The Saint Descends (3)
⟨ Saint of Prophecy ⟩
Having at last awakened as a Saint through Serista's consecration, I pressed my hands together and opened my status window, where I found that my title had changed from Ethan's Personal Maid to Saint of Prophecy.
And the very first thought that came to me upon seeing my new title was not relief at having safely awakened as a Saint, but a question — why on earth had I been given the title of Saint of Prophecy?
Why did I become the Saint of Prophecy instead of the Saint of Destiny?
According to the knowledge stored in my memory of clearing Luminor Academy twenty-four times, if Lilith had received her saintly consecration along the original storyline, the title she should have earned was Saint of Destiny.
A Hero of Prophecy summoned from another world, and a Saint of Destiny with the power to change the future.
Those two were supposed to form the IF storyline that would have existed in Luminor Academy had Lilith never left the original path — so the moment I found myself, like the Hero, suddenly turned into a Saint of Prophecy, I simply couldn't make sense of it.
Well, I did awaken as a Saint either way, so it shouldn't matter much….
What mattered was that I could now wield divine power and put an end to McHart, so it wasn't a serious problem. Of course, that didn't stop this strange anomaly from nagging at me all the same.
If I had awakened as the Saint of Unyielding Will that Lilith was destined to become in the original game, I could have simply accepted it as the game playing out exactly as written. But Saint of Prophecy was a title that never even appeared in the game.
Between this and the way Seraphin's Future Sight keeps showing her a changed future, I suppose 'me' and the 'Lilith' in the game really are being treated as separate existences.
I would have loved to sit down with Serista and talk about divine power and sainthood, but regrettably, neither of us had the leisure for such a conversation right now. Having become a Saint through her consecration, I couldn't return to my hospital room on the third floor of the church — I had to rush through my discharge paperwork on the spot.
If I walked back into the hospital ward with this body brimming over with holy energy, it would be tantamount to publicly announcing that I've become a Saint.
Unless I wanted the whole Academy, inside and out, to know what I had become, I needed to put as much distance between myself and the church as possible while everyone slept. And until the day of the operation, I had to avoid crossing paths with anyone who could sense divine power.
Thankfully, it was vacation, so only a handful of Divinity students remained at the Academy — and even those few would, at this hour, be sunk in deep sleep. As an institution built on faith, the Divinity dormitory was governed by strict discipline; wake-up times and lights-out were all but mandated by regulation.
Naturally, none of the Divinity students would be attending that upcoming impure noble exchange gathering either. For students devoted to a faithful god, an event like that was precisely the kind of occasion to avoid at all costs.
"I'll process your discharge now, but I'll explain to the other priests that you left first thing in the morning. If they learn you were discharged in the dead of night, quite a few of them will find it strange."
"Understood, Saintess Serista."
As the High Priestess of the Academy church, Serista held real authority over patients' admissions and discharges, and thanks to her, checking out was no trouble at all.
"And 'Saintess'? The Saintess is no longer me — it's you, Lilith."
"That may be so, but as far as the world knows, you are still the Saintess. And I truly believe that you, Saintess Serista, will become a Saint in your own right someday."
Because I was going to make sure of it.
She laughed off my words with a murmured, "You're too kind," but I was certain. Once this affair was over, Serista would receive this saintly power from me and become a true Saint — and once she was a Saint, the story would progress so smoothly that hardly any crisis would count as a crisis anymore.
Perhaps because the two problems I had agonized over ever since transmigrating into this world — my sainthood and clearing the game — were finally about to be solved at once, my heart felt lighter in more ways than one.
"I still have to tidy up the items used in the consecration, so… I'm sorry I can't see you out."
"Not at all. The consecration was performed for my sake — if anything, I should be the one assisting you, and I can't even do that. The discourtesy is mine."
"No, it's fine. This was my work to begin with, after all."
Something about the way Serista so oddly diminished her own rightful place stirred a faint unease in me, but I had no room just then to unravel the source of that strange feeling.
Setting that lingering disquiet behind me, I walked back toward the knight's dormitory with my eyes blankly lifted to the sky — and the night sky of my first night as a Saint seemed, more than ever, to glitter.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
The knight's dormitory, after returning from receiving my consecration as a Saint at Serista's hands.
