Yes, it's been a while.
---
Originally, part of the reason he'd chosen to come back to Fuyuki for this whole thing was the home field advantage.
The possibility that the Einzberns wouldn't figure things out from the utter and complete _mess_ his and Illya's departure had left in their wake was
so remote it didn't even bear contemplation. There'd been enough brass that might as well have been signed with his name lying around the place to
stock up a small armory, and he hadn't really been all to thorough about taking care of possible surveillance after he'd gotten in. He lacked the time
and ability.
Fuyuki was a calculated gamble. If they knew where you were going _anyway_, you might as well go somewhere where keeping the so-called neutrality is a concern.
Well, where it's a concern during those intervals that the locals aren't busy killing one-another over ancient constructs said to grant the powers of
Magic to the conqueror in.
Still, all things considered, the advantages had seemed to far outweigh the disadvantages.
Knowing your way around being an added, and most welcome, bonus.
... plus, he'd been a bit worried about Fuji-nee going and burning the house down or something during his several months' worth of absence. That was
about the only thing that _hadn't_ gone wrong.
Case in point, the fact that while they may have gotten rid of most of their pursuers thanks to that abovementioned home ground advantage, most is not all.
In this particular case, 'not all' apparently meant one.
Something which in Shirou's experience and Kiritsugu's memories had never, ever, been a good thing.
The ominous rumble coming from the grey, heavy looking clouds gathering overhead, even as the two 'siblings' and their onetime hostage were halted in
their ascent of Ryuudoji's stairway, seemed only fitting.
Several meters ahead, Tohsaka didn't notice, but Illya seemed to be momentarily on edge for some reason and ...
It wasn't anything _he_ could notice, but suddenly his two pistols were in his hands and Kiritsugu's instincts were screaming bloody murder at him.
He moved. Then there was an oddly maroon-shaded blur coming down in front of him, and chips of the stone stairway filling the air as he half-stumbled,
half-hopped backwards.
"Emiya Shirou," the blur resolved itself into human form, one gloved fist buried up to the wrist in the stone. "By order of the Mage
Association, you are to accompany me."
"... can you people not use phones like the rest of the world?" Shirou said, regaining his balance. "What if I said 'no'?"
"I have been authorized to use any means neccessary," the woman said, removing her fist from the ruined section of stairway. "Your survival thereof has not been prioritized."
She was slender, short-haired, clad in a sharp pantsuit, and quite attractive.
"Why?" Shirou turned his eyes skywards, with a pained expression on his face. "Why do you insist on doing this to me? It's like every
attractive girl I run across wants to visit bodily harm upon me. Was it something I ..."
He flung himself to the side, bringing up his left arm and letting loose as soon as Tohsaka and Illya were out of the line of fire. The sound of the five
gunshots fired as rapidly as possible given the mechanical limitations of the weapon seemed as one continuous, distorted thunderclap rather than a series of
sharp barks.
Her speed was unnatural, even to Shirou. Especially to Shirou.
He'd learned to affect his senses as well as his body through simple reinforcement sorcery, but while his crude approach did not let her simply vanish, she
was still faster than he could make himself respond ...
The woman still almost blurred, seeming to slide underneath the path his projectiles had been sent along. Instinct saved him again, and the palm-strike that
would have shattered his sternum slid along the side of his ribcage instead as he twisted in mid-fall.
It still hurt like hell, though, even with reinforcement - his reserves were simply not enough to negate pure, directed power like that.
His back hit grass, and he rolled with the motion, away from the stairway and into forest that covered the hill. He followed momentum up into a crouch.
***
The crackling levinbolt dissipated, and Illyasviel growled in frustration.
"Stubborn, pig-headed, self-sacrificing _idiot_ of a brother ...!"
Before Tohsaka could do anything herself, the pale-haired von Einzbern had already started off towards the treeline, with little regard for anythinging else
...
Down below and some ways off, where Shirou and the woman had disappeared into the greenery, a tree suddenly - and without any warning whatsoever - came
crashing down.
Rin swore. Rin cursed. Rin gathered her reserves and followed.
***
"... was it something I said?" Shirou choked out, getting his breath back while his eyes searched ... and for a moment, gaped.
The woman was crouching on the side of a tree, legs bending to absorb impact.
Shirou had about enough time to think: 'Hey, I think I saw something like this in a manga once ...' before she launched herself towards him, with a
motion akin to the uncoiling of an oversized spring.
