathing.

This must have been tailor-made against the cybernetics I have, he realized as he desperately held on to what little sensible remained to his mind, trying to ride through the worst of it.

He didn't feel the impact of landing so much as he reasoned it must have happened, as there was a distant and faded sensation of a heavy impact. The next second, his vision was replaced by a twisted waterfall of dancing sparks and the sounds of something grinding. The illusory shapes and forms dancing across his vision were distant and vague, as if they weren't a part of his reality anymore.

Realizing that his state was not disappearing or dissipating after what must have been several seconds, he jumped out of his body and opened his eyes.

Immediately the haze cleared, and the world made perfect sense to him once more, confirming that it was an attack on his cybernetics just now. Looking around, he noticed that Tyra and Liara—while screaming and panicking as the skycar was sliding along the ground—did not seem hurt by the pulse like he had been. Dropping backwards, he kicked out and manifested just enough for his heel to hit the back of the car where the magnetically attached drone had latched itself.

It shattered instantly, flying off with a good section of the back of the skycar's chassis.

Turning back, he placed an incorporeal hand on the back of his own neck and exhaled as he pushed magical energy into his own body and Reinforced himself to clear away whatever debilitation he had been struck with.

I might have to materialize and carry myself out... But with all the eyes on me, it will be immediately noticed.

Dropping back into his own body, he pushed through the haze of confusion and sensory static that clouded his perceptions, yet it was to little avail. His senses were a snowfall static of indescribable colors and shapes, quite nauseating in their pulsating and writhing undulations.

All of his senses seemed to have been entirely scrambled into a useless and indecipherable mess.

Should I risk it and materialize?

If his 'Justicar ally' suddenly appeared here, then those who had settled in to watch the sea and search for that obviously dangerous combatant would surely drop the search there and come running, doubling the resistance he was facing. Better to push as far as he still could in his body.

His mind set, he focused on the immediate means that came to mind.

Pushing outwards with his magical energy, he ignored his lack of sight, hearing, and touch as a headache of pure cacophonical chaos assaulted his mind from all metaphorical directions.

The magical energy in his body helped however, acting as a form of Structural Analysis that told him what his normal senses were unable to in that moment, even if it did not clear away the actual effects. Even through the haze, he could sense his own body through the magical energy, giving him desperately needed feedback on his surroundings.

I'll have to do that, then—begin synchronization;

The magical energy suffused his whole being and then bled out into the surroundings wherever there was contact with his body. His hardsuit, the longcoat, the seat and the skycar all appeared into his mind's eye through the feedback of his Structural Analysis in the form of wireframe models. It all adjusted itself in his mind's eye in sync with reality as he consciously exhaled and ran a check on himself.

He had been clenching his fist, causing the steering wheel to crack and shatter between his fingers before he had realized it, the lack of sensory feedback effectively removing all of his limiters.

Automatic and conscious breathing still work as does my ability to move my limbs. I simply can't feel that it was working or that I was moving. That's fine, I don't need eyes or ears to keep moving.

As he raised his hand from the skycar's controls, the hollow wireframe model moved in his mind's eye appropriately.

If he could not use his senses of balance and proprioception for feedback to know how his body was moving, then he would use magical energy with Structural Analysis to paint himself in relation to the ground beneath his feet instead. It was a roundabout and cumbersome method but it would work well enough for him to keep moving.

We hit the ground and we've come to a stop. The drones are still coming, I need to take them out before they try something.

Another effect of the magical energy in his body right now was that he was finally performing at the true level his body was actually able to. He was a Heroic Spirit: a being whose soul was elevated far above that of regular humans. Even if he had only managed to become one through the Moon Cell's assistance, it did not change the fact that his existence was more powerful than that of a regular human being.

So much so that normal life in hiding might well be impossible for him if he did not consciously limit himself, thus he had consciously been redirecting excess life force from his body into his spiritual core at all times for as long as he could remember. It served the dual purpose of keeping his true spiritual body at peak condition at all times while also keeping his physical body within human boundaries.

It had simply been a precaution he had taken as soon as he realized just how powerful his body could be.

But now, that limiter was gone. In this state, he could probably go toe to toe with himself, fighting at superhuman levels without any problems.

Well, until this body gave out under him.

It was well and good to strap a jet engine to a tricycle, but you couldn't expect it to be able to handle that level of performance for any length of time once you turned it on.

Reaching out, he tried the door. But the disabled electronic systems meant that it was completely jammed.

With an annoyed huff, he pulled back his arm and simply smashed outwards with his elbow. The door gave way with a single blow caving it in, being torn straight off of its hinges and seals as it flew out from his Structural Analysis-fueled bubble of perception. He stepped out onto the tarmac and through his feet his magical energy extended outwards into the ground, extending his perception until he could feel the ground all around him for dozens of meters.

Sight was useless; hearing was a cacophony of indistinct and unrecognizable sounds; his skin felt like he was being bathed alternatively in frozen needles and boiling acid and he could just about taste the rainbow right about now, which while interesting, was less than helpful at the moment.

But beyond all that he could also still feel the effect those drones' mass effect cores had on the fabric of reality, just like how he could feel other aberrations in the world around him.

Lost the rifle, pistol's battery is fried - need a ranged attack, but need to remember that I'm being watched.

His hand shot to his coat's pocket and pulled out the first of the chaff grenades he still had, loosing it with a mighty throw at the nearest drone. He couldn't see or hear the impact, but suddenly the warping mass effect field disappeared with a 'hiccup' of a sort.

Jumping back to avoid a swooping drone, he reached for his second grenade and dispatched the swooper the same as the first.

At the same time, two more drones came in from behind and he jumped away. But on landing, he realized he couldn't move. He could not see or feel anything, but through his Structural Analysis-wireframe on his body he could detect that something was on his feet and preventing him from moving. Spreading outwards his magical energy, he realized it was some form of hardened substance that the drones must have hit him with, like an aerosol superglue of some kind. The more force he exerted on it, the more it seemed to harden.

Ah, a dilatant. Much better than my stuff, too; I'd tear the hardsuit apart before this stuff gives way. Fine, that's not a problem.

He simultaneously reached for his last grenade to dispatch a third drone as he inexpertly Reinforced the gunk on his feet and destroyed it utterly through a forceful insertion of his magical energy to free himself again. Three drones had been destroyed, leaving him with two more. But without any more grenades, it would be difficult to reach them.

Or perhaps not, if I let them come to me.

The gunk was still on his feet and he hadn't moved; for all appearances he was still stuck.

Come on, then.

The last two drones came swooping in from above, no doubt intent on spraying more of the stuff on him to completely immobilize him. He smirked, bending his knees slightly. In various martial arts where breaking of tiles and boards was practiced, oftentimes spinning jump kicks were held in very high regard for their flamboyant nature.

Though he had never needed it before in a serious fight, he too had practiced diligently such moves at one point.

With his current superhuman condition—senses aside—such a move would not be difficult at all to perform.

The drone pair swooped right for him and he took a step forward, twisting his hips and turning around as he raised his leading leg into the air. With a mighty spring, he jumped up and tornado kicked the leading drone head-on. It cracked and shattered at the impact, flying backwards and hitting the second one with enough force to knock it back half a dozen meters and down to the ground.

Recovering from the jump and landing, he sprang forward to stomp down on the last drone, breaking it completely as its mass effect field had not disappeared yet. He exhaled, turning his head left and right as he tried to make sense of his surroundings.

No more drones. But the gunships aren't that far away, can't sense anything else at a distance but they can't be too far away either. Need to keep moving.

He ran back to the downed skycar and halfway there, he felt something resisting him. He blinked, slowing down and reaching out with his hands. Touching awkwardly, making sure that he was being as gently as possible, he realized he was touching an asari as his magical energy spread out to touch a fabric. Tyra?

Frowning, he realized that there was some kind of variation to the cacophony he was hearing.

She must be talking to me, right now. Can't understand a word she's saying...

"I can't see or hear anything. Get back in the car—" he said, before pausing as he realized the lift he had initiated through a wireless hack had been rescinded as the elevator was rising up again to seal the entrance down into the parking hall. The range of the drone's electromagnetic pulse must have been very short, perhaps it only propagated through contact and affected his cybernetics through some other method?

