The Saint of Purification (1)
When a person is cast into the open ocean without so much as a life vest, their future usually comes down to one of two outcomes.
They die, or they are miraculously rescued and survive.
And most of them die.
The waters near Tatancour, with their crushing depths and treacherous currents, are a place even competitive swimmers struggle to endure.
I had a life raft, so I made it. How the Valkyrie survived that day remained a mystery to me even now.
This chaplain was no different.
"…She's breathing."
How is she still alive?
It sat poorly with me as a mage to put it this way, but there was no other way to describe it. The Goddess had intervened.
I examined the woman's condition.
She was soaked from head to toe, seaweed clinging to the brim of her hat. Her clerical robes were torn in places. Judging by the state of her, she had drifted a considerable distance from open water.
"No airway obstruction, as far as I can tell."
I wasn't a doctor, so a proper diagnosis was beyond me. All I could determine was that she wasn't in immediate critical danger.
All right. Think this through.
A chaplain officer. Rank of Colonel.
The Valkyries had only been formed after the war began, but the Holy Kingdom's military chaplains had a long-standing reputation for hunting down mages with murderous zeal the moment they laid eyes on one.
Keeping this woman alive could become a serious headache in more ways than one.
"Will you kill her?"
David asked. I shook my head.
The Valkyrie standing beside me was practically an ally at this point. Kill this woman or abandon her, and what would happen? The Valkyrie would turn on me immediately.
Having a chaplain around actually had its advantages, too. If I could earn her goodwill, I might expect remarkably humane treatment as a prisoner of war once a Holy Kingdom rescue ship arrived. How likely that scenario was, I couldn't say.
I glanced at the Valkyrie's face.
Her expression was complicated in every possible way. She seemed glad to have found one of her own, yet at the same time looked crushed that a high-ranking priestess had washed up alone like this. I spoke.
"Let's move her."
"Move her?"
"Fire. Wood. Shelter."
"Ah… right."
The Valkyrie nodded. Since she was already carrying her spear and various other tools, moving the woman fell to me.
I took hold of the chaplain by the nape of her neck and the backs of her knees and lifted her carefully. Through the waterlogged fabric, I could feel how cold her body had gone.
Left like this, she would come down with a fever the same way the Valkyrie and I had that first day. I needed to take measures before that happened.
The Valkyrie snapped off a few nearby branches and brought them over. After laying the woman down, I struck my carbon-steel knife against a luminous stone and set a fire.
The moment the campfire caught, I gestured to the Valkyrie. Miming the act of undressing, I pointed at the silver-haired woman. The Valkyrie's lower lip tucked inward.
"Uh… um."
"You undress her. I'll turn my back."
The Valkyrie nodded. I rose and turned away, heading to the life raft to gather the tools, rations, and combat magic stones I'd brought along.
Rustle. Rustle.
The sound of fabric being loosened drifted over my shoulder.
"Don't you dare turn around."
"I won't look."
I was still a man, so it would be a lie to say that sound didn't register. But right now, lust was the furthest thing from my mind. Rowing all the way here had left me nothing but exhausted and hungry.
Come to think of it, how were we going to divide the food now? The moment that woman woke up, we'd have one more mouth to feed.
"Uuuugh… uh? Wha—? Wh-what?"
Speak of the devil.
"Kyaaah!"
The sound of thrashing followed immediately after.
"No matter how curious you are, you must not turn around. There's a saying that curiosity kills the mage— oh. Ohhh. Ohhhhhh."
Damn it. This bastard. And he's just a rock.
The Valkyrie and the chaplain began talking.
"Wh-where is this?"
"Colonel. Major Rachel Brokenheart of the White Lotus Battalion, reporting. Please remain calm and listen carefully. This is an emergency. We are stranded on an uninhabited island."
"An uninhabited island? Stranded? Wait—did you just say White Lotus Battalion?"
"Yes, Colonel."
"If you're from the White Lotus Battalion, then you must be a Valkyrie. And Brokenheart… the famous 'Black Cat' Rachel? I was certain I'd heard you went missing at the Battle of Tatancour."
"In the end, my ironclad dragon did everything it could to drag me here. I got lucky."
I couldn't follow a word of it. Probably some kind of introduction. All I could do was hope the Valkyrie was explaining things properly to the chaplain.
"I'm not sure if 'comrade' is the right word, but there's one other person traveling with me."
"Who?"
"Hey. You can turn around now."
