A Heart-to-Heart on the Bell Tower
That day, the Capital was unusually lively. From early morning, pedestrians hurried back and forth, decorating every corner of the city with brilliant flowers and glowing lights. The children, however, showed zero interest in helping their parents’ careful work. They clustered in groups of three or five, far too busy playing at being heroes to lend a hand.
Yet disapproving stares at such childish behavior were remarkably rare. Even if you combed the crowded main street from one end to the other, you could count them on one finger. Instead, the passersby wore satisfied smiles, radiating a thick, leisurely contentment quite unlike their usual demeanor. The long-awaited joyous occasion right before their eyes filled the once-barren streets with vivid energy. For anyone living in the Capital, it was an auspicious event impossible not to celebrate. The day of the Grace Bestowal Ceremony. The sacred moment when the Saintess would bestow her power upon the Hero was now only one day away. It was only natural that the spectators, able to witness the legendary hero’s glorious ascent from such close range, could barely contain the overwhelming emotion surging from their hearts.
But as with all things, there were exceptions. Not everyone facing this celebration was happy. This man was a prime example.
A towering bell tower that overlooked the entire cityscape. A middle-aged man with a haggard face leaned casually against its railing, the height of which was enough to make anyone dizzy just by looking up. His name was Robert. He ran a fairly well-known inn for travelers in the area and had once been the head of a household. Yes, he had been such a man.
A few weeks earlier, without the slightest warning, a dungeon disaster had struck his inn with uncanny precision. The establishment he had built by pouring in every last coin of his retirement fund had vanished without a trace. He might well have been the most unfortunate soul in the world. To make matters worse, the compensation sent by an anonymous benefactor who had pitied his plight had been seized by his wife, who then ran off with it. At this point, the only asset left to him was his own emaciated, wretched body.
“Farewell… you filthy world…”
Now he was about to let go of even that last possession. The Capital, home to the Saintess’s Audience Chamber, was a sanctuary among sanctuaries—a holy place where the dungeon disaster, called the root of all profanity, had not occurred even once in thousands of years. The mere fact that such a calamity had broken out here was disastrous enough. That it had spared every neighboring building and completely incinerated only his inn left Robert in indescribable despair. The complaints of his fellow merchants, who had raged about falling land prices after the disaster, now seemed utterly ridiculous to him.
A few weeks ago, when an unknown rich man had suddenly appeared and rented the inn for several days without blinking at the price Robert had shamelessly inflated to three or four times the market value, he never imagined such a horrific misfortune would follow.
“In the next life, I hope to be born in a peaceful world where dungeons like that damned thing don’t exist…”
He had taken that pitiful wish as his final testament and was gripping the railing even tighter when—
“Whoa!”
Directly below the railing, on a ledge so narrow it looked perilous even for a bird’s nest, sat a mysterious figure as still as a gargoyle. Robert let out a shrill scream and collapsed to the floor in shock.
“W-what are you?! Why are you sitting there?! Are you trying to die?!”
Whether a man who had just resolved to kill himself had any right to say such words was debatable, but his point was valid. Sitting on the outside of the railing like that was more than fearless—it was outright suicidal.
“Wh-what?! A-are you a priest?”
Once his pounding heart had calmed somewhat, Robert slowly examined the man. Sturdy height. A thick, solid frame. Sharp features that suggested he would have been a good match for Robert in his younger days. He looked to be in his mid-to-late twenties, yet his hair had gone pure white, like that of an old man on death’s door, making it hard to guess his true age.
Still, the lavish embroidery on his vestments and the expensive jewels dangling everywhere made it clear he was a high-ranking priest of considerable status.
“Um… mister… If you’re not busy, could you listen to my story…?”
“What?”
To someone who had just decided to die, the request sounded like nonsense. The old Robert would have said exactly that. But the man’s hazy white eyes, which seemed to stare at some faraway place rather than the present, looked so unbearably pitiful that Robert suddenly wanted to hear him out. The man’s wretched appearance, like a corpse one step from the grave, stirred such sympathy that Robert’s own sickly face—the one he saw in the mirror every morning—suddenly seemed full of life by comparison.
“You’re not going to listen. I see. As expected, there’s no one under this vast sky who will take my side. Thank you. Thanks to you, my resolve is firm. Now that I’ve looked my fill at this cloudless blue sky, I can leave without any lingering attachments…”
“Ah! I’ll listen! I’ll listen, all right?! A young man shouldn’t live thinking only such dark thoughts! Come on, lad!”
Robert felt it was rather comical that he, who had struggled up here to die, was now trying to save someone else. Still, he decided to hear the man out. At least he could take one interesting story with him to the afterlife.
The man introduced himself as Reygis Rowbill. According to him, the sexual harassment from his already persistent superior had recently escalated to a level he could no longer tolerate.
“I’ve told her many times that I don’t want to, but she never listens and always does as she pleases… forcing me… Yesterday she even held her breath, saying I wouldn’t sleep with her…”
“Sigh… That woman will surely receive divine punishment…”
Robert gently patted the man’s back as he covered his face with both hands and sobbed like a heartbroken maiden. The extreme reaction suggested his boss must be quite the harpy. Having roughly guessed the situation, Robert let out a heavy sigh as though it were his own problem.
“In times like that, just quit! What’s there to cling to?! When that happens, you throw your resignation letter straight into that damned boss’s face like a man!”
“I want to do exactly that, but unavoidable circumstances mean I can’t quit for the time being… Yet my direct superior is using that as an excuse. She’s assigning me achievements I don’t even remember and trying to force a promotion on me…”
“Oh dear, heavens above… Those crazy women…”
Robert had guessed the Cathedral was corrupt after reading about Priest Lobel’s bigamy scandal, but this was the first time he had witnessed the full reality. He was so shocked he couldn’t close his mouth for a long while.
“Wait—did everyone around you just stand by and watch until things reached this point? Was there no one willing to stop it?!”
“Well… there is one former colleague. How should I put this… The problem is that she’s trying to stop me far too aggressively…”
“What?”
“There was a girl I once looked after, almost like a niece, and we worked together briefly. After learning about my situation, she keeps pestering me to quit my current job at once, saying she’ll support me until she becomes a grandmother…”
“Huh! What a dutiful niece! Then why not just live with her?”
“I did something terribly wrong to her in the past. Even now that we’ve cleared up some of the resentment, facing her is still very awkward… Besides, at my age, living off someone who’s practically my niece doesn’t look good socially…”
“Ah, yes, I suppose that’s true!”
Even if he had no luck with work, it seemed he had some luck with people. If only his son—who had left home long before his wife ran away—could have taken after even half of that dutiful niece. As Robert chewed on these gray regrets, a white spark suddenly flashed through his mind like lightning.
“Ah! Then how about this, priest lad!”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Tell them you’ve found someone to marry!”
“.........Huh?”