Forgotten But Not Lost

30

Manato never thought he would miss his Archpriest yelling at him. Sure the man had a set of lungs that could shake the rafters, but at least his training had been relatively easy. Manato never thought anything could make his experiences when training to be a Priest relatively easy.
"

Get back up." Shirou told them as they lay on the ground panting. "If you must pant, then at least do it on your feet. Do you think that your enemies would give you the opportunity to rest on the ground like this?"
"I can't… feel my arms…" Moguzo panted.
"I can't feel… my everything…" Ranta said, trying to one up the big guy.
"Lucky your… everything then." Manato added his own comment. His everything hurt.
Shirou had said that it would be an exercise in positioning and coordinated movements, and that had been exactly how it started. He had given them all detailed explanations of how to move about the battlefield and to obscure an enemies path without getting in the way of their support units or stumbling over each other. Then he told them to practice. He gave them all blunted weapons and told them to attack him while Yume and Shihoru took shoots at him and try to not get in their way while limiting his movements.
That was where things started to go downhill for the group.
Shirou corrected them. He corrected their every move, their ever breath, their every glance around the field. He corrected them with a glancing strike and a sharp word delivered in his half-hearted tones. The individual glancing blows hadn't hurt much at first, but they started to stack up. Even with all six of them working together, they couldn't land a single glancing blow on the man, if he even was a man and not some kind of robot… whatever a robot was. The guy didn't have a drop of sweat on him after four hours.
Yume had long run out of arrows and went to help with a sword, and Shihoru was trying to meditate under stress in order to regain enough stamina to squeeze out more spells.
"Must… win… wolfy." Yume stammered as she attempted to push herself back up only to collapse back to the ground. Shirou had promised her that if they managed to land a single blow on him, that he would get her an animal companion. It did not look like that was going to happen. Motivated as she was, she was too weak to get back to her feet.
"I see. Fine then, a ten-minute break. Niko, you can tend to them now." Shirou said as he started to walk away.
"Should I heal them this time?" The green haired Priest girl asked.
"No, they are still only bruised. A [Restoration] spell for there stamina will be enough." Shirou said dismissively.
"You're a monster." Ranta said weakly.
"Good. Because that is what you are training to fight." Shirou said with a small smirk. "If you would prefer, Niko could heal your bruises but not your stamina and we can continue like that. Both spells draw from the same pool of energy. Choose one or the other, you can't have both. Besides, if you use healing magic to repair your bodies your muscles won't… grow at all." He said giving a tired yawn.
"Did… Did he just yawn?" Haruhiro asked, not quite believing his ears.
"Sorry. I stayed up all last night and the night before working on the armor sets for you. I should be done by… tomorrow morning with one more all-nighter." Shirou said before walking towards the kitchen. "I'm going to make some tea. Anyone else want some?"
"Yume would like some." Yume half whimpered as her senpai walked away.
"Told you that you guys would never be able to lay a finger on Onii-chan." Megumin teased them as Niko started to restore their stamina one by one.
"I will never call my sensei a sadist again." Haruhiro said with a tired sigh.
"Me neither." The other three boys joined in a chorus.
"Are you all going to be alright?" Shihoru asked them. Tired as she was from her spells, she was still in the best shape out of all of them.
"I think so." Manato said, giving the girl his best reassuring smile. Considering how she immediately looked away in embarrassment, he thought the smile must have looked as bad as he felt.
"Yume will be fine. Senpai is really demanding, but he wasn't trying to hurt us bad." Yume said, after receiving her treatment. She pushed herself up into a sitting position before looking around on the ground. "Yume should retrieve her arrows before he gets back."
"Why bother, we aren't getting anywhere with this. I say we throw in the towel." Ranta suggested.
"No! What about my wolfy!?" Yume cried, her bottom lip trembling.
"Just wait until you earn the money for it yourself. It can't take that long." Ranta said. "Let's face it, we aren't going to beat him. He's insanely strong."
"The point was never to beat him, it was to get stronger ourselves." Manato reminded the Dread Knight. "I'm as sore as you are, but you have to admit, he has given us a lot of good pointers. Even in this short amount of time, there has been noticeable improvement." Manato would try to keep morale up. It was all he was really good for at the moment, a friendly smile and encouraging words. His entire body was screaming at him. Shirou had seen fit to remind Manato of all of the vitals he was not protecting and that wouldn't be covered with armor by striking him near them whenever he saw an opening.
