[Complete] Ch 6.9 Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain Sheathed Against Injustice? (Patreon)

Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain 

Sheathed Against Injustice?

Story Starts

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Chapter 6.9

The Gale’s Justice

Demands a Stakeout

The Hostess of Fertility at full sail was a phenomenon Ryuu had never observed.

She knew the others regularly went out for drinks. Alise and Kaguya had their haunts; even Lyra, who kept to herself most evenings, occasionally vanished into the city with Neze and returned smelling of wine and questionable decisions. The Astraea Familia was not a dry household by any stretch.

But Ryuu had never entered this particular establishment.

To be honest, when Syr—the waitress who'd appeared during Evilus's failed raid on the orphanage—had mentioned she worked at a place called the Hostess of Fertility, Ryuu may have judged her.

She may have judged Emiya as well. When Syr, whom Ryuu had initially identified as a working girl of the pleasure district—and who could blame her, with an establishment named like that—shared that Emiya had first lodged at the Hostess upon arriving in Orario, Ryuu may have leapt to conclusions about his debauched lifestyle. And then—quite admittedly, this was the only actual circumstantial evidence her suspicion had ever possessed—he'd moved into the mansion beside theirs.

A newly arrived adventurer, able to afford the property next to an established Familia's home. Immediately. A property their own Familia was still making payments on.

Alise had told stories of their own first week in Orario. Hephaestus had offered them a run-down church, and it had taken Alise, Kaguya, and Lyra three weeks of Dungeon delving before they could afford even an inn. Only when their numbers grew and several members reached Level 3 did they manage proper lodging—the larger party and the buffer of higher levels letting them delve with confidence around Amphisbaena's lair, through the Under Garden and the Jungle Ravine.

Emiya had simply... appeared. With money. And moved next door.

'In hindsight,' Ryuu admitted to herself, watching a dwarf press yet another tankard into his hands, 'that was thin evidence for declaring someone a threat to all we hold dear.'

Around her, the operation had quietly demobilised. The Hostess ran warm with bodies and lamplight, and one by one the trench coats had come off—draped over chair backs, folded across laps, spectacles pushed up into hair. Eleven mysterious merchants had dissolved into eleven young women at dinner, and nobody in the tavern had remarked on it, because the disguises had stopped fooling anyone somewhere around the smoke bombs. Only Ryuu still wore hers, collar up, brim low. She was aware this no longer concealed anything. She kept it on anyway. Some retreats had to be conducted in stages.

"Right." Syr stood over their table with parchment and one of those fountain pens everyone had started using.

Ryuu had learnt only weeks ago that Shirou used to sell those pens from his food cart. When demand had outstripped his patience for retail, he'd partnered with the Guild—they sold them on his behalf now, and Guild members got replacement nibs at cost. Sophie had explained the arrangement whilst flexing her writing hand, citing the dramatic decline in arm cramps as one of the great civic improvements of the age.

"You'll be having the whole fried fish in fermented bean sauce—" Syr's pen tapped the parchment. "No, don't look at the price. Look at me. You'll like it."

Celty's mouth opened.

"You—" The non-ink end of the pen touched Syr's lips as she surveyed the table, plotting the meal the way a commander plots an assault. "It also looks like you'd want a whole suckling pig. Yes. Yes. Excellent choice."

"But we—" Maryuu attempted.

"I didn't know justice could provide such impeccable taste in fine dining—"

"Fine dining?" Noin's voice cracked upward.

"And since you have correctly deduced that the suckling pig will take time—two hours, in fact—excellent choice on the spiced marsh crab as an appetiser. Dumplings, steamed and fried. Variety is always good." Syr's pen moved without pause. "Bone broth, as you wouldn't want to commit injustice against your lovely skin."

She reached out and touched Noin's forearm, entering her personal space without asking, the way healers check for fever. "Do you regularly bathe in hot springs?"

Noin stammered. "Umm—we have heated bathing at the mansion."

"Yes, that's why you ordered the bone broth." Syr nodded as though Noin had said something profound. "Plus a large shank."

The order grew before their eyes like a creature spawning in the Dungeon.

"And for the lady in brown—" the pen swung towards Astraea, who straightened with the delight of a student called on with the right answer "—the warmed plum wine. You strike me as someone with cause to celebrate tonight."

"I am," Astraea confided, to her Familia's mild horror.

"Oh, thank you, Ms Kaguya, for reminding me—"

"Wuh?"

"The corkage fee for the wine you brought."

Eleven faces attempted innocence. Several succeeded. Kaguya, three bottles deep into evidence, did not.

"But," Syr continued, voice dropping to something almost charitable, "I can waive it. If you order double the alcohol."

She jotted it down before anyone had answered.

Kaguya winced. A small motion, barely a tightening around her eyes. But Ryuu sat close enough to catch the muttering beneath it—low, mournful arithmetic. "No longer profitable..."

Beside their table sat the reason they were here.

Emiya looked overwhelmed. More overwhelmed, in fact, than when he'd faced the elf and the werewolf not an hour ago. That duel had been clean—violence with rules, opponents he could read. This was chaos.

Patrons approached his table in irregular waves. A dwarf with a scarred jaw. A pair of animal-people still dusty from the Dungeon. A supporter barely old enough to hold her ale. Every one of them left a tankard in front of him.

Rose and Sophie had constructed a defence: whenever a fresh tankard landed, one of them swapped it for a half-finished one whilst the donor wasn't looking, redistributing the alcohol across the table like sappers redirecting floodwater. It bought him time. It did not buy him much. Everyone at that table was drinking fast, and the skyline of empty vessels had begun its second row.

"So. What do you think?"

Astraea's question arrived quietly and stopped Ryuu's thoughts where they stood. Gentle. Precise. The question of a goddess who already knew the answer but wanted her child to find it herself.

Ryuu looked back at Emiya's table. At the way patrons approached him—hats in hand, some of them, words tumbling out about a brother who'd been in Rivira, a Familia member who'd made it home. It was the way ordinary citizens sometimes approached the Astraea Familia. The bakery women who pressed bread on them after a patrol. The old men who bowed to Alise in the street.

Adventurers rarely gave them that. Adventurers rarely needed defending—or rarely admitted it. The newer ones sometimes watched them with awe in the upper floors. The Astraea Familia took the long route down on principle, the route that let them sweep up whichever fresh party had underestimated the first ten floors that day.

Not that there were many new adventurers lately.

Ever since the rise of Evilus—the second rise, she'd learnt to say, since back when Level 6s and above had been plentiful, Evilus had been treated as a joke—things had changed. Now Goddess Freya's Ottar stood alone at Level 6. Evilus had grown bolder. One Level 6. A handful of Level 5s spread across two Familias. They couldn't protect everyone.

This was truly one of Orario's darkest times.

And into that city had wandered a noodle vendor.

According to their Goddess, he may have been left behind by his own deity. Someone they'd confirmed today was Level 2—confirming what they'd suspected all along. He'd come to this city without a god's support. Started a noodle cart. Apparently dove to Rivira regularly, selling food and potions along the way until he reached the safe zone.

Someone who had stood guard over their Goddess at their request, despite Ryuu's loud objections and open mistrust.

