Remaining Days: 3
I gave up about the Code Cast in frustration early enough that I actually managed to get a decent night's rest this time. A blessing, this made classes a lot easier to follow with a fresh and receptive mind. Though the content wasn't the most relevant today. Going over the basics of history and some more general information about the Holy Grail War. Nothing about world history, really just related to the Holy Grail War.
Days ago I would've really appreciated getting such in-depth information, but at this point the generalized summary and broad history didn't do much for me. It's things I'd either been told by Saber or already figured out. They don't help me move on through the Grail War either.
More notably, Shinji had been absent all day. Is he all right? I know I shouldn't worry, but isn't it natural to spare some thoughts for a classmate who stays away from school all day? In a normal environment it would be normal, I figure.
Not here, and I should feel relieved that he's inviting penalties by the .PH so carelessly, it'll give me a better chance to come out of this round alive, after all. But it just doesn't feel right to rely on that, or be happy about it. I wouldn't just be happy about my own survival, but his death as a consequence. These two things can't be separated.
No point dwelling on that, though. There's nothing I can do about it.
"Let's head to the library," I tell the invisible Saber after class finishes it.
Though she should remember this was the plan, it won't hurt to remind her as the last few days we've been going to the Arena right away instead.
Right in front of the library, I run into Shinji's Servant — or rather, she bumps into me, being unable to see what's in front of her due to carrying a whole mountain of books. Shinji is focusing on self-studying, maybe?
"Awawa, sorry! I didn't see you there."
Rider apologized, even though she's the one who ended up dropping half of her books, whereas thanks to Saber materializing just in time to catch my fall, nothing happened to me.
"Ah, Hakuno, it's you! Long time no see," she practically beams at me.
"It's only been a day, though?"
I help her pick up the books she dropped, some really thick and old, others with just a soft-cover and fairly modern.
"Is Shinji all right?" I ask her.
I do genuinely care, and since I've run into his Servant to begin with… Besides, at the very least Rider seems like someone who'd be fine talking about her Master. I can see Saber shake her head in disapproval and fade again, not wanting to deal with this directly, it seems.
"Ah, well… Hmm. That's a good question."
And that's anything but a good answer.
"He's sitting at his desk all day, doing stuff, making plans, giving orders as usual. Pretty boring, but he's probably fine like that," Rider adds after thinking about it for a bit. "I go out to grab food and run other errands for him."
So that's why she's here, huh. Is it fine, letting his Servant run around on her own like that? Or did Shinji give up about keeping her identity hidden after Rin implied that, for all he knows, it's already spread anyway?
"Sorry for holding you up, then."
I return the last remaining book to the tower of books she's already carrying in her arms. She's short and petite, but as a Servant she's still pretty strong, huh? I'm not sure I could carry this many books as easily. For as light as books look, they tend to be pretty heavy.
"Nah, it's fine! I wasn't in a rush to begin with. Ah, but wait! You should keep that one."
"Huh? This book, you mean?"
"Yep, yep! It's the most fun one of the bunch, trust me. You should read it if you have the time."
If Rider gives me a book recommendation so happily, I suppose I can't exactly refuse.
"Are you sure that's all right?"
She seems confused at the question. Since she's here on an errand for Shinji, he'd get mad at Rider not bringing him all the books he asked for, right? Or, at the very least, that's how I'd imagine he'd react.
"It's fine, it's fine. Master told me to get all the books related to me from the library, but he never said to bring them to him. I only have to put them wherever, is what he said."
… is Rider serious?
"Master was all like 'Even if they know your true name, if they can't find any book on you, that means nothing!' and sent me off. As long as I leave none in the library, that's a job done. And this one is the best, it'd be sad to not share those tales!"
She is serious. Entirely serious.
Before I can even interject, she dashes off, however.
"Gotta go now, bye Hakuno and Hakuno's Servant!"
I… What just happened? I look at the title of the book. The Travels of Astolfo, One of the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne, the title says. That's… That's pretty much Rider's true name, isn't it? So her name is Astolfo.
I want to think she's just trying to give me a wrong clue here, playing dumb and giving out fake info to get me onto the wrong track. But with the way Shinji reacted to Rin's call-out yesterday, that's surely not it. No, really. The Servant of my opponent just handed me information about herself on a silver platter. I'm in disbelief.
"Oh, you've actually figured out Rider's true name?"
Rin, as if summoned by her mention in my mind, comments from behind me casually, seeing the book I carry. That all but confirms that Rider is Astolfo, if I hadn't been convinced before.
"I only did just now, she bumped into me and then gave me this book…"
Even I find it hard to believe that just happened. Rin's face drops her usual assured, serious expression in disbelief just like I was, though she catches herself fairly quickly again.
