The Fake Saintess, the Real Saintess (2)
My attack, landing from an entirely unexpected direction, must have hurt quite a bit — Gehmajoshigi-gwat clutched his chest with both arms and groaned in pain.
“Ah, my sternum….”
“…Sorry. Does it hurt that much?”
“What do you think? You hit me with everything you had.”
“…….”
“And come on, anyone could’ve gotten the wrong idea. I mean, I just said — you’re running around with the Lilgirlchang handle, how do we know you’re not actually not a virgin? — and you throw a punch out of nowhere?”
Looking back on it, maybe the punch was a bit much. …No, wait. He was the one who committed sexual harassment first, wasn’t he?
“I-it didn’t happen, anyway! Wh-why would you think I’d do that with Ethan in the first place? At least hear my reasoning.”
“From what I heard before, you two are dating, and I’ve seen you alone together a few times getting along well. Of course that’s what I’d think.”
“…Well, that’s fair, I guess, but you can’t go off just that. And besides, my old community handle was from before I started observing virgin Lilith, so obviously that doesn’t count.”
“Word around campus is that the dorm you and Ethan use is a marriage-and-engagement dorm. If you’re in one of those, you’re not exactly sleeping in separate beds, are you? From what I know, couples’ dorms usually have one big bed.”
“…We do share one. So what.”
“And Luminor Academy was an eroge to begin with. In a setting like this, when a pretty girl and a handsome guy start going around together, thinking they’ve seen every base there is to see is just common sense, no?”
“…That’s also true.”
“Then why the hell did I get punched?!”
Seeing Gehmajoshigi-gwat wear a freshly aggrieved expression, even I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt — because most of what he’d said was, annoyingly, impossible to argue with.
“L-look, none of what you’re imagining happened, so stop with the weird misunderstandings. And this is a chastity I’ve been trying to protect precisely for situations like this, okay?”
“Fair enough, you were a hardcore virgin-purist, weren’t you? Thinking back to what you were like in the gallery, it’d actually be weirder if you had done it. So? How’s it feel, living the dream as the virgin Lilith you wanted so badly?”
“Yeah, yeah, you bastard. Anyway, you get that nothing’s happened between me and Ethan, right? We do live in the same room, so it’s not like there’s been absolutely nothing of one sort or another, but I’m still a virgin, so….”
“Hm? ‘Nothing of one sort or another’? Like what?”
“…N-nothing! Nothing at all happened!!”
In a moment of emotional confusion, I’d very nearly blurted out all the other various things that had happened with Ethan. That reckless mouth of his, I swear.
Besides, for some reason, talking with this guy for too long made me start loosening up myself, so I decided to just get straight to the point.
“Anyway — in order to awaken as the Saintess, I need to receive Consecration from a high priest. That was the Saintess awakening rule in the original game too. So to get consecrated, I need your help convincing Serista.”
“Why insist on getting it from Serista of all people? Don’t tell me you’re planning to teabag some poor girl — ‘I’m the real Saintess and you’re the fake.’”
“…I don’t know what image of me from my community days you’ve got stuck in your head, but obviously I’m not planning any such disrespectful nonsense, so quit suspecting me.”
“Honestly, I get it. It’s about keeping the secret, right? If you got consecrated by any high priest other than Serista, there’d be no way to hide that Serista is a fake Saintess. That last bit was just me messing with you.”
“…….”
Inhale.
“…Still. Don’t just go straight to violence.”
Noticing my clenched fist, Gehmajoshigi-gwat quietly blocked his own sternum with an open palm.
“Right — you know this well too. Most of the high priests of the Aurelia Church who can perform Consecration are grandpas and grandmas in their sixties or older, and the ones in their fifties are all tangled up in the plot to make Serista the fake Saintess. Right now, the only high priest who can both keep the secret and grant me Consecration is Serista.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but either way, isn’t it just a matter of time before you’re exposed as the Saintess? The aura that appears when one awakens as Saintess — wasn’t it part of the setting that priests can’t hide or suppress it?”
“Obviously I can’t hide it. Within a month, some kind of real-Saintess search party will probably come sniffing around.”
“…And knowing that, you’re still dead set on getting consecrated? Even now, plenty of people suspect Serista isn’t the real Saintess. I’ve been asserting it so firmly that no one’s dared say it out loud. But then you suddenly show up — what’s Serista supposed to do?”
“I know. That’s why I’m throwing the whole Saintess thing overboard before the search party arrives.”
“Huh?”
“Once we resolve this McHeart business, I’m handing over all the Saintess’s power to Serista.”
“…Can you even do that?”
“Yep.”