Someone who, despite being handed responsibility for a deity's mortal life, had helped ensure that Evilus's raid on the orphanage claimed not one name for the tally of missing or dead.

Someone who had spent the Rivira incident on a rooftop, loosing arrow after arrow into the tide, and then spent the aftermath handing out soup.

Someone who had, at no point, in no way, done a single thing to warrant the sustained suspicion of one Ryuu Lion—suspicion she had aimed at him from the first evening and reloaded every day since.

It had never been about him.

Now, after Kaguya and her Goddess had pointed it out, she understood. He felt like the Ryumilua Forest. And that particular association carried baggage—it was the reason she had left the comforts of her homeland in the first place.

Ryuu closed her eyes.

And there it was, underneath the tavern noise and lamp smoke—that sense of him, three tables away. Green and quiet and old. Apple trees. Silver blossoms. The exact resonance of a homeland she had renounced, coming off a red-haired human like warmth from a hearthstone.

Her prejudice needed re-evaluating regardless. The ledger no longer supported it.

Celty—patient and kind. Riveria Ljos Alf—royalty without the rot. Sophie—who had claimed Ryuu as an advisee and then simply as a friend. Even the Dionysus captain, apologising for her Familia with her own hands on her own member's ear.

The case against elvenkind was collapsing under the weight of individual elves. Ryuu had been the last barrister refusing to rest.

"Ryuu—I mean, Lion—?"

Alise's voice. Ryuu opened her eyes. Her captain leaned across the table, spectacles pushed up into her hair, faintly worried.

It had been a while since they'd bothered with surnames. That had been the protocol once—a combination of safety and trying to sound professional. But little by little, as everyone called each other by first name at home, things had bled into patrol time.

"Oh—I mean, Star Three Bunny!"

The tavern did not go silent. It did something worse: it continued at full volume whilst one specific red-faced noodle vendor, three tables away, raised an eyebrow over the rim of his tankard.

Directly at her.

Ryuu felt the blush climb her ears like a house fire.

She shot her captain a look she reserved for perhaps one occasion a year. Kaguya, without glancing up from her wine, raised a thumb at Alise—also roughly annual. Alise returned a peace sign. Astraea watched all three of them over her cup and smiled the smile of a mother whose children were, technically, behaving.

Something in Ryuu stood up before she did.

One thing remained. One thing that had sat in her chest since Rivira, lodged behind the suspicion. The suspicion was gone now, and the thing was still there—heavier than she'd budgeted for.

Her chair scraped back. The Familia's chatter dipped.

She crossed the floor.

The crowd around Emiya's table parted before she'd asked it to. Something in her stride, presumably. Or the fact that she alone still wore the coat and spectacles of someone who had spent all day being professionally mysterious.

Emiya looked up mid-conversation. Rose and Sophie looked up with him. The dwarf with the scarred jaw took one glance at Ryuu's face and stepped back to give room.

Ryuu extended her hand.

"THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME FROM VITO!"

It came out at parade volume. She heard it leave her, heard it land across half the Hostess, and felt her face climb past red into whatever colour came next.

Silence. Real silence, this time. Even the kitchen seemed to pause.

Then Emiya set down his tankard, reached out, and took her hand.

His grip was warm. Calloused across the palm in the pattern of bow and blade and kitchen work—large enough that she noticed, and then noticed herself noticing. He shook once, firmly, as though she'd said something entirely ordinary.

"You're welcome," he said. "I'm sure you'd do the same in reverse."

Ryuu winced inwardly.

She thought his assessment was right. She would have acted. But she would have hesitated first—and if Emiya had hesitated even a second on that rooftop, there would have been no reverse left to speak of.

Which was when Syr materialised beside them.

"You know," she said—to the room as much as to them—"it's tradition to exchange drinks with someone you're showing gratitude to."

"Wah?" said Ryuu, with all the fabled eloquence of elvenkind.

The waitress produced two tankards filled to the brim. From where, Ryuu could not have said. She was beginning to suspect the woman of minor divinity.

At the edge of her hearing, Rose leant towards Sophie. "Didn't you say she has healing magic as well?"

"Mm," said Sophie, with terrible warmth. "Her second spell, as it happens, Rose."

"So that's—Airmid, Naaza, Heith, and—"

"He's completing the set. Do you think he mentioned feeding her noodles—"

If Ryuu could have gone redder, she would have discovered it then. But between her own Familia's cajoling—Alise drumming the table, Iska and Neze chanting something with her name in it—and the expectant grin of the entire crowd, and Syr already pressing a tankard into her hand with the gentle inevitability of the tide, there was nowhere to retreat.

Emiya lifted his own tankard. His face was flushed with drink and his eyes were apologetic, which somehow made it worse.

She clinked her vessel against his and drank.

It was bitter. Ale always was; she'd never seen the appeal—not even wine, truly, though she'd partaken at Familia celebrations at Stardust Garden. But the cheering had acquired the words "in one go," and her Familia had joined it, traitors all, and somewhere in the noise she could hear her own Goddess's voice among them.

So Ryuu Lion tipped the tankard back and did not lower it until it was empty.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand to a roar of approval.

The bitterness, she noted distantly, faded quickly.

What remained was warm.

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The tables merged somewhere between Ryuu's flushed face and her shouting at everyone to stop it.

"Stop what?" The question came from at least four directions at once, delivered with varying degrees of innocence that fooled precisely no one.

Ryuu could only manage a sharp "Hmph!" before dropping into her chair with enough force to scrape it across the wooden floor.

"OI!" Mamma Mia's voice cut through the tavern noise like a war horn. "You scratch my floors, you're paying for the refinishing, elf!"

Ryuu's ears went from pink to crimson. She muttered something that might have been an apology—Alise couldn't tell from this angle, and frankly didn't care to investigate. Besides, everyone had switched off the comms by now; hearing the room's ambient noise doubled in one ear had been disorienting enough sober. The only device still transmitting was Shirou's listening crystal, and against the roar of the tavern it was negligible.

Alise leant back, her chair propped against the establishment's wall at a comfortable angle, and folded her arms across her chest. She nodded twice, slowly, satisfied with the day. It was a rare day of quiet—or at least relative quiet.

'Today was fun.'

The chaos had reorganised itself into two distinct clusters. To her left, Iska, Neze, Maryuu, Noin, and Asta had bracketed Rose and Sophie. The interrogation was already well underway.

"Ummm—did you really used to go to the pleasure district to ummm—" Neze, fellow werewolf to Rose, asked with her ears flattened in embarrassment. She couldn't seem to finish the sentence.

"Do the deed?" Iska finished it for her, because Amazonesses had never met a question they wouldn't charge headfirst into.

At the neighbouring section of the merged tables, both Celty and Ryuu were nursing glasses of wine, trying to be casual. Their ears had gone red again—Ryuu's from residual embarrassment, Celty's from the direction the conversation was taking. Both had leant slightly closer to the Rose and Sophie group, trying desperately to look as though they weren't hanging on every word.

Celty's eyes met Alise's across the table.

Alise gave her a conspiratorial wink.

