"Well, welcome."
"Welcome to the Einzbern family home."
In the cozy doll-filled room, the small girl with her oddly mature and playful bearing gave a graceful curtsy to Emiya Kiritsugu, who was still kneeling on the floor.
Illyasviel von Einzbern. That was this girl's name.
Though her face was identical to Miss Illyasviel's before, the spirit behind it was entirely different — less like a person consumed by obsession, more like the older girl next door. There was no trace of that sharp, hostile edge she had shown toward friend and enemy alike.
The six golden Class Cards rotated around her. Due to the brief chaos in the Grail's authorization hierarchy — caused by Kiritsugu's destruction of the Irisviel-wearing Holy Grail will — Miss Illyasviel had unexpectedly become something of a minor mistress within the Grail's interior, at least for the moment.
After all, the Grail housed only two wills. Even though the corrupted Irisviel held ninety-nine percent of the six Heroic Spirit souls and their magical energy, Miss Illyasviel still held that remaining one percent. A token share, but a share nonetheless.
The majority shareholder had suddenly gone offline. So the company's interim affairs passed, by default, to the minority shareholder.
Of course, a minority shareholder was still only that. She couldn't shake anything up in the short term.
The "company" known as the Holy Grail was malfunctioning from top to bottom, and now it was at the critical juncture of going public. Her opinion counted for very little. She simply had slightly more breathing room now that the majority shareholder wasn't pressing down on her from above.
"...Is this another trick?"
Kiritsugu, still kneeling on the floor with tears drying on his face, looked at Miss Illyasviel in bewilderment. He noticed too that the bodies of the illusory Irisviel and her daughter had dispersed. Years of honed instinct made him raise his guard without thinking.
"Hm? Is that all you have to say? Sorry, sorry — I was going for something a bit more dramatic, but I figured you'd just been through something painful, so..."
Miss Illyasviel scratched her head with a sheepish, apologetic expression, genuinely sorry for not thinking it through better.
Then she padded over on bare feet, helped Kiritsugu up by the arm, guided him into a chair, and poured him a cup of steaming tea.
Looking more carefully, the floor and bedding were covered in tiny fragments of stone and gray dust. The walls were cracked in every direction, as if the place had just been through an earthquake — a stark contrast in atmosphere to the scenes Irisviel had conjured. Both were quiet and cold, but in different ways.
This was natural. What Irisviel had done was guide Kiritsugu through the corridors of his own memories, peering into his heart. Now that Irisviel was offline, the disordered interior of the Grail was peering into the heart of its other resident — Miss Illyasviel. Though she could control when it ended.
"Who exactly are you?"
Kiritsugu asked quietly, choosing not to make another move.
"In terms of this Holy Grail War, I've already introduced myself: Assassin-class Servant Illyasviel von Einzbern, with Kotomine Kirei as my Master, operating under the alias of Medea, Age of Gods Magician."
She settled back into her original seat and sipped the plain, rough tea with patience. She hadn't expected to be summoned by Kotomine, of all people. The compatibility must have been surprisingly high — high enough for a resonance summon.
And the Assassin class was terribly underpowered. In her base state, she was somewhere between second and third-rate, and the performance she'd shown at the banquet had only reached above first-rate by burning through her Spirit Origin in a suicidal all-out state. Unstable, at that.
"You're really Illyasviel? Not the will of the Grail? But when a Servant dies, their soul should..."
Kiritsugu paused.
He recalled that Irisviel had also mentioned her. The disobedient, foolish daughter.
"Am I the will of the Grail? I suppose I qualify as one, in a way. Though I'm somewhat different from that Irisviel. The exact mechanics are something like a program error, I think. Don't worry about the details, Kiritsugu — it's not as if I particularly care whether you make a wish or not."
She swayed her pale, bare legs idly back and forth.
The best way to understand the two wills inside the Grail was probably like two AI assistants installed on the same phone. One had just gone offline. The other — Miss Illyasviel — had simply come online to take her turn.
Where the first assistant had been working hard to sell the user on a purchase, enthusiastically pushing every feature and presenting option after option, Miss Illyasviel had completely checked out. Whether the customer bought the product or not, and whether that generated revenue for the owner, was not her concern.
You want to make a wish or not? What does that have to do with me? I'm already dead.
I'm dead, and you want me to work unpaid for this black-hearted Grail? What exactly am I getting out of that?
