Saintess Irina (4)
I hadn't planned on bringing him here in the first place. It just sort of happened. Being in the presence of a being as miraculous as Jim had softened my heart, that was all.
Yes—he was the last living proof of the miracle the Heavenly God had left behind in this world.
I had thought that simply being near him might yield a clue to the god who had vanished.
Perhaps that was why I'd been so giddy. I was still the Saintess of the Heavenly God Order, after all. I still desperately hoped the god would look upon this world once more.
"This place, you see, is where the Former Pope dragged the Heavenly God down from heaven."
The Order's most shameful stain.
Information that should have been buried in desperate haste had long since become an open secret. The Demon King's army surely knew of it as well—one of the ringleaders of that atrocity had been the Demon King himself.
The Pope of the Heavenly God Order and the Demon King had joined hands to drag their god down from His throne and seize it for themselves. But they had failed.
What remained in the aftermath was this vast, desolate stretch of empty ground.
Even now, the years had buried it so thoroughly that barely a trace of it remained—though it had only been seven years, give or take.
In those seven years, the Heavenly God Order had been thrown alive into hell, and I had clawed my way up from the bottom to restore things to this point.
How much blood had been spilled along the way? How much blood had I made others spill?
And how many transgressions had I been forced to turn a blind eye to?
"Since that day, the Heavenly God has vanished without a trace. Regrettably, He did not reclaim the divine power already bestowed upon us—but since then, not a single believer has awakened new divine power."
Once the object of your faith betrayed you, decline was only natural.
But if we simply fell like that—if we simply ended—then everyone who had lived in ignorance, devoting their lives to their faith, would meet a meaningless end. Wouldn't they?
"Jim, are there such things as miracles in this world? Do you believe they exist?"
The Heavenly God Order had once been the most powerful faith on the continent because the Heavenly God was a being who bestowed miracles upon this world—because He was a being who let people hold onto hope even in the face of the impossible.
But what of the world now that He was gone? What was it becoming?
When something was judged impossible, were we simply meant to accept defeat with empty hands, accept death, accept annihilation?
Anyone had the right to dream of a miracle. Even if it was a lie.
"A miracle is..."
As always, Irina waited for Jim's answer behind a falsified smile.
Honestly, it didn't matter what he said. His very existence testified to a god's miracle—but that could hardly serve as proof that the Heavenly God would return.
Yes, she knew.
She knew she was drawing comfort from Jim's existence itself.
She knew she was forcibly attaching reasons to something that was neither more nor less than what it was, using them as pretext to investigate him, to torment him.
"It will exist."
At that hopeful answer, Irina secretly sneered and shot back.
"And if it's merely a coincidence that looks that way? If it's not a miracle that overturned the impossible, but simply someone finding an opening in something that was always possible?"
"Then I would choose to call the reclaiming of that opening a miracle."
"I'm sorry?"
"Isn't it? Even if it was coincidence—if it's the sort of thing that makes you cry out, 'A miracle happened, just this once!'—then surely it was a brilliant idea the original me could never have come up with on my own."
Jim was brazen.
Brazenly admitting his own shortcomings, and affirming miracles on the strength of them.
"A good-for-nothing like me has survived more than two years in the Hero Party, hasn't he? If that isn't a miracle, what is? Haha."
Irina stared blankly at Jim for a long moment before a bitter smile crossed her face.
Fine—she would admit it. For an instant, she had almost wavered. The idea that those things could be miracles if you thought of them that way had genuinely tempted her.
But the example he tacked on afterward dragged her back to reality in a heartbeat.
Jim's joining the party had been planned from beginning to end.
There had been no miracle in it. Not even a coincidence.
'And yet...'
Just as she was about to dismiss his opinion, Irina turned back and studied Jim's foolish expression once more.
'The fact that I found you at all—that much might count as a coincidence, I suppose.'
For Jim and the Demon King's army, everything was calculation. But for Irina, who had stumbled upon a half-blood demon, it had been a coincidence like a miracle.
Merely thinking it made Irina, for some reason, unable to stop the smile rising to her lips.
Not the practiced, hypocritical smile she always wore before others, but a smile that bloomed entirely of its own accord.
A smile beautiful enough to be sad.
"You're right. Just thinking of it that way is a small comfort. Thank you, Jim."
"Haha! Think nothing of it."
There were still no miracles in this world.
Everything that looked like a miracle was nothing more than a coincidence with promise.
But perhaps meeting that coincidence at all was itself the miracle.
