The World Is Crumbling
The dungeon was collapsing.
“Uuuu… Uuuu…”
Crack.Crack-crack.
The girl’s pitiful sobs mingled with those eerie fracturing sounds. The silence that had seemed as if it would last forever shattered right after.
This alien space was filled with nothing but thick, suffocating darkness no matter where you looked. Across that gloomy backdrop, pure white cracks had sprouted like mold, spreading in every direction. It looked as though the night sky itself was splitting apart, scattering an indescribable sense of dread everywhere.
What those cracks declared was obvious.
The world—no, the dungeon—was collapsing.
“Hero…”
But right now, I didn’t have the mental capacity to spare a glance in any direction but straight ahead. The dungeon’s collapse was a monumental event, yet something far more serious had taken priority and was sitting right in front of my nose.
“What could you possibly want with someone like me…?”
The Hero’s desperate plea. A request. A confession. After long, careful deliberation, the answer I had given her was nothing more than a lame joke.
Asking for me in exchange for saving the world? There had to be limits to a bad deal. Setting aside whether a person like me was even worth that much, I couldn’t possibly accept such an absurd proposal from a naive girl who was clearly overwhelmed by emotion. Not as a responsible adult.
For now, I decided to soothe her first so she could calm the turbulent feelings raging inside her.
“Hero. As I’ve told you many times before, I’m not nearly as amazing as you seem to think I—”
“I’m going to hold you all day long.”
Right then, the Hero, who had been burying her face in my stomach and sobbing miserably, suddenly cut me off in a bold tone that reminded me of a participant in a grand debate.
“I’ll wrap my arms around your broad waist, rest my head on your firm thighs, and have you praise me for everything I’ve done well until now.”
“H-Hero…?”
“When you praise me, I want you to stroke my hair. And if you whisper my name in my ear from time to time, that would be perfect. We’ll eat together, chat about silly things, and when I get sleepy, we won’t even need a thin blanket. I want to fall asleep quietly while feeling your warm body heat all over me.”
“……”
I couldn’t say a word. If it had been any other time, I would have dismissed those ridiculous words as nonsense. But now that I fully understood the extraordinary feelings she held for me, my heart was no longer insensitive enough to ignore her earnest, sorrowful plea filled with such fierce longing.
How much time passed like that? I stood there in cowardly silence, unable to carelessly encourage her or tell her to restrain herself, now faced with the Hero’s awkward wish. Suddenly, she let out a mournful cry.
“I-Is it… not allowed…?”
Blue eyes shimmering with heartbreaking emotion. A faint voice soaked in damp anxiety. The entire scene felt unfamiliar and strange. After all, the Hero’s own principle had always been that she must never be bound by personal feelings or blinded by selfish desires.
Seeing her cry out loud like a child searching for her parents, voicing her own desires and begging—this was the first time I had ever witnessed it, even though I had been through life and death with her for years.
“I-I understand. I-I’ll endure it… I’ll just watch like before… Just look at you… So, could you at least… stay somewhere I can see you…? Even if it’s just within my sight…?”
Her trembling fingers clutched at the hem of my clothes. The moment she did, an old, dusty vision flickered across my mind.
An unknown man who had come to the orphanage to abandon his child. A shabby little kid desperately grabbing the hem of that heartless man’s pants, begging him not to leave. It was an all-too-common tragedy that anyone who grew up in an orphanage had probably seen at least once.
If you’re not going to take responsibility, then don’t give them affection in the first place.
That was what the elderly nun who worked at the orphanage where I had been raised used to say whenever she witnessed such tragedies. That sharp rebuke brought me back to reality.
What I had done until now, and what I was about to do, wasn’t all that different from the cruelty of that scoundrel who had kicked away his own child.
“Haa…”
I took a deep breath and steadied my mind. And with that, I made my decision.
“Huh?”
“Something like this… I can do it as much as you want.”
Instead of my blood-soaked right hand, I gently stroked the Hero’s golden hair with my clean left hand. Thankfully, thanks to the practice runs I’d had with the Saintess, I had picked up a decent amount of know-how on how to handle a woman’s hair.
“P-Priest? Huh? Uweh?”
The Hero, clearly not having expected this at all, scattered bewildered words into the air.