The fair-skinned elf turned bright tomato red, which was about as avoidable as sunrise.

Even caught, Celty still leant in to listen.

Rose's blush deepened as she nodded. "Only during my oestrus period, and it was purely—"

"Oh, we frequented Goddess Ishtar's establishment," Sophie cut in, leaning towards the group with the air of someone sharing vital intelligence. She gave Neze a wink. "If you ever experience the same thing, just ask for Aisha or Samira and tell them we sent you."

The group squealed.

The nearby tables winced at the sound of a half-dozen women going supersonic. Chairs scraped across Mamma Mia's floors—this time she didn't shout, perhaps recognising a lost cause—as patrons subtly relocated their tables a few inches further from the source of the noise.

Ryuu and Celty had transformed into a pair of steaming kettles, red from ear-tip to collar, still determinedly pretending they couldn't hear a single word as they took generous gulps of the night's libations.

Noin jumped in with her own question. "But how often do you—"

"And is it always the same—" Maryuu added, overlapping.

Neze and Iska pressed for more details—until Sophie turned the question around.

"Though why would you lot need the pleasure district," she asked sweetly, "when you have—"

Alise decided she'd gleaned enough intelligence from that particular front. She scooted her chair—carefully, so as not to incur Mamma Mia's wrath—towards the other group that had formed.

"—that useless elf," Kaguya was saying as Alise manoeuvred into position. "Honestly, if you'd seen the state of her when she first—"

"Oh, don't say that." Goddess Astraea's voice carried the warmth of fond memory. "I think you were just as cute and flustered as our Ryuu, back when you first joined."

"Goddess!" Kaguya's composure cracked for just a moment.

"Oh—are we talking about the old days?" Alise inserted herself into the conversation with a large grin.

"We were just discussing Kaguya's early adventures and how passionate she was," Astraea said, her eyes twinkling. "This was months before Lyra joined—it's precisely why Kaguya is the best one to guide our Ryuu through her own adjustment period. She has... experience."

"Oh—Kaguya was something else back then—"

"Alise." Kaguya's voice had dropped to a dangerous register. "Not in present company. Unless you want me to tell our neighbour here about the underwear incident involving a sacred site?"

At the word "underwear," Shirou's head turned slightly. So did Lyra's—the prum had been circulating with a bottle, refilling tankards, since the night was young and the pre-ordered drinks, which no one present remembered consenting to, had to be finished by someone.

Alise thumped her chest with her fist. "Ho! Ho! Ho! I'm an open book!"

She turned to Shirou, who wore the expression of a man who had not signed up for whatever was about to happen but was resigned to experiencing it anyway.

"Did you know, Shirou, when we first arrived at the outskirts of the Far East—this was years ago, mind you, I was doing some washing. Just me and Goddess Astraea's clothes, nothing scandalous about that."

"Nothing at all," Astraea agreed, her lips pressed together, though their corners gave the game away.

"The spring I found was beautiful. Crystal clear, perfect temperature, surrounded by these lovely stone lanterns that I thought were just decorations." Alise spread her hands expansively. "How was I supposed to know it was a sacred site? The shrine was tiny! Hidden behind some bushes! I thought it was a storage shed!"

Shirou's expression had shifted from resignation to a kind of horrified fascination.

"I hung our washing on the shrine's torii gate," Alise continued, warming to the story. "Goddess Astraea's undergarments were particularly fine silk, you see, and I didn't want them touching the ground—"

"You hung a goddess's undergarments on a sacred gate," Shirou said flatly.

"In my defence, I thought it was a drying rack! The crossbar was exactly the right height!" Alise threw her hands up. "The village priest came running out screaming about defilement. The entire village mobilised. There were torches, Shirou. Torches!"

"It took three hours of apologies and a formal blessing ceremony to calm everyone down," Astraea added. "I had to wear wet clothes for the rest of the day."

The three of them—Shirou, Astraea, and Lyra—now turned to Kaguya with identical expressions of anticipation.

"How about," Kaguya said, setting down her cup with deliberate care, "the time you got mistaken for an underwear thief? And were chased through three villages by an angry mob?"

The table went quiet.

"Oi!" Alise pointed at her. "That wasn't my fault! There was another redhead who apparently was stealing women's—"

She stopped.

Slowly, her pointing finger swivelled from Kaguya to Shirou.

"Wait. Redhead."

Shirou's expression had gone carefully blank in the way of someone who had just realised a conversational trap was closing around them.

"Aren't you from the Far East?" Alise asked, her eyes narrowing.

Lyra's grin could have lit the Dungeon's deepest floors. "Oooh, are we finally about to solve the underwear thief mystery?" She turned to Shirou with theatrical intensity. "Where were you six years ago, Emiya Shirou?"

"Oh my." Astraea leant forward, her voice dropping into a register of mock solemnity. "What say you, Emiya Shirou?" The words were serious, but the sparkle of mischief in her eyes was evident to her children.

Shirou took a long drink from his tankard. Too long. The kind of drink a man takes when he's buying time.

"I was probably in a different part of the Far East that day," he said finally.

His voice was perfectly even. His face was perfectly composed.

Three pairs of eyes—divine, noble, and chaotic—fixed on him with identical intensity.

Astraea's head tilted slightly.

"Lie."

Shirou choked.

Ale went down the wrong pipe. He doubled over, fist pounding against his chest as he fought to keep from spraying drink across the table. The coughing fit lasted several seconds whilst everyone watched with varying degrees of amusement and concern.

"Uuh—" He cleared his throat, massaging it with one hand. "If my lady shall test my honesty, then let me rephrase."

He straightened in his chair, composing himself with visible effort.

"I was never involved in an underwear incident—"

"Lie."

The word dropped like a stone into still water.

Every eye at their section of the table focused on Shirou, who had begun to sink into his chair as though hoping the furniture might swallow him.

"Oh—I think Rose is calling for me." He started to rise.

Astraea's hand landed on one shoulder. Kaguya's landed on the other. He was guided firmly back into his seat.

"The deities' gift of discernment is rarely wrong," Kaguya said, her smile sharp enough to cut glass. "Perhaps you'd like to try again?"

Shirou's eyes darted between them like a trapped animal calculating escape routes.

"I have never stolen any women's—" He caught the flash in their eyes and course-corrected mid-sentence. "—or men's! Underwear! In my life!"

A pause.

Astraea's eyes narrowed, her head tilting as though listening to something only she could hear.

The moment stretched.

"...True."

Shirou exhaled so hard his entire body deflated.

"So," he said, his voice cutting through with the precision of a man redirecting artillery, "what exactly is the story behind the Yamato Nadeshiko's cute and flustered past?"

"HEY!?"

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The suckling pig finally arrived. Mamma Mia brought the platter herself.

Every member of the Familia went wide-eyed at the sight of it. It was small as pigs went—young, glazed, about the length of an arm—but after everything else Syr had ordered on their behalf, it might as well have been a Goliath on a serving board. The large knife embedded upright in its neck did not help matters.

"Do you want to split the pig with us as well?" Shirou offered. "I haven't actually tried this dish before. Rose, Sophie? You too?"

