CHAPTER 4 – STIRRING SHADOWS
(beta: RavingScholar)
Forty year old Ryutaro Dojima was one troubled detective. When he first moved in Fuyuki a couple of years prior, he was quite happy with how quiet the city was. It was the kind of place where he wanted his daughter Nanako to grow: lively and densely populated but without the crime rate of other cities of the same size.
In hindsight, he should have known better. Twenty years in the law enforcement department had taught him that just because you don't see something, that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't there. His opinion of the city and its inhabitant had changed drastically in the previous twenty-four months, starting with his colleagues.
Initially, it didn't surprise him that they were somewhat laidback. Besides the few theft and robberies there weren't that many crimes to keep the police forces on their toes. But as time passed, he came to realize that most of his colleagues were lazy and incompetent. Truth be told, he was known to be too serious and inflexible when it came to his job, so his opinion might have been a little biased. But the fact remained that most of his colleagues were way too eager to dump a difficult case on someone else's shoulder. Such was the case with the infamous vigilante dubbed Archer.
The masked teen hero was the fulcrum of Ryutaro's current dilemma and that wasn't limited to the case with his alias printed on it. It appeared that every time the boy was involved or even only supposed to be involved the situation was greatly magnified, starting from within the police department itself.
The law's officers took advantage of the boy's exploits when they managed to cover up his involvement while denouncing his action publicly when they couldn't. For over a year they kept denying his existence, until the number of witnesses was too high to continue doing. While Ryutaro couldn't condone Archer's escapades since vigilantism was a crime, he couldn't forgive his colleagues behavior either and he didn't make a secret out of it. To say that he was disgusted was a gross understatement and that, paired with his work ethic, made him a pariah within the department with the sole exception of his kohai Adachi. Of course while his colleagues dislike him with a passion they didn't dare to cross him either. For one, the man was hard as a brick wall and no amount of enmity would so much as make him flinch, and second he had the support of the higher ups for the same reason. All in all, Ryutaro Dojima was a man not to trifle with.
While knowing all that made him quite proud with himself, it greatly impaired his work. Being new to the city meant that he didn't have nearly the same amount of knowledge the rest of the detectives had. Thus, he had to rely a great lot on the flabby Adachi who had lived and worked in Fuyuki his entire life. The man however, while good natured and well meaning, was as reliable as a house of cards on a windy day, further complicating Ryutaro's work and life in general.
Furthermore, the Archer case was all but simple. The kid was no pushover. He came and went as he pleased without leaving as much as a trace behind. The forensic department was as at loss for words. There was no way someone could sneak inside a warehouse, dispatch ten to twenty armed criminals, with bow and arrows of all things, tie them up, tip the police and leave the place like he hadn't even been there to begin with. It was mind boggling that a teenager could do that by himself. That kind of stuff was impossible for everyone but an agent of some foreign secret service with a lot of backup. In all honesty Ryutaro didn't know where to begin looking for someone like that.
There were too many questions and not the shadow of an answer in sight. The only thing they were fairly certain of was his age, since his height and voice were confirmed by the many witnesses to be of a boy from fourteen to sixteen years old. That was, unless he was in fact a secret agent of twice that age, with a stunted growth that mimicked a younger voice. Of course the few individuals that matched the physical description of the vigilante over the age of twenty in the range of fifty kilometers from the city had been already investigated without the slightest result. Therefore, unless the guy bothered to commute to fight the nearly nonexistent crime of Fuyuki while there were other cities with a lot more needed work, he had to be a minor residing in the area without an independent mean of transportation.
Too bad that there were thousands of boys that fit that description.
The recent cases didn't have any information he could use and the witnesses didn't interact with the vigilante long enough to figure out anything about him beside his apparent age. He had absolutely nothing but his resolve not to give up.
Let it not be said that luck doesn't smile upon the stubborn. Then again, the threshold between a blessing and a curse is often a line so very thin that stepping beyond is unavoidable.
That was one truth that Ryutaro Dojima was about to discover at his own expense.
"What the hell?" He grumbled as his laptop froze while he was browsing the previous cases. With a loud beeping noise it shut down and refused to boot up again. "Wonderful; just what I needed at a time like this. Adachi!"
"W-What is it, Senpai?" The scrawny detective asked as he peered inside Dojima's office.
"This blasted thing stopped working. Call the maintenance guy for me, would you? I'm going to the archive."