Besides, she genuinely didn't think this idealistic man standing in front of her — who'd thrown away wife and daughter for the sake of the world — would wish to resurrect one dead Servant just for her benefit.
"Wait... Are you saying Kotomine Kirei was telling the truth? That 'Iri' was also telling the truth?"
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
He'd been seventy percent convinced of Kotomine Kirei's words with thirty percent skepticism. He believed most of it, but not all. Irisviel's words he had dismissed entirely as manipulation, not a single syllable believed.
And now, this girl who had briefly inherited the Grail's will was confirming all of it. Kiritsugu couldn't help blinking in genuine surprise.
What on earth? Kotomine Kirei and that Irisviel had both been completely truthful? He thought Holy Grail Wars were built on schemes and deception. Yet somehow, aside from him, everyone else seemed to have been speaking from the heart — even to their enemies. Were they even playing the same game he was?
"If we're going by your understanding, then yes — what they said was real."
"You're Assassin? Who did you assassinate? Where was your Presence Concealment, your disguise-type skills?"
"Tokiomi Tohsaka, yourself, King Gilgamesh, and Ryunosuke Uryuu — Gilles's Master. Though all of you attributed it to invisibility-type magecraft. And my Presence Concealment rank was too low to be effective against the Three Knight classes and their detection skills, so by the time everything ended, I had only ever successfully assassinated one person."
"Was Gilles really Caster? Did your Noble Phantasm seal away his magecraft?"
"That, even Kotomine and I didn't expect. Neither of us imagined he genuinely had no magecraft at all — that his monster-summoning was entirely dependent on the grimoire in his hands."
"..."
The most conclusive evidence for Miss Illyasviel's identity had always been the Gilles situation. Honestly, it came down to extraordinary luck. Who could have known that the Marshal of France, summoned legitimately as Caster, didn't know a single spell? If he had possessed even one form of incantation-based magecraft beyond his monster-summoning, Tokiomi Tohsaka's side would almost certainly have uncovered Miss Illyasviel's identity long before the end.
"Did you... really have Kotomine Kirei kill Iri?"
His voice trembled slightly as he asked. This had been the one point he'd refused to believe from Kotomine Kirei. The one thing that hadn't added up.
Illyasviel had had numerous chances to kill Irisviel and never taken any of them. How could she possibly have compelled her own Master to kill her own mother?
"An enemy is an enemy. There was nothing special about it. Besides, being absorbed into the Lesser Grail as a vessel is a fate worse than death — she was already going to die. Better for it to be quick." She paused briefly. "Though at the time, I wasn't really thinking in those terms. I just didn't want to create any hesitation in myself. Killing a loved one who genuinely cares for you... I suppose you could call it out of sight, out of mind."
"But she was your mother, Illyasviel! Iri was your biological mother!"
Kiritsugu's voice cracked, his eyes bloodshot.
Miss Illyasviel was silent for a few seconds.
Not out of remorse. As she had stated at the banquet, she never felt regret over her own actions. Wrong was wrong. Right was right. If she had been wrong, then she would accept the consequences — not waver, not crumble, not like the Saber girl in her early days. That kind of inner weakness was something she had long discarded.
She was simply confused. Genuinely puzzled by what exactly Kiritsugu found so surprising.
"Well... Kiritsugu, didn't you just kill the illusions of your wife and daughter as well?"
"I..."
"There's also your father, Norikata Emiya. Your foster mother, Natalia Kaminski. Both killed by your own hand. I genuinely don't think my choices warrant your surprise."
You're a kindred spirit who killed your own father and foster mother, and you're shocked that I killed an enemy? Isn't that a little strange? If anyone else couldn't understand me, fine — but you?
You couldn't exactly ask me to spare Irisviel. Just as I couldn't ask you to spare Norikata Emiya.
"That's completely different!"
"Is it? I don't think so. Every person's path is their own, unreplicable. But both of us are walking ours. No matter how fierce the storm, no matter how the thorns leave us bleeding — don't we both still believe that our solitary little boats will one day reach the green mountains on both banks? Don't we both fight toward that with everything we have?"
The Saber girl. Iskandar. Tokiomi Tohsaka. Diarmuid Ua Duibhne.
And Illyasviel. And Emiya Kiritsugu.
Put generously, they were all dreamers, fighting with everything they had for their own beliefs and ideals.
Put less generously, they were all madmen — abandoning everything that a life could hold in pursuit of a single obsession.
