The Savior Who Will Not Come
The memory of her previous life returned, sharp and whole. It had been the same then.
The plague—no. This dreadful calamity...
House Cardel made it, and spread it.
In that former life, once Odelli married Ludville and became a woman of another house, Cardel was left to manufacture glory without a Purifier. But what achievement could they ever claim, they who knew only how to drain a Purifier and possessed no power of their own?
Gawin's choice had been contemptible, and perfectly conventional. Create a plague, loose it on the people, then appear like a hero, cure them, and be crowned their savior.
The Ludville of that life had seen through every part of it.
Across the repeating regressions their marriage had not been the first, and Gawin's conduct was always much the same. Having recognized the scheme for what it was, Ludville purified the miasma before the sickness could spread and brought the entire performance—the miraculous entrance and all—crashing down. The heroic play Gawin had composed never even reached the stage. The curtain fell first.
But now...
Before he had so much as grasped the cause, Ludville was reaching for a measure as extreme as it was inhuman.
By now Gawin must be delighted.
A blockade ordered by the Archduke of Exepsion himself. People dying inside it. The framing was almost too perfect. When Gawin arrived in Belader, he would seize public opinion without effort, declaring that had he not appeared, the city would have been nothing but ash. Then, curing the very disease he had sown, he would play the savior. The Archduke abandoned you, but Cardel saved you.
Left as it was, Ludville would become the villain. A monster. A madman. The empire's calamity.
...That was what they would call him.
She had to stop it somehow, before Gawin arrived here, before the thing became irreversible.
In the lives before this, you went out of your way to spare them. Even across thousands of regressions.
Of course there had been times he looked away. In some loops he had even abandoned them and passed them by. But in the final life—the one in which Ludville believed he could never regress again—he had saved them with his own hands. In truth, he must have wanted them to live. So Odelli would use his memories. She would follow the traces of knowledge he had left behind and bring about the best ending she could.
Just as you did.
"Are the preparations finished?"
The commander of the Knights of Radiance, clad in black armor, asked it. Behind him the knights who had completed their preparations hesitated, swords already drawn.
The dead had already been burned. But executing the infected who still drew breath was no easy thing, not even for men who had crossed countless battlefields.
"...Must we truly?"
The lieutenant, after a hesitant pause, asked it carefully.
"We really didn't do anything wrong.... Please, my lord...."
"If nothing else, spare our children!"
"Mama... I want to go home... Mama..."
"Heaven has abandoned me... God, the empire, no one..."
The knight commander squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. Beneath the black cloth covering his mouth and nose, a complicated expression flickered past. What followed was a voice gone hard.
"It is His Grace the Archduke's command."
That single sentence erased every judgment. They were the Knights of Radiance, after all.
The sickness could not be cured. No magic touched it, and no medicine did. It spread swiftly, and every one of the infected died without exception. Smoke rising from the corpses, miasma settled into every alley—already this place had proved itself a living hell.
Horrific. All of them thought it in the same silent breath. But their lord's order was the swiftest choice for protecting the empire, and the surest.
"...Only give the order."
The black-armored commander closed his eyes and made his final decision.
"Cut them down, then burn the bodies."
The knights lifted their swords in silence. They meant, at least, to send these people off with as little pain as could be managed. That was when a cry cut through them.
"Wait!"
From among the infected who had been gathered apart, a man in pure-white vestments shouted.
"Please don't kill the innocent! This city will be saved before long...!"
His voice shook, and his breath came so short it seemed about to break. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips split and bleeding, and still he did not stop.
"The scion of the Divine Beast, heir to great Cardel, will come to deliver us!"
His voice swelled, and he began to pour out words like delirium without pause for breath. Yet to those trembling in the terror of death, Lionel's words were a single thread of hope.
"A-a savior?"
"The heir of House Cardel... Do you mean Lord Gawin?"
The people looked at one another as if they could not believe it. One woman covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
"Can we... truly live...?"
"Yes."
Lionel answered with the fevered certainty peculiar to a fanatic.
"Cardel would never abandon us."
At that, a man clutching a terrified child to his chest cried out as if howling.
"Lord Gawin the hero is coming to save us!"
The shout was a fuse. Those who had lost their reason roared at once, fury and hope snarled together.
"We begged to be saved, and His Grace the Archduke meant only to pen us like beasts and kill us!"
"The Archduke of Exepsion is a monster. A mad monster!"
"Lord Gawin ought to rule this land in his place! Instead of an archduke with neither blood nor tears!"
The moment someone set the archduke's name in their mouth, the crowd's rage burst. Some snatched up stones. Others jabbed fingers at the knights and began to spew curses. Public feeling tilted past any hope of recovery.
That was when it happened.
Beyond the street choked with miasma, a single silhouette came walking slowly, cutting through the wind. Someone was approaching.
The figure wore a shabby robe, yet the long silver hair spilling from beneath it caught the sunlight and shone, brilliant. Silver-white, white as snow—the sign of Cardel, through whose line sacred blood was said to run.
"...Ah!"
Lionel's face flooded with rapture.
Lord Gawin hasn't abandoned me!
He had drilled it into himself that all of this was a trial sent by God. Only then could he forgive himself for spreading a plague, however much he had been threatened with his younger sibling's life held hostage. Beneath the empty title of Cardel's savior, he was choking on conviction, guilt, and fear.
At last the one who had drawn near their gathering lowered the hood.
It was not Gawin Cardel.
Odelli Cardel.
It was her.
"Lady... Cardel?"
The people recognized her. They could hardly fail to. House Cardel had strewn portraits across the whole country, swearing they would find the daughter who had vanished.
Odelli walked with measured steps to the center of the square and looked upon the infected, their faces lost in confusion. Then she spoke.
Those few words fell upon Lionel like thunder from a clear sky.
"...What?"
Odelli regarded him in silence where he had frozen stiff with shock. A young priest who had pledged his loyalty to House Cardel. A fanatic, bent somewhere out of true, who had lived inside blind faith and a warped creed. And yet he, too, was a victim Gawin Cardel had used to the last.
Odelli knew he was fated to die today—struck down by the plague he himself had spread, and saved, in the end, by no one.