Chapter 5:

The man in front of him wore only a black hakama. Scars adorned his bare torso, some jagged and some clean and straight. Not old but not any younger than thirty, his features were spotted with old burns that spoke of sparks flying from molten metal.

Shirou Traced Kanshou and Bakuya.

"You're set then," Muramasa said cheerfully, lifting the black katana from his shoulder. "Let's get started."

He took no stance but advanced with an aura about him that reminded Shirou of an avalanche.

Any reluctance Shirou had been harbouring upon seeing his benefactor disappeared.

Kanshou curved up and blocked a line of darkness from cutting his head in half, but at the cost being flung from Shirou's grip.

Bakuya cut towards Muramasa's hamstrings and clanged against the black cross-guard of the man's sword, which Muramasa took as an opportunity to cut one handed at Shirou's legs.

Shirou disengaged by pushing back against the sword, tracing Kanshou again and raising his guard even more warily.

"Huh," said Muramasa, inspecting the edge of his sword. "Ya tough."

Not tough enough apparently. Shirou's cheek was scored from barely being able to parry that first slash, and he felt a dull burning on his shin that felt like a freely bleeding cut. He had not expected a combination of Reinforcement and the married swords' passive ability to completely negate that sword's edge, but he had been sure that he had managed to completely parry and block those strikes.

Even more alarming, Kanshou and Bakuya were already damaged from that simple exchange of blows.

"That sword's blade is longer than it looks," said Shirou. And I've seen that style of swordsmanship before. But where?

Shirou's Structural Analysis of the sword Muramasa carried told him that the blade was supposed to be brittle, made with too much carbon in its mix to be anything close to taking blows without shattering. But it was a cursed, demonic blade. In return for any damage to the sword being negated, it could not be sheathed until it had drunk its fill of blood in battle. To further serve that purpose, any wounds it left would heal slowly and bleed worse. Avalon was taxed as it was keeping him from bleeding out in mere minutes.

The name of that sword was Muramasa, after its maker and owner. A B-rank Noble Phantasm in its own right. He could not see past the curse and into what kind of experiences that went into its make either.

"Ya think so?" Muramasa asked thoughtfully. "I think yer just not a good swordsman. I mean-"

He disappeared, leaving a vacuum in space that made the air shriek.

BEHIND! Shirou threw himself to the side, swinging both blades.

The force of Muramasa's blow shattered Kanshou and Bakuya, throwing him even further to the side and without a weapon for a single moment.

Kanshou and Bakuya Projected in time to block a strike that never came.

Muramasa spun his sword onto his shoulder, and said casually while leaning against a tree: "I ain't even tryin' that hard."

His style is familiar. When have I seen it before? That stanceless, formless style. "You're different from when we last spoke," said Shirou, trying to stall for time.

"Well, that was a different 'me'. The 'true me' ya might perchance say." Muramasa shrugged. "What's the most important basis fer a Servant's power, kiddo?"

"Their legend," Shirou replied, not seeing where he was coming from.

"That's it!" crowed Muramasa, stepping off from the tree and raising his sword once more.

The onslaught made the forest ring with the sound of screeching metal. Muramasa's swordsmanship was almost peerless, and his strength was unbelievable. It was like fighting the wind, always moving from one cut to the next without pause. Even the openings he left in non-vital areas were left untouched, and the few vitals he did leave open were relentlessly slashed or stabbed at.

Shirou found himself two steps from being cornered against the tree at his back and knew he had to do something drastic.

He went on the offensive. If there was no opening in Muramasa's attacks, he had to forge one himself.

Shirou slammed both his blades against the man's blade with all his strength, forcing Muramasa back a step at the cost of shattering his Projections.

It was enough.

Shirou threw himself backwards, throwing a newly Traced pair of swords at Muramasa's neck.

"Spirit and technique, flawless and firm."

Muramasa cocked his head to the side, batting the swords aside with contemptuous ease, and easily kept up with Shirou's next flurry of strikes immediately afterwards. "No pride in your swordsmanship," the man said quietly, his voice still carrying above the clash of steel against steel.

"Our strength rips the mountains."

Muramasa's eyes widened and he twisted his body to the side to avoid a flash of black steel, even while fending off Shirou's swords.

