Chapter XXXII: Monotony

The days passed with agonizing slowness.

There was only so much research I could do on the era of Emperor Nero's reign and the geopolitical situation of Rome in 60 AD before my brain started leaking out of my ears. Too, the constant specter of futility kept hovering over my head, reminding me that knowledge of the Hundred Years War hadn't been of much use in the Orléans Singularity, so all of my studying and cramming — the majority of which I would probably forget before we even stepped foot in Rome — might wind up being completely pointless.

Training with the twins was taking some of the edge off and doing wonders for my stress levels. It helped that the twins were progressing at a good pace, even if they weren't exactly soaking up everything I was teaching them like sponges.

At the end of the day, they were a pair of kids with average potential, made special only because they were essentially nobodies from the magical equivalent of the boonies. That they had any potential at all was supposedly the only thing at all remarkable about either of them.

What they weren't was my Chicago Wards or the Undersiders. They didn't have the sort of background capes tended to come bundled with, and that meant their only real experience with combat was Fuyuki and Orléans. I tempered my expectations a little with that in mind, and when I did, I thought it was more than fair to say that they were coming along at a decent rate.

What really hampered us was the limitations of the simulator. It really was fairly low down on the list of priorities that needed to be handled, and I honestly had no idea when Da Vinci would get around to bringing it back up to snuff. It was getting to be close to a month since the sabotage that had crippled both the physical and human infrastructure, a stretch of time that felt longer since the twins and I had spent a month in Orléans, even if only about a week had passed in Chaldea, and while it looked as though all of the important bits had been slotted back into place, I wasn't really in the position to know one way or the other whether or not everything was fixed and what still needed more attention first.

The fact that most of the rest of the staff were still stretching themselves fairly thin probably said more about it than not, though. It still made me feel kind of guilty to watch Meuniere and the others run themselves ragged while I got to get full nights' sleep and had enough free time to get bored.

I kept reminding myself that I didn't have any place trying to help all of them, and I'd just get in the way if I interjected myself into any of their jobs. I was hired to be a Master of Team A. With Kirschtaria and the rest down for the count for the foreseeable future, my job was to lead Team A.

One of the most frustrating parts was that I didn't even have a collection of spiders around to weave useful things for myself in the meantime, like silk undersuits for our mystic codes or length of silk cord to use as rope.

Maybe I could convince Da Vinci to let me set up a terrarium in one of the unused rooms so I could bring back a collection of spiders from Rome. Ghoulish as it might have been to say, there was no point in letting spare rooms go to waste now that the original occupants weren't around to use them anymore.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

I blinked as Arash slid into the seat across from me, smiling that friendly, charming smile of his. He carried a modest tray of food, a small sampler that wouldn't be missed, so that he could enjoy Emiya's cooking without cutting into our essential supplies.

To my knowledge, all of the Servants were doing that. They didn't need to eat, but they wanted the chance to enjoy the little things every now and again, the finer, simpler parts of life. Well. "All" five of them, six, if you included Mash.

"What?"

"That is the right idiom, isn't it?" he asked. "It all gets a little confusing, sometimes. Technically, I speak every language in existence, but the idioms can get a bit jumbled, and some of them only make sense in their native tongue. Like 'wash your neck.' I think Ritsuka and Rika would get that one, but I don't think it crosses into English well."

Wash your neck? Was that one of those homophone puns that only made sense in Japanese?

"No, that was the right idiom."

One of the perks of being a Servant that I was actually jealous of. What was effectively a potent Brute and Mover package, those were definitely nice, and the Breaker kind of ability that let them ignore conventional attacks just by the nature of being a Servant, that was incredibly convenient. Skills, Noble Phantasms, they were all one shade of potent or powerful or another, and a younger me might have jumped at the chance to have any one of them.

But the Thinker-esque ability to communicate with anyone they talked to, no matter who it was? Fuck, I wanted that.

Just, you know, without the slight inconvenience of having to be a dead hero, first.