"That Servant…" She mutters under her breath, before for some reason directing her anger at me again. "God, if you weren't so unbelievably lucky…! You can't just keep expecting things to turn out in your favor, not everyone is as stupid and careless as Matou and his Servant!"
Rin stomps off before I can get any word in. Is she angry at Shinji and Rider for being careless? At me for only running into valuable information by mere chance? Or frustrated about something entirely different? I wouldn't know.
I'm starting to get the feeling that Masters tend to be rather eccentric people, which is a bill I don't fit at all. Nevertheless, I finally go into the library and look for the shelf carrying books on Code Casts.
The last time I've been here, it was to look at the student register that turned out to be empty. But this time, books seem to actually have content, at least. I pick up some books with promising titles, though I don't even nearly rival the number of books Rider held.
Code Casts 101 is probably great literature to start with. Recovery through Code Casts should be just what I need for the specific Code Casts I want to create. I consider Code Casts for Dummies, but I don't think I'm quite that desperate yet… Maybe in the future.
I put back some other books that may be interesting as well, not wanting to hog too many books on Code Casts to myself, maybe another Master is in a similar place and needs them.
I'm sure Saber would chastise me for that thought.
"Master," Saber addresses me and for a second I'm afraid she can suddenly read minds. "Do you want to work on your Code Cast first?"
Hmm… Well. I know we planned to get books, then go to the Arena, and I'd then work on my Code Cast in the evening by myself while Saber gets to rest. And being the fourth day, the second Trigger is available today, which we still need to get.
"Is that even an option?" I ask.
"You're close to finishing your Code Cast, no? Including that in training would be beneficial."
Yeah, Saber has a point. From how I see it, I just need a bit more work and my Code Cast should work; being able to use it in practice today would be a huge help to not only test it out, but also find out how to improve it.
"True," I agree.
I put down the books onto a nearby table clearly meant for studying — I wonder if anyone really uses those? Browsing through the Code Casts 101 book, I find out some core principle I forgot to apply to begin with. No wonder it didn't even compile.
Working with my terminal, I manage to adjust the Code Cast to make up for what it lacked. It seemed like something that could work before, so maybe my judgment isn't really reliable, but now I feel like it could actually really work. It'd be a great success, adding not only to our chances for victory, but also to our arsenal, in a way.
The compilation works, without a problem. I end up with not just a work-in-progress-attempt of a Code Cast — which is what I had until now — but a compiled Code Cast, ready for use. It shouldn't require too much energy to be executed, but given how useless a Master I am, I still can't use it too often.
"Can you show yourself?" I ask, almost calling out Saber by her class, but stopping myself before I can make such a blunder, thankfully. "I'd like to test the Code Cast."
Saber materializes, waiting for me to try it. It's a recover Code Cast, so even if it works, nothing would happen, but I'm hoping that Saber can at least tell that something is going on.
I hold out my hand in Saber's general suggestion, this is the proper way to use a Code Cast for beginners, the book said. Focus your energy flow into your hand, focus on the Code Cast you want to activate.
heal();
A sudden bang startles me before a harsh, burning pain shoots through my hand. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but the Code Cast definitely failed spectacularly. Not only did it not work, no, it somehow did something like short-circuiting, blowing up in my hand.
"Master!?"
Instinctively, I hold my injured hand with my other one, though touching the wounds directly just hurts even more. I have to try really hard to not cry. I failed. Failed hard, again.
"Guess… I messed up," I mutter.
Not that Saber needs me to tell her that. She sighs, annoyed, but at the very least she seems to be at least somewhat concerned over my well-being.
"You should go to the infirmary," Saber tells me. "I'll send your books to your room and come after."
"Yeah… Thanks," I tell her, making my way towards the infirmary.
Sakura seems surprised to see me, or the type of injury I've gotten. Though being an AI, even though it feels like one, I have to remind myself that her reaction isn't genuine, merely a replication of how a normal school nurse should react to a student coming here injured.
"Kamiyoshi, what happened?"
"My Code Cast backfired and this happened," I explain.
She guides me to one of the empty beds and I sit down, letting her check my hand and my general vitals, I suppose.
I didn't really look at it in detail so far, but my hand looks burnt. There's multiple burn marks on my head, dark red, burning at the mere sensation of the air around it.
"Hmmm… That's unusual," Sakura comments. Yeah, I suppose it is. "But since it happened on school grounds, I'm at least allowed to treat you."
She seems relieved to be able to help me.
"You couldn't help me otherwise?"
"As the school nurse AI, I am only allowed to treat wounds inflicted on school ground. It's supposed to be something of a safe area. Wounds from the Arena are off-limits for me," Sakura explains. "Though I'm also allowed to treat Masters after their Elimination battle."
