Matou Sakura

Sakura Matou

	Also known asDark Sakura, Sakura Tohsaka
	AffiliationHomurahara Academy, Year 1
	ServantRider
	GenderFemale
	BirthdayMarch 2
	Height156 cm
	Weight46 kg
	Place of originJapan

Background

Born as Sakura Tohsaka, she is the biological sister of Rin Tohsaka and daughter of Tokiomi Tohsaka and Aoi Zenjou. Like most magi, her father chose only one daughter to carry on his family's tradition as he believed raising an additional child would introduce competition. Zouken Matou, an ancient ally of the Tohsaka House, offered to adopt Sakura with the intention of training her as the successor of the Matou's magecraft as his own heir, Shinji, was incapable of sorcery

*Sakura during the worm implanting process*

As a result of her natural abilities, Zouken sought to use Sakura as one of his future vessels, empowered by the Angra Mainyu. Having to endure the cruel training under Zouken and Byakuya, Sakura became an empty and emotionless shell resigned to her fate. When Kariya Matou, Sakura's adopted uncle and her mother's childhood friend, learned of Zouken's intentions, Kariya attempted to win the Fourth Holy Grail War in hopes of liberating her. Unfortunately, Kariya died in his attempt and Sakura was unable to understand Kariya's motivation for trying to rescue her. His death demoralizes her and she convinces herself that she should not attempt to fight against Zouken.

Although castigated and humiliated on a daily basis, Sakura maintained her bearings with great stoicism. For the eleven years after her adoption, Sakura grew to resent Zouken for his cruelty, Tokiomi for sending her away, and finally Rin, for never coming to save her. However, she still kept the ribbon Rin gave her. Sakura drew her strength to endure such hardships from Shirou, whom she admired for his dedication. The inspiration she found came from watching him persistently attempt to jump a bar during a track-and-field practice session. She joined the Archery club in order to be closer to Shirou watching him from afar. A year before the events of Fate/stay night, after Shirou was injured in an accident, Sakura gathered enough courage to approach and help him; she has visited him ever since to assist with daily activities.

Personality

While Sakura is outwardly shy, soft-spoken and eager to please, she possesses a great inner strength. As noted by Shirou, she can also be openly stubborn at times. However, she is also prone to feelings of resentment towards others.

Despite the cruelty she endures living with the Matou family, she is given a brief reprieve in Kariya, her adoptive uncle and the only person who genuinely loved her. When he dies in the Fourth Holy Grail War, Sakura mistakes Kariya's last attempt to free her from the Matou house as a warning from Zouken as the fate of those who disobey him. The incident cements Sakura's despair and resignation towards her own suffering. However, her own resolve is strengthened after she falls in love with Shirou Emiya and becomes closer to him by helping him with domestic tasks to express how she cares about him. During Fate/stay-night, she begins to feel isolated when she believes that Shirou is beyond her reach.

When she becomes Dark Sakura under the influence of Angra Mainyu, her personality changes drastically; she becomes a devilish, evil, and cruel person. Sometimes she talks about herself in the third person.

Abilities

Sakura was born with great potential and rare natural talent, considered to be a miracle equal to that of Rin. It surpasses the norm of "natural talent" or "inborn skill" possessed by others, and due to that she would be in danger without the protection of a magi house, can be equated to a curse in a way. She was given to the Matou house to act as their heir for this reason, but Zouken did not intend to use her for that purpose. For the purpose of acclimatization, she has to undergo constant torture in the basement of the Matou household. The way they pass on their magecraft is not a study, but constant, lifelong torture due to Zouken's preference. Taught to the body rather than the mind, she is forced through immense pain and stress constantly for her "education." The changes are so extensive as to change her hair color, eye color, and every cell in her body so that they no longer reflect her Tohsaka heritage.