"So?" he prompted.

"So what?"

"You looked pretty deep in thought, Master," he said. "Anything I need to be concerned about?"

A breath hissed out of my nostrils.

"Just feeling a little restless, I guess," I admitted. My fork speared down on my plate, but the scrambled eggs I'd been eating had cooled to an unappetizing lukewarm while I was navel gazing, and I couldn't help but grimace around the metal tines.

Arash chuckled and glanced back over at the twins' group. Unlike usual, they were uncharacteristically silent. "Yeah, I think we're all starting to feel that. There's only so many stories we can all tell before we run out of anything interesting."

"Mm."

I gulped down a sip of my orange juice, but it had much the same problem as my eggs did, only in the opposite direction: it had warmed up closer to room temperature than I would have liked. A shame that temperature played as much of a roll in taste as it did, because Emiya made even a simple dish like scrambled eggs and toast far closer to gourmet cooking than it really had any right to be, and it felt like a waste to be disappointed with letting it sit for too long.

"Your training sessions with Ritsuka and Rika have been a major source of entertainment, though," he added. "I think Bradamante is eagerly waiting for the day that they manage to get one over on you and win a match, although Siegfried is certain it won't happen anytime soon."

For some reason, that put a smile on my face.

"That confident in me, is he?"

"It's because he sees something in you that she doesn't," he remarked. He turned back to me with his dark eyes, and there was something in them, something deep and unfathomable, like looking into the boundless black of the deep sea. And then he laughed a little and that unfathomable depth disappeared. "Well, maybe it's more like he just had more time to get to know you. You have commanded him in battle several times, and the way you met was a lot more action packed than how we met Bradamante."

Bit of an understatement, there.

"Maybe," I hedged. "Or maybe it's just a matter of personality. She seems to get along with the twins much better than she does with me."

She seemed like a bright, cheerful person, and me? Well, I didn't know if it was really fair to label myself dour, but I'd been slapped with the word "intense" several times throughout my career. Mostly by the Chicago Wards when they thought I was out of earshot.

"Well, who knows?" said Arash. "Maybe when the simulator is ready for it, we can start having scrimmage matches with all of the Servants. Her opinion of you might change a little after she's had the chance to fight under your command a few times, even if it's only in friendly, low stakes matches."

"I had plans for something like that," I agreed. "I thought it might be educational to show how a single Servant under a competent Master's command can fight off even multiple Servants simultaneously."

Arash chuckled again. "Now who's confident? Your faith in me is flattering, Master, but there's a limit to what I can do on my own, you know."

I slid a glance his way. "I was planning on Siegfried, actually," I admitted.

"Ouch!" But he wasn't insulted, he just laughed some more. I was beginning to wonder if he would take offense to anything on his own behalf. "That makes more sense. For how mild-mannered he is, Siegfried is quite the powerful hero. You would never expect a guy that humble to be that strong."

He wasn't wrong, come to think of it. Reputation had been everything as a cape. You could be approachable as a hero, but you couldn't afford to appear weak. Always, always, you had to project the image of strength, confidence, and control, even when you wanted nothing more than to crawl into a ball and cry.

Siegfried, the strongest single Servant on our team and likely one of the strongest Heroic Spirits period, flew in the face of all of that.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"No," I mused, "you really wouldn't."

"It sounds like that's still a little ways off, though," he remarked. He looked back over at the other table. "Any ways of changing things up a little until we can get the Servants in on the fun?"

"That's one of the things I was thinking about," I said wryly. "There's only so many ways I can add variety to French forests and farm fields."

"I think you have a slightly better idea about that than I do," he said, chuckling. "The terrain in France is a little different from what I was used to when I was alive, and trying to manage aiming through dense forest cover was trickier than I would have expected it to be. It makes me wonder what heroes like Robin Hood must be like. Maybe I'll get to meet him and compare styles of archery."

I shrugged. "I grew up in the city myself. Went to nature camp a couple of times, but it's not like I was exactly in my element in the forests either."

