The Saintess Irina (3)
Esmeralda was in a remarkably complicated state of mind.
When she had first come face to face with the trap laid by the demon known as Lilith, her blood had run cold. If Jim had announced back then that he intended to live out his days with his family from now on, she would have had no grounds to stop him.
And yet Jim, the fool, had stepped back without even realizing it might be an operation.
Thinking about it alone was enough to draw a hollow laugh out of her — he really was that dense.
But what had left a sour taste in Esmeralda's mouth was this:
[Note: If he had agreed here, he could have escaped. However, believing that doing so would bring no good to the other party either, he firmly refused.]
Whether or not it had been part of some operation, he had known it was an opportunity. And still, the thought of exploiting someone who might have genuinely lost his son had never once crossed his mind.
And to think he'd complained so much about wanting to escape the Hero Party.
That one conviction of his — to never cause harm to an ordinary person — was something even Esmeralda couldn't help but acknowledge.
Come to think of it, he'd been that way from the very first infiltration. It had been an absurdly crude method, but he had chosen to conjure an entire fictional village out of thin air.
When it would have been far easier to simply destroy a real village and raze it to the ground.
"Jim. I think we're almost there. Thank you for your hard work."
That was why Esmeralda approached Jim with a noticeably gentler attitude.
Of course, that wasn't the only reason she was being kind to him.
"Exciting, isn't it?"
"...Yes. I suppose so."
They were currently on their way to the papal seat of the Heavenly God Order, escorting a demon — or rather, in all practical terms, Esmeralda was marching Jim straight to the executioner's block.
Every step made Jim's face a shade paler, and each time the surface of his thoughts wavered with unease, Esmeralda felt a pang of sympathy. Once they reached that place, breathing itself would likely be agony for him.
But there was nothing to be done. Esmeralda simply could not endure the blasphemous commentary streaming out of Jim's head any longer.
Besides, leaving wounds untended past the point where bandages stopped helping was never a good idea. The injury had been inflicted by a High Demon, and without holy power it would barely heal at all — which meant she needed to reach the temple as quickly as possible. It was simply how things had to be.
And really, what was the harm?
"Jim isn't a demon or a criminal, so there's no problem bringing him to the Order, right?"
"...Yes."
"Exactly."
He'd given his consent, after all!
Would she deny that it was very much a case of forcing mustard down his throat while he wept? No, she would not.
But she would only refrain from denying it. Repenting was another matter entirely.
Time to start whipping this place back into shape. The way he looks at me these days is getting on my nerves.
Lately, Jim had begun looking at her with the gaze of "well, at least she's a woman" instead of "that idiot moron," and it unsettled her.
Wasn't that reason enough?
She was honestly exhausted from being blindsided by the sudden, adolescent-fantasy-style blasphemies that kept erupting out of nowhere.
And so, Esmeralda endured the one-sided assault all the way to the Order's doorstep.
"We've been waiting for you, Hero. And you as well, Jim."
"Hello, Irina. Have you been well?"
Irina Saintis, Saintess of the Heavenly God Order, had come out to greet them, smiling radiantly as if meeting the two of them were the very thing she'd been hoping for.
[Note: She is genuinely delighted to meet the two of them.]
Reading the surface of Irina's thoughts, Esmeralda nodded along.
Well, she was the Order's Saintess, after all.
It wasn't as if she spent every waking hour imagining grinding Esmeralda down to manufacture Holy Relics.
They'd spent enough time together by now to build a genuine rapport — she surely wouldn't entertain any sudden urge to toss her into the millstone.
Granted, she's the shameless witch who'd sob her eyes out at my funeral while grinding up my corpse for relics, but still.
A woman with no conscience whatsoever.
Tucking that unvarnished opinion behind her smile, Esmeralda answered.
"I heard you encountered a Legion Commander. And that you stopped by our temple to have that wound treated."
"Ah — yes, that's right."
Esmeralda flinched at Irina's motion of seizing her hand, then nodded back with a vaguely disgruntled expression.
The sensation of being trapped in a grip made her nod along even as she subtly tried to slip her hand free. Thankfully, it wasn't clamped down hard — it seemed to be merely one of Irina's habits — so escaping wasn't difficult.
What is this?
The Irina reflected in Esmeralda's eyes showed nothing but warmth and welcome. So what was it? This lingering sense of something being off?
Is it just my own paranoia?
Esmeralda dismissed the feeling as nothing — while, of course, never once lowering her guard.
"Please escort the Hero inside."
"Yes, Saintess."
True to her standing as the Order's real power, Irina commanded the priests with practiced ease.
Before long, priests appeared bearing a stretcher — apparently for transporting her.
"Er, I don't really need this much, do I?"
"You do, Hero. You've been pushing an injured body far past its limits this whole time. Perhaps you managed until now, but having come this far, I must insist you get as much rest as possible."
"I... is that so?"
