Chapter Text
It was Monday, and classes were starting again. The students got ready for school while the news channels warned about a gas leak in the central district of Fuyuki. For a few reasons of his own, Carlos did not watch the television.
He had spent Sunday with Nero. After telling her about the dream, he also revealed that, once his spirit guide had pointed the way, his family had moved to Fuyuki soon after. His mother had told him that her grandfather was from the city — and that was enough to make him suspect he would need to set aside some time to look into it more carefully. There was some connection to the war, Carlos thought. Apologizing again for the delay in the hunt, he argued for time to rest and to decide which course of action to take. The temple was one of them, and even so, waiting for a more decisive move from the supposed “spider” would be wiser — if only because the terrain itself was excellent for defending whoever held its summit.
Not that this supposed inertia went unprotested. The Roman empress despised stillness far too much. But a few kisses, by the simple fact that they could be stolen, made Carlos guilty of how homebound the Sunday had turned out. The feeling the two of them shared was still too new. And for two young people — an eighteen-year-old boy and a girl of twenty, all the more vibrant in her case — it was something explosive, too dizzying to take all at once.
Even so, Nero had been an empress who’d had to handle a great deal of strategy, political and military alike. So she didn’t object much to the idea of a day of strategic planning. She received his kisses as something owed to her and returned them like one bestowing a favor. She yielded to the planning day out of a commander’s calculation: to observe the enemy is also to advance. And, even between warm interruptions — lips meeting, waists drawn close — they reached the conclusion together that there were two magi at the school. Staying near his friend was a good option. Inexperienced as they were, they were still allies. Nero acknowledged that Shirou’s Servant was still far too strong, and honorable besides. It was a safe choice. And since Tohsaka had already declared herself his enemy, it was easier to watch what her next steps would be. It was even clever, to keep her under close watch.
Before leaving, Carlos remembered that he’d never answered Mitsuzuri’s worry about her family in the hospital. He called her house. He waited, for a good while, and no one answered. He figured she must already have gone to school to deal with the club duties Shinji had left undone, and that her family had gone to work. So he decided he’d find her at school. He made a new ebó for protection and left the house with Nero.
Then, on the way, he realized that, however thrilling and fun it was to have Nero beside him, she was not a student. Somewhere between a tease and a quip, he was going to have to warn her she couldn’t go inside the school.
Stroking, and then taking, her hands, he said:
“Hm… there’s something off about this gata…”
“Umu? Something off?” She left her hands in his, but lifted her chin with the loftiness of one who scents flattery from leagues away. “Praetor, you stroke your empress’s hands like a courtier afraid of his own request. Out with it — what mischief is that smile of yours trying to hide from me?”
He smiled.
“It’s just that tigresses and lionesses, this time of year, can’t go to a school.” He said it while kissing her hand. “And there’s another detail. Emperors had their praetorian guard. I can’t leave my empress out for everyone else’s eyes. I won’t be able to stand everyone staring at us. I’m very jealous,” he added, teasing.
“Umu! Jealous?” She laughed, flattered to the very root of her crown, but the laugh sharpened quickly into something prouder. “Hear me well, Praetor: your empress is no jewel to be locked in a vault, far from the eyes of the world. If I must be kept from your side, let it be sword in hand — do not hide me away; give me a field.”
“Hah! And am I really someone who could hide you? Ha.” Then he spoke seriously. “It really is so good to have you with me. But I won’t be able to get you into the school with me. They won’t allow it. Not unless we work out a plan…” His hand grazed his chin, thoughtful.
“Sentimental fool.” She said it with a half-smile, but her gaze softened for an instant before his sincerity. “Then do not drag me into your chalk-walled rooms like an intruder. Give me the streets, the walls, all that surrounds this den of studies of yours. I will be your sentinel and your huntress. If any enemy prowls near, it will meet the empress long before it reaches you.”
“Ah! Damn, well thought!”
He genuinely brightened. He hadn’t considered the possibility of scouting — and it would be fitting as protection. He seized her by the waist and lifted her, spinning her lightly through the air. Then he set her down, embracing her from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder. The people nearby clearly took them for foreigners, more for the way they showed affection in public than for their features. But Carlos didn’t care. To him, it was simply: I feel what I feel.