Rose and Sophie looked at the pig. The elves at the table—Ryuu, Celty, Sophie—had been raised on what a forest could offer, but forest-raised did not mean meat-averse; it was rather like the way inlanders rarely ate seafood without ever actually disliking it.

Sophie and Rose exchanged a glance and nodded together.

Shirou turned to Goddess Astraea, and the motion carried the question to the whole table. Everyone agreed. Splitting it between fourteen seemed far more manageable than eleven—even if the difference was only three.

Shirou pulled back his sleeves.

"Okay, let me handle it. Mamma Mia, could we have more plates? I'll divide this properly."

"Fourteen of 'em?" Mia raised an eyebrow from behind the counter.

"That'll do. Thank you."

She returned with a stack, and Emiya set to work. The table watched him dismantle the pig—skin from meat, leaner cuts from fattier pieces, the joints giving way as though it had been cooked far longer than the two hours they'd been waiting.

"They probably pre-cook the pig and finish it once it's ordered," Shirou said, not looking up from the blade. "Saves the customer the full roasting time."

"What if nobody orders it?" Celty asked.

Shirou pondered this for a second, then shrugged. "The pork gets repurposed. Fried rice. Filling for dumplings. Broth from the bones." He separated a shoulder from the carcass in one clean motion. "Nothing goes to waste in a kitchen that knows what it's doing."

He built fourteen equal portions, balancing fatty against lean, laying a rib bone with meat still clinging to it across each plate, and crowning every serving with a shard of crackled skin.

They noted, of course, how easy he made it look. But then, given what the man did when he wasn't delving, it was hardly surprising.

As the tavern wound down around them—the rowdier patrons filtering out into the night—Syr finally untied her serving apron and draped it over the back of a chair. She dropped into the seat beside Noin with a theatrical sigh, rolling her wrists.

"Finally. My feet are staging a revolt."

Emiya was still circulating with plates. He paused at Sophie and Rose's end of the table, refilling Rose's water glass before setting down their servings. Sophie murmured thanks without breaking her conversation with Neze. Rose caught his wrist briefly, squeezed once, and let go—her face flushed. Shirou raised both brows and smiled at her. Sophie giggled and nudged Rose with her elbow.

Syr folded herself into the group's conversation, her arrival functioning less as an entrance and more as a detonation.

Back at his seat, Emiya had settled beside Goddess Astraea. The two were talking. Ryuu's ear twitched—the listening crystal was still active, its twin fastened to his collar from when Kaguya had brushed past him hours ago, and through it their voices arrived clean beneath the ambient noise.

It wasn't a remarkable conversation. Astraea spoke about the orphanage repairs. Emiya mentioned the orphanage had finally managed to engage Goibniu Familia for the work—though given the smith clan's backlog, they wouldn't start for a few days. From there the talk wandered: recipes, small stories from Shirou's past—vague ones, Ryuu couldn't help noting, with no names given.

She caught herself noting it. The suspicion was a reflex, and reflexes didn't switch off cleanly just because you'd realised and decided that you were being unreasonable.

Then Astraea said she wished the Familia could do more—the conversation had drifted to Orario's defence, its fraying stability—and Emiya agreed. Proper procedure was slow, he said, and it always felt as though everyone was merely catching up.

He agreed plainly. Not with deference. Not with the careful, measured assent of a mortal addressing a goddess. He simply agreed, the way one person agrees with another when they share a frustration and see no point in dressing it up.

Ryuu observed the exchange with something she couldn't quite name.

She knew how her own Familia spoke to Astraea. She knew because she did it herself. There was love in it—genuine, deep, uncomplicated love—but there was also a frequency beneath the words. The unspoken see, Goddess, I am upholding the oath, I am being just, please tell me I am doing it right. That framing was perhaps uncharitable. But there was a grain of it in every conversation, every report, every oath recital at the end of the day. A child seeking.

Emiya carried none of it. It was the same way he addressed Riveria Ljos Alf, the captain of the Dionysus Familia, the guild staff, or anyone.

He spoke to Astraea the way two neighbours spoke across a fence about a shared problem. Direct. Unperformed. As though the goddess's divinity were a fact about her, like her height or her hair colour, rather than the organising principle of their interaction.

'Was he like this with his previous deity?'

Or was this because Sh—

She caught herself. Emiya. She corrected the name in her thoughts several times tonight.

Or was this because, as Astraea had deduced, he wasn't looking for a deity. Wasn't looking to impress anyone or earn anyone's blessing. He had lost his god—or goddess—and hadn't sought a replacement, and so the social architecture that governed how mortals addressed the divine—that invisible scaffolding of need and gratitude and yearning—simply wasn't there.

The thought led her back to the bruise of her earlier prejudice. Her Familia had been kind about it. Kaguya especially—explaining the forest-essence that elves perceived around him, the way it struck Ryuu's particular hatred of everything she'd renounced about her homeland. The explanation had been generous. Even Celty, who had every right to be offended by Ryuu's previous behaviour back when she was new to the family, had simply nodded and said It's fine, I understand.

But generous framing didn't change the fact. She had been unrepentant. She had observed kindness and consistency and selflessness from a man who owed none of it to anyone, and she had decided—against every piece of evidence—that he must be hiding something sinister. Not because the evidence pointed that way. Because something about him felt like home, and she hated home. Though hate was a strong word. Home reminded her of her kind, and she did not like the inherited condescension her kind held over every other race.

The narrowness of that thinking sat in her chest and it felt heavy.

Celty refilled her glass—the last of Kaguya's own bottles, the smuggled stock, as distinct from the tavern's wine they had all been contractually cheerful about purchasing at double.

Ryuu raised her glass. Celty met it with hers.

"Cheers."

"Cheers."

The clink was small and bright. Ryuu smiled—a real one, not the polite contraction she performed for strangers—and Celty's ears lifted in response.

Ryuu turned towards the other group. Her Familia members were clustered around Syr like moths to a lantern, feeding her gossip and receiving it back refined and weaponised. But Syr's attention had drifted. The waitress sat slightly angled in her chair, her gaze resting on Emiya and Astraea.

Astraea laughed at something—a bright sound, unguarded. Emiya's mouth curved. He said something Ryuu missed even through the listening crystal, though the cadence suggested self-deprecation, and Astraea laughed again.

Syr watched them. Then she turned back to the group, and her eyes met Ryuu's on the way.

Syr smiled.

There was something about that smile Ryuu felt was wrong. It almost felt—

Sad.

The word surfaced and Ryuu shook her head, dismissing it. She had made too many wrong assumptions lately. She was second-guessing everything now, reading shadows into smiles and intent into silences. If she couldn't trust her own judgement about a man she'd watched for months, she certainly couldn't trust a half-second impression of a waitress she had met precisely twice.

She drank her wine and let the thought go.

"Mamma Mia," Emiya called across the room.

"Oi! What is it?" The former adventurer's voice cut the ambient noise clean in half.

"Could you come here for a second? I have an idea."

Mia wiped her hands on a towel as she rounded the counter, her heavy frame moving towards their table. She dropped into the chair Emiya pulled out from the empty table beside them.

What followed was—well, Ryuu wasn't entirely certain what to call it.

