Where Miracles Die
Crack!
Esmeralda's decisive blow.
She had spoken as if it would be the finishing move, and she had struck as if it were — but of course, there was no chance in hell that a single punch would put Irina down.
She was a member of the Hero Party. A woman who had weathered every trial imaginable at their side was hardly going to collapse from one fist.
'Come on, show me. Your doubts, your contradictions. Show me the reason you had to suffer, to agonize, to break apart in the first place……!'
Irina had been far too careless this time, nothing like her usual self. If she had truly intended to turn the girl into a holy relic, she should have made certain she never woke up at all. And even if that wasn't the plan, she should at least have taken minimal measures to keep her from moving.
But she hadn't.
She had locked Irina in nothing more than a prison she could escape from at will, and hadn't even bothered posting guards to watch it. And now her own subordinates were begging her to talk Irina down. Could the outcome have been any more obvious?
Irina's brainwashing deceived even herself. Wrapped in the conviction that it was simply what had to be done, it made her do the very things she despised. She should have gone mad — and she had chosen, willingly, to go mad.
But that could not be allowed. She could deceive the whole world if she had to — herself, never. And if the deception was fragile enough to show even to other people's eyes, all the more so.
"Haap!"
The battle continued. Esmeralda pressed forward, determined to save even the woman who wanted to grind her down into a holy relic — because that was the path she believed in, the path she had chosen to walk.
The Irina she had watched all this time was not the sort of person to leap to conclusions, no matter what dark thoughts crossed her mind. Esmeralda might not trust Irina, but she trusted herself. She trusted the part of her that believed Irina would never actually go through with it.
With that desperate resolve, Esmeralda strode toward Irina, who was flying backward from the blow to her face.
And in that very moment —
Crack!
"Huh?"
Irina's morningstar came hurtling straight at Esmeralda's face. True to its name, stars bloomed before her eyes.
A magnificent counterattack, delivered with the crushing force of someone who had never known a moment's hesitation.
Well — of course she hesitated nothing. This was a woman who had concluded that she should be rendered down into a holy relic in the first place.
'This bitch hit my face?'
The wound wasn't severe. It was, after all, a single strike from a priestess. But there was no overlooking the fact that the instrument in question was a spiked morningstar. Dodging by a hair's breadth and escaping a fatal blow, Esmeralda thought:
'How dare she?'
No — the opposite. The instant her face was struck, her mind went completely white. She forgot why she was even fighting, and she forgot the fact that she had been the one to plant her fist in Irina's face first. That was simply how a rattled head worked — all composure scattered to the winds.
Esmeralda's follow-up attack carried nothing but raw emotion.
"Kgh!"
Her thunderous fist smashed into Irina's waist this time. Discipline abandoned, the greater cause forgotten, she gave full vent to a single thought — 'This lunatic actually hit me in the face?!' — and nothing else.
Her heart was in the right place, but Esmeralda was still an unripe hero. Being swept away by her feelings was only natural.
'Haa. Losing your composure over this much? How utterly predictable, Lady Hero.'
But Irina was the inverse. A woman who had lived her whole life as a cleric could keep her head even inside a scene this theatrical.
Yes — she was calm. Calmly, even as her body bent and went flying, she seized a fistful of Esmeralda's hair.
"Kyaa?!"
Another counterstrike trampling a woman's pride — and Esmeralda's mind went whiter still.
The opponent was no longer someone to persuade and save, but a sworn archenemy who needed putting in her place. If she grabs your hair, you grab hers back. That was justice. And so Esmeralda acted on the most common-sense logic imaginable.
Which was why—
"Huh?"
The arm reaching for Irina's snow-white hair was caught midair by a pair of manacles that appeared out of nowhere.
Yes, Irina was calm. Calm — which was precisely why she had goaded Esmeralda on.
Brainwashing. Suggestion. Intimidation. Agitation. The arts of moving hearts, steering them, deceiving them.
She knew Esmeralda's character inside and out. She knew the girl would try to save even someone like her — because she was the Hero, because she was so upright that she could keep Irina from rushing to a conclusion.