Confronted with such a circular, word-game answer—one that changed nothing—Irina kept her smile intact and quietly lost interest in Jim.
"Thank you, Jim. Thanks to you, I feel lighter."
Miracles do not come.
What people call miracles are, in the end, only coincidence.
And if Jim insisted that the arrival of that coincidence was itself the miracle—
'Then I will go forward and create miracles with my own hands.'
Irina wanted to make miracles, even if it meant doing it by cruel means.
So that people could pray with peace of mind. So that no one would give up in the face of the impossible. A sacrifice of the few for the sake of the many.
Peace, even if it had to be a lie.
"...Shall we head back now, Jim? You've only just arrived, and I feel I've been terribly childish, dragging you along like this."
"Oh, not at all. I got to see plenty of interesting things, thanks to you."
"I appreciate you saying so. Then let me show you where you'll be staying."
Irina no longer took Jim by the hand and led him.
She would wait on no miracle now. She intended to move with her own two hands and return miracles to this world.
Yes—by any means necessary. It didn't matter, so long as people didn't simply die empty deaths.
She intended to cross the line.
The last faint line she had held herself to until now.
"Ah..."
Suddenly turning around, Irina looked upon it.
The place where the Former Pope had once dragged down the Heavenly God and tried to usurp His divinity—the very stain upon the Order.
Back then, the aftermath of that day's deed had reduced this ground to little more than wasteland. That enormous scar was something everyone in the Heavenly God Order had been forced to carry.
But what she saw now, half-buried beneath the slow current of time, had faded until neither the wound nor the lesson remained—nothing but ambiguous, indistinct land.
Esmeralda came to with a start, flailing upright in the infirmary bed.
"Hah?!"
She remembered the final moment. Irina driving a syringe into her neck, declaring she would carry her off to the laboratory.
And so Esmeralda frantically patted herself down, searching for wherever something might have gone wrong.
After a good while of rolling up her sleeves and running her hands over her body looking for problems, Esmeralda belatedly noticed the gaze fixed upon her.
Simply focusing on the scene unfolding before my eyes at this very moment.
"Ah..."
Jim was watching Esmeralda with an expression of tremendous, solemn earnestness.
He stared straight at her as though determined to brand this very instant into his memory forever.
"Would you mind taking your eyes off me?"
"Ah, my apologies. Greetings, Hero. I came to check on you. You look to be in excellent health—truly a relief. The divine magic of the Heavenly God Order really is remarkable."
"..."
Esmeralda glowered at Jim for a long moment as he turned his gaze away with the utmost composure, then finally let out a sigh.
Utterly incapable of acting on any normal occasion, and yet when it came to moments like this, he was second to none.
Currently feeling a profound sense of regret.
If Esmeralda hadn't been able to read Jim's inner thoughts, she might have wondered whether she was the one overreacting.
Esmeralda eyed Jim sideways—noting how conspicuously his lust had grown of late—then heaved a deep sigh.
'I'm the root cause of it, so I can hardly scold him for it... honestly.'
The real problem was that Esmeralda had panicked and gone checking her own body without looking around first.
Jim had merely harbored a lustful thought upon stumbling into the situation by chance.
Esmeralda had no grounds to be angry. If anything, the only thing worth getting angry at was her own carelessness.
Of course, his shameless ogling even after she'd called him out on it was unpleasant.
But still...
'Being this attractive is simply beyond my control. Hmm.'
Esmeralda's mood lifted.
She had been under crushing mental strain from every direction lately, and a tiny sliver of accomplishment like this was enough to make her happy.
It was a sorry state of affairs.
"Jim, nothing strange happened while I was asleep, right?"
"I really couldn't say."
"Really? Then how long was I out?"
"Haha, I couldn't tell you that either. I was asleep until just a short while ago myself. I only woke up today, in fact."
"...?"
Something was off here.
Before the belatedly suspicious Esmeralda could ask, Jim shrugged and answered.
"We're under confinement, you see."
"You said you came to check on me?"
"The entire building's been sealed off. I'm in the room next door."
Only after hearing Jim's words did Esmeralda turn to look at the window—and there it was.
A heavy lattice of sturdy iron bars.
In that bewildering situation, Esmeralda had one thing she needed to confirm above all else.
"While I was asleep—tell me you didn't do anything strange to me?!"
It was a matter of the utmost importance.
"Well... that rather depends on where 'strange things' begins and ends, doesn't it?"
"You absolute lunatic!"