Save the Boss (8)
The instant I raised my mace overhead, the Divinity Armadi had bestowed upon my body began to surge.
It was far purer and far mightier than any Divinity I had ever carried — a power wholly beyond what this wretched body of mine deserved. Normally, I wouldn't have been able to control its movement at all. And that wouldn't have been the end of it. Unable to endure the wild thrashing of that power, I would have been screaming in agony.
But not now. Gramps was controlling the Divinity within me.
I already knew how extraordinary he was. I had read his tales of heroism, experienced his strength firsthand, and was walking the path he once walked by following his teachings. But feeling his power with my own body, I couldn't help but be awed.
To think Divinity could be handled like this.
A portion of the Divinity Armadi had gifted me was being channeled into reinforcing my body. Not the simple physical strengthening I usually did on my own. From my heart down to my fingertips and toes, through every last vessel, inside and out, my entire body was being shielded by the Divinity itself. Thanks to that, despite the movements of a power I could never have endured on my own, I didn't feel even the faintest sting of pain.
And that wasn't all.
The Divinity gathering at the tip of my mace wasn't merely condensing. Even as it pooled, it kept weaving more magic from itself, amplifying and amplifying again.
"Getting this flustered over a little of this won't do, lass."
I was still mid-gasp of admiration when Gramps let out a voice tinged with laughter. I turned my head toward him, and his will-filled eyes were the first thing to meet my gaze.
"The real show starts now."
The moment he spoke, the Divinity gathered at the mace's tip burst outward, spreading through the air around us. From that condensed core, an enormous magic circle bloomed into being.
I was still a stranger to magic, but even I knew the basics by now. That was how I could tell — this was no work of a god. It was the creation of man.
"This technique, ye see, is one our party's mage and I devised together to reproduce Armadi's miracles."
Not simply borrowing a god's authority, but a wonder forged by fusing divine power with human strength. The result of mortals on the ground thrashing and scrabbling to recreate what the gods themselves had wrought.
"Chasing after this old man's ambition gave us no end of grief, mind ye."
Upon the great circle, dozens more circles were drawn, and upon those, yet others still.
{What are you doing?!}
Sensing Armadi's Divinity, the evil god roared and glared at me. Hatred and bloodlust pooled in his black eyes, hollowed to nothing. It was the malice of one who held the seat of a god — something I ought to have feared. And yet somehow, only a smile crept onto my lips.
{Did you think I would simply watch and do nothing?!}
The evil god moved to smother the miracle, but nothing he did could reach me. The flames he spat were blocked by walls of ice that sprang up from nowhere. The curses streaming from his mouth were swallowed by words of blessing pouring from a priest's lips. The judgment he hurled to punish a mortal was stopped dead before a human greatsword.
Naturally, that standoff couldn't hold. Imperfect as he was, he was still an evil god.
The mage's mana, spent desperately holding back the flames, was being shaved away bit by bit. Sweat beaded across the priest's brow as he channeled his blessings. The smile on the knight holding the line grew stiffer by the second. If the standoff dragged on like this, the evil god would surely be free to unleash his fury upon the world.
{Don't interfere! You who will be nothing but ash in the end!}
But the miracle finished preparing faster than the evil god's will could be done.
I stared blankly upward. A sphere had taken shape where the countless layers of Divinity-woven circles overlapped. That great orb, brimming with the Divinity Armadi had gifted me, was no mere spell.
It deserved to be called a sun.
"There now, lass. This is the miracle ye have sought."
This is difficult.
Pushing back a miracle with blessing upon blessing, Johann wiped the sweat dripping from his brow.
Imperfect or not, an evil god was still an evil god. The power wielded by a being beyond the bounds of living things was never something humans could hope to counter forever.
Ren looked as though he still had strength to spare, but Johann and Count Georg were another matter. However hard they clenched their teeth and held the line, the limit would come in the end.
Hah. Just what manner of beings were the heroes of old, who won victory against evil gods in their fullness? If even one whose seal has not yet fully broken taxes us this badly, how did mortals ever bear a complete evil god?
Respect welled up in him unbidden.
{I said don't interfere!}
As Johann clutched his cross to the evil god's cry, a warmth reached him from behind. Not the stifling heat that had hung in the cavern, but the warmth of the sun in the sky — the comfort and calm of it.
Feeling it, Johann turned — and dropped both his hands at the sight behind him.