Without expecting anything from her intelligence, Zouken sought to turn her into a tool that uses magecraft. With such little formal education, she is unused to combat and cannot normally match someone of Rin's caliber, losing ten out of ten times without being able to breach Rin's barrier. Rin compares her to a bird with the potential of flight being placed in water, forced to die or adapt as best it can. While she would have had great success as a Tohsaka magus, her current state is much like that of the untrained Shirou, only worse due to her lack of physical training. Under duress, she can cast a spell using the Matou "absorption" nature magecraft, and it shoots like a spear, stabbing and entangling the part hit to drain the person of energy. She says that it has little practical use compared to something like Reinforcement that has many different uses in that it is limited to "stealing away from others" and feeding on their pain.

The Magic Crest of the Matou family is in the form of Zouken's Crest Worms, forcefully implanted into her as part of her acclimatization process. They have grown within her for eleven years, turning into a nerve that has entangled throughout her entire body like a Magic Circuit. It is suspended under normal circumstances without have an effect on her body, but it will attack her nerves and use her energy to roam throughout her body while taking even more if it activates. Left for half a day, they will drain her body of energy and consume her flesh as nutrition. As with any Magic Crest, it is painful containing a foreign substance in her body, but even more so with it entangling her nerves with its own and moving about. Compared to the pain experienced in Rin's arm, she compares Sakura to a cluster of Magic Circuits that violates her function as a human being and should overwrite her mind with a wave of energy.

At some point after the Fourth Holy Grail War, Zouken managed to collect fragments of the destroyed Grail and implanted them into Sakura's body, transforming her into an incomplete lesser Grail. Sakura has been developed to be able to act as the Black Grail, a second Lesser Grail, by Zouken Matou. Though the ritual of the Fourth Holy Grail War ended in failure with the destruction of the Holy Grail, it had briefly been completed. It would normally be painful to have the inorganic substance of the Grail within a human body, so he turned the shards into a living thing to allow her to still function as a human. Combining them into Crest Worms, he placed them into her body. Zouken lacked the skill of the Einzberns and completed an eighth of the process in his own way, so she is in an incomplete state. She has the ability to function like the Einzbern Lesser Grail, Illyasviel von Einzbern, in acting as a container for the souls of the Heroic Spirits and becoming the gate upon the ritual's completion.

With the development of Sakura as the Holy Grail, the Black Shadow begins to manifest around Fuyuki. It is the contents of the Grail, Angra Mainyu, leaking out from the other side when Sakura is unable to properly shut the gate even as a complete Holy Grail. It is a Cursed Boundary Layer, Sakura's shadow or even Sakura herself, normally controlled below her threshold of awareness. While it seems that it works with Zouken, he cannot communicate with it, and he can only arrange its path to keep it from running wild. Though he is able to calm it nightly to keep the damage to a minimum, he eventually becomes unable to handle it as Sakura develops. It devours magical energy at first, only leaving people unconscious. More ruthless in its feeding than Caster, it eats their magical energy along with their minds. It eventually realizes that eating them fully is more efficient, taking hundreds of people from fifty households in one feeding. Rather than smashing them, it only needs to swallow them, body and soul.

After Sakura rejects Zouken's control and regains her central consciousness, she becomes Dark Sakura, a rancorous and psychotic distortion of her normal self. It would normally be that she would either have exploded from the strain of being the Grail or have had her consciousness disappear and be overtaken by the shadow. Due to her affinity with it, she is able to take control of it. Touching Angra Mainyu, the mud of the Grail, contaminates a person's personality and reverses it towards the orientation of evil. Her reasoning and emotions are severely impaired, and she is indiscriminately destructive to everything around her. She is one capable of using the power of the mud as part of her own power due to the contamination. As she develops, she becomes a "threat to humanity" that could potentially have required or eventually gotten to the point of needing intervention from the Counter Force. Even with this overwhelming strength, being unused to battle and her unstable mental state makes planning against her possible.

The Shadow Giants are familiars made out of her Hollow element. Under normal circumstances they are extremely small, but when her powers are augmented by Angra Mainyu and the Holy Grail, their size increases vastly and they start acting as a materialized curse. Each composed of roughly one thousand units of magical energy, they are called a match for the Noble Phantasms of Servants. She can bring them forth without limit, and the amount of energy spent creating them for just a single battle, over one hundred million, is enough to run a department of the Clock Tower for one hundred years.

