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You'd be surprised by how much time you have to think while you're falling from the sky.
Soshiro knows it's only a matter of seconds. That this—this prolonged god's eye view of the battlefield, dark plumes of smoke and bright bursts of light, spirit energy so concentrated you can feel it in every intake of breath, a thousand little dangers that will mean nothing to him in less than a quarter of a minute—is just his brain's way of processing what's happening, which is that he is plummeting to the ground at not-quite-terminal-velocity-yet. The wind claws at his face. He can almost hear a joke about finally getting his hair out of his eyes.
It would be an annoying final thought to have, but Soshiro isn't going to die.
He could. It's wise to remember that he could. These kinds of things happen all the time—bad intel. Displacement sorcery, like this. Every day is a shitty lottery out here, and Soshiro's number has come up more than once. One day, that will happen for the last time—he'll reach into his sleeve and find that his ace has already been played.
But this time, right before that sorcerer launched him a thousand feet into the air, he could have sworn he saw—
Shiba has always had one over on the devil. Soshiro only needs to think of him for him to appear.
There's never a sound when he materializes into existence between one heartbeat and the next, but Soshiro finds himself turning his head anyway. Looking, right where he somehow knows Shiba will be. A sixth sense for an old friend, maybe. Or a survival skill, honed by several hundred sparring matches. Soshiro has had to dodge Shiba's strikes as often as he's had to reach for his hand and hold on tight while the rest of the world disappeared.
A memory tugs at the back of his mind: lying flat on his back on the floor of the dojo, catching his breath while a walking stick digs into his side. Ichiki's voice: You can't always rely on Shiba to pick up the slack when you make a mistake. A real enemy would have let you break your neck. Think, Azami, you have to be more than your fists.
They'd been training. The evasive, acrobatic style they were both studying had always lent itself more easily to Shiba's sorcery than his own—it was easy to jump when you didn't have to worry about where to land.
Shiba always stuck the landing. Soshiro… mostly did.
He'd miscalculated, that time. Shiba had teleported them higher than he'd anticipated, farther from any potential footholds, and he'd known he'd messed up even before Shiba had grabbed his hand and brought them both crashing back to the training mats.
It wasn't an especially graceful save, but it was better than whatever flailing attempt Soshiro would have made on his own, and likely resulted in significantly fewer broken bones. Shiba's hand was still locked around his own even as Ichiki turned the walking stick on him. And you! If you were even a second too late, you would have dropped him. Next time, don't take someone up that high unless you plan to kill them.
Trust me, Shiba had grumbled, if I plan to kill someone, I'm taking them way higher up than that.
The cane thwacked loudly against his shoulder, and he let go of Soshiro to roll clear with a sharp Hey!
Soshiro had flexed his newly-freed fingers. An ache was already starting to settle between his knuckles—not just from how tightly he'd been grabbed, but from how tightly he'd held on.
He'd been told he couldn't always rely on Shiba to pick up the slack, but Shiba hasn't failed him yet—hasn't been too late, hasn't let him down. Literally, in some cases.
Like this one.
Shiba is good at catching people when they fall. Soshiro—
Soshiro is good at the other thing.
In the present, he calls over the rush of the wind: "Drop me on his head."
Shiba doesn't need to ask who he's talking about. He doesn't have time to be plucking displaced allies out of the sky all afternoon. Fortunately, Soshiro is just the person to clear his schedule.