"...What in the world."
The sun was there.
Not a metaphor, as with the great flame he had witnessed. That was unmistakably the sun, watching over them all from a clear blue sky.
How could this be? The sun, which belonged in the heavens delivering warmth to the world — why was it in this cramped cavern? Was he hallucinating? Had the evil god addled him, leaving him to face this impossible scene?
{Impossible! How could the likes of you bring about such a thing?!}
Johann, still doubting his own eyes, lowered his gaze toward the laughter that rang out beneath the sun — impish and unmistakable.
And he saw her. A girl holding her mace aloft, bearing the sun up before her like a sacred image.
Ah. I see.
The sun that should have watched over the world had not fallen underground. This tiny girl had made a sun inside this cavern.
Even as he thought it, it sounded like nonsense — a description he would have dismissed without a second thought had he not seen it with his own eyes. Words that, mixed into a bard's ballad, would only have drawn complaints: isn't that going too far, even for a song?
But every word of it was true.
The girl holding up the sun gazed at the aghast evil god in the distance, wearing that signature, insufferable grin of hers.
"What, did you want me to scream?♡ Beg for my life?♡ Was that supposed to feed your pathetic little ego?♡ Wow♡ that's disgusting♡"
{Yooouuuuuu!}
"Kyaah~♡ How scary♡ Really. Pfft♡ how very evil-godly of you. Fufu♡ just dripping with intimidation, aren't we?♡"
{You dare toy with me, Bahdi?! You, a mere mortal!}
The flames that had rippled endlessly around the evil god scattered all at once, every last ember of their heat converging into his hand.
He, too, was a sun. Not like the one the girl held aloft — not the gentle sun that nurtured the world, but a wicked sun that burned people to death. A being who stood upon a drought-stricken land and laughed at the dying. One who wished nothing more than for every life upon the earth to perish in agony.
{You will regret that arrogance!}
The moment the evil god, white sun clutched in his hand, hurled it forth, light began to spill from the sun the girl held raised.
Only then did Johann understand what the girl's sun truly was. Only Johann could have understood it. It was the Divinity of the great Armadi — the very same light that the One who had shown him his path in the distant past had beheld.
Holy light poured from the sun and filled the cavern. The chamber that had been steeped in ominous color bled slowly into a brightness like high noon. Where heat that sought to render all things to ash had reigned, a warmth that cradled the earth settled in its place. The wicked energies lingering in the cavern crept backward hunting for shadows, and then backward again.
The evil god was no exception. The hand he had raised to erase the little girl from the face of the earth froze mid-motion and could not move an inch.
{How. How. HOWWWW!}
"Curious why this is happening?♡ I don't have to tell you, but I'm nice like that. So I'll give the right answer to an idiot who burned out his own brain♡"
The white sun began to shrink. What had first been nearly the size of the evil god's own merciful sun dwindled to less than half. It shrank to the size of his fist — then vanished entirely.
"Because you're trash-tier, that's why♡"
As though nothing had ever been there at all.
{No.}
The sun guarding the girl's front was gone. Now it was the evil god's turn to face Armadi's Divinity head-on.
{I said no!}
Bahdi swung his axe to resist it — but it meant nothing. Even the sun he had forged at the cost of everything he possessed had withered beneath the light of another sun. A worthless little axe could never hold back Armadi's Divinity.
Cracks spread from the blade, and the axe shattered, scattering into the empty air.
{I cannot be sealed again!}
The flames that had formed the evil god's hands, his arms, his legs, his very body lost their center —
And the seal that had caged him did not miss that tiny opening.
As if drawn by the power of the earth itself, the substance of the evil god's body began to be pulled through the cracks in the walls.
{I curse you, Armadi! May everything you love turn to ash!}
A voice closer to a scream — and then it was over. The sun the girl held aloft had filled every corner of the cavern with its warmth, and the evil god, with nowhere left to go, could only flee to the place he hated most of all.
Soon after everything that was Bahdi was swallowed into the seal, the runes carved into it were restored.
Johann took in every moment of the scene, then gazed up at the sun that still hung in place — and knelt.
Something common sense could not accept and reason could not grasp. A tale that, heard secondhand, would have drawn hollow laughs and sneers. The thin-eared would gape in awe; the pessimistically minded would sneer their doubts.
People called it a miracle.
And in this very moment, Johann etched into his eyes the unfolding of one.