Close Encounter (5)
“I-I really don’t know. I mean, how would I know, you know….”
With the geas successfully placed and her life now truly in our hands, Aisha had become nothing more than an ordinary girl stripped of all her powers. Her spirit thoroughly crushed, she spoke in a defeated tone.
“You truly have no idea?”
“I already told you, didn’t I? I-I just felt something and came here, you know….”
Though Zeke hadn’t drawn the Hero’s Sword, his expression toward her was intimidating enough that the pink-haired girl’s already hunched shoulders sank even lower. Yet her story never changed.
“It really doesn’t seem like she was involved.”
At Yulia’s words, the rest of us—including me—had no choice but to agree. No matter how often people say criminals return to the scene of the crime, getting caught after coming back and handing over her life like this was far too stupid. Besides, it was she herself who had contacted me through a dream to suggest meeting at the theater. If this pink-haired Demon King were the culprit, nothing about it made sense. If she’d still possessed that level of power, she would’ve chosen a different approach altogether. After all, the strength required to push a hero, a saintess, and several high-ranking noble escorts to the brink of defeat while causing numerous casualties wasn’t something ordinary.
“Do you sense anything at all? I must confess, shameful as it is, that I felt nothing whatsoever.”
“It’s all blurry, so I don’t know either, you know. Ugh, I’m serious! I felt something twisting and came here to figure it out, so I hid… but by then it had already vanished. I didn’t even have the strength left to hide again, so I just waited until I found an opening in the Saintess and slipped in… and before I knew it, things turned out like this….”
“An opening in me? You tried to interfere with my mind?”
“N-no! That’s not it! I-I just… I only wanted to make you feel a tiny bit of sympathy for me! Just a really, really tiny bit of pity, that’s all! You know….”
In short, she’d been trying to latch onto me for survival. Even that much revealed just how cornered the pink-haired Demon King—Aisha—had been. Naturally, her goal wasn’t merely to survive indefinitely, but to stay until she could recover her strength. She’d probably been aiming for the classic “darkness beneath the lamp” situation. Still, wasn’t this far too reckless? One wrong move and she’d have been dead.
“You could’ve died if you failed, you know.”
“If I just left, I’d die as a Demon King anyway, you know. Th-this is so hard to say properly….”
She tried to force polite speech, but when it clearly wasn’t working, tears welled up in her eyes again. I wanted to press her further, but at this point it just felt like bullying a child. Guinevere didn’t seem to care either way.
“Twisting? You said you felt something twisting?”
“Hic! Y-yeah….”
“Explain what exactly was twisting. Depending on how useful the information is, I may treat you better. You’d best tell me everything you know.”
“It’s like… the truth of the world? Hic! The principles that should naturally apply? Space? Concepts? Sniff! Things that people call differently depending on the era or the observer, you know. Hic! Huuu….”
That was enough for me to roughly grasp what she meant. And here, even I couldn’t help but feel a jolt inside.
What? Was she talking about me? After all, I was never supposed to exist in this world. Cardinal Rondel had attempted to summon a lower-ranking god and either failed or half-succeeded, resulting in a perfectly ordinary thirty-something Korean man being dragged here and granted the ability to wield saintess-level divine power. If something about the world’s truths, space, or concepts had twisted, that was a pretty direct description of my situation.
“Still nothing? Or any kind of reaction from being here?”
So I put on the mask of a final verification and filled the entire theater with divine power. Since there was no intent to attack or exorcise, Aisha only flinched briefly before showing no further reaction. If my very existence was tied to this twisting, then perhaps flooding the place with my divine power would provoke some kind of response.
“N-no! There’s nothing, you know. Just… really scary divine power everywhere….”
Hearing her answer, I let out a quiet sigh of relief in my heart. Good. At least it wasn’t my divine power or miracles that were twisting the world. But then… what was the cause?
“What will you do, Lady Guinevere? Will you say we couldn’t identify the cause?”
I could ask with a lighter heart than before. If I had been the cause, there would’ve been some kind of reaction by now. Therefore, it probably had nothing to do with me.
“I wouldn’t go that far. We may not know the exact cause, but we can say that a twisting of the world occurred inside this theater. That much should be enough for the rest to handle on their own.”
Is that so? If that was how it would end, then fine. We’d secured a share in owning—or something close to owning—a Demon King, Guinevere had gained the glory of digging deeper into something neither the Demon King nor the Hero could have uncovered alone, and we could even claim we’d been helpful in the end. All in all, things had wrapped up better than I’d feared. There was still an uneasy aftertaste, but it was better than knowing nothing at all.
Wait. Was there something more than just an uneasy aftertaste…? Ah.
“Please add one more thing. Placing the geas on the Demon King was a huge help to you, wasn’t it, Lady Guinevere? Consider it payment for that.”
