The Hero and the Saint - Part 1 Complete
One of the most common survival strategies among the lower and middle tiers of the food chain is to make oneself appear larger than normal.
Yet what is a desperate, life-or-death struggle for those involved looks quite trivial—and occasionally even cute—from the perspective of humans, who sit at the very top of that same food chain.
It really is a rather poignant thing.
A pufferfish swollen to bursting after gulping down water.
A red panda raising its tiny arms high above its head.
A baby penguin standing ramrod straight with its head thrust skyward.
There aren’t many humans who would feel genuine fear at such pitiful threats.
But.
“Huuung!”
My mind was currently drowning in unprecedented terror.
The sight of the red-eyed girl with her mysterious white hair swaying as she strode straight toward me, cheeks puffed out to their absolute limit in an adorably sulky pout, was simply too frightening.
Ba-bam. Ba-bam.
Yes, frightening enough for the Jaws theme to echo faintly through my skull.
She was someone whose face rarely showed emotion—so rarely, in fact, that one might wonder if she even had facial muscles. The fact that she was displaying such an obvious reaction meant her mood had soured to a degree far beyond what my pathetic imagination could possibly fathom.
I had expected her to be quite angry after I skipped breakfast without permission. That much was predictable.
But I had never imagined her fury would reach this level.
As the distance between us slowly closed, the dark fog clouding my thoughts grew thicker and thicker.
The trivial matters of dungeon outbreaks and collapses had long since vanished from my mind.
Right now, I was already overwhelmed just trying to figure out why she had come all this way, what emotions she was carrying, and what methods she had used to get here.
“S-Saintess…”
“Promises. Must be kept. Unless unavoidable circumstances.”
“Guhk.”
I couldn’t hide my shock.
Her vocabulary had improved noticeably lately, but this was the first time I had ever heard her speak in such perfectly formed sentences. And I had been watching her every move from up close for a long time.
What made it worse was that those were the exact words I had repeated to her over and over while stressing the importance of keeping promises.
It was only natural that my mouth, which had been about to offer some pathetic excuse, froze solid in an instant.
There had been unavoidable circumstances, of course.
But explaining the complicated chain of events in a way she could fully understand was an acrobatic feat far beyond my capabilities.
“This.”
“Eh…”
By the time I realized it, the Saintess had closed the distance until she stood right in front of me. She held up the final page of her most treasured picture book, spreading it wide before my eyes.
A heartwarming illustration of the prince and princess sharing a tender kiss.
A beautiful finale that would satisfy every reader. The so-called happy ending.
The very same shameless picture she had once pestered and pestered me to imitate now filled my exhausted, narrowed pupils.
“Going to do it.”
A single drop of cold sweat rolled down my spine, ringing every alarm bell I possessed.
It was painfully obvious what she was demanding as compensation for my broken promise.
I had been dodging her repeated requests for my lips with every excuse under the sun, postponing it again and again.
So I could tell.
This time, her stubbornness was on another level.
If her usual stubbornness was made of steel, this one was clearly comparable to diamond.
“Saintess? Sister. Did you just refer to this person as the Saintess?”
Right then.
The Hero, who had been standing quietly behind me and simply watching the whole situation unfold, finally spoke up, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
Before I could even answer, two familiar voices sliced through the air like arrows from outside my immediate awareness.
“Hero! Hey! Are you guys okay!?”
“Thank goodness you’re safe! Priest Lazis!”
The owners of those voices were Apis and the nun.
Their expressions were so overcome with emotion that they looked like people reuniting with long-lost family.
Only now did I notice that the ground where the Hero and I stood was deeply cratered, as if a massive meteor had just slammed into it.
Ah, right. I had just come out of an unregistered dungeon.
I’d heard that when people with weak constitutions go through severe ordeals, their emotions and memories experience a slight delay. It seemed that was exactly what was happening to me.
The damp fatigue and hazy fog blended together into a languid daze, making it difficult to clearly distinguish the boundary between consciousness and dream.
“Chuuu. Going to do it. Say ah. Ah~”
But.