"You seemed to have an easier time of it than I did," he commented. "Then again, I guess that bug power of yours gets even more powerful out in the forest than it would be in a city, so that makes some sense."

"None of which does me much good figuring out how to mix things up with training the twins," I pointed out. "I can't just keep jumping from field to field and expect them to get much better at fighting anywhere aside from French farmland."

Maybe it was time to up the stakes a little, move on from the more simplistic war games we'd been doing. The twins were steadily improving, and there were only so many different kinds of natural terrains I could train them on before I had to start grasping at more and more unlikely zones with less and less common weather patterns. It wasn't to say that we would never find ourselves climbing the sheer cliff face of a towering mountain in a blizzard, but throwing them into further and further extremes would just serve to frustrate and exhaust them.

And, well, I didn't exactly have oodles of experience with that sort of thing myself.

So maybe it was time to go in the opposite direction. Double up on the lesson, too. After all, the twins weren't magi, so they'd never heard that adage that Marie had drilled into my head about fighting a magus in his workshop, and we hadn't had to face a properly sneaky Caster yet, but it was only a matter of time.

"I think…I'm going to train them on urban warfare today," I decided aloud.

Memories of Brockton Bay swam up from the recesses where I'd buried them, scenes of my childhood with my mom and dad, of school and simpler days, but more prominent were the sites of my battles — the stretch of the Docks where my first night out had culminated in a fight against Lung, the bank we'd robbed on our first job together, the storage facility where we fought Bakuda, the Forsberg Gallery, the staging area before the Leviathan attack, Coil's underground base, the PRT headquarters, and so many more that I couldn't name but stood out in stark relief from all of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my body as I passed through them.

All gone, no doubt. There was no way of knowing if or how much of it was intact after Gold Morning, but if things had been rough and chaotic in the wake of Leviathan, I couldn't see how the city had survived after a tragedy that made that one seem tame.

"Urban warfare?" Arash asked curiously.

Almost against my will, I could feel a smile starting to bloom on my face.

"It'll almost be like going home."

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

The twins arrived in the simulator room early in the afternoon, after lunch had a little time to settle in their bellies but not so late that they'd be craving dinner soon, with Mash in tow. The curious look on their faces told me they were wondering about why I had delayed our usual session from morning to afternoon, but weren't really expecting anything wildly out of the ordinary. They had no idea what was in store for them.

I took a position at the front like a teacher or an instructor, trying my best to set my posture like the ones who had handled my training in the Wards. Authoritative and commanding, but not tyrannical.

"The reason I postponed our training session from this morning was because I needed time to set up the simulator," I told them. "As you've probably guessed, we're going to be doing something a little different today. Mash?"

Mash stood a little straighter, like a student who had been unexpectedly called on. "Yes, Miss Taylor!"

"You're free to join us, if you want. It might do you some good to learn this, too. However, I haven't set things up to account for your Demi-Servant form, so you won't be able to use it if you do join us."

Mash's brow furrowed thoughtfully, but after a moment, she shook her head. "If it's okay with you, Miss Taylor, I think I'll stay out here and watch from the monitor. If I can't transform, then I'll just get in the way of Senpai's training."

I nodded. "That's fine." Then, I turned back to the twins. "So. It occurred to me that we have yet to encounter a proper Caster class Servant in either Fuyuki or Orléans."

Ritsuka raised his hand. "Um, don't Cúchulainn and that Gilles guy count? Or Mozart?"

"Even you don't count Shakesy as a proper Caster, huh?" Rika chuckled lowly. "Poor Billy Shakes."

"No, they don't," I said confidently. "A proper Caster is like a magus. I realize you two don't know much about magi and how they work and Chaldea hasn't given you much education on that front, either. There's an adage about magi, however, that it's very important you learn: don't fight a magus in his workshop. The very last thing you want to do is get into a fight with an enemy whose tricks you don't know in the place where they are at their strongest. The same goes for a Caster class Servant, a proper one who was a magus in life: don't fight them in their workshop.

