I'm an Inquisitor, You're a Heretic
Out of nowhere, the Goddess materialized. And right in front of the Holy Kingdom's terrifying Heresy Inquisitor, no less.
"Hey, you idiot. If you just pop out of nowhere like this..." Yohan muttered, his voice laced with worry. But the Goddess merely raised a hand, gesturing for him to back off as if she had everything under control.
"Ugh..." Yohan grunted, stepping back. Fine. She must have a plan if she's descending in her true, adult form, he reasoned.
"Inquisitor. Until now, I had only suspected, but your words have made me certain." The Goddess spoke, her gaze fixed on Agnes.
Thud. Instead of answering, Agnes dropped straight to her knees.
"M-My Lord..." she sobbed, her voice trembling more violently than Yohan had ever heard.
"A-At last. At last, I hear your voice..." Tears welled in her wide eyes before spilling over, tracing wet paths down her cheeks. Yohan, Falco, and Billy stared in utter bewilderment.
"The Primary God..." the Goddess murmured, looking down at the kneeling woman with a wistful expression.
"Agnes. I am sorry, but you are half right and half wrong." Despite her tears, Agnes tilted her head in confusion.
"W-What do you mean? That noble light, the divine presence radiating from you... it is clearly..."
"The same as the Primary God you worship. Is that not what you would say?"
"Y-Yes, My Lord."
What the hell are they babbling about now? Yohan felt a prickle of irritation as the two conversed in riddles only they understood. But his annoyance quickly faded as a memory surfaced—his very first conversation with the Goddess.
His fool of a Goddess hadn't always been nameless. She had once been a great deity with countless followers, stripped of her name and sealed away after a certain incident. If so, her true identity, her real name, must be...
"The name of the Primary God you serve is..."
"The Great Justice, Lady Justia... It is you."
"Indeed. But that, too, is only half right and half wrong." The Goddess suddenly turned her head, her eyes locking onto Yohan's.
"My Apostle."
"W-What?" Yohan grunted. Why is she acting so damn serious all of a sudden? He kept his tone deliberately blunt.
"As the Inquisitor says, my name was once Justia." The Goddess placed a heavy emphasis on the past tense. It made sense; as she had told him before, that name had been stolen by another.
"So, the bastard who stole your name is impersonating you and founded the Holy Kingdom?" In short, the current Primary God of the Holy Kingdom was an imposter, and the fool standing before him was the real deal.
"No, that is not it," she said, correcting his assumption.
"In the past, Justia, the Goddess of Justice, split her existence in half out of necessity. I was one of those halves, but I was exiled after my name was stolen by the other." Her voice carried a heavy, complicated sorrow.
"Uh..." Yohan stared. So this fool of a Goddess—who cried at the drop of a hat and wiped her snot on his clothes—was actually one half of the supreme deity worshipped by the Holy Kingdom that ruled half the continent?
No fucking way... But it wasn't a joke. The Goddess's expression was dead serious. No matter how much of a clown she usually was, she wasn't the type to spout nonsense in a situation like this.
Above all, Agnes's reaction was impossible to fake. Even if she couldn't perform Miracle Arts herself, she had spent her life as an Inquisitor, witnessing her colleagues channel divine power countless times. It was only natural that she would recognize the true divinity of the god she had worshipped her entire life.
The only reason Agnes hadn't immediately unmasked Yohan and had merely suspected him was because Yohan had trained to suppress his divine aura under the Goddess's tutelage.
"First... My Apostle, this is going to be a long story. Would you mind preparing a place for us?"
"Huh? Oh, right." At her request, Yohan summoned the dimensional portal leading to his pocket dimension.
"You heard her. Let's head inside and talk comfortably. It's not like you want to sit on the dirt road all day." Yohan gestured to Agnes, who was still slumped on the ground.
He stepped through the portal, with Falco and Billy following close behind. Only the Goddess and Agnes remained on the road.
"Let us go," the Goddess said gently. Without a word, Agnes nodded, picked herself up, and quietly followed her into the portal.
"Now, ask me anything you wish. I shall answer to the best of my knowledge." Once inside the pocket dimension, the Goddess reverted to her usual child form.
She bypassed the empty chairs to plop down right in front of Yohan, leaning her back against his legs. It seemed she had grown far more comfortable in her smaller form. Agnes, knowing full well that this child was the very same deity she had just seen, didn't seem to mind.
"I..."
"You are likely hearing of the Goddess of Justice splitting into two for the very first time."
"Y-Yes, My Lord."
In truth, this was news to Yohan's party as well. The Goddess had always kept her past under wraps, using the excuse that her name had been stolen. The most she had ever done was boast about how grand she used to be back in the day.
Hearing her lay bare the truth now left Yohan just as bewildered as Agnes.
"The reason is likely because the Primary God Justia, whom you worship, hid the truth." Though her voice carried absolute certainty, she framed her words as a mere deduction.
"Are you saying she intentionally hid her other half?" Agnes looked as if she couldn't believe her ears.
Yohan, however, immediately understood how she had reached that conclusion. The Unnamed Goddess had been sealed away for thousands of years, completely cut off from the outside world. Yet, predicting Justia's actions was child's play for her. They had once been a single entity; it was only natural they knew each other inside out.