Emiya proposed a common table. Regular food distribution for those in need—the orphanage district first, then Daedalus Street, cooked out of the Hostess's kitchen or maybe a setup in public.

"The cost and labour have to be budgeted," Mia said flatly. "Ingredients, transport, preparation time. I can't justify running this kitchen at a loss, even for a good cause. My girls have wages."

"Of course." Emiya nodded. "That's non-negotiable. This only works if the people doing the work are compensated properly."

Mamma Mia studied him for a long moment. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy something, because her arms uncrossed.

"A trial run," she said. "Three days from now. We can order the stock tomorrow morning."

Astraea leant in at once—she could ask her fellow deities to contribute, she offered, already halfway through a mental list of which gods owed her favours.

"That would be quite helpful," Emiya said. "And I can ask Sophie and Rose about Guild support."

Astraea beamed. Not the composed, serene radiance of a goddess bestowing approval—plain delight, the delight of finally being handed something useful to do after too many days of being unable to.

She turned that smile on Emiya, and it was an expression Ryuu had rarely seen directed at anyone outside the Familia. Warmth without performance. Gratitude without ceremony.

Half the table was watching now. Syr had gone still again, grey eyes resting on the exchange for the space of one breath before the look was folded away behind her usual bright smile.

It was into that lull that the gossip cluster overflowed.

"—no, you never answered!" Iska was jabbing a finger at Sophie, three drinks past tact. "You said, why would you lot need the pleasure district, and then the pig arrived! Finish the question!"

"I only meant," Sophie said sweetly, "that a mansion containing ten fit women and a goddess has options the rest of us lack—"

The squeal that followed rattled the cutlery.

"We do NOT—" Neze's ears went vertical.

"Nobody is—there are no options—" Noin, scandalised.

"We follow our Goddess's example!" Alise's voice rode over the top of both, bright with the pride of a captain planting a flag on a hill nobody had asked her to take. She thumped her tankard down. "Lady Astraea is a chaste goddess! Her Familia holds to her standard! Discipline of the body is discipline of the blade!"

She sat back, thoroughly satisfied with the declaration.

The table might have moved on. The table was ready to move on—Maryuu already had a follow-up loaded for Rose—except that Syr, reaching across to reclaim her cup, went still for the second time in five minutes.

"Hm," said Syr.

It was a small sound. It carried anyway, the way a drawn breath carries in a fencing hall.

"Hm?" Alise turned towards Syr.

"Nothing." Syr settled back with her cup, unhurried. "Only—that sounds like an injustice to me."

The word landed on the Familia of Justice like a dropped plate.

"Injustice?" Alise straightened as though slapped with a glove. "Explain yourself, waitress."

"Well." Syr crossed one leg over the other, no longer serving anyone anything. "You spend your days answering everyone else's needs, don't you? The city's. The Guild's. Strangers' who will never learn your names. If a man is hungry, you feed him. If he's in danger, you bleed for him. You'd call it unjust to deny anyone food, or rest, or shelter." Her grey eyes glinted. "But your own wants—warmth, touch, desire, the whole beating half of being alive—those get tempered, shelved, denied. For the sake of an example. Whose justice does that serve?"

Ryuu's wine glass stopped halfway to her lips.

Except this wasn't teasing. She realised it with a creeping dread that started at the base of her spine and worked upwards. Syr was not teasing. She was litigating.

"That's—" Alise rallied. "That's completely different. That's discipline—"

"Is it? Rose here has needs on a schedule, by her own account—"

"Syr." Rose's voice carried the hollow resonance of a woman who had already been killed once today and was being asked to endure it again.

"—and there are arrangements, and it's all very sensible, and nobody at this table called it weakness." Syr's gesture swept the Familia's side. "And you do have members who are Amazonesses and werewolves."

Iska and Neze blushed in perfect unison.

"A blade unpolished rusts," Alise declared, finger aloft, "but a blade over-handled dulls—"

"You've never handled the blade at all, by your own account."

The table made a sound that had no respectable spelling.

"Point to Syr," Kaguya murmured, and drank.

"You're keeping score?"

"Someone must. Two–nil."

Silence. Then every head rotated—slowly, inevitably, like flowers tracking the sun—towards Astraea.

The goddess picked up her tankard and took a drink. Not the delicate sip Ryuu associated with her. A proper pull, the kind you would observe a dwarf take fresh from the dungeon. The tankard came down, and Astraea set it on the table with a composure that belonged to a completely different action than the one she'd just performed.

"I am a chaste goddess," she said. "Though chastity is not truly part of my being—it is a consequence of my dedication to justice."

"And we follow her standards!" Alise materialised at their goddess's flank, tankard in hand, wearing the expression of a soldier who had just volunteered for the forlorn hope and intended to enjoy every second of it. "Her Familia, her example! Chastity! Discipline! The pure blade of—"

"But is the expectation just?"

Syr's tankard met the table with the soft, definitive boom of a gavel. She leant forward, and her tone shifted into something almost gentle.

"To be precise—I'm not suggesting anyone abandon their principles. If any of you genuinely feel no need for companionship, or... other things, that's perfectly fine. That's your choice, and choice is the whole point. What I'm asking is whether abstinence as a condition of service is just. If someone in your Familia wanted to pursue love. Wanted to be held. Wanted to share her life with someone. Would the oath permit it?" Her eyes travelled the table, unhurried. "Or would she be choosing between her Familia and her heart?"

The table had gone very quiet.

Neze was staring into her wine glass as though it contained prophecy. Celty's ears had flattened. Iska and Maryuu exchanged a glance that lasted half a second and contained an entire conversation. Kaguya swirled her wine and said nothing, which was itself remarkable. Alise's magnificent rally had stalled entirely. Even Lyra, who observed most emotional conversations from a safe distance, had gone still.

Sophie pressed her palms together and touched them to her lips, watching as though at the theatre.

Rose still looked red.

"I think," Astraea said slowly, "that is something to be considered." She set down her tankard. "Even as a goddess of justice, there may be forms of injustice to which I am not privy. Things of which I have no experience."

A pause.

Then Astraea turned. Her gaze found Emiya with the serene ruthlessness of a goddess redistributing a burden she no longer wished to carry alone.

"Shirou—as someone outside our Familia, what is your opinion?"

The table swung to him as one.

Fifteen faces. One goddess. One litigating waitress. Eleven women in varying states of investment, inebriation, and mortification. Two dates. One former adventurer who had stopped wiping glasses to watch.

Shirou Emiya sat very still.

Ryuu watched his face cycle through several expressions in rapid succession. She recognised the first—calculation, the swift assessment of a battlefield. The second was harder to read. The third was the expression of a man who has checked every available exit and found them all barred.

"I think I hear Rose calling me," he said.

He stood.

He walked away from the table.

Rose, who was seated at the table, three chairs from where he had been sitting, stared at his retreating back.

"I did not—"

"Coming, Rose!" he called, from several medr in the wrong direction—specifically, towards the bar counter, where no version of Rose existed. "Oh—sorry, I thought I heard you call me." He turned back, rubbing his neck. "Maybe I'm drunk."