“Honestly, I’d like to stay like this. I’d stay like this forever. But going to school is part of the plan, right? And it really is a good idea for you to stand guard outside it. So how can we keep in touch, if we need to?”
“Umu…” For an instant she let herself sink into that embrace, her back against his chest, and she lifted her chin — not out of pride, but to hide the warmth rising to her face. “For that, there is the bond that joins us, Praetor: speak to me with your thoughts, and your empress will hear you, no matter how many chalk walls come between us.” The pride returned, and she turned her face just enough to look at him sidelong, with a sharp smile. “But let it not be on a whim… or rather — yes, call to me also if you miss me too much. Both reasons serve me.”
Then her eyes shone, as if the winter light were reflecting some bit of mischief that had just come to mind.
“I can’t do that. I’ll get distracted just wanting to talk telepathically. And what would be the fun, if I didn’t get to hear your voice?” He kissed her cheek and kept walking, now ahead of her.
“It’s settled, then! Since I’ve never done this before, can you do a little of it the moment we say goodbye? In a bit I’ll have to stay out here and go inside. If Taiga sees us together, I might even get smacked. I’ll try to dodge her all day.”
“Fleeing from a teacher! And this is the hero to whom I entrusted my lance.” She laughed, but then tilted her head in an almost solemn gesture and pressed two fingers to his temple, like one sealing an oath. “Then hear me, Praetor. Not with your ears.”
And her voice bloomed from within his skull — warm, vivid, as close as if it were still pressed to the back of his neck:
“Go, my champion. The empress will guard your walls, and at a single thought of yours I will come. Use it wisely… or use it out of longing. Both serve me.”
Carlos walked through the gate of Homurahara. Only the club captains and the student council president were there at that hour. He tried to look for Mitsuzuri. But there was no sign of her. Her clubmates didn’t know where she was either. They only told him, after much insistence, that the last person to see her had been Shinji. And they only told Carlos on the promise that he would do Shinji no harm that day. In exchange, he answered openly the questions about who the girl in the red coat had been, the one who’d walked him to school. Before long, plenty of classmates were chattering about “Claudia” and eager to meet her.
And then he found Shirou. Even though he wasn’t in any club, he usually came early to fix the things Issei asked him to. When Carlos spotted him, he called to him quickly and made sure of the silence and that they were alone.
“Emiya, good morning! Hey — did you happen to see Mitsuzuri this morning?”
“Ah, Carlos, morning.” He lifted his eyes from a jammed hinge Issei had asked him to fix, and wiped his hands on a cloth. “Mitsuzuri? No, I haven’t seen her today… I got here early and I’ve been stuck on these repairs the whole time. Why? Is everything okay?”
Carlos grew more suspicious, but let it go.
“Hm, everything’s fine.” He stepped closer to his friend. “Did you manage to get away from Fujimura-sensei, after Saturday? Did she say anything? Because you saw me make my escape from there, heh.”
“Get away? Man, I’m the one who opened the gate for you.” He laughed awkwardly and scratched the back of his neck. “Fujimura-sensei kept an eye out the whole weekend, suspicious of the… houseguest. She and Sakura ended up sleeping over to keep watch — sensei only left yesterday. It was a kind of… tight weekend, you know?” Something flickered quickly across his face, and he turned his eyes back to the jammed hinge, like someone who’d rather face the mechanical problem.
Carlos came closer and crouched down on one knee.
“Did something happen?”
“It’s nothing major…” He hesitated, fiddling with the hinge without actually fixing it. “It’s just that, with Sakura and Saber both there the whole time, the house felt… different. Not bad.” He searched for the word and couldn’t find it. “There are moments when I look at them and feel something I don’t know how to name, and I don’t know what to do with it.” He set the screwdriver down and risked a crooked, sheepish smile. “Must sound silly. You handle these things way better than I do, I think.”
Carlos stayed quiet a moment. He thought a little about how his own weekend had gone. But he knew he couldn’t just push his friend.
“Look, I always figured you and Sakura got along well. And Saber seems just as determined as you. I felt a good heart in her. Even if she’d show me no mercy the second I slipped up, ha.” He breathed in more deeply. “I think you have to live one day at a time. That’ll help you read the moment, read the feeling.”
