The Two-Bed Hospital Room (3)
And then, that night.
By the late hour when every visitor—including Ethan, Serista, and Gehmajoshigi-gwat—had returned to their respective quarters, the hospital room was naturally left with only its two original occupants: Agnes and me.
We hadn't yet discussed the second requirement for eliminating McHart. That was a matter best known to as few people as possible, so it went without saying that it wasn't the kind of thing to bring up in front of everyone.
As for the matter of the saintess, I'd have to save it for a time when Serista and I could talk alone. If it truly became necessary, I could call for the Hero and no one else.
At any rate, after two straight days of exhausting affairs, my body had reached its limit in every possible way. It had only been yesterday that I'd fought a genuinely serious sparring match against Agnes, trading blows and mind games the whole time, and today's meeting had dragged on so long that I'd been denied rest until late—so the physical fatigue had piled up considerably.
I need to rest properly and recover fast. If I want to enter the noble exchange that McHart will be attending this vacation….
Just as I was drifting toward sleep with such thoughts loosely floating through my head, Agnes's voice calling my name from the bed across the room jolted me awake.
"Lilith, you asleep?"
"…I almost was, just now."
"…Sorry. Should we talk tomorrow?"
"As long as it's not too long a story, I don't mind. If I put it off until tomorrow, I might just forget about it again, so you might as well tell me now."
"……"
In the quiet silence, only the sound of breathing answered—no words.
I was starting to wonder if she'd actually fallen asleep from exhaustion when Agnes's voice came again, cautiously this time.
"I'm sorry for fighting you for real yesterday. During our match."
"I'm sorry… what?"
"You said you had no malice, Lilith. But I did. …So. I'm sorry."
"…Now that you mention it, you did say something like that."
Right before I'd been swept up in her flame explosion and stumbled my way out of it. So I hadn't understood what she meant at the time—but apparently, her talk of malice hadn't been empty words. She'd genuinely meant it.
I couldn't think of anything I'd said that would have earned me a grudge from Agnes. I'd poked at her a bit during her midterm assignment, pretending it was just a practice fight, but Agnes, with her deep knowledge of magical theory, wasn't the type to get genuinely angry over a little criticism of her magic.
The only other thing I'd said that might have offended her was teasing her about her physical features instead of her magic, midway through the match….
"Could it be… you really were upset about what I said about your height and chest a week ago?"
"…You didn't notice?"
"……No. I didn't."
Agnes shot me a look of utter disbelief, her expression a strange mix of exasperation and resignation.
I'd genuinely thought it was just Agnes putting on an astonishingly realistic performance of being furious. Realizing it hadn't been an act at all actually made everything click into place.
"I had no idea you were actually hurt. I'm sorry, Lady Agnes."
"…It's not your fault. I was the one who brought up the chest thing first. The mistake was mine—I just took it out on you for no reason."
"Well, in the end, the plan worked out, and here we are sharing a hospital room, so I'd call it a win. Let's look on the bright side, shall we?"
"…So. We're making up, then?"
"I'm sorry… making up?"
"…You don't want to?"
"That's not what I meant… I was never angry with you in the first place, Lady Agnes? We've been friends this whole time. Haven't we?"
"…Yeah. I guess we have."
With those final words, Agnes quietly closed her eyes and turned away, her face flushed red.
Taking that as her way of saying she'd said all she wanted to say, I too closed my eyes and let sleep quietly pull me under.
It was the fourth day since Agnes and I had been admitted to the Academy church.
Two days had passed since the meeting, and Agnes rose quietly from the bed across from mine, luggage bag in hand.
Today was the day Agnes, my roommate in this hospital ward, would be discharged.
"The Elizabeth family carriage appears to have arrived, Lady Agnes."
"…Maybe I should stay a little longer."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You never know. That bastard McHart might attack you the moment you're left here alone."
"Prince McHart's return to the imperial palace was already relayed to us through Hero Gehmajoshigi-gwat, was it not? Information obtained through Princess Seraphin herself, no less—I'd say it's reliable."
"…Still."
"And I'll be discharged in a day or two anyway. Lord Ethan will be visiting often until then, too. There's really no need to worry this much."
"……"
"Your carriage is waiting outside, Lady Agnes."
Agnes kept making that peculiarly worried face, as if she genuinely couldn't stop fretting over me, but at my firm attitude she seemed to finally make up her mind and gave a quiet nod.
"Fine. I'm off, then. Take care of yourself."
"Travel safely."
For the record, Serista had already cautioned me that I was better off staying for a bit more treatment.
Double-down or not, the injuries I'd sustained in our duel had been worse than Agnes's—which meant, in the end, I'd be owing the church my stay for longer. All because Agnes's explosion magic packed that much more power.
Ordinarily, I'd only taken a single flame explosion from Agnes, while she'd taken a stab wound to the heart plus her own explosion, so logically her injuries should have been the more severe. But the raw power of Agnes's flame explosion magic had been nearly double what hit me….
…Though the fact that Agnes jammed her staff straight between my breasts in the final moment of the duel may have had quite a bit to do with it. Considering the sheer size of these lumps of fat I'm confronted with every time I stand before a mirror, they may well have absorbed a decent portion of the explosion's impact meant for Agnes.
