The True Saint (1)
With a soft thud, McHart's head hit the floor, and immediately afterward came the sword-wielder's excuse that wasn't really an excuse at all.
"My apologies for swinging my blade without permission, Princess Seraphine. Now that it's been proven beyond doubt that Prince McHart conspired with the demons, I judged it best to dispose of him quickly, before he could do anything rash."
"...No, it couldn't be helped. Even had you not done it, Prince Ethan, it was something that would have needed doing sooner or later. If anything, I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused you."
In truth, it was closer to say that Ethan had cut McHart down to keep him from ever spilling the secret that I was the real saint — but Seraphine seemed to have no sympathy left to spare for McHart, and she did not press the matter of Ethan's sudden execution.
"That my own brother borrowed the power of demons to alter his appearance — to tamper even with how he existed in other people's memories — the more I think on it, the more absurd it becomes."
"……"
"I always knew my brother lacked confidence in his looks as a boy. I suppose a delusion about all the things he never had is what twisted him into... this."
"Princess Seraphine..."
"That said — using a new face to toy with women and live a life of debauchery would be bad enough, but threatening Miss Lilith as well is something I cannot forgive."
With those words, she signaled to the knights of her detached palace guard, and they hurriedly began gathering up McHart's remains.
As the knights escorted away the two halves — Mc and Hart — of the headless corpse, Seraphine quietly tilted her face toward the night sky and murmured, half to herself.
"Five years ago, when Prince Philipson passed away — that too was likely McHart's doing. Right up until then, I'd assumed he had withdrawn from public life because he feared he'd become a target of assassination just as Philipson had. I never imagined he'd been preparing magic on this scale, manipulating the perception of everyone around him.
Even if only half his blood ran royal... no matter how you look at it, that may be a little too much to simply accept with a shrug."
"That's only natural, Princess Seraphine."
"And with my brother dead, at least I feel some measure of relief. So many of the questions I'd carried about McHart have finally been answered, too. Whenever I recalled my past experiences with the man I remembered as my brother, there was always a faint sense that something was off — and now, every last piece fits.
How, despite being imperial family, every new maid or butler who entered his service would fail to recognize him and commit some unintended rudeness. How his fiancée was replaced three separate times, each time over some circumstance with the woman involved. It was all of that piling up, one piece at a time, that drove him to the choice of borrowing demonic power."
"……"
"And I... I'm a truly useless little sister. I should have understood at least a fraction of the pain he was carrying..."
...No matter how real Seraphine's Future Sight was, it remained an intermittent gift at best. She had never been granted the ability to choose which moment of the future to view, or to single out the futures that mattered most.
And yet she wore that bitter smile, as though the situation here were somehow her own fault — well, that was simply who Seraphine was.
Me? Whatever feelings Seraphine might have harbored for McHart, I was just genuinely, deeply relieved that the only existence in this world that had ever threatened my life was finally gone.
McHart had tormented me longer than anyone since I'd transmigrated into this world (if we're going purely by duration, Ethan technically had him beat, but Ethan had never actually put my life on the line). The moment his head finally rolled, I was honest-to-god happy enough to want to break into a little dance.
Of course, if I actually did that in this atmosphere, people would start questioning my character, so I restrained myself like a good girl.
God, that took a disgustingly long time.
What in the world had I gone through, all this suffering, just to bring down this one bastard?
Two or three of those ordeals had come genuinely close to killing me, and beyond that, the subjugation campaign had been riddled with countless smaller crises.
Granted, launching a subjugation war against the Part 4 boss before Part 2 had even concluded was, if it worked, easy; if it didn't, it defied all reason. It was an operation we'd only barely been able to pull off because two of us — counting the Hero himself — knew the story.
Fighting an imperial prince, before he'd even awakened as a demon, before the saint had ever made her appearance — the number of variables we'd had to manage was far beyond excessive. And even at the very end, this bastard had almost spat out the truth that I was the saint before going down.
The silver lining, I suppose, was that even if he had gotten it out, it wouldn't have mattered much.
As long as the detached palace guards kept their mouths shut, everyone else present already knew I was the saint. Even if McHart's final desperate gasp had landed cleanly, precious little would have changed.
"……"
But judging by the way Seraphine had been casting suspicious little glances my way for a while now, she'd surely caught on to the fact that I was the saint ages ago. The whole situation had been impossible not to see through, really.
Ugh, explaining this is going to be a whole ordeal. How many times do I have to confess to being the saint before this is over?
By the way, where the hell are the Hero and Agnes, and what are they doing?
With those two missing, I'm the one stuck absorbing all of Seraphine's attention.
I suppose if they've gone off on their own, they must have their reasons — some significant business of their own. But ignoring my summons outright and vanishing? That deserves an explanation.
If it turns out they ditched me over something trivial, so help me...
My life was on the line here. I've earned the right to at least complain.
Evelyn Bridget Steiner.
It was a name she no longer needed.
The moment the greatest reason she'd had for wearing it — for melting so seamlessly into human society all this time — vanished right before her eyes.
Damn it. Damn it. DAMN IT!
Right up until the moment she'd announced McHart's disappearance to the noble daughters at the banquet hall and smoothly steered the crowd toward the back courtyard, Evelyn had never imagined things would turn out this way.
