[Nasu x Worm] Straight-Edge

[warellis]

It's pointed out in-chapter, or at least Taylor assumed, that's he's wearing it to imply that he isn't someone from the E88. He's prolly using the camo more for the military-esque look than function anyway.

Well is it the color of the mask that makes it recognizable or the features of the mask that make it recognizable?

[nununu]

It's a matsuri mask in the image of an iconic Japanese cape so I'd say it's the features.

[fallacies]

1.1

---

a.

The first time that Shirou Emiya witnessed a murder up close, he was alone with the victim in a blind alley, holding a sword to the man's throat. The sudden muscular convulsions forced him to back away, and he was left to stare wide-eyed as the body jerkingly slid from the brick wall to the damp blacktop below.

With a deadly, hidden beauty, a hemorrhage had blossomed like a flower amidst the countless cascading misfirings of the cerebrum.

Shirou was unable to react; unable to completely process what it was that had unfolded before his eyes. He'd done his homework on parahuman triggering before -- and for a brief moment, the thought crossed his mind that he might've unintentionally caused such a thing. Snapping out of his stupor enough to reassess the situation, however, he found himself staring not at a new cape, but a rapidly cooling corpse.

A more concerted application of structural grasp revealed no poisons or recent injuries -- no obvious cause, beyond a possible medical condition, and the words that had nearly graced the man's tongue moments prior.

'If he were Mastered, the mystery would be blatant,' thought Shirou, clenching his jaw beneath his mask. 'But remote death induction falls pretty far outside the domain of modern magecraft. You'd have to penetrate into the soul ...'

Shirou could grasp the physical workings of the human body, but the soul was beyond the purview of his senses. For complex organisms, the boundary of the spiritual structure served as a natural barrier against external influence or observation of the nonphysical variety -- an evolved defensive mechanism that might've been the immediate inspiration for bounded fields. In magecraft, the phenomenon was known as 'thaumaturgical resistance'; and in cape lingo, the 'Manton Limit.'

At the moment of the man's death, Shirou hadn't detected the action of a mystery. If indeed the cause of death was magecraft, the spell was in all probability designed to circumvent the notice of other magi -- functioning, for example, from directly within the domain of the victim's soul.

'But there was something else ...'

It might've been his imagination, but during the spread of the hemorrhage, Shirou thought that he might've sensed a faint thrum of od across the skin on the man's back. Pushing the corpse prone with the toe of his boot, he carefully drew a vertical cut along the man's shirt with his broadsword.

Tattooed in pigments of red and black, the Bodhisattva Kanzeon returned his gaze, ever merciful.

---

b.

Back when the Merrimack River textile industry figured centrally into commerce of New Hampshire, an actual thoroughfare canal had run along the course of the present-day motorway of Canal Street -- junctioning with the river between Concord and Manchester to the west of the city, and carrying shipments of goods seaward to Lord's Port.

The district around the former canal was still a visible divide in the landscape of Brockton Bay -- a neighborhood of low, aging buildings that separated the Docks to the north from the Downtown. A decade and a half prior, it had been a reasonably safe residential-commercial zone, but the arrival of Lung had changed things. It was now a prime source of repair work for Fortress Construction.

"So, how much is this going to cost me?" asked the owner of the deli.

Shirou surveyed the damage. In the week since Kaiser's arrest, the gangers from the Boyz had systematically gone about trashing the territories of contention that they shared with the Empire. This establishment in particular had been pretty thoroughly vandalized; there weren't any glass surfaces left intact within the storefront, and it seemed as if looters had made off with basically everything that hadn't been nailed down.

Indirectly, it was probably Shirou's fault.

"I'm sorry, Mister Singh," he replied, "but as an independent contractor, I really wouldn't be able to tell you. If there's a fee that you'll be paying outside the coverage of property insurance, it would be decided between your insurance provider and Fortress."

The middle-aged Indian man didn't exactly glare, but the look he directed at Shirou wasn't at all friendly.

"Are you aware of how difficult it is to get property insurance in this part of town, young man?" he asked coldly.

Shirou winced.

"If I knew how this neighborhood would turn out," the man continued, "I would have taken up Arrowhead Futures on their offer years ago. Twenty-six months of poor profits, and then this!"

Arrowhead Futures, yet again.

There was a lull in the conversation as the deli owner silently fumed, glowering at the fragments of glass that littered the floor. Recognizing a mood for what it was, Shirou decided to interrupt.