Esmeralda glanced back and forth between the stretcher prepared for her and Irina's face, then finally lay down on it.
Once she settled in, she had to admit nothing could be more comfortable. The wound hadn't actually healed — it had merely been wrapped in bandages — so being able to lie back and travel at ease was genuinely welcome.
She was gazing up at the brilliant sunlight, brows knitting briefly against the glare, when it happened.
Click.
Esmeralda, who had been sprawled on the stretcher basking in the warm sunshine with a grin plastered across her face, suddenly tilted her head at the strange weight of restraints pressing down upon her body.
She stared blankly at the bindings materializing over her limbs one by one, then slowly raised her eyes to Irina again.
[Note: She intends to quietly send her off to the laboratory.]
Irina had long known, at least in vague outline, the nature of the Hero's ability — and so she had deliberately doctored her surface thoughts to toy with her. It was a kind of staged performance, prepared in advance, because Esmeralda's gaze had been subtly ignoring her goodwill from the moment they'd met.
That alone was enough for Esmeralda to start breaking out in a cold sweat.
After all, Irina's suspicions had drawn one step closer to the truth.
"Um... Irina?"
"Rest well, Hero. A few days of sleep and you'll be right as rain."
With an unchanged smile, Irina pressed a syringe into Esmeralda's neck.
"Sl... huh?!"
As consciousness drained away through the mystery syringe embedded in her throat, Esmeralda managed one last thought.
I knew it... I was... right... after... al...
Like a genius detective meeting her final moments, she slumped over without another word.
As if in mourning for her untimely demise, a snore echoed through the air a short while later.
Zzzz—
Thanks to it, Esmeralda — who hadn't slept properly in days — was able to sleep long and deep.
Jim stared at her in sheer disbelief, and only upon noticing the eyes on him did he belatedly turn around. There stood Irina, grinning ear to ear.
"Now then, Jim, allow me to show you around the temple grounds."
"Oh, that's quite all right. I was planning to lodge at an inn nearby—"
In that instant, Irina's gaze, which had been dripping with affection, turned arctic.
"Why, may I ask? You're neither a demon nor a criminal — is there something about the temple you'd rather avoid?"
"N-no, n-not at all! Of course not. Very well then — may I trouble you for the tour?"
"But of course. Just trust me and follow along, Jim."
With a smile in full bloom like a flower, Irina took hold of Jim's hand.
And then, still gripping it, she went toddling off like an excited child.
Her destination was first the chapel — the one place ordinary visitors frequented.
It was also, on occasion, the site of weddings, a place heavy with meaning.
But Jim, whose heart had been fluttering over Esmeralda's small act of kindness, couldn't have conjured up such saccharine thoughts even if he'd tried.
For a demon spy like him, it was nothing short of a one-way march into hell.
Oh, come to think of it...
Jim found himself staring blankly down at Irina's hand wrapped around his own.
Ordinarily, the mere ambient leakage of her holy power would have been agony — yet for some reason, right now, it didn't hurt at all.
For the first time, he truly registered the softness of her hand.
Oh. No. That is not the point. Get a grip, you insane bastard.
Jim roundly chastised himself for letting his heart flutter over the feel of that hand even as he was being dragged toward damnation.
...Though it is soft.
But thoughts, alas, are never quite so easily brought to heel.
First, the chapel.
Then the gardens, the hall where the divine statue stood, the lodgings where the priests lived, and even the places where they worked.
The papal seat of the Heavenly God Order turned out to contain a far greater variety of buildings than one might have expected.
Some of them, it was hard to even guess the purpose of...
"This is the Heresy Reformation Center. Even I can't bring outsiders in here without authorization, so I'm afraid I can't show you the interior."
"I-It's quite all right..."
For most of the tour, once the explanation was over, it turned out to be a place he had never wanted to know about in the first place.
Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he could faintly hear screams — though since nothing had been audible until just now, the odds were good that it was simply his own delusion.
Yes, surely that was it. He must have imagined those phantom wails into existence himself.
"Now then, next is a place I've been simply dying to show you, Jim."
Thirty minutes into being led by the hand through the interior of the Heavenly God Order.
She'd supposedly only just returned from her journey, and yet here she was dragging him all over the place — perhaps she was, in her own way, still a sheltered soul. Then again, he knew well enough how pure the heart of a Saintess could be. Though it was precisely that purity that had kept him in tears without end.
And so, half-running in Irina's wake as she led him through the papal grounds, Jim noticed it —
her footsteps gradually slowing, hesitating, until at last they came to a complete stop.
That was how he knew they had arrived at the destination Irina had spoken of.
The place looked forlorn and desolate, and yet flowers had bloomed there, pushing up through soil and rock — a somewhat unsettling sight, all things considered.
"Jim."
After standing in silence for a while, gazing out at that scenery, Irina finally spoke.
"Jim — are you aware of the Heavenly God Order's sins?"
All he understood was that this was an exceedingly dangerous question to answer.