Role

Sakura only plays a minor supporting role in the Fate and UBW route and she only appears as Shirou's friend. She visits Shirou every day and competes with Rin for his affection.

Sakura would not develop as the "Black Grail" in any other route. However, when she was chosen by Shirou, "the person she does not wish to lose", the negative emotions she kept bottled up all these years came flooding out, which accelerated the growth of "All the World's Evil – Angra Mainyu"

Heavens Feel
Sakura is the principal Master of Rider, who was summoned several days prior to the start of the 5th Holy Grail War. However, under pressure from Shinji and the desire not to fight either Shirou or Rin, Sakura yielded her Master's right to him, although Sakura retains her original Command Mantra. As Rin and Shirou became closer, Sakura began to feel contempt for her sister, which was intensified by her belief that Rin was the cause of all her suffering. Zouken, disgusted at the ineptitude of Shinji as a Master, begins a genocide against the other Servants with help from True Assassin and Sakura morphed into a premature form of Angra Mainyu, referred to as "the shadow". Berserker, Lancer, Saber, and Archer are all absorbed or terminated by this unholy trinity, and Sakura regurgitates Dark Saber and Dark Berserker as assistants. At night, she goes on a rampage throughout Fuyuki City, ingesting large numbers of innocents for mana. Gilgamesh eventually confronts and impales Sakura's body with several Noble Phantasms from within his Gate of Babylon, but she regenerates at an impossibly fast rate and consumes him as well. She is forced to quickly convert him to mana in haste because she was afraid he might tear her up from the inside if she does not digest him. Meanwhile, Shirou, who was not attracted to Sakura and only saw her as a friend and Shinji's sister, realizes that something is wrong and that Sakura is suffering. Shirou decides to protect her, but he is unsure of his feelings for her. Because of it, Shirou is devastated when he found out that Sakura is one of the participants in the Grail War. He starts doubting about his ideals because he still wants to save everyone, but realizes that if he does so, Sakura might die. Finally, after a talk with Illya and later Archer, Shirou abandons his ideals in order to protect Sakura. With this new ideal in mind, he finds Sakura crying at the park, and believing that she cannot be saved. Shirou consoles her by telling her that he will always protect her and he will fight for her. However Sakura continues having her strange dreams. Recognizing the devastation she has wrought, Sakura seeks out her grandfather to force him into ending her life in order to protect Shirou. However, along the way Shinji attempts to blackmail her into sex, threatening to tell Shirou of his history of raping her. Horrified at this prospect, Sakura murders Shinji and gives into her internal malice. She then realizes that she is the shadow that appeared in her dreams and becomes Dark Sakura and proceeds to abduct Ilya, hoping to use her as the core for a new Holy Grail. After Shirou and Kotomine rescue Ilya, Dark Sakura stops the supervisor's artificial black heart, giving him only a few hours to live. She also assimilates True Assassin and purges her body of Zouken's worms. She is confronted by Rin in the chamber of the Greater Holy Grail beneath Mount Enzō, her power equally matched by The Jeweled Sword of Zelretch. Rendering Sakura's shadows useless, Rin makes her way to Sakura, but is unable to give the finishing blow due to her love of her sister. Rin embraces Sakura even after Sakura has stabbed her in panic. Realizing Rin's love, Sakura again starts resisting the malice within in her long enough for Shirou to dispel Angra Mainyu's grip on her soul with Rule Breaker. If Shirou does trace Excalibur and destroy the Grail, his life is extinguished, which results in Sakura's Normal Ending. Refusing to accept Shirou's death, Sakura continues to live in the Emiya house, forever waiting for Shirou until she later dies of old age. She later reunites with Shirou in what is insinuated to be the afterlife. f Ilya intervenes, closes the gate, and performs the Heaven's Feel on Shirou to keep him alive and close the Grail once and for all, it results in Sakura's True Ending. After her dark self is destroyed, Sakura's body is left containing vast amounts of mana due to her connection with Akasha. She ends up living with Shirou and Rider, with the servant's existence sustained by Sakura's mana pool. Sakura is the de facto Winner of the 5th Grail War in this route. However Kirei Kotomine proclaimes Shirou to be the Winner.

