Saintess Irina (5)
Esmeralda was confident in her acting. It had been three years since she'd formed the Hero Party — three whole years of playing the fool and enduring. Her patience and composure were anything but ordinary.
“Die! Die, you perverted bastard!”
Yes, she probably could have held out even longer — if only Jim weren't tormenting her so.
Unfortunately, she was still a greenhorn of a hero. That was Esmeralda for you.
Face flushed hot, she began strangling Jim in earnest. She was far too worked up to even entertain the thought that he might be reading her mind, and her face had gone so red it looked ready to burst.
“W-Wait, it was a j-joke…….”
“What?”
“It was a joke, Lady Esmeralda.”
“You call that a joke?”
The misunderstanding had been cleared up, but her anger had not. Given how relentlessly she'd been exposed to Jim's shameless lust lately, an overreaction was only natural.
“What on earth were you even thinking? I am deeply disappointed in you, Hero.”
Jim fussed with his clothes and grumbled as though he were the wronged party, but Esmeralda could only find his attitude absurd.
While you were strangling me, I was vividly recalling the sensation of your thighs straddling me. I am finding it tremendously regrettable.
“And you're one to talk……?”
Resentment. But more than that, the stifling frustration of knowing yet being unable to say it aloud. The unfairness of her position — turned into the one-sided villainess — nearly brought tears to Esmeralda's eyes.
“……So you're telling me you didn't actually do anything to me?”
“Well, I wouldn't say I did *nothing* at—”
Jim desperately grappled with her wrist as it came for his throat once more. This time it was different from before. This wasn't a squeeze; this was a grip meant to snap bone.
“I was trying to wake you up! I was trying to wake you!”
“……You swear?”
“Yes!”
Had I known I'd be choked like this, I should have at least gone for your chest instead.
Esmeralda was left speechless.
It was a relief he hadn't crossed the line — but knowing his inner thoughts were like that… Perhaps killing him right here and now really would be the path to peace and prosperity for all the world.
But she was the Hero. She endured, with superhuman willpower.
“Uuugh…….”
She didn't kill him — but the shoulder he'd seized and shaken to wake her up now burned oddly warm. Esmeralda seriously began to wonder whether, over the course of their long journey, she hadn't quietly piled up some lust of her own.
H-How utterly shameless….
She'd never once permitted herself even thoughts on the subject before, so the self-loathing that crashed down on her was inevitable.
By the time Esmeralda had clawed her way out of that self-loathing and Jim had escaped his bout of asphyxiation, the two of them could finally sit down and discuss the situation in earnest.
“What's the last thing you remember?”
“Hmm, well, you see…….”
Digging through his memories, Jim laid everything out in as much detail as he could manage. And having heard it all, Esmeralda was able to compress every single one of his actions into a single word.
“So what you're telling me is that you went on a date. I see. Perfectly clear. While I lay there unconscious with a syringe jammed in my neck, you were off skipping through the daisies with Irina. How utterly heartwarming.”
“Lady Esmeralda, you seem to be in a poor mood lately — could it perhaps be that time of the month, the magic—”
“That's sexual harassment.”
“My apologies.”
On reflection, I believe it may indeed be her weekly Spell of the Month.
Esmeralda heaved a long, deep sigh. You could muzzle the mouth, but you couldn't muzzle the mind.
And she had to admit that her recent failures at playing the fool — the glimpses of her true self slipping through — were partly her own fault. Everything about her had been a lie from the start, a portrait painted in falsehoods. If she tried to keep up the charade even in a crisis like this one, she'd be booking a one-way date with the afterlife in no time.
And the thought of going on a date with Jim, of all people, was horrifying enough on its own.
Given how things stand… it really does look like Irina went and did it.
The fact that the two of them had been locked up here said as much. There was no explaining this away. What possible excuse could there be for imprisoning the Hero and Jim together?
Of course, she'd have no trouble justifying it to everyone else.
Convincing herself, on the other hand, was a lost cause from the very beginning.
Which is to say — Irina had never intended to persuade Esmeralda at all. After all, once her plan came to fruition, Esmeralda would already have become the Holy Relic of the Heavenly God Order.
But why on earth?
What Irina was about to do was easy enough to guess. What Esmeralda couldn't fathom for the life of her was why it had to happen now — why she'd abandon her duty as a member of the Hero Party, the very mission of felling the Demon King, to do it.
Had the Demon King frightened her at the last moment? Had she somehow become convinced this journey was doomed to fail?
Or perhaps…
“Ah, come to think of it, we had one last conversation before everything happened.”
“What kind of conversation?”
“Hmm… something like, 'Do you believe miracles exist in this world?'”
“And how did you answer?”
“I said there probably weren't any.”
Jim walked her through what had happened back then, explaining it thoroughly. And to her surprise, Esmeralda found his reasoning rather sound.