"In any case," he said, "I've completed the testing and repairs for your linework. You'll want to replace the wiring behind your cold room sometime in the next year, but for the time being, there shouldn't be any risk of an electrical fire."

"When can I expect the place to be restored to working order?"

"My handlers mentioned that they would contact you about it sometime tonight or tomorrow morning."

The Indian man frowned, but nodded -- and Shirou unstrapped the company-issued digital clipboard from his belt.

"If there's nothing else," he said, holding forth the tablet and its stylus, "could you sign here, please?"

Absently, the storekeeper did as asked and returned the device. Stowing it again at his side, Shirou bowed his head slightly -- but the man's gaze had already drifted away to the broken remains of the refrigeration case at the center of the room.

"Thank you very much, sir," said Shirou, "and have a nice day."

The deli owner made no response, and merely stared woodenly to his side as Shirou let himself out by the front entrance. When he finally reached the company car, two blocks away, he permitted himself a long, exasperated sigh.

'I haven't fixed anything,' he thought, unlocking the back of the vehicle. 'Kaiser's arrest only contributed to the problem ...'

Setting down his toolbox and the roll of wiring about his arm, Shirou shut the hatch and looked to the fire-damaged building cordoned off behind police lines across the street. Between chatting officers and a parked fire truck, he glimpsed a red, leftward-facing gammadion freshly spray-painted across a stretch of intact wall. Was the ABB marking out their hits on Empire property now?

Shirou narrowed his eyes.

'That isn't a Nazi swastika ...'

---

There was a working hypothesis in Learning Theory that any information attended by the human mind to at least the level of written regurgitation would forever be engraven to memory. Forgetfulness, supposedly, owed less to errors of encoding, and more to impediments in the process of data recovery.

Shirou Emiya wasn't certain that any of this was true, but in his freshman year of high school, adoption of techniques for mnemonic retrieval had significantly improved the fidelity of his Tracing. Though his recollection had hardly become eidetic as a consequence, these days, he rarely scored less than a perfect in any honest test of explicit memorization.

Still, the collation of known data was better carried out outside the element of mental visualization.

"Trace on," he said.

Beneath the LED lighting blocks that he'd installed over the ceiling of the atelier proper, an alteration was applied to the map of metropolitan Brockton Bay that covered the wide wooden table at the center of the room; small polygons of red ink bled into the surface of the projected paper, marking out the real estate properties presently owned by Arrowhead Futures.

It was a good eighth of the city, centered on the Market District at the Docks.

To begin with, Shirou had been halfway certain that Arrowhead was a front for the Boyz -- but it looked more and more as if they'd never intended to be subtle about their operations.

The recent rash of vandalism and arson were part of a very transparent stick-and-carrot ploy: On the one hand, the Boyz would provide land owners in a targeted neighborhood with a very salient reminder of the reasons to get out of the Bay. On the other, Arrowhead Futures would turn up with an exceedingly generous offer for their property, to help sweeten the deal. Obviously, there wouldn't be any hard evidence to connect the company back to the gang -- but in the long run, it hardly mattered.

If the victims accepted the offer, ABB territory would expand -- permanently.

"Yurie Yanaga," muttered Shirou, sitting down on a chair and lazily tossing the manila folder that he'd been holding to the table.

Public records that he'd obtained from the Offices of the City Register spilled out over the map. At the top of the stack, there were printouts of two photographs: A posed portrait shot of an elderly Japanese couple in full formal kimono, and a color image of a pretty young Asian woman in a business dress -- Juliet Fujou, the CEO of Arrowhead Futures.

The women in the images shared the same face.

"Somebody died because of you last night," said Shirou, more to himself than to the photographs. "I'm not gonna let this go."

---

c.

Even knowing the address, the old Yanaga mansion was overly easy to find; it was sitting on a major leyline junction, and the glaring mystery of the bounded field only in fact exerted a mild mental interference, obstructing rudimentary surveillance via sensory spoofing. If Shirou hadn't witnessed remote death induction in action, he might've taken the magus responsible for a third rate bit player that had grown sloppy with arrogance.

The impression was probably intentional.

Casually entering over a wall and announcing his presence, he prepared himself for the worst. He was almost disappointed. Much in the manner of souls, bounded fields of sufficient strength could insulate any mysteries that lay within from means of outside observation -- but on plunging headlong into the apparent trap, Shirou didn't suddenly find himself in the midst of a danger that he hadn't anticipated.

The ABB thugs that guarded the grounds were just ... thugs.