“I’m sorry…”
For running away. For turning away. For pretending not to notice. There were more than enough reasons and justifications for an apology. But I lacked the courage to face what I had done head-on, so I couldn’t even bring myself to offer her this meager apology. No. In fact, I had even tried to push her away.
“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, Hero…”
“N-No, no! I’m the one who should be apologizing! Because of me, Priest, you can’t even use your holy power anymore, your hand is scarred, and your path to promotion has been blocked…”
“So you knew about all that too… It’s fine. None of it was really mine to begin with.”
“That’s not tr—! N-No! Uck!”
The words I had offered hoping her tears would stop seemed to have the opposite effect and only stimulated her sobbing. But perhaps because I had finally set down the heavy burden weighing on my heart, the thoughts that had been endlessly churning with guilt were growing calm, like the sea after a storm had passed.
Maybe it was because the current situation felt strangely familiar. After all, comforting and soothing a crying child was something I had done to the point of exhaustion over the past few months.
After a long exchange of clumsy, tearful apologies, the Hero, who seemed to have regained some composure, suddenly asked me a cautious question.
“Priest. If it’s not too rude… may I ask you just one question?”
“Hm? Oh, yes. Go ahead, ask anything.”
“Earlier… I think you said that you actually like women…”
“Ah…”
That suspicion was perfectly reasonable. After all, I was the one who had proudly declared that sexual desire was a concept that could not exist for a cleric who had sworn chastity to God. Even though I had been dragged there against my will, the memory of being taken to a brothel on the day of my coming-of-age ceremony still remained one of my most painful dark histories. Of course, even though I had gone to the brothel, all I had done was hold a woman’s hand once before coming back.
“It’s embarrassing, but… yes…”
“……”
The moment those words left my mouth, the Hero’s straight gaze suddenly twisted sharply toward my face. I briefly considered confessing that I had gone to the brothel too, but I wisely kept my mouth shut. I wanted to cover my face, which was burning with shame like a heated stove, but I couldn’t bring my blood-covered right hand up to it, and I couldn’t stop stroking the Hero’s hair with my left hand either. In the end, I had no choice but to meet the Hero’s sharp gaze head-on as she scrutinized my humiliation.
“Priest…! Your face is red! It’s so red…! A-Are you… feeling shy right now?!”
“H-Haha…”
I had no idea what was so amusing about my face turning red. The way the Hero watched my expression with eyes full of curiosity, like a cat staring at a fish in a tank, was indescribably awkward.
“I see! So even you have sexual desires after all, Priest!”
“Hero. There’s an echo in here, so could you please not speak so loudly… Wait, I’m not saying we should talk about it somewhere else.”
I was in the middle of an unexpected quarrel with the overly excited Hero when it happened.
“Y-You…!”
As if in sync with the slowly collapsing dungeon, an unfamiliar woman was glaring at us with murderous intent. Her body was cracked and misaligned in several places, giving her the strong impression of a broken doll rather than a person.
“Even though it was only a temporary body, not only did you dare strike my sacred face with your fist, but you’ve also ruined the vessel I had so carefully prepared…”
Most of the parts that should have been above her eyes and nose were gone. All that remained as her only possessions were one half-destroyed eye and a pair of dry, cracked lips. Where her eyes and nose should have been, there was nothing. You could see straight through to the scenery beyond. I couldn’t even begin to guess her identity, and an unnamed terror warned me that I shouldn’t even try. It created a vivid sense of crisis in my mind, which had only just begun to relax.
“To think a mere lower-worlder’s insignificant body could contain that much divine power… And to even be capable of absorbing divine power dwelling in another person’s body… Indeed, so that’s how it is. You are the one I’ve only heard about in ru—!”
“I don’t know who you are, but please be quiet for a moment! The Priest and I are in the middle of an important conversation!”
And just like that, the sense of crisis was extinguished far too anticlimactically by the Hero’s decisive slash. No, even so, attacking someone who was in the middle of explaining something with a serious atmosphere was a bit—
I was thinking such carefree thoughts when the Hero suddenly shouted with a bright smile.
“Priest! In short! You’re saying that you also have the desire to embrace a woman’s body!”
“Huh? Oh, well, yes, that’s true… Wait, wait a second.”
With an innocent smile on her face, the Hero suddenly began taking off her outer clothes.