I Only Asked Because She Feels Like a Daughter to Me
Two days had passed since Thirin returned from the priestess’s clinic to the inn. Before leaving for the mining village, the priestess had declared herself busy with personal preparations and essentially kicked Thirin out, telling her to get her own affairs in order. She would call when it was time to depart. Since Thirin was in no position to argue, she had obediently returned to her room.
For those two days, Thirin had spent her time practicing qi circulation, but eventually she’d started rolling around on the bed in boredom. Cultivating was tedious. The feeling of a warm flame slowly expanding in her lower abdomen wasn’t unpleasant, but that was all there was to it. Thirin lay sprawled across the mattress, munching on potato chips and idly kicking her legs.
“At this rate, when the hell am I supposed to achieve Rebirth...”
Thirin was venting a mountain of dissatisfaction that had swollen past the point of bursting. Any ordinary martial artist would have taken days at the shortest, months at the longest, to sense qi and begin circulating it. Thirin had done it in a single day. She was undeniably a genius of martial arts.
But Thirin herself couldn’t care less about such relative evaluations. Even if she acknowledged her own talent, she would have bragged for about a day before forgetting all about it. She was a modern person. More specifically, a Korean who treated fast, easy efficiency as her highest life goal. Among all such people, she was particularly addicted to getting things for free.
Thirin wanted to shoot flames from her fingertips right now. She wanted to turn the ground beneath her feet into lava. On top of that, she wanted to use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
“Heavenly Demon Death Beam.”
The Heavenly Demon’s signature Death Beam. The Heavenly Demon’s signature Force Grip. The Heavenly Demon’s signature Moonwalk. That damn Heavenly Demon Divine Art had completely ruined her. It had even made her forget her desire for Rebirth for a moment.
Eventually Thirin sprang up from the bed. The fastest route was, of course, squeezing information out of that insane blonde priestess somehow.
That woman looked like she knew more.
Thirin’s intuition told her the priestess knew far more about both the Divine Core and the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. But the woman didn’t seem likely to hand over that information easily.
What? Train myself to suppress bad language?
She had somehow gotten through that conversation on the spot, but thinking about it again, it was a horrifying suggestion. How could anyone make such an outrageous demand! Did the religions of this fantasy world not understand the concept of freedom of speech?
Still, Thirin was the one at a disadvantage. If the priestess told her to use only nice words, she had to comply. Thirin tried imagining herself unable to curse at villains.
......
It was literal hell. Thirin groaned in frustration as she thought. How could she extract information about the Heavenly Demon Divine Art and melting down the Divine Core without having her freedom of speech taken away?
“...!”
There was only one method.
I need to learn about the person herself. Know the enemy and know yourself, and you will never be defeated.
The surest way to manipulate someone was to grab their weakness and shake it. As a modern person, Thirin knew this simple truth well. She was already thinking only of how to use people. In the end, Thirin was simply an underdeveloped human being. This half-baked human munched on another potato chip while pondering how to seize the priestess’s weakness.
I should go to the guild.
Come to think of it, the priestess had mentioned obtaining information about Thirin from the guild. (She had never said that.) The guild employees who had leaked her personal information without permission now owed her a debt. Thirin intended to collect.
#
Thirin pulled her robe over her head and headed for the guild. If she opened the guild doors in her usual light attire, the stupid low-rank adventurers who recognized her would definitely cause another scene. Sure enough, the moment she stepped inside, nonsense flooded her ears.
“Hey, did you see? That escort request for the ‘Lonely Widow.’ It says she likes someone who listens well at night… Heh heh, isn’t this quest made just for me?”
“You’d be lucky if that face of yours even passes the interview. I heard the widow made a pass at some handsome new imperial officer and got rejected. Her standards are probably through the roof.”
“......”
The lively idiots were, as always, hurling around alcohol, crumpled papers, and stupid remarks. The moment Thirin quietly pushed through the crowd with her robe pulled low, an interesting conversation caught her sharp ears.
“Hey. Did you hear? That healer from the Salvation Cult is back in Lutetia.”
“Ah, that woman? I saw her at the guild the other day. She was pretty enough. A priestess, huh? Does that mean she received the blessing of the Ten Thousand Gods’ healing or something?”
Another adventurer set down his drink and clicked his tongue. “Idiot. The Salvation Cult doesn’t receive blessings from the Ten Thousand Gods. And she’s not a healer. That title is too polite. She’s closer to a crazy monk.”
A monk? Thirin tilted her head. The adventurers’ conversation continued.
“Anyway, she’s got a face worth looking at. If she were mine, I’d fix her attitude… heh heh……”
“Wake up, dumbass. That woman isn’t normal. She’s called the ‘Salvation Cult’s Crazy Slit-Eyes’ and ‘The Nightmare Spawned by the Love Cult.’”
“......”
Thirin was dumbfounded. Why did these idiot adventurers love giving everything such grandiose nicknames? She had already completely forgotten that she herself had once claimed to be the saint of all sorts of things. Self-reflection was not in Thirin’s skill set.
Other adventurers nearby joined the conversation, and increasingly sinister rumors about the priestess poured out.
