Raid Prep (18)
While I'd playfully told Grandpa that I was going to deliver a "gift" to Tariki, the truth was slightly different. The sun I intended to forge was a means to an end — the end of clearing this raid.
According to Karia's report, Tariki's forces had already swallowed Burrow Territory whole.
The citizens of the territory. The servants of the estate. The criminals of the back alleys. The soldiers guarding the streets. The priests of a local church. The knights sworn to the family.
Every last one of them, without exception, had already been consumed by the darkness.
The old me had assumed I'd only be dealing with a handful of them.
Putting someone to sleep and making someone move were two entirely different feats of difficulty — and I'd judged that Nakrad, in his current state, could barely puppet a few people at once. Given proper preparation, I'd figured, a brute-force push would be enough to confront the dungeon disguised as House Burrow.
But that was no longer the story.
The moment the magic circle activated and the darkness swallowed the territory, every single one of those people would become my enemy.
That was a volume of bodies I could never handle alone.
It would be an army — a disaster in its own right. Try to respond half-heartedly and I'd be crushed and suffocated long before I ever reached the estate.
And so, I was preparing a sun.
Whatever Tariki had in store, I would create a light vivid enough to erase every last trace of that darkness.
A brilliant radiance to steal the night away from those who had sunk so deep into slumber they could never wake again.
<...I suppose that's theoretically possible.>
When he heard my plan to build a sun, Grandpa sounded somewhere between troubled and skeptical.
Fair enough, honestly. What I was about to attempt was the kind of thing that left common sense far behind.
<The leaps in logic are outrageous and the risk is enormous. Honestly, if someone under me had brought me this, I'd have screamed at them for being insane.>
'Grandfather. Have you forgotten how I usually operate?'
Oh, come on, Grandpa. You of all people — the man who's watched me pull off every crazy stunt I've ever committed — worrying about risk?
Grandpa, who had witnessed my recklessness from closer than anyone, trailed his voice off long and slow, as if he'd run out of things to say.
'So it's definitely possible, then?'
If everything goes exactly the way you say it will.>
'That's all I need to hear.'
With Grandpa's assurance secured, I told Alsaetin to wait for me and stepped outside Academy Street.
Finding the person I wanted to see proved remarkably easy.
With the sheer amount of divinity she carried, her very existence was a landmark all its own.
"Young Lady."
Phoebe. The False Saintess — and the woman who would one day become the True Saintess.
The more I trained, the more keenly I understood just how exceptional her command of divine magic really was.
One of Soul Academy's broken, overpowered characters.
She'd come to the church in the early hours of the morning to pray before the holy statue, and the moment she saw my face, she smiled.
A smile threaded with relief, reassurance, and happiness.
I smiled back and got straight to the point.
'I need your help.'
"Pathetic Saintess. I'm feeling espe~cially generous today, so I'll give a hopeless mess like you a chance to be of use to me. What do you say?"
"What do you need me to do?"
Even though I'd blurted out my request before so much as greeting her, Phoebe nodded without a flicker of hesitation.
And in that moment, I sensed something in her — a kind of madness. Something eerily similar to what I'd seen in Karl.
Caught off guard, I asked whether she even wanted to hear what it was first, and Phoebe tilted her head and answered like this:
"No need. If it's a request from the Young Lady, that's all that matters."
'...And what if I ask you to do something insane?'
"Hmm~ Anything at all? So if I told you to crawl on all fours and bark like a dog, you'd do it?"
"Would you need me to?"
With even the smallest trace of humor wiped from her face, Phoebe gave me no way to tell whether those words were serious or a joke.
So I couldn't bring myself to answer. Because the moment I said even as a joke, no, I had a feeling she would actually do it.
"Just kidding, my Lady."
The short, heavy silence dissolved as Phoebe let out a laugh.
...Uh. Right? It was a joke, right?
"The reason I asked what you needed me to do is that I assumed there was only ever going to be one thing the Young Lady would ask of me."
Ah. Fair point, actually.
It was Phoebe who had uncovered the anomaly in House Burrow. If I came to her with a request mere days later, of course it would concern the Burrows.
Wait. So I just got played by Phoebe?
The sweet, docile little Saintess, teasing me. She must think of us as pretty close, huh.
Once I understood that, it made me happy — but happiness aside, being the butt of a joke was genuinely annoying.
Retribution was in order.
"Young Lady?! Ow! That hurts! It hurts!"
Having administered the appropriate punishment in the form of a two-handed cheek yank, I hauled a red-faced Phoebe out of the church. The church was hardly the right venue for a secret conversation.
The day Phoebe had noticed the anomaly in House Burrow, she'd explained everything she'd seen to Lucy — and even offered to report the family to the Church herself, if need be.
But Lucy had refused.
