The Fake Saintess, the True Saintess (3)
“…Huh?”
Wait, what was that just now?
When Gehmajoshigi-gwat suddenly suggested I join the Hero Party, the first thing I felt was, quite obviously, sheer bewilderment. Up until a moment ago I'd been sure he'd understood me perfectly when I said I had no intention of joining the Hero Party. Never in a million years did I expect him to come back with a condition this absurd.
“Wh-what kind of nonsense is that?!”
“I told you, this is the bare minimum I'm willing to compromise on. If you won't even agree to this much, then I'm not cooperating with your plan either. Actually, I might go out of my way to sabotage it.”
“No way…!! I-I could see myself bending on plenty of things, but that condition is way too far out of bounds! Joining the Hero Party at Luminor Academy means years of being dragged through hell at minimum—trust me, as a player on my twenty-fifth playthrough, I know that better than anyone. Who exactly are you planning to drag into the jaws of death like some cursed water spirit?!”
I would sooner take a bullet to the head—or, well, an Energy Bolt—than join the Hero Party.
Part of why I'd struggled so desperately to survive as Lilith was to avoid getting pounced on by Ethan in his pig days, but it was also to make sure I never got sucked into the Academy's main storyline and ended up in the Hero Party. Back then, I'd figured getting pinned under Ethan or skewered by the Hero made little practical difference—and escaping a future of writhing beneath one man by getting skewered by another wasn't even an option in my survival playbook.
And yet, after all that effort, after successfully dodging both Ethan's assault route and the Hero Party route, now he wanted me to waltz right back into it? Absolutely not.
“S-so it's my body you're after, huh?! In case you've got the wrong idea, let me kill that thought right now—just because I join the Hero Party doesn't mean I'll spread my legs whenever it's convenient for you, unlike the Lilith in the game….”
“You're the one who's got the wrong idea. I'm not particularly interested in your body, and I'm not trying to sabotage your future life plans. All I'm saying is, if Serista can't awaken as the Saintess, then I'll need you—so I'm bringing you into the Hero Party.”
“B-but you don't need me for that. Serista is destined to awaken as the Saintess either way, so if your goal is clearing the game, there's no reason to drag me along….”
“I read the guides, so obviously I know that. But that only applies when there's no 'true saintess' like you around.”
“…Huh?”
“For Serista to awaken, it won't happen until late in Part 4—in real time, that's almost five years from now. Do you really think she can spend those five years branded a fake saintess while running a proper Hero Party with me—all because of you?”
For a moment, Gehmajoshigi-gwat's words left me completely speechless. Honestly… I might never have thought that far ahead either.
“And what if, in the middle of all that, Serista's faith wavers, or something disturbs her enough that she never awakens at all? No—odds are it would happen exactly like that. If a 'true saintess' already exists, then the belief that she needs to become the Saintess would never take root in the first place.”
“Th-that's….”
“And let's say her faith holds firm to the very end and she survives those five years and awakens. Fine. Then what about the years of humiliation she'll have endured as a 'fake saintess'? Do you think a couple of public apologies is going to cover that?”
“N-no, obviously it wouldn't….”
…Maybe, somewhere deep down, I'd been working overtime to deny it. I'd half-suspected all along that if I became the Saintess, Serista would never be able to become one on the strength of her own faith alone—but because that realization worked against me, my subconscious had simply refused to drag it into the light.
The reason Serista could still awaken even after Lilith's awakening in the game was that, by that point, her heart had already grown certain that perhaps she, too, could become the Saintess.
The reverse was true here. If she witnessed the existence of a true saintess while she was still this spiritually immature, then no matter how faithfully events followed the original story, her awakening through her own will would be nearly impossible.
“B-but, um, look.”
“Yeah?”
“Even if I join your party after my awakening, the fact that Serista is a fake saintess is going to come out eventually. That's unavoidable whether I'm in the Hero Party or not. So wouldn't it be better to just block the Consecration itself?”
“Honestly, that's what I'd prefer too. But it's still better than you dying. And I figure if I knowingly let someone from my hometown get killed when I could've stopped it, it'd leave a bad taste in my mouth later.”
“…Well, fair enough, I suppose.”
“Besides, I'm cooperating with McHart right now because killing him now will be useful to the story later—but if your decision starts getting in the way of clearing the game, I can't keep helping you. …And one more thing. If you join the Hero Party, we get a way to protect Serista from disgrace.”
“…Huh?”
What did me joining the Hero Party have to do with protecting Serista from disgrace?
As I was still scrambling to follow, Gehmajoshigi-gwat launched into an explanation with the breezy confidence of a man stating the obvious.