The heel drop shattered its way through the spot he'd been in a moment ago, throwing him off balance by the virtue of the fact that while _he_ had managed
to barely slip out of the way, part of his coat had not.
My, that knee was coming at his face rather quickly.
Momentarily panicking, he lashed out. Hell, he was out in his left, and his right was down to half-magazine. Given the state of his hands, he didn't think
trying to Image extra bullets was something he should try - the time he had, after waking up to a teary Illya and a raging Tohsaka, he'd just succeeded in
blowing blood through his bandages. And in blowing, he meant with near explosive force.
Whether it was just luck, or some lingering shade of Kiritsugu's skill, this time the blow actually struck ... pity it was just the blunt barrel of a
pistol against an obviously enhanced target ...
... there was a crack, and a metallic sort of sound immediately thereafter, and the wrenching sensation in his left hand told him that not only was he less one
pistol, he'd either broken or dislocated several fingers.
He was rewarded with the sight of the woman's face contorting into a brief grimace of pain as she hopped away, landing awkwardly and clutching at her knee.
'Kneecap?'
It gave him a moment of breathing room, though said breathing came in painful pants there and then, which was just enough.
His remaining pistol came up.
He didn't even need to aim - he knew how the weapon worked. That he couldn't create one like he could, say, blades or bullets, didn't mean he
couldn't feel how it had been put together. He knew every nook and cranny of the barrel, and every imperfection in a bullet. Every detail of how the flight
path would be, where it would take the bit of lead through, he could almost see before him in vivid detail.
He pulled the trigger, and ...
... knew exactly _when_ things went wrong. Knew exactly _why_. The past few hours hadn't been easy on it, and his condition being what it was, there was
little he could do to help with no time to spare.
He could do nothing about it without reinforcing the weapon - something he did not thing he could, at the moment, accomplish because of his hands'
condition.
"Ah, _crap_!" He swore as the gun jammed.
It was enough. The blued steel went flying, knocked out of his hand, even as the woman hissed in pain at the process of moving at near what he thought was her
top speed with a ... cracked? ... broken? ... kneecap.
"You try my _patience_," she said. "In your condition, why would you even try to fight?"
"... fight? This wasn't a fight," Shirou said, falling back with a resigned expression on his face. Then he smirked. "This was a
_distraction_."
The sudden spike of power coming from a ways up the hill made the woman turn, and her eyes widen.
There, in all her channeling glory, Illyasviel von Einzbern seemed to almost hover, the brilliant ball of pure power resting between her cupped hands glowing
scorchingly. So much so, in fact, that nearby vegetation was starting to slowly twist and blacken from the heat, and the Magic Circuits covering her body were
literally scorching their way through her clothes.
"Get away form him!"
In a moment.
In an instant.
In a flicker of motion, Shirou's expression froze.
Perception is a funny thing that way. It just happened that his own attention was focused on his attacker, instead of Illya's display. He noted the brief
flash of panic. The moment of resolve. The practiced, reflexive motion as a hand reached out.
Shirou's hand shot forward, fingers reaching.
Hers was faster, and grasped the small, ornately looking thing he'd mistaken for mere decoration ...
... but not before a tip of his finger brushed against it.
Realization came instantly, for his body if not for his mind. For instinct, if not for consciousness.
Weapon.
Knowledge came after.
Illya's spell was loosed, even as Shirou's assailant countered ...
It was a concept. A flash of energy realizing the perfect, the ideal counterattack, gathering and reflecting power back onto its source.
Shirou had never before moved as quickly as he did there and then, and in fact wasn't aware of what he'd done, merely that he had done it and stood,
sans coat, with Illya at his back, and the onrushing torrent of power before him.
He knew he wasn't much of a mage. A one trick pony at best. But at that one thing, he could say with certainty that he excelled.
His palm erupted in blood, the bandages not stemming the flow in the least, even as he strained to replicate that brief flash of realization. He had touched
it, therefore he knew it. He knew it, therefore he could _create_ it. He could create it, therefore it was _his_ to wield.
He had not come so far, had not given her her _life_ back, merely to let Illya _die_ like this.
Something within Emiya Shirou snapped, painfully tearing at the limits imposed by his body and fighting its way through to the world in a fine mist of
crimson-red.
Blood. Iron. Power.
Two out of three, and the third should have been provided for a month's time, but Emiya Shirou was a one trick pony.