They weren't capes or otherwise empowered by magecraft. They probably weren't even as well-trained as the prisoners that he'd fought in the Empire facility. Less than ten minutes after his entrance, he'd incapacitated the lot of them, and cornered the last one capable of weathering an interrogation at a side of the now-ruined Zen garden.

"In case you missed it before," said Shirou, holding the man against a pillar of the engawa, "all I want is the location of Yurie Yanaga. Are you willing to cooperate?"

"Go ahead and fuck me up if you like," the thug replied, breathing hard, "but I ain't sayin' nuthin'."

There was a familiar thrum of odic excitation that spread across the man's back as he spoke -- or rather, along the dorsal boundary of the man's soul. Yet again, Shirou couldn't discern any trace of thaumaturgical phenomenon -- but he was starting to get a clearer idea of what he was dealing with.

"Can't? Or won't?" he asked, as a matter of confirmation.

The man was silent, but the thrum was there -- faintly coursing in the spiritual analogue of the Bodhisattva tattoo on his back.

It didn't feel as if the refusal to answer was a consequence of mental interference -- but if the thug were indeed in full control of his faculties, then somebody had obtained direct access to his soul for the purpose of implanting 'consequences' to a knowing violation of specified terms.

It was, in short, a Geis contract bastardized for use with non-practitioners of the craft; a version that didn't require both parties to consciously commit their thaumaturgical circuits to a binding agreement.

Deciding that he'd seen enough, Shirou traced out a tranquilizer bolt and sent the man to unconsciousness -- lowering the body the stones of the rock garden, and retrieving the dumbphone in the man's pocket to place a call.

"Nine-Nine-Nine," said the dispatcher. "Please state the nature of your emergency."

"Hi," said Shirou. "I'd like to report a parahuman incident at 1126 Oak Drive in Brockton Bay, at the corner of Birmingham. There's a Stranger phenomenon in place around the property, and eighteen members of the Azn Bad Boyz are unconscious within. There may be ABB reinforcements on the way."

Not waiting for a response, he hung up and tossed away the phone. Now was probably a good time to deal with his observer.

Shirou had noticed the girl's arrival late into the fight, but when she'd hung back apparently to 'watch,' he'd tentatively dismissed her as a threat; an ABB cape would've directly involved herself, and an agent of 'Yurie Yanaga' wouldn't have a need to be so obvious in presence. As far as he could tell, her power involved some variant of absorption -- subsuming the ill-defended spiritual strata of the insects about the garden in the substance of her own soul, and effectively turning them into familiars.

"If you aren't with the ABB," said Shirou, throwing out his voice, "I recommend that you get outta here. The PRT will be arriving soon."

The insects didn't move, but outside the perimeter wall, he felt the girl turn her head, as if wondering who he was addressing.

"You, with the insects," he said. "And no, I can't read your mind. I'm just guessing based on your body language."

There was a movement of od, and arthropods of assorted species began to gather in a composite, human-sized swarm roughly four feet from him -- maintaining a safe distance, likely to indicate a lack of hostile intent. Concerted, the highlights of the noise they generated issued into an approximation of a female voice.

"Who are you?" it asked.

"A new independent hero," Shirou replied. "Call me Blade Crimson."

For a moment, the swarm didn't 'speak.'

"Why didn't you wait?" it asked, after deliberation.

"Sorry?"

"You're here for Yurie Yanaga," stated the swarm. "Why call the PRT so quickly? You could've investigated the buildings."

The girl was probably a hero, in other words -- and she'd investigated the ABB enough to know the name of Lung's largely inconspicuousness left hand. Shirou hadn't read that there was an insect-controlling Master active in the Bay, so either she was new, extremely low-profile, not from around, or more than one of the above.

"I doubt that I would've found anything," said Shirou. He gestured at the mansion. "I didn't realize it either until I got here, but this isn't headquarters. It's not even a base of operations. It's bait, set out by Yanaga for people like you and me -- an early warning system that she uses to pick up on threats."

The swarm buzzed in askance.

"How can you be so sure?"

"You didn't find it odd that you'd conveniently locate something related to Yanaga in one of the first places an investigator would think to look?"

Again, the swarm fell 'silent,' and Shirou could sense the girl's lips twist in frustration. He felt a little guilty about putting down her efforts, but it was better if she was discouraged from further investigation. Yanaga wasn't a cape, and didn't play by the established rules of engagement.

The sound of sirens blared in the distance, and Shirou turned.

