Master of the Divine Vessel
"Lady Saintess, so this is where you were."
"Huh?! Jenison, you still haven't le— Eek!!"
Finding the Saintess had been no great task. He had known her location from the very start, after all. The only reason he'd arrived late was that the roads kept overflowing with trash, and separating it out for disposal took time. Having run himself into a sweat finishing the sorting, he'd gone straight to her — only for her to recoil in horror and shriek.
"...What's the matter?"
"What's the matter?! What is all that blood on you?!"
"Ah..."
So that was why people had kept staring at him on the way here. It wasn't every day one saw a minor drenched head to toe in blood.
"Priest Finn! Could you treat this man for me, please?"
"Hmm? Who do you mean... gah! R-right away!!"
Perhaps even to the priest's eyes his condition looked dire; the man hurried over and began pouring holy power into him. Before long, however, he stopped, and with alarm plain on his face he drew the Saintess back behind him instead.
"Huh? Is he all healed?"
"Lady Saintess, the only wound on that man's body was a minor abrasion."
"...Pardon?"
"And that much blood..."
At those words the Saintess whipped her head toward him, and he answered with a blank expression and a single shrug of his shoulders. In the same breath, the wariness of the surrounding priests and knights deepened all the more. Untangling the misunderstanding took far longer than he'd expected — too much of his story strained belief.
A child not yet grown had killed at least several adults? And every last one of them, wherever they'd stood, taken down by the same methodical ambush? It was a hard tale to swallow, but thanks to the Saintess vouching for him, the misunderstanding was finally, laboriously, put to rest.
Only when the crowd's guard had eased did she at last ask what had brought him here.
"Lady Saintess, I'll get straight to the point. Run. Flee, now."
"...Didn't I tell you before? I have no intention of running—"
"That applied when you were of use. In this situation, the only help you can offer is running petty errands, is it not?"
"..."
"I know your holy power isn't coming forth. I don't know the reason, but that revol— no, that energy simply cannot be felt."
"..."
"You can't aid anyone, you can't accomplish anything. All that is left to you is to beg help from yet another someone — is it not?"
As though conceding the point, the Saintess's head sank. He judged she'd taken the meaning by now as well, and seized her wrist to drag her toward escape. The only problem was that her body would not move.
"Help me..."
"...?"
"Just as you say, right now I'm a good-for-nothing who can't do a single thing. Pitiful, dim, a fool. So I have no choice but to ask someone — anyone — for help..."
"Ha, and if you know that, then—"
"There's no time!!"
"..."
The Saintess's tear ducts opened once more. The sisters nearby dabbed away the tears as they fell, drop by drop. With that settled, she dispatched the priests and turned her gaze on him — her eyes red, her voice soaked through and thick.
He listened to her account with composure. A tremendous explosion had torn through the cathedral, and the Pope, she said, seemed to be caught in the midst of it. Her voice, lovely to begin with, was layered with earnest anguish, lending the plea both weight and pathos — and having heard the whole of it, he refused. Naturally.
With an explosion of that magnitude, there was no guarantee the Pope still drew breath, and his foremost objective had been the Saintess's rescue.
Yet she kept clinging. It baffled him. There were other knights, after all.
"If that's the situation, then the other knights—"
"I'm afraid... that cannot be."
He was in the middle of trying to talk her around, determined to walk her out by any means necessary, when a knight who had approached from somewhere with unhurried, measured steps countered him. At a glance, the man was a knight of fine bearing.
"The Pope's final command was... to save as many people as we could. Every one of us, myself included, reveres His Holiness above all others, and yet... we cannot abandon this many people and rush heedlessly to his side... So I, too, must beg this of you, Holy Son. Please... could you not save the Pope...? I beg of you."
"Please!! Holy Son!!"
"...Might I ask just one question?"
He was curious. What exactly they trusted in a mere child like him, that they hoped so earnestly and would send him to the Pope. Why they trusted him enough that everyone who had gathered at the knight's back now bowed their heads. The knight answered as though the answer were self-evident, and Jenison loosed a hollow laugh — sorry, but he was going to refuse one more time.
Being led around by sentiment and taking nothing but losses was not to his taste. Above all, he had no intention of living like a sucker ever again—
≪ A new quest has been created! ≫
The first feeling that rose in the Pope the moment he laid eyes on him was honest admiration. This had by no means been a weak attack, nor one easily turned aside. As proof, the wall the blow had struck had not merely cracked — a hole had been punched clean through it. Worse still, the face of the wall that remained was melting away by slow degrees with a sizzling hiss, as though hydrochloric acid had been poured across it — and this despite every wall of the Church being raised from Holy Stone, mighty in durability and high in magic resistance.