Heavens Feel

Sakura is the principal Master of Rider, who was summoned several days prior to the start of the 5th Holy Grail War. However, under pressure from Shinji and the desire not to fight either Shirou or Rin, Sakura yielded her Master's right to him, although Sakura retains her original Command Mantra. As Rin and Shirou became closer, Sakura began to feel contempt for her sister, which was intensified by her belief that Rin was the cause of all her suffering.

Zouken, disgusted at the ineptitude of Shinji as a Master, begins a genocide against the other Servants with help from True Assassin and Sakura morphed into a premature form of Angra Mainyu, referred to as "the shadow". Berserker, Lancer, Saber, and Archer are all absorbed or terminated by this unholy trinity, and Sakura regurgitates Dark Saber and Dark Berserker as assistants. At night, she goes on a rampage throughout Fuyuki City, ingesting large numbers of innocents for mana. Gilgamesh eventually confronts and impales Sakura's body with several Noble Phantasms from within his Gate of Babylon, but she regenerates at an impossibly fast rate and consumes him as well. She is forced to quickly convert him to mana in haste because she was afraid he might tear her up from the inside if she does not digest him.

Meanwhile, Shirou, who was not attracted to Sakura and only saw her as a friend and Shinji's sister, realizes that something is wrong and that Sakura is suffering. Shirou decides to protect her, but he is unsure of his feelings for her. Because of it, Shirou is devastated when he found out that Sakura is one of the participants in the Grail War. He starts doubting about his ideals because he still wants to save everyone, but realizes that if he does so, Sakura might die. Finally, after a talk with Illya and later Archer, Shirou abandons his ideals in order to protect Sakura. With this new ideal in mind, he finds Sakura crying at the park, and believing that she cannot be saved. Shirou consoles her by telling her that he will always protect her and he will fight for her. However Sakura continues having her strange dreams. Recognizing the devastation she has wrought, Sakura seeks out her grandfather to force him into ending her life in order to protect Shirou.

However, along the way Shinji attempts to blackmail her into sex, threatening to tell Shirou of his history of raping her. Horrified at this prospect, Sakura murders Shinji and gives into her internal malice. She then realizes that she is the shadow that appeared in her dreams and becomes Dark Sakura and proceeds to abduct Ilya, hoping to use her as the core for a new Holy Grail. After Shirou and Kotomine rescue Ilya, Dark Sakura stops the supervisor's artificial black heart, giving him only a few hours to live. She also assimilates True Assassin and purges her body of Zouken's worms. She is confronted by Rin in the chamber of the Greater Holy Grail beneath Mount Enzō, her power equally matched by The Jeweled Sword of Zelretch. Rendering Sakura's shadows useless, Rin makes her way to Sakura, but is unable to give the finishing blow due to her love of her sister. Rin embraces Sakura even after Sakura has stabbed her in panic. Realizing Rin's love, Sakura again starts resisting the malice within in her long enough for Shirou to dispel Angra Mainyu's grip on her soul with Rule Breaker.

If Shirou does trace Excalibur and destroy the Grail, his life is extinguished, which results in Sakura's Normal Ending. Refusing to accept Shirou's death, Sakura continues to live in the Emiya house, forever waiting for Shirou until she later dies of old age. She later reunites with Shirou in what is insinuated to be the afterlife.

f Ilya intervenes, closes the gate, and performs the Heaven's Feel on Shirou to keep him alive and close the Grail once and for all, it results in Sakura's True Ending. After her dark self is destroyed, Sakura's body is left containing vast amounts of mana due to her connection with Akasha. She ends up living with Shirou and Rider, with the servant's existence sustained by Sakura's mana pool. Sakura is the de facto Winner of the 5th Grail War in this route. However Kirei Kotomine proclaimes Shirou to be the Winner.