“Th-that’s right! I’m not so shameless an elf as to ignore that. Saintess, speak your wish. I swear on the name of the Archmage that I shall grant it—within reason, of course.”
It really must have helped. Opportunities to experiment on a Demon King didn’t come often, after all. Especially one that was still alive and bound by a geas. In comparison, this was nothing.
“Originally, things could’ve been much worse, but thanks to the Saintess and the Hero, it stopped at this level. Please include that as well.”
“Hm? Isn’t that already the case? I heard the Saintess helped and the Hero finished it.”
“Not that. I mean the twisting itself. It feels like it was somewhat suppressed thanks to me and the Hero. Please say it’s suspected to be so.”
“That is… however….”
“You don’t have to say it as fact. Just that it’s suspected. In exchange, I’ll leave the Demon King entirely to you, Lady Guinevere. I don’t need any other compensation.”
Yulia simply blinked, while Zeke seemed to assume I had my reasons and didn’t interfere. Guinevere fell into thought. She was probably calculating what impact agreeing to my words would have and how much of a burden it might become for her. After a moment…
“Very well. Truthfully, I had considered something similar myself. The Saintess’s divine power is exceptionally strong, is it not? The Hero’s power is also quite special. It’s entirely possible that the two forces suppressed this twisting. So it wouldn’t be a lie on my part.”
The way she rattled it all off was clearly self-justification, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either. We’d already verified to some extent that my divine power hadn’t caused the twisting. So conversely, it wasn’t impossible that—as Guinevere said—my power and Zeke’s had suppressed it. More importantly, recalling the situation at the time… who was it that had sliced through all those half-rendered black spheres? It was Zeke, wielding the Hero’s Sword that had absorbed my divine power. If that power could destroy them outright, then it could’ve suppressed them beforehand as well.
“Then we’re settled?”
“Yes, good. Personally, I feel quite satisfied to have built a better relationship with the Saintess.”
With that, the deal with Guinevere was finalized. And indeed, she included our agreed-upon content about the twisting in her announcement.
“Why go that far? Just to make us look better?”
Right after the announcement, during our meal together, Zeke asked with a subtle glance. Well, lunch, not dinner.
“That’s just a bonus. Our image was already about as good as it could get just from ending that phenomenon.”
“Then why?”
Hmm. How should I explain this? Just telling him outright would be boring, but teasing him here might come back to bite me later.
“I want to raise Goldhwa’s value even higher. People already believe my blessing resides in it, don’t they?”
“Ah, well… that’s true. But isn’t that image already pretty strong?”
Zeke wasn’t an idiot, so he knew Goldhwa was already being received very positively. In fact, even the nobles had been throwing money around like water at the auction, so anyone with half a brain would’ve noticed.
“It is, but we didn’t announce that we found the cause of the twisting. If we seem too greedy, people might start saying it’s affecting things and cause trouble.”
The problem was Goldhwa’s explosive rise in value. Eventually, factions within the Church would try to keep me in check, and if those people started getting involved in shady politics, who knew what might happen? Of course, this might only be a minor crack—something that could be patched up without leaving a trace. But the best option was to avoid needing even minor patching in the first place.
“Hmm, I see.”
“Exactly. We should always be collecting every possible advantage, shouldn’t we?”
“Do you always think like that?”
“I have to. You can’t be satisfied with harvesting just one benefit from a single move.”
Of course, I hadn’t told him everything I’d been thinking. There were many other gains from Guinevere’s confirmation. Among them, the biggest was putting a brake on the imperial family’s ongoing attempts to separate the Empire’s Church. Think about it: in the theater incident, it wasn’t just anyone—it was Yulia, the Empire’s princess, who awakened divine power. Not quite at saintess level, but still undeniably powerful. And the claim that this power had suppressed the twisting came from none other than the Archmage whom the imperial family cherished. What would people think? That the twisting caused the incident? That even the Archmage doesn’t know the exact cause? Yet the orthodox Church’s Saintess and Hero suppressed it? Meanwhile, the Empire’s Church tried to persecute such people with force? How could that not explode? And there was one more finishing blow.
“I need to visit His Holiness the Pope.”
“Why?”
“We need to get Yulia’s divine power officially recognized. Since she gained it thanks to this Church’s Saintess, it’s only natural for this Church’s Pope to acknowledge it. I’ve already gotten her consent. You’ll have to come as a witness too.”
Yulia was already my apostle. She herself had accepted that fact, so using the relationship this way was only natural.
“Right, I should go with you. Hmm, there is one person I’m a bit worried about, though….”
“Don’t worry about Lady Guinevere and that pink-haired Demon King. That geas is apparently quite powerful.”
Zeke, who seemed to take his accompaniment as a given, simply nodded at my words with an unreadable expression.