Strangely enough, it did not seem that his wireless connectivity had been troubled by any of this, as he immediately realized as he reached out and stopped the elevator. Finding a connection to a nearby security camera, he suddenly received coherent visual stimuli again as he patched through to it.

Of course, it was from the point of view of the camera that was looking at him and Tyra who was standing in front of him, rather than from his own point of view, making it slightly difficult to handle. She seemed to be shaking her hands in front of his face and speaking rapidly, none of which he could see or hear.

Liara was just getting out of the car, struggling with getting to the front seats to get out through the smashed front door.

Strangely, as he compared the visual stimuli of the security camera feed and his own sight, it seemed like suddenly the shapes started to make sense again. It was like he had been tumbling around in the middle of a huge wave, underwater and utterly blinded when suddenly the waters were stilled and the light above returned to give him clarity of his situation.

Shapes consolidated, colors began to recede from the bleeding out and by the second his sight started returning to him.

Tyra still looked like a vague purplish-orange blob, more than anything.

"I can't hear a word you're saying, you know. Calm down."

That only served to make her more animate as she turned to shout something at Liara.

'He—can't—see—what—should—we—do?'

Emiya blinked, realizing that he could see her face through the camera which allowed him to read her lips as she spoke. She turned to him and began to speak again, but since the camera did not cover her face anymore, he could not understand her.

Frowning, he walked three steps until his back was facing the camera and forcing Tyra to turn to face it again. Moving a step to the left, he made sure that he could see her face through the camera now.

"Don't move, I can read your lips like this."

'Huh—what—do—you—mean?' She immediately turned her head to look at Liara, shouting at her again. 'He—can—see—I—think—but—he's—not—making—any—sense!'

Exhaling with annoyance, Emiya rubbed his forehead.

We don't have time for this.

"Get your things, we need to go right now," he said grabbing Tyra's hand and dragging her as he walked to Liara.

Walking around her, he leaned into the car and grabbed his backpack and pulled it out. Strange vibrations assaulted him, causing the colors in his half-restored eyesight to bleed all over the place and to drip into his sense of touch. It seemed like all sensory stimuli had somehow been scrambled by his cybernetics. Not in the sense of his body being altered, but that the cybernetics being unable to decipher what was what as it acted in unison with his brain or when passing it along.

As if I'm watching reality through a twisted kaleidoscope.

It was similar to what he had read about what people would experience when they first installed cybernetics sometimes. But the effects seemed much more pronounced and potent than anything he had heard about before.

No, well. They made this stuff, so they would know much more than was made publicly known.

Emiya noticed Tyra was wildly waving her arms in front of his face again, just now. He frowned, his arm stretching out and turning her head towards the camera as he spoke. "Just speak that way."

'Uhhh—okay—I—don't—really—get—it—but—something—happened—to—you—right?' She seemed to be saying and he nodded as he concentrated on reading her lips.

"Yes. But it can wait, we need to go right now before they have time to return." He looked up as he spoke, though he could not see much beyond the effervescent blue.

So far, they've been quite cautious. But the longer we wait the bolder they'll grow.

She nodded, turning to look at Liara once.

With the skycar totaled, they would have to continue on foot. Well, given the distance they still needed to cross it wasn't a problem. Five to ten minutes, he judged.

Above, a gunship was beginning to head towards them high up in the sky as another two pentad-wings of drones were approaching from the north and west. If they stuck around for much longer, he would have to fight again. And without the cover of his house or the danger of his instant death from falling too high to force them to limit their attacks, it wasn't looking good.

The two asari with him were far too difficult to protect as it was without worrying about having to deal with ramping difficulty.

Whoever is in charge of this operation, he's been feeling me out and adapting to me. Can't stay here and keep playing on their terms.

"Let's go!" he shouted as he began to run.

Leading the way, he ran towards the parking spot that he had re-initiated.

It was already two meters below the surface, but that was fine. Tyra and Liara hesitated behind for a second before they followed at a run, no doubt having noticed the gunship that was heading this way.

Arriving at the edge, he extended a hand to both asari. "Give me your hands."

They must have said something, but he could not hear or see it. He simply kept his hand out, waiting for them to obey. After a second, he saw them accept his hands in his mind's eye. Nodding, he exhaled and grabbed both around the waists before jumping down into the dark shaft that was the underground parking hall.

Above him at his mental behest, the opening sealed shut and they were plunged into complete darkness.

They must have been screaming, but he couldn't hear it as he landed on the still descending platform, bending his knees to absorb enough of the impact so that the asari would not be hurt. Extending his mind through the cybernetics, he put the Automated Parking Systems entrances into lockdown as he continued directing the platform they were on to keep moving. As he let Liara and Tyra down, he kept a hold of them for support. In the complete darkness, they would not be able to see a thing while he at least had his Structural Analysis.

It wasn't like there were any lights he could turn on either, since this wasn't a place anyone was actually supposed to enter.

Slowly the platform came to a halt and then began to move sideways, like a conveyor belt. All around them, hidden in the darkness just beyond their sight lay hundreds upon hundreds of skycars and shuttles. He had been using this system with his skycar so often that he had ended up investigating the whole system thoroughly, both as a spirit and through hacking. He knew the blueprints well enough that he could have navigated through here with his eyes closed.

Their destination? The east-side underground maintenance accessway. It would get them close enough to where he needed to get while offering concealment from their pursuers.

"You can just sit down and wait for five minutes, it's fine now. If you want to stand, keep your heads down, since the ceiling is low at places. They shouldn't be able to follow us down here. At the end of the track by the east side is a maintenance access that we can take the rest of the way."

He spoke but was not sure whether they believed him. He just hoped that the power would not be cut off. It would be a pain to walk the whole way through the darkness, but it wouldn't really slow them down too much since the distance wasn't that great.

Well, for now he should focus on trying to restore his senses while he had some peace and quiet. Settling down into a cross-legged position, he began to focus on his breathing and calming his mind.

By the time they arrived, he would have to be in good enough condition to be able to keep fighting again.

---

;

---

Tela Vasir groaned.

She had taken three shots and a dose of medigel, but it still felt like she had been hit head-on by a speeding frigate. If she did not focus on keeping her eyes on one spot on the wall she was likely to start throwing up again. If it was just the concussion, she would have grit her teeth and borne it with dignity. But her fury and humiliation compounded the injury to lengths beyond anything she had experienced in well over a hundred years!

What the prophecy was the house! Who the fate was that huge Justicar? Where the seven doctrines did those huntresses come from? How the goddess is some human pulling off all of this crap?

She grit her teeth as she tried to ride through her swimming vision again, as in response to her agitation another wave of nausea hit her again and she had to focus on breathing to keep it all down.

That damned Kryik had pulled her back and taken command along with the STG contingent he had brought with him, telling her to handle the third party asari huntresses and the Justicar who had suddenly attacked them during the operation. Thirteen had been caught, all garbed in black hardsuits and heavily armed and the fighting had been long and hard outside of that blasted house, but not a one revealed their affiliation or purpose so far.

This had been an operation geared for the live extraction of a single human being thus they had not prepared any facilities or equipment suited for interrogation of asari.

Additionally, that Justicar had disappeared into the ocean without a trace. She had enlisted the Serrice Guard into assisting with the task of securing and scanning the coastline while the turian Spectre had taken the majority of the orbital satellites as he continued following the priority target, Shirou Emiya.

The Serrice Guard had some underwater sonar buoys for sweeping the coast since lidar and radar were horribly inaccurate in the Serrinan sea, and they had already scanned most of the coast. But since too powerful a sonar could injure or kill sea life living along the coast, the equipment available was of lower potency and range than she would have liked. So far, they had found nothing in the ocean, the many crags and caves making it difficult to find anything.

It was like that bitch had just vanished upon submerging.

She ground her teeth, sitting up and pushing down the wave of nausea that assailed her. She couldn't fight, but that didn't mean it was alright to be laying around. The Shadow Broker's plan had been shot to hell and now she would have to cover her tracks when it came to those two, before someone troublesome showed up and—

"Who the fate is in charge here?!" A loud shout rang out and there was the sound of something large being thrown aside and hitting a wall.

It could have even been a person.

FUCK.

Getting up, she listened wearily to the attempts of the local huntresses she had enlisted to stop whoever it was that was knocking on her door, but it was obvious they were having no luck with it.

