Everdistant Utopia [NieR: Automata] [Fate]

Chapter 6

"The Shop Owner always says the same thing. I've bought a few things from him that have been broken. This is just one of those things." Shirou said while focusing on the circuits of the conditioner.

"Have you fixed many things before?" A2 gazed at the man as he worked.

"I have. I think it started back in my home because I fixed things as a way of training and improving."

"How so is it training?"

"When I was still clueless about my magecraft and what I've been doing wrong, I wasn't very strong you can say. I had two different variants of magecraft at my disposal before I fully developed my tracing to its current level. Back then, my projection abilities were still weak. The other two pieces of magecraft that I had at my disposal were reinforcement and structural grasp." Shirou said. "Reinforcement is one of the most difficult magecraft as its purpose is to strengthen an object to its limit. An example is a branch. A branch doesn't require much strength to snap it in half correct?" He looked at A2 in question.

"Of course not. A twig is so fragile that you don't need to put much strength into destroying it."

Shirou nodded at A2 as he turned back to the conditioner. "When pouring magical energy and reinforcing the branch, its durability increases, and its strength as well. Reinforcement isn't just for physical strength and durability, although it can also be used on your body such as reinforcing your legs to spring faster, or hardening the skin and increasing your strength, it's also able to be used to increase the nourishment of food, sharpen a knife... However, at the end of the day, it's still hard to use. If you mess up and pour too much magical energy in a part of your body, it can potentially kill you and sometimes reinforced objects can explode."

A2 stared in alarm at the information. "Kill you!? Then those who reinforce their bodies will be fools if they know they can potentially die." She scoffed as she saw the man widen his eyes while scratching his head lightly. "Are you insane—"

"It's fine. Back then I was quite incompetent with reinforcement and injured myself a few times, but even then I was slowly able to grasp how to use reinforcement. I'm better at controlling it but I don't use it on my body too much because it's still a risky move. However, when it's necessary, I do." Shirou said with a smile as he looked at A2.

"That still doesn't make things better." A2 gritted her teeth with slight agitation. How can he smile while speaking of his near-death experiences so casually?

"Hey, who said walking down the path of a magus was safe?" Shirou asked as he fixed the problem with the conditioner. "'To be a magus is to walk with death.' That is the path that every magus knows when deciding to remain a mage. Inevitable, we understand that if we wish to trudge the path of a mage, then we will be at death's door... That was the first thing I was taught and I accepted it despite knowing the consequences."

A2 frowned at the knowledge of what it means to be a mage. Humans willingly follow the path of a mage despite the breath of death on your neck waiting to claw down at you. Their supposed creators are even more idiots than she imagined!

"Moving on, structural grasp is the ability to help me understand both design and structure of an object. You can say that the reason I'm able to fix this conditioner is because I used structural grasp on it and a 3D image was produced in my mind."

"That sounds useful."

"It's very helpful." Shirou agreed. "Thanks to it, I'm able to find out problems that might need repairs or are faulty in objects. Although not everything can be fixed, structural grasp makes things easier to learn where the problem exactly lies."

"..."

"You must've come here for a reason I presume?" Shirou stopped working on the conditioner as he stared at A2.