"Uh, okay but… you can use my computer if you need," he offered.
"So that you can skim on your own work? Not likely. Besides, I like paper better that these modern pieces of shit that don't work when you need 'em the most."
Truly he would have accepted Adachi's offer if he knew what kind of ordeal was waiting for him.
He could be found five minutes later by the archive room's door with a blank expression and his jaw hanging loosely in surprise. The archives were, to put it mildly, an outright mess. Apparently, after the various folders had been taken out to be digitalized, nobody bothered to put them back in their proper place. Countless folders laid scattered around with no order to them.
Cursing his colleagues even more than he did technology and too prideful to go back and eat his word with Adachi, he rolled up his sleeves and began searching for the folder he needed.
It was the dawn of the following day when he finally came out. Nearly sixteen hours after he first entered. His eyes were circled black and he looked a lot older than the previous day. He hadn't found what he hoped but that doesn't mean his research had been fruitless; quite the opposite in fact. He had a whole different picture to work with. A completely different scenario against which the existence of the Archer made a lot more sense.
The absurdity of a teenager going vigilante in a city as quiet as Fuyuki was the point that made less sense to the tired detective. The boy was too capable to be just a kid living up a childhood dream, but until that point Ryutaro couldn't figure out why someone so young would push himself to acquire such skills when there was no real need for it. Sure, the crimes he prevented there very real, but there wasn't so much apparent criminality in Fuyuki and the neighboring cities to explain something like that.
Apparent being the keyword. Beneath the surface Fuyuki had a shady background: unexplained deaths, disappearing people, disappearing suspects, disappearing witnesses and disappearing evidence. They weren't so many to draw the attention of the general public or the media, but if someone barely competent within the police ever bothered to look beyond his workload, then he would have noticed a very suspicious trend.
The incidents that caught his attention were too many and too different to chalk up to the police's incompetence alone, although it evidently played a great part. He knew that in every city of a certain size a few uncomfortable cases were hushed up for the sake of someone important, but the situation in Fuyuki couldn't be explained that easily. For one, there was no apparent connection. The people involved were of both genders, age, social status and more often than not they didn't know each other. Yet each and every one of those cases were suddenly dropped, treated as natural deaths, or labeled as suicides. They had nothing in common except the way they had been treated by the investigators, which is to say silently and in a hurry.
To someone less interested and experienced it might have passed unnoticed; but not to Dojima's experienced eye.
The most disturbing of all was the unexplained fire that had consumed the city ten years before. It had been blamed to a malfunction in the gas lines that escalated wildly to an entire district, but no conclusive evidence had ever been provided. The affected families had been refunded, the orphans assigned to a family or put in the local church's care and the entire matter had been put to rest.
It took Dojima sixteen hours to put the archives back in order, and for each folder put back in place the situation grew grimmer.
If such a great disservice of justice happened on a regular basis, then it was no wonder that someone decided to take the matter in his own hands and see that the citizens were safe.
The upside of having discovered this obscure scenario was that he finally had a timeframe to work with. If the estimated age of the vigilante was correct then Archer had to be around five or six years old when the great fire happened. Old enough to remember it clearly and being affected by it, and more important than anything else, old enough to have seen something he wasn't supposed to. Seen something that might have prompted him to undergo severe training to prevent more things like that from happening.
Truth be told, Dojima knew it was a big stretch of the imagination, but it was the only thing that made sense to him given the circumstance. Perhaps it was just another dead end but if he restricted the identity of the vigilante to the children affected by the fire that still lived in the city the number potential suspects dropped from several thousands to an hundred at most. He still had to cross reference those names with Archer's patterns and remove from the list those that didn't match his physical description, but he was confident that by the end of the week he could have a list of no more thirty individuals to interrogate.
However, his priority had just changed. Finding Archer was no longer the finishing line but the starting point of a deeper investigation, one that could reach the government itself. He had to be prudent. If the situation was bad as he thought it was there was no telling who could be trusted among his colleagues. He was alone in this, at least until he found the masked vigilante and the organization that undoubtedly trained and supported him. Perhaps then he would have some allies.
The sun was barely rising when he finally left the building to go home and get some well-deserved rest. In another occasion he would have enjoyed the crisp air and the warm sunlight, but no matter how he looked at it the only things he could pay attention to were the shadows stirring menacingly toward him.
