Aftermath (4)
"You worthless bastards—you're lower than animals!"
Hans's face twisted at the stench that stabbed at his nostrils. There was no real smell, of course, but somehow the air reeked worse than foul vomit.
The villagers shouted at Hans as he stood between them and Daisy.
"My lord! That girl is a wicked witch! She forgot every kindness we showed her—food, a roof over her head—and summoned a pack of magic beasts down on our village!"
"That's right! The witch put a curse on us! My husband broke his leg up in the mountains because of her!"
"The river turned black overnight, too! All of it—every last bit—is that witch's curse on our village!"
A peculiar madness flickered in the villagers' eyes: the special brand of fanaticism belonging to narrow-minded people who were utterly convinced they were doing the right thing.
"If Daisy were really a witch, why didn't you report her to the temple?"
"Th-that's…"
"If she truly were a witch, you should have gone straight to the Pantheon! What did you think a witch might do if you just left her alone?"
At Hans's words, the villagers faltered.
Lies spilled from their mouths, and they had begun to believe those lies themselves—swallowing their own falsehoods until they took them for truth. They knew what they were saying was not true, but greed and desire had blinded them. They turned their backs on the truth right in front of them and chose instead the fiction they had invented.
"You already knew," Hans said, chewing on every word. "You knew she wasn't a witch."
Every one of them was a vile creature. Devils wearing human skins.
A tense standoff stretched between Hans, whose killing intent poured off him in waves, and the villagers. All the while, the gemstone trembled in his hand, pulsing with a deep red light.
"Hans! What on earth is going on here?"
"Hero."
As the confrontation dragged on, Kenis—who had spotted the commotion from a distance—came running and arrived at last. The sight of her unharmed brought a little color back to Hans's face.
"Hero, this gemstone…"
"This is… a Bloodstone? Where did you get this?"
"There's a cave in the mountain behind this village. There was a demon inside it."
"What? A demon?!"
Kenis reeled at the word. The villagers stirred and murmured among themselves. A demon, in the mountain behind their own village! A few of them even fainted on the spot.
"A demon—Hans, this is no time to stand around! We need to go back, re-equip, and launch a subjugation—!"
"Ah—Hero."
Hans caught Kenis as she made to rush off, scratching his head with a faintly sheepish look.
"Well… the demon's already been dealt with. By me. That gemstone is what I brought back after killing it."
"…What? I'm sorry—what?"
Kenis asked again, thoroughly flustered. He had killed what, exactly?
"The demon. I killed the demon."
"…Excuse me?! You mean—a demon? By yourself?"
"Uh—well, yes?"
"No, that—what—how in the world—"
Kenis's mouth fell open as she stammered. The demons she knew of, even the weakest among them, were monsters that could tear a human apart without effort. Hans, who had only a few days of training under his belt, was not someone who should have been able to defeat one alone.
"Judging by the size of this Bloodstone, it was at least an upper-rank demon. And you killed it by yourself? How?"
"The gods watched over me."
Hans said it to a still-dazed Kenis.
"More importantly, Hero—this gemstone you called a Bloodstone. The villagers were hiding smaller stones that resonate with it."
"What did you just say?"
Kenis's expression cooled at once. A Bloodstone was the core that formed a demon's vessel of authority. Because its raw material was human blood, the Pantheon treated possession of Bloodstones with the utmost severity.
"Is what he says true?"
"Oh, Hero, we knew nothing of the sort! Ignorant folk like us thought they were just pretty gems!"
"We never dreamed they were such wicked things! A filthy demon deceived us—we had no idea, not even in our worst nightmares!"
The moment Kenis spoke with real menace, the villagers, terrified, dug Bloodstones out of their clothes and flung them onto the ground. Not a single person among them failed to produce one.
In truth, everyone in the village except Daisy and her mother had been carrying a Bloodstone. The stones piled up in a heap—every size and shape imaginable.
Hans quickly stepped close to Kenis and told her everything without holding back: how Daisy and her mother had been branded witches by the village, and how the villagers had deliberately concealed that fact from the temple and the Apostles.
Kenis's gaze grew colder by the second.
"Simply possessing a Bloodstone is treated as evidence of heresy. Whether you acted with intent will have to be investigated thoroughly—but for the moment, your faith is highly suspect."
