Reborn in Type-Moon: Starting by Adopting Sakura - Chapter 46

"Iri, we should get moving." Artoria pushed herself up from the car seat and stepped over to stand beside her Master.

Irisviel studied her Servant's profile, trying to piece together what exactly had happened to turn the once and future king into someone who treated conversation like a luxury she couldn't afford. Artoria had the social skills of particularly antisocial granite, and she'd never bothered explaining what she wanted from this War. The woman who'd supposedly united Britain apparently couldn't be bothered to share her motivations with the person literally keeping her anchored to this world.

Yuu had mentioned something about there being multiple versions of the Arthurian legends floating around academic circles, and enough contradictory historical accounts to give any serious researcher a migraine. Probably explained why their King Arthur seemed to have graduated from the school of emotional constipation.

Lancer, for her part, maintained the conversational habits of a particularly reticent monk. The woman hoarded words like they cost her actual money. Though she did have a soft spot for Sakura—they'd apparently bonded over afternoon tea and what Yuu had described as "an alarming amount of cake consumption." Even legendary warriors, it seemed, weren't immune to the power of sugar and a sweet kid.

These scattered thoughts drifted through Irisviel's mind as she climbed out of the car, following her perpetually serious Servant.

Yuu considered the logistics of extracting himself from Serenity's octopus-like grip, then decided against it. The girl had attached herself to him and showed no signs of releasing her hold. Given that autumn nights in these mountains could freeze the enthusiasm right out of a person, having a personal heater wasn't exactly a hardship.

He maneuvered carefully into the driver's seat, managing not to wake his passenger, then called over to the others. "I'm heading out. Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone, and keep your phones on."

Iri glanced at the sleeping bundle currently using Yuu as furniture and made an exasperation sound. "Try not to drive off the road while you're playing chauffeur to sleeping beauty. Lancer, let’s go."

She turned and headed toward the castle.

…

The Holy Grail System represented the kind of magical engineering project that made most magi either deeply envious or vaguely nauseous, depending on their tolerance for human experimentation on a grand scale.

The massive ritual array sprawled beneath Ryuudou Temple on Mount Enzou, designed to siphon magical energy from Fuyuki's leylines and hoard it like a particularly ambitious dragon. The whole setup hinged on what remained of Justeaze Lizrich von Einzbern—the so-called "Winter Maiden," though "Magical Infrastructure" would have been more accurate at this point.

Her original circuits had long since stopped being merely human. They'd grown and spread and multiplied until they formed a network stretching a full kilometer in diameter, like some kind of organic magical cancer that had decided to become useful instead of fatal. What had once been a single person's magical capacity was now a sprawling underground web that could power rituals most magi could only dream about. The Einzberns had always been thorough when it came to getting what they wanted, ethics be damned.

At 3:26 a.m., Yuu guided his white Santana to the base of Mount Enzou and drove straight into the woods. He brought the car to a stop in a clearing where moonlight managed to slip through the canopy, illuminating a narrow stream that probably hadn’t seen another human being in months.

"End of the line," he announced to the girl who'd spent most of the drive clinging to him. "Time to stretch those legs."

"Of course, Master." Serenity blinked herself awake and reluctantly untangled herself from his arms, moving as if gravity was more of a suggestion than a law.

The moon hung overhead like a silver coin someone had tossed into the sky and forgotten to catch. Serenity stepped out of the car, her bare feet making contact with the forest floor as if she weighed about as much as morning mist.

He pocketed the keys and climbed out, his boots making considerably more noise as they crunched through the accumulated leaves. After retrieving a silver suitcase from the trunk, he took a moment to remove the license plates.

"We're just abandoning it here?" Serenity asked, glancing back at the car as he started toward the temple. "Shouldn't we at least try to hide the tire tracks?"

The question showed good tactical thinking, which he appreciated. "Most magi operate under the assumption that they're the smartest people in any given situation," he explained, shouldering the suitcase. "If they stumble across something this obviously amateur, they'll write it off as some mundane who got lost and wandered into the woods."

Serenity nodded and fell into step behind him.

…

Yuu tilted his head back to study the mountain's jagged outline against the star-scattered sky. Ryuudou Temple perched up there like a particularly antisocial lighthouse, anchoring a bounded field that had been specifically designed to give anything non-Servant a very bad day.

A Rider-class Servant might manage to slip past on some kind of flying mount. A helicopter, on the other hand, would be lucky to make it halfway up the slope before the "mysterious magnetic interference" turned its navigation systems into very expensive paperweights.

By the time dawn started creeping over the horizon, the North Star had begun its daily fade into irrelevance. Orange light spilled across the eastern sky, though the mountain itself blocked most of it from reaching the forest floor. Yuu finally found what he'd been looking for—the entrance to a cavern that looked like someone had taken a very large bite out of the mountainside.

The old legends called leylines "dragons" and their convergence points "dragon caves," which explained why this particular temple had ended up being called Ryuudou. Yuu pushed through a tangle of branches and undergrowth that seemed determined to keep people away, Serenity following behind him like a shadow.

The entrance squeezed them through a passage barely wide enough for a person, a natural chokepoint that made anyone with claustrophobic tendencies reconsider their life choices. After what felt like several dozen steps of playing human toothpaste, the tunnel opened up into something considerably more impressive.

The cavern stretched out before them, lit by a faint phosphorescent glow. Someone had carved the mountain's heart into a perfectly circular chamber, its walls etched with magical circle that would have made most Clock Tower professors weep tears of joy. This was the Greater Grail system in all its terrible glory, the real engine behind the Holy Grail War. Two centuries ago, Justeaze Lizrich von Einzbern had volunteered to become its living core.

Irisviel had been modeled after Justeaze, which explained the resemblance, though calling it "modeling" was like saying a photograph was modeled after the sun.

The circuit network spiraled down into the chamber's depths, a living testament to what happened when magical ambition met human sacrifice and decided they could work together.

"Definitely family resemblance," Yuu murmured, studying the patterns etched into stone.

Having spent considerable time examining Irisviel's magical circuits, he could recognize the underlying architecture of Justeaze's far more easily than most people could have managed. But the scale difference was staggering. Justeaze hadn't been another Einzbern artificial creation—she'd been a genuine miracle, born after nearly nine centuries of magical experimentation and a genetic accident that had connected her directly to the Third Magician. The kind of one-in-a-billion occurrence that couldn't be planned, replicated, or explained to anyone's satisfaction.

The Einzberns had spent almost a millennium trying to create their "salvation for all humanity," and in the end, they'd gotten exactly one perfect success that had cost them everything they'd been trying to achieve. Justeaze's existence had been their admission that their dream was impossible, a beautiful failure that proved the limits of even their legendary magical engineering.

So while Irisviel shared Justeaze's template, she was at best an extremely gifted copy of an original that couldn't be reproduced. Close enough to serve their purposes, but not close enough to fulfill their original vision.