Let's Live Kindly
In this impoverished and chaotic world, the selection process for the personal knight of Saintess Asty—the goddess’s proxy who would bring dreams and hope—came with a few firm conditions.
First: the candidate must not already be a formally invested knight.
The reason was simple. A knight who had been properly granted or inherited a title would command an exorbitant price, and their pride would sit so high they would never so much as glance at a proposal from a commoner girl like me. That was simply how the class system worked. If you didn’t like it, you had to get yourself certified as a Saintess and raise a holy knight order of your own.
Even if I somehow solved the problems of cost and face and managed to recruit such a knight, a deeper issue remained: could I actually trust them? In a feudal society, holding a title usually meant you owned land or a manor in your own name. In other words, you had somewhere to run back to after you stabbed me in the back and broke the contract. Therefore my personal knight had to be either an uninvested free knight or an aspiring knight with no real foundation to fall back on.
Second: they had to possess a certain level of courage and moral character.
The role I intended for my personal knight was that of the just and valiant savior straight out of chivalric romance. I needed to dress them up as a noble hero in advance so that, when the time came to gut the loan-shark king, the inevitable voices of concern would be fewer. If the “noble hero” turned out to be a base, petty coward, who would ever believe a word we said? Psychological testing was essential—not only for my personal preferences, but for operational efficiency and the management of our public image.
And finally, the third condition.
They should harbor hatred toward heretics or other races.
This was more of a preferred qualification than a hard requirement, yet depending on its intensity it could outweigh the first two. To put it more precisely: even a candidate who failed the first or second condition could still be recruited if their hatred burned hot enough to compensate. The Vesta Order had always been a religion of humans, for humans alone. Hating heretics meant you were a devout believer; even if you weren’t a believer, hatred of other races was something I could use to draw you into the Order. If a genuine fanatic who despised both heretics and other races appeared, I would welcome them with open arms.
Right now all we had to offer was an identity no one would believe and a purse we couldn’t freely spend. If I could secure the loyalty of a capable talent, I was even willing to borrow the lantern from Rebecca and perform a baptism. Whether our Order actually had a baptismal rite was another question entirely.
How could a Saintess chosen by the goddess herself not know whether her own Order had a baptism? Sadly, I still hadn’t finished memorizing our doctrines. I knew I would have to learn them properly if I ever wanted to play the Saintess role convincingly, but I was simply too busy; there was never time for theology. Besides, I already had two walking theological encyclopedias. Pates, who had once held high office in the old Order, had been left behind in Montpellier because of a bad back, but Rebecca—healthy, diligent, and equipped with a built-in user-protection function—stayed at my side twenty-four hours a day. Finding out whether we had a baptism would be no trouble at all.
“Rebecca. In the old Order, did they perform any special ceremony when a new believer joined?”
“Yes. As a sign that they had cast aside their former life and become a new person, they lit a fire and scorched the flesh.”
…What did I just hear?
They poured a baptism of fire over prospective converts? Enough to scorch the body? For a moment I wondered whether I had become the high priestess of some fantasy Aztec cult rather than the Saintess of an otherworldly Catholicism. Then I reconsidered: a goddess whose Order was that deranged would never have chosen a twenty-first-century atheist as her proxy. Everything I had seen of the goddess so far had been surprisingly merciful and sensible. Besides, medieval religious practices often looked a little extreme and dangerous by modern standards. Since Vesta was the goddess of fire, a light scorching with something as safe as a candle flame wouldn’t have been strange at all…
“So they left a small scar on the skin with a candle?”
“No. They doused the entire body in flame.”
…I had been constructing a careful hypothesis, and it turned out they simply went full auto-da-fé. These people were completely insane. Why were they running an Inquisition on their own converts? And if that was how they baptized people, how did any converts survive? Without divine power they would either burn to death on the spot or spend the rest of their lives in agony from full-body burns.
“Th-then… do I need to receive a baptism as well?”
