Chapter 32. That Bastard Can Die of Frustration
“……”
“……”
In the depths of the heavy darkness, a suffocating silence flowed.
Crushed beneath a pressure that made even breathing difficult, the prostrated man could only glare at the floor, sweat beading down his face.
After a moment, a short sigh drifted out from the darkness.
“What am I to do with this…… I find myself growing rather weary.”
“I beg your forgiveness.”
Though he bore no blame for what had happened, the man had no choice but to bow his head anyway.
Shortly after, he felt a faint stirring of movement across the darkness, as if someone were shaking their head.
“No. The fault is not yours, Roger. Nor anyone's. By all rights, this should never have failed.”
Had it not been for a few minor variables.
The plans carried out in other countries had never once gone awry. Entire villages and cities had been rounded up and seized, and fear had begun to spread among the people, exactly as intended.
But in the Callion Empire, the outcome had been the precise opposite.
Crow had been denied an honorable death and made to taste humiliation instead — and his corpse had even been stolen away.
It was fortunate the follow-up measures had been laid in advance; otherwise, they would have found themselves in truly dire straits.
“It feels almost as though they understand our every intention. Roger, what do you think?”
“……”
The man — Roger — could not bring himself to deny it.
When they sought a head-on confrontation and provoked him, he would simply taunt them as if playing a game and slip away. And when they meant to destroy everything and sow terror, he would instead use them as a stepping stone to elevate a shining hero.
“It takes two hands clapping to make a sound. How can they fail to grasp that all of this is, in the end, for the sake of the whole world?”
The Imperial Knights — no. Arendt von Eckhart seemed to have no intention whatsoever of playing along.
Roger, who had remained silent until then, finally spoke.
“Those who serve Luce lack that measure of wisdom.”
“Do not underestimate them so. It is true that they have ruled this world in peace, is it not?”
“……I spoke carelessly.”
As Roger bowed his head deeper, a light chuckle rippled through the darkness.
“It is quite all right. There is no need to grow hasty yet. Though it seems we, too, must change our methods somewhat.”
“And how would you have us change them?”
“If we continue like this, we will end up burnishing Commander Laios's reputation for him.”
Everything that had happened so far said as much.
A brief silence fell, as if the speaker were lost in thought, before the deliberately light voice flowed out once more.
“……Now that Crow is dead, Jin must be quite heartbroken. Go and comfort him.”
“You wish me to do it?”
For the first time, the docile Roger gave a reluctant reply.
“Why? Do you dislike the idea?”
“……No. I shall do as you command.”
Roger's lips worked for a long while before he at last managed a stiff nod, and bright laughter burst from the darkness.
Contrary to her usual appearance, Priestess Lumiel in plain clothes was the very picture of a kindly old grandmother. Her face brimming with a warm smile, the elderly priestess hummed in a voice even livelier than usual.
“It's such a lovely feeling to get some fresh air after so long. I really should go out like this more often, you know. But the moment I so much as think about stepping out for a bit of breeze, the children start fussing around me to tag along — so even that never quite works out.”
“Is life at the Great Temple so stifling for you?”
“Oh, I'm far too busy to feel anything so stuffy. But every now and then, I do find myself missing those days of wandering wherever my feet took me.”
Arendt shot back as though the whole notion were absurd.
“That sounds remarkably like calling it stifling, if you ask me.”
“Well, there's little to be done about it. Still, the fact that I may serve Lord Luce for the remainder of this life is a great fortune for me.”
For a woman born with a free-spirited nature, temple life surely could not have been entirely pleasant. Her refusal of the High Priest's seat, too, may well have sprung from the same reluctance to be bound.
“I take it Sir Arendt is treating me to lunch today?”
“You intend to bleed a green apprentice knight dry?”
“Everyone knows you're a rich man, Sir Arendt. Surely your income far exceeds that of this old priestess?”
At Lumiel's teasing remark, Arendt found himself shrugging his shoulders despite his better judgment.
Before long, Lawrence approached and laid out a lavish lunch before the two of them.
Having offered a brief prayer before the meal, Priestess Lumiel smiled brightly and asked, “So then, Sir Arendt. What was it you wished to know?”
“Divine power. It's an entirely different force from mana, isn't it? I'd like to know how it works — the principle behind it.”
As Arendt tore off a piece of soft bread and popped it into his mouth, Lumiel tilted her head in a vaguely noncommittal way.
“The principle, you say…… Well. To call it an entirely different power is stretching things slightly. I certainly couldn't claim it's the same, but their natures do share a certain similarity, you see.”
After a moment's deliberation over her words, the priestess added, “It might be easiest for you to think of it as the mana that the gods themselves possess. Each temple's divine power carries its own distinct character, after all.”
“As in mana attributes? Like the healing power of the Temple of Luce?”
“Yes. Through Lord Luce's grace, we were granted our potent healing power. The other temples are much the same.”
Some temples could gather many priests together to call down rain; others blessed the land so that crops might flourish.
“In general, a priest's abilities are connected to the domain each god exercises over this world. We priests borrow the power of our god — much as knights and mages draw upon the mana of nature.”
“……”
As Lumiel's explanation flowed on in a gentle murmur, Arendt cast a sidelong glance at the Frost-Tinged Touch wrapped around his hand.
A Holy Relic.
The cult would not have used that word for an artifact without reason.
“The evil god is Cernion's opposite — Lord Luce's, I mean, isn't it?”
“It would seem so, yes.”
The God of Darkness, and the God of Night.
Arendt recalled the figure of Cernion he had witnessed in Rebecca's castle.
