Chapter Text
The animal growled not with it’s mouth, but it’s stomach. It had just finished eating a wild boar. It wasn’t enough, it had easily eaten at least a half a ton of meat in the last hour yet it still looked like it might die of starvation any moment now.
It’s snow white skin was stretched thin over a humanoid skeleton as if there was no muscle or fat separating them, it’s ribs protruding from it’s torso, having pierced it’s skin long ago once it stretched too thin to contain them. It’s matted black hair stretching over it’s back down to the waist looked like fur at first glance.
Suddenly, the beast heard the only thing that tasted like food to it, a human just entered the forest.
All it took was 4 seconds.
In the first second it jumped onto the top of a tree.
In the second it hopped between them traveling 110 meters in the span of that one second
In the third the young woman could make out the figure of the creature latched to a tree, it’s yellow eyes savoring the sight of a meal.
In the fourth second the woman’s head, left arm and a fourth of her torso were already in the creature’s stomach.
And yet despite that.
The beast’s stomach growled even louder than before.
An Einzbern of around 180 years of age named Igor Einzbern had been sent to Denris (stand in for Kenora in this setting but a little over twice the size) to work privately on a project to use in a future holy grail war, the creation of homunculi that are the perfect hosts for heroic spirits. After all a servant that is an Einzbern themselves would be compelled to follow their goal to achieve heaven’s feel way more than a pure hero of humanity.
For that he was sent to retrieve a spirit from Alberta that due to it’s nature was the best match around for possessing a living vessel in the place of a proper heroic spirit. After that he was meant to settle there and keep perfecting his homunculi until called upon.
At least that was the plan until he heard of their deactivation after the fifth holy grail war. He was furious, sent to work for over a hundred and fifty years just to discover his creators had given up on the goal that was his whole purpose for existing. So he spit on their graves and visited fuyuki, copying most of the greater grail, retrieving the records for it’s creation, collecting a wraith of a participant of the holy grail war and his corpse to attempt to learn as much as he could about the war from what remains of the boy.
After it was all said and done he had the recipe to create a near perfect replica of the fuyuki holy grail and was able to change some of the rules. Only thing left was the masters. He had devised a way to gather enough magical energy to start the war at a mere 10 years after it’s creation. It would have horrible consequences on the land but that didn’t matter, what mattered was the Einzberns winning the war, so the only meaning to gathering the magical energy on such short notice is to be able to gather the masters without them dying of old age or being too old to participate by the time the war happens.
First he invited a vampire named Viktor Blackwin, one that he had collaborated with in the past due to their shared interest in changing the nature of a humanoid body. While they did it for different end results there was common ground in the process in which the research they shared with each other proved valuable. As a result of their partnership convincing him to come to Denris in 10 years time to participate and use the grail to further his goals was easy.
Igor then scheduled a message to both the clocktower and the church that would be delivered in 10 years near the scheduled start of the Denris holy grail war. Of course an executioner would come to investigate this vampire sighting once they get the message so that’s another person who would qualify as a master down. Viktor had a seal designation due to a past of not covering his tracks well after using magecraft to capture people for his experiments and for food. This meant a seal designation enforcer from the clock tower would come too.
For the fourth master he contacted a 14 year old boy in the middle east. He may have been young but he had accomplished the goal of making a name for himself as a mercenary despite that, often referring to himself as a hassan in training. Of course when Igor was able to convince the boy that if he came to Denris in 10 years time he could summon a real hassan, the boy, despite his skepticism, agreed.
The fifth he planned to be one of the shamans overseeing this land. He was on horrible terms with them due to his project having devastating effects on the ecosystem in the long run but the fact they want to stop and kill him and anyone who might succeed him meant that at least one would be in the city to try to end the holy grail war as soon as possible and use it to restore their ecosystem.
For the sixth he chose the most recent homunculi he had worked on turning into vessels for heroic spirits. A pair of twins sharing one soul, the idea behind them is due to already being incomplete beings a heroic spirit would be able to fill that empty half with no trouble. This method showed little promise in the experiments however with the spirit always completely overtaking the body in the last 3 pairs of twins before these ones. They likely won’t even be able to operate as separate masters due to their nature as two halves of a being making them be recognized by the world and likely the grail as the same entity. Nevertheless even if they could only summon a single servant he would leave them everything he had in hopes they’d achieve heaven’s feel.
The seventh was a tricky one, he had run out of people he knew for a fact would be present and become masters either willingly or forcefully if the grail find no alternatives. With no guaranteed option Igor resorted to quantity, he invited random mage families he was able to make contact with and getting a total of 20 to agree to join, at least one of them was going to not change their mind in the coming 10 years of waiting and any extra who may come after all the masters have been chosen won’t be his problem to deal with, in short it was just a bunch of back up mages in case a slot was empty.
With the masters prepared all that was left was to start the ritual. The location chosen to be the resting place of the greater grail was a pond in Orinwa island (coney island replacement). The man accompanied by the twin homunculi and many of his familiars went to the pond after drying it out in preparation for the ritual.
Once there, he ordered his familiars to tear him apart and use his remains, his very blood, for the magic circle called the greater grail, just like his ancestor Justaeze long ago. The twins who had been activated just a few weeks prior to this, held the responsibility of witnessing and memorizing the location, and when the time for the holy grail war was nigh, to pour in the liquid made by Igor that functioned as a lesser grail, in turn turning the whole pond into the wish granter. After that they were free to spend the next 10 years doing whatever they desire as long as they laid low to hide from the shamans who were after them to prevent Igor’s scheme.
With all that finished and Igor’s life sacrificed for his ambition. The Denris holy grail war, was a matter of time