“They say she breaks the arms and legs of quacks on the spot.”
“There’s a rumor she euthanizes patients, saying it’s better to die than suffer an incurable disease.”
“No, it’s worse than that! I heard she kidnaps patients to treat them. And even if someone isn’t sick, she insists they are and beats them half to death under the pretense of ‘treatment’!”
Thirin quietly nodded beneath her robe. The last one was true. She had witnessed it personally.
“She’s completely insane, isn’t she?!”
“Tell me about it. Two crazy bitches in one city. One’s the whip-carrying Witch of Death, and the other’s the crazy slit-eyes who calls beating people a form of treatment. The empire’s future looks bleak.”
These bastards......
Thirin’s brow twitched. How dare they lump her together with that insane blonde? She briefly considered throwing off her robe and administering corrective therapy to those mouths. Corrective therapy was something Thirin could perform just as well as the priestess.
But her motivation quickly faded.
“Still, I’d like to get whipped by that Witch of Death at least once…”
“...!!!”
Goosebumps exploded across Thirin’s back. The hand that had been about to remove her robe froze in place. She pulled the hood even lower as if nothing had happened and quietly made her way to the reception desk.
#
“Call Rina for me.”
The receptionist stared at the hooded Thirin for a moment, then her eyes sparkled as she recognized the voice.
“Ah, Lady Thirin!”
The receptionist looked at her with visible disappointment. “Um… your outfit is different today……?”
It wasn’t because Thirin was a VIP of the guild. It was because when Thirin appeared, the troublemakers would at least shut their mouths for a while thanks to her infamous reputation as the gender-reassignment-surgery specialist. The receptionists were sending her desperate glances.
Please come more often. What do you need? Please come more often. If you can make those idiots behave, I’ll do anything. Please! Please!!! Please!!!!!
The one who silenced troublemakers. That was Thirin. But Thirin had zero interest in the receptionists’ inner thoughts. She had the temperament of a troublemaker herself.
“Where’s Rina? I’m busy. Bring her quickly!”
“Y-yes! P-please wait a moment!”
The receptionist hurried off somewhere and soon guided Thirin to a small counseling room on the guild’s second floor. When the door opened, Rina was inside along with the bald man who had been standing beside the security chief last time.
“Section-chief uncle?”
As Thirin tilted her head, Rina shot up from her seat with a sound that was nearly a scream.
“L-Lady Thirin! You can’t call this person that!”
Rina’s face had gone deathly pale. She whispered desperately into Thirin’s ear.
“This person is from the Imperial Army’s Special Task Force……”
“Hoho, it’s fine, Miss Rina. That isn’t so important.”
The bald man cut Rina off, then smiled kindly and gestured to a chair at the table. Thirin didn’t sit. She looked at Rina instead.
“Did you have a prior appointment? I would have waited.”
“It’s all right. I asked to sit in.”
“......?”
What kind of nonsense was this? It was like showing up to a business meeting only to have someone suddenly invite an employee from a completely different company. And in this analogy, the different company’s employee was Thirin. She was so dumbfounded she couldn’t even insult this barbaric fantasy world.
“......”
But seeing that Rina couldn’t say anything, the bald man’s position must be quite high. Thirin observed the situation with interest. The guild was an organization that operated with imperial permission, but that didn’t mean the empire could control it at will. Neither the imperial administration nor the security forces could interfere carelessly with the guild’s internal operations. The guild possessed a vast information network and economic power that spanned the entire empire, and above all, it acted as a problem-solver that handled the empire’s dirty work in places beyond its reach.
For such a guild to be so deferential, that bald guy must be no ordinary bald guy.
Thirin thought so and put on an indifferent expression. Watching that half-hearted look, Rina swallowed dryly. The “section-chief uncle” before them was no ordinary imperial soldier. He was a Thousand-man Commander of the Special Task Force.
The empire had an obsession with efficiency and standardization. Their naming conventions followed the same principle—straightforward and simple. Therefore, imperial military titles carried literal meaning. A leader of ten soldiers was a Ten-man Leader. A leader of a hundred was a Hundred-man Commander. And a Thousand-man Commander meant a field officer who commanded a thousand soldiers.
But in the Special Task Force, the numbers carried a slightly different meaning. There, the number did not represent the size of the troops under command. It represented the number of enemies a single individual was expected to handle. A Ten-man Leader in the Special Task Force was an expert capable of subduing ten trained soldiers alone. A Hundred-man Commander was a powerhouse who could overturn battlefields against a hundred armed troops. And a Thousand-man Commander was a superhuman who could face a thousand elite soldiers single-handedly—one who could accomplish alone what an entire legion was meant to do. Someone capable of tearing through a city wall like paper and facing a demonic beast alone.
A human strategic weapon.
That was what a Thousand-man Commander of the Special Task Force meant. Cold sweat ran down Rina’s back. But the real problem wasn’t his martial prowess.
The real problem is this person’s authority.
A Thousand-man Commander of the Torch Legion possessed the right to preemptively burn and purify a city without any procedure if he judged that something evil was ruling it. He held one of the few “act first, report later” privileges in the slow-moving empire. The bald man smiling like a friendly neighborhood uncle was exactly such a person.