The very same night of Dojima's enlightenment on Fuyuki's true nature, somebody was else was about to discover just how dangerous the city really was.
Kazama Yukiko, a student in her last year of high school, was returning home from an evening out with her friends. She was later than usual but her parents gave her their permission to stay out until late in lieu of her excellent grades and the help she gave in the family's business. She was one of the most attractive girls of her school, with her long, shoulder length hair. Her refined look and her gentle character, developed by working in her family's Japanese-styled hotel, made her the image of classical beauty in her schoolmates' eyes. The kind of beauty that should never walk alone at night.
Humming to herself she walked down the nearly empty streets. Even at that hour there were still people around the central part of the city, giving a sense of relative safety. She never once bothered to look behind her shoulder and therefore she didn't notice the inconspicuous van following her at a distance.
Needless to say, Kazama Yukiko never returned home that night.
Shirou sighed and closed the small book he was reading. He tossed it on the desk in front of him, near his laptop and stood up, stretching his limbs. He watched the scattered sheets of paper he wrote in the past three hours. He rubbed his temples and sighed again. The mission his father had left him was proving to be more difficult than expected. He didn't have enough information and he couldn't afford to leave the county to gather more by himself. He had to make do with the little knowledge his father managed to scrape from his travels and plan for every possible outcome.
Taking the Einzbern's bounded fields lightly would spell certain death and while he had no issue with sacrificing his life, he wasn't about to throw it away senselessly either. He was doing his very best to master the subject, and in all honesty he was fully aware that he knew more on Bounded Fields than any other Magus his age whose family didn't specialize in that particular subject.
Yet he couldn't feel satisfied with just that. Not while the sister he had never met was being kept prisoner in a castle somewhere in the middle of Europe.
In the last years of his life Kiritsugu tried numerous times to break through the Einzbern's defenses and take his daughter away from the people that couldn't see her as anything more than a tool. She might not have been human, but she still was a person and the only relative Shirou had. There was no way he could leave her in that place. The Root only knew what sort of treatment she was receiving there. The Einzbern weren't pleasant people by any stretch of the imagination if Kiritsugu experience with them was any indication.
Still, Shirou knew that he couldn't take those wards with his current skills, and that getting to the level where he could would take him years without a proper teacher to guide him. He caressed the thought of revealing himself to Tohsaka and pleading with her for help, but from what he knew about her family their knowledge on Boundary Fields wasn't much better than his.
The only other family he knew about where the Matou, Sakura's family, but they were a dead line of Magi, with the exception of the elder Zouken, and there was no way he would go anywhere near that thing. He had nothing to offer in exchange to him anyway, and it was better if the elder Makiri ignored his existence altogether, although Shirou wouldn't bet on the ultra centenary not knowing that the son of the Magus Killer was in town. One doesn't live for over two hundred years without knowing his turf like the back of his hand after all.
The last person he could talk with was the one he didn't want to see at all. Kotomine Kirei had to be avoided at all costs, Kiritsugu had been adamant on that. If he hadn't been so debilitated by the Grail's curse he would have ended the job with the fake priest he begun during the fourth Grail War. Too bad the Magus Killer couldn't afford to bring any attention to himself and his adopted son while he was about to die and leave the boy by himself. There were already plenty of people that wanted a piece of him as it was without the need for him to go out and make some more.
That left Shirou stuck with nothing but a collection of books from his father and a bunch of suppositions. Until he reached adulthood there was no way that Taiga would let him go abroad by himself and get some firsthand information. The Einzbern's reputation also made it impossible for him to hire someone and gather it for him. Anyone fool enough to accept such a mission would be incapable of pulling it off.
Realizing that there was nothing else he could do at the present time he decided to put his notes in order and transcribe his latest work on his laptop. If any proper Magus saw Shirou use modern technology in relation to Thaumaturgy, said Magus would certainly die of outrage. The rejection of modern technological achievement was a common factor among Magi, but Kiritsugu schooled him in making use of the best tools at his disposal, and Shirou complied more than willingly. The only thing his father couldn't convince him to do was using firearms. Not that Shirou needed them anyway. His archery skills, paired with his eyes' Reinforcement made him as precise as a sniper with bow and arrows if he wanted to be. Therefore the only weapon left in his possession was Kiritsugu's old Thompson Contender and a lot of bullets that Shirou preferred not to touch at all. The feeling of dread he got from those never failed to make him sweat.
