The Goddess Is a Liar
“What is this...”
Lethe stared at the divinity Simon had conjured as though she couldn't believe her eyes, then stammered out a reply.
“Y-yes! You've finally found faith in the great Goddess, haven't you! Reading the scriptures to you was worth every minute!”
“I don't think that's it.”
“Then what's that blooming in your left hand? Proof that your faith has reached its fullness!”
Simon answered with a flat, unimpressed expression.
“The Goddess is a liar.”
“Wh-what? Hey, you brat! What did you just say—”
Whoosh!
But the divinity lingering in Simon's left hand flared larger and brighter than before. At the sight of it, Lethe's mouth snapped shut.
“Proven.”
Simon smiled brightly.
“At least for me, divinity doesn't come from faith in a god.”
“That's impossible!”
She clutched her head in anguish. Divinity was power granted by the Goddess—there could be no exceptions, none at all. Lethe could feel the tower of faith she had spent her whole life building shaking to its very foundations.
Then Simon asked, with an awkward smile, “So... how do I turn this off?”
“...”
The girl, who had been buried in her knees in torment, lifted her head slightly.
“You ask the Goddess for permission, obviously... 'Thank you for lending me this great power today. I shall now return to being an ordinary human.' Like that.”
“Okay.”
Simon tried it exactly as Lethe had instructed.
Like that would ever work.
Next, he applied the same trick he'd discovered earlier—he directed the request not to any god, but to himself, asking his own permission to release the power. Failure.
Not it, huh? Though it does feel a little different this time.
Simon deliberated for a while, then changed his approach.
Really, it's only natural that I can't use divinity.
Fwoosh!
The moment he settled on that thought, the divinity in his palm vanished as if by magic.
“Oh.”
Lethe's eyes gleamed.
“Did the Goddess answer your prayer?”
“No, it just turns off if I think of it like self-hypnosis—I can't use divinity, so it goes out.”
Trembling.
The kneeling girl's whole body shook like a leaf in the wind. Simon, sensing a flicker of danger, tried to back away, but she was faster.
Scarlet-faced, she let out a shriek and lunged, and in an instant Simon was pinned face-up in the grass with her straddling him.
“You little—! You're doing this on purpose, aren't you?”
Zap!
A pure-white spear of divinity materialized in her outstretched hand above his head.
“You think I don't see through your schemes? You're trying to shatter the faith of Efnel's rank one, that's exactly what this is! Not a chance! Who put you up to this?”
“...What are you even saying? I haven't told a single lie all lesson.”
Simon's voice was steady, unwavering.
“This is a matter of my mother's life—what reason would I have to lie? I'm more serious right now than anyone else alive. If I ever needed to hold you back, it'd be after I got the material from the Tree of Life. What possible benefit do I get from shaking your faith here and now?”
“...”
She bit her lip and trembled. In the end, she climbed off Simon and sat down in the grass.
“Haaah.”
It was a sigh thick with deep anguish.
“Lethe.”
“Wait.”
She held out a hand.
“Give me a moment to think. Please.”
“...Uh? Okay.”
And thus, having asked for time to think, twenty minutes passed.
Worried, Simon asked again. “If it's too much, should we call it a day?”
“No.”
She raised her head.
“...I was the fool.”
“Huh?”
“I simply failed to fathom the great will of the Goddess. What is utterly natural cause and effect in the Goddess's eyes must look warped and broken through the narrow lens of my insufficient training. To let my faith waver over something this trivial—that is my failure. Perhaps my pride as Efnel's rank one made me overlook something fundamental.”
Simon gave a hollow smile inwardly. It sounded like nothing so much as rationalization, but he decided to let it slide.
“Now, let's move on to the next step.”
From there, Lethe drilled Simon until he could switch his divinity on and off freely. She explained the precise mechanism by which divinity manifested and had him learn to feel its flow.
“Everything begins with sensing mana.”
Whether divinity or Jet-Black, the base of both was mana.