If miracles don't exist — if everything is mere coincidence — then one could simply choose to regard the process that led to each coincidence as a miracle. The outcome never changes; it's only a difference of perspective. But that alone was enough to reshape how a person thinks.
It was a chronic ailment the Heavenly God Order had carried for ages, which made Jim's little koan unexpectedly convincing.
“And then I said — someone like me joining the Hero Party, surely that counts as a miracle too, no?”
“Ah….”
But the answer Jim gave at the end made Esmeralda understand everything.
Jim's joining was no miracle. It wasn't even coincidence.
It was meticulously, thoroughly planned.
And he'd presented that as his example — so the credibility of all his eloquent philosophizing beforehand could plummet straight down in an instant, and no one would blink.
“Jim… you really went and did it.”
“……Did I do something wrong? Is that why things turned out this way?”
“Unfortunately, it seems you poked Irina right in her reverse scale.”
“Then what's going to happen to me?”
“Honestly, I couldn't say — but I suspect you'll be reduced to a handful of blood spatter.”
Under the circumstances, all Esmeralda could do was share her best guess at what Irina might be thinking.
She couldn't do it alone. This place was, for all practical purposes, the beating heart of the Heavenly God Order. In a one-on-one fight, toppling Irina wouldn't even be a problem — but if she turned the Order's entire fighting force against them, defeat was all but guaranteed.
I don't know why she locked Jim up like me, but she's clearly still mindful of him, one way or another.
So she wouldn't try to kill him just yet. Besides, the special power Jim carried was something only she knew about.
He can't possibly be one of Irina's test subjects. She probably just locked him up on the off chance of some rebellion.
Unfortunately, Esmeralda had no inkling of what being a half-demon meant to Irina. She didn't even know that his mixed blood could be a problem in the first place. All she knew was the mysterious trait called Blue Blood — and she'd only confirmed its existence recently, so she resolved, without much weight on her heart, to make use of Jim.
It was the moment Jim fell back into hell.
“Good. Understood? Irina isn't going to kill you anyway, so all you need to do is run off in another direction and draw her eyes.”
“Lady Esmeralda, may I ask you just one question?”
“We don't have time, so make it fast.”
“I don't really understand why you think the Saintess would kill you.”
“……I believe she intends to use my corpse to create a Holy Relic for the Heavenly God Order. Because I'm—”
“—the Hero,” Jim finished for her.
The world held many gods. And the vast majority of them were folk deities and miscellaneous minor spirits. That was precisely why the authority of the Heavenly God — the one god who had ever granted true miracles to this world — had been so overwhelming.
But the Heavenly God was gone now. The Order had collapsed once before, and the sheer filth of the political scheming it must have waded through to claw its way back to this position was unpleasant just to imagine.
And it was in that very situation that the Hero appeared.
The Hero was a 'Seed of Miracles,' born of folk gods and stray spirits and the Heavenly God itself combined. Her very existence meant she was, in effect, half an apostle of godhood.
To grind that girl down and forge from her a ritual device that would reproduce the Heavenly God's miracles — that was Irina's plan.
Esmeralda laid out the whole situation for Jim, weaving together her deductions with everything she'd uncovered so far.
“Do you follow?”
“Lady Esmeralda, you're sharper than I gave you credit for. You really do know everything, don't you?”
“…….”
Esmeralda wanted nothing more than to plant her fist squarely in that grinning mouth, inappropriate as the moment was for laughter.
“But you really are the Hero, after all. To think you genuinely believed all that. The sweet, pure, innocent Saintess would never do such a thing — isn't that right?”
“You son of a—”
It was the gap between image and reality — a gap Esmeralda herself had built. Grinding her teeth, she knew the fault lay with her, and so she swallowed the punch.
“Fine. Fine, let's say that's true. But we are currently locked in a cell. Go on, then — let's pretend Irina is as sweet and pure as you say. So what do you call this situation?”
“Hmm….”
“No — actually, let's push the assumption all the way. What if the one who did this wasn't Irina? Then someone else did it — and the conclusion comes out the same, doesn't it? It happened inside the Heavenly God Order, didn't it?”
Esmeralda gestured toward the drooping bars and the view beyond them. This was still the Heavenly God Order's interior. Which meant that even if it wasn't Irina, someone connected to the Order had done this.
And what reason could the Order possibly have for holding the Hero captive?
“Whoever did it, the conclusion is the same. That's all there is to it.”
“No, Lady Esmeralda. There is a fatal flaw in your reasoning.”
“Fine. Talk. I'll do my best not to punch you.”
For some reason, Jim flinched for an instant at Esmeralda's frosty demeanor — but then he cautiously opened his mouth.
However clever you may be, you are still, in the end, a fool.
At that brief glimpse of his inner thoughts, Esmeralda's fist clenched, cocked and ready to strike — but Jim got his opinion out even faster.
“To begin with, a Holy Relic cannot be made from the Hero's corpse.”
How could you possibly know that?
He looked so utterly certain of it that Esmeralda found herself unable to say another word.