An idiot savant or an art thought redundant by modern mages.
To him, its rules were more like _guidelines_.
In other words, he cheated like a motherfucker.
The look on his attacker's face when the perfect counter was itself countered was priceless, but deemed secondary as the interplay of energies coiled
together like two fighting serpents ... or one serpent attempting to bite its own tail.
Counter. Counter. Counter. One after another, the energies rebounded, returned, and were reflected a dozen, two dozen, a hundred times in the blink of an eye
in a blinding ballet that suddenly turned on itself. Inverted.
For a heartbeat, what looked like a perfect sphere of pure nothingness hung in the air between him and the woman, warping energy, warping space, warping light
around it in a vertigo-inducing display.
Then, like a soap-bubble, it popped.
The last thing he remembered was channeling the dregs of mana still within him into reinforcing his body, as it was picked up by the rush of expanding air and
then ...
... he woke up to wetness and chill.
For a moment, confusion reigned, before he realized that he was on his back, looking at the sky.
Oh, he was getting rained on. Slowly, and with moments of not-quite-but-almost-agonizing pain as interruptions, he managed to sit up.
There was a sort of path, if you could call it that, leading upwards through the trees. You could tell because of all the broken branches.
And speaking of broken ...
'... I did _that_? And didn't break anything ... just ... ouch ... feels like I bruised _everything_ instead.' He blinked, taking in his
surroundings. 'Wait, isn't that the stairway. The _bottom_ of the stairway. The one I was on the other side of last I recall? How am I not dead? For
that matter ... oh, crap.'
He tried to rise before remembering about his hands, though they did that well enough on their own, and spent another moment looking at the mess his right hand
had become. The good news was, he still had four fingers and a thumb. The bad news was ...
'Eew ... damn ... well, at least it looks like whatever I did cauterized it so I'm not bleeding to death.'
The left one was in better shape, at least after he winced through getting the index and middle fingers back into joint.
That still left him at the bottom of the damn hill, sans coat, slowly getting further and further soaked by the rain and with no clue as to where either of the
girls were.
He _hoped_, on top of the hill, at the temple.
Finally, after a minute or two worth of further trying, he managed to get upright. Oddly, he wasn't feeling exhausted _other_ than physically, which was
just plain strange given the amount of power that last bit of Imaging had taken. How or why this was, he had no time to delve into at the moment. Instead, he
reached to the small of his back, and grinned - the weatherproof holster for the holdout SIG was still there, contents and all.
Not really up to snuff, considering his now likely late CZs, but it would do for the moment. He needed to get up that hill, and ...
What the hell was _that_? The rain was making sound garbled, but he could have sworn he'd just heard someone. Stepping onto the stone stairway, he took a
look around.
Oh.
A few more steps were enough to work through the lingering stiffness and ignore protesting muscles, as he descended to the stairway's base. Carefully.
That someone was apparently unconscious on the ground there, he was only assuming, and assumptions got one killed more often than not. And when not, they
usually involved pain of one kind or another, which he really wasn't up to enduring at the moment.
'I wish I had a sharp stick to poke whoever it is ... with ...' Shirou thought as he finally saw the face under the voluminous hood. Figures.
Also, hooded robe? Well, _that_ was just modern fashion, surely. Certainly. Rrrrrright.
With a heavy sigh, he knelt down beside the prone woman and checked for a pulse ... then froze at the brief spark of mana that seemed to flash along the area
where his fingers rested on her neck. He had no time to do anything else, though, as the woman's eyes shot open in ... panic?
"... please, no ... please, leave me alone ..." She seemed to want to scramble backwards.
"Easy, easy, don't hurt yourself ..." Shirou tried, but as soon as he'd said the first bit her eyes fluttered closed once more, and she was
still. The pulse, and the _other_ one as well - whatever the heck that meant - was still there. Alright, obviously, she was _some_ kind of mage. Sorceress.
Whatever. Point against, as he was fairly sure there were no mages whom he would consider friendly, or even non-hostile, in Fuyuki at this time.
Plus the other problems.
On the other hand ...
Shirou scowled at the sky. "Alright, alright ... but if _this one_ wakes up and decides to try and kill me too, I'm off to find a few gallons of
gasoline and see how well the damn shrine will burn."
But still, couldn't she have fallen unconscious near the _top_ of all these stairs? Would that have been too much to ask?
