One Month

One month.

A full month had passed.

Exactly one month since the day I lost consciousness and collapsed, and quite a lot had changed.

After I blacked out, a ridiculous rumor circulated that the Saintess had collapsed from holy power exhaustion—but in the end, it was chalked up to my frail constitution.

The Hero and Jerome started smothering me with overprotective concern, but I kept refusing and insisted on continuing treatment, and they eventually, reluctantly, let go.

Around the time the overprotection began to fade, I realized I was essentially stranded on a remote island right in the middle of the front lines.

Yeah. Damn it.

The allies I could recruit or gain on the front were limited, and on top of that, even though the overprotection had stopped on the surface, I could still feel eyes on me from somewhere—subtle, lingering stares. With no way to sneak out, no way to flee the front, no way to hunt for items, and no way to grow stronger by conventional means, I began examining my own abilities instead.

Yes. I poured a great deal of time into it.

Day after day I pushed my holy power to the absolute limit my body could endure, then slept, and repeated the cycle for nights on end. Slowly, that limit expanded.

For reasons I couldn't explain, the Saintess never appeared in my dreams during that entire month.

On days without a flood of wounded, I could almost call my situation leisurely.

The day the Pope had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠drilled holes through my eyes, he compared the Saintess's body to a cracked vessel.

A balloon stretched taut by overflowing holy power—pricked carefully through a strip of rubber tape with a fine needle, so the air could escape little by little through a tiny hole. That was the state I was in.

To be blessed by a star meant drawing on infinite starlight and holy ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠power.

But the more you used it, the more it burdened you—because the volume was simply too vast.

Like a faucet fixed open over the ocean, pouring water without end until it finally destroyed itself.

A consumable that couldn't withstand the pressure, endlessly vomiting it out, breaking apart.

In short: the more holy power I used, the more strain my body inevitably took. There was no getting around it.

Or perhaps the cracks in the vessel had widened further, and that was why the strain no longer felt as severe.

If the cracks grew, water might leak through them—but the burden on the vessel itself would lessen.

In that case, the reason the Saintess had been terminally ill in the game was likely not disease at all, but the use of holy power itself.

Why, then, had the Saintess cut her own wrists?

I didn't know.

What I didn't know, I simply didn't know.

So, to put the essence of this ability as I had come to understand it: use holy power beyond a certain threshold, and the vessel shatters.

Because the cracks had already widened, pouring holy power into the wounded day after day no longer widened them further.

The Erosion Rate stayed the same, too.

As those days of lingering on the front and repeating treatment stretched on, a memory surfaced.

When the Erosion Rate had crossed fifty percent—when I had acted like someone else entirely.

I had handled holy power with uncanny skill.

As if I had become a different person.

No waste. Precise restraint. A blade honed sharp and keen, permanent physical reinforcement always active—I had fought the Hero, who was presumed to have regressed, on equal footing.

In other words, the higher the Erosion Rate climbed, the stronger I became.

…But could that really be called me growing stronger?

That was why I still kept the notebook on me.

Hoping the day would never come when I had to burn it, I thought.

As for the changes in everyone else: the Superhuman Lloyd, commander of this front, had said he would make them Superhumans within a month. That hadn't been complete nonsense—though if you pressed me, I'd say it was about half nonsense.

In the end they failed to become Superhumans, but both the Hero and Jerome had improved by leaps and bounds.

I had written Jerome off as barely scraping upper-tier, a disposable vanguard—but he had risen enough to hold out through the mid-to-late game, and while he wasn't a Superhuman, he could now call himself upper-tier without shame.

The Hero… honestly, I wasn't sure.

He had grown dramatically stronger, yes, but attributing it to Lloyd felt slightly off.

It was more like he was reclaiming strength that had always been his.

If the Hero had regressed to the end of summer—the point when the Saintess was presumed to die—then he had already reached a level where he could hold the vanguard through at least one Season and land successful attacks, and he had killed two Seasons.

A Superhuman was, by definition, off the scale—a tier the Hero would only reach after defeating roughly four Seasons—so I hadn't expected him to get there.

As he stood now, you could roughly think of him as two Jeromes.

Sorry, Jerome—but the Hero was a genius, and he was a dullard.

And so, one month later, I sat in the chair of a tent that had grown familiar and cozy, set the Madman's Notebook on the table, and wrote down the things I needed to organize.

I had written the word Spring inside it, and since the Madman's Notebook had already activated, it was now little more than an ordinary notebook.

As long as I remembered that destroying it would cancel the Erosion Rate lock, that was all that mattered.

Hmm. I'd written quite a lot over the course of a month.

That was the thought that crossed my mind.

I had spent a long time on the front with the Hero and Jerome, but the two of them still felt awkward to me.

One of them might kill me on the spot if he ever realized I wasn't the real Saintess. The other chatted easily with the Hero, then looked at me alone with that uncomfortably fond smile and spoke in formal address.

It felt, just a little, like they were leaving me out—and even knowing that wasn't true, it still soured my mood.

At any rate, I used formal speech with them as well, and decided that counted as getting along reasonably well.

The Emperor periodically sent crows with orders—go here, go there—and our missions involved riding a carriage a short distance to this front or that one and successfully hunting a few intermediate-boss-class beasts judged particularly strong among their kind.

The Jackal and the Wolf.

Beasts with black fur and red eyes, identical as twins—they were strong, but not as strong as we were now.

Jerome and the Hero each took one, and I supported from the rear.

Unlike when we had been helpless against Spring and Summer, they cut down the black mud-clumps mimicking beasts one after another with ruthless, practiced skill—even on a first encounter. It was the work of thoroughly seasoned fighters.

Watching the fruits of training play out before ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my eyes, I raised my evaluation of Lloyd a notch.

It really was an impressive training method.

Anyway—around the time the Emperor was sending us back and forth across various fronts with these odd jobs and elite-mob hunting orders meant to grow us, one incident occurred.

We reported the Jackal and Wolf subjugation to the Central Front, and a crow carried the message away.

Then I saw Akan, appearing from who knows where, watching me from a distance behind us.

The moment our eyes met, he hastily looked away and disappeared into a tent, so I never caught his expression—but something about it felt wrong.

A few characters from the previous work had appeared in Four Seasons as well, but ever since that foul-tempered mage rejected my proposal, I hadn't been able to read his behavior at all.

Suddenly throwing himself into the front lines, driving off Spring single-handedly—and now this attitude on top of it?

I was a little afraid of people whose intentions I couldn't read, so I had quietly marked him as a variable.

In any case, we were advancing slowly but steadily—and I couldn't bring myself to be glad about it.

Yes. We were advancing slowly, and I felt restless.

The slowly was the problem.

The Hero, oblivious to my pace, would occasionally turn up with medicinal herbs or pills he'd found somewhere and press them on me. I recognized them easily as fairly expensive healing items from the game.

But why give them to me?

Come to think of it, the Hero had most likely regressed after watching the Saintess die.

The only people he would turn back time to save were probably his parents or the Saintess.

His parents seemed unlikely—his strength already sat around mid-game level, and his body was completing itself at high speed—so the Saintess was far more probable.

Which meant the Hero was almost certainly under some misunderstanding about the Saintess's physical condition.

No. It wasn't a disease.

I wasn't sick.

It was a night of wondering how on earth to say that.

Then again, did I even need to say it? That thought crossed my mind too.

While I was entertaining those selfish thoughts, a crow's cry cut through the air.