Manato wouldn't complain though… not much anyways… so long as his team grew stronger and he wouldn't have to worry about his own limitations as much.
"How in the world does anyone get that good in just four months?" Haruhiro asked no one in particular.
"He didn't. Shirou's always been like that." Sara told them. "From the very first day, he was unbelievably strong. Even now, the more I train and the stronger I get, the more I realize just how far ahead of me he really is. He has a talent for weapons that set him apart from the rest of us."
"Must be nice to have someone like that in your party." Ranta said as lay on the ground, trying to conserve his strength.
"I… suppose." Sara's eyes dropped a little. "Shirou has saved all of our lives from time to time, we haven't had to worry about money since the first week, and even if we make mistakes he is there to fix everything. Still, it… it makes you feel rather insignificant. Having people like him and Rin around, who seem strong enough to handle the entire Frontier by themselves. Makes you wonder sometimes why you even try."
"We just need to grow stronger!" Megumin said in response to Sara's uncomfortable statement. "Once I grow a little more and learn [Explosion] then I can help Onii-chan and Rin-sama blast away all the monsters!"
Sara smiled at the small Mage and patted her head. "That might work for you, but the Paladin's Guild doesn't have any super spells that I can learn." Sara said, before turning back to the newer Rookies. "Our original party was made up of twelve people, but seven of them left because being on a team with Shirou and Rin made them feel irrelevant. Only Megumin, Niko and I stayed behind."
"No point in leaving. So long as I stay with Shirou and Rin, I wouldn't be in any real danger, and I get to eat good food too, so I'm happy enough being next to useless." Niko said as she finished restoring Moguzo's stamina, giving the large boy enough strength to push his own body off the floor. "Um… too many [Restoration] spells. Niko go to sleep now." With her job done, Niko flopped down on the grass, her arms spread eagle and started to snore gently.
"She's tapped out already?" Shihoru said, a little surprised. She could cast around forty [Mystic Missiles] before being too exhausted to continue, but Niko, who was more experienced than her, had only cast fifteen spells that day and was already dead tired. "Is [Restoration] a higher-level spell?"
"Not really. It's only slightly higher than [Cure]. Rin-sama says that Healing spells and Blessings are a lot more expensive than Elemental magic, because even though you are trying to help someone, their body still recognizes it as a foreign energy trying to invade it. So in order to heal someone, you have to overpower their natural defenses. It's also the reason why Blessings wear off after a half hour or so, because your magic resistance slowly breaks them down." Megumin explained. "Though that limitation doesn't apply if the Priest is trying to use Blessings on themselves, which is why most Priests just stack up a large number of defensive Blessings instead of wearing real armor."
Manato swallowed hard at the girl's words, waiting for the question. For his team to ask him just how many heal spells he could cast. For him to start seeing the fear in their eyes that he felt in his heart. He had to stop himself from breathing a sigh of relief when they asked a different question.
"Who's this Rin person you all keep mentioning? I haven't seen anyone else around. Where are they?" Ranta asked.
"Rin-sama is an extremely powerful Mage. She has achieved mastery in twelve different branches of Elemental magic and has even developed her own spells and bonded to Elemental Familiars. She also knows how to wield a sword and is super smart. She's our team's leader and is called the Hundred Spellstress because she knows more than a hundred spells." Megumin said, practically jumping up and down with excitement.
"Only you call her that." Sara said with a slight smile.
"Well they should call her that! It's a cool name!" Megumin insisted.
"Alright… that sounds cool and all, but how impressive is it? The only Mage I've ever seen in action is Shihoru and in case you weren't aware, her good qualities start and end at her boobs." Ranta said, pointing towards said breasts and causing the girl in question to flush red and cover her chest with her hands.
