I'm in deep shit.
This wasn't the first time Emrys had thought that since this fight began. But the phrase had never been as true as it was right now.
He had lost Drainda.
The sword was more than 20 meters away from him, and he was certain his enemies wouldn't give him any chance to strike back.
Summoning Drainda again was out of the question given his catastrophically low level of mental energy.
And worst of all, the impact had knocked him off balance.
He was now lying on the ground, unable to get back up.
I'm truly in deep, deep shit.
"Good, now that you're calm, we can bring you in," said Galileo.
"Br-Bring me in?" Emrys murmured, disconcerted.
"Of course we're going to bring you in," Averroes confirmed.
"Your case is far too precious for us not to study it." Jordano thus revealed the mindset shared by all the mages.
"Light cage." Galileo cast it once more.
N-Nooooo!
The cage of light closed around Emrys, isolating him completely from the outside world.
"DAMN IT!" Emrys raised his fist and slammed it against the ground.
Unfortunately, his fist had no strength left in it.
"Is this really how it's going to end? Did I put myself in danger and sacrifice all of that for nothing?" Emrys was drawing closer and closer to a breakdown.
"I was supposed to find my mother. Why did I get myself involved in this?" He kept cursing the voice that had told him to get involved.
He should have stayed on his hill, watching the world while he waited to become strong enough.
"I'm not a hero and I'm not trying to be one. I'm not Emiya, damn it."
Then, right after those words, Emrys's eyes went wide.
"I'm not Emiya… But I have Emiya's powers." It was so obvious it seemed absurd to him.
"How could I have forgotten that? Even if I can no longer use my bonuses. I still have Emiya's powers."
A glimmer of hope began to shine in Emrys's mind before instantly going out.
"Except I still can't use magical energy."
That simple fact immediately cooled Emrys's enthusiasm.
"But I have no other way out of this. I have to manage to awaken my magical power."
Emrys closed his eyes.
The outside world, the cage, his enemies' muffled laughter, all of it kept existing somewhere, but it wasn't his problem anymore. Not right now. One by one, he cut the threads still tying him to the outside. He stopped using his Observation Haki, shut his ears to the hum of the light around him, even shut out the dull pain still drilling into his skull.
He no longer had anything to do with the outside world.
The only thing that mattered now was himself, and himself alone.
Descend.
That was the only image that came to him. Descend into himself the way one descends a bottomless well, feeling his way, not knowing what awaited him below, not even knowing if there was a bottom at all.
The lack of mental energy made concentration almost unbearable. Every meter traveled inside himself felt like carrying the weight of a mountain on his shoulders, and yet he kept going, again and again, refusing to give up before being totally and unquestionably dead.
A minute passed. Then two. Then he lost count.
And then, slowly, the first shapes began to take form in the darkness.
He saw his mental energy first.
That ethereal energy, once a bright blood red , was now nothing more than a barely perceptible thread, a dying ember stubbornly refusing to go out entirely. It flickered, tiny, as if it knew itself that it no longer had the strength to carry its owner much further.
Then came the black heart.
A compact core, dense, almost solid to his mind's eye, radiating that same dark, reddish hue as Drainda. That was where it had all started. That was where every summoning of his blade was born.
But that wasn't what he was looking for.
He kept descending, even deeper, to a place where even his instinct hesitated to venture, and it was there, just beneath the black core, that he saw it.
A silver glow.
Tiny. Almost invisible. Curled in on itself like an animal that had never known daylight and feared being exposed to it.
It was so faint that Emrys finally understood why he had never sensed it, even with his Observation Haki pushed to its limit. It wasn't that it didn't exist. It was that it had always hidden itself away, patient, waiting for someone to finally come looking for it.
I found you.
He focused all his attention on that glow then, all the willpower he had left, everything he could still muster despite the exhaustion threatening to swallow him whole. And as he focused on it, the glow stopped trembling.
It grew.
Timidly at first, as if testing the waters, then stronger and stronger, more and more certain of itself, as if years of silence were suddenly trying to make up for lost time in a matter of seconds. The silver thread became a strand, the strand became a ribbon, and the ribbon began spinning around the black core in a silent dance.
Emrys felt something break inside him. Not painfully. Like a door being opened after being thought sealed shut forever.
And so, a few seconds later, the light exploded and spread through his entire body, into every vein, every muscle, all the way to his fingertips.
Fiou!
Emrys's eyes snapped open and he felt himself thrown into the air.
A continuous stream of information poured into Emrys's mind then, too fast for him to really process, and he began acting without thinking, carried by knowledge that wasn't truly his own and yet belonged to him just as much.
Judging the concept of creation.
Hypothesizing the basic structure.
Duplicating the composition material.
Imitating the skill of its making.
