No Law, and Fists Hurt
The role of the Lantern Bearer is protection and preservation.
To safeguard the final sacred relic the Goddess left behind, and to carefully preserve the order’s disciplines and duties so they may be passed down to future generations.
And thus to keep the spark of faith from dying out until the day She returns.
It was a role of truly immense importance—yet the office of Lantern Bearer had never once been officially recognized by the order.
Of course it hadn’t.
The position only came into being after the order itself had collapsed.
When the Goddess, disappointed by the corruption of the mortal world, withdrew Her power, the order still possessed considerable strength.
Losing the ability to wield Divine Power did not erase the prosperity they had already amassed.
The order had a great deal: vast wealth piled high through tithes and corruption, a knightly order of six thousand holy knights—the largest on the continent—and a sprawling administrative network that governed the entire western half of the Europa Continent.
Even after the Goddess departed and Divine Power melted away like spring snow, the order remained the strongest force among humankind.
The problem was that every single member of that order had fallen into a state of panic.
An organization that had once controlled half the secular world disintegrated in the blink of an eye.
Bishops who sensed impending doom instinctively fired the opening shots of a blame game. The priests beneath them either followed their bishops into the political fray or, conversely, fled the order entirely.
Countless holy knights knelt before feudal lords simply to keep food on the table; just as many turned bandit and set the continent ablaze.
It was an age when boundless grief gnawed at the earth and the wails of the innocent never ceased.
Archbishop Jude, who discovered a lantern still holding residual Divine Power in the order’s storehouses, liquidated his entire fortune to purchase a small castle.
Then he severed every tie with the secular world and devoted himself to raising successors.
For the day She would one day return.
That was how the mission of the Lantern Bearer began.
“W-what on earth are you saying all of a sudden, Saintess?”
Time flowed onward to the year 1298.
Rebecca, the third Lantern Bearer who bore that weighty mission, was pouring cold sweat before the very Saintess she was sworn to protect.
“I’m asking how many people you killed last night. Quite a few knife-wielders came calling after dark, didn’t they?”
She had no choice but to sweat.
The Saintess she had sworn to protect even at the cost of her entire life was now coldly interrogating her about her sins.
Uh—
Rebecca’s face went paper-white.
Originally the Lantern Bearer’s duty was simply to keep the sacred relic from being damaged or stolen. But now that a revelation had ordered her to protect the Saintess, the situation was entirely different.
An object the Goddess had left behind on earth, versus the Goddess’s own proxy whom She had personally commanded her to guard.
If one had to choose which took priority, the latter was obvious.
Therefore the Lantern Bearer’s mission was no longer the protection of the relic, but the protection of the Saintess.
A person had appeared who must be valued even above the lantern she had revered like a household god since the day she was born.
And protecting someone meant ensuring not only their physical safety but their peace of mind as well.
Having been caught red-handed at a merciless murder scene by a girl who had only just turned eleven, Rebecca had, for all practical purposes, already failed in her duty.
“…It was only a handful of ordinary bandits. I dealt with them because I thought they might harm the villagers if left alone. Nothing Your Holiness needs to worry about.”
So Rebecca lied.
She drastically understated the number of enemies she had burned to death and concealed the fact that their true purpose had been Asty’s assassination.
If she didn’t, she feared Asty would grow afraid of her.
She feared the girl would take fright at the knowledge that people wanted her dead and simply run away.
A girl raised from birth as a Lantern Bearer could not tolerate that possibility.
From the moment she first opened her eyes until now, her entire life had been spent praying solely for the Goddess’s return.
If through her own mistake the Saintess were broken or fled, it would not merely be a mission failure—it would be the failure of her entire existence.
What do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do—should I just kidnap her outright? But if that only makes her hate me more—
She desperately needed some kind of plan.
The Lantern Bearer who had been charged by the Goddess with the Saintess’s protection began, in a state of complete panic, to scramble for ways to deceive her charge.
“What are you talking about? Those were an assassin squad sent by the Spinners’ Guild, weren’t they? I even heard something about them originally being some kind of merchant caravan.”
Fortunately, the person she was protecting was no ordinary eleven-year-old girl.
No—she wasn’t even eleven, and she wasn’t a girl at all.
Noticing how thoroughly cowed Rebecca had become, Asty merely shrugged as if it were nothing and set about easing her timid guardian’s worries.
The reincarnator from the twenty-first century had already evolved into a proper half-medieval person.
Even in her previous life she hadn’t exactly lived a peaceful existence.