She had already resigned herself to falling into the abyss, and yet in this one respect she had never stopped being clear-eyed. Perhaps my actions are wrong after all. Perhaps I'd rather someone stop me. Even while entertaining such thoughts, her mind had coldly produced the optimal path.
Divine Arts — Purification Discipline
[White Light Hot Sand Wave]
Fwoooosh!
The signature holy magic of the Saintess Irina — a spell capable of grinding demons into dust. Glowing white sand, scalding hot, crashed down upon the shackled Esmeralda like a tidal wave.
Had her opponent been a demon, the divine power stored within every single grain would have shredded her, quite literally, to nothing. And even against a human, a force of that magnitude had swallowed Esmeralda whole at point-blank range, with no chance even to raise a guard. The outcome was already decided.
Of course, that was—
"Whew. That one was genuinely dangerous. Seriously — when did you brainwash my mind? My head's gone completely blank."
"Not quite brainwashing, I'm afraid. You simply lost your temper and charged in without a second's thought, Lady Hero."
That was the story of what would have happened against anyone who wasn't the Hero. Against an opponent of her own caliber, Irina would certainly have won. But Esmeralda, blood streaming down her, merely grinned.
"Thanks to you, I'm calm again. Shall we continue?"
"By all means. Now the odds finally favor me. Let's do this properly."
Passion and composure. The two women hurled themselves at each other once more, each carrying an emotion the other did not share.
Irina had wished for a miracle. Even if it never descended upon her, she had wished for one to truly exist somewhere in this world.
She had lived and acted with absolute rigor in every single moment, committing sins no ordinary believer ever could — leaving nothing that could be pinned on her, nothing that could come back to haunt her. And yet, for all that rigor, she had yearned for someone to punish her for it. Practicing hypocrisy disgusted her; concealing her misdeeds tormented her.
So if, even after all of that flawless conduct, someone were to drag her dirty secrets into the light — wouldn't that be a miracle? Wouldn't that herald the return of the Heavenly God?
'But no. It mustn't happen.'
Her exposure would mean the second fall of the Heavenly God Order. She had never actually betrayed god — and yet somewhere along the way she had come to walk a path not so different from the Former Pope's own.
She must never, ever be discovered. And yet, even so, she wanted to be.
If Irina died, then this time, truly, the monasteries and orphanages the Order supported would meet their ruin. The world was cruel; people had no interest in one another; the Empire scorned commoners and squeezed them dry. If even the Heavenly God Order abandoned its abandoned children, far too many lives would simply wither away.
And so she had to steep herself in evil. To save people, she had to threaten people, brainwash people. It was this contradiction, above all else, that festered at the very core of her.
"Haha."
For the Order. For the Heavenly God. For the world. For the people no one else would care for. Yes — for two values that, for now, could not coexist.
That was Irina's justice. But now she had to betray one of them. The authority she had clawed upward through every scheme and every piece of political maneuvering could rise no further. Beyond this line, the Order would cease to be a church and become nothing but an interest cartel.
That final line had been drawn. And that was why she had been so desperate for a miracle — why she ached for the past, when she could serve god's teachings with an unburdened heart.
"You know, Lady Hero… I think I've come far too far."
But Jim had not been her miracle. In the end, he had proven that miracles simply do not exist.
A meeting that could never have been more than coincidence, packaged up and presented as a miracle — the sight of Jim doing exactly that was so sorrowfully emblematic of the world as it stood that she felt it all over again, keenly and anew: there were no miracles left in this world.
For a miracle to arrive would mean her receiving divine punishment. Her punishment would mean the Heavenly God Order, so precariously stabilized by her own hands, collapsing once more.
Yes — it had never been possible to begin with. Dazzled by that pitiful delusion, the fool had wandered to a point of no return.
"See? In the end, miracles never existed at all."
Irina looked down at Esmeralda, sprawled on the ground, her face wretched. Her wounds had already reached fatal territory, and no amount of struggle could topple the Irina of this moment. If it had been possible, it would have been a miracle indeed — but Esmeralda could work no such miracle. Miracles no longer existed in this world.
"You said it yourself earlier, didn't you, Lady Hero? That even using your corpse, no holy relic could be made."
