Before She Was a Saint
Five years had passed since Hilde left the mountain village and came to Senium.
Agatha had returned to a high post within the Church. She’d supposedly risen to an even higher rank, but everyone kept their heads down and spoke of it only in whispers, so Hilde never found out exactly what that meant.
The city gate had been checked by soldiers before she was let inside, and what waited beyond was familiar and strange all at once. In the game, there had only been white-tiled roads, a few buildings, and one enormous temple.
"Why did you use that power?"
After following Agatha into the Church, Hilde spent her days in religious instruction and simple chores until she turned fifteen, and whenever she had free time, Agatha drilled her in swordsmanship. It had stung a little when Agatha trained her as harshly as if she weren’t her own child.
But all of it had become the very marrow of her bones. The moment she turned fifteen, the imprint of Divine Sword Art appeared, and with her rapidly growing body, it produced an extraordinary synergy; in terms of pure sword skill, she had become one of the top ten in the Church.
Looking at herself in a full-length mirror still filled her with mortification, probably because she’d once been a man. This was basically a walking...
"Hilde!"
She startled. Hilde gathered herself and looked at the person in front of her. She must have been lost in thought from exhaustion. Right now, she was in the office with Agatha, writing an incident report.
"I know you're tired, but your health comes first."
Agatha looked at Hilde with concern. Hilde’s eyes were a little red, and her whole body was covered in strained muscles and wounds. Agatha had figured out that it was surely the aftereffects of the power she’d awakened five years ago.
That power was a hidden ability unique to each character. There had been a way to obtain one, but if you simply created a character, one of several thousand powers would be assigned at a very low rate. Some powers could dramatically raise a character’s stats, while others were as pointless as one that merely kept you from feeling hungry even if you didn’t eat.
But Hilde herself didn’t know any of that. In truth, she didn’t even know it was called a power. Agatha had kept Hilde’s ability tightly hidden from everyone except the Saint and the Pope.
"Mother, the other side was a heretic. And... there were unavoidable circumstances."
Agatha looked at the Saint beside Hilde, who couldn’t make a peep, as if judging whether that was true. Even though Irene outranked her in title, the atmosphere made it impossible for her to talk back. Still, the Saint spoke as usual.
"Yes, yes, that's right, Sir Agatha Sermilt! That heretic held a dagger to my throat and called Lord Sermilrod an idiot, a fool, and an ugly sea anemone!"
"Still... yes, I see. It couldn't be helped."
Agatha worried about her one and only daughter. If anything happened and she lost Hilde, she didn’t know how she would go on living. With Hilde as her first priority, Agatha couldn’t bring herself to say any more. In truth, if she hadn’t used her power, the Saint would almost certainly have been injured or killed. That was not just a private matter, but a tremendous loss to humankind.
Hilde took Agatha’s hand. Tired as she was, she smiled to reassure her.
"I'm fine, Mother. After a night’s rest, I’ll be as good as new."
Agatha had intended to scold her severely when she first saw her condition, but looking at her angelic daughter made her heart soften.
"All right... you must be tired, so go and rest. I’ll finish up the report and submit it myself."
Seeing the dark circles under Hilde’s eyes, lowered all the way to the rims, Agatha couldn’t bear to press her further. She always wanted to treat her sweet daughter as well as she could, even a little.
After saying their farewells, Hilde and the Saint left the office, personally returned the holy relic to the Pope, and headed back toward their room.
"Greetings! Saint! You’ve worked hard on your prayers!"
The priests nearby recognized the Saint and bowed deeply, almost reverently. For some reason, they kept stealing glances at Hilde, their cheeks reddening. When Hilde glared at them, the priests quickly hurried past at a faster pace.
"If Hilde were kind to men, she'd be insanely popular."
She didn’t need the attention of men she wouldn’t even bother to take. If anything, growing older had only drawn more eyes to her. Her large, cumbersome chest was nothing but an inconvenience when she fought.
"Then I suppose the Saint can have that sort of thing for herself."
"Boo! How impious! Still! Thanks to me, you finished the report so quickly, didn’t you? You should be grateful."
And who was it that had caused all this trouble in the first place? Hilde went back to her room, delivering an imaginary flick to the Saint’s forehead as she walked.
Skoti, the tallest tower in the world.
This magic tower, located in the Arctic, stood at the pinnacle of all the towers across the continent, a place where the most gifted talent competed for supremacy.
Even graduates of the elite academies in each nation found it difficult to apply, and yet the magicians of Skoti held such immense power that simply presenting a business card anywhere was enough to command respect. Tasked with managing human conflict and order, they were not people anyone could afford to offend. If someone did manage to get on their bad side, the end rarely turned out well.
Then again, there wasn’t anyone with the guts to openly oppose Skoti’s magicians in the first place.