"That's the reason I wouldn't count Cúchulainn, Gilles, or Mozart as proper Casters," I went on. "A proper Caster absolutely will not take the fight to you. They'll hole up in an advantageous position and fortify it with all sorts of tricks, traps, and defenses. If Gilles had been a proper Caster, there's no way we would have been able to walk through that palace unscathed until we found him fighting Emiya. No room in that entire building would have been safe."

Ironically, in at least that sense, I would have considered Shakespeare more of a proper Caster than not. He didn't have the skillset to land a decisive killing blow himself, but if he had the time to set it up, then he could trap an enemy inside the illusion of his Noble Phantasm, giving himself time to escape or another Servant time to set up for a decapitating strike.

And his Noble Phantasm was like Tattletale's best tricks on steroids.

"But we didn't have any choice except to go there," Ritsuka pointed out. "Even if Gilles was a proper Caster, what else could we have done?"

"That's part of the problem," I agreed. "Sometimes, fighting the enemy on their home ground is going to be unavoidable. That's why, today, we're going to be doing something different from usual. The only proper Caster we have on the payroll is Da Vinci, and she doesn't have the time to spare helping us out with this. So, I'm going to do my best to simulate a fight with an actual Caster in her stronghold, and this is going to double as urban warfare training."

"Urban warfare training?" Rika asked.

I smiled. "You can consider it my specialty."

Obviously, that did nothing to comfort them, and the twins suddenly looked like they wanted to be anywhere else than there. They're learning, I imagined Lisa would have said, snickering.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm not going to throw you straight into the deep end. For the first exercise, we'll be going back to some place that's at least a little familiar. Remember Fuyuki?"

Immediately, they perked up. I nodded before they could even ask.

"I found the data for what it was supposed to look like, so we'll be going there again, only it won't be on fire and there won't be any Servants or skeletons trying to kill us."

"Just you, right?" Rika snarked.

I tilted my head a little, neither confirming nor denying it, then stepped to the side and gestured towards the simulator pods.

"Let's get started."

The twins shared another dubious look, and their reluctance was clear on their faces, but I'd chosen to use Fuyuki instead of New York, Las Vegas, or Chicago, because at least they were passingly familiar with Fuyuki. For the opposite reason, I'd chosen to avoid Tokyo, the city in whose outer districts the twins had grown up in, according to their personnel files, because I didn't know it at all. Giving neither side an immediate terrain advantage was the goal, because I was going to be pressing them hard enough without it.

Naturally, Brockton Bay had never been an option. Leaving aside the fact it gave me too big a home field advantage, it would raise too many questions not just from the twins, but from anyone who got too curious about it. Brockton Bay didn't exist in this timeline, after all. It'd be hard to explain where I knew it from and why.

After another moment of hesitation, the twins stepped forward and climbed into the apparati for the simulator. Without further ado, I went over to my own designated spot, but before I sat down, I turned to our spectators.

"Mash."

"Yes, Miss Taylor?"

"Whenever the others decide to stop hiding, let them know I don't mind them watching, so they don't have to sneak in."

Mash blinked at me, bewildered, and then let out a startled squeak as a sheepish Arash and Siegfried, a smirking Emiya, and a gaping Bradamante all materialized around her. The twins let out a pair of surprised shouts, but I just shook my head, sat down, and started up the scenario I'd spent the last few hours programming. The visor came down over my eyes, and the back of the seat pushed up to cup the nape of my neck.

A cool sensation swept down my spine, and with a feeling not unlike the process of Rayshifting, my real body fell away, left behind.

Between one blink and the next, I was in Fuyuki. The metropolitan district, to be more specific. Shinto, if I was remembering the labels right. The street I'd appeared on was abandoned, empty of people, but the street lights were on and the city was not entirely dark, nor was it the ruined husk it had been when we were last here, the aftermath of a catastrophe. Instead, it was as though everyone had simply vanished, leaving everything frozen in that single moment.

