Kapitel 67: Chapter 64: Sakura Matou (2)

Well, imagination is beautiful but the reality is cruel, despite trying shirou couldn't establish a stable and linear bounded field across his body. Applying the change in rate of time can result in his body being torn apart from the inside as different parts accelerate at different rates and hence the parts would twist off his body.

The lack of aptitude in most magecraft is what held him back and looking at his slightly dejected son kiritsugu weakly smiled and said

"Don't worry shirou, a magic crest is used for this. It can activate the magecraft perfectly with a simple command from you. Without that, it would take you nearly years to train time alter to the level where you can effortlessly use it in combat"

The magus killer explained to his son how the magic crest would make the activation easier like having a skill icon in a game but shirou would need training as well as a lot of combat experience to use the magecraft seamlessly like kiritsugu did during the war. The time after that went by in a blur when kiritsugu began imparting the complicated magecraft theories and things that wouldn't make sense to an average magus if they were not a user of Emiya Crest.

Kiritsugu was a mercenary a hitman, not a proper magus, he didn't have elaborate formulas, complicated spell matrixes, long chants and full-proof theory for every flow of mana in his magecraft.

What he used worked because it was made from trial and error, it focused on using the body to use the spell rather than the mind. The crest did the heavy lifting and the magi using time alter just had to start it, rather it's the body of the user that bore the strain.

After this shirou went into the house to meditate, as his mind wondered and body felt one with the sword, the thoughts about the girl peeking at him came to his mind. Ignoring that he tried to continue his meditation and separate his psyche. Still, that incident bothered him repeatedly. Finally trusting his institution he decided to confront the girl about why she was tailing him at school.

A few days later he acted upon his decision and finally tracked down Sakura by asking around the school. He went towards the classroom the girl beside him pointed at and as he walked towards it sakura came out of the empty classroom. Their eyes met and the girl was extremely flustered and embarrassed at being caught, without thinking anything she reflexively ran in the opposite direction.

The budding female magi whose body had been freshly internally injured and scarred by crest worms was chased by the trained protege of the magus killer. As obvious she quickly started huffing and her leg started aching while shirou didn't even change his breathing. As Sakura stopped the words of zouken flashed in her mind.

She slowly stopped her running and breathed through her mouth. In her eyes the command of zouken was absolute, he was like a force of nature to her. The worms inside her body were proof of that, she couldn't do anything against it and she hated that but her body shivered in anticipation of the pain that was about to come if she even thought about not following the old man`s orders.

She turned around and decided to accomplish her task. She turned around and smiled politely at the boy coming towards her and said

"Greetings senpai,"

The smile in the girl`s mouth didn't reach her eyes and they were as hollow as the 1st time he saw her, even then the emotional intelligence of the human named emiya shirou was very low and he took her greeting at face value. Well rather than saying he didn`t understand them it would be apt to say that he was straightforward.

His actions were as straight as the edge of a blade so he greeted her back and asked her about herself and why she was peeking at him for the last fortnight. Sakura hearing the direct question gained a shade of red on her face but quickly said

"I am Matou Sakura, one year younger than you senpai."

Hearing her name shirou connected the dots of her hair colour and surname with Shinji and asked

"Are you related to Matou Shinji?"

"Yes senpai, that is my older brother and I heard that he had finally made some friends so I wanted to meet them," said Sakura meekly. While hiding the fact that she wanted to meet him due to her sister than her brother.

Shirou smiled at this and asked the final question he had

"I see, so why did you run away from me when we met earlier."

Hearing this sakura`s face became bright red and even her ears were visibly red from her shame. Seeing this shirou didn't press but rather concluded that Sakura is a shy child and she ran away from him because she was embarrassed about being caught. Shirou put his hand on her head and ruffled her hair similar to the way Taiga did to him and said

"It's fine. I am Emiya Shirou a friend of your brother, nice to meet you Matou Sakura."

Sakura being sensitive to emotional change in people interacting with her due to the environment she grew up in found that shirou genuinely was happy to meet her and felt that boy only 1 year older than her carried a strange sense of weight and age which made her feel oddly comforted. Looking at this girl burying her head in front of him the boy felt a foreign sense of fondness for the girl like looking at a cute animal companion or a treasured artifact with emotional history.

They made small talk for some time and Sakura politely excused herself. Looking at the little girl speed away he was left basking in his lingering emotions then he smiled, shook his head and went back to class to eat with Issei.

Then his life went back on track and as time passed, well a new interlude was added to it now. Sakura sometimes came to talk to him and there was a weird sense of rapport between both of them. Issei also met with Sakura when shirou once pulled her to their class as in the beginning, she had said that she wanted to meet her brother`s friends.

Shinji behaved pretty rudely to her but it was within the limit of the relationship between siblings. Issei said how it's pretty common for siblings to fight among themselves and with it being a family matter both of them didn't interfere or comment on it.

Still, these actions made shirou wonder about the stark difference in the personality of Sakura and Shinji and how these two could even fight each other in some cold war when Sakura is this meek and the seaweed is extremely overt and pushy.

Shirou wondered about how it would be when he would meet his sister the white-haired girl he saw in his visions. Remembering that sweet-looking girl his body shivered in the reflex of the past trauma but his mind treated her as a new person as he had decided not to treat people differently based on possible future visions.

As kiritsugu had said

"Don't get lost in the visions of the future shirou and ignore the present. That is the path of actualising the things you saw not changing them for the better"

(A/N: we have pretty much met all heroines now and the case is closed. Now I will accelerate the chapters till MC is fatherless and then I can use my author powers to hammer some trauma onto the boy and make him say the iconic lines.

Well besides that, the information passed out in notes, interviews and other things is pretty contradictory and weird. Nasu maintains his reputation as weird, quirky, and spontaneous AF.

The man directly says that the man Shirou Emiya is only blessed with boundless talents in things related to swords but then says "You know Shirou's talent is pretty below average for swordsmanship ao even when living with taiga he couldn't learn much."

I mean come on man this does make sense, the other guy with his origin of stillness can pause space and time and here is a guy with element and origin hyper-focused on the sword and whose body can literally turn into swords is bad at swordsmanship. What level of cap is it but hey I am up for it then, I still have ways to make him into a good swordsman and bypass this BS.

Well