“Pardon? Ah, you needn’t worry. The flame used in the rite is kindled with divine power, so it is harmless to people—in fact, it even washes away bodily ailments.”
I had curled up and started trembling like a Chikorita that had just met a Fire-type, so Rebecca smiled and corrected my misunderstanding. Right. Even in a mad age they wouldn’t throw a perfectly healthy person into a bonfire. The relief of knowing I wouldn’t be launched straight to the goddess’s side by a fire baptism was genuine, yet Rebecca’s gaze toward me had begun to feel a little… off. How to put it? A faint sense of being looked down on? The way she was looking at me was the way one looks at a cute little sister, and it did not sit well with me at all. Coming right after talk of burning people at the stake only made it worse. That was trauma for me.
“Speaking of knights, I’m suddenly curious— is handling mana a matter of talent, or is it hereditary?”
I decided to change the subject and return to the matter of a personal knight. In truth this was slightly more important than the Vesta Order’s Fire-type baptism. Rebuilding the Order was still a distant prospect, but the way supernatural force manifested would affect the path immediately ahead of me.
“In principle, anyone can learn to handle it given enough time… though without a teacher to help, it takes rather a long while.”
Rebecca’s answer felt a little strange. If anyone could awaken mana given enough time, how did the balance of power hold? If every dog and cow could class-change into a knight or mage, the aristocracy couldn’t have existed in the first place.
“Exactly how long does it take?”
“With both outstanding talent and a teacher, about two years of one hour’s practice a day. Without either, a lifetime of training may not be enough.”
Ah. Now I understood. Penniless commoners would starve or grow old and die before they ever awakened mana. Unless you were a once-in-a-generation prodigy, you would collapse before you ever grew wings. Even if you ground time and effort into dust and finally learned to handle mana, you would already be far too old. In the end you needed either money or connections to awaken young enough to find employment; the fools who tried to reverse their lives through self-study would, even if they somehow succeeded, be pushed out again almost immediately because of their age. This felt uncomfortably familiar from my previous life. Golden spoons, is that you again?
“Then it would be easier to recruit someone who has already awakened mana. The problem is how to find such a person—”
“The duty of the Lantern Bearer is to guard the sacred relic left by the goddess and to illuminate every darkness in the world. The moment a target enters a certain range, I can sense them at once.”
“Oh. So it has a tracking function too?”
“…Actually, I’m simply sensitive to mana. Given the nature of my work, knights and mages are the highest-priority threats…”
Ah, well. Nice while it lasted. Still, being able to detect nearby mana-users was an impressive ability. Thanks to it I no longer needed to go around spreading word that I was recruiting a knight; I could travel at my leisure and simply visit places where useful talent was likely to be found.
“How long until we reach Avignon?”
“It shouldn’t take too long. Why don’t you rest your head on my lap and take a nap—”
“Then I’ll gratefully accept.”
“Eh?”
Thinking ahead to the schedule, I promptly laid my head on Rebecca’s thigh. The wretched road conditions of the Middle Ages were not something you could grow used to no matter how often you experienced them. Before this nightmarish ride drove me out of my mind I had to escape into dreamland somehow. Falling asleep inside a jolting carriage was no easy feat either, of course, but I had stayed up all night precisely for this moment; if I simply closed my eyes I would drop off soon enough.
“Wake me when we arrive… mmm.”
And so I poured every ounce of will into falling asleep—
“Die! You lackey of a greedy pig!”
—only to nearly leave this world the instant we entered the County of Avignon, skewered by a pitchfork.
“You blasphemous wretches…!”
“A-a monster!”
“We’ll die if we’re caught! Run!”
“?”
Immediately afterward Rebecca, eyes rolled back in pure fury, reduced the someone who had swung a farming tool at me to a state of five-body dissatisfaction. From the perspective of someone who had been abruptly swept into a peasant revolt, however, the entire situation was simply baffling.
Why are the serfs trying to harvest human heads instead of crops?
Is there a war going on here or what?