By the time they all left the pub, dawn had fully broken, and the party was left to figure out how to get settled into the new town. They decided to split up to gather information and meet up in a few hours back outside the Crimson Moon headquarters. Manato went off to find a tavern, Ranta and Moguzo struck off for the marketplace, Yume and Haruhiro left to explore the town a bit, and Shirou wanted to find a blacksmith for some reason, with Shihoru along for the ride.

When they eventually managed to find a blacksmith, following the black smoke the forge belched out into the sky, Shirou introduced himself warmly to the owner, a portly man with a robust beard, and began surveying the weaponry that was on display.

Almost reverently, Shirou traced his hand along a sword's blade, murmuring "Trace: On" as he did so, more out of habit than any necessity. His soul had already analyzed and stored the many blades present. It was curious – many of the blades were freshly forged, but others had seen use before, and had merely been repaired, after their previous owners had met grim fates. The prevailing theme among the histories of those swords which had had owners before was that they were inexperienced, and had no memories of holding weaponry before the first time they had used the blades. Even those that had merely been traded in as their previous owners searched for an upgrade, which implied their owner was skilled enough to live long enough to do so, were used by relative amateurs. Not a single sword here had a memory of being wielded by someone who had studied the blade before their teenage years.

"Shirou-san really likes swords, huh?" Shihoru interrupted his musings from where she was waiting patiently.

"No need for the honorific, Shihoru. You can just call me Shirou. And yeah, I guess. Something about weapons, especially swords, really seems to resonate with me. Besides my own name, one of the only things that I'm sure about is that I'm somebody who makes swords."

"R-really? You can make swords?"

Shirou held his arm in front of him, reaching for a phantom blade. He considered projecting one of the nameless blades before him as a demonstration, but a lifetime of instincts stopped him from blatantly using magecraft in front of a civilian. "Maybe. We'll see, later, but I can get a good sense of the history of the region just by examining these blades." He turned towards the purple-haired girl with a solemn expression on his face. "Being a volunteer soldier is a very dangerous job, you know? We'll all have to try our best to stay safe."

Shihoru nodded vigorously, and Shirou spent a bit more time chatting with the smith, even going as far as offering a few tips to improve the weapon he was currently forging, before they decided to meet back up with the others.

Yume and Haruhiro got back at around the same time as they did, followed by the other three a short while later. Haruhiro mentioned that they'd found a bank where they could store their money, called Yoruzo's, which was staffed by a single young girl with a photographic memory. Ranta and Moguzo had spent a bit of their money sampling some of the food in the marketplace, and their description of the kebabs there was enough to make the rest of the hungry party follow them back to the stall that sold them as they continued to talk. Shirou explained a bit of the history of the area, and described some of the monsters that the trainees were likely to fight against, while Manato offered perhaps the most useful tidbits of information: that there was a Reserve Force barracks that would let trainees lodge for free, and that if they wanted to be successful, they would all need to join a guild.

"Most of the business in town is controlled by the guilds, and if you aren't a part of a guild, the guilds will actively try to hamper your opportunities. In return, joining a guild protects your individual rights, teaches you the trade, and grants some mutual protection from your guild members. It's expensive to join one of them, eight whole silvers, but without joining them there's really no way to make money… As soldiers, the main guilds we should be looking at are the Warrior's Guild, the Priest's and Paladin's Guild, the Hunter's Guild, the Dread Knight's Guild, the Thieves' Guild, and the Mage's guild."

"Wait, there's a guild that teaches magecraft?" Shirou couldn't help exclaiming.

Manato looked at him oddly. "Shouldn't the emphasis in that question be on the "magic" part, Shirou? And what's with the archaic terminology?"

Shirou froze, wondering how to answer the question. Why had he put the emphasis there? It was natural that he wasn't surprised by the existence of magecraft, of course, but why were his thoughts also insisting that magecraft was something to be kept secret, something that would decrease in power the more people knew its mysteries? Why couldn't he remember why he knew these things?

"Why, Red? You thinking you want to be a hotshot wizard or something?" He was saved by Ranta's questioning.