"I see… Thanks."
That explanation is helpful. I should be a lot more careful in the Arena, then. Sakura picks up a bandage.
"This will hurt, but please bear with it," Sakura announces, before starting to gently wrap the bandage around my burnt hand.
I can tell she's careful to not irritate my wounds, but it's honestly a losing battle. Each touch against a particularly bad patch — of which there are quite a few — makes me wince, annoyed at myself for getting this hurt in the first place.
"There's a healing procedure running on the whole campus. It's only minor in the general school building or outside, and the strongest here in the infirmary. The dorm rooms have an increased healing process as well."
"Really?" That's convenient. Though maybe such a system is required here.
"Your hand would need about 6 hours to heal in the infirmary, roughly 12 hours in your dorm room. On school grounds it would take a bit over a full day," Sakura explains.
"… so that means, in either case, I won't really be fine until tomorrow, right?"
That's still extremely fast. I don't even want to think about how long such a burn would take to heal in a real setting. At the same time, surely there must be a way to immediately heal it. But maybe I'm oversimplifying how this works, just because it's a virtual space.
"Yes, I'm sorry. I'd like to keep you here for the fastest healing, but… Since you should avoid the Arena until you're at full health, given your statistics, being healed until after classes tomorrow is all you need. You don't need the infirmary for that."
Yeah, adds up. Given the estimates she gave me, going to my room later and spending my evening and the night there, plus classes tomorrow, I should be fine soon. It's frustrating… Out of all days, it has to be the one when the second Trigger is generated. This throws back Saber and me way too much. Just because I stupidly and stubbornly wanted to work on a Code Cast.
"There, all done." Sakura smiles at me, happy with her work. "The bandage doesn't help the healing at all, but it blocks the pain as long as you don't touch your hand."
"Thank you, Sakura. I don't know what I'd do without you." I really mean that.
"That's just my job, though."
I leave the infirmary, not sure what to do with the rest of my day. It's a free day at a time I don't deserve one.
"I heard her," Saber brings up next to me. "It's frustrating but it can't be helped."
"Yeah," I agree.
I can't let something like this happen again. At the same time, I don't think I have the luxury to give up on learning how to use Code Casts. But by myself, I evidently won't get anywhere. That much was fine when I simply didn't make any progress, but now that I injured myself and actively sabotaged us, that's not a state I can accept.
Although I know it's futile, there's only one person I can think of who might be able to help me with this — Rin Tohsaka. I'm not expecting her to be willing to lend me a hand at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure she won't. But she's the only Master I know who isn't my current opponent and who I haven't asked yet.
If the result of asking her for help is a verbal lashing, then I'm willing to accept that outcome. But I can't just do nothing.
The first time I met her was on the rooftop… so maybe that's the first place I should check. If she's not there, I could try to look for her dorm room and wait for her there, I suppose.
Arriving on the rooftop, it looks empty. Yeah, I'm not really sure what I expected, to be honest.
"What are you doing here?"
I hear Rin's voice from an even higher place behind me. She sounds more surprised than generally frustrated for a change, sitting on the flat roof of the small room of the stairway leading to the rooftop. Rin jumps down to land gracefully in front of me. I'm wondering why she's wearing a red skirt that short if she's willing to pull off such a stunt, given it revealed to me more than I'd even want to see. Black, huh.
That aside. It's not what I'm here for, after all. Focus.
"What's that on your hand?"
Rin eyes the bandage suspiciously, throwing another question at me before I even had the chance to answer her first one.
"That… Well, it's the reason I'm here," I tell her, raising my hand to let her get a closer look. "I tried to make a Code Cast, and failed."
She raises her eyebrow at me. I'm sure she can tell where I'm going even without me spelling it out. There's only so many conclusions to draw here.
"Would you maybe help me?"
Rin takes a breath and I already expect to be bombarded with insults in a second that are, at the core, completely true, but before Rin can start to berate me for being the hopeless case of a Master I am, her Servant materializes next to her, stopping her dead in her tracks.
A similar height as Rin and I, with long, blond hair tied in a braid, her clothes dark and pale shades of purple. She's beautiful and exudes an aura of serenity, in a way.
"Master," she calls out to Rin. "I believe you still owe that girl."
"Ugh…"
Rin doesn't seem to have a very good argument against her Servant if that's the only response she's giving, with how verbose she can be normally with her verbal jabs. Really? What does Rin owe me? I don't remember ever doing her a favor.
"Kamiyoshi is your name, right?" Her Servant approaches me. "On behalf of my Master, I apologize for her… too intimate behavior on your first meeting."
Both hers and Rin's cheeks take on a noticeably red color. It appears difficult for her Servant to use any clearer words than that to describe what happened.