“Yeah… you’re right.” He nodded slowly, but there was a weight in the way he said it, like someone who knew he’d never been good at taking one day at a time. “Thank you, Carlos. Really.” He fell silent a moment, and then his face closed a little. “About the weekend… it wasn’t just the full house. There was something with Shinji. We had a bad falling-out, Saturday night.”
Carlos was taken aback.
“So you went out after I left! What happened?”
“I went out to get some air and ended up running into Shinji near the park.” He pressed his lips together. “He started talking about Sakura in a way… that I couldn’t stomach. The way he treats her, Carlos. I lost my head.” He lowered his eyes to his own hand, as if he still remembered the weight of the punch. “We came to blows. It wasn’t pretty, and I’m not proud of it. But if it happened again, I think I’d do the same.”
“You ran into him at the park? In the dead of night? You went out to patrol, didn’t you?”
“…Yeah.” He hesitated. “Okay, it wasn’t just ‘getting some air.’ Saber wasn’t going to let me sit still at home, so I went out to make rounds, see if I felt anything. That’s when I came face to face with Shinji at the park. And he wasn’t alone. There was a Servant beside him — I don’t know which class, only that it was one.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He talked about Sakura, to provoke me, I answered… and before I knew it, Saber had already lunged. It wasn’t him and me trading blows, Carlos. It was between the two of them. Saber was so fast that the other one vanished before anything could be settled. I just watched him walk away.”
“Matou Shinji…”
Carlos remembered the conversation at Emiya’s house.
“So Shinji’s a Master. Was.” He stood up. “I’d have done the same; you did right. Sounds like he won’t be a danger anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s what crossed my mind too — that maybe he’d been left without his Servant after the park.” He shook his head slowly. “But no. This morning he called me over to his house. I went, kind of wary… and she was there again, beside him, whole.” His jaw tightened. “Then he came at me all smiles, offered me an alliance, like Saturday had never even happened. I refused. After the park, after the way he treats Sakura? There’s no conversation that holds up.”
Carlos thought about the whole history with Shinji. After everything he’d done, insulting his own sister was something far lower.
“He still manages to surprise me. I hope that after this, you won’t try to treat him as a friend.”
The bell for the start of class rang. It was time for the students to get ready. From a distance, he saw Rin Tohsaka heading toward the classroom.
“Anything you need, call me! I’ll try to figure out how to help you.”
Shirou said his goodbye — he raised his hand to wave — but Carlos had already turned, leaving before the gesture could land. The hand hung in the air a moment and came down slowly. In the other, he still held the screwdriver. The tool of someone who spent his life fixing what belonged to others, being useful, being needed. Only that morning, he’d been the one fixed. It had been Carlos who’d listened to him, who’d given him advice, who’d offered to help. And now it was Carlos who walked on, back straight, toward Tohsaka, needing nothing in return. Shirou turned his eyes back to the jammed hinge. That, at least, he knew how to fix.
Carlos was on his way to Rin. Seeing her was something painful. The little moment they’d shared together had already been sabotaged. Seeing her renewed in his mind the image of the goodbye at the gate, of the scolding he’d taken for his recklessness. As guilty as he felt, he still carried a great deal of hurt at finding himself more distant from Rin. And in that inner conflict he made a decision other than being honest with himself, and with her.
Before Tohsaka could go into the classroom, Carlos stopped near her and leaned against the door.
“Good morning, Tohsaka-san.” That was not the same “good morning.” It was a different kind of provocation.
“Good morning.” She returned it, curt. “But you didn’t stop here to be polite.” She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder, already halfway out the door, her voice low enough not to draw the attention of the classmates in the hall. “So just say what you came to say. I don’t have all day for games.”
Her reply hurt Carlos more than a punch — more than any of the many he’d taken in fights.
“Ow, that one stung!” he said dryly. “I never stopped being polite with you. But I have something for you.” Then he came closer and pulled her gently out of the classroom doorway. “Let’s not get in our classmates’ way, right?” Then he spoke low: “If you’re such a good magus, what’s my Servant’s name? Because I probably already know yours.” He settled into a pose, like this was an extremely entertaining challenge.