---
tbc ... eventually ^^
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
---
Originally, part of the reason he'd chosen to come back to Fuyuki for this whole thing was the home field advantage.
The possibility that the Einzberns wouldn't figure things out from the utter and complete _mess_ his and Illya's departure had left in their wake was
so remote it didn't even bear contemplation. There'd been enough brass that might as well have been signed with his name lying around the place to
stock up a small armory, and he hadn't really been all to thorough about taking care of possible surveillance after he'd gotten in. He lacked the time
and ability.
Fuyuki was a calculated gamble. If they knew where you were going _anyway_, you might as well go somewhere where keeping the so-called neutrality is a concern.
Well, where it's a concern during those intervals that the locals aren't busy killing one-another over ancient constructs said to grant the powers of
Magic to the conqueror in.
Still, all things considered, the advantages had seemed to far outweigh the disadvantages.
Knowing your way around being an added, and most welcome, bonus.
... plus, he'd been a bit worried about Fuji-nee going and burning the house down or something during his several months' worth of absence. That was
about the only thing that _hadn't_ gone wrong.
Case in point, the fact that while they may have gotten rid of most of their pursuers thanks to that abovementioned home ground advantage, most is not all.
In this particular case, 'not all' apparently meant one.
Something which in Shirou's experience and Kiritsugu's memories had never, ever, been a good thing.
The ominous rumble coming from the grey, heavy looking clouds gathering overhead, even as the two 'siblings' and their onetime hostage were halted in
their ascent of Ryuudoji's stairway, seemed only fitting.
Several meters ahead, Tohsaka didn't notice, but Illya seemed to be momentarily on edge for some reason and ...
It wasn't anything _he_ could notice, but suddenly his two pistols were in his hands and Kiritsugu's instincts were screaming bloody murder at him.
He moved. Then there was an oddly maroon-shaded blur coming down in front of him, and chips of the stone stairway filling the air as he half-stumbled,
half-hopped backwards.
"Emiya Shirou," the blur resolved itself into human form, one gloved fist buried up to the wrist in the stone. "By order of the Mage
Association, you are to accompany me."
"... can you people not use phones like the rest of the world?" Shirou said, regaining his balance. "What if I said 'no'?"
"I have been authorized to use any means neccessary," the woman said, removing her fist from the ruined section of stairway. "Your survival thereof has not been prioritized."
She was slender, short-haired, clad in a sharp pantsuit, and quite attractive.
"Why?" Shirou turned his eyes skywards, with a pained expression on his face. "Why do you insist on doing this to me? It's like every
attractive girl I run across wants to visit bodily harm upon me. Was it something I ..."
He flung himself to the side, bringing up his left arm and letting loose as soon as Tohsaka and Illya were out of the line of fire. The sound of the five
gunshots fired as rapidly as possible given the mechanical limitations of the weapon seemed as one continuous, distorted thunderclap rather than a series of
sharp barks.
Her speed was unnatural, even to Shirou. Especially to Shirou.
He'd learned to affect his senses as well as his body through simple reinforcement sorcery, but while his crude approach did not let her simply vanish, she
was still faster than he could make himself respond ...
The woman still almost blurred, seeming to slide underneath the path his projectiles had been sent along. Instinct saved him again, and the palm-strike that
would have shattered his sternum slid along the side of his ribcage instead as he twisted in mid-fall.
It still hurt like hell, though, even with reinforcement - his reserves were simply not enough to negate pure, directed power like that.
His back hit grass, and he rolled with the motion, away from the stairway and into forest that covered the hill. He followed momentum up into a crouch.
***
The crackling levinbolt dissipated, and Illyasviel growled in frustration.
"Stubborn, pig-headed, self-sacrificing _idiot_ of a brother ...!"
Before Tohsaka could do anything herself, the pale-haired von Einzbern had already started off towards the treeline, with little regard for anythinging else
...
Down below and some ways off, where Shirou and the woman had disappeared into the greenery, a tree suddenly - and without any warning whatsoever - came
crashing down.
Rin swore. Rin cursed. Rin gathered her reserves and followed.
***
"... was it something I said?" Shirou choked out, getting his breath back while his eyes searched ... and for a moment, gaped.
The woman was crouching on the side of a tree, legs bending to absorb impact.
Shirou had about enough time to think: 'Hey, I think I saw something like this in a manga once ...' before she launched herself towards him, with a
motion akin to the uncoiling of an oversized spring.