Ah, I remember. On the first day, when I came to the rooftop and met Rin, she did feel me up, didn't she? It wasn't that big of a deal, so I honestly pretty much forgot about it.
"Don't worry about it," I tell her Servant.
"See? You didn't need to apologize," Rin grumbles. "It wasn't that bad."
"No, you should have apologized as you said you would," her Servant lectures her further. "To make amends, you should help her this one time, Master."
Her amethyst eyes say 'That's the least you can do to make up for what you did, and not even apologizing on your own'. It's refreshing to see such a serious, genuinely good Servant but at the same time I feel a little relieved that Saber isn't this strict with me.
Rin sure has it rough, not only having a Holy Grail War to participate it, but also bettering herself as a person by her Servant's standard.
"Fine, got it! Geez," Rin relents. Though I don't think she has much of a choice. "Show me your terminal."
Her Servant smiles and disappears, I hand over my terminal to Rin who takes it in her hands and leans her back against her wall while checking over my work. I feel awfully nervous all of a sudden. Me, a novice so unskilled I hurt myself in the process, showing my failure of an attempt to someone far above my skill.
"Hmm, you went for recovery, huh?"
"Yeah. I thought the two classes and the Code Casts 101 book were enough, but apparently they weren't."
Rin chuckles. So focused on studying my Code Cast attempt and making some changes to it, she doesn't really have the mind to criticize me as openly as usual. In this moment I catch myself thinking that she's actually quite cute like this, not just intimidating.
"Figures," Rin finally says. "Maybe you should've tried Code Casts for Dummies."
She gestures at me to come over and shows me what changes she made to my Code Cast, explaining the issue to me.
"You wanted to cast a recover process, which basically just restores something to the way it's supposed to be. But you didn't add a part that specifies how much recovery you want to happen."
… what?
"I have to do that? But wouldn't I want a full recovery?"
"Not with such a sloppy Code Cast, you wouldn't. A simple one like this just blindly runs its recovery process, in your case endlessly. That's why it blew up the moment you ran it — going multiple times in split seconds until it overloaded, blew up, and quit itself. It's more of a surprise that your injury isn't worse."
"… I see…"
There's a lot more to Code Casts and their specifics than I first thought, it seems…
"I changed the part that was butchered, it should work just fine now. It was just a small fix. I'm surprised you even got that far with how ignorant you are."
Is that a compliment? If so, it's a very backhanded one. Honestly, more of an insult.
"Thanks, Rin. Somehow it feels more like I'm in your debt now," I tell her as she returns my terminal to me.
"Don't start that back up! We're even now, got it? Even!"
Rin crosses her arms in front of her chest defiantly. No need to react that strongly, but either way, she's helped me out a lot. I'll make sure to repay that favor to her one day.
"I'll go rest now, see you," I bid Rin farewell, though I can't quite make out what incomprehensible stuff she mutters under her breath.
Rin can be surprisingly nice and reliable when she's not being her… well, usual self. I didn't really expect that of her. Though I shouldn't get used to that side of her, I doubt she'd show it again under normal circumstances here.
Back in my dorm room, Saber materializes and asks something I didn't even consider until now.
"Master, are you sure you should trust that girl?"
"Hm? You mean Rin? Why not?"
Ouch. I can tell by Saber's usually unreadable face that this was probably next to the wrongest thing I could've said in response.
"Are you really that foolish?"
"I know she's another Master, but… She didn't seem like she's a bad person! And her Servant seemed kind, too."
I don't exactly understand why I feel the need to defend Rin. I hardly know her, and most of the time she hasn't exactly been kind to me.
"How do you know it's not a lie? An act? Master, being that naive is nothing short of reckless."
Saber is probably right. Not just probably, definitely. And yet, I can't find myself agreeing with her view here. It's not that I have a logical reason for disagreeing, but it's rather that I don't want to distrust everyone.
But I also know that arguing won't lead anywhere. Saber and I disagree on this, and I think that we will have to accept our opposing views.
As long as I'm in my room, the healing process should work fast, and it's only early evening, so plenty of time for my wounds to recover. I'll make the best use possible of this otherwise waste of a day — in terms of training, that is — and go over the changes Rin made to my Code Cast, as well as more material in my Code Cast books.
Next time, I should be able to do it without Rin's help, as I doubt she'd have a reason to make up for my flaws again.
Eventually, I decide to call it a day in terms of studies. There's only so much I can take in in a single session, after all. I take the book on Astolfo's life and skim through the tales described in it a bit.
Rider didn't lie, those adventures illustrated in this book are quite fun. But something seems off. First, I thought it might've been a printing error (could those happen here, anyway?) but it was so consistent throughout the book that it can't be the case. No, it has to be correct.
… Rider is a guy!?