Please, don’t make any verbal slips……! Just for today…!
Whether or not Waldemar knew Rina’s inner thoughts, he simply chuckled like the uncle next door and offered Thirin a seat.
“Hoho, perfect timing. Come and sit, bounty hunter. We’re already acquainted—why don’t we have some tea together?”
Rina gave Thirin a desperate look. Please don’t provoke him!
Thirin nodded and thought, Why does this uncle’s gaze feel so greasy? It’s unpleasant.
Still, Thirin was a person who retained at least a tiny shred of social awareness regarding when to push and when not to push. She obediently took a seat. Rina, still sitting across from her, continued fidgeting anxiously. Thirin felt pure curiosity at the sight of someone who could render Rina so helpless.
“What exactly does the Special Task Force… do?”
She spoke as politely as possible, even adding a slight upward lilt at the end for extra femininity.
“Hoho, nothing special,” Waldemar answered with a deep smile. “We do work similar to what you did when you handled those fallen cultists. Our job is to clean up evil things.”
Evil things.
Cultists, corrupted demonic beasts, whatever-things hiding in the whatever of the night, and witches. Thirin was already sick of hearing the word “evil.” The moment she arrived in the city the security forces had detained her for no reason, and not long ago some sock fetishist had even clung to her.
“How do you judge what is ‘evil’… exactly?”
Waldemar thought for a moment before speaking. “Hm. It’s a little difficult to explain to civilians.”
He smiled as if troubled, then continued. “There are many methods, but most are classified so I can’t tell you. However, I can compare it to animals.”
“Animals?”
“Have you ever seen a fierce beast like a wolf?”
It was an abrupt question, but Thirin nodded. Those things had charged at her several times while she was possessing a dog butcher. Waldemar went on.
“Wolves lick each other’s fur. It’s to remove the smell of blood on their bodies. Hunting inevitably stains them with blood, after all.”
“Hmm.”
“And staining themselves with blood is the same for evil things. Fortunately, unlike the blood scent wolves can wash away, this scent doesn’t disappear easily.”
Waldemar’s voice sank low. “As you’ve experienced yourself, the actions of evil beings like cultists are all the same in the end. They pretend to have some grand, lofty purpose, but they always end up sacrificing ordinary people. And when ordinary people are sacrificed, a negative residue is always left behind in that place. You can think of it as us distinguishing evil by the smell of that residue.”
“Heeeh……”
Thirin blurted out without thinking, “So you’re a sniffer dog.”
Rina’s body went rigid. She almost screamed. But Waldemar’s reaction was completely unexpected.
“Haha! That’s right! We are sniffer dogs! What an appropriate expression!”
Waldemar burst into cheerful laughter. Thanks to that laugh, Rina was finally able to exhale the breath she had been holding.
“......”
Waldemar set aside his cheerful laughter, lifted his teacup, and took a sip. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, he asked in an utterly natural tone.
“So, bounty hunter. What brings you to the guild today? I happened to have business here myself, so I’m curious.”
“......”
This was like showing up to a business meeting, dragging in an unrelated company employee, and then asking, “By the way, why are you here today?” And once again, the unrelated company employee was Thirin. She was speechless.
He barged in when he wasn’t even supposed to be involved, and now he’s interrogating me.
On top of that, there was Rina’s attitude as she fidgeted and watched Waldemar’s every move. Before Thirin could open her mouth, Waldemar spoke first.
“Now that I think about it, I heard that famous priestess from the Salvation Cult has returned to the city. Have you heard anything about her?”
Another spoonful of discomfort was added. Thirin’s social awareness was nearly destroyed, but she could at least tell that this bald man was casually probing her. She decided to answer honestly.
“Actually, I just came from meeting her… yep.”
“!”
Rina’s body visibly stiffened.
“Hoo.”
Waldemar’s eyes sparkled with interest. “I’ve met that priestess before myself. She left quite an impression. Could you tell me what occasion led you to meet her?”
“......”
“Hoho, I’ve lived long enough that I’ve become a nosy old man who asks unnecessary questions. I misspoke. There’s no need to answer if you don’t want to.”
Thirin’s brow twitched. She was starting to find this bald man extremely, extremely annoying. Why was he prying so persistently?
If this continues, he’ll probably ask what I ate for dinner today.
He had said there was no need to answer, but the atmosphere suggested that brushing it off now would only make him bother her again later.
“It’s nothing special… yep. I just heard there was a skilled healer and went to see… yep.”
Waldemar’s face hardened. “You? Were you injured somewhere? You received treatment?”
“Yeah.”
“This is serious. It might be a curse mark left from fighting cultists. If it’s not rude, may I ask what kind of treatment you received?”
“......”
Thirin found it annoying, but she decided to answer. A true man reveals even his weaknesses with pride. Taking advantage of the moment Waldemar lifted his teacup, she spoke.
“Menstrual cramp treatment.”
“Pffft!”
Waldemar spat out the tea he had been drinking. Thirin continued speaking without changing her expression. She needed to chase this bald man away quickly and dig up the blonde priestess’s weaknesses.
“As for how bad the menstrual cramps were...”
“!!!!!”