Sophie buried her face in both hands. Her shoulders shook.

"Let me just get more water."

He picked up a glass from the counter and walked towards the back of the Hostess. He passed the water jug. He passed the bar. He passed Mamma Mia, who watched him go with a flat expression; she had witnessed this exact tactical retreat a thousand times, from a thousand men, and it had never been any less entertaining.

The door to the privy closed behind him.

Then—transmitted through the resonance crystal still pinned to his collar with merciless clarity—came the unmistakable sound of a man relieving himself.

Ryuu's hand shot to her ear.

Too late. Every member of the Astraea Familia wearing an earpiece heard it. The sound was intimate, echoing, and—given its duration—suggested Emiya had been holding this particular retreat in reserve for some time.

Neze's face went blank.

Celty's ears flattened against her skull.

Iska covered her mouth.

Maryuu leant back in her chair, lifted her gaze to the ceiling, and appeared to pray to a deity, present company not included.

Kaguya took a long, measured drink of wine, her expression suggesting she had achieved a state of transcendence beyond embarrassment.

Alise opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. No sound emerged.

Lyra pinched the bridge of her nose and exhaled through her teeth.

Noin stared straight ahead, thousand-yard, having seen too much to ever unsee it.

Astraea—Goddess Astraea, keeper of the scales, embodiment of the starlit heavens, arbiter of righteousness—tugged at her ear.

Everyone followed her lead. Nothing gave.

And then, to the collective horror of eleven bonded earpieces, a neighbouring stall creaked open, and its occupant began to hum—and unlike Emiya, the sounds that followed made unmistakably clear that they were not there on the same errand.

'We should remove the device from his collar.'

Eyes met around the table. A silent resolution was ratified, unanimously, without a single word.

"Well," said Syr, rising with her cup, "let's have another round."

-=&<o>&=-

The night thereafter came to Ryuu in pieces, which she would later blame entirely on Syr's tradition of gratitude and the three further traditions Syr invented over the following hour.

It should not have gone that way. The Familia had a mission. The resolution had been ratified in silence not ten minutes earlier: the listening crystal on Emiya's collar had to come off, tonight, before anyone went home wearing an earpiece that could not be removed.

The problem was that the mission had opponents, and the opponents were winning.

"Another round for the table!" Sophie announced, for the fourth time.

"You've barely touched yours," Rose told Ryuu, and pushed a full cup into her hand with the authority of a Guild adviser processing a form. "Drink. You're celebrating. You thanked him, remember?"

"I am on du—" Ryuu stopped herself. She was not on duty. There was no duty she could name without explaining the duty. She drank.

That was the shape of the whole hour. Every time a member of the Familia positioned herself near Emiya's collar, a drink arrived. Syr kept the cups filled; Rose and Sophie kept the cups moving; and none of the three had any idea they were running a counter-operation, which made it impossible to resent and impossible to stop.

The first attempt was Celty's.

The plan, whispered along the table and repeated twice into collars—the comm crystals were still bonded to eleven ears, so they reopened the operational frequency—was simple. Celty would pass behind Emiya's chair on her way to the counter. She would stumble. Her hand would find his collar. The crystal would find her sleeve.

Celty rose. Celty walked. Celty passed directly behind Emiya's chair, made eye contact with the back of his head, lost every nerve she possessed, continued to the counter, and returned with a basket of breadsticks nobody had asked for.

"Petal has aborted," Lyra reported into her collar, unnecessarily, from the same table.

"I panicked," Celty whispered.

The second attempt involved Iska and Maryuu and a two-pronged approach: Iska would challenge Emiya to arm-wrestling as a distraction whilst Maryuu, admiring his shirt from behind, unclipped the crystal.

The distraction half worked flawlessly. Emiya accepted the challenge with good humour, put his elbow on the table, and let Iska throw her entire Level 2 strength into the grip—which, given his surprise, slammed the back of his hand clean into the wood. The table cheered. The extraction half died instantly, because Emiya—without appearing to notice anything—turned in his seat at the exact moment Maryuu's fingers approached, to wave Syr over for a refill on Iska's behalf.

Maryuu withdrew her hand and pretended to fix Iska's hair. Iska, mid-strain, hissed, "What are you doing."

"Supporting you."

"Support me from your OWN chair—"

The third attempt was Astraea's, and it failed for the simplest reason of all: their Goddess rose with perfect divine grace, took two steps towards Emiya, and was intercepted by Syr with a warmed cup of plum wine and a question about cooking—despite the Familia having been warned, not two hours ago, that engaging Syr on any topic related to the preparation of anything meant to be ingested was an unwise idea.

They were still discussing braising techniques four minutes later.

"Star One has been captured," said Lyra.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the night began arriving in fragments.

There was a stretch where Iska and Maryuu arm-wrestled each other to settle, permanently and for all time, the ownership of the name Anvil, and Asta—unable to whisper encouragement—shouted it, and the pallum bookmaker from the plaza turned out to be two seats away and opened a line on the spot.

There was a stretch where Celty, two cups of honeyed wine into the bravest night of her year, stood on the bench and recited what she insisted was an ancient elven blessing over the remains of the suckling pig, and got four lines in before Ryuu recognised it as a nursery rhyme about a duck, and said nothing, because Celty was radiant and the pig didn't mind.

It was during the third verse that Alise's celebration injured someone.

The captain had climbed onto the bench for the chorus. She came down off it for the final line, arms flung wide, and slipped—the back of her skull meeting Kaguya's face on the descent with a crack that cut the song off mid-word.

"OW—Kaguya! Sorry, sorry—"

Kaguya sat very still with one hand over her mouth. When she lowered it, her lip was split and her nose was bleeding.

"Captain," she said. Her voice was level. Blood moved when she spoke.

"I'll get ice—"

"Sit down." Kaguya pressed a napkin to her mouth and inspected the red that came away. "I'm fine. Go wash your head."

"But—"

"You may have abnormal resistance, but better be safe."

Alise acquiesced and left for the washroom.

The song resumed as Kaguya held a napkin over her bleeding nose and lip.

And then Lyra called the fourth attempt.

"Final approach," the prum's voice said in Ryuu's ear, low and businesslike. "He's fetching the next pitcher. When he passes the gap between tables, I foul his footing. Star Two catches him. In the tangle, Star Two retrieves the asset. Nobody search for meaning in anything that happens. Confirm."

"Confirmed," said Kaguya, muffled by napkin, already rising and drifting towards the gap with her empty glass as cover.

Ryuu wanted to object. She could not find the words, or the words were several drinks behind her, so she watched instead.

Emiya came back through the gap with a full pitcher and a drunk man's faith in his own footing. Lyra's boot slid out from under her table—small, precise, timed.

Physics did the rest, and physics had not read the plan.

Emiya's foot caught. The pitcher went one way. He went the other, twisting to save the drink out of pure instinct, and the twist took him past the catch Kaguya had prepared and into her entirely. She went down beneath him. The two of them hit the floorboards in a tangle that ended—the whole table saw it—with his mouth flush against hers.

Against her split lip.