“First of all, just by staying close to Serista, she can keep playing the 'true saintess' indefinitely. To ordinary people, all that registers is the sacred aura of divine power—and when a whole group of people is gathered together, no one can tell exactly who it's coming from.”
“Fine, ordinary people might be fooled that way. But what about church-related events? For Serista's sake if nothing else, we'll have to stop by the church plenty of times.”
“…Obviously we'd have to be careful around those events. Still, with help from the high-ranking priests who backed Serista as the Saintess, hiding it won't be impossible.”
“…….”
“But honestly, that reason matters less than this next one. The reason I want you in the Hero Party is so that if Serista ever gets exposed as a fake, she'll be protected to the very end.”
“…How?”
“Say you're active in the Hero Party alongside me, and at some point it comes out that you were the real saintess all along—and that Serista was the fake. Walk through it with me.”
“…Okay.”
“Then naturally, the accusations against Serista would pour in. You were never a saintess at all, so you sold the honor of the title and passed yourself off as one—how dare you?”
“…I mean, yeah, that tracks.”
“And if it comes to that, all you'd have to do is say one line. That 'Serista only posed as a stand-in saintess in order to protect me from the threat of demonic assassination.' With that one sentence, Serista would be spared all the pointless condemnation—in fact, she'd be celebrated as the brave girl who willingly shoulderied the danger in your place.”
“…Oh!”
Only after hearing the whole explanation did I finally understand why Gehmajoshigi-gwat had been so determined to put me in the Hero Party.
It wasn't the simple, shallow logic of we need a saintess, so if you become one, you're coming with us. What he'd worried about from the very beginning wasn't the power of a saintess—it was Serista, the priestess herself.
In fact, watching how much he cared for Serista—caring more about her than even the fact that the endgame strategy required a saintess—suddenly made him look different to me. I'd assumed he was just a Hero on the outside with a reckless schemer underneath, but surprisingly, his sense of duty itself was genuinely heroic. That part especially.
“And if we're going to use the excuse that Serista was standing in for you, then obviously you have to actually be there working alongside me—which is why you'd need to join the party. If you just install a double and let the real saintess sit around doing nothing, everyone will see straight through it as a flimsy, half-baked cover story.”
“Ah, yeah. No, I understood the point a while ago. I was just… a little surprised, that's all.”
“Surprised by what?”
“It's just… I figured someone dead set on returning to his original world would be focused purely on clearing the game. It caught me off guard that you'd go out of your way for people like Serista, too.”
“…Can't be helped, can it? Serista has been doing everything she can for my sake—hiding the fact that she's a fake saintess, keeping her mouth shut about it, all of it—and I'm the only person she's looking at. So obviously I owe her everything I can give her in return. Same goes for Silena and Seraphin.
I can keep the fake-saintess suspicion under control for as long as I'm around, sure. But at the end of the day, I'm someone who has to go back to my original world. After I'm gone, I need to have built an environment where Serista can feel safe without me.”
…With a guy whose resolve ran this deep, if I sat here and said actually, that's still a no from me, then I would be the irresponsible one.
Even I had no intention of becoming that shameless. What I was about to do would raise the odds of Serista being exposed as a fake saintess, after all—so morally speaking, carrying my share of the responsibility was only right.
Depending on how you looked at it, my end of the bargain was nothing more than a few years of hardship. But for Serista, my choice could mean a lifetime of pain. Worse, in a bad scenario, it wouldn't stop at a lifetime of humiliation—she could be charged with impersonating a saintess and suffer something far uglier for it.
Once that thought settled in, I couldn't help but make up my mind.
“Fine. If I go that far, at least I won't feel like I owe Serista an apology.”
“Don't turn around later, once everything's done and you've got no more use for me, and act like this never happened.”
“I won't. I'm the one leaning on your help to survive here—if I bolted the moment the situation reversed, what kind of shameless bastard would that make me?”
“A shameless girl, technically.”
“…Whatever. Point stands.”
“Keep your promise. If it ever comes to the point where Serista can't awaken as the Saintess, then Lilith—you join the Hero Party.”
“I said fine. If it looks like Serista won't be able to awaken as the Saintess, then I'll join the Hero Pa—”
-Creeeak, THUNK!
“…N-nooo, you can't…!!”
“…Join the… wait…?”
“……Serista?”
“Th-that's, that is absolutely NOT allowed!! E-even if it's you, Lady Lilith, I—I can never, ever hand the Hero over to anyone!!”
“…….”
“…….”
Right in the middle of my conversation with Gehmajoshigi-gwat, Serista had abruptly burst out of nowhere, and the Hero's mouth and mine snapped shut at exactly the same time.
…Hold on. Just how much of that had she overheard?