They didn't care what others thought, unless caring about others' opinions was their obsession to begin with. Friends, family, loved ones — if the world itself stood in their way, they would walk straight into it without a second look.
None of them would turn back. Not for anything. Not even death could make them relinquish what they were chasing. A group of madmen who had drawn a line between themselves and the rest of humanity — self-absorbed, incomprehensible to others, and incomprehensible even to each other.
And now one madman was questioning the choices of another.
It wasn't funny. It was merely strange to Miss Illyasviel.
"But I was wrong..."
"You were wrong. That doesn't mean I was wrong. I pursued happiness. I haven't seen my own ending yet. Whatever that ending turns out to be — ridiculous or clarifying — I never had the luxury you have, of still being able to pursue what you believe in. Because as I just said, I envy the fact that you're still alive."
"..."
"As long as there is life, there is a future. As long as there is a future, there is hope."
What is justice? Emiya Kiritsugu's answer: save the world.
Miss Illyasviel's answer: simply being alive is the greatest justice.
Heroes had their grandeur.
Small people had their smallness.
She had never compared herself to a hero. She only wanted to live. Simply, to live with some happiness.
Boom.
Boom.
A deep tremor ran through everything. The castle shook. The cracks in the walls multiplied, as if under sustained bombardment — blows falling from outside in, then resonating back from inside out.
Miss Illyasviel picked up a dusty little cake from the table and bit into it. No flavor. Only bitterness, and the nauseous taste of black mud.
Not far away, part of the wall collapsed, exposing a stairway and the desolate, ruined hall of the castle beyond — covered in the marks of blades and weapons, with flames of residual magical energy faded down to a bone-deep cold, a wide hole in the ceiling, and at the base of the stairs, a pool of dried crimson that had long since gone dark.
A small girl in a purple coat and white skirt with white socks lay in the blood.
A body. Eyes robbed of their light. Chest caved in from a killing strike, heart removed with brutal deliberateness.
Who was she?
Kiritsugu had risen to his feet the moment the wall fell. He saw it from across the room. Instinct drew him forward. He stepped out of the room to get a closer look, and then went still the moment he made out the body's features and posture...
"Illyasviel?"
It was Illyasviel von Einzbern. A little older, but the face and clothing were unchanged.
Still that purple and white he remembered. Still that simple, open little girl.
"So, yes — it's quite rude to peer into someone else's memories without permission. Though it doesn't really matter. Dead people can't exactly file a complaint."
Miss Illyasviel leaned against the wall, one hand on her hip, the other pressed to her forehead with mild exasperation.
Her instability and coldness had come from her skills and the extreme pressure of her environment. Now that she was dead and had lost her Spirit Origin, she had shed all of that and came across as relaxed and straightforward. She just happened to still be a little short.
Her earlier apparent inability to communicate had been a pretense. Both of them were shareholders in the Grail's interior — if Irisviel could wear a personality as a shell and hold a coherent conversation, then Illyasviel was certainly capable of the same. She simply hadn't wanted to talk at the time.
Being crushed by the revelation that the Holy Grail she had fought for, the one she had pinned all her hopes on, was this — that had staggered her somewhat. Seeing the one impersonating Irisviel had irritated her. She had found it preferable to collect herself in silence rather than engage.
"You..."
"You guessed it. That's my body. Both eyes and the heart destroyed. Some tasteless, cruel person's handiwork, whoever that was."
"..."
"I imagine you want to ask what great feats I accomplished. Probably none, honestly. Just an unfortunate person who lost her father and mother and was killed somewhere around the age of eighteen."
Seeing Kiritsugu fall silent, Miss Illyasviel thought for a few seconds before answering lightly.
In a certain sense she did qualify as a future Illyasviel — Kiritsugu and Irisviel's biological daughter — but with a significant qualifier attached, the kind that made the connection fall somewhere between real and not. Closely related, and yet separated by a gap that was hard to define.
Click.
A crisp snap of fingers rang out.
As if she had grown a little tired of all this, she switched the scene again — like fast-forwarding through a video, accelerating past it, but unable to stop it from playing.
"Isn't it obvious that an older sister protects her little brother?"
The voice that drifted up was unburdened, released — rising from somewhere deep in the soul without the anchor of logic. The scene that came with it: a sky drained of all light, and a vast pit of unimaginable depth, its darkness stuffed with writhing black shapes. But the darkness was being driven back.
By light. Magical light. True magic.
