3. Tiana
Tiana had always been a gifted girl.
Even as a child, the moment her parents taught her something, she grasped it—and then some.
"Oh, you're the kid living in this village? Don't worry about the monsters—we'll take care of them for you!"
She had learned the sword simply by watching adventurers who stopped by the village on monster-slaying requests, and within a few months she possessed skill enough to rival a squire. A little over a year later, she had grown so fast that even fully fledged knights were no match for her.
One day, having merely overheard a mage in the city bragging about the fundamentals of magic, she went and manifested magic on the spot.
"A bunch of folk who don't even know what magic really is! Magic, you see, is—"
"Haah, there he goes again."
"Leave him be. He's like that whenever he drinks."
After becoming an adventurer, her growth only accelerated, and in what felt like the blink of an eye she had risen to S-Rank.
Teach her one thing—no, you didn't even have to teach her—and she would understand not two things, not three, but ten. A genius.
That was exactly who Tiana was.
And yet—
"The... 10,000 Grateful Sword Draws?"
"That's right. And if you finish too quickly, then lengthen your prayer time."
Even she could not make sense of the training Sian had proposed.
She was prepared to do anything for vengeance against the Calamity that had razed her village to the ground.
She would even have willingly used black magic, forbidden as it was by the kingdom.
Even if it meant hellish training that tore at her body and burned away her lifespan, she would have endured it.
When he told me to follow him out with a sword, I thought he meant to test my abilities... but this.
The Grateful Sword Draw. Really.
Generously speaking, she could accept that swinging a sword was meant to gauge her fundamentals.
But the gesture of grateful prayer—no matter how she turned it over, she could not fathom its meaning.
And besides...
The moment Sian had swung his sword, she had spotted it at once: his form was appallingly crude.
It wasn't that he had never handled a weapon, but he was clearly no professional—his skill looked barely that of a squire.
Setting aside the prayer gesture, even in the simple motion of stepping forward and cutting along a diagonal line, his posture had wavered. That alone was telling.
His mana handling looked rough, too...
For a human to grow strong, one had to handle mana with finesse.
Or else possess a magnitude of mana beyond anything human.
But Sian's mana was neither vast nor refined.
It was simply unstable—just like his swordwork.
Did I come to the wrong person?
No—she had checked and double-checked. There was no way she had come to the wrong place.
When she had arrived in this village and asked the locals whether they knew the S-Rank adventurer Elina, they had called her the pride of the village.
And they had said that only one person in the village bore the name Sian—the man standing before her now.
The adventurer who had trained Elina.
What if...
A dark thought flickered through her mind.
What if Sian really was just an ordinary man?
What if Elina's inexplicable strength—strength even she herself couldn't properly explain—was owed purely to her own talent?
The moment the thought took root, dread closed over her like a shroud.
No. That can't be it.
She drove the thought from her head at once.
It would have been easy enough to attack him right now and measure his true ability.
But if her suspicion proved true, it would be no different from watching her one and only hope crumble to nothing.
That... I can't. I just can't.
She could not let it be true.
Because if it was, it would be far too cruel.
After everything—after all the feeling she had carried here with her.
Even now she could see it flash before her eyes: the face of her friend, bleeding from her chest, her breath fading away.
How could words ever capture that fury, that despair?
Those days of hesitation, when she lacked even the courage to stake her life on a fight.
And at the end of it all, the last hope she had seized hold of—that hope had been Elina.
Elina told me.
Go to her teacher, Sian, and I would be able to surpass my own limits.
Tiana had asked her how she could possibly be so certain.
In answer to that question, Elina had talked through the entire night until her throat ran dry, recounting just how extraordinary her teacher was.
And so Tiana chose to trust not her own eyes or her own instincts, but Elina's word.
If she didn't, she felt she would simply collapse where she stood.
Having steeled herself thus, she opened her mouth carefully.
"May I... ask you one thing?"
"What is it?"
The grateful prayer, then the sword draw. Ten thousand was hardly a small number, but for her it would not be difficult.
And yet there was one thing she simply had to ask.
That was—
"To whom... am I supposed to offer my prayers??"
Whom was that gratitude-'prayer' meant for?
Tiana had no intention of denying the existence of gods.
This world had its priests, and they wielded a power distinct from mana—divine power.
But she did not like the gods.
Her years as an S-Rank adventurer had shown her that this world held far more misery than happiness.
If the gods were truly good beings...