She let herself be pulled — not because she wanted to, but because a scene in the hallway would be worse. Her body went rigid under the touch, and she pulled free the moment they were out of the doorway. She didn’t answer the question. Instead, she lowered her voice even further, and the ice in it gained an edge of steel:
“Whether or not I know your Servant’s name is not what should be worrying you.” Her gaze cut to the hallway and came back. “You’ve been drawing far too much attention for someone who barely knows what he’s gotten himself into. Be careful. You and Emiya.” A minimal pause, just enough for the threat to settle. “Before someone with less patience than me solves your problem for you.”
Carlos caught the threat itself before he caught what really mattered underneath it. He closed himself off, blind in the verbal sparring and in the skill he wanted to show. Crossing his arms, he said:
“And yet, here I am, aren’t I?” — eyes narrowed, smiling faintly. “Whenever you want, I’ll always be here.”
For a second, just one, something in that line made her stop. I’ll always be here. She couldn’t say why it sounded different from a bluff, why it nagged at a place that wasn’t where irritation lived. But she buried the feeling before she could even name it, and the ice came back whole.
“Keep that smile.” She said it already turning her back, heading for the classroom door. “You’ll need it when you understand what you’ve gotten into.”
And without looking back, lower, almost only to herself:
“Idiot.”
She went in, and the door closed between the two of them before he could have the last word.
Carlos didn’t press to keep talking. He saw that she was cold with him. Deep down, he wished Rin would notice him. And yet he was thinking how bad it was to keep insisting on being noticed by someone who’d treated him with such coldness.
He went into the classroom and let the day pass, focusing on speaking to Nero in his mind. Since there was no imminent danger, he spent his time on compliments to his partner.
The break bell rang. He saw Tohsaka startled by Shirou for having greeted her. His answer to his friend was to wave off her reaction. That day wasn’t a good one for the two of them to take on the challenge. Beyond that, he remarked that Shirou was a lucky guy. He didn’t have much time to spell out what he meant, though — the bell for the club meeting rang. And he still wanted to swing by Mitsuzuri’s classroom and see whether she’d come to school.
On the way, he ran into Issei, at the very moment Kuzuki-sensei appeared as well.
“Good afternoon, sensei. Good afternoon, Ryuudou-san.” Then he saw that the air about Kuzuki-sensei was graver than he had ever seen it. “I hope I’m not interrupting.” He said it with the smile vanishing from his face.
Kuzuki did not change his expression.
“You’re not interrupting.” Flat, without inflection. “We were dealing with a student. Ayako Mitsuzuri didn’t come in today, and no one answers at her house. I consider the matter serious enough to notify the club captains today.” A dry pause. “Matou didn’t show up either. I didn’t see him a single time all day.”
Beside him, Issei wrung one hand in the other, unable to summon the composure his position would have demanded.
“To vanish like this, without a word to anyone since Saturday… it isn’t like Mitsuzuri.” He hesitated, and distaste won out for a moment. “And if Matou has something to do with it, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. I never liked the way he treats people.” Then he caught himself, almost ashamed to have said that in front of the teacher. “Sorry, sensei. This isn’t the time to point fingers.”
And then it was as if an invisible punch had landed in Carlos’s stomach. An intense cold climbed his spine. Tohsaka had been right about being careful not to draw too much attention. He touched Issei’s shoulder.
“President.” He wanted to bring him back to the responsibility of his post. “Whatever you need to notify the clubs, just tell me.”
He looked at Kuzuki-sensei. His own gaze already said that he understood the situation.
The teacher only returned that unreadable look.
Carlos left the two of them and set about his duty as a captain, notifying the other clubs. It took up a good part of his day, one club at a time. As he passed the messages along, he reflected without rest. Mitsuzuri had disappeared. It caused him an immense ache. A reel played in his mind — their friendship, the jokes, the small kindnesses. At the last moment, he hadn’t called her. He’d taken too long, lost a whole day. And now no one knew where she was. The only person who might have an answer was Shinji, who also hadn’t shown up at school.
According to Shirou’s account, he was at home. Shinji took shape in his mind as someone without scruples. He hadn’t only attacked his friend — he’d then tried to ally with him afterward. A Master. Could he have some connection to Mitsuzuri’s disappearance? For some time now there had been disappearances and comas across the city, just as there had been with his own family. There was someone who could help him with his questions.