Where a necromancer used the organ within their body called the Core to refine mana into the power known as Jet-Black—
A priest, by contrast, felt as if their entire body was a core. The instant mana within the body was released outside it, the mana bleached of its color and became divinity.
“Consciously direct it with your mind, a little more.”
Of course, releasing mana thoughtlessly accomplished nothing. To turn mana into divinity required a mental recognition so powerful and unshakable it could fairly be called brainwashing.
Faith—that was what Lethe kept hammering on about. For Simon, the switch that triggered divinity was the absolute certainty that he could use it.
...I think I get why Efnel has so many fanatics.
In a sense, divinity belonged to the realm of madness. You had to convince yourself, beyond all doubt, that you possessed a power you did not yet have.
If you believed you had it, you had it—even when you didn't. And if you doubted it, you didn't—even when you did.
A fanatical faith that bordered on literal brainwashing. Simon even caught himself thinking that perhaps religion itself was the system holy practitioners had adopted precisely to fill that faith to the brim.
All complicated thinking is stripped away. You simply place before yourself one absolute, perfect, infinite Good called 'God.' And everything after that becomes lucidly clear.
If you built your faith around that worship and used it as the foundation for summoning holy power, you could call forth divinity as freely as breathing.
Though of course, if that faith ever wavered, you could collapse into nothing—just like Flema.
“Lethe.”
During a break, while Lethe was rereading her scriptures to renew her faith, she answered in her characteristic cynical drawl.
“What.”
“In the normal case, how do priests of the Holy Federation come to be able to use divinity?”
She looked up.
“This is a power bestowed by the Goddess. There's no answer but training your faith.”
According to Lethe, every village in the Holy Federation had a monastery. When a child was born and reached the age of seven, they were obligated to visit the monastery and undergo a mandatory 'holy affinity' examination.
Children who tested above the threshold were then duty-bound to become devotees of the Goddess. They received daily theological instruction at the monastery for a set number of hours, steadily cultivating their faith in the Goddess.
“But only the tiniest fraction of laypeople can ever rise to the clerical rank of priest. To become a priest, you must pass the 19 Tribulations.”
“And what on earth are those?”
From what Lethe described, they were truly 'tribulations.'
Walking the pilgrimage roads bearing a heavy cross, fasting for three months straight, crossing a forest of thorns naked with nothing but faith to shield you, walking into fire—the list went on, and every item was enough to make his skin crawl just hearing about it.
“And you went through all of that yourself?”
“Of course.”
She answered with a voice full of pride and crossed her arms.
“Only after accomplishing every single one of those do you earn the right to enter the Holy Coffin.”
The Holy Coffin was the final, nineteenth tribulation. You had to endure an entire week sealed inside a casket flooded with endless divinity.
“...How is your side inhuman and cruel in literally every way?”
At Simon's words, delivered with a slow shake of his head, she snorted.
“That is what worship means. That is what faith means. It's on an entirely different plane from you people, who slap the label 'necromancer' on any stray dog that manages to dirty its body a little and grow a so-called Core.”
“Yeah, yeah. So what happens to an ordinary person exposed to that much divinity?”
“A small amount of divinity can heal wounds, but a full week of exposure is another matter entirely. To ordinary flesh, divinity is a foreign substance. If you can't endure it, you die. Simple as that.”
“...Insane.”
Through this barbaric ritual, the human body underwent a kind of 'mutation,' producing humans with extraordinarily high holy affinity. These were the ones baptized and ordained as priests.
Those who gave up partway were deemed lacking in faith, sent back to the laity, and made to rebuild from the very first tribulation. And those who endured the full week but failed to mutate and fell short of the affinity threshold became 'Clerics.'
“Cleric's a new one on me.”
“They're just lackeys—ahem. They handle the practical work of cathedrals and monasteries. They can use divinity, but never on the level we priests can.”
The Holy Federation was a society of rigid caste.
Commoner. Devotee. Cleric. Priest.
The lower castes owed absolute obedience to those above them.