The heel drop shattered its way through the spot he'd been in a moment ago, throwing him off balance by the virtue of the fact that while _he_ had managed
to barely slip out of the way, part of his coat had not.
My, that knee was coming at his face rather quickly.
Momentarily panicking, he lashed out. Hell, he was out in his left, and his right was down to half-magazine. Given the state of his hands, he didn't think
trying to Image extra bullets was something he should try - the time he had, after waking up to a teary Illya and a raging Tohsaka, he'd just succeeded in
blowing blood through his bandages. And in blowing, he meant with near explosive force.
Whether it was just luck, or some lingering shade of Kiritsugu's skill, this time the blow actually struck ... pity it was just the blunt barrel of a
pistol against an obviously enhanced target ...
... there was a crack, and a metallic sort of sound immediately thereafter, and the wrenching sensation in his left hand told him that not only was he less one
pistol, he'd either broken or dislocated several fingers.
He was rewarded with the sight of the woman's face contorting into a brief grimace of pain as she hopped away, landing awkwardly and clutching at her knee.
'Kneecap?'
It gave him a moment of breathing room, though said breathing came in painful pants there and then, which was just enough.
His remaining pistol came up.
He didn't even need to aim - he knew how the weapon worked. That he couldn't create one like he could, say, blades or bullets, didn't mean he
couldn't feel how it had been put together. He knew every nook and cranny of the barrel, and every imperfection in a bullet. Every detail of how the flight
path would be, where it would take the bit of lead through, he could almost see before him in vivid detail.
He pulled the trigger, and ...
... knew exactly _when_ things went wrong. Knew exactly _why_. The past few hours hadn't been easy on it, and his condition being what it was, there was
little he could do to help with no time to spare.
He could do nothing about it without reinforcing the weapon - something he did not thing he could, at the moment, accomplish because of his hands'
condition.
"Ah, _crap_!" He swore as the gun jammed.
It was enough. The blued steel went flying, knocked out of his hand, even as the woman hissed in pain at the process of moving at near what he thought was her
top speed with a ... cracked? ... broken? ... kneecap.
"You try my _patience_," she said. "In your condition, why would you even try to fight?"
"... fight? This wasn't a fight," Shirou said, falling back with a resigned expression on his face. Then he smirked. "This was a
_distraction_."
The sudden spike of power coming from a ways up the hill made the woman turn, and her eyes widen.
There, in all her channeling glory, Illyasviel von Einzbern seemed to almost hover, the brilliant ball of pure power resting between her cupped hands glowing
scorchingly. So much so, in fact, that nearby vegetation was starting to slowly twist and blacken from the heat, and the Magic Circuits covering her body were
literally scorching their way through her clothes.
"Get away form him!"
In a moment.
In an instant.
In a flicker of motion, Shirou's expression froze.
Perception is a funny thing that way. It just happened that his own attention was focused on his attacker, instead of Illya's display. He noted the brief
flash of panic. The moment of resolve. The practiced, reflexive motion as a hand reached out.
Shirou's hand shot forward, fingers reaching.
Hers was faster, and grasped the small, ornately looking thing he'd mistaken for mere decoration ...
... but not before a tip of his finger brushed against it.
Realization came instantly, for his body if not for his mind. For instinct, if not for consciousness.
Weapon.
Knowledge came after.
Illya's spell was loosed, even as Shirou's assailant countered ...
It was a concept. A flash of energy realizing the perfect, the ideal counterattack, gathering and reflecting power back onto its source.
Shirou had never before moved as quickly as he did there and then, and in fact wasn't aware of what he'd done, merely that he had done it and stood,
sans coat, with Illya at his back, and the onrushing torrent of power before him.
He knew he wasn't much of a mage. A one trick pony at best. But at that one thing, he could say with certainty that he excelled.
His palm erupted in blood, the bandages not stemming the flow in the least, even as he strained to replicate that brief flash of realization. He had touched
it, therefore he knew it. He knew it, therefore he could _create_ it. He could create it, therefore it was _his_ to wield.
He had not come so far, had not given her her _life_ back, merely to let Illya _die_ like this.
Something within Emiya Shirou snapped, painfully tearing at the limits imposed by his body and fighting its way through to the world in a fine mist of
crimson-red.
Blood. Iron. Power.
Two out of three, and the third should have been provided for a month's time, but Emiya Shirou was a one trick pony.