"As talented as Shirou is with swords, that is about how talented Rin is with magic." Sara explained, putting Rin's power into relative terms. "It normally takes an entire year just to gain mastery in a single Elemental magic type. Though her knowledge of magic alone she is probably in the top twenty Human Magic users in the entire World, only surpassed by people who are thirty or more years her senior, though most of them are starting to become weaker with age and can't compare to her magic reserves. Right now she is finishing up joining the Priest's Guild so that she can learn Divine Magic, she is going to be acting as the backup healing for our group."
"Sounds like your generation had two insane power houses." Haruhiro said looking lost in thought. "I thought that Renji was strong when he stood up to Commander Bri, but Shirou is something else."
"Onii-chan beat up Bri-chan on our first day." Megumin told them, giving each of the newer Rookies a shock. "He beat him so bad, I wouldn't even call it a fight. He would have killed him too, if Rin-sama hadn't stopped him."
"He… beat up the Commander." Moguzo murmured, remembering how the Commander had moved so quickly that they hadn't even been able to follow his movements. At the time, Bri had seemed untouchable. Now hearing that Shirou had to be restrained in order to stop him from killing the gay Commander, they wondered just how strong Shirou really was.
"So this Rin girl is your leader huh, and she's able to control a guy like Shirou." Ranta said a blush forming on his face. "She must be seriously hot."
"W…what!?" Sara half shouted. "Hey, don't start having weird ideas about our leader!"
Her objections were cut short though when a shout came from the front gate of the Barracks. "Megu-chan! Sara! How've you been!"
The group all turned towards the gate and jaws dropped.
Standing there was a woman for whom the word beautiful didn't seem fit. It was as if a goddess had descended to the world.
A female mage, one who was just under six feet tall with long flowing purple hair and bright green eyes shining out from underneath a tall witches hat, which was decked out with curved horns and a smile stitched onto it in the same way one was on Megumin's hat. She was dressed in a short black dress with a low cut to show off her hourglass figure and massive breasts. Even if Shihoru had been scaled up to the same height as this woman, her breasts would have seemed small in comparison. She had a mature, calm and gentle expression, giving her an almost otherworldly look.
"I…is that Rin?" Moguzo said, eyes wide.
"No wonder she could control Shirou. She could probably control any guy." Haruhiro said.
"They're huge!" Yume said, reaching up and touching her own chest. "They look super soft too."
"Y…Yume, don't say things like that!" Shihoru said, flushing with embarrassment, rather than the reason the others were flushing for.
"I wish our leader looked like that. No offense Manato." Ranta said.
"None taken." The blonde man said, finding himself no more able to look away than the others.
"That isn't Rin." Sara said, surprising all of them.
"Mimori-nee-chan!" Megumin shouted happily, running towards the older Mage and jumping onto a hug. "What brings you here?"
Mimori smiled as she patted Megumin's hat. The way they were standing there like that, in almost matching outfits, they looked like a mother and her daughter. "I just came to deliver a message to Archy-tan." Mimori said, giving the little girl a wink. "So, how about we go surprise him?"
Shirou stared at the tea pot, trying to will it into absorbing heat and nutrients from the tea leaves faster.
Damn he was tired. Sixty hours with no sleep was getting to him. He could have had Niko use her magic to restore his stamina like she did with the others, but that would have been a waste of her magic. He wasn't exhausted physically, just mentally.
He couldn't just take a break. While the new party was complacent for now, with a strict plan in motion, sooner or later they would start to have the same stirrings to advance as the others before them. He wouldn't be able to do anything about that. He only had a few days at the most before they would start to insist on heading out. Manato might be able to resist, but he would only be put in the same position that Rin and Shirou had been in before with their party. That is if he bothered to resist in the first place, he might even want to prove himself.
Shirou hadn't told him, the trait that seemed to define talented Priests. It would have been too complicated to explain. After all, how do you explain the benefit of having a particularly high magic resistance, having it more difficult for other healers to heal you and give you Blessings. It didn't help at all against any sort of physical magic, which was basically the only kind of magic that you had to worry about. There weren't enough forms of magic that targeted the Soul directly.
While anyone who starts to use magical energy gains a certain amount of Magic Resistance, Rin believed that many Priests possessed far more Magic Resistance for their quantity of magical energy. Because of this, if something attempted to alter their thoughts, that something would find it much more difficult to do so. Something like the Counter Force.