"Is this supposed to be the best? You’re all below standard. Is this really all you can do?"
Edan Patrick, the Tower Master’s disciple, tossed the documents in his hand onto the man standing before him. The man watched the papers flutter down to the floor and trembled with fury.
As a magician of Skoti, he wanted nothing more than to punish the one who had insulted him, but the person before him possessed magical talent far beyond his own.
So what was he supposed to do about it?
Andrew Beus, drenched in a rain of paperwork, glared at Edan.
"Then do you mean to say you have better improvements than this magical design? More than thirty people from our school spent half a year losing sleep over this result! No matter who you are, Sir Edan, I can’t tolerate you dismissing it without even looking properly."
Andrew was furious at Edan’s attitude, as if he had simply flipped through the documents carelessly and sneered at them. If another magician from a different school had acted like that, Andrew would have hurled Hellfire right into their face.
"Huh? I did look at it. You call that the best your school could manage after half a year? I should speak to the Tower Master and think seriously about whether the Oligos School should even continue to exist."
Andrew couldn’t take it any longer. He had spent ten years clawing his way to the top of the academy, and it wasn’t for this kind of treatment.
He drew up his mana. Even if he received a severe punishment, he was going to smash Hellfire into this bastard’s face at least ten times. But then, for a brief moment, Andrew froze. The mana he had used as naturally as breathing all these years refused to move, as if it had been locked in ice.
It was magic cancellation, the sort that required calculating many times faster and further ahead than the spell circuit his opponent was using.
Edan looked at Andrew and snorted. He stood from his chair, then used his left hand to tap Andrew’s shoulder twice, while his right hand held the paper he’d picked up from the desk.
"Let’s see... a high-tier anti-demon magical barrier system for the front lines. It’s a fine idea, but at this rate of mana consumption, maintaining it for a year would cost five hundred million gold in magic stones. Roughly ten years’ worth of a nation’s budget?"
Andrew knew that much already. But by his calculations, that was cheap for what it cost to block the magic of high-ranking demons.
Edan clicked his tongue and, with a blank sheet and a pen, bent over the desk and began to scribble away on the spot.
"All right. Erase this entire section. Use a mana restoration artifact here, and this part... what is this, a sieve full of leaks in the circuit itself? Replace this with a biopolymer and redesign the mana convection so the whole thing is biodegradable."
About ten minutes passed.
Edan, who had been silent the whole time, straightened up and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Seeing him drenched in sweat after barely ten minutes, Andrew sneered inwardly. There was no way this upstart could casually revise work that had taken their proud Oligos School half a year to complete, even if he was the Tower Master’s disciple.
Edan sat back down and slid the magical blueprint he had just drawn across the desk for Andrew to see. Andrew, who had been inwardly scoffing the whole time, had spent over an hour interpreting the design while sweating buckets.
This is insane. How is there a circuit like this...? Why has no one ever imagined a design like this before? At this level of efficiency, the cost to maintain it for a year would be....
"Five million."
Andrew suddenly felt as if the man before him had grown even larger. A circuit thought up on the spot had produced what was effectively the finest design a human could create. No—perhaps it had reached a realm beyond that.
Edan Patrick waved a hand lazily.
"Take this and do even better. If you manage that, I’ll let it slide this one time."
Andrew Beus had always thought of himself as the finest magician of his generation. He had never once missed first place at the best academy in the capital of his country, and he believed his ability was just as exceptional. At first he had thought Edan was an unbearably arrogant bastard, but now he felt an almost instinctive awe for the man.
He bowed his head respectfully, feeling as though there were skies above the sky, and left the room.
"Ah, and take the paper off the floor with you."
He was about to send the whole mess into the trash with magic when—
Click.
The door opened. A white-bearded old man with a full mane stepped inside and picked up one of the papers lying on the floor.
"Ho ho! Not a bad idea, is it? The young man I just ran into didn't look pleased, though. What happened?"
The old man, who had recently been too busy to visit and yet somehow claimed to have taught him everything worth teaching, read the paper Andrew had brought.
"Still, it was full of holes from the start. Old man, do you really like this?"
It reminded him of the design he’d made when he was eight, and that somehow bothered him.
"I can feel their dedication in it! If it’s polished well, it could certainly produce a usable result."
"Oh? That may be. So what brings you here, old man?"
Edan’s master smiled at his disciple’s insolent tone. This brat was going to have a rough time of it this time.
Heh. This time, even you’re going to have to suffer a bit.
"An official decree came down from the Empire. To put it simply..."
At his master’s pitiful, almost taunting expression, one of Edan’s eyebrows arched. Sensing the reaction, the old man’s grin deepened.
"Edan Patrick, provisional Tower Master of Skoti. Assist the Hero and eliminate the high-ranking demon."
Edan’s face, utterly unprepared for the contents, went stiff.
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