It could not have lasted half a second. Emiya rebounded off her like a man off a hot stove, already apologising, hauled the rest of the way upright by a fistful of his collar—Ryuu's fistful, she discovered, because her body had crossed the room without consulting her.

"YOU," she announced, at a volume calibrated by ale, "HAVE SEDUCED ENOUGH WOMEN OF ORARIO!"

"I tripped—"

"Airmid! Naaza! The Freya girl! Rose! Sophie! The scaffold! The noodles!" She was counting on her fingers, and the fingers were not cooperating. "The city has a FINITE NUMBER of healers, Emiya!"

"That's—hold on. Seduced? Where is this seduced coming from? Who told you—" He stopped, visibly ran some arithmetic, and pivoted. "I have seduced no one—"

The table roared. Sophie was weeping into Rose's shoulder. Rose was pounding the boards. At the edge of it all, Syr laughed with her whole body and topped up the nearest cup by feel.

On the floor, unnoticed in the din, Kaguya had not moved.

She lay propped on her elbows. Her lip and nose had opened again with the impact; blood sat bright on her mouth—and not only on hers. A smear of the same red marked Emiya's lip where the collision had pressed them together. As Ryuu hauled him upright, he wiped it off on his knuckle without a glance, mid-protest, as though it were ale foam.

Kaguya watched him do it.

Then she moved. Quickly, steadily, table to table—asking anyone who remained whether they had an antidote. A dia frater. Anything. The remaining customers shook their heads, offered toasts, assumed it was part of the evening's entertainment. None of them had what she needed.

She turned back towards Shirou.

He was still arguing with Ryuu. "—and ANOTHER thing—" and his protests were still rising over the tavern's laughter, ordinary and unbroken and alive.

She stood there for a moment, watching him argue.

Then she returned to her seat, set down the napkin, filled her glass to the brim, and drank it in one motion. She filled it again.

"Kaguya! You're bleeding," Celty said, arriving late to everything.

"I'm fine," Kaguya answered, her eyes still on Shirou. "Everyone's fine."

She drank. The matter closed.

It was another quarter of an hour before Lyra's voice came through eleven earpieces, flat with professional disgust.

"Asset check."

Every head at the Familia's end of the table turned, with tremendous casualness, towards Emiya. He was upright again, restored to his seat between Rose and Sophie, laughing at something with his collar in plain view.

The crystal glinted there. Small. Secure. Exactly where Kaguya had clipped it eleven hours ago.

"The asset," Lyra reported, "remains deployed."

"Ryuu, you had your hands on his collar, and you did nothing!"

Ryuu's ears drooped as she whispered, "Sorry."

Nobody groaned aloud. On the operational frequency, eleven people did.

-=&<o>&=-

They poured out of the Hostess well past the third bell, into a night gone cool and enormous.

The walk home organised itself by loose groups. The Familia moved as one singing constellation—Neze conducting with her tail, Asta providing volume that rattled shutters, Celty asleep on her feet between Noin and Maryuu like laundry on a line. Her head lolled with each step, and twice Maryuu had to catch her before she wandered into a lamppost.

Somewhere near the fountain district, Lyra called a halt.

"The crystal," she said, flat with defeat. "We're not getting it off tonight."

"We could try again," Alise offered, swaying slightly.

"That's precisely why we're stopping." Kaguya dabbed at her lip, which had finally stopped bleeding. "First light. Asfi Al Andromeda. She made the cursed things; she can unmake them."

The Familia murmured agreement, too drunk and too tired to argue. The crystal would keep until morning. Nothing else could possibly happen tonight.

And at the centre of a smaller orbit wove Shirou Emiya, an arm over Rose's shoulders and another over Sophie's, upright—mostly—with Syr trailing half a step behind carrying his coat and wooden sword, smiling at the middle distance like a cat who'd found the cream unattended.

"—and that," Shirou was concluding, to no argument anyone had raised, "is why you never trust a priest with a mapo tofu addiction."

"No, dear," Sophie agreed, patting his ribs.

"Nearly there," Rose said, adjusting her grip on his belt.

They reached the gap between Stardust Garden and the neighbouring house, and the two orbits came apart. There were goodnights—many, overlapping, increasingly repetitive. Alise saluted with both hands. Asta attempted a bow and had to be caught by Noin. Astraea, flushed and glowing and happier than Ryuu had seen her in a year, pressed Emiya's hand in both of hers and thanked him for "a night of true fellowship," which he answered with a bow that nearly took all four of them down.

Then the smaller group—Shirou, Rose, Sophie, and Syr, who announced sweetly that they were making sure he reached his bed safely—turned in at his gate. The door of the too-large house opened, swallowed the four of them, and clicked shut.

The Astraea Familia went home, singing.

-=&<o>&=-

Astraea sat before her mirror, brushing out her hair, and let the evening—or rather the early morning—settle over her like a second robe.

The house around her creaked with the sounds of her children preparing for sleep. Doors closing. Water running. The soft pad of bare feet on wooden floors.

'I had missed this.'

Not the wine, though the wine had been excellent, and not the theatre of coats and call signs, though she intended to keep the coat. The silliness. The sound of serious young women being unserious together. Kaguya laughing without her hand over her mouth. Ryuu—her stern, wounded, magnificent Ryuu—shouting gratitude across a tavern and drinking to cheers. They had grown so much, all of them, and so much of that growth had happened in shadow, in ash, at funerals. Tonight it had happened over a suckling pig, and she had been there to see it.

The brush stilled.

There was a sound in her ear.

There had been sound in her ear all evening, she realised—the operational frequency had never truly gone silent. But in this quiet, with the Familia dispersed to their rooms and the night pressing close against the windows—

"—careful, the boots first, the boots—"

"I am being careful—"

"Shh, both of you, he'll—oh. Oh, hello."

Sophie. Rose. Syr.

And then Syr's voice, carrying a smile: "Is that a sword in your pants? Or are you just happy to see us?"

Muffled laughter. A fourth voice, low and warm and completely unguarded, saying something Astraea did not catch, and did not need to, because what followed was a laugh from Sophie, and a sound from Rose that was not quite a growl, and then—

Kissing. Unambiguous, unhurried, multiplying.

The earpiece was bonded to her ear.

Astraea's hand flew up anyway. Her fingers found the small curved shell nestled against her skin and pulled. It did not move. She knew it would not move. They had spent half the evening proving it would not move.

She pulled again. Hope was not a strategy, but it was all she had.

More rustling. Fabric against fabric, then fabric against skin.

A gasp. A question about a scar. Shirou's voice explained it as a legacy of a misspent youth, and someone laughed, and the rustling continued.

"Wait." Shirou's voice, suddenly clearer. "Are you all sure?"

Three voices gave their assurance.

Then someone whistled—low and appreciative.

Astraea did not want to know who.

She hooked a nail beneath the crystal's edge and levered, and, as with every previous attempt, nothing happened. In her ear, Sophie said something breathless about the door, and someone's door closed, which improved nothing, because the crystal had been clipped to a collar, and the collar was evidently no longer—

"Oh," said Rose's voice, gone soft and low in a register Astraea had never heard from the stern Guild adviser. "Oh—"

The chaste goddess of justice sat before her mirror, scarlet from collar to hairline, both hands clamped over one ear, achieving nothing.