“…How did you hear about that? I made certain you were asleep before I left.”
Only then did the tension leave Rebecca’s body, and she finally voiced the question she had been holding back.
It wasn’t as though she had wanted to be caught at the scene of a burning execution.
A Lantern Bearer’s senses and agility far surpassed those of ordinary people, and Rebecca had used every scrap of both to finish the entire process at lightning speed.
Confirming Asty was asleep and slipping out of the house, gauging the enemies’ numbers and strength, quietly disposing of them before they could raise a ruckus—
She was certain she had handled every step swiftly and secretly. She simply could not understand how she had been discovered.
“There was a smell… the smell of human flesh burning. That’s what woke me. I may not remember much else, but that particular scent I remember perfectly.”
And Asty’s answer was rather chilling.
The Saintess, briefly recalling memories of her previous life, gave a bitter smile as she explained.
Rebecca unconsciously decided to forget the words she had just heard.
“Anyway, I’m not going to scold you, so you can relax. If anything, I’m the one who should be thanking you. I’m still alive thanks to you.”
Whether Rebecca liked it or not, Asty simply steamrolled the conversation forward.
She acknowledged that Rebecca’s execution by fire had been justified, then bowed her head in gratitude for saving her life.
“From now on, Rebecca unni, please speak comfortably with me.”
“A Lantern Bearer would never dare address the Goddess’s proxy so casually—”
“Then consider it an order from the Saintess. Starting now, speak comfortably.”
“…I-if that is what you wish… then… yes.”
And just like that she began acting familiar, even demanding that they converse in an easy, informal register.
For Rebecca, who had been trapped in every kind of pessimistic fantasy, it was a dream come true—yet dreams are called dreams precisely because they eventually end.
Having swept away the obstacles that made communication tiresome, Asty suddenly thrust a single sheet of paper in front of her eyes.
“Ta-da.”
“A blueprint… is it?”
“Yes. Drop the ‘is it,’ though.”
“Even so, at least let me keep the polite ending…”
“Fine. But then you don’t get to complain when I use formal speech either.”
After a brief tussle over honorifics, the two girls turned their eyes to the blueprint.
A hollow cylinder, a simplified sketch of a loom, and dense rows of formulas packed so tightly they were nearly illegible.
Even without understanding the meaning, the sheer visual impact of something clearly extraordinary made Rebecca nod in unconscious admiration.
“It’s a flying shuttle. A device that will revolutionarily improve the efficiency of the most mind-numbingly tedious weaving work.”
Had she known the true nature of that blueprint, she would never have done such a thing.
Because this was an invention that would spark a revolution in the weaving industry.
“Ooh… oh?”
And revolution, by its very nature, inevitably brings the destruction of the old order.
Rebecca, who had been admiring it without a second thought, belatedly noticed something odd and tilted her head.
The question was extremely simple.
Which guild’s people did I burn to death yesterday?
The Spinners’ Guild.
Why? Because the Water Frame Asty had built threatened the spinners’ livelihoods.
So what reaction would the weavers show once Asty invented a flying shuttle and revolutionized their industry?
“They’ll come try to kill me, of course. Practically half the entire clothing industry will be united against me. Ah, and since I’m also going to make a primitive ancient sewing machine, maybe three-quarters?”
Asty rattled off the absurd statement with a perfectly calm face.
They would absolutely come to kill her.
And yet she never once said she would stop inventing—so in effect she was declaring her intention to make enemies of the entire clothing trade.
“Please reconsider, Saintess! It is far too dangerous!”
“Ah, your speech got stiff again.”
Rebecca tried to stop her with a face even paler than before.
From the standpoint of someone charged with the Saintess’s security, it was an entirely natural reaction.
She could cut down and snap every blade that flew out of the dark, but the sticky malice that seeped between person and person could neither be cut nor broken.
If the order still stood and she could use the church walls and the holy knights’ piety as a shield, it might be different—but with only a single Lantern Bearer, deliberately making more enemies was far too reckless.
“Please. You are the sole hope of this bleak age. What value could this machine possibly hold that you would risk yourself for it?!”
So Rebecca all but screamed as she tried to dissuade her,
“The Goddess told me to do it this way~.”
Asty, who had no confidence she could patiently explain industrial automation and the increase of total wealth, simply pulled out the faith shield.
And once she did, there was no way the Goddess’s own Lantern Bearer could dare voice opposition.
With a sigh that seemed to sink into the earth from Rebecca, the cheerful construction of a semi-automatic loom began.