“Kitten,” he called out to Nero in his mind, “what happened to my family and to the people of the terreiro — can you make sense of it?“
I can, Praetor… and I do not like what I make of it. Her voice sounded inside him, lower than usual, stripped of its habitual vanity. What was done to your people was no ordinary attack. It was a harvest. Someone drained the life-energy from them. The same sap that moves all magic and that sustains those of my kind. It was not hatred, Carlos. It was need. They needed what ran inside them. A heavy pause fell over the mental silence. And those you call the sleeping ones… they do not sleep. They were emptied out.
A silence came before his last doubt.
“Of your kind. I can’t picture you doing that.” It was something he didn’t want to believe.
And you do well not to picture me so. There was pride in the voice, but something more tender beneath it. There are servants who gorge themselves on the lives of others like pigs at the trough. I despise them. An empress does not fatten her own glory by draining the defenseless. I prefer hunger to dishonor, Praetor. After a pause, her tone softened, intimate. You may doubt a great many things in this war. Not this. Never me.
Relief struck Carlos’s chest. It seemed the sign from the dream — the girl who filled his eyes — was growing clearer and clearer alongside his bond with Nero.
Then she cut through his daydreaming:
“Praetor… you felt the same thing I did, didn’t you? That’s why all these questions.” The voice came sharp and alert. I drew closer to your chalk walls and struck a barrier. I thought it might have reached you as well. It is right beneath your feet.
“What barrier?” he said, startled.
The one they wove beneath that school. Her tone hardened. I came chasing a movement of mana prowling the area, strange and hungry. Up close, there’s no mistaking it. It is one of those barriers that drink in living energy little by little, with no one noticing until it’s too late. It isn’t at full strength yet… but it’s growing. The voice dropped, grave. Take care in there, Praetor. Whoever plotted this means to use it. And you are inside it.
Barrier, draining mana… he thought, desperate. Then the whole situation snapped into place. Shinji was the only one who had challenged him directly, and then vanished from school. Shirou knew things. So his friend was a target — and he was in danger.
“Kitten, go after that source of mana you felt! I’ll go after Shirou. He’s the target!” The missing piece had clicked into a hunch. Shinji was a Master — Shirou himself had said so. And if there was an attack underway, it was Shirou it was coming for. “Let’s catch him in the act!”
“Praetor, wait.” Her voice changed, suddenly on alert. An obstacle has come up between me and what you asked. Someone has placed himself in my path… and there’s something about him that—
And the link was cut. Like a snapped rope, the empress’s warm presence fell silent all at once, and where her voice had been, only silence remained.
“Damn it!” His heart was racing.
He didn’t know what to do. His partner was in danger, and so was his friend. He slapped his own face. Focus! She needs to feel that you trust her, Carlos! he told himself. She’s a Servant; she’ll know how to handle herself. Shirou’s only human.
He ran off in search of his friend. He knew Shirou had a habit of staying late, sorting out whatever school matter would let him help others. The sun was going down.
He ran, and nothing. Until a sound of hurried footsteps and crashes rose from the floor above. He went up there.
On the staircase, then, he saw it — and, startled, hid in the corridor.
Rin Tohsaka was hurling black spheres that tore the school’s walls apart. Shirou had run into a classroom and was weathering the shots. You could only tell he was alive because they were both shouting.
He drew near with a cat’s steps, in silence, and when he was close enough, he made Tohsaka feel firsthand what made the captain of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu club feared even by the karate and judo teams.
In a single movement, he locked her by the torso and took her to the floor. It wasn’t brute force, but the act of someone who had mastered, over years, the art of throwing without injuring — he cushioned her fall, protecting her head, her nape, the base of her spine, his whole body wrapping around hers so that the impact would die before it could hurt.
Then the world slowed. Seated over her waist, he pinned her wrists above her head. The din of the shots, the noise of the school coming apart, all of it receded into a distant hum. What remained was only her eyes against his. Her short breath striking his. The heat. The scent. And, beneath the rage and the fright, another thing neither of them could name. Something that didn’t belong to that fight. It was as if her blue eyes were deep as water, spreading through the earthy dark brown of his. As if a bonfire were being fed, little by little, with just the right oxygen. They both buried it when they felt that nameless sensation rise.