"If anyone should be called Red, it's you, Ranta," Haruhiro cut in. "You make people angry enough to see red, anyways, and you're just as much a redhead as Shirou."

Before Ranta could come back at Haruhiro with one of his usual tirades, Shirou cut him off. "No, I don't think so. I'm only a third rate magus, anyways. I'm better suited to combat."

"I-I think Shirou would be great at anything he wanted to do!" Shihoru shot back.

"You are a third rate magus?" Haruhiro picked up on Shirou's second slip, as Manato nodded with a matching frown.

Wide-eyed and a little panicked, Shirou fought down the instinct telling him that he absolutely must keep his abilities a secret – it wouldn't be that bad if he told them, right? Especially considering there was openly a Mage's Guild in town – and managed to force out a response. "I just – I know a few things. I'm… good with swords. I can kind of, you know, read them. And I can make things stronger, a little bit. And -"

"Shirou." Ranta cut him off. Shirou almost flinched back, ready for whatever terrible things the slightly smaller boy could call him. A liar, a cheater, somehow complicit with whatever it was that brought them here – "That's not magic, you retard. That's just called being good at fighting."

Shirou let out a nervous laugh, taking the easy out where he had one. "Haha, yeah… that must be it…"

"Well, what guilds do y'all wanna join, then?" Yume thankfully changed the subject.

Manato explained a bit more about the different guilds, and their strengths and weaknesses. Yume was instantly taken in by the idea that hunters would eventually be able to get pets, and declared that it was the guild for her. Ranta was thrilled at the idea of being a dread knight, which didn't surprise anyone. Manato declared that he would become a priest and make sure everyone stayed healthy, which earned him a proud and thankful look from Shirou, their largest member Moguzo decided to become a warrior, and the wiry Haruhiro thought he might fit in as a thief.

Shihoru was originally afraid to pick the Mage's Guild after hearing that even Shirou didn't think he could make it as one, but after being reassured that it was one of the jobs that required the least amount of physical conflict, she was convinced. After hearing about the different branches of magic, Shirou suggested that she might want to try out shadow magic. Something about her appearance, which still faintly reminded him of someone, made him say something about Imaginary Numbers that she didn't quite understand, but decided to take into consideration nonetheless.

Shirou was left without a clear choice left for him. Thief and dread knight were non-options, considering only one thief was allowed in a party and the other guild didn't appeal to him at all, and he didn't think he had what it took to be a mage, but the guilds of Hunter, Warrior, and Priest all appealed to him. As much as he loved swords, he was sure that he would also make an excellent Archer, which for some reason his mind automatically capitalized. That said, the guild of priests was that most devoted to saving others…

"I'll join Manato at the Priest's Guild. You said there was a more martial order of priests as well, right? Paladins?"

After receiving a nod of confirmation, Shirou smiled slightly. He had some reservations about being labeled a priest for some reason as well, but looking down at the clothing he had come here in, he decided that the blue and white of the priests and paladins would suit him nicely.

Shirou regretted his choice of guild. It wasn't the rigorous, week long initiation to the guild that bothered him, however grueling the physical exercises might have been. It was more that his own instinctual preferences seemed to clash with almost everything that the grizzled old man who was Manato's and his teacher tried to teach him.

First of all, he was expected to wear heavy armor. As always, he wasn't sure why he thought so, but Shirou was pretty sure that in his experience, armor wouldn't matter in the slightest against the things he was used to fighting, and all it managed to do was slow down his usual fighting style. Not to mention that most paladins used shields, and that new members were heavily encouraged to use them as well, as it tended to increase their survival rate. Shirou, who had initially wanted to dual wield one-handed swords, was quickly shot down and shouted at for being foolish, and the best that he managed to haggle for was using a two-handed sword, which was met with grumbles as to why he didn't just join the warrior's guild in the first place.

