Kalmash (3)
The primordial language, runes.
It was the language of the gods, a supreme power that contained the world’s foundational laws.
To wield that power, one needed a special resource: the trace of divinity etched into the soul—Mental Image.
For the forgotten gods, Mental Image was infinite. They stood in direct contact with the world’s source, after all, and could replenish whatever they spent whenever they wished.
Humans were different.
With mortal bodies, they could never reach the world’s origin. Which meant…
Once Mental Image is spent, it can’t be refilled.
That was the fundamental difference between gods and humans, the inescapable limit placed on all mortals.
And the thing that let one transcend that limit was the Ring of Ephrasia.
A treasure that defied the laws of the world, a relic steeped in original sin and twisted causality.
Of course, Arkan had no way of knowing the ring existed, so from her perspective, what she saw now probably looked as though…
…I’d broken through a wall.
Keeping my poker face in place, I turned lightly to look behind me.
She had done an excellent job of blocking every last ripple from the violent blast.
Rudine and Adina looked unharmed as well, safely sheltered beneath Arkan’s protection.
But the look Arkan was giving me was anything but ordinary.
She seemed shocked, and yet there was also something almost ecstatic in her expression.
…What am I supposed to do now?
Suddenly, I remembered a passage from the original novel in which Arkan evaluated humanity.
Humans are weak by nature.
But at the same time, they are also the race with the greatest potential.
Within their brief lives of not even a hundred years, they clash with their limits again and again, converge on them, and smash through them.
If one person cannot do it, then a family does; if a family cannot do it, then all of humanity inherits that brilliant flame and carries it forward.
Arkan loved that flame.
For her, who had lived for centuries, the dazzling light humanity passed down was one of the few amusements in existence.
But in the end, humans were still humans.
They were advancing, step by step, toward new turning points, but they remained absurdly weak.
That was a wall.
A colossal wall that the human race could never cross.
And now, she would think she had met the first human to break through it.
……Of course, that was nothing more than a colossal misunderstanding.
“…Ha ha!”
Sure enough, Arkan’s lips stretched upward as though they might split.
It was the exact same reaction she’d had in the original story.
In the future, she would witness the protagonist cross that wall, and from that moment on, the Arkan Monarch Assembly, which had remained neutral for centuries, would side with him for the first time.
And now, the obsession that should have been aimed at the protagonist…
was beginning to veer off in a completely different direction.
“Luke Richter.”
Arkan’s eyes glittered.
She looked like a child who had just been promised a present and couldn’t contain herself.
The line she was about to throw at me had a very high probability of being…
“Do you want to be a lord?”
Ah, shit.
I knew this was coming.
Elfride Trivia.
She had been wandering the streets alone since she was eight.
It was around then that her parents cast her out for abusing sacred power without the Holy Order’s permission, all because she was nothing but a commoner.
“Mother! I was wrong! Please forgive me!”
“Get out! What, you won’t? Who do you think your parents are, anyway?”
“It’s cold… please…”
“If I have to cut off that wrist before you move, I swear—get out of my sight!”
“I know I was wrong, I know I was…”
The holy power to heal wounds and purify evil.
That power belonged solely to the Holy Order.
So when someone outside the order abused it, they were branded a heretic and cast aside.
In a world this merciless, an eight-year-old girl with no one behind her and a heretic’s mark on her was effectively condemned to death.
To abandon one’s own child over something as trivial as violating the Holy Order’s precepts was unthinkably barbaric, yet that barbarity was simply the spirit—and the madness—of the age they lived in.
The power of rumors spreading from mouth to mouth was beyond imagination, so even finding ordinary work was nearly impossible.
There was no kind-hearted employer willing to hire a little girl stamped as a heretic.
In an instant, she lost her family and her home and was reduced to drifting from street to street, begging for scraps.
She had no choice but to continue a miserable life, rummaging through garbage to survive.
“Child.”
“……”
“Would you not come with me to the Holy Order?”
“……Yes.”
And so, when the Holy Order finally noticed her.
When a man offered to take her with him to the Holy Order.
Elfride could not bring herself to refuse.
It was like the whisper of an angel come to save her.
“From this day forward, you are a member of the Holy Order. That means you are family now.”
“……Then you won’t abandon me?”
“Of course not. A god does not abandon the faithful. Not like your parents, in any case.”
Unlike the parents who had tossed her away as if she were baggage, the man’s claim that a god would never forsake a believer was sweet to her ears.
It was born of deprivation, but Elfride had no intention of worrying about that.
She didn’t want to think too deeply about anything.
Being free from hunger and cold for the first time was more than enough to satisfy her.
“You were born with sacred power.”
“……”
“There’s no need to be frightened. Being born with the power of a god is something to be celebrated. It was surely the will of that god that you were blessed with such a gift. Still, power comes with responsibility. There is work you can do for the Holy Order. Well? What do you say?”
“Yes. I’ll do it.”
Elfride accepted the Holy Order’s offer without hesitation.
At the time, the Holy Order was everything to her, and she could not even imagine acting against its will, so there was no reason to refuse a request that her abilities were needed for.