An idiot savant or an art thought redundant by modern mages.
To him, its rules were more like _guidelines_.
In other words, he cheated like a motherfucker.
The look on his attacker's face when the perfect counter was itself countered was priceless, but deemed secondary as the interplay of energies coiled
together like two fighting serpents ... or one serpent attempting to bite its own tail.
Counter. Counter. Counter. One after another, the energies rebounded, returned, and were reflected a dozen, two dozen, a hundred times in the blink of an eye
in a blinding ballet that suddenly turned on itself. Inverted.
For a heartbeat, what looked like a perfect sphere of pure nothingness hung in the air between him and the woman, warping energy, warping space, warping light
around it in a vertigo-inducing display.
Then, like a soap-bubble, it popped.
The last thing he remembered was channeling the dregs of mana still within him into reinforcing his body, as it was picked up by the rush of expanding air and
then ...
... he woke up to wetness and chill.
For a moment, confusion reigned, before he realized that he was on his back, looking at the sky.
Oh, he was getting rained on. Slowly, and with moments of not-quite-but-almost-agonizing pain as interruptions, he managed to sit up.
There was a sort of path, if you could call it that, leading upwards through the trees. You could tell because of all the broken branches.
And speaking of broken ...
'... I did _that_? And didn't break anything ... just ... ouch ... feels like I bruised _everything_ instead.' He blinked, taking in his
surroundings. 'Wait, isn't that the stairway. The _bottom_ of the stairway. The one I was on the other side of last I recall? How am I not dead? For
that matter ... oh, crap.'
He tried to rise before remembering about his hands, though they did that well enough on their own, and spent another moment looking at the mess his right hand
had become. The good news was, he still had four fingers and a thumb. The bad news was ...
'Eew ... damn ... well, at least it looks like whatever I did cauterized it so I'm not bleeding to death.'
The left one was in better shape, at least after he winced through getting the index and middle fingers back into joint.
That still left him at the bottom of the damn hill, sans coat, slowly getting further and further soaked by the rain and with no clue as to where either of the
girls were.
He _hoped_, on top of the hill, at the temple.
Finally, after a minute or two worth of further trying, he managed to get upright. Oddly, he wasn't feeling exhausted _other_ than physically, which was
just plain strange given the amount of power that last bit of Imaging had taken. How or why this was, he had no time to delve into at the moment. Instead, he
reached to the small of his back, and grinned - the weatherproof holster for the holdout SIG was still there, contents and all.
Not really up to snuff, considering his now likely late CZs, but it would do for the moment. He needed to get up that hill, and ...
What the hell was _that_? The rain was making sound garbled, but he could have sworn he'd just heard someone. Stepping onto the stone stairway, he took a
look around.
Oh.
A few more steps were enough to work through the lingering stiffness and ignore protesting muscles, as he descended to the stairway's base. Carefully.
That someone was apparently unconscious on the ground there, he was only assuming, and assumptions got one killed more often than not. And when not, they
usually involved pain of one kind or another, which he really wasn't up to enduring at the moment.
'I wish I had a sharp stick to poke whoever it is ... with ...' Shirou thought as he finally saw the face under the voluminous hood. Figures.
Also, hooded robe? Well, _that_ was just modern fashion, surely. Certainly. Rrrrrright.
With a heavy sigh, he knelt down beside the prone woman and checked for a pulse ... then froze at the brief spark of mana that seemed to flash along the area
where his fingers rested on her neck. He had no time to do anything else, though, as the woman's eyes shot open in ... panic?
"... please, no ... please, leave me alone ..." She seemed to want to scramble backwards.
"Easy, easy, don't hurt yourself ..." Shirou tried, but as soon as he'd said the first bit her eyes fluttered closed once more, and she was
still. The pulse, and the _other_ one as well - whatever the heck that meant - was still there. Alright, obviously, she was _some_ kind of mage. Sorceress.
Whatever. Point against, as he was fairly sure there were no mages whom he would consider friendly, or even non-hostile, in Fuyuki at this time.
Plus the other problems.
On the other hand ...
Shirou scowled at the sky. "Alright, alright ... but if _this one_ wakes up and decides to try and kill me too, I'm off to find a few gallons of
gasoline and see how well the damn shrine will burn."
But still, couldn't she have fallen unconscious near the _top_ of all these stairs? Would that have been too much to ask?
---
tbc ... eventually ^^
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm