Oath To The Other Side

V - The Long Night

His enemy is right in front of him. The room he's in is white, clinical. There's people shuffling around, surgical masks and scrubs in his field of vision. His mind pieces together that he's in a hospital, and from his position he must be lying on a bed. None of that matters though, because dead ahead is his enemy. He'd miraculously survived their battle, and he'd been mistaken in thinking the war was over. Nothing else mattered. Miyu was gone, and he had nothing to lose by attacking with witnesses. He just had to devote every part of him to killing his enemy.

The aria is muttered, the never ending field of blades is searched. Kanshou and Bakuya are found. Mundane weapons won't be enough, but can't afford anything expensive. The concept of creation is judged, the basic structure hypothesised. As he reaches the third step however he realises something is wrong.

Pain rushes through his body like a raging storm. It's like a hot rod has been stabbed into his spine, and every blade stored inside his reality marble is under his skin, threatening to burst at any second. It reminds him of his first lessons with Kiritsugu, when he had no idea how to properly handle his magecraft. His body is a ball of yarn being unravelled, his magecraft eating away at his body as he surpasses the limits of a mere human like himself.

Someone's screaming. It's a fact he distantly realises as his mind tries to make sense of what's happening to his body. Like the flood gates closing on a pierced hull, the magical energy flowing through the circuits is cut off and the projection is cancelled. His grip on the imaginary weapons goes slack and the accumulated magical energy disperses in blue light.

His body feels too light and his head is in agony. It's like he's back home losing Miyu for the first time, helpless as he's skewered by the weapons belonging to the Gilgamesh card. His vision fades and the screaming stops, and distantly he realised that the screaming was him.

┈ ┈ ┈ ⋞ 〈 ⏣ 〉 ⋟ ┈ ┈ ┈

The next time Shirou wakes up, the room is bathed in the light of the setting sun. The walls are a warm orange, much more pleasant and easy on the eyes than the stark whiteness. He hazily remembers waking up and seeing the Ainsworth, but he isn't sure if it was real. The image is ruined by his stuffy nose, and how hard it is to breathe in the room.

Everything is a blur as he tries to recall how he got here. He and Ainsworth fought, he remembers that much. His connection to Miyu was cut, and he couldn't maintain Unlimited Blade Works. After that, he passed out, and now he's here.

He looks out the window next to his bed and towards the sun set. His first thoughts are of Sakura. When he would meet her at her classroom so he could walk her home, and watch the sunset against her face. The second thing that comes to mind doesn't recognise this place. The view is of a sprawling city, with buildings reaching the sky. Far below, people happily make their way home. Businessmen walking stoically after a hard day's work, schoolgirls chatting to each other with smiles on their faces.

Shirou blinks, and then squints. This shouldn't be possible. Those girls are at least a kilometre and a half away from where he is, not to mention the people surrounding them making them harder to spot. Leaning away from the window, he lets a trickle of magical energy run through his circuits as he structurally grasps his body.

He's immediately aware of the fact that his body is incredibly injured. He must not have noticed because of the adrenaline, but to say his body took a beating during his fight inside his reality marble was an understatement. Twenty eight stab wounds, three broken ribs, sixteen bruises from blunt force trauma, and his left leg had been broken near the end.

On top of that, his circuits were showing clear signs of overuse. Even the lowest amount of magical energy to perform a structural grasp was far more painful than normal, and his body was heating up like crazy. If he were to surpass his limits and use projection on EMIYA's level again, he's certain it would kill him, maybe just cause permanent brain damage if he was lucky.