Stepping out, she came face to face with an asari who had been in the process of barging into her room. "I'm in charge here—"

That's as far as she got as suddenly she was lifted into the air by her hardsuit by the strange asari. Tela blinked, realizing that she recognized her.

"Matriarch Aethy—"

"If you're the one in charge here, does it mean I can flay you alive and break all of your bones for how utterly you've managed to fuck up?!"

Tela blinked, realizing that she was being lifted off the ground through sheer physical strength without the use of any biotics. Licking her lips, she tried to think of what to say. Trying to cow this asari with her status as a Spectre would not work, trying to arrest her would only end up badly for everyone and—

"Where is she!" the Matriarch shouted at her. "Bring out Shiawe before I throw you out the nearest window and slap you with a singularity before you hit the ground!"

"Shiawe?" Tela parroted, suddenly utterly lost as to what was going on before making the connection. "The asari commandos we arrested?"

"Yeah, those - the one's working for Matriarch Benezia, so you better hand her over right now!" the Matriarch shouted, shaking Tela once more, almost making her throw up again.

Fuck's sake, this is like trying to talk to a krogan! What is wrong with her?!

"Ah, eh, could you tell me what they were doing here?" she tried to ask.

"That's none of your damn business, now hand them over and tell me where the son of a bitch took Liara T'soni!"

"Eh?"

Suddenly, it felt like all the pieces fell into place. T'soni, T'soni, T'soni.

She had been repeating the name under her breath for days, trying to figure out where she had heard it before. The asari brat who was stubbornly being reticent at every question. She hadn't thought to do a more thorough check of her identity until now, since there had been too much going on and the plan had been taking too much of her attention.

It was only now she made the connection to Matriarch Benezia—formerly Benezia T'soni. And at the same time, she recalled the rumors of a pureblood daughter the famed spiritual leader had birthed, drawing a connection to this other famed Matriarch who had long been one of Benezia's staunchest allies.

In the moment, she knew exactly what she had to do.

Turning to her subordinate who was hesitantly watching by, Tela spoke; "Release the prisoners and give back their equipment at once!"

"Huh, guess you aren't that stupid after all," Matriarch Aethyta said, nodding as she let down Tela.

She put a distressed expression on, reaching out with a hand for the Matriarch. "I understand that you must do what you must, Matriarch. But I ask that you not interfere or pursue the criminal we are after. Another Spectre—Nihlus Kryik, one of the finest turians in the galaxy—is already on their trail, and—"

"Like I give a damn about that, I'm going to—"

Tela smirked for just an instant as she knew the bait had been taken. "You can't! That man, Shirou Emiya, said he would kill the two asari he took hostage if anyone tried to interfere with him!"

The Matriarch stilled before suddenly her pupils widened. Slowly, but to an absolutely abnormal degree, as the elder asari began to breathe slowly and deeply. Her fists were shaking, as small bursts of dark energy flared about her.

For a moment Tela Vasir was nervous that the Matriarch would go mad right here, but then it subsided. But only a tiny bit, the smallest fraction. All that energy was still there, just beneath her skin, just waiting to be loosed.

"Not if I tear out his spine and kill him with it first, he won't," Matriarch Aethyta ground out, turning on her heel and stomping out. Small flares of dark energy whipped around her as she left, pushing aside furniture, asari and doors alike as she stomped away.

Tela rejoiced internally as she took support from a wall against a wave of nausea from the asarihandling she had been subjected to.

I was ordered to bring him back alive by the Council, but… If a mad Matriarch goes and kills him, that's hardly my fault. Well, any more than I've already fucked up. Best case, all of the blame is put on Nihlus.

Through her mind, a smirking human face flashed by.

That fucker won't know what hit him.

---

;

---

Emiya slowly exhaled, focusing on the sensation of his heart beating and the blood coursing through his veins, and the expansion of his lungs with every breath.

That much was easy enough to sort out from everything else, a simple and unmistakable sensation he was extremely familiar with.

He was slowly growing accustomed to the chaos that was his sensory world. As he minimized his own activity and sat in this darkness, where only the periodical and predictable sounds of the surrounding machinery could be heard, and no light could assail him, he could very efficiently focus on trying to sort out what was really what. For example, the constant state of temperature flux he had been experiencing was not in fact related to the temperature at all but was in fact something that was tied to his breathing he had realized.

Perhaps it was the sense of touch one experienced when inhaling and exhaling that had been cross-wired with another sense and thus felt like temperature instead?

It really was a curious case of forced synesthesia.

But even if everything was a complete mess that did not mean it was a hopeless situation. The human brain was extremely plastic, pliable, and adaptable. For example, if one were to wear a set of specialized glasses that turned the world upside down to your eyes it was possible for a person to perfectly adapt to such a change within mere days to the point of normal ability. Similarly, when a major sense like sight was utterly lost, the brain would begin to adapt by allowing other senses to utilize the regions of the brain that were no longer in use for the eyes to compensate for the loss.

Given enough time, he was certain that his full sensory clarity would return to him, just as it had been before.

It was something all patients who had undergone cybernetic enhancements of his kind—certain exceptions aside—went through when they first woke up from particularly invasive cybernetization. It was just a matter of time. But time was exactly that which he did not have an excess of.

He had minutes where he needed weeks, he had seconds when he needed days.

Of course, he had gone through something similar when he had first returned to his body after his operation and that hadn't been a problem at all. This was different. Where before things had been made as optimal as possibly could be by a team of galaxy-renowned experts to help him along, those very same specialists must have now turned their brilliance to hindering and inconveniencing him as much as possible without killing him.

Rather than merely being left without the training wheels, the entire thing had been made as inhospitable and hostile towards him instead.

That this was a thousand-fold more difficult than the first time went without even saying.

Before he had done it in seconds when most needed weeks. So this should be no different, even if the hurdle had been placed much higher than before. Therefore, as long as he had the ability to interact directly with his cybernetics through diving, he was certain he could do something with the time allotted to him.

His usual no mind-method of meditation and the utter darkness he was in did wonders in calming down the storm his brain thought it was in, enough at least to figure out what was really what.

Though he had had to go deeper than he had in ages to find the peace that allowed him to start figuring things out.

It was like a puzzle, he thought distantly.

Recognize what each sensation is and figure out what its origin could be, then attach it to the proper senses and pull its effects out from where it shouldn't be. That should be the sound of Liara and Tyra breathing, therefore it should be something I'm hearing, not something that registers as flashing lights to my eyes.

Slowly, he divided up and organized the sensations he was experiencing and figured out what they each were.

Even so, there was still loads more he needed to do before he could say he was back to a hundred percent. How much more of his sensory data was still similarly jumbled right now? Was he seeing what he should feel? Was he hearing what he should see? There was no way to tell without simply focusing on a particular sensation and linking it to something in the outside world.

I never thought I would have to reconstruct my 'umwelt' like this. Though, it does pose some interesting questions in that neither Structural Analysis nor the sensations of strangeness in the surrounding world seem muted or disturbed at all. Does that mean they're wholly separate from the corpus? Magic Circuits as an organ run through the physical body directly to the soul, if I remember correctly. Does that mean something?

Such as the ability to use magic stemming from some evolutionary lineage older than human consciousness itself...

He discarded that line of thinking, focusing instead on keeping an eye on the flow of information through the wireless signals. He supposed that it had similarly been spared the sensory scrambler treatment by virtue of being wholly of the cybernetics, rather than something that functioned with both cybernetic and flesh. Alternatively, because it was the input-output port for his alterations, it had been kept free of sabotage to ensure that the STG could 'fix' him once he had been caught.

Still, given how deep underground they were, it was getting difficult to actually keep a connection open.

Through his Structural Analysis he knew that the Automated Parking System worked mostly through physical wires and landlines as the thick walls and floors would diffuse and weaken all commercial grade signals too much.

Time's up - he could ponder more later.

Getting up, he spoke into the darkness. "We're here."

Reaching out, he wirelessly opened the maintenance access they had reached and turned on the hallway illumination while keeping it contained so that no one would be able to pinpoint their location so easily. Light streamed out from the underground corridor, lighting up the dark platform they had been traveling on for several minutes now.