She had no intention of borrowing the Church's power — no intention of publicizing the matter at all, in fact. She'd even asked the pathetic Saintess to keep her mouth shut for the time being.
Phoebe hadn't understood the request at the time.
An Apostle of the Evil God was devouring a ducal house. Left unhandled, it would almost certainly blossom into a catastrophic calamity.
By the proper doctrine, the moment such traces were discovered, they were to be reported to the Church and severed at the root.
Having spent long years under the Symbol of the Church of the Main God, Phoebe understood the importance of that protocol better than anyone.
And yet, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she had obeyed Lucy without question.
Lucy was the Apostle of Armadi — the one who stood closer to the divine word than any soul alive. There had to be a deeper purpose behind every request she made.
So Phoebe had kept her silence, entertaining not a single doubt.
She had simply waited for the day the will of God descended upon the earth.
Then, several mornings later, Lucy — who should have been sweating away at the training grounds — came looking for Phoebe at the church.
That alone told Phoebe everything. The Apostle of God needed her to strike down the Evil God.
Her guess had not been wrong. Lucy wanted Phoebe so that the calamity brewing within Burrow Territory could be overcome.
She had been chosen — by the Apostle, by Lucy herself.
It should have been an honor. Had it been the Phoebe of ordinary days, she might have wept with gratitude.
But she could not.
"Let me be clear up front — this is a trap laid by a creepy little piece of trash to drag me in. For all his caution, that garbage will have plenty prepared, and it'll be extremely dangerous. So think it over one more time. Your life is on the line here."
What Lucy was saying was simply too strange.
"...Huh? My Lady?"
"What is it, Pathetic Saintess?"
"You said it's a trap?"
"Yeah. The creepy, weakling excuse for an evil god can't take revenge on the Pathetic Chief God himself, so he's coming after me instead."
"And you're still going there yourself?"
"Um. Are you feeling okay? Why do you keep asking me things you already heard, like some goldfish?"
"Why indeed?"
Why?
Knowing that place was a trap.
Knowing how dangerous it would be.
Knowing that going there meant suffering — and quite possibly death.
Why would you insist on walking in yourself?
There were a hundred better options. You could borrow the power of the nation. The power of the Church. No matter how she turned it over, there was no reason for the Young Lady to step into danger. What reason could the Apostle chosen by Armadi possibly have to stake her own life?
And yet — why, of all things—
"Why on earth would I need help dealing with a self-proclaimed god who's weak, despicable, and a piece of garbage?"
"It's not that simple, my Lady—!"
As Phoebe moved to shout her protest, unable to accept Lucy's answer, a single truth suddenly crystallized in her mind.
What if.
What if she did as she'd said — what if other powers were brought in?
The nation. The Church?
Phoebe knew the answer.
She'd heard it in voices, read it in records, seen it in paintings, faced it with her own two eyes. She knew it far too well.
House Burrow would be erased.
Struck from history for the sole crime of one of its members reaching out to an evil god.
The young lord of House Burrow would lose everything for the sins he'd committed in his foolishness.
Unlike Phoebe, he would never even be granted the chance to atone.
He would fall to hell.
But what if the Burrows' problem were solved without dragging in any other power at all?
What if every last bit of it were buried in silence?
The moment the thought took hold, Phoebe stopped mid-sentence and began to laugh.
Not the gentle laugh befitting a saintess's dignity —
but the laugh of sheer disbelief.
And of awe at the person standing before her.
So that's it, then. The Young Lady intends to throw away her own life for the sake of another's — as though it were the most obvious thing in the world?
When no one would ever know what she'd done?
When it wasn't even certain that the young lord of House Burrow himself would ever thank her?
You mean to cast your own life aside without the smallest hesitation?
Ah. Yes. Of course. That's why Armadi chose you as her Apostle.
And by contrast, this fool here was busy calculating the price of a life.
Convinced that the life belonging to the Chief God's Apostle was simply worth more than anyone else's.
Even though she herself had been saved by your nobility.
I'll have to stay up all night offering prayers of atonement later.
How long had she been laughing?
Only when even Lucy had begun to regard her with open concern did Phoebe finally open her eyes.
"My Lady."
'...Pathetic Saintess? You haven't lost your mind, have you? Right?'
"I'll do it."
'Huh?'
"Whatever danger may be waiting — I don't care. I'll do it."
To add her own wretched strength to the will of a noble Apostle.
"So please tell me what we must do."
When Phoebe had said something similar at the church days ago, Lucy had shut her down — absolutely not. This time was different.
Lucy raised one eyebrow slightly, then curled the corner of her mouth into a slow, knowing smirk.
"Alright then, Pathetic Saintess. Allow me to tell you what we must do."
"Yes. I will give my utmost in all things."
'Right now, this instant, we're heading to the Artea family estate to sell our dignity to the divine pervert living there.'
"...I'm sorry, what?"