Guilt
When the tower’s collapse briefly stalled, Alice’s gaze landed on Ian for the first time.
Ian had been focusing every last bit of his attention into his fingertips, trying to delay the tower’s destruction by even a fraction.
His eyes were closed, his head bowed, and he never noticed the look from the mother he had longed to meet.
For him, worn down to the point of breaking from squeezing every drop of his dwindling divinity into delicate control, it was a terribly unfortunate thing.
Only for an instant, pity flickered through her eyes.
But when Ian lifted his head again, Alice was no longer looking at him.
Instead, she had turned away to watch a bird flying past the window.
Even as the tower she had lived in collapsed around her, she remained disturbingly composed, as though she had already stepped outside herself.
Either she was certain she wouldn’t die, or she had simply given up and no longer cared whether she lived or died.
It could have been the first. It would not have been strange if it were the second. It could have been both.
For her, the Tower of Chastity had been both home and prison, and all of it had been her life.
Repeating time. A repeating day.
Alice’s too-monotonous existence had always been the same.
She would place her hand wordlessly atop the hand of a man asking for hers, spread her legs without protest over the waist of a man demanding her body, and carefully press her lips to the face of a man in need of love.
Every one of those acts had been carried out in a holy place blessed by a goddess.
It was a life no different from that of a common whore, the life of the Benevolent Mother Hero.
Alice remembered every one of those moments. She endured every one of them as well.
She thought she had held out to the very end.
She had been terribly arrogant.
After twenty years and seven births, her patience finally ran up against its limit.
And it was only natural. Anyone would have ended up that way.
For a mind carrying decades of memory as a man, how horrifying it must have been to feel her belly swell with life; how shameful the whole thing was.
Those who had never felt the depth of that humiliation for themselves could not possibly imagine it.
A day like a year, a year like a day.
The nights she spent alone were far too short, and the nights spent with others far too long. There was no ordinary middle ground between long and short.
She no longer distinguished night from day, and morning was nothing more than a time when she happened to be awake.
When the sun set, something else began. When the sun rose, she drifted off with the relief that it was over, and before she knew it, she no longer even realized that she was conscious.
She would open her eyes to find a day gone, then three days had passed by the time that day ended; on other occasions, she would sleep as usual only to wake after more than half a month had slipped away.
Drunk on dreams and unable to tell them apart from reality, her dazed thoughts could not keep up with the passage of time.
In the middle of all that, even if a child had somehow come into being, there was no way she could have grown attached.
To Alice, Heroes were knights, and she was nothing more than a horse to them.
The dead do not stop to let the horse rest, even after death.
They were hypocritical, contradictory beings, and even the children born from them felt like part of the same cycle of sin.
There could be no such thing as maternal affection, and she had never even considered it.
For Alice, bearing a child was the filthy coupling of beasts, and even the child born from it was only a byproduct of sinful desire. She did not even think of them as her children.
To Alice, children were herself in a form that could not be loved, the past she no longer wanted tangled around her.
They called her mother, those unfamiliar children; she could not always tell them apart after they had grown so much over the years, and even the fact that the children she gave birth to did not differ all that much from her own self only made it worse.
All of that stacked up, layer upon layer, until Alice could do nothing but grow more and more exhausted.
She wanted rest. She resented the life that had never been ordinary. She cursed the god who had cast her into hell.
At some point, when she could no longer bear it, she pushed them away and spat out cruel words, yet the children kept returning, endlessly seeking her out and begging for affection.
No matter how often she drove them off, no matter how much she despised them, what remained in the end was only a vicious, gnawing sense of guilt. She hated even that in herself, and could not stand it.
She did not want to be hurt anymore.
Now, even her own existence felt unbearable, and she did not want to hate anyone else.
She turned away from that miserable reality and forcibly ignored the wounded thing inside her heart.
She had never truly tried to understand the human being called Alice, and once she shut out all of her emotions, at some point the pain stopped.
But that was not healing.
She had never realized that someone else was merely bearing the suffering of the being called Alice in her place, and that even that act only added further sin.
Perhaps even this present situation was the result of her own sin, born from trying to defy fate.
Looking at the floor as it gave way one last time, Alice thought so.
“Ah...”
Rumble—
The bedroom collapsed. As the upper level of the spire gave way and then the middle section followed, the tower lost all balance and tipped over completely.
Alice’s body, which had been sitting quietly on the bed, was hurled into the air. With her body falling helplessly, she had no room left even to keep thinking.
And yet, miserably enough, the pitiful hand flailing through empty air was instinctively begging for someone’s salvation.
And miserably enough, that helpless instinct—clinging to others even in the face of death—only sharpened her self-loathing all over again.