The world should have been a little more beautiful.
Instead of envying and quarreling with one another, people should have lived helping and working alongside each other.
There should have been fewer starving to death, fewer taking their own lives in despair over their lot.
And...
The Calamity should never have turned her village into a wasteland in the first place.
That was why she disliked the gods.
And yet—pray, to the very gods who had stood by while her village burned?
That, more than anything, she could not accept.
Had Sian noticed the feeling festering in her heart?
"Everything."
He had not told her to pray to a god.
She blinked and asked again.
"Everything...??"
"That's right. You offer a prayer of gratitude to everything that has made you, here and now, what you are."
"..."
"If something comes to you, come back and tell me."
"...Understood."
She gave the answer, but honestly, she had no idea what he meant.
All she had really confirmed was that she wouldn't have to pray to a god.
Was he telling her to find her own object of prayer?
With that, Tiana set off in search of a suitable place where she could perform the 10,000 Grateful Sword Draws without anyone disturbing her.
So she's finally gone.
Having confirmed that Tiana was out of sight, Sian let out a quiet sigh.
He hadn't cleared up the misunderstanding, but for the moment, things seemed to have worked themselves out well enough.
Still—pray to whom, she asks...
It was a blind spot he had never considered.
Because this world was one where gods truly, genuinely existed.
Gratitude for everything that had made him who he was...
In the end, couldn't that just count as gratitude toward the gods?
He fretted over how to answer, but in the end he simply told her what he remembered being told.
Besides, he figured the point wasn't the praying itself—the point was calming her head.
It was less prayer, really, and more meditation.
When Tiana had first explained why she had come here, he had definitely told her from the start that it was all a misunderstanding, and he had even tried to clear it up.
But she had taken his refusal as him being annoyed, and clung all the harder.
Honestly speaking...
The fact that an S-Rank adventurer couldn't gauge his abilities at a glance said everything.
It showed just how far her thirst for vengeance had blinded her—even sound judgment was beyond her.
That was why Sian had prescribed this training for her.
Because she's already transcended humanity by a mile.
She could probably blast through ten thousand draws in no time.
And once she finished quickly and the prayer—meditation—time stretched longer and longer, her head would cool, and soon enough she would realize how foolish she'd been.
...I wonder if she'll be angry when that happens?
Once her head was clear, she might well rage at him for deceiving her. But he had offered his explanation from the start, and he had never once told a lie.
Everything was simply a matter of her misunderstanding and leaping to conclusions on her own.
If he laid that out for her, surely she'd give him at least some benefit of the doubt.
I'll just have to pray about that when the time comes.
Praying was all he could do—pray that her temperament wasn't absolute garbage.
"A Calamity, huh..."
Sian murmured the object of her vengeance to himself.
Realistically speaking, exacting revenge on a Calamity alone and unaided bordered on the impossible.
It said everything that even at the national level, these things were treated as natural disasters, and kingdoms balked at subjugating them.
That wasn't to say subjugation was impossible, of course.
Those who had felled Calamities in the past were hailed as heroes, their tales still told to this day, and the records held instances of nations banding together to destroy them.
The reason countries left them alone was simply that subjugation devoured astronomical budgets and manpower, and the body count was always staggering.
In fact...
More than one nation had poured its national strength into slaying a Calamity, only to be invaded by its neighbors and annihilated shortly after—which made every kingdom all the more cautious.
But the moment his thoughts reached that point, something Tiana had said floated back to him.
"Elina said she's fighting off other Calamities, didn't she."
And that Elina was far, far stronger than she was.
Back in the village, the kid had mixed well with the boys and played at being their leader, but honestly, she had never struck him as particularly talented.
If anything, he remembered another child having far more of it.
He went out and came back, though.
Just as Sian himself had, that boy hadn't been able to endure a life spent walking on thin ice with death at his shoulder day after day, and had returned home.
These days he helped his parents with the farm and lived quietly.
Honestly, even that much was luck.
With worse fortune, returning home itself would have been impossible.
He would simply have died a lonely, nameless death somewhere out in this world, bleaching down to bare bone where no one would ever find him.
In any case, he had heard that Elina was strong, but he'd assumed it was nothing more than rumor, exaggerated as rumors are. He had never imagined she'd be that strong.
And to top it all off, she believed that strength was his doing.
The thought sent a strange, creeping chill crawling up his spine.
...This isn't going to happen again, is it?
Sian could only pray that this one time would be the last.