"Indeed. Since your Primary God Justia and I are fundamentally the same being, reading her mind is no different from reading my own." Yohan's prediction was spot on. He let out a quiet snort.
"Then why did the Primary God go out of her way to exile her other half?" At Agnes's question, Yohan nodded reflexively. He, too, had been dying to know.
"Because although we originated from the same source, what we carry within us is different."
"Different...?" The Goddess suddenly stood up and walked to the center of the room. She slowly spun around, her gaze sweeping over everyone present.
"Once, the Goddess of Justice, Justia, was a near-flawless being. In this perilous world rife with distrust and wickedness, she was born from the collective unconscious of those who pursued the ideals of order and justice." She spoke as if recounting someone else's legend, devoid of any self-aggrandizement. It was clear proof that she viewed herself as an entirely separate entity from the original Justia.
"Justice is inherently righteous. It stands at the absolute opposite pole of what the demons and their worshippers pursue." Strictly speaking, the concept of justice was not absolute; it was highly relative. What was good to one could be evil to another. But that was merely Yohan's modern perspective. To the people of this world, justice was synonymous with absolute good, simply because demons—monsters of pure, existential malice—actually existed.
"After spending eons guiding and protecting humanity, the Goddess of Justice one day conceived a way to make herself even more perfect."
"And that was... splitting herself in half?" Yohan asked. The Goddess nodded gently.
"My Apostle. You, of all people, must know how many different values are packed into the concept of justice."
"Mmm..." Yohan grunted in acknowledgment.
"Fairly distributing food is justice. Punishing those who do evil is justice. Feeling righteous anger at wrongdoing is justice. And feeling pity and helping the unfortunate is also justice."
"So you're the half that got stuck with all the soft, fuzzy parts. A single core couldn't handle the load, so she went dual-core. Is that it?"
"Your understanding is swift as always, even if I have no idea what that last part means." The Goddess turned to look at the others.
"It is as Yohan says. The Goddess of Justice divided her values and split herself into two entities. She believed that by doing so, she could prevent herself from obsessing over a single aspect of justice, and that the two deities could support one another."
But the experiment had failed. The proof of that failure was the nameless, exiled deity standing right before them.
"My other half—the current Primary God of the Holy Kingdom—lacked the capacity for patience. That was the fatal flaw."
Justia had grown jealous of her other half. She believed that the throne of the supreme deity belonged to her, and her alone.
"My other half believed that she alone was true justice, and that I was nothing but the dregs. Powerless to resist, I was cast away to a place where no one could ever find me." This was the truth of a tragedy that had unfolded thousands of years ago.
"But I ended up finding you anyway. Not that I did it on purpose," Yohan chimed in, having listened quietly until now. The Goddess nodded.
"Your arrival was something neither I nor my other half could have ever foreseen. It was, quite literally, a miracle."
"Aw, shucks..." Yohan muttered. The Goddess beamed at him with a smile warmer than any he had seen before. Feeling a bit embarrassed, Yohan rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
"Now, Inquisitor. Is there anything else you wish to ask?" The Goddess turned her attention back to Agnes. Agnes's eyes were red and swollen from her relentless tears.
"What you have just told me... if the Papal Palace were to hear of it, it would be punished as the gravest blasphemy." Agnes's voice shook, her pupils trembling with anxiety.
"Indeed. It completely upends the very foundation of your faith. If an ordinary priest of the Holy Kingdom had heard this, they would have washed their ears with holy water and spent the night in frantic prayer." The Goddess did not deny it. Yohan, Falco, and Billy nodded in silent agreement.
"And yet... I could not detect a single lie in your words." Agnes closed her eyes tight, biting her lower lip until it turned white. As a Heresy Inquisitor of the Holy Kingdom, the sheer weight of this revelation and the cognitive dissonance she was experiencing must have been agonizing.
"Primary God... No, Goddess." Agnes finally broke her long silence. Having seemingly reached a resolution, her voice was much calmer now.
"I am listening."
"I have a mission," Agnes said, her eyes shifting toward Yohan, Falco, and Billy. "To investigate the traces of heresy in the borderlands, and to hunt down and execute any heretics I find."
"And those traces of heresy were the tracks left by me and my Apostle."
"But through that man, Yohan, I was granted the chance to hear the 'voice' for the first time in my life." She had dedicated her entire existence to the church, yet she had never once been graced with the voice of the god she served.
"Goddess," Agnes whispered, crawling forward on her knees. She raised her head, looking up at the child-like deity.
"What am I supposed to do? Am I truly expected to arrest the man who allowed me to hear the voice, the man who revealed the hidden truth to me, just to fulfill my duty?" This was the crux of her dilemma. Yohan's expression grew solemn as he waited for the answer.
"Hmm..." The Goddess, however, merely hummed, her face perfectly relaxed as if the answer were obvious.
"Why make things so complicated?"
"P-Pardon?" Agnes blinked, caught off guard.
"You only need to choose the path that you truly believe is right and just." The Goddess offered her a warm, gentle smile.