Even If I Look Like This, I'm a Saintess, Right? (4)
The sight left the abbess utterly speechless.
The young nuns might have mistaken the Saintess for someone who had been inside the cathedral the entire time. But the head nun and the older sisters already knew the truth.
The Saintess was an existence sent into the world by the Earth Mother to save the continent in her stead.
The Saintess who had suddenly appeared just days ago should have been no different from a newborn infant. No matter how close to real combat the Pope’s training had been, the abbess still couldn’t believe it.
To grow this much in just a few days… As expected of the one chosen by the gods. She truly is the woman most beloved by the divine.
The demon who had maintained a relatively neat appearance when first confronting the abbess had, within minutes of the Saintess’s arrival, been reduced to an unrecognizable bloody pulp.
“Ptui.”
The demon spat out the blood pooling in his mouth, only to feel it instantly fill again. Cheolkeong’s eyes trembled violently.
This can’t possibly be human strength!
No matter how much divine power one wrapped around their fists, it shouldn’t have been able to inflict this kind of damage on a demon like him. He frantically searched his memories for any pink- or orange-haired Saintess who had ever swung her fists like this, but no such person came to mind. The confusion only deepened.
The Saintess, blinded by rage at the abbess’s brutal defeat, hadn’t even noticed how her own appearance was changing. But one demon and one nun had already realized it.
The Saintess’s eyes, which had been the fresh green of summer leaves, now blazed with golden light as if steeped in divine power. The divine power surging with fury looked even more ominous than demonic energy.
I need to get back and report this… This new Saintess is a complete lunatic…
“Ugh… huk… ungk…”
Startled by the Saintess’s sudden appearance, the demon began muttering a spell out of habit. It was the perfect moment to exploit the foolish Saintesses’ terrible habit of trying to save everyone.
Nuns could not use magic. That meant they didn’t analyze spell structures or incantations to counter them. Most human magic grew exponentially more destructive the longer and more complex the chant became.
That was why demons loved to cast slightly longer incantations or move their demonic energy in suspicious ways. They knew the Saintesses, who prioritized protecting the party above all else, would frantically layer protective prayers on themselves instead of attacking.
Heh heh. Just look at that panicked face!
The abbess had done the same. During their one-sided beatdown that could barely be called a fight, whenever the demon began chanting, she would occasionally drop her offensive blessings and rush to cast defensive prayers. The longer the chant, the more layers of protection she would pile on, just like the other nuns and previous Saintesses before her.
The demon had been certain she would stare helplessly at the spot where he had been lying before fleeing back to the Demon Realm. Instead—
“Kek?!”
Cheolkeong’s eyes, which had been launched into the air by the Saintess’s sudden punch, filled entirely with black pupils.
“Where do you get off pulling that crap?!”
The Saintess drove her fist, bulging with veins and wrapped in multiple layers of divine power, straight into the demon’s face. Not content with that, she didn’t even pull back her momentum. She mounted the collapsing Cheolkeong as he fell to the ground.
After pinning him down with her legs infused with divine power so he couldn’t move an inch, the Saintess began mercilessly pounding his face. One would never have guessed she used to be a mage. The demon, who had always compensated for his weakness with a bit of magic and trickery, was a terrible matchup for the Saintess who saw through every one of his spells.
Cheolkeong, who had briefly lost consciousness, quickly regained his senses thanks to the demonic energy clinging to his body. But that only marked the beginning of his suffering.
“You bastard!”
“Guhk!!”
One punch from the Saintess, one scream.
“Trying to—”
Clang!
“Run away?!”
Bang!
“Are you?!”
Whenever he desperately flapped his wings to escape, the furious Saintess would slip off her high heel, grip the stiletto like a hammer, and slam it—filled with divine power—straight into his solar plexus.
It was a blow that would have killed an ordinary human hundreds, no, thousands of times over. The Saintess, whose body had transcended human limits through divine power, continued the assault. The demon kept losing consciousness, waking up, and getting beaten again. The abbess had long since lost her mind watching what could only be described as a one-sided lynching rather than a battle.
After being knocked out so many times that he had absorbed all the sticky demonic energy around him, Cheolkeong’s recovery grew slower and slower. The still-enraged Saintess slapped his cheeks repeatedly with palms wrapped in divine power. When he failed to regain consciousness, she began stabbing his entire body with razor-thin threads of divine power, like performing acupuncture. She looked less like a priestess following the goddess and more like a vengeful evil spirit.
“Kehk… You… you crazy bitch!”
The demon, regaining his senses from the excruciating pain, promptly lost consciousness again under the Saintess’s relentless fists and divine power-infused high heel.
“Gweeeh?!”
Every time he tried to chant a spell or gather mana to return to the Demon Realm, the Saintess would make a face that suggested she might actually be a demon herself and hammer her fist into his solar plexus like a stake.
When he attempted fast-cast magic, she would kick off the ground, retreat before he could even target her, then rush in again and deliver a clean uppercut from below. When he began a longer chant with greater destructive potential, the Saintess would take a few steps back, utter a surprisingly short prayer, and charge forward like she was taking a running start.