The first Kanshou Shirou had been disarmed of spun through the air.

"I know these," Muramasa said with a rabid smile. "Gan Jiang's make!"

"Our swords split the water."

Shirou feinted a cut and instead threw his swords to the side and projected another pair quickly enough to catch Muramasa's return stroke in a cross guard, locking the man's blade in place for a moment.

"Our names reach the imperial villa."

Three swords came curving at the man's neck, spine, and groin.

Shirou let go of his swords to trace yet another pair, the attraction between all the oncoming swords enough to hold even Muramasa's blade in place for the moment.

"The two of us cannot hold the heavens together!"

He slashed at the man's ribcage with both swords.

An improvised attack coming from five directions at once. Impossible to block with the one sword Muramasa carried, impossible to dodge in the position he was in.

In that moment, Muramasa muttered something under his breath.

"Tsumugari Muramasa."

And Muramasa's blade blurred.

Seven swords clashed against seven swords, appearing from nowhere yet feeling as if they could not be anywhere else.

But not a movement came from Muramasa's sword.

Shirou did not see so much as somehow grasp what had happened.

In another timeline, Muramasa had freed his sword and batted away Kanshou from cutting his neck.

In another timeline, Muramasa had freed his sword and struck down Bakuya from stabbing his heart.

And so on.

Every instance of where Muramasa's sword could possibly be was made manifest into reality.

This was the pinnacle this blacksmith had reached. A technique born of the frustration and desperation of fighting against a blessing that had turned into a curse. The defiance of Karma itself, in defiance of how history would remember him.

In that frozen moment, Muramasa looked Shirou in the eye and said with a sad smile:

"Good stuff, kid. Take this and go as far as you can with it."

As Muramasa cut through him with one sword that was infinite, Shirou felt something break in his mind, something that had been stoppering something else up for a long time.

Knowledge flowed in as a rushing torrent, and everything faded to white.

A boy grew up alone, with no knowledge of his parenthood beyond what the old blacksmith who had taken him in had told him. Fools, the old man had called them. Fools who could not be discreet with their emotions and paid the price for it.

Estranged from his peers, the boy had thrown himself into the blacksmith's work, quickly becoming obsessed and proficient enough to get the old man to train him properly. Eventually.

The old man taught to the boy how to create scythes, horseshoes, knives. And later swords. He taught the boy the bitterness of knowing that no matter how fine one's work was, there were some swords created by mortals that had reached the realm of the Gods themselves by the virtue of how well they had been made. It was in this the old man had given the boy an ideal to strive towards, this boy so desperate for purpose and meaning in his life.

As the boy grew into maturity, the old man on his deathbed named him 'Sengo Muramasa', finally referring to him as something other than 'boy' for the first and last time.

And in his youth, after some measure of infamy had truly set the fires of his forges ablaze, Muramasa made a foolish agreement with a certain capricious goddess to create swords that would cut anything and everything.

He cared not as his name quickly became infamous as a forger of death, as his blades became soaked in more and more blood.

But he did care when he was presented with a work of Goro Nyudo Masamune by a travelling monk.

As his finest sword cut even the current of the water, that sword had cut not one thing deserving of harm. Not only steel had sung then, but the river, the stones and the trees had made a beautiful choir that resonated in his soul. Here was a sword that meant more than killing, what other men dictated swords do.

Here was a sword as an embodiment of an ideal.

He exiled himself to where no one could find him, deep in the woods, trying to find the truth of that dead man's swords, trying to separate the curse that was imbued in his own swords.

He saw instead that it was blatantly impossible.

Thus, Muramasa had taken on a new identity, enough to disassociate himself from the man who had made that agreement so long ago. Even if that disassociation was only in his own mind. He stopped forging swords, forsaken as he was by his ideals. He mastered the art of the sword as he had mastered the forging of them.

He had even picked up a child along the way-

Sasaki Kojiro?

-But that boy was troubling in his own way. He had not seen much of himself in that child when he had taken him up, and he never truly did. Too relaxed about everything except the swinging of a sword. The one thing that mattered the least to Muramasa at the time. To him, learning the art of swordsmanship was a means to an end.

Time passed. It had been so long he had thought the goddess had forgotten about him.