I could say with absolute certainty that the vivid tragedy unfolding right before my eyes was not a dream.
Though I really, really wished it was.
“S-Saintess… Just a moment, please… There are people watching… There are eyes on us…”
I shot the Hero a quick glance that I hoped conveyed “wait just a second,” then turned back to the Saintess. Deciding that calming her rampage was the top priority, I spoke in a low, restrained voice to stop her.
One of the rules I had painstakingly devised after much trial and error to restrain the Saintess’s abnormal obsession with physical contact with me was this:
Three times a day, she was allowed skinship on any part of my body except the lips. However, such acts were strictly forbidden in front of others.
I don’t think I need to explain just how many setbacks I had endured to drill this simple rule into her.
“Saintess. Please look around. There are so many people here. So the chuu can wait until later…”
I clasped my hands together reverently, as if in prayer to the gods, desperately hoping my earnest plea would reach her dry emotions and grant me a temporary stay of execution.
But right after that, an intangible ripple flowed out from the Saintess—like a small wave surging forward—and instantly crushed my fragile sliver of hope.
“No one now.”
“Pardon?”
It was as if time itself had frozen.
Everything around us except the Saintess and me suddenly stopped moving.
Apis and the nun, who had been rushing toward us in a panic.
The pedestrians who had been watching us from a safe distance.
Even Priest Ranobel, whose presence here I still couldn’t understand.
Everyone around us stood completely still, as though someone had pressed the pause button on a video.
A scene that felt strangely familiar.
The chilling memory of the time the Saintess had turned Priest Ranobel into a human statue naturally overlapped with the current sight.
“W-Welna!”
“Ah. Open.”
I cried out her name in a last-ditch effort, but there was no sign that her bold momentum would ease in the slightest.
The Saintess gently placed her hand on my cheek and slowly pulled my head toward her.
Her slender hair tickled my skin. A sweet, fragrant scent wafted into my nose.
Just as her sensual ploy seemed poised to rob me of any will to resist, my body and mind—already reduced to rags by consecutive days of grueling work—were about to be helplessly toyed with without so much as a proper struggle.
Then—
Whoosh.
My body was yanked forward by a savage strength, only to be gently caught against someone’s soft, warm flesh.
Squeeze.
The pressure was almost enough to cut off my breath. When I instinctively looked up, I saw the Hero had fixed my face precisely against her chest. She glared at the Saintess with eyes blazing like she was staring at her parents’ mortal enemy.
“Who exactly are you, and where are you from, that you dare try to claim Sister’s lips so casually? I demand a detailed explanation. Because right now, I am on the verge of losing my composure.”
Though she was smiling brightly, the thick hostility dripping from her tone left no doubt that the Hero’s emotions were running extremely high.
And then.
While everyone else in the area remained frozen, the Hero—who was moving normally—stared at the Saintess for a long moment with clear displeasure. The Saintess finally spoke in a cold voice completely devoid of any trace of life.
“Mine. Give back.”
Grind.
Even in the face of the Saintess’s brazen declaration of ownership, the Hero did not lose her natural smile for even a second.
But from the ominous grinding sound coming from inside her mouth, it was easy to tell that she was desperately clenching her teeth, struggling to suppress her violent thoughts.
“Sister is not yours. In the first place, humans cannot own other humans. Slavery is strictly forbidden in this capital, after all. That is something even a fool would know. Are you a fool?”
“Don’t know… Give him…”
“As I said again and again, I cannot hand Sister over.”
“I hate you……”
“Is that so? What a coincidence. I have also come to greatly dislike you, whom I only just met for the first time.”
In the long, long history of the Capital, spanning thousands of years, this was an unprecedented event.
The two people who, for the sake of the world’s peace and tranquility, should have been closer to each other than anyone else… had just become bitter enemies right before my eyes.
Perhaps it was because I had witnessed such a monumental incident up close that my body and mind, both of which had already reached their limits, finally let go of the last thread of sanity I had been desperately clinging to.
It happened right after that.