The Valkyrie called me over. When I turned, the chaplain came into view—wearing nothing but the Valkyrie's outer coat.
Silken silver hair. Eyes dark as black jade.
She was a beauty with delicate, doll-like features. Calling her a goddess descended to earth wouldn't have been an exaggeration.
But what truly demanded attention was something else entirely.
Her eyes.
The irises that had been pure black flushed pink the instant they met mine.
"A Lumina, it seems."
The chaplain frowned and pulled the Valkyrie's coat tighter around herself. She drew her legs further inward, curling up like a hedgehog.
"She appears to be embarrassed."
Come to think of it, I'd heard that Holy Kingdom clergy were extremely strict about exposure. High-ranking priests, in particular, supposedly wouldn't even wear sleeveless garments in front of the opposite sex unless the person was their spouse.
And yet here the chaplain's bare legs were fully on display—the Valkyrie had stripped her stockings off as well. For a chaplain, the humiliation must have been unbearable.
The woman carefully opened her mouth.
"So who is this man?"
"He introduced himself as Erihi Ronshstein. He's a mage from Hazkail, but we were shipwrecked together and spent a month cooperating on another island."
"Erihi Ronshstein?"
The woman murmured the name.
"You. Magic Kingdom person?"
I froze.
She can speak our language?
When she came to, she was on a shoreline. The woman retraced her memories of how she had arrived here.
Her mission had been to search the waters near Tatancour for the missing dragon-rider unit. If they lived, it would be by the Goddess's grace. If they had already perished, she needed to recover their souls at the very least.
And then what had happened?
A sudden storm had struck, and after that… nothing. She truly remembered nothing at all.
What mattered now was assessing the present situation. In a stroke of fortune amid misfortune, she had immediately encountered a woman who introduced herself as Rachel Brokenheart.
"So you're the one who went missing at the Battle of Tatancour. Black Cat Rachel."
"Yes."
"Ah… the Goddess has truly watched over us. If people knew a war hero was still alive, everyone would rejoice."
"Did you come to rescue us, Colonel?"
"That was the original plan, yes."
"The original plan?"
The woman let out a long sigh and recounted everything she could remember. Rachel's face darkened rapidly.
"That can't be."
Rachel murmured blankly. All the while, the woman's gaze had been directed elsewhere.
"So you've been cooperating with that man?"
"…Yes."
Rachel bit her lip lightly.
"He's the enemy who killed my comrades. If it were up to me, I never would have worked with him. But there was no other way. Monsters shaped like fish appeared out of nowhere, and…"
"Monsters shaped like fish?"
A single word rose in the woman's mind.
"Demonic beasts, then."
"It seemed that way. I never imagined they'd survived extinction into this era."
"I had roughly suspected as much."
The woman fidgeted with the holster at her hip. Thankfully, she hadn't lost her pistol. All that remained was deciding whether or not to shoot the man in front of her—the mage.
Not yet. Gathering information came first.
"You there."
The woman spoke in the language of the Magic Kingdom.
"Name?"
"Erihi Ronshstein."
"I've heard of you."
"You know me?"
"I am a Saint. Of course I know."
"…A Saint?"
"Tiria Caston."
Tiria gave only the barest nod—a greeting of pure formality. Ordinarily she would have wanted to add that she was the Saint of Purification, but unfortunately her conversational ability was limited to the most basic level.
"You wrote a paper once. You claimed that mana and Sephiron are essentially the same element…"
Tiria paused a beat before finishing.
"That is blasphemy."
The name Tiria Caston rang a faint bell—and also didn't. But a Saint?
I'd never had any interest in their religion to begin with. It wasn't as though I went around memorizing the names of every era's Saints, especially ones who weren't historically famous holy figures.
I wasn't even certain this woman truly was a Saint. So I read the truth from the Valkyrie's expression.
"There appears to be no room for doubt."
That Valkyrie was bowing her head with profound reverence. Had she always been this devout?
No. That wasn't what mattered right now.
"That is blasphemy."
"Pardon?"
"This word. Difficult. But I know it. Because of people like you."
The chaplain pressed on somehow, piecing sentences together with her limited conversational skill.
"The paper you wrote was designated a banned book by the Church even before the war began. To dare insult the Goddess's grace with the false claim that magical power and divine power are equal—you deserve divine punishment."
The sentences were clumsy and broken, but one thing came through with absolute clarity.
"The Lord's judgment shall be upon you."
This woman thoroughly despised me.