I could have simulated people, but adding in bystanders would muddy the exercise a little and was a few steps beyond where the twins were besides. Best to save more complicated things like that for later on, when they were a little more experienced.

After a moment, the twins materialized a little further down the road, about fifteen feet away. It was a little strange to watch from the outside as the system built a wireframe, then a blank, gray model, and then filled in the details, all so quickly that you could miss the whole thing if you blinked.

"Whoa," Rika said, looking up at the completely intact skyline and the clear night sky above. "It looks…different from the last time we were here. So, this is what Fuyuki is supposed to look like, huh? Got nothing on Tokyo, though."

Ritsuka, on the other hand, had immediately found me, and his eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. "Senpai? What are you wearing?"

Rika's attention swung towards me, and her own eyes went wide. "Holy shit!"

"The rules are going to be a little bit different for this exercise," I told them, ignoring their reactions and their surprise. "For one, I won't be using my ravens, so you don't need to worry about them. For another, a proper Caster is going to be miles better at magic than you are, which means no spells you throw at them are going to be of much use, so it won't be as simple as just hitting me with a Gandr twice, this time."

"Simple, she says," Rika muttered disbelievingly. I ignored that, too.

"Your objective today is going to be landing one solid hit on me," I went on, patting my armor's chestplate. "One good, strong blow on my body. Since I'm playing the part of a proper Caster, I won't fight back physically, and I won't just swarm you with bugs, so if you can get in close, you can win with a single punch."

"There's gotta be a catch," Rika said sourly.

"Are there any other conditions?" Ritsuka asked more seriously.

I nodded. "A few more."

With a sweeping swing of my arm, I gestured out to the city around us. To the Shinto district, specifically.

"I'm going to set a timer for thirty minutes," I said. "In that time, I'm going to find a base in this half of the city and start fortifying my position. I won't go to Miyama. I won't cross the bridge. I won't leave the city limits."

In truth, I'd already picked out my hiding spot. If the twins had been paying enough attention and remembered how things had gone in Fuyuki, it should be obvious where I was going to camp out at. After all, there were only so many places in this city that an actual Caster would choose to set up a base, and for a proper Caster who was actually a competent magus, in Shinto, there were only two.

But it all hinged on how clever the twins were. If they picked up on it quick enough, then they'd come farther than I was expecting. If they didn't, well, it would be a valuable learning experience for them either way.

"Once the timer goes off, that's your signal to come looking for me," I continued. "Your task today is to find my base, make it through all of my tricks and traps 'alive,' and land that one, solid hit. Sound simple enough?"

"I'm beginning to think our definitions of 'simple' are just completely different," Rika muttered.

"We understand," Ritsuka said, glancing sidelong at his sister. "Is there a time limit?"

"We'll stop for dinner, but otherwise, no. Be warned, however," I cautioned, "the longer you take to find me, the longer I have to prepare and the more dangerous my stronghold will be. If you take too long, it's entirely possible that you might not even make it past the front door unscathed."

I was exaggerating, of course, but not as much as either of them would probably like me to be. The twins exchanged a nervous glance but didn't whine or complain, so I took that as a good sign.

"Thirty minutes," I said, bringing up my arm so I could set the timer. "Starting… Now."

Their wrists both beeped, and the pair of them looked down at them for a brief moment.

"Remember, you two." The feel of my mask sliding down over my face was achingly familiar, like pulling on an old pair of jeans I hadn't worn in a while, and the yellowish tint of the lenses made something in my gut curl with nostalgia. "As soon as that timer goes off, the exercise begins. Use that time wisely."

The swarm I'd been gathering surged up from the shadows and consumed me, and the twins backed off, recoiling away from the writhing mass as it spiraled around them like a tornado. Behind the cover of my bugs, my intact flight pack activated, and I took off, heading towards my destination.

By the time my swarm dissolved a few moments later, I was already gone.