"The PRT's coming," he said. "You probably don't want to stick around."

With that, he reinforced himself and bounded to a rooftop.

---

d.

At around eight PM on Sunday evening, when Shirou left his flat to grab some dinner, there was somebody waiting for him on the doorstep outside his building.

"Hi," greeted a girl in a skin-tight suit and mask.

Shirou stared at her, and blinked. Then he closed the door.



---

Notes:



In Mahayana Buddhism, 'Bodhisattva' is a term for an ascended being that, for the purpose of delivering salvation unto those still bound to the mortal coil, withholds themselves from reaching the swirl of the void.



The ambiguously-gendered Bodhisattva Kannon / Kanzeon is an east-Asian rendering of Avalokitesvara, or 'The Lord Who Gazes Downwards,' a figure thought to embody the compassion and mercy of the collective Buddhas. Commonly depicted as a being with a thousand hands, he / she is regarded as a saint of comparable stature to the Virgin Mary.



Incidentally, owing the legacy of the Greco-Buddhist tradition, the hero Herakles was the artistic model of the Bodhisattva Vajrapani ('Vajra in His Hand'), a protector of the Buddha (depicted at the right of the relief above). Herakles' name is also listed among the legendary kings of Britain as 'Hercules Lybicus.'

[Kirby]

hue

[Twi]

Odd, Shirou's not that sloppy when it comes to covering his tracks, so I don't think its Tayor.... is it Lisa?

[warellis]

Odd, Shirou's not that sloppy when it comes to covering his tracks, so I don't think its Tayor.... is it Lisa?

Couldn't Taylor have used her bugs to track Shirou down to his home?

[Frostyvale]

The first time that Shirou Emiya witnessed a murder up close, he was alone with the victim in a blind alley, holding a sword to the man's throat. The sudden muscular convulsions forced him to back away, and he was left to stare wide-eyed as the body jerkingly slid from the brick wall to the damp blacktop below.

It isn't too clear when this event happens, nor am I entirely sure of Shirou's backstory in this context, but I suppose that this is as effective an introduction as any to this element of the plot.

With a deadly, hidden beauty, a hemorrhage had blossomed like a flower amidst the countless cascading misfirings of the cerebrum.

It's a very poetic description. If I had to make an analogy, the image this evokes is like a glass of wine shattering against the floor.

Shirou was unable to react; unable to completely process what it was that had unfolded before his eyes. He'd done his homework on parahuman triggering before -- and for a brief moment, the thought crossed his mind that he might've unintentionally caused such a thing. Snapping out of his stupor enough to reassess the situation, however, he found himself staring not at a new cape, but a rapidly cooling corpse.

The alliteration in the last line clinches this paragraph. I like this application of character. Shirou was clearly unprepared for a person to die in front of him.

A more concerted application of structural grasp revealed no poisons or recent injuries -- no obvious cause, beyond a possible medical condition, and the words that had nearly graced the man's tongue moments prior.

Perhaps a little bit of a stretch regarding the capability of Structural Analysis, but it's consistently applied in this story so I shan't question it. The impression I have now is that Shirou was questioning this person. Then the hemorrhage occurred in response to the sharing of information? How devilish.

'If he were Mastered, the mystery would be blatant,' thought Shirou, clenching his jaw beneath his mask. 'But remote death induction falls pretty far outside the domain of modern magecraft. You'd have to penetrate into the soul ...'

Shirou could grasp the physical workings of the human body, but the soul was beyond the purview of his senses. For complex organisms, the boundary of the spiritual structure served as a natural barrier against external influence or observation of the nonphysical variety -- an evolved defensive mechanism that might've been the immediate inspiration for bounded fields. In magecraft, the phenomenon was known as 'thaumaturgical resistance'; and in cape lingo, the 'Manton Limit.'

A fine way to link those two things. The additional worldbuilding is appreciated as well.

At the moment of the man's death, Shirou hadn't detected the action of a mystery. If indeed the cause of death was magecraft, the spell was in all probability designed to circumvent the notice of other magi -- functioning, for example, from directly within the domain of the victim's soul.

'But there was something else ...'

It might've been his imagination, but during the spread of the hemorrhage, Shirou thought that he might've sensed a faint thrum of od across the skin on the man's back. Pushing the corpse prone with the toe of his boot, he carefully drew a vertical cut along the man's shirt with his broadsword.

Tattooed in pigments of red and black, the Bodhisattva Kanzeon returned his gaze, ever merciful.