They had deliberately hidden Daisy, whom they themselves had suspected of witchcraft, even after the Hero and the Apostles arrived in the village. They had accepted Bloodstones in exchange for blood and tried to cover it up. And those very Bloodstones, forged from their own blood, had allowed a demon's vessel of authority to descend.
Kenis drew her Holy Sword.
Becoming the Hero had conferred upon her countless rights and duties. The weight of those duties was immense—and the rights that came with them were no less numerous. Kenis, who disliked coercion and the trappings of authority, had never once exercised those rights until now. But this was the moment to use one of them.
"The rights granted to a Hero are beyond counting. One of them is—"
A judgment of heresy.
"—the authority to declare someone a heretic on the spot and carry out immediate judgment, without a religious trial or the ruling of an Inquisitor."
The Hero alone decided, and in the name of the gods, pronounced the verdict of heresy. Among the Hero's many rights, it was one of the gravest and heaviest. Because the Hero received her mission directly from the gods, her judgment was trusted completely.
"H-h-heresy?! Oh, Hero, we truly knew nothing!! Oh, please—please!"
"Th-the chief! The chief made us do it!! He said that girl was a witch!! I-I didn't do anything wrong!! I said from the start something felt off!!"
"Hero… Hero… we were truly wrong… we're so sorry…"
"The chief!! That pig of a man!! He said if we all just kept quiet, no one would ever find out!! He made us do it!! It's all because of that pig!!"
"The chief said her father had a lot of money!! He said if we framed her as a witch, we could all split it!! All of it—every bit of it—was the chief's idea!"
Daisy's hands trembled faintly. The revelation that the villagers had branded her a witch out of greed for her father's money seemed to have struck her hard.
"Money…? Because of Dad's money… Mom and me…?"
The villagers crawled forward on shaking knees, clutching at Kenis's feet and clinging to her. The eyes that looked down on them were ice-cold.
In the end, for money, they had persecuted a little girl and her mother and driven them into the role of witches. Blinded by immediate gain, they had joined hands with heresy and helped a demon take form. Even allowing for ignorance, the gravity of their crimes was crushing.
With a solemn expression, Kenis raised the Holy Sword before her face. Sunlight caught the blade, and its edge gleamed with a killing frost.
Shunk!
Kenis drove the Holy Sword into the earth with force.
The cold, final verdict of heresy fell upon them.
From this moment on, they were heretics. Wherever they fled across the continent, the Pantheon's paladins would hunt them, and no nation would take them in. The Inquisitors would not cease their "re-education" until every last truth had been wrung from them—and even in death, their souls would find no rest.
Such was the fate of heretics who turned their backs on the holy Six Gods.
They would have to hide underground, living in the shadows to escape the eyes of the entire continent. And when they died, they would be buried in darkness—their flesh torn by worms and wild beasts, their bones ground to powder and burned to ash.
"Ah—aah… aaah!! Hero!! Please, Hero, spare us just once!! Ah, Hero!! Please, just one measure of mercy!!"
"Ugh… uwaaah!! I-I had nothing to do with it!! I'm not guilty!!"
The villagers howled, unable to accept that they had been branded heretics.
Farther off, the fallen village chief began to twitch. Slowly, he pushed himself upright. He must have come to some time ago—his eyes were sharp and clear.
No. Not clear. Those bloodshot eyes belonged to a man one step from madness, overflowing with bottomless mania.
Drool spilled from the chief's mouth as he looked around wildly for something. Then his gaze locked dead onto Daisy.
And with a speed that did not match his heavy bulk, he lunged at her.
"Kyaaah!"
Clang!
Hans cut in at once, swinging his sword. The dagger in the chief's hand spun through the air and clattered to the ground. Hans twisted the chief's shoulder back and pinned him down. The chief thrashed wildly, his face ground into the dirt.
"You!! Because of you!! You're the witch—so why am I the one—whyyy!! You should have just died as a witch!!"
Spittle flew from the enraged chief's mouth. The arm Hans had twisted to the brink of breaking made a sickening crack as it contorted further.
"Uwaaaah!! Aaaaah!! What crime did we commit!! A Hero is supposed to protect people like us!! That's a Hero's job!!"
The chief screamed at Kenis with bloodshot eyes.
"A Hero protects the weak and upholds what is good," Kenis said evenly, looking down at him.
"Not heretics who are barely human—who lack even the barest scrap of decency."
"Hnnngh!!! Hwaaaaah!!!"
The madman's agonized screams carried into every corner of the mountain village.