There’s no way the Saintess could know about demon magic!
Cheolkeong, who had nearly lost his original form, moved his barely intact eyes rapidly left and right. The Saintess responded to each spell as if she knew exactly what it was meant to do. She no longer seemed like someone he could even touch. The more he tried to scheme his way out of this, the more certain he became that the Saintess—who he had assumed was just buying time without intending to kill him cleanly—was only growing more vicious with every punch.
On his ninth revival, Cheolkeong saw the Saintess still straddling him. She clasped both hands together, raised them high, and swung down like a descending axe. He panicked. A massive clump of divine power the size of an adult’s head formed in her hands as she delivered the final blow to his chest.
A tremendous explosion rang out as if a bomb had detonated. The self-proclaimed strategist of the Demon King’s army, Cheolkeong, finally closed his eyes for the tenth time.
Only after delivering the final strike did the Saintess’s eyes return to their original green. She kicked the demon a few times as if he were nothing more than a rolling pebble, then slowly walked toward the abbess.
“Abbess. Are you alright?”
“Y-yes… I-I’m fine. But why did you come back?!”
“…I couldn’t just leave you here… You look like you’re in pain, so stop talking and rest. I’ll listen to the scolding later.”
The abbess, surrounded by the horrific traces of a battle too gruesome to witness, clearly needed the fastest possible recovery.
How dreadful.
Still, it was fortunate. She seemed to have avoided any fatal wounds, so they could at least exchange a few words. The most urgent issue appeared to be the bones jutting through torn skin.
If she had been an ordinary nun instead of the abbess, she would have died several times over. Thanks to past experiences where I had been forced to maintain shields for hours, counter his magic, and endure long-range bombardment, I immediately recalled the best way to deal with him. I was able to suppress the demon quite effectively.
The divine power that demons feared most. The experience of knowing he would regenerate up to ten times. The knowledge of how demon magic chants were structured. Mixing those three things together had allowed me to finish him off alone in such a short time. It was practically thanks to the goddess.
He must be groggy now.
This demon, Wave Evil Fiend Cheolkeong, would fall into a deep sleep like a hibernating bat for an entire day after dying ten times. The hero had called it “groggy.” We had used the term vaguely, not really understanding its meaning, simply thinking it was what heroes called this state.
Since we now had a full day’s grace period, I could kill him by chopping his head into tiny pieces. Demons in the groggy state couldn’t move at all. For now, taking care of the abbess came first.
Did I scrape my knee?
The moment I knelt to pray, grains of sand dug into my skin.
“O Mother. Please watch over your daughter.”
Even if I prayed while running, the Earth Mother would hear me. There was no way she wouldn’t hear me in such a quiet place. Still, the moment I knelt, I felt the effect double, just like borrowing the power of a mana amplification circle. I had no other choice.
I could tell from the abbess’s labored, wheezing breaths that she didn’t have much time left.
I’m not sure if I should be the one doing this.
I remembered every prayer used by past Saintesses recorded in the ancient tome that contained the heroes’ messages, along with the miracles witnessed by those who had heard them. The reason I had never used them before was a small obstacle in my heart.
Every time such prayers were offered, it was said that one goddess-like woman would gently stroke the wounds. It was also said that their solemnity had made even those who didn’t believe in the gods realize the divine existed. I had thought none of those things were something I could do.
Whatever. Who cares how it looks? First, I need to save her life.
Oh… You’re badly hurt. It would have been better if you had run away with the children.
Was it true that the Earth Mother had created humans? The goddess, who clearly didn’t understand humans at all, drew the divine power that had been flowing through my hand and wrapped it around the abbess.
“Ah, not yet… Hup! There are more demons on the Pope’s side…! Don’t waste your divine power!”
“It’s fine… Even if I look like this, I’m a Saintess, aren’t I?”
If I thought of it as acting, it wasn’t so bad. As long as I wasn’t with the hero and the other three, I could just pretend for a little while. At the very least, I had to make sure I didn’t disgrace the other Saintesses. If I just copied their behavior and acted accordingly, it should be fine.
Yes. There wasn’t even time to feel confused. I needed to accept the current situation and focus only on figuring out how to use this power properly.
“Haa… Still… thanks to you, I survived. Thank you.”
Saving you is only the beginning.
Only now did I realize something I hadn’t understood during my sparring sessions with the Pope.
What the phrase “most beloved child” truly meant.
It seems that once I call forth divine power, it really does move according to my will.
When I prayed for protection, the divine power that appeared all over my body instantly condensed several times denser the moment I threw a punch. When I intentionally pushed divine power down to my feet, it wrapped around them even more naturally than mana. The more I poured divine power into the abbess, the more the surrounding divine power clung to me. It felt like a fountain that caught the water it had poured out and shot it forth once more.
It seemed that performing an infinite divine power fountain show someday wouldn’t be that difficult.
I had become the perfect person to support my party members, who charged straight into traps like lunatics. I had become the one who could perfectly solve the biggest weakness our party had—sustainability. Only now did I finally realize it.