Put another way, the attack of moments before carried force enough to melt even Holy Stone. And yet this man had deflected it. Beautifully. Flawlessly. As though it were the plain order of the world — though one wrong move and his dagger and hand might have melted away entire.
Doubting the sight before his eyes, the Pope replayed the man's movements from moments ago. He had not braced his blade beneath the spear's tip; had he done so, the insufficient surface area and force would have let it punch straight through. Nor had he turned it aside with the flat of the blade; unless that blade had been mithril, it would have snapped in an instant. A curved dagger, its edge forged who-knew-where. Small holes like grooves, bored one by one along its spine. Into those holes he had forced the black spear's blade to seat, and turned his wrist. A hair's-breadth instant, a minute motion, a whisper of strength. That alone had wrenched the black spearhead from its course. True, it had turned in a perilously narrow line — but had he dallied a moment longer, what melted would have been his dagger and his arm.
It was dagger craft he had never once witnessed. Nothing like the martial arts of the paladins or the other knights. If the swordsmanship of others was a thing of form — bound within convention, courteous and respectful, overflowing with dignity — this man was its opposite. Every motion bent solely toward incapacitating his opponent and turning their attacks back upon them. Movements devised, in the plainest sense, to kill the other man and survive.
Into the hush drifted his weary breathing, and from every side rose awed exclamations. The man himself seemed disgruntled at nothing more than being winded after deflecting a single blow, but the reactions of all who had watched him were another matter entirely.
"Wh... what..."
"...I can't recall the last time I was genuinely astonished."
Antonio stood gaping, the nose he'd been pinching slipped clean from his fingers, and even the composed Hercal's eyes had gone perfectly round. The reaction of Greed, the very author of the attack, was little different — save in one respect: he was smiling so widely that his saw-like teeth stood in full bloom. As though he had met someone he had waited long years for, tears of joy seemed faintly to glimmer.
"Ahh, at last I have found you. O Moon."
"...?"
"Finally... round and round, and the chance has come at last..."
Though his attack had plainly been turned aside and the Pope left unkilled, far from displeased, Greed was delighted — and Jenison eyed the reaction with open puzzlement. And only then did the Pope come back to himself.
"Wh... what are you doing here?!"
"..."
"This place is dangerous. Even now, you must hurry and...!"
Their numbers here had been few, granted — and yet these were the ones who had pressed even him, the Pope himself, to the brink. And how much strength that young man had left was anyone's guess. He was truly grateful to have been saved, but he had no intention of driving a young man still green and full of promise into a pit of certain death — least of all one he had taken a personal liking to. Even if it cost him his own life, he was resolved to at least take that black-haired young man along as his companion on the road — and with that thought, he pressed his hands against knees that refused to obey and forced his body upright.
That was the moment it happened: the Pope, still mid-rise, found his entire body hoisted off the ground.
"You...! What in the world are you—"
"Shut up and think about nothing but surviving, this instant..."
Jenison, who had been squared off against Greed, had abruptly sprinted to him, heaved him across his back, and broken into a run.
"Uh... huh? Wait...!"
"...What a bother."
To Antonio and Hercal, who had fully expected a life-and-death struggle between the Pope and Greed — Jenison excluded — to now begin, this was wholly unforeseen. While the pair stood momentarily dumbstruck, the distance between them and Jenison widened by the second; and Jenison was no laggard on his feet either, so he believed he could shake them clean.
That belief was smashed to fragments by the man who barred his path.
"Where are you rushing off to in such a hurry? It seems to me we still have a great deal left to discuss."
"..."
Even Greed had felt a flicker of bewilderment. A very brief one, of course. On legs quickened by the sharpest read of the situation of anyone present, running down Jenison — encumbered, no less, with a Pope slung across his back — had been a trivial thing.
With his way blocked, Jenison's mind raced. The man had reacted from their very first meeting as though he had come looking for him. He racked his brains for a reason the man might let them go. But the deliberation did not last long.
"How many times is it now, O master of the Divine Vessel?"
"...?"
The words spoken aloud he could not fathom — but the soundless shape of the lips that followed, he could read.
Life. That, unmistakably, was what the man had mouthed.
"...Who the hell are you, you son of a bitch?"
"Haha. Finally in the mood to talk, are we?"