"Oh—was sca—-—op," someone said and Emiya blinked.

An improvement, but hardly coherent yet…

It was much easier to see, now that every sound and touch did not cause ghostly hallucinations to run through and into his vision.

So sight was a little better, but every sound still caused the outlines of everything he saw to blur and vibrate, with colors bleeding and shifting constantly. He could recognize Tyra and Liara from each other now, at least. Touch and temperature were still shot to hell, but kinesthesia seemed to be working somewhat well already since his wireframe models had allowed for near-perfect parallels, his Structural Analysis allowing him to figure it out piece by piece.

Getting up slowly, he focused on taking slow steps without having to rely on his Structural Analysis-born mental wireframe map of the surroundings and himself. It worked, but it was inefficient in terms of magical energy expenditure, thus he had strived to stop using it as quickly as possible. Well, it was still more efficient than fighting in his Servant body.

But if this was going to be a prolonged conflict then he needed to conserve his stamina.

Walking to the door, he stepped off the moving platform and crossed into the light. The subtle sensation of heat the lights gave off caused a curious buzz to begin playing in his ear, which he absently noted for later.

"Wh—-—we ?"

He turned around to look at Tyra who had asked him something.

"Shh, keep quiet," he said. He could not accurately gauge their reactions through sight yet, but their body language was somewhat understandable already. "Let's not get into another fight. We still have a little to go."

They must have understood, as once he started moving out they kept pace with him.

The labyrinthine maintenance access ways were a complete opposite to the pristine and spotless Serrice above ground. He actually found it rather telling of the asari in general, how it functioned. For the end-user, it was a simple enough system: land your skycar in the neat little parking spot, get out, and get your digital ticket. Then, when you wanted it back, you just sent in a request with the ticket and the Automatic Parking System would spit the vehicle back out. If you had a flight VI, you wouldn't even need to be physically present at the entrance for any of this.

However, under the surface, the system was a rather complex and headache-inducing mess that had been re-built, re-modeled, maintained, and expanded by dozens of different companies and firms over the centuries.

This place had not had any single true designer or architect behind it, since it was constantly repurposed to suit whatever the latest fashion or fad was. As skycars lengthened due to changes in popular demand, the internal dimensions of parking spots had to be changed which skewed the internal dimension entirely. As some new device or function came to the fore on the galactic scene, the image-conscious asari would always strive to one-up one another and the other races by having that service in full display, requiring that the parking hall be equipped to match that.

If this were any other planet he was sure it would not be quite this bad.

It wasn't quite as bad as on the Citadel, with the Keepers constantly at work and modifying everything, but it was still quite a mess. The ever-changing aesthetic demands of the asari, the rigidity and structure of the turians, the clever shortcuts and solutions of the salarians coupled with the penny-pinching ways of the volus could all be seen in various parts of the underground complex.

Emiya was certain that in another decade or two, a human company would be hired to perform one service or another repair here, which would only further exacerbate the situation. The asari prided themselves in their networking and connections above all, so sooner or later they would vote it as a fashionable and grand gesture of trust towards humanity, which would only further complicate the underground structure.

The craftsman in him didn't so much want to cry, as... sigh and lament the wastefulness of it all?

He had found five different blueprints for the APS; two of which the actual system used in tandem for large parts, but the fact was that none of them were even close to being correct. There were unused sections, hallways that had disappeared between service and repairs, parking number spots that had been merged causing other spots to simply disappear in the process...

Of course, having explored this place before he had a vague idea of what was actually where.

The hallway he had taken was from one of the early salarian expansions which had supposedly been torn down during a later turian refit of the north-eastern top octant. But since the volus—probably anyhow—in charge had not seen any real benefit to tearing down the hallway in comparison to the costs of doing so, it had been left standing even as it had been quietly erased from blueprints. The volus had supposedly come one point three million credits under budget, half of which he had been given as a bonus for the accomplishment.

In short, parking in Serrice was serious business.

They continued moving.

In a straight line, it would have taken them less than five minutes to get through to the surface again from the point they entered, but due to the haphazard and chaotic nature of the maintenance accessways, it would take at least another ten by his estimates before they were there. The overhead lights helped with seeing again, but they also complicated his state as well. It seemed like he was being tickled and doused now at a periodic rhythm.

It felt almost like his skin was the surface of a still body of water, where periodically someone would cast in a stone in. The gentle waves, rippling outwards seemed to have no end.

Not unpleasant, but he couldn't figure out what exactly the sensation was supposed to be, even as he put his mind to it. Nothing in his surroundings matched the sensation. Perhaps it was a small flicker of the lights he would have normally been able to see? Perhaps it was the machinery and automation of the parking system at work, vibrating through the floors and walls. At least it didn't feel like it was anything directly harmful and neither of the asari seemed to have noticed it.

It's probably nothing. Might just be my heartbeat throwing me off.

After walking for two minutes, he noticed something tugging at his arm. Stopping, he turned around to see Tyra wildly gesturing at him.

"Di—r—th-t—?" Tyra asked, looking around.

Emiya frowned, not quite able to tell what she was trying to say. "Can you repeat that?"

She paused, an unintelligible torrent of words spewing from her mouth. He understood roughly nothing, frowning at her. Should I try Structurally Analyzing her? Maybe that would let me read her lips? I've never tried it and I doubt it would work that—

He frowned, turning around with his arms raised. A mass effect field was rapidly approaching; he immediately recognized it as a drone, like the ones outside. "Something's coming. Get back."

Tyra and Liara squared up behind him as he faced the hallway ahead from where the drone was approaching.

But as suddenly as it had appeared, it stopped.

He blinked, realizing that another one was rapidly closing in from behind as well. Exhaling, he focused outwards while suppressing all other senses.

Six, nine, fifteen, twenty-five? They keep popping out of nowhere - did they have a blueprint of the place after all? It's too quick for the drones to be mapping it out right now. At least, with these numbers. Was I duped by fake blueprints to think there weren't any accurate mappings of this place?

Still, this was a much better place than above ground to be facing off against this many drones.

With how constrained the hallways were, it would be easy to reach them and by kicking off of the walls and ceiling he wouldn't have to worry about being stuck in the air against his flying opponents for long enough for them to take advantage of it.

However…

They're not coming closer? What's their plan? And how are they coordinating? They were using tightbeams communications earlier, but here the corners would preclude such a method. There's not enough of them for an unbroken chain to be possible, yet this level of synchronization is impossible otherwise…

He reached out with his cybernetics, sweeping the surroundings for any signal he might have missed.

Much like omnitools, he knew he had a wide enough band on the electromagnetic spectrum that nearly anything should have been possible to locate. But as the drone tightbeams and as physical landlines such as the Automatic Parking System's own network had revealed, if he could not access it wirelessly then his cybernetics were mostly useless.

The lights went out and both Tyra and Liara jumped up in surprise as they were plunged into complete darkness again.

He blinked, realizing that the entire grid had gone dark, all of the wireless connections suddenly disappearing. He frowned, realizing that as the lights went out, the physical doors all went into lockdown as well. All of the entrances were now sealed, meaning he would have to find another way out.

"Wh-t's—-_-—on?!" Tyra shouted in obvious panic.

"Calm down, they're still keeping their distance," he said calmly, hoping it sounded reassuring. In response, both of them said something, but he couldn't hear it clearly enough to make any sense of it. "Let's keep moving, grab a hand and follow me."

They fumbled in the dark, Tyra grabbing his hand and Liara's and they started moving in the dark as one column with slow and silent steps. He frowned as he noticed that the drone up ahead was keeping its exact distance from him, receding backward slowly as they advanced while the one behind him kept moving forward. Neither had a direct line of sight on him either, which was the curious thing, as they were several corners away to his reckoning.

Picking up the pace, he kept a wary eye on both the drones and the two asari in tow as he tried to figure out what was going on. It was only as he arrived at his third corner in the hallways as he finally noticed something: Liara was slowing down, lagging behind as if she seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

He stopped, Tyra almost walking right into him as he spoke.

"Liara, what's wrong?"

They had only been walking for a few minutes, she couldn't have gotten that tired yet.

She said nothing for a few seconds, before finally falling over. He rushed forward, startled as he reached out for her to keep her from hitting her head on the floor.

"Liara?"