This was why Niko seemed completely unaffected by the normal drive that pushed the other members of the Crimson Moon Reserve forward. It was also why Yue was constantly afraid. She didn't receive the same kinds of calming effects from the Counter Force that the rest of them did.
Shirou had tested them the night before to see how they would react to a mystic attack on their psyche, releasing a dark intent on them all. Most had fell completely to pieces, Shihoru having it the worst as she was more tuned to the mystical energy but hadn't yet developed any sort of Magic Resistance. It was only Manato and Niko who had been mostly unaffected. They had felt his presence, but they remained within their right minds… Niko just always acted like that.
Shirou couldn't think of a way of explaining this without revealing the existence of the Counter Force to Manato and leading him to the same kind of paranoia induced living hell that he and Rin had occupied for the last three and a half months. The guy was better off not knowing… Or was it the Counter Force not wanting Shirou to reveal it to him?
Shirou breathed a heavy sigh. He was far too tired for this shit. He just wanted his damn tea already.
He considered trying to use reinforcement magic to boost the intensity of the flames.
[Reinforcement] worked by taking the soul or idea of whatever it was that was the target of the spell and boosting the qualities it already possessed with magical energy. So in theory, he could reinforce the firewood or even the fire itself in order to increase the flames. Though he would be equally likely to just cause the wood to explode and directly interfering with something that was as inconsistent as fire would to next to impossible for someone with his meager level of skills.
He would have better luck [Reinforcing] the tea itself, boosting the water's ability to absorb heat… actually that could work. He could also increase the rate in which it filtered through the tea leaves and maybe even enhance the stimulating effects, helping him wake up more. He might also be able to boost the flavor…
Shirou's eyes widened. It was like something clicked into place. Like he had rediscovered something that he was searching for all along without knowing it.
He quickly acted upon his hunch, taking the teapot off the fire and pouring it into a different teapot. He then put his hand to it and preformed [Structural Analysis] bringing in as much information about the tea as he could and isolating its idea before moving on to the next step of his master plan.
[Reinforcement.]
After a few seconds of enhancing the tea, Shirou performed another check with [Structural Analysis] before concluding that it was ready.
He poured two cup of tea and placed one on the windowsill with a word for Eldritch before he took a sip from the second. The taste and texture were both far better than before, putting a smile onto Shirou's face… but still. "I rushed the preparation of the tea leaves. I'll have to be more careful next time." He was good, but he could do better.
Still, Rin was going to be in for a shock when she got back.
"There you are. I've been looking all over for you, Archy-tan." Shirou froze when he heard her voice. Sure enough, Mimori stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, a smile on her face.
For some reason, the sight of the admittedly beautiful woman always filled Shirou with equal parts nostalgia and dread. However, he tried his best to hide it. "Mimori-san. I wasn't expecting to see you before tonight. Has something come up?"
The woman shook her head. "Not at all. We've talk to Mery about coming and speaking to you and your new batch of kids. We just thought it would be nice to change the location, that's all." Mimori said, wrapping one of her long locks around one finger as she spoke. "We thought it would be nice to all meet here for dinner instead of at Sherry's. Naturally the whole gang will be coming along."
"Oh, is that so." Shirou said, scratching his chin in thought.
"That wouldn't be a problem would it?" Mimori asked with a tilt of her head, bending over to the point where Shirou could look straight down her…
"Not at all. It's only that our pantry is running rather low and I'm not sure if I can accommodate everyone." Shirou explained. "Would you mind taking over training the newest Rookies while I swing by the market for ingredients?"
Mimori smiled even wider. "Sure thing. Just leave it all to your Onee-chan, she'll take care of the kids while your away."
"No way, we get to train with the beautiful Onee-chan!" Ranta said from where he was peeking in through the doorway with the others, a small line of blood was leaking out from his nose. Shirou didn't recall hitting the boy in the face. "Forget what I said about throwing in the towel! Let's all give it our best!"
Shirou could only shake his head in pity. They didn't know what they were in for. Mimori had far less control over her strength than he did.
Some people have asked if the Orcs are going to start leaving barrels of beer outside their barracks in order to try to ward away raiders.
The answer is yes. And it will work until one of them is dumb enough to suggest adding poison to it.
The Typhoon will not like the waste of good beer.