The Power to Help Those Who Suffer
The carriage headed for Semek.
Neither fast, nor particularly slow.
When someone asked whether they shouldn't hurry—if they dawdled like this, what if the culprit who had torn Semek apart slipped away?—Ceres had answered with a light, derisive snort.
"It's been days since the incident blew up anyway. If we get there and find mana traces remaining, the culprit is either a lich or a necromancer—strong traces mean a lich, weak ones a necromancer. If there are no traces at all, it's a vampire. Detecting mana traces? With me here, what's so hard about that? As long as it's not a vampire, it should be manageable."
At that, everyone fell silent.
She wasn't wrong. Days had already passed since the disaster struck, so rushing now wouldn't change a thing.
"That's why we're traveling at a pace that lets everyone recover their strength. Does anyone have something so terribly urgent to do?"
At Ceres's sly, grinning remark, everyone shut their mouths again.
Scarlett alone seemed distinctly displeased—though not a single readable expression crossed her face, so that was only a guess, however accurate—but even she said nothing in the end.
"Hey."
"What is it, you deranged healer?"
Yona felt like the nickname had slipped from "crazy-headed healer" into something decidedly worse, and she shot a glare upward before letting out a small, deep breath.
It was a gloriously sunny afternoon.
Since they would likely reach Semek by evening, Ceres had told everyone to rest up, and so Vigrind and Yona had climbed up onto the roof of the carriage to gaze out over the Medial Plain.
"Autumn is giving way to winter" no longer seemed sufficient to describe the day.
Mornings had grown cold enough for frost to form by the time one woke, and Yona had dug a cardigan out of her pack and wrapped it around Rubina's shoulders.
Then she'd climbed up onto the carriage to bask in the sunlight—and Vigrind had suddenly scrambled up after her and planted herself right at Yona's side.
Yona lay half-reclined, legs stretched out, propping herself up on her arms.
Vigrind knelt primly, her skirt neatly arranged, sitting upright.
They were both clergy, yes—but the contrast between them could hardly have been starker.
"...I wanted to say thank you."
"For what?"
"Th-that healing you put on me. The blessing, and... all of it."
At Yona's words, Vigrind fell silent for a while.
As for why she'd done it—well, the answer was obvious enough. She and Yona were old adversaries who growled at each other the moment their eyes met, but that didn't mean she wished her dead.
The two of them had been the only orphans of their generation at the Evian orphanage. The Day of Discernment had split their paths apart, yes, but they had once promised each other that whichever of them became a priest or a healer, they would look out for one another.
"...I didn't want to watch you die. That's all there was to it. There was no other intention."
"Well, either way, you nearly died and I saved you, so. Thanks."
"Yes. Please accept that gratitude, then."
And then silence fell again.
Wind slipped wordlessly between the two girls as they sat facing forward, neither speaking a word.
Cold wind. Cold, and colder still.
Across the barren fields, long stripped bare by the harvest, withered leaves tumbled and rolled on the wind.
A few small birds darted through them.
Yona watched the birds quietly for a time, then spoke as if something had just occurred to her.
"Hey. Are you going to be okay?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
This was before Yona and Vigrind had fallen out—back when they were still receiving their training as novices at the cathedral.
As trainee nuns, they sometimes went out on volunteer work, and once they had visited a small settlement of settlers on the outskirts of Evian.
Wild kobolds had overrun the village, leaving many people injured and a good portion of the settlement—houses, barns, and all—reduced to rubble. The problem was that Vigrind had collapsed flat on the spot.
Yona and Aize, the supervising instructor at the time, had rushed to help her up and made her rest, and when Vigrind came to, she had quietly confessed something she had never been able to tell anyone before.
That her hometown had vanished, just like this.
That the hometown she had lost had looked exactly like this.
The barn where she had run and played with such fondness had collapsed into ruins. The house where her mother had prepared meals and her father had split firewood had crumbled to nothing but foundations. The mill where she'd played hide-and-seek with her friends had left only its cornerstone behind.
The moment she'd laid eyes on that settler village, the sight had come rushing back to her. That was what she'd said, and Yona remembered it still.
"How would I be fine, exactly?"
"And what if you collapse flat on your face again?"
"What would I do about it? Nothing. I'd simply be someone who collapses. Besides, I'm a Saint too. ...Though I do feel the title exceeds my worth."
"Exceeds your worth, my foot. The Heavenly God made you a Saint because you're up to it."
Yona's expression was utterly indifferent.
Hiding her worry for Vigrind beneath it, Yona turned her gaze away from her and looked back out over the plain.
"I can't make heads or tails of what's about to happen. A Hero appears, you become a Saint, demons show up. I honestly can't tell where any of this is taking the world."