The classroom door flew open. Shirou appeared in the corridor with a poster tube raised like a sword. And it really did look like a metal tube. He stopped dead. His eyes went from Carlos — mounted over Tohsaka, her wrists pinned — to Rin, and back, and for a second the Reinforcement seemed forgotten in his hand.
“…Carlos?” His voice came out more bewildered than ready for a fight. “What—”
A girl’s scream cut through everything.
It came from below, from the direction of the school exit. High, short, and strangled. The sound of someone losing their breath before they could scream again. It crossed the corridor like a blade and shattered whatever had been hanging in the air between the three of them.
Carlos let go of Rin’s wrists in the same instant. There was no time for embarrassment, nor for explanation, nor for the fight to start up again. Shirou’s instinct had already set him in motion. He shot down the stairs before a single word, the tube in his hand like a weapon. Rin tried to say something, but the words vanished. She sprang up and went after him. Carlos felt his chest still unsteady, for two reasons he hadn’t had time to tell apart.
The three of them went down the stairs to help whoever it was. And the urgency was stronger than the enmity. They found the student fallen on the floor, near the exit. Shirou knelt beside her, searching for wounds. He found none, and the relief lasted half a second.
“There’s no cut, no blood… but she won’t wake up. Why would she faint like this?”
Tohsaka’s face closed over.
“Because this isn’t fainting, Emiya. She’s almost dying.”
“But how?” He looked at her, stunned. “Without a single wound…”
“It’s the mana. There’s almost nothing left in her. She was—”
“Drained.” Carlos finished, his face as grave as hers.
Tohsaka turned her face toward him, surprised that the word had come from someone who shouldn’t know it. But she said nothing — she only agreed with the smallest nod and knelt beside the body.
“Leave it to me. Maybe I can still save her.”
The open door let the wind in, in gusts, lifting her hair.
“Hey!” she grumbled, annoyed. “One of you shut that door!”
It was then that Shirou stopped short. Something cold climbed his spine, and on pure instinct he raised his hand.
“Look out!”
A black dagger pierced his palm — the blade had come straight for Tohsaka.
“Shirou!” Carlos was already running to his friend. Rin’s eyes went wide.
Pressing on his wounded hand, Shirou saw the dagger simply dissolve in the air.
“Carlos, stay here.” The voice came out locked with pain, but firm. “The target was Tohsaka. I’ll go after wherever that came from. Keep protecting her.”
Carlos only consented. His throat locked up. He stood there watching his friend move off toward the archery club woods, not knowing what to say, not knowing how to react after what had happened up there. Then he took a deep breath and stepped closer to Rin.
They said nothing in that moment. But they looked at each other, in a silent kind of conversation.
Rin went back to what she had to do. She searched the pockets of her skirt and drew out something small, green, the size of a palm, in the unmistakable shape of a parakeet. The same folds, now hardened into river stone — smooth and warm, pulsing with a soft golden light that asked for no incantation at all.
She set it on the student’s chest. She recited nothing. The muiraquitã shone of its own accord, and a warm wave traveled down the girl’s body, restoring her color, her breath, the life that had been drawn out of her drop by drop. The student’s breathing steadied.
Only then did Rin realize that he had seen. She felt the weight of Carlos’s gaze on her hands, on the stone parakeet she was holding. For an instant, she hesitated. She did not tuck the amulet away in a hurry, like someone hiding something. She only lifted her eyes, met his, and stayed there, in silence, knowing exactly what he was recognizing.
In his mind, flashes passed of a lighter time.
A “good morning” gift, left on the shoulder.
What did it mean? Why had she kept it? And he was still rooted to the spot.
To look at Rin Tohsaka was no longer only to see the number-one student, the classmate. Time seemed to run more slowly when he looked at her. But the day was moving fast enough to keep him from processing what he was thinking and feeling.
Outside, muffled by distance, came the sounds of a fight. In the direction Shirou had gone. A crash, the grinding of metal, and a strangled scream that the woods swallowed.
Rin rose, leaving the student breathing safely on the floor. Carlos shot off at her side. They crossed the exit, the cold dusk air cutting at their faces, and ran toward the archery club woods, where the crashing was coming from.
