19 A quiet night.
Alex quickly made his way back home while carrying the three victors.
Once he initially got a safe distance away, he did his best to mend any of the more serious wounds with a familiar potion. While the gate did contain quite a few that he had discovered, he was almost out at this point and it would take awhile for them to 'refill'.
The gate had two interesting functions attached to it that made it something more than a simple pocket dimension that should shoot items.
There was the Auto-retrieve function, which is self-explanatory. It can retrieve items that are deployed from the gate.
And then there is the auto-repair function. This though is a bit of a misnomer. While it is mainly used to 'repair' any items that are inside the gate, it also has an effect on 'consumable' items as well.
Alex had some theories on how it worked, his current was that it was less of a 'repair' and more of a concept of 'returning the object back to before it was used'. If a sword was obliterated into dust, the gate would retrieve the remains and the 'auto repair' function would work on restoring it to before it had been shot from the gate. If he drank any of the wine, it would eventually refill to before it had been used outside of the gate.
The time it took to 'return' the object back to before its use was determined by the properties of the object. A nameless [ E ] noble phantasm would probably take several weeks or months. An [ A ] rank Noble phantasm may take decades to restore.
The same concept was attached to the consumables. These 'potions' he had been using would probably take a few weeks since they had quite a few drawbacks, whereas the potion of youth he had somewhere inside the gate would probably take decades to restore a few drops.
It was one of the reasons he had been so liberal with the use of these lower end consumables. He had yet to truly scour to the ends of the gate, so this was basically the best he could do for the moment.
They were away from death's door, but some of their wounds or specifically Touma's wounds were going to take awhile to heal even with what he had done to speed up the process.
Touma had done surprisingly well all things considered. It was the small things, almost every time he was about to take damage he had shifted if only slightly to mitigate a blow that could have permanently taken him out of the fight. And he was also able to get a good grasp on the flow of the battle to exploit an opening when he needed to. It may sound like a simple thing, but he didn't sit there like an idiot when the opportunity presented itself.
He had seen it on many occasions where people get caught up in a haze while the battle is flowing around them and become unfocused or 'tunnel vision' certain aspects. It seemed like Touma stayed aware the whole time.
It didn't take long to reach his apartment, and Kaori was waiting nearby. She had apparently been sitting and watching when she noticed that Alex hadn't come home at his usual time and Touma was also missing. It wasn't hard to put 2 and 2 together.
She was definitely surprised to see the kids passed out and flung over his shoulder, some wounds still very predominant.
"What happened?" She asked as they walked into his apartment.
"They won." Alex said bluntly and he laid them down.
They were out cold.
"I'm going to wrap up Touma, can you take care of the girls, I don't think they would want me undressing them." Alex asked.
He let her take the two girls to the bedroom so she could properly wrap up any cuts or scrapes. He also provided a set of clothes, though he could only estimate their sizes.
It would have been a tad weird to have clothes for the girls had he not purchased a wide variety of clothing previously in his time in the city.
He thought about the time with Illya previously, it would have been beneficial to have clothing on hand and adding this time onto that, it seemed like this may become a habit so he was happy he endured the odd looks he got when he went shopping.
It didn't take very long to wrap them up, the girls weren't very hurt on the outside, they were mainly going to wake up with a very bad headache and possible a fatigued body. Though he was in no way a physician and had no idea how their powers would rebound after over extending themselves like they did.
He could only speculate that overextension was a common occurrence when people learn their powers as some new magi do. There shouldn't be anything too horrible with regards to consequences.
But in any case, he silently slipped Touma in between the two girls as he left them to rest on his bed.
Kaori gave him an evil look while he was trying hard to stifle his laughter.
It was going to be fun when they woke up~
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After a lengthy retelling of the battle, Kaori had finally departed back to Index.
She didn't speak much about the whole incident, but it was clear on her face that she had a lot to say. Probably give Touma and the other two girls a scolding.
