Reborn in Type-Moon: Starting by Adopting Sakura - Chapter 17

The highest mountains in Southern Europe stretched endlessly in every direction, their peaks capped with snow that never melted. At 2,000 meters up, the temperature stayed at freezing year-round.

The Einzbern castle sat tucked away in these mountains, surrounded by endless cold and nearly a thousand years of single-minded determination that bordered on madness.

Today, Irisviel von Einzbern had been called to meet with the family head in the castle chapel—though calling it a chapel was misleading. This wasn't a place where anyone came to pray or find comfort. In a magus household, a chapel was just another word for ritual chamber, nothing more spiritual than that.

The stained-glass windows told the long, winding story of the Einzbern family's obsession with the Holy Grail, stretching back through the centuries.

Of the Three Founding Families, the Einzberns had the deepest connection to the Grail, the longest history with it. They'd locked themselves away in these frozen peaks, cutting off all ties to the outside world, pouring everything they had into chasing this one impossible dream for almost a thousand years.

And what did they have to show for it? Nothing but failure after failure, each one more humiliating than the last.

Two hundred years ago, they finally admitted they couldn't do it alone. That's when they made their deals with the Tohsaka and Matou families, forming the alliance that would create the Holy Grail War.

But since there could only be one winner, one wish granted, they'd turned what might have been cooperation into a battle royale.

The Einzberns had lost every single war since then. Their Masters just weren't cut out for actual combat, no matter how much magical knowledge they possessed.

Nine years ago, they decided they needed fresh ideas from the outside. That led to their arrangement with Yuu five years back—the Einzberns handed over some crystallized mystery they'd recovered from ancient ruins, and in exchange, Yuu had Touko share some of her dollcraft techniques with them.

Two years ago, they finally finished their masterpiece: Irisviel von Einzbern.

She represented everything the Einzberns had learned about creating artificial life, the absolute peak of their magical engineering. If even she couldn't win them the Holy Grail War, then their thousand-year obsession would finally be over.

After her meeting with the family head, Irisviel walked slowly through the corridors, her attention caught by one of the newer stained-glass panels.

The image showed the Winter Maiden of the Einzberns flanked by two other magi, all three reaching up toward the Holy Grail floating above them. You could tell from how it was designed that whoever commissioned it was trying to make the Tohsaka and Matou representatives look smaller, less important—a petty way of asserting Einzbern superiority even while admitting they needed help. The embarrassment of that compromise was written all over the glass.

But Irisviel wasn't really looking at the figures. Her eyes were fixed on something else. Just above the Grail, someone had carved a binding rune directly into the glass.

She stared at it for a long moment, then her porcelain features broke into an amused smile. "Really? Who just goes around carving things into other people's walls like that?" She tilted her head, letting her silver hair spill over one shoulder, and laughed softly to herself.

"I heard Yuu is in Japan too... I wonder if he still remembers me."

The thought brought back a flood of warm memories, but she caught herself before they could take over completely. This wasn't the time for nostalgia. She straightened up, forcing her expression back into something more appropriate for the task ahead.

"Lancer, we're going."

The figure beside her nodded without a word.

She moved with the confidence of royalty—no, something even beyond that. Her golden hair caught the light beneath its circlet, and her blue eyes held an otherworldly gleam.

...

There were two completely different stories about how King Arthur died, and both of them seemed to be true.

The first one came from Celtic legends and medieval chronicles. At the battle of Camlann, Arthur found himself surrounded by corpses, managing to kill the traitor Mordred with his spear but taking fatal wounds in the process. As he lay dying, he told Bedivere to take Excalibur back to the lake where he'd first gotten it. The sword disappeared beneath the water, and Arthur prepared himself for death.

The second version turned up in what appeared to be Arthur's actual tomb. Inside was a preserved scroll that told a completely different story: Mordred gave up and surrendered, Arthur kept his authority over the Round Table intact, and somehow managed to lead all of Camelot into some hidden realm where ordinary people couldn't follow them.

Both stories had physical evidence backing them up. Both seemed to have legitimate historical foundations. Two totally contradictory accounts of the same events, but each one apparently real.

The thing was, history couldn't work that way. There could only be one version of what actually happened.

So which one was true?

Even by the 1990s, archaeologists still couldn't give a definitive answer.

Gilgamesh had the same problem—multiple histories that didn't match up.

Yuu had come across another clay tablet once, one that never mentioned the "Three Goddesses" at all. It followed the standard Epic of Gilgamesh right up until the part where he came back from his failed quest for immortality.

Then it went in a completely different direction.

In that version, Gilgamesh begged the gods to let him see Enkidu one more time. Shamash opened a path for him to glimpse the afterlife, where Enkidu told him about the grim, depressing world of the dead.

No goddesses anywhere in the story.

The whole "Three Goddess" theory started feeling like something someone had just made up on the spot. Back when Yuu was still at the Clock Tower, he'd raised his hand during one particularly dry lecture and asked, "What if both histories are actually true? What if they're happening at the same time?"

The silence that followed was brutal. Then came the snickering from the back rows, spreading through the classroom like wildfire. His professor even gave him one of those looks—the kind that said he was wasting everyone's time with philosophical nonsense.

"Always the dreamer, aren't you, Yuu? Maybe stick to the facts instead of chasing fairy tales for attention."

The other students had eaten it up. There was something about tearing down the person asking uncomfortable questions that seemed to make everyone else feel smarter.

But then Misaki City happened. He'd seen that thing and suddenly all his old doubts came rushing back. Because if multiple histories really could exist side by side, overlapping and contradicting each other, then what did that say about everything they thought they knew? How could you build any kind of understanding on ground that kept shifting beneath your feet?

Not that the Clock Tower had been right either. They were just as blind, just in a different way.

Yuu remembered something he had read about understanding: "First you see a mountain and think it's just a mountain. Then you learn about geology and weather and realize it's not really what you thought at all. But if you keep studying long enough, you come full circle—it becomes a mountain again, except now you actually know what that means."

Most of the magi he'd known never made it past that first stage. They saw what they expected to see and called it wisdom.

He pulled out his notebook and started writing down these thoughts, trying to work through the contradictions that had been eating at him. When his hand started cramping, he set the pen aside and settled into his usual meditation posture, focusing on clearing his mind and sharpening his mental energy.

There was only so close you could get to the truth before hitting a wall. Yuu had learned that much during his time digging through old ruins and dusty archives. The further down you went, the more you realized how much humans just couldn't know, couldn't understand, couldn't reach. At some point, you had to stop chasing every mystery and focus on what actually mattered.