Sympathizing with the experience of its growth.
Reproducing the accumulated years.
Excelling every manufacturing process.
Feel every battle it had been through.
Absorb every legend built around it.
Master every step of its forging process.
Become, for the span of a single breath, the smith who had shaped it.
A very particular weapon then appeared in Emrys's mind. A weapon that would serve as a perfect substitute for Drainda.
A weapon created for the sole purpose of breaking magic.
A weapon once wielded by one of the greatest Celtic heroes: Diarmuid Ua Duibhne.
The air around him began to crackle.
"Crimson Rose of Exorcism…GAE DEARG!"
Lightning burst from both of Emrys's hands, coiling around each other like serpents of lightning, before suddenly solidifying into a shaft more than two meters long.
The spear that resulted bore no resemblance to Radiance's crude copies. It was entirely red, a bloody aura emanated from her as if she were ready to commit a massacre on the spot , and ancient runes ran the length of its shaft, glowing faintly one after another as if the weapon itself were waking from a very long sleep.
A gust of heat, dry and electric, swept across the ground around Emrys. A smell of white-hot metal briefly hung in the air.
But Emrys didn't really pay attention to the spear's appearance.
Armed with fresh energy from his newfound use of magical energy, Emrys spun the spear and struck the cage several times with its tip.
And just like with Drainda not long ago, the cage shattered.
"Again?" Galileo was exasperated by Emrys's lack of cooperation.
"He has another weapon besides the sword." Copernicus remarked.
"And this time it's giving off magical energy. That confirms one thing: everything we've seen so far wasn't actually magic." D'Aquin, and none of them for that matter, seemed the least bit concerned by Emrys's latest escape.
"Shining spear."
Galileo launched his attack once more, seeking to quickly finish this second round.
Except that, unlike last time, Emrys managed to cut through Galileo's attack effortlessly. The spear of light scattered into shimmering dust well before it could reach him.
Emrys spun the spear several times in his hands, feeling it vibrate against his palms as if it were alive, before securing it against his back with his right arm.
He extended his left arm toward Galileo and flexed his fingers several times. As if telling Galileo to show him more.
That made Galileo smile, though he didn't answer.
5 spears of light then appeared in the air and rushed at Emrys, each coming from a different angle, trying to catch him in a pincer.
Far from panicking, he gripped his spear with both hands. He pivoted on himself in a fluid, almost natural motion, and sliced through the 5 spears coming at him one after another, never breaking his momentum, as if his body had always known how to do this.
This display unsettled the mages.
"Wasn't he a beginner? How could he have become this technically skilled in so little time." said Averroes.
"His aura has completely changed since he started holding that spear. Do you think it's his weapon of choice?"
"We'll find out very soon."
The five mages then did the same thing as before. One after another, they sent spells at Emrys, in the same strange order as before, never coordinating with one another.
But this time, he didn't bother dodging. He dispersed every spell coming at him with his copy of Gae Dearg, each parry more assured than the last, each movement inching a little closer to the perfection that the borrowed memory of the hero whispered to him.
At the moment, nothing in his technique could distinguish him from Diarmuid Ua Duibhne.
But even if nothing in the technique could tell them apart, that didn't mean they shared the same body.
I'm starting to get seriously tired.
From constantly moving the spear at this speed, Emrys was exhausted. Whereas before he couldn't give it his all because of his lack of mental energy, now he could no longer keep up the pace because of his sheer lack of stamina. His arms began trembling under the otherwise reasonable weight of the shaft, his legs were supporting him less and less well, and every parry cost him a little more than the one before.
And so, taking advantage of a glaring lapse in vigilance, Galileo ended the fight.
A ball of light appeared not far from Emrys, but far enough that his spear couldn't reach it in time.
Emrys then focused all his attention on that ball.
He didn't realize that was his worst mistake.
"Sun bite."
The ball exploded, releasing a staggering amount of light.
"ARGH!!"
Emrys felt a searing pain in his eyes and let Gae Dearg slip from his hands.
It broke apart into particles of reddish light the moment it hit the ground, as if it had never truly existed beyond the span of the fight.
Emrys had lost again, and he was about to be captured once more.
Not this time. I hope she had time to hide.
Before passing out from the pain, Emrys dematerialized, escaping his enemies.
"He managed to get away." Galileo was deeply disappointed by that.
He and the other 5 mages both, but D'Aquin reminded them of their true mission.
"Too bad, but we need to hurry. We have to bring @&&#&-@- back."
"You're right, let's go."
The group of mages then took off running in the direction the little girl had gone.
The fight had been a total defeat for Emrys, but he had gained something invaluable. He had awakened his magical power.
And thanks to this power, in a few years people will be praising the legends of Faker.