Someone's God
Lionel, overwhelmed by the feeling surging through him, dropped to the ground.
A light that washed away sin and saved the soul. A true savior, come down upon this earth.
Every faith he had ever held collapsed, and a blind devotion to Odelli swallowed the hollow it left behind. That day, Odelli became someone's god.
......What's wrong with him.
The woman in question only looked down at the fanatic prostrate on the square, bowing and all, with the flat stare one gives a strange man. In truth, she had no attention to spare for Lionel. A cough tore out of her, and blood surged up to fill her mouth.
......I overdid it. Of course I did.
Purification could cleanse every impurity in the world. In exchange, every malice and every remnant poured into her body. Like swallowing poison, the work was finished only when she had taken the last dregs of miasma into herself.
Odelli bit down on her lip and swallowed the blood, letting not a single drop escape. She wiped her mouth as if it were nothing, mindful of the eyes around her, and lifted her head as though nothing at all had happened.
In that same instant, her gaze met his.
The silver crest cut into the black armor marked the Knights of Radiance. The man at their head was Gareth Quinton, commander of the order—a man who had ridden battlefield after battlefield at Ludville's side, the archduke's oldest sword, who held it a disgrace to fall before his lord.
He hated me. Down to the bone.
Through thousands of regressions, in not a single loop had he failed to hate her. He had reason enough. Odelli had always been the one who ruined the lord he had spent a lifetime ready to die to protect.
And yet.
"Since His Grace holds the lady dearer than his own life, it is only right that my life, too, be spent protecting her."
Once, he had died for Odelli. She still remembered the loyalty of the man who had wrapped himself around her and fallen, coughing up red blood.
When House Cardel sent a band of assassins to manufacture a new Purifier, it was this man who took the countless blades that came for her.
And now.
Stripped of every memory, he was looking at her again—cold-eyed, studying her, running his gaze over her as if taking her measure. He did not know that he had once given his life for her.
"......Quite an impressive sight."
Gareth broke the silence. His low, heavy voice cut through the quiet.
"A dying city has come back to life, and the people are healed as if they had been washed clean."
He said it as he walked toward her, unhurried.
"And yet something is strange."
A brief silence.
"The one who spread the plague was Gawin Cardel. And the one who saved them from it is, of all people, a lady of House Cardel—the same blood."
He did not take his eyes from her. The question was blunt.
"Can you swear that the two of you have nothing to do with each other?"
Gareth stopped before her, one hand resting on his scabbard, and spoke low.
"I do not easily believe in the word miracle."
The manner was courteous. The blade hidden inside it was not. His eyes narrowed, and the look asked whether she even knew how many had died of this.
"If you truly have nothing to do with this affair, you will prove it. Here. Now."
"......"
"I do not carry out orders on a hunch. I am not naive enough to be taken in by a convincing performance."
Odelli met his gaze in silence. She offered neither excuse nor explanation.
After a moment, she was the one who broke the stillness.
"You finished?"
"......"
"If you are, I could use a hand. The rest of this isn't done yet."
For a moment Gareth could not find an answer.
"......You want my help?"
He frowned and asked it again, with the face of a man to whom the words simply would not make sense.
"What matters more—proving myself to you this second, or saving the village as fast as we can?"
"......"
"Miasma feeds on human despair and grows. It's quiet now, but it can spread again whenever it likes. It has to be sealed properly."
With that, she carefully opened the sack she had prepared before leaving the Archducal Castle. Inside were rare herbs, brown lime, mana crystals, and shards of ore. She knelt in the middle of the square and began laying the materials out with neat, precise hands.
It was, originally, the cure Ludville had used. After thousands of regressions, he had found the surest way to put a plague to rest: a barrier that shut miasma out completely, so it could not draw near through the feeling called despair. To recreate the barrier she remembered, one thing was still indispensable.
She asked Gareth for it.
"Fetch me a rock?"
"......A rock?"
"About... that big."
She pointed to a boulder nearby, some ten times the size of a grown man.
"And split it clean in half. Make me stone slabs."
"......Me?"
"Well, who else here is going to do it?"
"You want that split in half?"
"You can't?"
Odelli asked it as if genuinely puzzled. She had not meant to provoke him. In her memory, Ludville had sheared through boulders like that without a second thought—one idle chop.
Gareth was silent a moment at the question. Then he drew his sword and went to the rock.
To put it shortly, he succeeded, just barely, in splitting the boulder in two. Exhausted, he kept looking at her with the eyes of a man who had a great deal he wanted to say.
Setting that aside.
Odelli set the flat slab on the ground and began placing the materials upon it, one by one. With a special chalk she drew the formation in exacting lines, working from memory, not a single stroke astray.
"......Done."
After the last line, she set a mana crystal at the center. She was no mage, and so she used the crystal to turn raw power into mana-energy fit for a spell. At once she felt it running through her veins. Her heart hammered. Her breath caught hard in her throat. Her arms shook, and her vision blurred.
Ngh.
She felt the limit of her body, but she did not stop—not until light burst from the circle drawn on the slab and, in an instant, covered the square.
The barrier was complete. There was no longer any crack where despair could take root, and the remnants of miasma drifting over the square vanished without a trace.
But.
Odelli, standing at the heart of it, swayed. A sudden dizziness washed her vision white. Her skin went cold as ice, and the trembling reached her fingertips.
"My lady, are you all right?"
It was Gareth. He must have been startled; for an instant he reached toward her, and then she felt him falter and draw the hand back.
"......I'm fine."
She forced the words out. She was not fine at all. She tried to steady her breath, but inhale and exhale tangled, and a pain like something piercing her lungs struck her chest again and again.
I really should have hired a mage.
There had been no time for that, and doing it herself had been the best choice she could make. Ludville had managed the thing so easily it looked like less than a stroll after dinner, and she had not imagined it would end like this.
The people before her eyes began to overlap, then blur.
Ah. This... I'm going to pass out.
The familiar premonition had barely touched her when, an instant before her falling body could meet the ground, someone caught her hard. The arms around her were rough, and hot, and rank with blood.
"Have you lost your mind? Do you even know where you are...!"