“Then what sort of divine power would the priests who serve him come to hold?”
“……”
At the unexpected question, Lumiel's eyes went round. Once Arendt had given her a concise account of everything that had happened, the surprise on her face gradually deepened into gravity.
“……This matter is to be kept in strictest confidence, yes?”
“That's the idea. I'd rather only you knew about it. I'd prefer you didn't tell the High Priestess, either.”
“Goodness. You do have a talent for putting this old woman in impossible positions, Sir Arendt.”
Despite her grumbling, there was nothing displeased in the wrinkled face beneath the wry smile.
“Well, I suppose it can't be helped. Setting the temple aside entirely — my promise to help you personally still stands, after all. Now, let me see……”
Priestess Lumiel let a long pause hang in the air, as though ordering her thoughts.
Arendt occupied himself with his meal and waited patiently, until at last she spoke again.
“Without any accurate information or records, all I can offer is conjecture…… As you well know, Sir Arendt, the power of the God of Light — of Lord Luce — is mighty healing. And it is said that in the wars of old, it served to rouse and strengthen the spirits of warriors as well.”
He had read that in the novel, too.
Functioning as a kind of buff, knights blessed by a priest found their morale replenished and their physical abilities temporarily heightened.
“Put simply, their power elevates the capacities of the body. So one might reasonably suppose that their strength stands opposed to ours — at opposite poles.”
Having wet her throat with her drink, Lumiel continued.
“That is to say, our power is devoted to aiding our allies. Theirs, by contrast, would be focused on destruction — on the enemy.”
“Destruction……”
Murmuring the word briefly, Arendt lifted his head and looked at Priestess Lumiel.
“The truth is, I've got a hypothesis rattling around in my head.”
“Yes. Do tell me.”
“It's just — the moment I say it out loud, I suspect you'll never share another meal with me, Priestess. That does make it a little hard to bring up.”
Whether the remark caught her off guard, Lumiel blinked at him for a moment — then, catching sight of his expression, burst into a suppressed giggle.
“For someone who says so, you don't look the least bit sorry, Sir Arendt.”
“I'm not particularly sorry or apologetic, but I'd rather not earn your hatred. You are, after all, the only person inside the temple willing to help me.”
Arendt shrugged his shoulders with shameless ease, and Lumiel shot him a meaningful look.
“And yet you mean to tell me anyway? Otherwise there'd be no reason to set aside this private time and buy me such an expensive meal.”
“Yep. Just laying the groundwork, that's all. Please don't hate me. Or — well, hate me if you must, nothing I can do about it. I'm simply curious whether my hypothesis holds any water. That's all there is to it.”
With a quiet snort of laughter, Arendt speared a piece of steak with his fork.
“You said Lord Luce's power aids our allies, yes? I'd like to look at it from a slightly different angle.”
Strip away the altruistic disposition entirely, and look only at the raw function……
“When a human holds faith in a god and prays with true devotion, the god is moved by that earnestness and lends them power — that's what divine power is, isn't it? But I want to view it from another perspective.”
“Another perspective, you say…… In what way?”
“The divine power held by the Temple of Light concerns itself with the bodies of living beings. Under the banner of mercy, it heals and reinvigorates — and thereby collects faith.”
“……?!”
“It isn't that the gods look kindly upon humans and bestow divine power upon them. It's that humans are made to use divine power, and the humans moved by it then offer their faith up to Lord Luce himself.”
“……”
“You said his power is Cernion's opposite, didn't you? In that case, wouldn't it be fair to say their divine power interferes with the minds of their faithful?”
It was an appallingly cold-eyed view, faith and heart and the love of gods all stripped away without the slightest hesitation.
“They possess loyalty to the point of excess, yet every time they were provoked mid-battle, their reason crumbled with ease. And their faith allowed them to interfere with a believer's mind and impose restraints upon it. To the point of wiping a man's memory of the cult entirely.”
It was the power of the artifact — the Breath of Mnemosyne.
“I've heard that with the High Priestess's divine power, even a patient on death's doorstep can be saved. And their cult, for its part, can toy with its believers' memories at will and deaden parts of their reason. So if a war were to break out between the two of them……”
“I understand quite well what you mean to say, Sir Arendt. And I now understand, too, why you worried about earning my hatred.”
In the end, Lumiel cut him off mid-sentence, unable to listen any further.
Arendt stopped obediently and stared at her, expressionless.
“Is it an outrageous thing to say?”
“……”
Unable to hide her bewilderment, Priestess Lumiel remained silent for a long while.
A war between Luce's soldiers, who rose again without end so long as breath remained in them, and Cernion's soldiers, whose fighting spirit never wavered even as their comrades fell beside them.
And in that war, not a scrap of piety or divine mercy — nothing but a bare transaction of exchange between men and gods.
It was a vision with no equal in hell itself.
What unsettled the priestess even more was the fact that she could not carelessly dismiss it all as nonsense.
Arendt folded his arms and leaned back in his chair with a soft thump.
“Judging by your reaction, maybe I'm not entirely off the mark. Just forget it, though. At this stage it's nothing but speculation anyway.”
“You really are……”
Only after a long silence did the priestess manage to murmur the words — then, belatedly realizing her composure had slipped, she forced an awkward smile.
“You truly are relentless, Sir Arendt. I fear this meal may not agree with me. I'll have to pick up a digestive remedy when I return.”
“We've got plenty of those back at the dormitory. I'll bring you some next time.”
At the apprentice knight's perfectly matter-of-fact response, the priestess could do nothing but let out a hollow laugh, her face gone pale.