Once finished he turned to the only set of stairs, pushed the hidden trapdoor open and left his Workshop, finding himself in the inconspicuous tool shed situated in the backyard of his house. Deciding to ease his mind a little he set himself to work on more mundane matters and began working on the motorbike Taiga gave him as a gift the previous year. It didn't work but Shirou was confident he could repair it, not in small part thanks to his Structural Grasping and the skills he picked up doing small jobs here and there. It was a good method to wind down from his training while keeping himself occupied with something that wouldn't explode in his face if he screwed up even slightly.
He worked without caring for the time and he managed to nearly finish the repairs when a tingle on his skin, caused by the Boundary Field erected over his propriety, subtly announced the arrival of somebody at the front gate. Shirou glanced at his wristwatch and was surprised to see it was nearly ten in the evening. He hadn't noticed the passing of time, relying on Taiga's arrival to mark dinnertime. He scowled. It was unusual that she would arrive at such a late hour without giving him so much as a call beforehand.
He walked to the front gate where the female teacher was waiting for him on shaky legs.
"Fuji-nee! Are you all right? You look about to pass out," Shirou said with concern in his voice. The woman looked pale and her eyes were a little glazed.
"Hungryyyy," she moaned pitifully clinging to him as soon as he was in arm's reach. "I haven't had anything to eat since this morning."
"I'll have something ready in a minute if you'd just let me go. Come on, Fuji-nee. I can't cook if you keep my arms pinned like that." CHOMP! "Ouch! Stop biting my arm! You can't eat me. Taiga! Let me go."
"Hmmm! Meat!"
With no little amount of effort on his part, Shirou dragged the surprisingly strong woman to the living room and then proceed to cook double the usual amount of food. A starving Taiga was a dangerous creature.
Half an hour and several thousand yen of food later Taiga patted her stomach in satisfaction.
"Aaaah~!" she breathed relieved. "That was a lifesaver. Thank you, Shirou."
"Never mind that. Why haven't you eaten anything since this morning? You know how grumpy you'll get if you skip a meal," he said massaging his abused arm. Damn, Taiga's bite did hurt.
"I know but I really didn't have any time to stop and grab a bite."
"Oh? I didn't know the life of a teacher was so intense," Shirou teased.
She looked at him strangely before shaking her head. "Right. I forgot you are not one that listens to rumors. Didn't you hear about Kazama Yukiko from third year?"
"Can't say that I did. What about her?"
"She didn't return home two nights ago after school," she explained. "The police came over to ask some questions, but they are already treating it as a runaway case. Her parents are worried about her."
"Ah. I remember her, though I don't know her all that well. Are you sure she couldn't have left on her own?
"Yukiko-chan wouldn't do something like that," Taiga protested. " She's a responsible girl and she wouldn't do something to make her family worry. I spent the day looking for her in the places I know she frequents but nobody has seen her."
"No clues at all?"
"None. Do you know how many teenagers disappear every year? Without a body or even a request for ransom the police won't put too much effort into it."
"Oh. Well there's nothing we can do as of now. I'll keep my ears open in case I might overhear something while I'm in town for work. The perk of working in a bar is that a lot of people come by. Now, it's better if you get some rest: you really look about to pass out."
Fifteen minutes later Taiga fell asleep at the table while watching TV. Shirou gently carried her to a spare room and laid her in one of his futons. Tired as she was there was no chance she would wake up before morning, but since Shirou had something planned for the night the red haired boy softly hummed an Aria that would let his guardian sleep until morning. He normally didn't like using spells that affected people's minds, but Taiga needed her rest and he didn't want her to wake up in the middle of the night and find him gone. She would definitely worry and she would demand an explanation he didn't want to give.
After calling Taiga's place to let her family know she was sleeping there he returned to his Workshop, grabbed an inconspicuous backpack and left his house silently.
Half an hour later he snuck into a back alley in the central part of the city and after ensuring no one would walk on him with a makeshift Bounded Field he emptied his backpack. There was nothing inside but some black cloth and a few sheets made of different metals. Raw materials were all he needed to get the job done.
"Trace on," he muttered. The contents of his bag began shifting and changing shape. The cloth coiled around him like a snake, ripping and fusing itself together in the shape of his body. The metals liquefied and swirled together forming the shape of a bow and several arrows. When the surge of Prana subsided Emiya Shirou was gone leaving the Archer in his place.