Irony is a lovely tool. Now, to summarize my thoughts on this section:

The introduction is gripping, and pulled me forward to read the rest of the part. The details are well crafted, from Shirou's immediate shock, to the thought process of his quick investigation. The sprinkling of information about the world, Shirou's own magical senses, and the sudden image of the Bodhisattva tied together the beats, and I enjoyed it immensely.

For some quick opinions on the remainder of the chapter, the destruction of the former Empire 88 territories seems like a natural conclusion to the affair with Kaiser. The new villain, who I have personally identified as Not Kirie, promises to be interesting, and Shirou's inadvertent run-in with Taylor is equally so.

[Twi]

Couldn't Taylor have used her bugs to track Shirou down to his home?

He can move out of her range rather quickly, and see the connection between her and the insects. Considering he got ambushed by Night and Fog before, he would have learned to be more cautious. He would have noticed under most accounts. Plus, we know what Taylor looks like so there's no real reason to try and mask that by not saying it was the girl from before.

Tattletale, however, is working for Coil if we're going by canon and he already knows about Shirou given he was taken in before. He'd be able to get his address rather easily. It'd be easier to know if we knew what mask it was.

[warellis]

What's Tattletale like in personality and looks?

[Twi]

A bit of a troll, actually, mostly due to her powers, but has underlying guilt due to her brother's suicide, appearance-wise here's what she looks like from the first chapter of Worm she appeared in:

She was dressed in a skintight outfit that combined black with a pale shade of blue or purple – I couldn’t tell in the dark – and her dark blond hair was long and windblown.

And I know she has a mask too.

[eddyak]

A bit of a troll?

More like, she's someone who'll wreck your whole life, and she'll do it with a smile.

She's still one of the best characters.

[warellis]

I've heard people claim she's a bit of a Sue or something. Tattletale I mean.

[eddyak]

She has a pretty meta ability, it's one of those vague ones that works at the author's whim. There are a couple of those in the series, but they don't affect the balance of the series enough to be Sues. It's probably more accurate to think of her as an author mouthpiece or something, though she is proven wrong more than once.

[Twi]

A bit of a troll?

More like, she's someone who'll wreck your whole life, and she'll do it with a smile.

Panacea came out of it fine.... except for the whole sister thing...

Okay, fair point.

[ItsaRandomUsername]

Prose is as lovely as ever, the details it takes note of are relevant and help to solidify the way the world works even, and the plot is thickening accordingly. I couldn't ask for more.

[Mattias]

She has a pretty meta ability, it's one of those vague ones that works at the author's whim. There are a couple of those in the series, but they don't affect the balance of the series enough to be Sues. It's probably more accurate to think of her as an author mouthpiece or something, though she is proven wrong more than once.

I've always seen her as a walking plot guide for the story. Any time the Taylor needs to be involved in the plot, but the story has no reason for her to be there, or have any idea what's going on, Tattle will show up and point her in the right direction and tell her who to brutalize and why.

[warellis]

So does anyone know who the cape here is at Shirou's door?

fallacies had this to say:

Just to make this straightforward, the girl's identity is nothing so imaginative as what's been proposed. ^^;
In a moment of anxiety, somebody was able to think of a way to get around a previously established limitation to her power.
Certain people function better under stress.

[warellis]

Thinking about superheroes, it makes me wonder how well magical girls would fit into the superhero genre. Because I'm wondering what a timeline similar to this, but with Rin as Kaleido Ruby instead of as a magus would be like. Would she team up with Blade Crimson?


Essentially a Kaleido Ruby like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=115&v=JN5DUHwgntw

[Twi]

Not well, I imagine. Shirou takes himself seriously. Very few magical girls, especially Kaleido Ruby, could partner with him. And... well, this is Nasu x Worm. Capes deal with Endbringers and gangbangers, while we have the horrors of Nasuverse in the wings. That's just asking for a Madoka-level deconstruction.

[warellis]

Not well, I imagine. Shirou takes himself seriously. Very few magical girls, especially Kaleido Ruby, could partner with him. And... well, this is Nasu x Worm. Capes deal with Endbringers and gangbangers, while we have the horrors of Nasuverse in the wings. That's just asking for a Madoka-level deconstruction.

Eh I think Kaleido Ruby could possibly appeal to his Sentai watching side and the it's not like Shirou here is less hotblooded or anything, just more quiet. Or maybe Ruby would try to cheer him up?

Also I would say magical girls are superheroes.