Fortunately, I slipped past the dorm supervisor's notice and made it inside, then safely reached the two-person room Ethan and I shared, where I knocked three times — quietly enough to be heard only by someone deep within the room.
Please let Isabel still be awake.
That way Isabel would open the door instead of Ethan. Maybe because of that secret outing with Agnes before, just returning to the dormitory at this hour made me oddly nervous.
Of course, this time I hadn't actually done anything wrong, so I could face Ethan with a clear conscience. …Probably.
Hadn't… I done anything wrong?
If I had to name something, it would only be that I'd never told him I was a Saint? But that was hardly something to go around blurting out, so surely Ethan would understand. Or I could always claim that Serista had only recently informed me of it myself.
Ethan had warned me before that wandering around late at night was dangerous, but at the moment nearly every student — dangerous or not — had already gone home to their families. Even the most dangerous one of all, McHart, would be at the imperial palace right now.
My early discharge with days of hospitalization still remaining was no issue either. Divine power had already begun flowing through my awakened Saint's body, and ever since the consecration I could feel the ruined wounds deep inside me regenerating on their own.
Right. Nothing wrong at all.
I waited for the door to open, fully convinced Ethan had no reason to snap at me like last time — and then a black-haired man opened it and stepped out, regarding me with faintly startled eyes as I stood there, returned to the dormitory in the dead of night.
"…Lilith?"
"I'm sorry to wake you from your rest, Young Master Ethan."
"That's fine, but… why are you coming back to the dormitory at this hour? Weren't you at the church?"
"My injuries from the evaluation match have fully healed, so I completed my discharge procedures."
"In the middle of the night…? And Saintess Serista actually permitted that…?"
There was a distinct thread of suspicion woven through the way Ethan looked at me — as though he were entertaining the possibility that the person standing before him was not Lilith, but someone else entirely.
I had warned him to be careful about exactly this, so it was an understandable reaction. Among the demonkin there were those who could change their shapes, and in a sensitive time like this, everything deserved to be doubted.
"If you doubt whether I'm truly Lilith, your maid, you're welcome to test me."
"…Sorry. Then may I ask you a few things?"
"Of course."
"What was the greatest crisis between you and me?"
"If we speak of crises between the Young Master and myself, it would be the time young Ethan played a prank on me that went too far, and I was truly, sincerely furious with him."
"…I want to be certain. Can you be specific?"
"Young Master Ethan gave me a wedgie, and I strangled him with the laundry I happened to be holding."
"When I was a child with no table manners, how did you or others discipline me?"
"Must I repeat the exact words that were said?"
"…Something close is fine."
"I don't remember the precise phrasing, but I believe I told you to shove that hunk of meat — caked in spit and fingerprints — into your own gaping mouth."
"…When I first asked Lilith what her ideal type was, what did you answer?"
"You talked about the type you hated instead."
"Specifically, what kind?"
"If I recall, you said the worst was an ungroomed piglet of a boy, or a brute who smacked his lips and gobbled at the table without a shred of manners, or a sexual harasser who went around grabbing backsides and giving wedgies. Though I can't promise it's exact. That was when I despised you more than anyone in the world, so I likely simply listed every one of your traits at the time."
"…Yeah. You're definitely the Lilith I know."
With those words, Ethan smiled a bittersweet smile and let me into the room, murmuring under his breath, almost to himself, that no other maid could ever have gotten away with such behavior.
I had worried he might scold me for coming home at this hour, but the one who ended up deflated as if he'd been the one scolded was Ethan himself.
…To be fair, the Ethan of those days had been nothing but a thoughtless child, and I, too, had judged him rashly on nothing but the villain's route from the game — so I still carried a small pang of guilt toward the boy he'd been.
"Young Master Ethan. The man you are now is finer and more admirable than anyone, so there's no need to feel bitter about your childhood."
"It's fine. Besides, the me of today only exists because the Lilith of back then did. Those were the days when one wrong word to me could have cost someone their head — and even so, you spoke honestly to me. I'm grateful for that, even now."
"It was hardly anything so grand as honest counsel…."
Still, hearing Ethan say that the man he'd become existed because of the girl I'd been — it warmed me a little.
…Then again, if there's anyone I should be honest with, it's Ethan, more than anyone else.
About what happened just now — that I had become a Saint. And about the fact that I had known, all along, that I was fated to become one.