“From today onward, you will be a substitute.”
“A substitute?”
“What do you know about the saintess?”
“A messenger of god. A being who fights against evil and corruption.”
“You know your place well. From today onward, you will serve as the saintess’s substitute.”
Me?
How?
“We need your sacred power.”
“…Doesn’t the saintess have sacred power of her own?”
“That’s none of your concern. There simply happens to be a use for your power.”
“What kind of use?”
It was a serious question, as far as she was concerned.
She was both a member of the Holy Order and a faithful believer, so there was no reason for her to refuse their request.
“The Demon King has descended into the mortal world.”
“The Demon King?”
“Yes, a fragment of chaos that pursues primordial evil.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Of course it’s dangerous! Fragments of chaos were born to bring evil into reality. That means their roots are rotten from the very beginning.”
The Demon King’s descent.
With that, the continent was plunged back into chaos.
In response, the imperial family assembled an expedition to subjugate the Demon King, and before long, they became known as the Hero Party.
Rumor had it that the saintess of the Holy Order had also joined that expedition, but in truth, that was not the case.
The reality was that Elfride, with her overwhelming sacred power, had impersonated the saintess and taken part in the campaign in her place, standing in for the useless one the Holy Order had sent.
The Demon King campaign was brutal.
They faced countless trials, collapsed before crises, and eventually overcame them all.
Through it, Elfride grew as well.
And she came to understand something: her sacred power was anything but ordinary.
“You’re really the fake saintess, right?”
“…Yes.”
“Good grief. Fake, my ass. Since when is the fake more capable than the real one? No matter how I look at it, the Holy Order played you for a fool. Do you even know the kind of things those bastards get up to while borrowing god’s name?”
“……”
What the hero said was true.
Elfride, not the impostor, was the real saintess.
She was an apostle chosen and ordained directly by god, not by the Holy Order.
But she shook her head and brushed the thought aside.
There was no need to want more, nor any reason to.
Finishing the mission she had been given and returning safely—those were the only things Elfride had to do.
Standing by and watching.
That was the choice she made.
And the price of that choice was catastrophic.
“M-Malice!”
“Everyone, get away!”
“Elfride! What are you doing over there? Move, now!”
The Demon King’s body was nothing more than a shell.
They succeeded in taking his head with the holy sword, but the chaotic malice dwelling within his soul burst forth at terrifying speed.
And the target of that outpouring was…
“Elfride!!!!”
Elfride Trivia.
The saintess herself.
The curse of chaos sank deep into her soul.
It gnawed at her reason and poured madness into the cracks.
Her skin gradually rotted away, and even controlling her own mind became a burden she could barely endure.
The agony was so intense that she wished, more than anything, for death to come quickly.
But the tremendous sacred power lodged within her would not even allow that.
“You’ve done well, Elfride.”
“Please… save me…”
“Ha ha, what are you talking about? You’re perfectly alive, aren’t you?”
She clung to the last shreds of hope and made her way back to the Holy Order.
But the man who had taken her in only smiled.
“If only I could die…”
“That won’t do. You think the world’s causality would allow your death?”
What?
Causality?
“Causality means role. And if someone who has been given a role suddenly dies, that causes trouble, doesn’t it? That is why the world protects such people—until they can complete the role they were given. That is what it means to be bound by causality.”
“Then this sacred power too…”
“Exactly! It exists because it would be troublesome if you died before finishing the role assigned to you, Elfride. If you don’t believe me, try it right now. See whether you can achieve the kind of death you want.”
He was right.
Whether she threw herself from a building or stabbed her throat with a knife, she could not die.
That was what it meant to be a being protected by the world… a being bound by causality.
“In any case, good work. Now that you’ve outlived your usefulness, the Holy Order can no longer keep you.”
“……What?”
“You said you wanted to die, didn’t you? Then go to Blackmore. Who knows? If you cross the boundary of chaos, maybe death will finally find you.”
She had been discarded.
The claim that a god never abandons the faithful was a lie.
Everything was a fraud.
She wanted revenge. She wanted to burn the world to ash. Yet stronger than all of that was her desire to die.
Perhaps the state of the body follows the state of the mind, because that desire only grew stronger as the days passed.
She walked without direction.
She walked, and walked, and walked some more.
Eventually she left the city and headed toward the demon wilderness, crossing the boundary at last.
All she could do was wait for death, bound in an endless chain of pain.
And then…
“……”
A man appeared before Elfride.
Her vision was blurred.
Only the indistinct figure of a man coming toward her, and reaching out a hand, remained carved into her mind.
The man’s clear blue eyes fixed on Elfride.
The moment she met that gaze, a lump rose in her throat as if she might choke.
His hand reached toward her, and his fingertips brushed her forehead.
A soft, warm, unnameable heat seized hold of her reason.
Whoosh—
Her thoughts could not keep up with what was happening.
And yet, for some reason, the unbearable agony that had seemed impossible to endure began to fade away.
At that very instant, something hot spilled from the corner of Elfride’s eyes and ran down her cheeks.
It was an emotion far too unfamiliar to name.
It was salvation.