The truth was, on my end, this was a plan I’d settled on long ago, without needing any search party to spur me on. If, by some circumstance, I had no choice but to awaken as the Saintess, I had always intended to pass the power to Serista as quickly as possible and return to an ordinary life.
Handing over the Saintess’s power certainly wouldn’t strip away the ability to use magic from me — someone who had already learned numerous spells and pushed my maximum mana past three thousand. I’d confirmed this mid-playthrough in my previous world, so there was no doubt about it.
And besides, my current status was no longer that of a commoner — I held noble rank as the daughter of a baronet. I wasn’t sure exactly how the Luminor Academy setting that only nobles could use magic would apply, but handing over the Saintess’s power wasn’t going to cost me any of my other abilities.
Either way, if things went well, Serista would become the true Saintess she’d always longed to be and be able to support Gehmajoshigi-gwat — good for her — and I could shake off the bothersome power I carried while resolving the McHeart affair — good for me.
And without the Saintess’s power, there’d be no need to protect my maidenhead anymore, so even if Ethan were to one day lose himself to lust and pounce on me, nothing irreversible would happen, and…
No no no no no!
Are you seriously out of your mind? Pounce on you? What would he even be pouncing on?
The whole idea of worrying about losing the Saintess’s power in a scenario where Ethan attacked me was laughable. Setting aside whether I could become the Saintess at all — the answer was simply no, full stop.
However much I’d chosen to live a second life in Lilith’s body, some things simply had to be protected, and my psychological and emotional well-being was obviously among them.
No matter how much I’d accepted this female body of mine, being held in a man’s arms was an entirely different matter. …Though, if I truly, absolutely had to be held by someone, there was no one but Ethan — which, put the other way around, meant that unless I was forced into making that kind of choice, there would never be a scenario where I did that sort of thing with Ethan.
“What are you doing? Why are you suddenly shaking your head?”
“…None of your business.”
“Anyway, back to what we were saying. Passing the Saintess’s power to Serista — that’s actually possible?”
“Yeah, it’s possible. I did it a few times while playing Luminor Academy too. It shouldn’t be impossible.”
Luminor Academy, the game of my past life, had, in theory, two Saintesses. The prophesied Saintess was virgin Lilith and no one else — but even after virgin Lilith ceased to exist, there were two unofficial ways to unlock power on the level of a Saintess.
One was the Saintess of Faith (=Awakened Serista), born when Serista awakened while truly believing, from the depths of her heart, that she wanted to take on the role of the Saintess herself.
The other was the Indomitable Saintess (=Awakened Lilith), who awakened by refusing, through countless humiliations and disgraces, to ever lose her will.
And in the case of Awakened Lilith, it was possible to transfer the Saintess’s power to an unawakened Serista. I’d tested this in the ‘Lilith awakens first’ scenario I mentioned before, so I was fairly confident.
For the record, wondering if this might be an easter egg for the Lilith virgin route, I tried it in reverse as well — but no matter how many times I attempted it, transferring Awakened Serista’s power to an unawakened Lilith was impossible. Though honestly, given Serista’s personality, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to hand over the Saintess’s power she’d barely managed to awaken to Lilith anyway.
In the game, the explanation given was that Lilith didn’t particularly like the Saintess’s power she possessed, which was why the transfer was possible — so even if the current me awakened, handing the power to Serista shouldn’t be impossible.
That the Saintess’s power — something I never wanted but ended up with — was nothing but a cumbersome burden was something I felt just as desperately as the Lilith in the game had.
“A hundred percent sure it’ll work?”
“…Probably. At least in-game, I ran it maybe three times with different variables, and it transferred properly every time.”
“That alone isn’t exactly….”
“And if it works, it’s a good thing for Serista too. If she truly awakens as the Saintess, the other priests will figure it out on their own — no more being smeared as a fake Saintess, and above all, she’d never have to live with that guilt again.”
“…….”
“…Look, I think I know what you’re worried about, so I won’t force you. But since it’s necessary to kill McHeart anyway, I’ll convince Serista myself, even if I have to do it alone.”
Rather than killing McHeart and then failing to produce proof of his connection to the demons and getting tangled up in charges of treason, it was better in every way to simply persuade Serista. After all, the moment I awakened as the Saintess, nearly everything else would resolve itself.
“Then — before you do that, promise me one thing.”
“Hm?”
“Say you succeed. You get consecrated by Serista and awaken as the Saintess.”
“Okay.”
“With that power, you kill McHeart, and the moment you try to hand the Saintess’s power over to Serista — it goes through, just like that.”
“Okay.”
“But if — if, in the worst case — you end up in a situation where you can’t transfer the Saintess’s power to Serista.”
“…If it comes to that?”
“If that happens, then you join the Hero’s party together with Serista. That’s the bare minimum condition I’m willing to concede.”