"That bag looks heavy. Shall I carry half of it for you?"
"A patient? Don't be ridiculous."
"I'm just worried you might trip and fall going down the stairs."
"Who are you calling a little kid?"
Honestly, going by looks alone, she could pass for a middle schooler—so yes, that would make her a little kid.
Besides, a patient helping Agnes was a contradiction in terms no matter how you sliced it, so I simply waved my hand at that point and saw Agnes off as she made her way out.
"…The day we agreed on. See you at the palace."
"Yes, Lady Agnes."
Creeeak.
Once I'd confirmed Agnes closing the door and stepping out of the ward, I immediately woke one of the two spirits dozing at my side and made a request. My thinking was simple: if it wasn't me personally offering to help, Agnes wouldn't have grounds to refuse.
"Sei, could you see Agnes off to the church entrance? It would be nice if you could quietly lighten the weight of her luggage with wind magic."
'…Okay. Got it.'
Watching Sei quietly tail after Agnes, I let my gaze wander around the hospital room, now left to me alone. When the two of us had shared it, it had felt a bit cramped—but now that I was back to being just one, the space felt oddly empty.
As I entertained such thoughts and quietly waited for Agnes to emerge from the window's view, the door to the ward suddenly swung open—and in walked Serista, the one currently in charge of my treatment.
"H-how are you feeling today, Lady Lilith?"
"Thanks to how much the Saintess has looked after me, I'm quite well now. I feel like I could go running this very instant."
"Th-that's still not allowed, you understand? You should be able to leave in a day or two, Lady Lilith, so please bear with it just until then. Your injuries were always somewhat more severe than Lady Agnes's, after all."
"…Yes. Thank you."
As I watched Serista tend to my condition, I thought about it very seriously in the depths of my mind.
For reasons I couldn't quite pin down—the matter of that honorific she'd started using for me at some point. The way she called me 'Lady Lilith.'
Up until now, I'd tried my best not to let it bother me, but no matter how I turned it over, the situation was simply too strange: Serista addressing me with the utmost reverence. Within the original story, the list of people Serista addressed with '-nim' attached was not a long one, even counting the entire narrative from start to finish.
There was the Hero—the protagonist she adored. The church elders of the Aurelian Orthodox Church who outranked her. And the imperial family, whom everyone addressed with honorifics as a matter of course.
That was more or less it. Of course, it wasn't as though Serista spoke casually to everyone else. She was the type to use polite speech with anyone and everyone—a child, an animal, it made no difference.
But when addressing others, she invariably used relatively ordinary forms like 'Lady' or 'Miss.' The '-nim' honorific was a title reserved for people whose standing was on an entirely different plane.
Ethan might be a different matter, given his status as the son of a ducal house—but she had absolutely no reason to elevate me, of all people, with an honorific like that. And yet Serista, contrary to all logic, used '-nim' for me and me alone.
And what's more, every attempt I've made to correct her has been flatly refused.
Which left, in the end, only one explanation for when Serista had started calling me 'Lady Lilith.'
It wasn't as though I had nothing to go on. I'd remembered not long ago that there was in fact a point in the original story where Serista addressed Lilith that way.
'The period when Lilith awakened as a saintess—and Serista failed to. That, without a doubt, was when Serista began calling her "Lady Lilith."'
It was an event that veteran players genuinely encountered only occasionally. Why only occasionally? Because the 'saintess awakening' event in the story was, as a rule, completed by Serista before Lilith.
Serista was a character who traveled with the party from roughly the middle of Part 1 onward, which meant her experience points rose almost in lockstep with the protagonist's. Lilith, on the other hand, only joined near the end of Part 2—so naturally, there was an unavoidable gap in accumulated experience between her and Serista.
Granted, with a mid-join level of 15, Lilith hardly started out weak. But by the time most players reached the middle of Part 2, Serista and the other main characters had typically grown to around level 20.
After all, if you didn't grind at least that far, beating Ethan—the mid-boss of Part 2—was nearly impossible. Even pig-era Ethan became fairly formidable with a level-15 Lilith supporting him, so taking him on reliably required leveling to a stable 20 or so.
And in the course of that grind, Serista naturally leveled up alongside the Hero, making her higher-leveled than Lilith from the moment of her joining—far and away the most common state of affairs in a standard playthrough of Luminor Academy.
'But I was not a standard player of Luminor Academy.'
I had tried every strategy imaginable in my desperate pursuit of the 'Lilith Virgin Ending'—and among those approaches, naturally, was 'awaken Lilith before Serista.'
The method: grind a single protagonist character relentlessly through the early parts of Part 1, pushing them to a wildly elevated level, then pick up Serista afterward. This made it entirely possible to face Ethan with Serista deliberately kept at a lower level than Lilith.
And if you carried that party configuration through to Part 5, you could trigger Lilith's saintess awakening before Serista's. For the short window between that moment and Serista's own awakening, Serista would address Lilith as 'Lady Lilith'—or so I remembered.
And if—if—the hypothesis barely surfacing in my mind applied to the present situation as well….
'…Then it means Serista already knows I'm a real saintess.'
If she truly knew what I was, then there was no longer any reason to hesitate.
After all, the time and opportunity I had left to speak with Serista alone were running out fast.