At most, she'd accounted for the possibility that he might lose to that woman Lilith. Her whole plan had been to gather as many witnesses as possible in case of exactly that outcome. With his abilities, McHart should have handled a middling swordsman with sealed magic without breaking a sweat — the late arrival of a variable at the Sword Expert level was something Evelyn had failed to foresee.
And so she had gathered the crowd intending to somehow protect McHart at all costs. Framing a dead man after the fact would have been the surer method, true — but McHart still had use left in him.
This was a man she'd graced with a few kisses back in his unbearably hideous days, and who still babbled about true love for it. Even now, he possessed an imperial prince's status and — where women were concerned, at least — a face that let him bend most anyone to his will. She'd judged him too valuable to discard as an expendable pawn this late in the game.
And that judgment turned out to be the misstep that hurled her into the pit.
Right up until the saint invoked the Mirror of Truth, Evelyn had believed things were going smoothly. That Serista was a false saint was an open secret among the demons — and it was Evelyn herself who had relayed that information to McHart.
So when the Mirror of Truth that woman conjured was used, there was no way the dark magic carved into McHart's body would be erased. If anything, Evelyn had hoped it might rekindle suspicions that Serista was a fraud — and this time, at last, she could drive a wedge between the Hero and that bothersome girl.
But contrary to Evelyn's expectations, the Mirror of Truth activated with the correct activation chant — and only then did she finally grasp that something had gone terribly wrong.
Don't tell me — the "true saint" was hiding here all along...!
It seemed no one else had noticed. But amid the chaos, Evelyn saw it with absolute clarity.
The Mirror of Truth had already been complete before Serista finished her final line of the incantation — and the one who had spoken that last activation word was the woman who'd been whispering in her ear from behind.
The woman whose yin energy ran unusually deep — the very woman McHart had taken such a liking to, the one Evelyn had planned to keep around as a convenient source of essence to feed on for the time being.
That the woman she and McHart had marked as their target was, in fact, the true saint who had yet to reveal herself — that was the last news Evelyn wanted to hear.
I have to report this to the higher-ups. Immediately. If the Demon King revives while that woman still lives...
The instant she confirmed McHart's dark magic unraveling, Evelyn fled without a single glance back. Information this critical had to reach her fellow Demon King's army agents a moment sooner than anything else.
If the Demon King were to revive with the saint still alive, the prophecy would come true along with him.
To prevent exactly that, the Demon King's army had deliberately sold the child fated to become the saint away somewhere she would never be found — and within the Church, they had spread blame across the saint search parties, pressuring them into producing a false saint instead.
The original plan had been to simply kill the fated child outright, but things hadn't gone that smoothly, and selling her off had been the best they could manage.
She'd been pretty enough, so they'd assumed she'd been sold off to some brothel somewhere, stripped of her qualification as saint — or worked to death in some brutal labor camp. Who could have imagined that insect would still be clinging to life after all this time?
Something had struck her as odd, admittedly — a saint with that much yin energy about her — but none of that mattered now.
What mattered was reporting to the Demon King's army that the saint still lived, and finishing her off for good this time—
Squelch!
"Kh—khagh?!"
She had slipped out of the detached palace grounds and was hurrying toward the demons' temporary safehouse when a blade of cold steel punched through Evelyn's back — a searing agony driving straight into her heart.
The dense divine power pouring from the blade buried in her body. And the wielder of that power.
Though she hadn't turned around, somehow Evelyn knew exactly who had run her through.
"How... did you..."
"Found her, Agnes! Over here!"
"...How many times do I have to tell you? Stop acting like we're close and using my name."
Gehwa-joses-gigwat Volt.
Agnes Elizabeth Blaze.
Even as her consciousness dimmed, Evelyn recognized the voices: the Hero the Demon King's army always kept under the closest watch, and the mage of his party.
"Man, the next Tower Master really is something else. Your mana-detection magic is no joke — you tracked down a demon who'd even cast a concealment spell."
"...It was easy as eating cold porridge. Don't patronize me over nothing."
"Anyway, glad we got her. If we'd fumbled and lost her, word would've spread through the demons that Lilith and Ethan are dangerous, or whatever. Thanks to you, Agnes, we caught her clean and dealt with her."
"...Make sure you tell Lilith that. Straight up. If Lilith gets mad that the rendezvous promise got blown off, then that's all on you."
"Oh, come on. That won't happen."
"...Wait, how did you even know she was a demon? I only managed to confirm it myself just now."
"...Ah, w-well, that's... th-the thing is, once you become the Hero, you get revelations from time to time. And the revelation that came this time was..."
Have... to report... have to get there...
...Feeling nothing but absurd disbelief toward the two people who had run her through and were now casually chatting among themselves as if they'd merely finished some routine chore, an unnamed demon quietly crumbled to dust on the mountainside behind the detached palace.
"Huh?"
"What's wrong, Lilith?"
"Why so sudden, Miss Lilith?"
"...N-nothing, it's nothing."
...What is this? For some reason, I could swear the chastity levels around here just ticked up a notch.
A side effect of becoming the saint as Lilith at this point in time? Or maybe I'm just imagining things.