Chapter 46
Chapter 46
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 46
Chapter Title: The Reaper's Greeting
-----------------------------------------------------------------
“An angel...? That giant from just now was an angel?”
Viscount Leighton seemed quite taken aback. The moment the angel vanished, he latched onto me, firing off one question after another—yet no matter how I answered, more just kept coming.
“One of the many retainers who serve the Lord. We’re well acquainted, actually.”
“B-But it looked nothing like the angels I’d imagined...”
The easygoing smile from earlier was gone from Viscount Leighton’s face as he scratched his head vigorously. All that remained was a head brimming with tangled thoughts on the verge of bursting and eyes flickering with unease.
“Did the Ancient Gods originally command angels like that...?”
The princess was just as stunned. Viscount Leighton answered her.
“The Ancient Gods are the laws of the universe. What need would laws have for angels? They themselves permeate every corner of this cosmos already, so there’s no reason to create or command such beings. Only personal gods create angels.”
“But no matter how I think about it, it’s completely different from the angels we know?”
A form and build indistinguishable from a human’s, peerless beauty. Pristine white wings untouched by blemish and a halo floating above its head.
That’s the image I’d pictured too, before meeting the Lord’s angels. Everyone said so, everyone thought so.
I’d only assumed they each had distinctive appearances. Was that really something to brood over with such grave expressions?
“There is one possibility.”
After much deliberation, Viscount Leighton seemed to have reached some conclusion.
“The one the priest serves is likely a new form of divinity we’ve never encountered before. An alien divinity beyond our ability even to interpret. I’ve never heard tales of such gods on the continent, after all.”
“Not an Ancient God, but now an outer god?”
I could only laugh hollowly. Unless the Lord Himself revealed what He truly was, all these guesses were nothing but baseless speculation—and I knew that full well.
I’d thought it over time and again, but in truth, what He was didn’t matter.
What intrigued me instead was why He’d chosen me and granted me His power.
“Viscount. No matter how we rack our brains together, we’ll only deepen the mystery of who the Lord is. We can’t even fathom His will—how could we possibly grasp His essence?”
What mattered was that He had heard Viscount Leighton’s plight and bestowed a miracle upon me to resolve it.
The miracle, the Bell of Commandments. I summoned the miracle’s bell that called forth mysteries, grasped it in my hand, and showed it to Viscount Leighton. He flinched in surprise at the sudden appearance of the bell, then eyed it curiously. Suddenly, realization dawned in his eyes as he opened his mouth.
“No way, that’s...”
“It’s the miracle the Lord granted me after hearing your second prayer, Viscount.
The Lord respects human free will
and does not wish for humans to lose their freedom and fail to fulfill their intentions.
The Bell of Commandments is a miracle that exists for those who are bound.
It shatters restraints, casts off shackles, and ultimately brings freedom—that must be why the Lord granted me this miracle: because you, Viscount Leighton, were not truly free.
The Lord always sees ahead of me,
and whatever He deems I need always proves truly necessary.
It wasn’t hard to speculate that far.
“So, will you tell me?”
No matter how grand the miracle, what meaning does it hold without someone in need? A miracle becomes a miracle only when there is one to receive it.
I didn’t know why this miracle—meant to grant freedom to those bound from birth—was necessary for Viscount Leighton. The Lord knew, but I didn’t. Unless he himself spoke of it, I probably never would.
“Viscount Leighton. Are you... being manipulated by someone?”
*****
Not everyone who was born wanted to be born,
but there were children rejected from the very moment they drew breath.
There were young lives extinguished before they could even develop awareness or sentience. Places where, walking the roads, children’s bones caught underfoot like mere pebbles.
It was perhaps inevitable that a reaper would be born on Meso Mountain, where those children lay buried.
The will to live, the desire for it, the fear of being unwelcome.
Embracing raw anger at a world that rejected them and the drive to survive, the god was born that way. It inhaled the piled-up grudges and forged its own divinity. A vengeful spirit transcended its bounds and became a god at last.
What is a god? A being that gathers human desires and receives prayers.
Is there any desire more fervent than the will to live? Newborns are pure. Infants know nothing of wealth, glory, or power—only the longing to be loved and the yearning to survive. Those pure desires coalesced into a strand of divinity.
“Why didn’t you love us?”
The reaper, possessing Leighton’s son’s body, murmured. It whispered into the ear of Laila, who had hanged herself with a noose—whispered again and again. Even as a god, it remained a child.
Craving love, yearning for it. Yet the source of its power lay on the opposite side of love.