Letting more Prana flow through his circuits he reinforced his body, enhancing his strength and speed. When the process was concluded he leapt upward and to the rooftops. There were some places he needed to visit and people he wanted to meet.
"Not you again," a man with a crooked nose whined as he looked up at the black clad vigilante entering the warehouse from a high placed window. He was rather short even by Japanese standards, and his black hairs were uncombed. Even his clothes had seen better days. Everything about his appearance told that he was a small time criminal. The kind of guy that was out of place on both sides of the law.
"Good evening Nezumi-san," Archer greeted. "Excuse me if I barge in uninvited but I find myself in need of your services again."
"Oh, no. Not this time. Seriously man, every time you make me do something I end up being beaten or shot. Find somebody else," he shooed him away with a wave of his hands.
"Oh. All right then," Archer turned to leave.
"What, really?" Nezumi asked surprised by the vigilante's willingness to leave him alone.
"Of course, I would never force you to do something you don't want," he confirmed. "Though I have to admit that since I can't find somebody else for this job tonight I'd have to spend my time doing something else," he stopped and tapped his chin with his finger. "Now if I'm not mistaken the police might be interested in where certain stolen goods are being kept. Now that I think about it, it should be somewhere around here."
Behind him the crook palmed his face and groaned. "Alright, alright. Just tell me what the hell do you need and leave me alone."
"I knew you'd see it from my point of view eventually," Archer said, amused. "I'm looking for this girl," he said handing him a photo he picked from school before coming to meet him. "Kazama Yukiko. She disappeared two days ago, supposedly not by her will."
"She's your woman or what? Either way I don't know shit. Satisfied?" Archer merely leveled a glare at him. "I'll take that as a no. Fine, I'll look into it but no promises. Kids these days disappear every five minutes ya'know?"
"Thank you. I'll get in contact with you again when you find something," he said before turning and leaving for good.
"How would you know if and when I find something? Hey, for that matter how do you know where to find me every fucking time?"
"Magic," the masked boy chuckled as the shadow of the dimly lit warehouse seemingly swallowed him. The truth of that statement flew over that the annoyed man's head completely.
Back outside, Archer crouched on top of a nearby building. Pulling out a slip of paper covered in runes, he muttered something under his breath. The paper folded itself over and over again like in origami until it took the shape of a crane. It quickly spread its wing and flapped away.
Shirou would have liked to boast the idea of the small construct as his own, but it wasn't. It was something his father ripped from the cold finger of one of his targets when he was still in the business. It was merely a tracking device fueled by a Magus' Prana that would follow a target set in advance and then report back to his creator when certain conditions were met.
He always kept one of those around the crook so that he could track him quickly and use his contacts to find whatever he was looking for. He always required some convincingon Shirou's part, but in the end Nezumi gave in every time. Not that he didn't reward him when he helped his cause, on top of not ratting him out to the police. Still, the man was never too happy with Archer's assignments. He was the sort of man that survived by keeping his ears to the ground and staying away from any form of danger. A direct confrontation of any sort was his weak point and the bane of his existence.
For that reason Nezumi's information network was top notch. If Kazama had been kidnapped there was a good chance he could find something about her or at the very least give him some clues to work with.
Satisfied with his job Archer jumped to another rooftop and headed home. He had to attend school in the morning after all.
Kazama's disappearance was the new topic of interest at school. The third year girl, ranked second in beauty according to the unofficial ranking in use at Homurahara gakuen, was known to be a cheerful but serious student that would never do something as irresponsible as running away from home, especially since she had a very close and serene relationship with her parents.
Of course that didn't prevent the spreading of silly rumors about a supposed secret Yakuza boyfriend that dragged her into a ring of drug and prostitution, but those kind of nonsense came mostly from other girls envious of Kazama's popularity.
A couple of detectives were seen asking questions to Kazama's known friends, among which was the girl who scored first in the aforementioned ranking: one Tohsaka Rin.
And speaking of said Magus, Shirou noticed that she looked like she hadn't slept much lately. Her usual composure wasn't exactly in place and Shirou saw her sighing frequently when she thought nobody was looking.
Shirou was sure it wasn't a normal occurrence for her. He was sure because despite his general mistrust for her due to her heritage as a Magus and her new hostility toward him, he happened to agree wholeheartedly with Homurahara's girl ranking system. Therefore he often looked at her when she was in sight.