His choice of weaponry also made many of the skills the guild taught useless, as they were designed to be used with a shield, and it was tough to adapt them to use with a single weapon, but more than that, Shirou saw almost all of them as being useless. For example, they had a skill called "Block," a closely guarded guild secret – which was just blocking an attack with a shield. Why were such basic techniques referred to as skills? Did he need to learn "Punishment" to be able to swing a sword down vertically onto an opponent?

His final major ideological clash with the head of the guild, which almost had him expelled, was his argument that even a primarily front-line fighter could use a long range sidearm, namely a bow. The Archpriest cursed him out for cowardice and swore that so long as he was training within those walls, he would use swords and swords only, and that was final.

In the end, Shirou learned only a single skill, due to the conjunction of the fact that he perked up at the name for some reason – Saber – and that it was technically a magic skill. When it was taught to him, he had initially protested that he wasn't particularly skilled at formalcraft, but his confused teacher had overruled him and insisted that he try it out. By inscribing a hexagram into his blade, and marking it with his blood, he could cause his sword to glow brightly and enhance its sharpness. Shirou knew that blood, like all bodily fluids, was a natural prana conductor, but he was shocked at the intensity of the effect for how little prana he had allowed to trickle into it. When he asked his teacher about it, he was again lectured on his heresy at comparing the blessing of the Light God, Lumiaris, to mere magic.

Shirou had assumed that all the talk of gods and such had just been superstition, but to evoke such a powerful magical effect… Shirou, as a third rate magus, knew his own limitations, and one of those was that he was almost completely unable to draw in mana from the world around him and convert it to prana; he relied entirely on his own supply of od. But now that he thought about it, sniffing the air, it did seem particularly mana rich – not that he really had any frame of reference, considering he lacked memories of the world from which his Noble Phantasms were born. Could this world possibly be in the Age of Gods?

During his daily meditations, where priests and paladins in training were supposed to commune with Lumiaris through deep introspection, Shirou instead explored the pocket of his soul that held infinite blades, re-learning the histories of some of the more notable ones. One night, he snuck outside into the empty training courtyard. With a muttered aria of "Trace: On," Shirou slipped into the state of self-hypnosis that made magecraft possible. Projecting his od out through his outstretched right hand, condensing it into solid form, he performed the most basic technique of Material Transmutation magecraft: Gradation Air. Rather than a hollow copy made of "nothing" based off of a shoddily constructed imagined image, Shirou judged the concept of his creation, completely hypothesized the basic structure and duplicated the composition material, imitated the skill of its making, sympathized with the experience of its growth, reproduced its accumulated years, and finally excelled every manufacturing process – and with a flash of blue light, a perfect sword materialized in his hand.

It was long – too long. The slender, slightly curved blade extended over five shaku, around 150 centimeters long, tapering to a razor edge on one side, and extended from a simple katana hilt wrapped in blue silken thread with no cross guard. Its name, Monohoshizao, meant "laundry-drying-pole," so called because its previous owner often used the abnormally long blade as such. The man, Sasaki Kojirou, was a swordsman who devoted his entire life to being able to cut down a swallow while it was in flight, and was from a country called Japan, which was also where the sword had been forged.

Japan. Yeah, that sounded right, for some reason. Shirou allowed the history within the sword to take over, replicating the skills of the man who once wielded it, and sank into a stance that was no stance, with a heart like clear water, and began a series of attacks that was almost like a dance. Each strike would be lethal, taking the head off of an enemy, but despite their clear goal, they were completely unreadable, flowing like water towards their target. When he finally finished, he looked down at the sword in his hand with a small frown, not because it was flawed in some way, but because it was still perfect. He had chosen this sword to try out projection with because of the small prana cost to project, and despite being a legendary blade, it still wasn't on the level of a noble phantasm, so it could probably last for a couple of hours, but after being around for at least half an hour, there should have been some degradation. Was Gaia's influence on this world not as strong as it was on his own? Who was Gaia? He shook his head as again, almost-memories gave him explanations that sounded right, but didn't have anything solid to back them up.

Perhaps this is the Age of Gods after all, Shirou thought as he willed the blade to dissipate back into nothingness.