It pursued, but could never reach. Thus, the reaper was twisted from the start.
To prevent such births, priests from churches led by the Triple Gods scatter holy rites and divine power over places thick with death. They don’t even accept payment in those cases.
For reapers are the fiercest rivals to the gods they serve. Allowing one to emerge invites endless calamity. Avarice for a few coins could doom humanity beyond endurance.
Yet the culling of vampire newborns had been conducted in utmost secrecy, and this fiefdom itself was deeply hostile to priests. Divine power was lethal to vampires too, after all.
In the end, the dead children’s grudges simply accumulated until this disaster erupted.
Bang bang!
Oblivious, someone pounded on the door. The reaper turned its eerie gaze toward it.
No response came from within, and soon the door splintered with a crash. Lord-class vampires, dispatched on Duchess Shumira’s orders, poured in one after another.
“Laila. This is the queen’s command. You bore a mongrel and hid it all this time? Did you think the queen wouldn’t find out?”
“Let’s make this easy. You know you can’t defy the queen anyway. Hand over that mongrel you birthed right now. If you can’t bring yourself to kill it, we’ll do it for you.”
“And divorce Leighton immediately, then take seed from another lord... What the—?”
Viscount Leighton and Laila had thought they were evading Duchess Shumira’s eyes, but the duchess already knew they’d birthed a monstrosity.
She’d simply chosen not to bring it up until now. Once she resolved to purge Leighton, merely dredging up the unspoken was enough.
Some of those she sent sneered at Laila’s misfortune; others pitied her.
But the progenitor’s word was absolute. Defiance was unthinkable. If she decreed Leighton’s son’s death and his wife’s pairing with another, none could oppose it.
The progenitor was the absolute ruler of all vampires, sovereign over their very flesh.
Yet what they found upon entering to carry out the order was a child quietly regarding them.
And a woman dangling from a noose, swaying limply. Execution? Nonsense—everything was already over. The reaper’s eyes gleamed as it beheld them.
“You—you, who are you?!”
“Laila...? How did you commit suicide...?”
Duchess Shumira had long forbidden her subordinate vampires from suicide using her dominion power. Yet Laila had hanged herself. That fact alone alerted every vampire to the anomaly.
Above all, that thing wore a vampire’s form but was no vampire.
An infant not yet two years old stood firmly on its own two feet, gazing at them with eyes no child that age could possess. A chill gripped their spines.
“Kill it!”
One vampire, spine tingling, seized a poker and swung at the child. He’d infused it with mana, yet not a scratch appeared; its skin remained unmarred.
Another kicked at it, but the racket yielded nothing—the child didn’t budge an inch. Not even a blink.
You won’t love us?
A hush fell, broken only when the child smiled faintly. No answer came.
The instant it smiled, the kicker’s and poker-wielder’s heads burst with a splat. Two corpses slumped into being, and silence stretched long.
They rubbed their eyes, unable to credit what they’d seen.
Only then did they realize this was no ordinary being.
They retreated hesitantly, but though they didn’t know the child, the reaper knew them. These Lord-class were the very ones who’d slain and buried the children on Meso Mountain.
“Ha ha.”
The reaper laughed once, then toddled toward the door. None dared bar its path. The vampires, backing away instinctively, stared wide-eyed down the dark corridor.
The thing that exited the door vanished without a trace, leaving only thick shadows cloaking the hall.
It all felt like a nightmare, devoid of reality—save for the one hanged corpse and two with shattered skulls, proving it all too real.
Only belatedly did Lord Bellon grasp what he’d witnessed and stagger. Terror filled his voice.
“R-Reaper...!”
The exceedingly rare abomination had been born in their fiefdom.
This was a catastrophe of the ages, beyond their power to overcome. They needed to consult the queen swiftly, devise countermeasures... countermeasures...
Crack!
His head split, blood gushing. Bellon collapsed unbidden, thuds echoing from every side. He wasn’t the only one falling.
‘Curse...’
His fading mind grasped the truth, but
‘It didn’t just leave...’
Even knowing, he couldn’t speak—and even if he had, none would heed.
A futile truth. The skull-smashed piled on the floor. Gods aren’t foes for numbers; lesser beings are meaningless, no matter how many.
To challenge a god, humanity needed heroes of commensurate might.
Regrettably, no vampire save Duchess Shumira possessed such strength. The reaper laughed once more and slowly departed the house. It yearned for a world vaster than this fiefdom.
Now, the child greeted the world.
It wondered what greeting the world would return.
* * *