That knowledge, however, unsettled him. The timing of her unusual tiredness coincided with Kazama's disappearance and that alone was food for thought. He didn't want to believe it, but there was the chance that Kazama could have inadvertently witnessed something she shouldn't have, forcing Tohsaka to… dispose of her, and now that crime came back to haunt her dreams.
No. He refused to believe such a thing. He desperately wanted to believe Tohsaka was better than that, both as a person and as a Magus. Still, the matter was worthy of being looked into.
But how would he approach the matter with her? Stealthy as Archer, or openly as Emiya Shirou?
Tohsaka swore under her breath. She had spent the previous two nights searching for her friend. She couldn't accept that she went missing just after spending the evening with her and the rest of her friends. She knew that the police was already looking for her of course, but she also knew how unreliable they usually were. She just couldn't leave the fate of Yukiko in the hands of such incompetents.
Still her restless research bore no fruit. No one had seen her in the places she used to hang around, giving further credit to her belief that she didn't leave of her own volition. What made things worse was that no request for ransom had been forwarded to her relatively wealthy family. That either meant that she was already dead or in the hands of somebody who was interested in different kind of assets. Tohsaka wasn't sure which option was worse. Perhaps she should have been looking for her remains as she should have done for Kotone so many years before.
She gritted her teeth in annoyance. She was growing increasingly frustrated at her own lack of results and was beginning to consider dark thoughts as a result. She prided herself of being competent and capable of achieving any goal she set for herself, but in this case even her precious Thaumaturgy was revealing itself to be useless and that didn't help her cause.
Prideful and aloof as she was, she'd never admit such a thing, but while he knew that her heritage separated her from the rest of the girls her age she still treasured the friendship she had with them, as it was the only thing that made her feel like just a normal girl.
Tired and disappointed she decided to take a break and entered the closest bar, the Copenhagen, to have a nice cup of tea, unknowingly solving Emiya Shirou's latest dilemma.
"Uh," Shirou intelligently observed as he nearly bumped on the school idol on his way out of work. "Tohsaka-san."
"Emiya-kun?" She asked genuinely surprised. She hadn't expected to run into anyone she knew. The Copenhagen was a refined looking shop. Not the kind of place where high school students would normally hang out. "Fancy meeting you here. I didn't peg you for the kind of person to frequent a place like this," she commented with forced politeness. Tired as she was she didn't have any patience to waste with her school rival.
"I suppose I'm a little out of place in this place," he agreed sheepishly. "But in my defense I'm not a customer."
Tohsaka blinked a couple of time at the revelation. "Oh. I've heard you had a part-time job but I imagined it was something rougher. Isn't this job a little too delicate for a man?" She really didn't feel like teasing him but she didn't have the strength of mind to hold back her sharp tongue.
"Delicate or not, a job's a job Tohsaka-san. Besides I don't work in the actual shop."
"Of course," she agreed with a nod. "Customers would stop coming if you were the one to receive them."
Shirou left eyebrow ticked in annoyance. What was wrong with that girl? Then he noticed her tired posture and expression, as well as the stack of papers with the picture of the missing Yukiko in her hand. Putting two and two together, Shirou felt relieved that the school idol was out searching for her friend, confirming his thought on her actual good nature. Instead of rebutting her barb he reached for her coat and helped her slid off it.
In her tiredness Tohsaka complied with his gesture before her brain could kick in and decide otherwise. He surprised her even further when he showed her to a table and pulled back a chair for her to sit. Not in the mental condition to pick a better reaction, Tohsaka decided to go with the flow. Shirou then pulled a chair for himself and sat in front of her.
"I see that you have been searching for Kazama-san," he said pointing at the flyers now resting on the table before she could address the boldness of him sitting at her table united. "Did you find anything?"
All right. Tohsaka took a deep breath and steadied her mind. The lack of sleep was getting to her and she allowed herself to be caught off guard too many times in the span of a minute. Deciding that addressing the boy's behavior was of no use she questioned the motives of his interest, hoping for his continued health that it wasn't a clumsy attempt to catch her interest by showing concern for her friend.
"What is it to you?" His response was fishing out an identical stack of flyers from his bag and showed it to her.
"Fuji-n… Fujimura-sensei asked me to look into her disappearance since I know a lot of people around here. So far I haven't been able to find anything. I was hoping you had better luck than me."
"I haven't," she admitted bitterly after examining Shirou expression for a couple of seconds. "It's like she vanished into thin air."