She did not answer, and he realized quickly that she was unconscious. Her breathing was fine as was her heartbeat, at least based on what little he knew about asari physiology, anyhow.

Emiya blinked, pushing his magical energy into her as he realized she was limp in his arms.

It required considerable effort to put your magical energy into another living being, especially if they were a sapient creature. It was not for naught that Reinforcement of another was considered the height of that particular spell, least of which due to the fact that one person's life energy would essentially be a poison to another person. It was almost like blood types or bone marrow transplants; if the types were wrong then the body would violently reject it, or vice versa.

Regardless, the results were not pretty if done forcefully.

But luckily, Structural Analysis was an extremely light spell. If Reinforcement was like pouring a liquid over a thing to soak it through—or in his case, like carefully skewering it with swords to form a lattice that worked like a supporting structure inside of a thing—then Structural Analysis like was brushing it with a feather.

Thus, he should not be hurting her.

Of course, that didn't mean anything in regards to the difficulty of overcoming her natural resistance to his od. He still had to use a three-fold amount compared to non-living matter to be able to analyze her.

Behind him, Tyra seemed to be swaying as well.

He barely had time to put Liara down before the athletic asari drooped and fell over as well. He caught her, barely in time, and set her against the wall next to Liara. Frowning, he considered what his featherlight prodding with magical energy was telling him.

They're breathing fine and their heartbeats don't seem disturbed, so it can't be oxygen deprivation from sealing up this space. The drones have been keeping a steady distance, are they spreading some kind of knockout gas?

As he thought that, additional two drones came racing up to the nearest pair and exchanged places with them, allowing the two that had been keeping up with him to leave.

Almost as if they were switching out.

This would a problem, he realized.

Using Structural Analysis on gases or air wasn't something one could actually do with any real efficiency. It was simply the nature of magical energy in the air to dissipate into the World if one attempted something like that.

He considered leaving them behind for a moment, before discarding that idea.

If they want to set me up while keeping me alive, this would allow them to take them out without me coming to harm. And I left my helmet in the car… At least there's a spare by the RX-5, but it won't help me here.

Exhaling, he focused on calming down his breathing and heartbeat.

If it was a gas of some kind, assuming it did work on humans as it did on asari, then his previous meditation on the way here would work to protect him somewhat. Divers would sometimes hyperventilate on purpose when preparing for a deep dive without breathing gear, even going so far as to use pure oxygen tanks to quicken the process of raising the amount of oxygen in their blood. Similarly, his previous meditation had worked to raise the oxygen concentration in his blood enough that right now he could probably hold his breath for fifteen minutes while moving.

As long as he slowly and periodically exhaled, the carbon dioxide in his lungs wouldn't allow the acidity to build up, which would make it possible to keep going without stopping.

I need to get them somewhere safe first.

He crouched down to grab both and lifting them onto a shoulder each. It was a bit awkward, but he managed. He blinked as something fell on the floor, noticing that Tyra had still been carrying the bag she had taken from his house. It had slipped from her unconscious hands as he had picked her up.

Looking at it more closely with Structural Analysis, he blinked as he realized that all it contained were his i'usushij—his practice i'usu blades.

Why did she take these with her?

Shaking his head, he picked them up as well and started moving out. Settling into a brisk jog, he made sure to not bounce around too much with the two asari on his shoulders.

As he moved, the numerous drones all around him kept pace with him with eerie precision, the closest two keeping an unerring distance to him regardless of his pace. He also noted how the strange rippling water sensation on his skin had intensified, along with some other kind of strange feeling. It felt unusual to him and much more uniform. It was like a continuously vibrating string, that kept humming at a low frequency that almost rattled his teeth.

Like he was biting down on a guitar string or tuning fork that would not stop vibrating.

Ignoring it, he kept moving while scouring the surroundings with Structural Analysis. He needed to figure out what was going on and then get the hell out before he fell unconscious himself as well.

---

;

---

Nihlus Kryik sipped his tranask, exhaling at the chill bite of the turian beverage as he observed the various monitors.

The starship's temperature was carefully controlled, thus unlike on Palaven, the beverage felt almost a little too cold. But drinking it any warmer was not acceptable either - there were simply some things one did not do.

It would help him focus, he rationalized.

All around him, numerous salarians were working in the mobile base they had set up in orbit around Thessia. The Special Tasks Group and he had worked together on numerous occasions, his flexible get-it-done attitude that had always gotten him at odds with other turians making him a natural ally of the goal-oriented salarian special operations operatives.

"Targets located, forwarding coordinates," a salarian behind him suddenly exclaimed. As a result, fifteen other salarians, all sitting by their own consoles received a data packet and began to adjust their focus accordingly.

"Have you confirmed their identities?" Nihlus asked, setting down the drink.

"Yes. Shirou Emiya, Tyra T'sanis, Liara T'soni all positively identified," the operator confirmed. "Bringing up on main screen."

A large forward screen lit up, showing three figures walking through a well-lit hallway. This feed was only half of the widescreen, the adjacent one showing a three-dimensional projection of the map they had been able to make of the underground parking hall.

"Excellent. Run a security protocol Trinif: I don't want anyone spying on us or hacking in right now."

"At once, sir."

Trinif was one of several scenarios they had built up into the system. The starship they had taken to using was a black op deep cover freighter, supposedly an elcor trade vessel that was waiting for permission to land on Thessia with its precious cargo.

In actuality, it was a mobile command base, built from scratch and set up for the express purpose of rooting out Redhax. Though it functioned through intermediaries and relays that in theory made it vulnerable to hacking, it had been deemed the safest option by STG analysts: every function was fully isolated, with only shadow networks visible to any outsiders.

In theory, the numerous links and relays made it extremely vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, but that had been countered through the utilization of onion encryption along with the use of all information coming in at least triplicate.

At longer ranges that would leave it vulnerable to light-lag when it came to combat, but in orbital distances, it was deemed within acceptable parameters.

It also functioned as a failsafe and firewall, with numerous checkpoints set up to ensure that they would not be hacked directly. At no time was there a direct link between them and any of the drones, as everything was being routed and mirrored through numerous intermediaries and proxies in a labyrinthine mess. They even had two functional electronic combat AI set up to play 'defense' against any possible intruders if such were to be detected anywhere in the systems.

Supposedly researching, developing, and fielding this entire operation required a not-so-insignificant fraction of the Special Tasks Group's multi-billion credit budget. This was the degree to which the Council felt threatened by Redhax. Though Nihlus was secretly certain that the salarians had more than one unlisted operation that was capable of filling in for the gap in the budget with their profits.

They always had more going on than they were willing to share with anyone else.

Nihlus turned to another salarian, flexing his mandibles as he did. "Analysis?"

The salarian kept quiet for several seconds, a clear sign of the effort the operator was putting in. Or the difficulty he was encountering in his current task.

"Analysis?" Nihlus repeated.

Finally, the salarian responded.

"Inconclusive. Cyber-warhead was confirmed to go off, yet the target seems unhindered. Infrared scan shows pupil dilation functioning normally along with tracking of moving objects; eyesight confirmed. Hearing appears normal; able to react to sounds yet appears unable to understand speech. Own words slightly slurred, hinting at a loss at certain ranges. Body control and movements completely unaffected, has portrayed ability far beyond prognosis - no models able to account for results."

Nihlus nodded. "What is your estimate for his current combat potential, benchmark with previous physical prowess taken into consideration."

"Analysis of skycar wreckage still underway, possibility of mechanism or explosives used in removal of door not yet overruled. Prodigious mobility and physical ability displayed in dispatching of drones still unaccountable. Suggest avoiding direct confrontation, even unarmed and partially affected by cyber-warhead, possibility of taking target down without serious injury… Unlikely. Wear down and work with long-term strategies, situation permitting."

Nihlus grit his teeth, his mandibles moving to show his displeasure.

It was not exactly a situation where they could maintain a slow grinding approach as they maintained control over Thessia. For every second they kept this blockade up, millions of credits in profits were being lost by hundreds and thousands of companies and individuals.

This had to be handled by the end of today.

He pushed down his dissatisfaction and focused instead on getting everything clear in his head.

"Initiate 'Hades'."

The salarians around him looked up for but a second before they began working at an incredible pace.

With the target located, they could cut off power now from the location. This would cause the doors and accessways to go into lockdown and cut off the lighting and ventilation systems. Unlike the space where the skycars were held, the maintenance hallways were much too cramped and simple for anyone to hide inside, even if they were a labyrinthine mess.

With the targets located and the power cut off, the countermeasures would be initiated; the drones would close in and begin surrounding the target and hopefully, they could end this without further conflict. It was quite lucky that the target had chosen to enter such an isolated and sealed location, several salarians had opined.

But Nihlus felt something was off about all of it, though he couldn't quite say what yet.

Tense several minutes followed as Nihlus continued to observe and slowly drink as a nervous habit. The tension on the Combat Information Center was palpable, though every one of them was a highly trained specialist and the cream of the crop when it came to their respective fields, none knew what would happen next.

Still, they were all professionals. Neither the Spectres nor the STG accepted half-boiled amateurs.

"Targets slowing down; one of the asari has fallen unconscious."

Nihlus looked up at the projected screen, frowning. According to the predictive models and simulations, Emiya should have been the one who would collapse first, based on biology and body mass. That it had been one of the asari was troubling - as the human had shown an annoying proclivity for complete deviation from all baselines and profiles in both ability and behavior.

"Which one was it?"

"Liara T'soni, infrared scan point to a point two-degree drop in nasal temperature; she is confirmed to be unconscious," the same operator answered.

The Spectre nodded, that at least was within predicted parameters. The less physically conditioned of the two Maidens was expected to collapse more quickly, the other would be soon to follow. However, the fact that Shirou Emiya seemed wholly unhindered by the gas was growing more and more troubling by the second.

"Target on the move, no observable effects from either gas or infrasound, both asari confirmed to be unconscious."

"Did he leave them behind?" the turian asked, his flanging voice distinct from the nasal of the console operator who was monitoring the drone operation.

"No, he seems to have picked them up and is carrying them as he is moving. His pace suggests he is running at a considerable pace," the salarian responded without looking up.

"Simulations suggest the gas will have trouble affecting him if he keeps moving this quickly, concentrations in the air growing too thin if he remains in motion," another salarian spoke from across the CIC.

"Unlikely," another protested. "He is operating at a strenuous level, carrying two asari. Due to the increased oxygen intake, he will be falling unconscious sooner."

"According to predicted model, he should have fallen over already. Chosen gas has thirty-four point two one six percent greater effect on humans than on asari, yet not noticeable effects observed yet. Cannot assume predictions are accurate."

Nihlus nodded, turning to the salarian operations officer in charge of this team; Jondum Bau.

The tall salarian had dark grey skin with large black eyes, fitting with his calm and controlled demeanor, the turian thought.

He was the most recent Spectre candidate and this was the third evaluatory mission they were taking together. If all things went well, the salarian would be joining him soon enough among the ranks of Special Tactics and Recon operatives.

"Pull the three rear drone wings and place them ahead of the target. If he is moving forward, then keeping the gas concentration ahead is more important. Even if he were to turn around, it will not have dissipated, allowing us to reverse formation as necessary," Jondum ordered and the other salarians immediately moved to enact that order.

Nihlus nodded in approval, that way the amount of gas the human would be subjected to would be maximized.

Of course, sooner or later the drones would run out and the formation would have to be adjusted for a replacement to be made. The chemical cartridges were highly efficient and densely packed, thus it wouldn't be a problem yet. But if this went on for much longer…

"We need to wrap this up quickly," Nihlus concluded and Jondum nodded as they observed the main screen.

From the orbiting starship, a tightbeam shot out, forwarded by satellites until it found the STG's mobile ground unit that was set up as the relay for the underground drones. Of course, given how few drones they had, they could not have normally kept in contact like this with them operating underground.

But that was where Nihlus had come in.

With his contacts in the Turian Hierarchy, he had been able to procure several thousand of the prototype miniature drones for use in this operation. They were too small to be seen by the naked eye at a distance over a meter and could move very rapidly.

Equipped with sonar and lidar, they were designed for situations just like this; undetectable infiltration units that could rapidly map out and search underground or fortified locations. The sonar allowed them to navigate and search their surroundings while the lidar could also function as a tightbeam communicator. This allowed them to extend the command relay from the orbiting starship all the way into the underground parking system. Additionally, the sonar had been re-purposed to act as an infrasound emitter that had been specially adjusted and calibrated to disturb and tire out a human being at a range that was just within the audible range for a human being.

According to the specs detailed, it would not affect the asari at all, either. Nihlus found the implications of that slightly disturbing, realizing it meant that the STG must have been experimenting with human subjects in order to be able to develop such a specific and discerning weapon.

If such had been performed against the humans, what was preventing similar experiments from having been made against turians?

Nihlus shook his head - he needed to focus on the here and now rather than anything else.

"Kryik, sir. Incoming transmission from Tela Vasir," a salarian by the side, handling communications and coordination with locals and the other Spectre spoke.

"Has she found that rogue Justicar?" the turian asked without looking away from the screen where he could see the human running in infrared light.

"No, sir. They've been scouting in a widening pattern but so far nothing has been found in the Serrinan sea or on the coast," the salarian conveyed. "She informs you that a Matriarch came asking about one of the asari hostages. She asks for you to confirm receiving this transmission."

Nihlus turned to look at salarian, flaring his mandibles. "Irrelevant, ignore such transmission from now on. We don't have time to deal with that, let her handle it."

"Yes, sir."

Nihlus turned back to his target, narrowing his eyes as he felt his trigger finger itching. He knew fighting smart was the way to go yet he yearned to be on the ground. Even if he was a known eccentric among the turians for his flexible tactics which made him a natural match with the salarians, he too still preferred an honest head-on fight whenever possible.

The salarians had already once completely failed against this man, with their careful calculations and plans...

Perhaps it was time for him to try his talons against this foe? It has been his instructions that had allowed the cyber-warhead to successfully strike him, the kinetic barrier adjustments something he came up with through observation. Just as this human kept one-upping them, so too had he managed one such up on him.

Nihlus itched to try himself against such a foe, the predatory instincts deep within him rousing at the hunt. Humans were such soft targets, their soft bellies and vulnerable necks simply screaming at him as being easy for his sharp talons and teeth. Shaking his head and flaring his mandibles to dismiss those thoughts, he returned his attention to the screen.

But results always came first, his personal desires a distant second.

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Emiya exhaled a sliver of a breath as he kept moving.

His heart was beating at a slightly elevated pace and his hardsuit was beginning to turn warm with the exertion. But it wasn't a problem yet.

The fact that he would not be able to shake off the drones this way was however a problem. Even if he found a way out, as long as he had these drones keeping track of him, nothing would really change. They would just pick off right where they'd left when he'd gone underground.

He needed to shake them off before he could get out of here.

For that, just moving quickly would not work. If they had enough drones for the long chains of tightbeam communication to be established, then even if he broke off unexpectedly they would surely find him again if he did not know how they were doing it.

No, the length of the tightbeam communication chain is too long with all of the mass effect signatures I can feel. There's something more going on.

He considered mirrors for a moment before discarding that thought. Reflecting tightbeam communications would be just as difficult as positioning drones, without any of the mobility the drones would offer. He was sure he would have noticed something like that by now if that was the case.

Which means, there's something more at play here.

Keeping pace as he was, he would not discover anything. He needed to act out and take them off guard for a moment, at least.

Exhaling, he slowed down just a bit. He focused, observing the nearest drones as he did. They slowed down to match him. But there was a delay of a fraction of a second before they did. Given the distance from the nearest drones…

I can do it.

Emiya had considered playing possum, pretending to have been overcome by the gas and acting in his Servant body once an opening revealed itself, but he did not want to expose either himself or of the asari to this gas for too much longer. He slowed down to a complete halt, exhaling completely as he set down the asari on his shoulders along with the bag and backpack as if he was growing too tired to keep going and setting down to rest for a moment.

He was currently in the middle of a U-shaped turn of two right angles, at the bottom of the U, with a ninety-degree turn both up ahead and behind, at a distance exceeding the distance they had been trying to keep at all times from him. He noticed that they had preferred to keep out of sight rather than attempting to strictly keep their distance, meaning that this was the optimal position to set up a trap.

Emiya inhaled slowly, trying to see if he could taste anything unusual in the air and hoping that he was not inhaling pure concentrated poison as he did, but again found nothing he could actually recognize. A wasted breath, drawing him ever closer to unconsciousness.

But for this next bit, oxygen would be important.

Feeling the renewed fire running through his veins, he looked ahead into the darkness. He rolled the ball of his foot against the ground, though there was no need to stretch since he had warmed up properly from his jogging previously.

Coiling up, he relaxed and then…

With a burst, he began to dash forward down the hall.

Unburdened by two asari and bags, he could move much more freely again. It wasn't a matter of muscle or generating speed, not given how much power he could put out right now that he had stopped holding back, rather it had been a problem of how much he could move without hurting his passengers.

Building up to a quarter of his full speed, he crossed to the end of the hall coming to the ninety degrees turn in the space of two heartbeats. The drone ahead had sped away as soon as it had been notified something was going on, flying up ahead to keep from his view just as the one behind him was adjusting to keep up. They must be predicting that he had decided to ditch his load and try running on his own.

But instead, as he came to the corner he crouched and jumped.

He had no intention of taking the corner and running onward. Instead, he was going to jump off the wall and run to the other end at his true full sprint, making a 180 degree turn to catch the rear drone before it could turn and escape from sight. With the lag in reaction to his movement the drones suffered, if he timed it right he was sure to catch a glimpse of the rear drone.

Performing a half-flip through the air, he 'landed' on the wall.

For a fraction of a moment, his momentum was sufficient to keep him against the wall and claw against gravity's hold on him. He crouched, coiling himself as he looked 'up', seeing Tyra and Liara. And like a hundred-meter dash sprinter, he exploded off of the wall nearly at his full speed. With one, two, four steps he had already crossed the whole off the hallway to the other end in the space of half a heartbeat.

Inching towards the outer wall, he jumped and turned to run along the wall as he came to the opposite end's ninety-degree turn, using the wall as a springboard to instantly turn the corner. There, he found his first glimpse of a drone underground. It did not have a cloak or the usual bright panels activated, causing it to look like nothing more than a floating disk in the air he could barely see a glimpse of in the darkness.

A tiny flying saucer, just as before.

But that wasn't what he was interested in. What bothered him was how they were communicating. This deep underground, they must have set up a more complex array to allow communication, the most obvious choice being a tightbeam relay or a connection to the landlines.

And if his guess was correct, then right about…

Now!

The lag he had observed meant that a communique should be coming through to the drone he was seeing. And just for an instant, even with his clouded eyes and turbulent senses, he could see something in the dark. A pinprick of light, something that could have been just a dancing illusion by his mind. But in the next instant the drone he could sense suddenly reversed its direction and began to rapidly fly away from him.

He didn't care about it at all: he had something more interesting already in his sights.

Emiya didn't stop, continuing to run forward down the hallway with nearly no loss of momentum from the corner he passed through. He dived forward into a forward roll, his hand snatching forward and closing its fingers around something. As he came to stand upright and bleed out his excess momentum, he ignored the drone flying towards him as he had dashed past it, the thing so pitifully slow in comparison to him that it was almost embarrassing.

Opening his hand, he looked at the tiny object between two of his fingers. With his eyesight still fuzzy and without a good source of light, he couldn't see all too well, thus he resorted to using Structural Analysis again.

Immediately he realized what it was; a miniature drone.

It was so small that most people would not be able to see it if it was right between their feet even in full daylight. A marvelous machine of incredible precision and engineering. A second later, he realized it was the source of the rippling-water-surface sensation he had been experiencing until now.

Sonar? And it's also working as a tightbeam relay underground, allowing the bigger drones to keep moving in coordination.

As the larger drone approached him from behind, he grabbed it too out of the air and brought it up to his face. Through Structural Analysis he found the compressed chunk used for the aerosol. It would mix with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air to create the gas, he realized. Comparing the two drones side by side, he found the camera on the larger one and looked directly into it.

He smirked, then.

"Oh, was that all?"

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Nihlus almost dropped his cylinder as the target suddenly moved faster than any of the systems could keep up. One second he was running down the hallway, the next he had literally simply appeared at the other end.

And as the salarian operators struggled to keep up and adjust the drones, he disappeared again.

It was only two seconds later they found him again, as Shirou Emiya casually grabbed the drone out of the air and brought it up to his face. There was a moment of utter stillness and silence as the entire CIC team looked up at the main screen where the feed from the drone had been brought up.

They looked at the stoic human, who seemed to be looking down at them all.

And then, he smirked.

"Oh, was that all?"

Nihlus had time to blink as the sound came through before both drones were crushed and that particular feed was lost.

"Drone C-4 and m-D144 lost!" A salarian shouted and the Spectre blinked as he realized he was in a daze.

"Set all drones with a secondary payload of adhesive to swarm him right now! Have all drones release all their gas payloads right now!" he shouted and salarians hastened to obey.

"Have we a countermeasure for his previous neutralization of the adhesive? The tests are still inconclusive on how he managed to break free from it so quickly," Jondum Bau noted, looking down at the turian Spectre with inquisitive eyes.

"…No, but a good action immediately is better than a perfect action later. We've been made and he's planning something." The turian's mandible twitched in annoyance as he spoke.

The salarian Spectre candidate nodded. "Time for the ground team to move in? They're close enough."

Nihlus inhaled slowly, trying to think but the smirk he had seen made it difficult. That wasn't the behavior of someone on the run. So far, he had been thinking of himself as a predator and the target as prey. But the sudden burst of speed had completely flipped his paradigms and he needed to adjust before he made a mistake that he could have foreseen.

"Yes. Have them go in with the hoses and try to corner him. He can't hold his breath forever, we need to wear him down quickly," Nihlus finally said.

Jondum nodded. "I'll coordinate the team."

The turian nodded before looking up. "Sitrep on the drones! Where is my swarm!"

"Drones closing in from both sides! Three lost so far, sir!"

Nihlus blinked at that his mandibles pulling back as he almost bared his teeth in surprise. "Already? Coordinate and set them in as staggered columns until you have enough numbers to overwhelm him!"

He looked up at the main screen, a composite simulation created by the continuous sonar the drones were emitting. "Has the infrasound shown any effects so far?"

A salarian turned around to look at him, responding with a "No, sir!"

"Then turn it off, have all micro-drones focus on sonar support! I want perfect clarity for the combat drones!" Nihlus shouted.

That should enhance the combat VIs' ability to react.

"Yes, sir! Another fourteen drones down!"

Nihlus ground his teeth then, his tongue going across the insides of his incisors.

Suddenly the main screen went dark and he blinked, looking around as he tried to figure out what was happening. All the salarians were in the zone as they moved their fingers at extreme speeds and precision, with several of them even directly plugged into the system to enhance their reaction speeds.

Ignoring his revulsion at the intrusive cybernetics, Nihlus shouted again. "What happened! Report!"

"The ceiling collapsed, there's too much dust for the tightbeam to work! Drones within vicinity are unresponsive, sir! Long-range sonar still available but inaccurate! No eyes on target!" a salarian responded, looking up for just half a second as he spoke at triple the usual speed.

A definite sign of an excited state by the salarians, Nihlus knew.

More than one among them was taking out pills and small hypodermic needles, injecting combat stims and mental enhancers as they were picking up the pace. Though nominally in charge, it was obvious that the STG had its own designs on this situation that had nothing to do with Nihlus.

"Where is the ground team?"

"Advancing, ETA to scene ten seconds."

"Drones?"

"40% on-site still operational, dust is making communications spotty!"

"Analysis on dust concentration."

"Unnatural given building material, tampering by target probable."

"Counter-measures?"

"Assume related to personal apartment durability, suggest possibility of nanotechnology. Strong EMP, possible."

"Negatory - would disable too many combat assets."

"AI analysis suggests possible additional modifications on Shirou Emiya; prolonged inhalation noted. Lungs modified to produce or modify oxygen to give it suitable chemical properties. Rapidly weaken concrete, possible."

As the salarians began to go into overdrive, Nihlus flexed his talons. This wasn't getting anywhere, he realized.

"Ground team on-site!"

"Visual re-established!"