He was nearly there. Where one sword's forging could not sever his curse, his swordsmanship seemed poised to be able to slay the demon in his heart.

Yet years long for man are but eye blinks to the immortal.

He lost his life to her, of course. One does not try to break an agreement with a goddess like her so lightly.

He left behind only one regret, and perhaps it was inconsequential.

I would have liked to see something of mine truly live.

Shirou opened his eyes.

He lay on his back in a field of grass with no trees in sight. A sun shed light from a cloudless sky, but not somehow not blindingly so. His body felt whole, the injuries made by Muramasa's blade gone.

"I've had enough of forests to last a lifetime," said a gravelly voice to his right quietly. "And even then, some."

Shirou sat up and saw mere meters away from him an old man sitting on the grass cross-legged, his back to him.

He wore roughly-sewn robes of white, clearly dirtied and rumpled. He looked wizened and brought low by age, but some strands of his hair still retained their crimson colouring.

"Muramasa?" Shirou asked.

The old man turned and looked at Shirou with brilliant golden eyes. "Emiya Shirou. I had not known I had left behind descendants when I passed..and yet here we are."

Shirou looked around. An endless plain of grass stretched dizzily into the horizon, each blade tinted a light grey.

This was undoubtedly a world of steel, but it was not his.

"This is the answer I reached," proclaimed the old Muramasa with a short sweep of his arm. "An answer that could only be reached after you understood all the aspects of my life, but at the same time you could only reach that understanding due to our souls being so similar."

Shirou ran a hand through the grass. He felt the truth of them as his fingers brushed against the soft metal. Each of these is one sword, he realized. One sword's possibilities. This is the Tsumugari Muramasa.

"Your Reality Marble?" He asked.

"Reality Marble?" Muramasa raised an eyebrow.

"Your soul, I guess." Shirou amended. Apparently the sword-smith did not know much about magecraft.

Muramasa shrugged. "It's a good description as any."

Shirou looked the man over more critically. "Why do you look so..."

"This was my age when I died."

"But your appearance just now..."

"As I said, the only way you would understand my life is if you understood all its aspects. Yes, you understood the works I left behind as well as my true character, even. But you were missing something crucial, something that makes me able to be summoned as a Servant despite not being a true Heroic Spirit."

Muramasa gestured to himself.

"Your legend," Shirou realized. "How history depicted you. That was what I just fought."

"Aye," said Muramasa tiredly, golden eyes downcast. "I apologize for any unpleasantness you experienced. It wasn't until later, at the age of this current form, that I realized her curse affected my dealings with others as well." The old man rubbed at his chin. "I suppose that's why Tsuda grew up the way he did." He grunted. "I never did right by him, did I?"

Shirou chose not to say anything. Sasaki Kojiro had been trained by Muramasa, if only reluctantly. Like Kiritsugu had only given Shirou the very basics of magecraft, Muramasa had given Kojiro tuition that was bare-bones. It was a wonder the man had grown to be the swordsman he was.

No, perhaps it was because of Muramasa's strange tuition that Kojiro had mastered what he had. A sort of man who devoted the utmost effort into cutting swallows down with only a sword.

"I might meet him," said Shirou, thinking of Chaldea's large catalogue of Servants.

"Really? Well that's something." Muramasa shook his head. "I didn't expect you to meet your beloved either. What a strange set of circumstances you find yourself in, successor."

Shirou nodded and looked up at the boundless azure sky. Such peace he felt just sitting here.

"You really were content, weren't you?"

Muramasa scratched behind an ear. "What's that?"

Shirou hesitated. Do I really want to know? "Forsaking your ideals."

The old man was silent for a moment. "At the time," he said slowly. "It felt like giving up my left arm. Giving up the purpose I had inherited from my old man. but it isn't a bad thing to lack a great purpose in your life, as long as you give yourself any purpose at all."

Shirou looked at the old man, understanding dawning. "It doesn't matter how many burdens you carry..."

"As long as you go as far as you can with them. It goes both ways." Muramasa finished with a dry smile. "Thank the author for me for bringing you here. I liked him. A better man than he gives himself credit for."

"You two have something in common then."

Muramasa scratched with a gnarled finger at his temple. "Don't tease this old man," he grumbled.