What they found there made Carlos freeze.
Shirou hung like a puppet, chains throttling him. Before him, tall and impassive, rose a woman in dark garments that clung to her body, her eyes covered by a blindfold. Even so, Carlos felt that she saw everything. Chains hung from her hands, and at their tips gleamed blades thin as needles. There was no effort at all in that posture. To her, Shirou was little more than a task all but finished.
The Servant raised one of the blades over the boy.
In that moment, Carlos used the full of his lungs. Unlike the other monster, the one the size of a mountain, this one — with a woman’s image — would be easier to behead. Those were the thoughts that came as he tried to run to save his friend.
The Servant turned her blindfolded head toward the source of Carlos’s shout. For an instant, the blade hesitated as it chose its new target. It was the instant that nearly cost everything.
“IDIOT!” Rin’s voice burst out behind him. “Gandr shot!”
Black spheres tore the air, one after another, smashing against the ground and the trunks around the woman in a hail. Rin knew very well that Gandr wouldn’t bring down a Heroic Spirit. They were meant to wrench the Servant off Shirou and off the reckless Carlos who was running straight toward his own death.
The Servant fell back a few steps, the chains drawing in the blades. She weighed the three of them. Weak as she was, barely sustained by the Master who commanded her, there was no advantage in pressing on against three. Without a word, she dissolved among the trees, and the woods swallowed her silhouette.
The silence fell heavy. Rin was already running past Carlos and kneeling beside Shirou to check his wounds.
“You.” she said to Carlos, without lifting her eyes, her voice sharp with held-back rage. “Running unarmed at a Servant. Do you have any idea what she’d have done to you before you took two steps?”
He gave her room. He saw that her gesture was one of care now, no longer the fighter he had met in the corridor. “I did what I could.” He answered before he noticed the pain below his chest. His diaphragm ached from running, throwing, running more. The air hurt.
Rin didn’t answer right away. Her hands stayed on Shirou’s arm, but the scolding didn’t return. She only glanced at him, for a second too short to mean anything she’d admit to, and turned her attention back to the wounded boy.
Shirou coughed, recovering his breath, his eyes searching past her, in the direction they’d come from.
“The student…” his voice came out in a thread. “Is she…?”
“Alive.” Rin answered, curt. “She’ll be fine.”
The relief was short-lived. Barely had he heard the answer when Shirou tried to push himself up, his good hand closing around the reinforced tube, his body placing itself by instinct between Rin and Carlos. Wounded as he was, he still remembered that the girl had hunted him through the school minutes earlier.
“So… we’re not done yet, Tohsaka.”
Rin had a moment of feeling confused, not understanding. Then she sighed.
“Not today, Emiya.” She was already drawing the little green parakeet-shaped stone from her pocket. “I don’t fight people who can barely stand. Not today. Besides which, I owe you for something else.”
She laid the muiraquitã over his pierced hand. The warm golden light kindled again. The bleeding stopped, the flesh closing under the glow. Shirou’s eyes went wide — not at the healing, but at what was holding the magic. An origami. A paper parakeet turned to stone. He knew that fold. He had seen Carlos make dozens of them, distracted, when he was killing time.
Shirou’s eyes went from the amulet to his friend, and something settled into place in silence. A thread connecting Carlos to that girl — one he had no part in.
Rin relaxed and put the stone away. When she spoke, her gaze flicked over Carlos before fixing on Shirou. There was more there than care.
“You two, come to my house. Emiya’s wounds need more than this. And I’m not carrying yet another half-dead body on my back.”
Carlos went over to Shirou and lifted him. Even with the wound stanched, he was still exhausted from a fight.
“I’ll help him to your place, Rin.”
He asked, in his mind, whether Nero was all right. She finally answered after a silence.
I am in one piece, Praetor. Her voice had returned at last, and it carried a thread of something he couldn’t read, halfway between relief and a nameless unease. The obstacle is gone. It isn’t worth your worry now. There was a short pause, like someone choosing to keep the rest to herself.
Let’s head to Rin’s house. For now, follow along the same way you did at school today.
Go on. I’ll catch up to you.
Carlos then reflected on just how long the day was going to be.