Shirou tackled Sakura to the ground as the spear left the thin man's hand. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the other man, the one wearing the cloak, step between the two teenagers and their attacker. There was a flare of light behind him, and then what looked like a fan of blue-white lightning bolts from an industrial-scale static electricity demonstration seemed to crash into an invisible wall. For a moment - which couldn't possibly have been as long as it felt, to be crammed into the space of a spear's flight - the barrier held, as brilliant, firey lines traced out from the lightning's points of contact to describe impossibly intricate patterns across the empty space of the evening air, but then it failed.
Most of the streaks of brightness grounded out into the the dark silouette of their defender, but the rest sprayed out all around him and ricocheted randomly off the falling, tumbling lacework the barrier had shattered into. Some vanished harmlessly into the air, or off to either side. Others were reflected back the way they came, and still more simply over or undershot.
The last hit him in the back, just below the shoulderblades, and his entire universe vanished into brilliance...
...As he snapped awake and tried to sit bolt upright with a scream. The scream worked perfectly, but only because the attempt to move had driven his body to remind him just how many parts of it hurt, and how badly, and, especially, that his stomach and back muscles felt even worse than the rest.
A pair of small, soft hands caught his shoulders and eased him back down onto the bed. "Please, don't try to move, Senpai. You're badly hurt," Sakura told him. When he forced his eyes open to look up at her face, he could see that she looked desperately frightened.
"You're lucky to be alive, Emiya-dono," said another voice from just outside his field of view. He didn't have the energy to turn his head and look, but after a moment he placed the voice as belonging to the more benevolent of those two mysterious men from...
no, that definitely hadn't been a dream. "All three of us are, in fact."
It occurs to me that we probably hit our first chapter break somewhere during all this. You want I should try and edit it up and post it as a seperate thread, say, as 'FATE/ Change Dusk'?
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"