Midnight street of the Tokonosu city residential area, a couple of street lights make the walk through the stillness of the empty street bearable. Most of the residents were already asleep with only a few still up for one or another reason.

Emiya's family house was among those that still had its light on, although only in some parts of the house. Tonight, they have a guest, a blonde woman who was the former King of Knights, Artoria Pendragon. She wore a set of warm clothes and also brought a briefcase containing her change of clothes and her toiletries. She planned to stay over at her lover's house after she managed to reunite with him. Other than to be with him, she also wanted to consult about some oddities that she managed to notice all around the city.

"Artoria, you could use the guest room for tonight, I already cleaned the room for you."

The one who prepared her room was Emiya Shirou, the heir of the Emiya family. A generally helpful young man who was also someone she knew from her past life. Other than being a high school student he was also secretly a magus, an occupation he kept secret even from his parents. There were a lot of things she wanted to talk with him about but something more substantial should take precedence and be brought up first.

"Shirou, I noticed a few places in the city have an oddly denser mana compared to its surroundings. It felt like a whirlpool that slowly gathered the mana around it in a spot. Do you know anything about it?"

When she was moving around the city to buy some necessities for her residence in her rented apartment, she noticed someplace had its mana behaved oddly, and when she traced the source of it, she found a place that seemed like to be the centre of the phenomenon. She ran around the city to investigate and found exactly five places with the same weird behaviour, all of them had something in common, that is the building was the tallest structure in the area. Each point of interest has a considerable distance from each other of at least a few kilometres.

She wanted to investigate further but decided against it in the end, she thought that consulting the matter with Shirou who already lives here longer was the wiser choice than blindly charging into an unknown magical phenomenon. She hasn't met any magus in this world, but she knows that she lacks a lot of critical information about this world to be confidently sure that there are no magus to worry about in this world. Since Shirou was here, who says others can't also be around? As far as she knows, Shirou was the most trusted source of information and also an ally that she has currently.

Artoria explained in detail what she saw in the city to Shirou while he prepared a couple of cups of tea along with the refills for both of them. Shirou just nodded before he made her wait while he went upstairs to pick up something. Artoria took a sip of the tea served to her while she waited for Shirou to get whatever he needed from his room. She only needs to wait for a minute before Shirou comes back to her with a worn-out Atlas with numerous sticky notes sticking out of the pages.

"What you see was this… it was my emergency posts that I call the 'The bowman's nest', I made them in case I need a nice vantage point to watch over the city and use my magecraft."

Shirou explained to her that, even though he was the same as her as he had not met any kind of proof about the existence of the magecraft world, he still prepared some kind of contingency plan for at least his hometown. These 'taller than the rest' structures he chooses allow him to use his magecraft to the fullest of its power. He also has other hidden countermeasures that he prepares in case of inhumane and magical danger arises in the vicinity of Tokonosu City. He took pride that even though Artoria noticed the obvious five of his watch posts, she failed to notice the numerous others that he worked hard to hide from those who could detect magecraft.

"…and the whole whirlpool-like feeling that you felt was… wait. I have some of the newly finished ones in my room, wait for a second, I'll fetch it for you."

And again, Shirou left her alone to go upstairs to collect something that he wanted to show to her.

"…five tall good vantage point…" She remembered that Shirou was exceptionally good in archery even the first time she heard about him in this world was his achievement in an archery competition.

"His magecraft was… he was able to make a copy of Caliburn, wasn't he? So, it is like that." Artoria tried to guess what his magecraft was based on what she knew about him. She arrived at an answer, that much like Kiritsugu, Shirou probably had some kind of mystic code that was in line with his superior ability in archery, he probably used some kind of bow that could be used to fire mystic codes that he traces. Artoria would never have imagined that while she landed closer to the truth, Shirou was on the level of firing noble phantasm as a disposable arrow. She would learn about it later when he explains to her about what his magecraft can do.

A short moment later Shirou comes down from his room upstairs bringing a black-coloured metal box with him.

"This is a charger and inside of it are…" Shirou opened the box revealing the inside of it that contained an intricate mechanism that held four silver metal canisters with dozens of circuits-like red lines all over the surface of the canister. "…backup mana charge."

He explained to her that the device he held was one of his original works from his old life. This one in particular works better in the new world compared to his old one. The charger and the backup mana charge or magic battery to simplify it were mystic codes he made to compensate for his lower mana capacity, despite having more magical circuit than average magus, the nature of his magecraft requires him to also use more mana than a normal magi would to use their magecraft in exchange for unmatched versatility. He made this mystic code for anticipation when he faces a situation where his natural mana reserves won't be enough to complete the task at hand.

The charger part of the mystic code was a device with an intricate function etched into the inside of the box. It was intentionally made to be incomplete until it was activated by the use of his alteration magecraft to connect multiple disconnected parts, which will complete the magecraft formula used to gather the mana in the surrounding air and condense it inside the box body. This mana gathering was the odd magical phenomenon that she detected in multiple parts of the city.

The magical battery part was another complicated device that absorbed the condensed mana gathered by the charger and further compressed it inside the canister to keep it. The magical battery has the capacity of three of Shirou's natural mana reserves with the ability to quickly dispense the stored magical energy to refill Shirou's natural mana reserve. The magical energy inside the canister was so condensed it materialised a physical body in the form of greenish translucent stone-like material, or how it should be normally. In Shirou's case, he filled a quarter of the canister with his blood. This causes the product of the mana condensing to be translucent red instead of the usual translucent green. This modification allows him to instantly refill his natural mana reserve, just like how he moves mana from his right hand to his left hand.

Due to Shirou's general lack of ability in magecraft other than that he specializes in, the efficiency of this mystic code was disastrously low in the old world due to the thin mana in the air. In this world where the mana in the air was much more ample than it was in the old earth, the efficiency of the mystic codes was still low but it was at least elevated from infinitesimal level to tolerable level. In the past to fully recharge a single canister could take 10 – 14 days with four of them in a single procedure it could take up to two months to fully recharge four of them. He had thought of making a singular version of the charger but the efficiency of the singular version prototype he had made so far was even more disastrously low than the quadruple version. Any more research and trial runs to improve the efficiency were simply out of the question due to Shirou's schedule barely having any time to spare after a certain worldwide event in the old world broke out, the event that ultimately led to Shirou's death by the gallows.

The charger in this world was simply perfect for him, with the full recharge at most only taking two weeks compared to the two months in the past. This improvement was simply because of the difference in the scarcity of mana in the air between the two worlds. The only thing that prevented him from mass producing this mystic code was the cost and the lack of the use he needed for it in this world. Overproduction of this mystic code was simply a waste of resources and it's not like he needed a lot of it even back in the old world where he used his magecraft every day. Most of the time, his natural mana reserve alone is enough to complete a difficult task and he doesn't want to make himself overly dependent on it. Currently, he has a total of 40 including the 20 that were currently being filled that Artoria detected earlier.

Hearing his explanation makes Artoria exhale the breaths she unknowingly holds.

"Haa… and I thought I finally found the source of this feeling."

"…your feeling?"

"Ah, actually Shirou, even before I met you, I had this feeling that something very dangerous would happen soon, at first, I thought it was because of the flight I was about to take, but nothing happened. When I arrived in this city, I still felt it so I was already alert from the beginning, meeting you was my chance to unwind…"

Artoria took another sip from the already cold tea and smiled lightly.

"Artoria if you have a problem, please, just tell me and I will help."

As if she had already expected that he would say that, Artoria chuckled a bit in amusement before emptying the rest of her cold tea.

"…then I'll take your word, Shirou."

Artoria can still feel the small trace of the same obsession in him that she loathed in the past, but at the same time, she knows that denying him will do both of them no good, even more so since it was herself. He had mellowed out, she was sure of that from the talks she had with him, but who knows when the situation suddenly calls for it, will he immediately relapse just by pure instinct? And… he was only offering help out of worry so there was nothing wrong for her to accept his kindness.

There was no more refill for the tea and their topic of conversation was also run out for today. Shirou was currently washing the utensils used for their tea meanwhile Artoria was staring at him from the dining table. Propping her cheek with one of her palms, she looks at the back of the man whom she had just talked to a few minutes ago. Her mind ponders about the things they've just talked about from the beginning until the end.

They soon retreated into their respective room, but before that, both of them agreed to make a plan for the weekend.

0o0o0

A/N: Testing some info dump format. Still warming up my bearings for writing, Grammarly saved me and you exalted readers from unreadable mess. orz