A red-eyed little girl in a ceremonial gown walked toward the darkness.
She wore a white, gold-filigree crown etched with magical circuit patterns. The gown itself was red and white, oversized for her small frame. It did not fit her. But to protect her little brother, as his older sister, she was the one who had to wear it.
Kiritsugu's true child — the little girl who had been abandoned from birth — walked toward that radiance.
She was engulfed by it at last, and no sound could reach her anymore.
At the very end, she wore the smile of someone who had saved her family.
"Illyasviel..."
"You could think of it as another ending, Kiritsugu. Still not a good one, of course."
Kiritsugu stood at the edge of the pit in a daze. Miss Illyasviel sat at the rim of it and answered offhandedly. This ending wasn't death, technically.
But it wasn't much better than death. At least, this version of her had never obtained the happiness she had been searching for either.
It looked like she had no regrets. But at its core, it was still an unhappy ending.
"Is this your past?"
"One of them."
"?"
"Because endings like this one — ones without hope, without a future — there are quite a few of them, actually. I don't keep close track, and I don't try to commit them to memory. Because for me, the only objective has always been: survive, and find some happiness. You can think of it as living to correct regrets, to move toward a future."
Click. Another crisp snap.
As if she didn't want anyone looking at her endings anymore, Miss Illyasviel fast-forwarded everything at full speed from that point. Countless scenes flashed by in rapid succession.
Some: surviving the Holy Grail War, then collapsing and dying wretchedly about a year after its end.
Some: dying in the War itself, killed in a variety of ways.
Some: finding a small peace just before death, but still never reaching the age of twenty.
Scene after scene of misfortune. Almost all of them bodies and blood. It seemed as though for Miss Illyasviel, her past was only ever this — and she could only ever arrive at these unhappy endings. Not a single one where she lived out her life in open happiness. Well. One scene showed everyone around her in happiness.
Just without Illyasviel in it.
Before long, the flashing scenes settled and froze on a sea of fire. The ruins of the Einzbern Castle, burning. The final, lonely conclusion of Miss Illyasviel in this particular Holy Grail War — killed beneath the invisible sword of the Saber girl.
"Well, Kiritsugu. Do you know a story? Long, long ago, someone made a boastful declaration — that they would create a world where Illyasviel could be happy. A world where everyone gets a happy ending."
Miss Illyasviel stood in the middle of the flames, bent forward slightly, and smiled — still faint, still light.
She looked at Kiritsugu. Still that same mature composure. Still that same gentle playfulness.
"But in that world, there was no guarantee of Illyasviel. Everyone in it had forgotten Illyasviel von Einzbern."
The heat of the fire closed in around her. The brief disarray caused by Irisviel's death had run its course, and the authority was returning to equilibrium.
Blisters rose on her bare shins. Her silver hair and white sleeping gown began to catch light.
And this was her final ending. The conclusion of a Holy Grail War fought in pursuit of happiness, reaching for an omnipotent wish-granting device. An ending that had always seemed, in some way, inevitable.
Misfortune. Death. Still carrying regrets.
Though this time, at least, her luck had held out in one small way. If she had won and the Grail she lifted had been this, she probably would have been far more heartbroken.
"Illyasviel. Who are you, really? Why..."
Kiritsugu stared at this little girl who wore lightness like armor, whose inside had perhaps been broken long ago.
"I am Illyasviel von Einzbern. I've already answered that, Kiritsugu."
Sensing the growing despair and collapse inside him — sensing that he had come to understand something about her past, and that he now felt the guilt of parents who had abandoned their biological daughter for the sake of a Holy Grail War — Miss Illyasviel clasped her hands behind her back and blinked once.
Pure and unguarded, she smiled — quick and easy, like sunlight.
It was time for him to go. The program had played its last entry. There was nothing more he needed to see. She didn't want his pity. She refused it.
She despised being pitied. Because she denied being a helpless, pitiable creature.
She would live happily and with pride. That was the path she had chosen. The ideal she was still chasing.
Even until death, she intended to end with her pride intact.
"Am I 'Regret'? Am I 'Misfortune'? Am I 'Malice'? Some kind of vengeful spirit, like Jack the Ripper? I don't know. And I don't want to know."
"Because I only recognize myself as Illyasviel. If you still feel guilty, then in the next Holy Grail War — summon me. I'll give you the chance to revise your impression of the pitiable girl you've imagined me to be. And so, let me give you this: my Holy Relic."