Despite his difficulties, he graduated as a fully-fledged paladin, much to his teacher's dismay, as he was able to replicate most of the basic paladin skills even without properly learning them. He turned down the armor that normally would have been provided as well (which he later regretted, realizing he could have sold it to recoup at least a little of the cost of the guild), graduating with a simple blue and white priest's outfit identical to the one Manato wore, with the only difference being that Shirou was given a simple iron bastard sword while Manato carried a collapsible staff.

His first stop after graduating anyways was back at the weapon shop, where he used half of one of his precious remaining two silver pieces to purchase a both a long dagger that he would use alongside his sword as well as a quiver of arrows and a strong yew longbow, which he got at a discount because it wasn't balanced properly – one arm was much longer than the other, which for some reason gave him an odd sense of nostalgia.

Because of this detour, he was the last to arrive at the tavern Manato suggested as their meeting point after they'd all finished joining their guilds, walking in looking like an eclectic priest who'd forgotten that their job was healing.

"Hahaha! Red Retard, did you get lost on your way to the Paladin's Guild? Why the hell do you have a bow, and why is it so fucked up looking?"

The one speaking, of course, was the small boy wearing a suit of horribly impractical looking red and black armor with a sword to match, both of them covered in spikes for no reason at all.

"Hmm, Yume's bow is smaller than Shirou's… but that's ok, because Yume can't hit anything with it anyways!" The auburn haired girl beamed, as though that were something to be proud of. "Master said Yume shouldn't have been a hunter after all, but Yume knows if she practices hard enough eventually she'll be able to hit the target! And master's little wolfie is just so cute, I can't wait to have one of my own!"

Shirou smiled at the hunter, who was now clad in a red and white jerkin and a pair of short black shorts. "I'd be happy to help you train. Archery is something of a hobby of mine… I think." For some reason, Shihoru shot Yume a glare after Shirou's offer.

The small girl was now clad in a black dress with orange trim, and had a matching stereotypical witch's hat. "I guess I'm a mage now…" she muttered softly.

Shirou's eyes grew a little sadder as he looked at the girl that reminded him of a little sister, or perhaps a school junior, but he smiled proudly at her nonetheless. "That's amazing, Shihoru! To think after just one week you could learn magecraft! You must be a genius! Just remember, to be a magus is to walk with death. Be careful, alright?"

Now with Shirou's smile directed at her, Shihoru couldn't handle the attention, and pulled her hat down so the brim would hide her growing blush. Luckily, Ranta was all too happy to divert attention back to himself. Shirou idly wondered if he might be better with people than he acted, as he certainly was making a habit of changing the subject whenever people were feeling uncomfortable. Or perhaps he was just angry that everyone had ignored his earlier outburst.

"Hey, hey! The only genius here is me! I'm an ungodly, unworldly genius of a Dread Knight who can summon demons! Glory to the Dark God Skullheil!"

"Demons, huh? What can they do?" Haruhiro asked, as always playing the straight man to Ranta's antics.

"It sometimes whispers in my ear, telling me demon jokes! Or, he can tell me when enemies are near – but only if he wants to! And I can only summon him at night. But he'll get stronger as I collect Vices!"

"Hmm, yes, that does sound pretty perfect for you, Ranta." The thief now wore a set of dull clothing, a short grey half-cloak over a skin tight black shirt, supplemented by bits of leather armor over vital areas that didn't seem to hinder movement much. "Man, I'm glad that's over. My master was sexy as hell, but she was a real slave driver."

Ranta's jaw dropped. "HELL YES. Tell me more."

Manato cut in before Ranta could start up again. "Ours was harsh too, Haruhiro," he said while gesturing towards Shirou. "We had an old man for a teacher who seemed like he was born to shout at us. Well, mostly at Shirou, but even just the dregs of his bad mood from dealing with him were enough to make my life hell."

Shirou scratched his head sheepishly and grimaced. "Yeah, sorry about that, Manato. I probably shouldn't have joined that guild after all."

"Why was the old man always angry at Shirou?" Yume cocked her head to one side questioningly.

"Eh… we just didn't really see eye to eye on a few things, I suppose. He didn't want me to use a bow, for one. I had to buy this one after I graduated."