The Dark Alliance had its own divide between commoners and nobles, of course, but the gap in status was nowhere near that strict.
Even among commoners, soldiers, merchants, and necromancers often wielded greater social authority than the average noble. At Kizen, too, ability and academic year counted for more than birth.
The difference was that in the Dark Alliance, status was inherited—whereas in the Holy Federation, everyone began as the same commoner, and one's station changed according to the rank one earned for oneself.
“Definitely a good idea to study Holy Federation culture if I want to pass as an Apprentice Priest properly.”
Lethe nodded at that.
“Exactly. If you can use divinity but don't even know what a Cleric is, the inquisitors will get suspicious.”
“Listening to you, one question's been nagging at me.”
“What.”
“You said divinity comes from faith in the Goddess. But isn't it really determined not by worship, but by the 'holy affinity' you're born with?”
Lethe growled immediately.
“Oh, come on! By that logic, then! Even among Efnel's priests, who all have similar holy affinity! Some rise all the way to bishop while others stay rank-and-file priests their whole lives! How do you explain that, huh?”
“Differences in effort, and in one's aptitude for handling divinity.”
“Differences in! Faith!”
she shouted.
“The firmer your worship and belief in the Goddess, the greater the volume of divinity you can wield and the finer your control over it! This isn't some claim your little rebuttals can shake—it's a fact proven by centuries of history, you brat!”
But by that same logic, shouldn't the Holy Federation's upper echelons be free of anyone chasing private gain or taking bribes? From what Simon had seen, not all of them were paragons of incorruptibility.
Still, pushing the argument further felt like a one-way ticket to an actual fight, so Simon swallowed the rest of it.
...Right. Lethe has her own values, earned her own way.
She'd lived her life and seen and learned things along the way. If he flatly denied or belittled that worldview just because it differed from his, of course she'd push back.
“That concludes the break.”
Lethe placed both hands on her knees and turned serious once more.
“I hate to admit it, but divinity like yours wouldn't lag behind the priests who've passed the Holy Coffin. So let's move straight into the basic curriculum. This is the level Apprentice Priests study—the role you'll be playing.”
“I've been waiting for exactly that.”
Simon's eyes lit up. Lethe rummaged through the backpack she'd brought and laid out the very textbooks she used at Efnel, one after another.
“Efnel, along with every holy academy, teaches a total of nine subjects.”
Blessing Studies.
Divinity Mechanics.
Healing Studies.
Holy Spirit Studies.
Guardianship Studies.
Divine Beast Studies.
Holy Martial Studies.
Dark Defense Studies.
Mass Instruction.
She picked up a nearby twig and wrote the list into the dirt. Watching it, Simon's pupils wavered.
These were all things he'd never heard before—so why did they feel so familiar?
“Efnel's three core subjects—students shorten them to 'Bless-Mech-Heal.' And below those, the four supporting subjects are 'Spirit-Guard-Beast-Blade.'”
Simon snorted with laughter, and Lethe's face darkened.
“What are you giggling at now? It's unsettling.”
“Nothing, it's just—reminded me that people everywhere end up living the same way.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing at all.”
Minutes ago he'd been feeling a wave of cultural whiplash at all this talk of tribulations and Holy Coffins—but seen like this, written out on the ground, everything felt strangely intimate.
Curse Magic and Blessing Studies. Divinity Mechanics and Jet-Black Mechanics. Magic Combat and Holy Martial Arts. The disciplines mirrored one another, opposite yet remarkably alike.
“Ah—why do you keep laughing!”
Simon smiled gently at Lethe, who flared up in indignation.
“I was just thinking... what if I'd gone to Efnel instead of Kizen?”
“...What a deranged thing to say.”
Lethe's lips jutted into a pout, but Simon paid it no mind.
His heart was pounding.
He'd been granted the chance to learn holy magic from Efnel's rank one—didn't that mean he owed it to himself to do it properly?
“So which subject are you teaching me first?”
His whole body itched with anticipation. He couldn't hold it in.
Hurry up and hand over what I get to learn.