"Sophie, the lamp—"

"Leave the lamp," said Syr's voice, silk over intent. "I want to see."

Astraea stood up so fast her chair fell over. She would go downstairs. She would—she would boil water. She would recite poetry. She would do something that did not involve sitting alone in her bedroom listening to her neighbour—

Her bedroom door slammed open.

Her daughters stood packed in the doorway in their nightclothes, every last one of them clutching an ear, every last face a shade of crimson visible by candlelight, wearing identical expressions of desperate, mortified appeal.

"GODDESS," they said, as one.

"I KNOW," said the goddess of justice.

-=&<o>&=-

In the Hermes Familia home, Asfi Al Andromeda sat at her workbench with her forehead pressed against the wood.

The earpiece would detach in—she consulted the clock without lifting her head—eleven hours. She had designed it precisely so it could not be jostled loose or forcibly removed during an operation. Field agents needed reliable equipment. Reliable equipment meant secure fittings.

She had not, in her calculations, accounted for this.

"Mm—" said the earpiece, in Rose Fannet's voice. "Right there."

"Hey, you have two hands," Sophie protested.

The protest did not last.

Asfi pressed her forehead harder into the workbench. The grain of the wood would leave marks. She did not care.

Across the room, Hermes reclined in his favourite chair with his hat over his eyes and his boots on the sill, wearing the smile of a man at a particularly fine concert. A junior Familia member refilled his wine glass without comment. Hermes raised it towards the window, towards the city, towards the general direction of the residential district, in a silent connoisseur's toast.

"Magnificent," he murmured. "Truly magnificent."

"Lord Hermes." Asfi's voice was muffled by the workbench. "Please stop enjoying this."

"I cannot help my nature, Asfi. I am the god of travellers, thieves, and information. This—" He gestured expansively with his glass. "—is information."

"This is voyeurism," Asfi deadpanned.

"Voyeurism requires eyes, Asfi." He settled deeper into the chair.

-=&<o>&=-

Ardee Varma had been four seconds from sleep.

She had done everything correctly. She had escorted her god home, which had required physical intervention only twice. She had filed the evening's preliminary notes, cross-referencing the duel incident with existing documentation on inter-Familia disputes. She had bathed, and dried her hair, and lain down in the dark, and reasoned—reasonably, like a reasonable woman—that the earpiece could wait until morning. Asfi would know how to remove it. The operational frequency had gone quiet after the Astraea Familia's departure from the tavern, just drunken singing and goodbyes.

Nothing further could possibly happen tonight.

Her eyes had closed, her breathing had slowed, her muscles had begun to unclench—

"Ah—"

Ardee's eyes opened.

She lay perfectly still, in the perfect dark, and listened to the perfectly unmistakable sounds of three female voices and one male voice engaged in activities that required no translation.

"...Shirou—"

A sound followed that Ardee declined, professionally, to classify.

She rose. She walked, with great composure, to her window. She looked out over the sleeping city, towards the far district where Asfi Al Andromeda presumably also lay awake, and made her a solemn, silent promise to be at her door at first light.

Then she went back to bed, put her pillow over her ear, and learnt within four seconds that the resonance was conducted through bone.

"There—yes—"

-=&<o>&=-

"We could tell them."

"We cannot tell them."

The Astraea Familia had convened its emergency council in the kitchen, by candlelight, in nightclothes, each member with one hand clamped uselessly to one ear. Kaguya had opened another bottle. No one had objected.

"We knock on the door," Alise pressed on, pacing the length of the kitchen with the manic energy of the sleepless. "We say, terribly sorry, false alarm, there is a listening device on your collar, we planted it, we've heard everything, please throw the collar out of the window—"

"Which requires explaining the device," Lyra said, "which requires explaining the operation, which requires explaining the coats, the smoke bombs, the code names, and the wine budget—"

"—there," said the earpieces, in Syr's voice.

"I can't believe she took the whole thing in one go," Sophie added, breathless with admiration.

A pause in the kitchen.

"...They could be drinking," Celty offered, into the silence. "People take drinks in one go."

The earpieces produced a sound that was not drinking.

The kitchen flinched in unison.

"We could cut off our ears," Neze proposed, with the calm of the far side of panic. "Airmid could reattach them tomorrow. She's the Dea Saint."

"She cannot reattach ears," Ryuu said flatly. She stood in the corner with her arms crossed, her face a mask of rigid composure that fooled no one. "Nor any part of the body. That's why prosthetics exist."

The council absorbed this information in silence.

"Besides," Kaguya added, her voice ragged silk, "do you know her rates? Eleven of us. We would be destitute. We would be a Familia of justice and debt, begging outside the Pantheon with matching scars—"

"Syr, that's—oh—"

A squeal. Kissing. Something that might have been furniture protesting its treatment.

"THE STATUTES," Astraea declared, and began, in a clear and carrying voice, to recite. "Article one! The Guild, being established for the regulation of the Dungeon and the welfare of—EVERYONE TOGETHER—"

The Familia took up the founding statutes of the Guild of Orario, in ragged unison, at volume, in a candlelit kitchen at the fourth hour of the morning. Kaguya moved through the chaos filling glasses, her logic impeccable: if they were drunk enough, they might pass out. Unconsciousness was, at this point, a mercy.

"—AND THE MAINTENANCE OF PUBLIC ORDER," they shouted, "SHALL BE GOVERNED BY THE FOLLOWING PRINCIPLES—"

"Ah—Shirou—"

"PRINCIPLE ONE: THE SANCTITY OF CONTRACT—"

Celty, who had never fully woken up, slumped against Noin and began to snore. The snoring did not drown out the earpiece. Nothing drowned out the earpiece.

"—PRINCIPLE TWO: THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE—"

Ryuu's voice cracked on peace. As the sounds of flesh meeting flesh that didn’t involve sparring persisted in her ears. She soldiered on.

-=&<o>&=-

On the roof of the Ganesha Familia compound—which was shaped like Ganesha, because Lord Ganesha believed in commitment—stood Ganesha.

He had felt the shift in what the earpiece carried—from the comfortable chaos of drunken singing to something far more... athletic. He had come up to the roof to hear the city better, because that was where he heard everything better, and because the roof was shaped like his head, and there was a certain poetry in that.

He stood now against the stars, fists planted on his hips, cape stirring in the night wind, the sounds of the district's most consequential address ringing clear and bright in one divine ear.

He listened.

He nodded, slowly, the nod of a judge whose ruling had been vindicated in a higher court. The duel earlier that evening had been a declaration of passion. He had said so. He had ruled so. And now—

"Yes—there—please—"

—now passion was being expressed.

"PASSION!" he informed Orario, because Orario needed to know.

Somewhere below, a light came on. A window opened. Ardee's voice drifted up, weary past all hope: "Lord Ganesha, it is almost four in the morning."

"PASSION KNOWS NO HOUR!"

The window closed. The light went off again.

Ganesha remained on his roof, cape billowing, satisfied.

Five minutes later, Shakti Varma would come to collect her God.

-=&<o>&=-

End

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