Moguzo, who had been sitting quietly until then, finally spoke up. "Will you be fighting in the back, then? I thought you would be on the frontlines with me, and Yume would be in the back, but if you two want to switch roles…"

"No, it's not that." Shirou shook his head confidently. "When you're fighting to the death, you have to be able to adapt. Getting stuck in the mindset of 'you must stand in the back and use ranged attacks, and I will be in front and only use melee' will make you rigid, and if you meet a foe smart enough to exploit that, it will mean your doom. For example, what would happen if you were busy fighting in the front, and a second enemy snuck behind us and attacked Manato and Shihoru while you were occupied?"

The small girl let out a small "Eep!" at the thought, and shrunk a little further into her seat, but Manato smiled, drew his staff, and flicked it open to its full length, before giving it a practice twirl.

Shirou smiled approvingly. "Exactly. A priest or mage who can't fight in close combat, or at least defend themselves, is a liability to the team – we'll always have to be focused on protecting them, rather than trusting that they have the strength to watch our backs and stay safe on their own."

Shihoru's heart sank in distress as the much stronger boy called her a liability. With tears springing unbidden to her eyes, she barely managed to mumble out "B-but they didn't teach us anything like that in the mage's guild… it's not my fault…"

Manato put his hand on her shoulder, making her jump a little bit, but as she looked up at him she was met with only kindness and reassurance. "Don't worry, Shihoru. Stick close to me, and I'll protect you." She visibly relaxed in relief, and allowed herself a small smile.

"Of course, I don't expect us to be perfect from the start. We'll get there eventually, and in the meantime you can rely on us." Shirou tried to calm the nervous girl down as well. "In fact, once we've made at least a little bit of money to ensure we can live somewhat comfortably for a while, we should take some time off to train and teach each other the techniques we've learned."

Haruhiro looked startled at that. "Isn't that forbidden? I'll be kicked from the Thieves' Guild if they find out I've been teaching their techniques to outsiders." Several other heads around the table nodded uncomfortably at Shirou's proposition.

"Well, I don't care about the stupid guilds anyways. It might make sense for you all to stay in them and make sure you can keep learning new techniques, but I'll train you all in self-defense myself if I have to. Getting kicked out of the Paladin's Guild would be nothing compared to losing one of you due to my own negligence," Shirou declared with steely eyes. "And I'll try my hardest to pick up on all of your techniques as well, and pass them along to the rest of you. That way, it'll only be me that gets in trouble for stealing guild secrets, right?"

Manato still bore a small frown at the idea. "But some of us need to worship different gods for our techniques to work, right? For example, I couldn't bond with an animal companion like Yume could because I follow Lumiaris instead of the goddess Eldritch, and Ranta can't learn healing magic because he follows Skullheil."

"Warriors and mages don't follow any particular god, do they?" Shirou glanced at Moguzo and Shihoru for confirmation, who both shook their heads. "It's settled, then. I'll make sure to teach you all how to use magecraft and to be able to fight well. The easiest way to save someone is to ensure that they don't need to be saved in the first place," he finished with conviction.

Ranta, for one, seemed fully in favor of the idea. "Hahaha! Yes! Stealing other guild's secrets… Nobody ever mentioned it in the Guild, but it definitely seems like what a Dread Knight should do! Of course, I won't let you learn my secret demon summoning techniques-"

"Not that Yume would even want to!" The huntress cut in, sticking her tongue out at him.

"Shut up, flat-chest!" Came the swift retort, causing Yume to let out a "Hmph!" and sit back with her arms folded over her chest. "-Or else you'd all try to steal my vices! And it's not like someone as awesome as a Dread Knight would ever need to learn the inferior techniques of other guilds, but I'll become the most awesome magic-Dread-Knight-warrior that ever lived!"

Shirou smiled at the rest of the group, patting Yume on the arm reassuringly, which again spurred a jealous glare from Shihoru, who inched a little closer to Manato in response. "It's settled then. Tomorrow, we'll go out hunting for monsters."