Nihlus looked at the screen, noting that the head-bob and height of the camera suggested a live feed from a helmet-mounted camera. The hallway looked like a bomb had gone off inside of it. There were dozens of broken drones laying on the ground, broken and shattered. The ceiling had collapsed, leaving an unusually fine coating of white dust everywhere and still in the air.

The asari were nowhere to be seen, nor was Shirou Emiya.

"He jumped and moved out."

"Ground team to follow, equipped with EAD-gear."

The salarian ground team jumped, easily clearing the height of the former ceiling as they landed on the wall's top with their mass effect field generators combined with miniature jump jets.

Spreading outwards, the map displayed on the main screen expanded to show the space outside of the hallway. There were four skycars in sight, parked into neat little platforms.

"There, highlight it for the ground team," one salarian said, pointing out a spot where there seemed to be another broken wall.

"Check where it leads!"

"It's not on any of the blueprints! No sonar mapping available either!"

"How many drones do we still have?"

"Fifteen operational combat drones, 436 miniature drones in operative zone with battery for an additional half-hour!"

"Pursuing targets." The comms from the ground team reported as the salarian analysts continued to try and predict Shirou Emiya's movements.

But it was beginning to be clear to Nihlus that they had been utterly beat as after a minute of the ground teams and drones searching, they still had not been able to find anything.

Damn it, what the hell just happened?

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"You two feeling any better?" Emiya asked as he crouched in front of the pair of groggy asari.

With the fresh air, they seemed to be coming to again. And since he had decided to let loose a little, he had been able to cross a much greater distance than they had been able to before.

"Oww—-—my —ach-hurts— - _—" Tyra complained something, throwing words his way in a constant barrage of unintelligible noises.

Liara seemed to be a little worse, simply groaning and rubbing her forehead. He had gotten them out of the accessways and into a spot where a rainwater grill allowed sunlight from above to stream down at them, lighting up their surroundings a little.

The natural light now seemed somehow... more radiant to him?

Strange.

At least so far it seemed like they weren't following him.

With Structural Analysis, he had a much more complete blueprint of the surroundings available to him than something like a quick sonar or old, contradictory records could produce, revealing that there were ways to cross through the existing pathways if one was willing to knock down a few walls in the process.

Of course, the second wall he had so obviously broken through was just a red herring. He had in fact projected a supernatural sword and cut a square hole into another wall and gone through, after which he had placed back the cut-out section and used Reinforcement to repair the cuts. The trick was to use a sharp enough sword that it could cut through the wall, but not one with such mystical weight that it cut the concept of the wall so deeply that it would be too difficult to repair.

It was something he had invented while watching cartoons with some orphans in a war-torn country long before his first death that he still vividly remembered, even if he couldn't remember any of their faces or names anymore.

The red herring hallway would lead his pursuers down a completely different direction as far as he could tell, leading them somewhere completely different.

Well, out of sight, out of mind.

They weren't a problem anymore for now.

While he had been running through the parking hall, he had stolen an omnitool from a parked skycar while he was at it. It was being used as a simple navigation tool and a dash camera, so he didn't feel too bad about the theft. Especially since he left a credit chit twice its face value behind.

He was getting it up to his standards right now, clearing away the unnecessary programs and clutter as he continued observing the two recovering asari.

That should do it, for now.

Turning on the microphone and speech recognition, he patched it through to his cybernetics.

"Guh, I feel like I got tackled by that Matron coach from the Ulee team again," Tyra said, spitting as she shook her head.

"What happened…? And, where are we? Is that you, Saiga?" Liara spoke, standing up slowly.

"Take it easy," Emiya replied gently, as he reached out to support her. "They were using a knockout gas, just breathe for now."

"Oh, well that is simply wonderful. I had never been drugged before," Liara complained as she did as told, breathing slowly and deeply. "Fujimura Saiga - you are without a doubt the worst thing that has ever happened to me, in all my life. Nothing compares; not the sandstorm that lasted two years; not the time I accidentally deleted my term paper and had to rewrite it from scratch in two hours; not the time I was nearly shot by a varren..."

Emiya almost laughed at that, realizing just how much she had been holding back her growing irritation and annoyance at him until now.

"Umm, Liara, don't you think you've been chewing him out enough already? I mean… I thought for the first five minutes that it was your right, but it's kind of… You know, already." Tyra seemed to be grimacing, and in response Liara scoffed.

"It's all true. The single. Worst. Thing. To ever happen to me," she reaffirmed, ignoring Tyra as she exhaled.

For a moment, Emiya considered speaking up to let them know that he could hear now. Just for a moment. He was sure her reaction would be quite amusing. But then he decided that it would be more amusing to keep quiet and listen to what she had to say from now on when she still thought he couldn't hear.

"If you're up to it, we should keep moving," he spoke, suddenly realizing that he was having some trouble speaking due to the omnitool picking up his own speech and feeding it back to him. It was like an electronic speech jammer. Well, if he concentrated it wasn't a problem, but disabling it while he spoke was easier. "It's not far, you can rest once we're there."

Liara sighed, standing up. "Fine, fine. Let's get this over with."

Emiya reached out with a hand and helped Tyra stand up.

She smiled at him as she grabbed his hand, he could vaguely see. With the omnitool giving him back a reference to hearing, he could actively filter out a lot of the sensations again which worked to improve his sight even further. Though it was still ways off from being back to normal.

"I'll go up first, follow me once you can," he said, turning to face the ladder that led to the surface.

Emiya climbed up until he reached the locked cover that was the only thing keeping them from the surface. With some effort, he cranked open the locking mechanism. Carefully lifting the metal cover of the asarihole in the ground, he looked out.

No one is here, as expected.

Pushing aside the cover completely, he jumped out and dusted himself. It was a secluded corner of the Serrice University grounds, with plenty of cover from tall trees and surrounding walls. Satellites above shouldn't be able to pick them up with the cover overhead, he reasoned. There weren't even any security cameras here as he had noted long before.

Leaning down, he shouted for them to join him at the top.

They grumbled and groaned, but slowly managed to make their way back up to the ground. They treated the sun as if it had been a long-gone and dear friend for a minute before they would get back on their feet and follow him.

Putting back the asarihole cover, he motioned for them to follow him once they were able to keep going again.

"Huh, isn't this the University of Serrice? I thought we might come out on another planet entirely at this rate…"

Emiya blinked, turning around to stare at Tyra who had just spoken. Hiding his amusement, he led them forward, arriving at the back entrance as he had planned. Hacking his way in and suppressing the alarms, he led them in and locked the door behind them.

Good, the security guard did not notice anything.

The thick walls of the building seemed to isolate them completely, as just outside they had still been able to hear the sounds of numerous gunships and drones flying still flying high above. The seemingly unchanging insides remained as pleasantly cool and calm as ever before, the carefully controlled humidity and light levels feeling rather pleasant even to his relatively synesthesia-confused senses.

Turning around to glance at the two asari who were still following him, he noticed that Liara seemed to have already realized where they were going, her growing excitement and energy obvious.

Tyra by comparison seemed rather confused and lost, following in the back as she looked around at the numerous high cabinets and displays. She asked something and Liara answered in rapid words as they continued walking forward, but Emiya didn't bother listening as he worked on sorting out more and more of the cross-wired sensations again.

Arriving at the personnel-only access door, he took out the digital access card. Bringing it out to the doorway he swiped it quickly, expecting the door to work as normal and almost running into it as the digital lock blared a red access denied warning back at him. He blinked, raising the card up and frowning at it.

Must have been that pulse, does that mean it works off of similar principles as my cybernetics? That's something to look into.

He repeated the card swipe, this time hacking into the system and opening the door as if nothing was wrong. Walking through, he continued towards the office.

Knocking only once by habit, he entered, as waiting for a reply was meaningless given his current state. Even so, he could sense the panic and hesitation off of Liara as he simply strode in. Looking around he couldn't see anyone around and he noted that the desk terminal was running a catalog update. Which meant of course that…

Professor Baliya Haphia, Curator of the Museum of the University of Serrice, Matriarch, and one of the foremost experts on various cultural artifacts, was currently sleeping on the floor behind her desk. She really had no sense for tension or current events, the ongoing fighting and operations outside and below the museum in no way affecting her daily life.

As usual, really.

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Thanks to PseudoSteak, Olive Birdy and Tactical Tunic for proofreading.