"If humans knew such things, they wouldn't be human, would they? A calamity is approaching, so we must stop it. Isn't it enough to be certain of that one thing, and move forward?"
"Easy for you to say."
"Thinking about it only makes it harder. You of all people should know that, you deranged healer."
"Even deranged, I'm still better off than you. At least I'm not stunted."
"...I'm still growing, you know!"
Vigrind's voice turned sharp.
It was not until dusk that the carriage finally rolled into the outskirts of Semek, the graveyard village.
The settlement that emerged dimly out of the fading light looked, surprisingly, largely intact.
"What would the dead want with knocking buildings down? It's not as though they eat them. If a passage gets blocked, they just find another way out."
Ceres's nonchalant observation was, irritatingly, quite plausible.
Dismounting from the carriage, they split into groups to survey the village.
Scarlett summoned the Crusade Knights, barked out a string of orders, and divided them into squads of four—six squads in all, which dispersed in separate directions.
"Um... actually, can't I just stay here?"
"Scared?"
"S-scared? Hardly."
Yona was scared.
It was understandable. The memory of that desperate bloody struggle with the undead the other day—of being ambushed by that ghoul—was still far too vivid.
Those pale gray eyes. The claws that had sunk deep into her side. The sound of her own ribs snapping under those claws—the sickening crack of bone that still echoed fresh in her memory. Honestly, if she'd had her way, she would have happily stayed behind in the carriage with Rubina.
"Well, if you're scared, that's that."
"It's not that I'm scared... someone has to gu-guard Rubina. Right? Am I wrong?"
Rubina was, in truth, the problem.
By all rights they should have reached the Infula Holy See by now and completed her admission to the orphanage, but things kept going sideways one after another—and so Rubina found herself caught up in events like these.
As a result, she still had to remain in the carriage, and Yona's insistence that someone needed to protect her did carry a certain persuasiveness.
Though it would perhaps have been even more persuasive if the face of the girl making that argument hadn't been, quite literally, paralyzed with fear.
"I would prefer to remain here as well. But leaving Yona and Rubina alone together doesn't sit right with me, so I'll stay."
James gave a quick grin, jingling his dagger sheath.
An archer whose true weapon was his bow, he was effectively useless with it now—his arrows long exhausted—and having waded into melee with bow in hand to rescue Kayak, the bow itself wasn't in great shape either.
"This one at least is good enough to fight with. Should've bought a second dagger, knowing this would happen."
At James's words, Yona's thoughts drifted to the hunting knife strapped to her thigh.
The hunting knife Vigrind had blessed with holy power when the ghoul attacked.
She started to hold it out—offering it for him to use—and then Yona's hand faltered, stopped.
...Alec gave me this, didn't he.
She was reluctant to let someone else's hands sully it.
And besides, just in case—if things went truly wrong, she ought to have a weapon of her own to defend herself with too.
After that brief hesitation, Yona decided to say nothing about the hunting knife at all.
"Keep Rubina safe. We'll take a quick look around and be back."
Alec waved a hand.
Then he walked over to Ceres and Kayak, who had been waiting.
"Ah, and this is why I shouldn't have gone talking about mana traces..."
Nothing to be done about it—there wasn't a mage capable of detecting mana traces other than Ceres.
And Hero Ludwig declared that he would pair with Vigrind, the Saint who could sense the miasma of monsters, and the two of them vanished together into the dark.
"Yona is a healer, so she cannot sense the miasma?"
"I can sense it, actually. Just... not very well. My holy power only circulates around inside my own body."
"Big sis, what's holy power?"
At Rubina's question, Yona hesitated, unsure how to answer.
She could just say it was a power granted by the Heavenly God—but wouldn't the girl then ask what the Heavenly God was?
And then what would she say? "Someone high up," maybe?
She was still wrestling with it when James resolved the question neatly for her.
"Rubina, child. Holy power is the power to help those who suffer and struggle."
His large, thick hand stroked gently over Rubina's head.
"The power to help those who suffer and struggle? Then... big sis helped me because I looked like I was suffering and struggling too?"
Rubina was looking straight at Yona with those dark eyes.
Truthfully, it had been something closer to a passing whim—but that didn't mean Rubina hadn't looked like she was suffering.
If she hadn't met Rubina's eyes on the way back from the village chief's house to their lodging.
If it hadn't been for the sound of that scream, just before.
Would she have saved Rubina anyway?
"Big sis?"
Yona looked down at Rubina.
She caught sight of her own reflection in those black eyes, and a small smile escaped her.
"...Yeah. You looked like you were suffering so badly, I just had to help. So you'd better be good to me, got it?"
"Okay!"
Rubina beamed up at her, radiant.