The moment she had heard those words, Irina had known they weren't a lie. She was expert at reading the hearts of others, and she could tell when someone was telling the truth.
In truth, she had suspected from the very start. She had been divining the impossible all along. To cling to a single record from the past and attempt to reproduce it — that itself had been madness.
'Oh. So that's it. I was already—'
Already broken. Already sprinting headlong toward failure — toward the worst possible ending, the one that would sever this thread of wickedness for good. She had been shoving herself into the abyss with her own hands. And now that she had actually arrived at that ending, she was too frightened even to move.
She had run blindly all this way, only to freeze at the very door. That was Irina now — looking down at the Hero who had fallen without accomplishing anything.
The Heavenly God Order would never recover its old authority. It would fail, in the end, to shield the deaths of its most helpless charges. Yes — the weak die. That was the way of the world. And Irina, who had strained to bend that law somehow, had been trying to defy the world itself.
A foolish creature, attempting to reproduce a miracle that did not exist. The limit of a sinner who had dared to challenge the works of god.
"Ahaha……"
It was still vivid before her eyes. The cold corpses of the monastery's people, who had starved to death holding one another like a single family. That miserable end to all their misfortune.
She had labored so that such people would never exist again — but it seemed she had reached her limit.
"You're right. That's what the impossible is, isn't it? We call it impossible because we dream of a miracle that can never happen."
Irina cast a restoration spell over the fallen Esmeralda. The holy power that had been honed razor-sharp for killing now softened and unfurled, wrapping gently around the girl.
Their battle had been a bitter one, and Irina herself was badly wounded. If anyone needed healing, it was her — but she didn't care. She had already given up on living. Even casting off the veil of delusion before her eyes, she had come too far.
"Lady Hero… thinking back on it now, the journey I shared with you was actually rather enjoyable."
Make a holy relic from the Hero. That had been Irina's purpose. She had approached with that aim in her heart, and at the very end, she had abandoned it. All Irina had done was waste time. And this was what it came to.
'I…'
What had she been trying to do? Had she been running toward failure all along? If the whole enterprise of using the Hero to forge a holy relic had been impossible from the start — if every action she had ever taken was meaningless — if her sins and her good deeds, her hesitations and her resolutions, were all worth nothing—
Then Irina could no longer choose. Now that she knew the possibility of impossibility, she could not perform the rite using Esmeralda. The last scrap of conscience left to her. And more than anything else—
"Because the world needs you more than it needs someone like me."
If a miracle could not be reproduced, then this world had to have hope. And she had believed that hope would never, could never, be herself. So Esmeralda must not be sacrificed. No — no life should be. She had no right to sacrifice anyone, no right to rank one life above another. Only now did she understand it, and the fool she had been all this time was almost laughable.
"Do not forgive me, Lady Hero."
She poured every remaining drop of her holy power into Esmeralda's treatment. To the point of excess — without sparing so much as a speck for herself. So that nothing, nothing at all, would be left behind.
"May you punish evil and proclaim justice. May you never make the foolish choice I did."
With that prayer, Irina began to stagger away. It was over now.
If she made for the place where the priests were, she could still survive — but she didn't want to. She was simply too tired. She wanted, at long last, to set everything down.
Then she would go to the place where she could unburden her sins. The place where every original sin of the past had begun and ended.
Yes — the accursed clearing that had dragged the Heavenly God Order down into ruin, and the very same one that had shaped the Order of today. She would meet her wretched ending there, in that dreadful place.
"……"
She would meet it wretchedly.
Arriving at the ground where the Former Pope had once cast down the Heavenly God, Irina discovered something. She froze, as though she had witnessed something that could not possibly exist.
"Why……"
"Why are you here……"
In the middle of a clearing that should have been utterly silent stood a young man, wearing a smile far gentler than usual. Eyes tinged with an unfamiliar blue light regarded Irina quietly.
Like a scene out of a fairy tale. Like a Mary Sue who resolves everything with a single stroke. Yes — innocently, purely, he held out a flower blooming in the meadow before her eyes and spoke.
"Won't you talk with me for a while, Saintess?"