"I see. Look, I've been asking a few people who have contacts with, well, with not so law-abiding citizens if they saw or heard anything about her."
"Really?" She asked surprised. "I never expected an honor student like you to know that sort of people," she added with a grin. Shirou sweat-dropped.
"You do know that Fujimura-sensei, my guardian mind you, is the daughter of a known Oyabun, right?"
"…" Tohsaka actually didn't know about that. Second Owner or not she took little interest in the workings of the mundane society outside of her small circle of friends. Actually, while the times when Yakuza were mere criminals were long past, picturing Fujimura –Tiger- Taiga as the daughter of a Yakuza boss was almost impossible for anyone who didn't know just how much of an oddball her father Raiga really was.
"Right," he acknowledged her silence as an answer. "You could say that I grew around that sort of people so for better or for worse I know a lot of them from all around the city."
"Did they have any luck?" She asked returning to the main topic, not wanting to further uncover things she preferred not to know.
"Not really, but that means that she wasn't abducted by any group affiliated to the local families. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing but we can at the very least remove the Yakuza from the list of possible culprits."
"That doesn't clue us as to where she is. Well, knowing where she's not isn't useless information. Do you have any other idea?"
"Three actually. The first is that she was kidnapped by some creep, and while that's bad at least we can try and look for the culprit into the circle of her admirers. The second is pretty much the same but worse."
"Meaning?" Tohsaka inquired.
"She could have been abducted by an organization that deals with human trafficking. If that's the case she could be out of the country by now." Rin nodded. That was pretty much the same thing she thought it could have happened. "Thirdly," Shirou sighed, "she has been killed and her body is hidden somewhere."
Tohsaka narrowed her eyes at the bluntness of his statement. Certainly she had considered that possible outcome but preferred to hope for the better. Still, his words held meaning; in fact they made a lot more sense than anything said by anybody else, police included. Perhaps…
"It makes sense. So Emiya-kun, what do you say about helping me looking for her from tomorrow on?" She proposed, not really believing he would accept.
"Yes, that was the same idea I had. If we work together as a team we can cover more ground and make the search much faster. How about we meet tomorrow at lunch on the school's rooftop and discuss how to proceed?"
"Sure, that would be great," she admitted more to herself than to him. In her dislike for him as her school nemesis she had forgotten Shirou's reputation of being a Good Samaritan, but she was now glad she had found someone both willing and apparently resourceful enough to help her. She might actually have to reconsider her initial opinion of him.
"Good. Now, what do you say if we order something to drink? Neko-san over there is already glaring dagger at me like I was a freeloader. We'd better hurry or she might kick out of the store."
"I heard that, Emi-yan," said daughter of the store owner said from behind the counter. "Don't think that just because you are with a friend I'm not going to put you in your place."
Shirou winced at her words. Neko-san was a nice person but she had a mean streak sometimes. Apparently she was in a particularly foul mood lately and that didn't help at all.
"See? That's what I meant," he added under his breath so that only Tohsaka could hear him. "So what would you like to have? Is milk tea still your favorite?"
"How do you know that?" She asked suspiciously.
"Hm? How do I know what?"
"How do you know what my favorite drink is?"
Shirou looked at her for a moment before realizing that he just blurted something he knew about her he wasn't supposed to have any knowledge about. A light blush formed on his cheeks as he stammered an answer.
"W-well… You have many admirers in our school. You'd be surprised by the number of things people know about you."
"Oh? And why exactly are you privy to what my admirers know about me? "
"It-it can't be helped," he protested waving both hands in front of his face. " I'd have to be both deaf and blind not to hear what they constantly talk about."
"Hmmm….," she looked at him through narrowed eyes. "Well I guess that makes sense," she said with a falsely sweet smile. "Though I'm sure we'll have the chance to discuss what else you know about me in the future, right Emiya-kun?"
Shirou could only nod in response, internally sighing in relief of being left off the hook even if only temporarily. He should have known that allying himself with Tohsaka could be the worst idea he ever had, but at the same time he couldn't dislike the thought of spending some time with her. There were boys in his school that would gladly give an arm for the privilege he had just been granted. The poor idiots truly had no idea just how close to Hell their imagined Heaven truly was and luckily they probably would never have to find out.
That was a burden that Emiya Shirou would have to shoulder all by himself.
CHAPTER 4 - END