"I was being serious," denied Shirou.

Muramasa pursed his lips. He placed his hands on his knees and said, "Shirou, I was not a good man. I did not do good things, nor am I even known as the greatest sword smith of a small island country. I was only ever good at what I did. I crafted swords knowing they would kill people, I even spent much my life trying craft a sword that would allow me to sever myself from my own fate, my own karma. An act that cost me the very thing I was trying to achieve."

"You aren't the one who put the curse on your swords."

"I made peace with my sins a long time ago," said Muramasa.

"You defied a goddess once you realized where your ideals led you."

"Sucessor..."

"I'm not praising you," said Shirou with a faint smile. "Just telling it how it is."

Muramasa squinted at him, and let out a huff. "Kids these days. Where did the concept of a venerable elder go?"

Shirou looked back up at the sky with a smile. "Age is only a suggestion of wisdom. I've lived for decades and I still feel like the idiot I was in my youth."

"Isn't that the truth," muttered Muramasa. "Well, in any event, you should be able to use that 'Reality Marble' of yours now."

Shirou frowned. "I don't feel any different."

"You will once you leave this place."

"That sounded ominous."

"Hrm. It wasn't meant to be. You'll be fine. Your problem came from the fact that no matter how similar our two souls were, we were still different people from different eras, and the 'melding' I suppose still had lasting side effects. After reconciling yourself with my legend just now, you should just feel more of my powers available to you."

"Like your Tsumugari Muramasa," murmured Shirou.

"It'll be yours to make your own," said Muramasa with a grin. "Like all the other swords I've made, and all the other swords I've seen." He frowned slightly. "I'm a little envious of your magic. No need for a forge at all to create your works."

"I'm not much good for much else," said Shirou dismissively.

Muramasa sighed. "We see the best in people even when they don't see it themselves. Did your parents teach you that?"

"I don't know," said Shirou, shrugging. "I lost my memories of them in a fire."

"I see. A shame," said Muramasa, turning away for a moment. "Tragedy seems to have dogged both our steps in life."

"I have no regrets."

Muramasa turned to face him once more and smiled. "Likewise, my friend." He looked up. "I should let you know this will be the last time we talk like this."

"This is the last of your power I have to take," stated Shirou.

"Indeed. In truth, you could have simply woken up to face your Master and demonstrated your potential as soon as my legend had conceded it to you, but I wanted one last chance to speak to you before you went off on your path."

"About what?"

"Things," said Muramasa simply. "Anything. A peaceful sort of talk."

And Shirou obliged the tired old man as long as he could.

They spoke of the similarities between their lives that had not already been retreaded. They spoke of differences. Muramasa was surprised at Shirou's old hobby of housework, and Shirou was in turn surprised at Muramasa's hobby of bird-watching. Both had questioned the other and found valid points in each after a discussion.

The talk had come around to wives, a topic Muramasa was most interested in, to Shirou's dismay, when Shirou felt something pulling at him. Something light but definite, like a puppy tugging at his shoes for attention.

Muramasa seemed to have felt it too. "Ah, that must be your Master's call," he said, unfolding his legs and standing up with a wince. "It was a good talk. I am not sad to see our acquaintanceship end like this."

"Neither am I," said Shirou. "I've said this before, but I guess I'll say this again: It was an honor, Sengo Muramasa."

The old man smiled broadly, teeth gleaming in the sunlight. "Likewise, successor. Likewise."

Shirou closed his eyes and pulled back at the summons.

And this world of steel collapsed in a flash of white.

A/N:

My writing could always use some work. This piece more so than usual I think. A little short too.

Update took a while because school. I've things due now that I had not before. More updates will likely take this long, unfortunately unless something dreadful happens.

I got ridiculously lucky with rolls on both JP and NA FGO. Musashi in two ten-rolls is good enough, but in NA?

Jeanne in one ticket. Tamamo in one ten-roll. And Orion and Atanyanta in the other. All these rolls done back to back.

The hunt for mats begins...after my mid terms.

Thank you for reading this fic. I appreciate any and all criticism. This is a learning process for me, and the more information I get about my writing the better I get. So you guys can talk as much smack as you want, don't hold back.