She didn't really know Misaki, only seeing her pop up 1-2 times, whereas Mikoto had come around probably a dozen or so in the past several days and weeks.
They were very cordial with Index so the Saint had no complaints with them. And she was happy to see Index socialize a little bit outside of her little group.
While the saint was by no means a social butterfly, even she knew that it wasn't healthy for someone to be so blockaded and shut off from life like Index had been for many of her years.
After everything was finally calmed down for a bit, Alex could finally relax.
He couldn't lie to himself and say he wasn't worried. He had been stressing the whole battle.
It really did pain him to see the kids get hurt…..it wasn't the kid's jobs to fight battles like that yet the responsibility was thrust upon them and they didn't complain.
The whole situation didn't really go as Alex had hoped, but it turned out well enough. He would easily call it a win in his books.
Though he was still mentally comparing it to the media, he just couldn't see how it was plausible for the fight to play out so cleanly like it did in the show.
Accelerator was obviously looking down on all of them, something they were able to exploit even if they didn't realize it.
Accelerator was ridiculously strong, he just didn't have any experience facing opponents who could actually fight him.
He could have easily just flow up into the sky and blown up the entire city if he desired, but he was so caught up in the fight he couldn't think straight. Not that he was thinking straight beforehand, he was not mentally stable as a person which also played a heavy role in his defeat.
With all the experiments and psychological issues he'd developed growing up, he was surprised the boy would still function properly.
There were layers upon layers of reasons as to why the battle concluded in their favor, but that could be said for a lot of fights over the years.
At the end of the day, they came out on top.
Still though, Alex let out a long sigh.
"This is probably how Bedivere felt whenever I caused a mess." He mused
His aid was always there to clean up everything, similar to what he was doing for these kids.
He took out a pitcher from the gate along with a wine glass.
The somber memories were coming to the forefront of his mind, and in a rare circumstance he was allowing himself to get lost in them.
The look on his friend's face as he handed over Excalibur to be returned to Vivian. Telling his friend to leave him to die as the kingdom had fallen and all their dreams were finally shattered.
A stray tear fell from the corner of his eye.
His living a second life had put a lot of his actions in his first life into a different perspective.
But it didn't make his heart ache any less when he was swallowed by the painful memories.
If it wasn't for Percy and Medusa, he would probably consider this a penance for all the mistakes he had made.
He honestly questioned sometimes why he was able to wield Excalibur. He could name so many heroic figures that he would say were more worthy.
Compared to the likes of Iskander who's warriors never forsook him and even Gilgamesh who was able to build such a grand empire. They were truly kings even with their own faults. But he, Arthur Pendragon, had made so many ridiculous mistakes and somehow still was able to carve out a legend.
Standing with those other giants in the Throne of heroes.....he felt so small....so human.
He admired his little sister in that regard, even after having been mocked for her ideals and her way of kingship, she stood steadfast and declared herself a king as their equal while he sat here and second guessed every decision he made in the past.
At the very least, he could stop anyone he came across from making similar mistakes as he had in the past.
But for tonight, he would allow himself to get drunk as the kids would be sleeping in and he didn't have any other immediate issue he had to deal with.
///////////Omake\\\\\\\\\\\\
To say they were surprised when they learned that they summoned another Arthur Pendragon would be an understatement.
If they were being honest, this whole summoning was a joke and they really didn't think anything would come from it except some kind of confidence boost.
It had been Emiya, the counter guardian, who had recognized him immediately and bolted out of the room, followed swiftly by his younger counter-part Shirou Emiya.
Alex had received a bit of information from the summoning, particularly why he was summoned and had that followed up by an indepth explanation from the people around him.
They questioned his ability to lead them to victory on the matter to which he only replied by taking an item out of the gate, which received quite a few raised eyebrows by itself.
There it say, a trophy as tall as he was. It read: 'World Champions' and had a large dodgeball on top.
"Now....." Alex said with a wide smile.
"Can someone show me where my little sister is."