Through the hazy sky above, her eyes caught sight of a bird riding the wind.
She could not help resenting the fact that she could never fly as freely as that bird. If she died like this, perhaps she would grow wings and be able to fly anywhere.
Even as she plunged toward the ground, Alice somehow found herself thinking such foolish things.
Snatch.
“If this is the kind of racket you’re making, you’ll have to come down and explain it properly.”
And then, with a clear, ringing voice, she did not die again.
She had always longed for death, yet when destruction truly came for her, the world somehow always held on to her throat.
That this situation made her feel like some tragic heroine was, to her, nothing more than absurd and embarrassing.
Cloud, who had snatched Alice out of the air, fell straight toward the opposite side of the spire. The Chastity Hero had no ability to fly freely through the sky.
He had only jumped. Bare-handed, all the way to the edge of the Tower of Chastity.
For an instant, Alice’s vision went dark. The Chastity Hero had used Holy Battle Qi.
His Holy Battle Qi was a dull gray, hardly fitting the meaning of chastity at all. As it wrapped around Cloud’s entire body, Alice in his arms felt as though the blue sky itself had vanished.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever been this glad to see you.”
“Stay still.”
Cloud’s arms tightened around her waist.
Given the height, even he could not help tensing up. If he made a mistake, he might be fine, but Alice would be reduced to pulp.
Unlike Apostles, Heroes were only ordinary humans in terms of the flesh itself.
Crash!
Simply using Holy Battle Qi did not reduce the speed of a fall. It only made the body a little sturdier.
Cloud landed with a thunderous impact, rolling across the ground to disperse the force.
After tumbling for a while, Cloud, now covered in dust, gave a few rough coughs and slowly caught his breath.
“...Well, at least we’re alive.”
“Your joints look dead, though.”
As the cloud of dust cleared, a voice came from Cloud’s arms. It was a sweet, birdlike voice, mocking him with airy disdain.
“You could have tried landing a little more steadily.”
“Save your insane comments for on top of a bed.”
Cloud scowled and muttered under his breath, annoyed that she never once agreed with him, then pushed the girl out of his arms.
He got to his feet, checked the scene, and soon wiped away his Holy Battle Qi with a sigh of relief.
“Thank God.”
Compared to the scale of the accident, the damage was not all that severe. Heroes had responded to the tower’s collapse, and Cloud was naturally not the only one—Heroes and Apostles stationed in the basilica or other spires were appearing one after another.
They erased the falling rubble and fragments, and prevented the tower from warping further. By fixing the upper sections of the tilting spire in place, they contained the secondary damage.
The tower’s wobbling crown froze in midair in an unnatural pose. The massive structure that seemed as though it might come crashing down at any moment had simply stopped collapsing.
That was not the only astonishing thing. Suddenly, the earth surged upward like a dragon’s breath, beginning to support the tilted body of the tower.
Dozens upon dozens of massive stone pillars rose through the ground.
It was a miracle wrought jointly by the Apostles of Crust and Preservation.
Even the priests who served the god stiffened, overwhelmed by the surreal spectacle unfolding before their eyes. The Heroes were no different.
A number of sharp, wary eyes turned directly toward the Apostles. They had always regarded Apostles with suspicion.
If the work involved nothing more than clearing away falling debris or rubble, Heroes could have done that much themselves.
But stopping a giant tower in midair or moving the earth to support a collapsing structure—those miracles were beyond them entirely.
Only Apostles, who bore divinity and wielded Domains, could perform such feats. That was why the order called them not human, but demigods.
Once the Heroes and Apostles acted directly, the situation was resolved quickly after that. The Great Wall Hero who had been hurled through the outer wall was found on the outskirts of Hart, several kilometers from the basilica.
When he was discovered, his forehead had been split open and the bones throughout his body had been smashed, requiring immediate emergency treatment. The order had nearly lost a Hero with humiliating ease.
The medical staff judged that without Aaron’s superhuman recovery, the wounds would have taken his life long ago. For all his stupidity, his vitality was truly stubbornly tenacious.
By contrast, the Apostle of the Rigid Body who had been found among the collapsed wreckage of the spire was taken away on the spot by the order’s executors.
Apparently, because his physical durability itself was so extraordinary, he had suffered no serious external wounds beyond a few trivial scratches.
Alice was granted a kind of reprieve. The order, too, seemed to feel the need to sort out the situation.
Time then passed quickly, and it was not long after the collapse of the Tower of Chastity. On the fourth day after reconstruction work on the ruined spire had begun, investigators from the order’s sacred office were dispatched to Aphaia Basilica.