The Saintess's Runaway Declaration
With her secret weapon at the ready, Beltein pressed herself flush against the firmly closed door of the Audience Chamber, ears straining like a safecracker who had slipped into a noble’s mansion. An unprecedented tension gripped her entire body.
She was the shameless culprit who had slipped a handful of illicit books among the carelessly scattered pile of fairy tales on the Audience Chamber floor. The very person who had committed this heinous act—deserving of divine punishment—was none other than herself.
For a Saintess who was supposed to embody purity, leaving behind texts that detailed the physical union of man and woman inside the sacred sanctuary where she rested her body was an act of profound blasphemy. It was serious enough to spark a religious trial. Yet to Beltein, who had sworn to spare no means or method to keep the priest bound to the Saintess, such threats had long since lost their power to frighten her.
Having served as the Saintess’s personal attendant from right beside her all this time, she had already perfectly analyzed the relationship between the priest and the Saintess. The priest, unable to endure the Saintess’s bold onslaught of affection, would sometimes push her away—only for her to forcibly seize his hand and cling to him again. Their bond was like a rickety bridge that could collapse at any moment.
Once, Beltein had hoped that precarious equilibrium would stretch on as long and thinly as possible. Now, however, she prayed with all her heart for that balance to shatter helplessly at any second.
Even Beltein, who remembered the Saintess from before she had become the Saintess, could only make vague guesses based on context about why the Saintess followed the priest so devotedly. She did not fully understand it. What mattered most to her now was that, thanks to a certain special power possessed only by the priest, the Saintess’s personality—once believed to have vanished without a trace—was slowly regaining its original shape.
Inside Beltein’s head, there was room for only one thing: schemes to ignite a romance between the Saintess and the priest during the seven-day grace period before the Grace Bestowal Ceremony, so that the deeply responsible man would choose, of his own will, to remain at the Saintess’s side.
She had to hurry. The church leadership made no secret of their displeasure that a lowly commoner had been chosen as the Saintess’s exclusive priest. They openly neglected his working conditions, incited the other priests to ostracize him within the monastery, and employed every dirty trick imaginable to drive him outside its walls. Protecting himself from them was an exhausting ordeal.
On top of that, the priest himself had no desire to continue in the exclusive role. If Beltein simply sat idle, it was obvious that this lifeline of hope would soon vanish from this place.
The memories of the days after her sister had become the Saintess—those nightmarish days too horrific to describe—still clung to the insides of Beltein’s eyelids like rust eaten into iron. It was like staring at a stuffed doll crammed full of cotton inside a space where every quality a human being should possess had been scraped away.
No, calling it a doll might have been too generous. A doll could move or speak if strings were pulled and someone lent it help. Even if the doll itself held no will, one could still be fooled into believing it existed in this world—like a child who watched the puppets dance exactly as the puppeteer intended and firmly believed they were real.
But her sister had not even become a marionette. She had been a vessel. Nothing more than a container meant to temporarily hold something precious. Her heart had stopped quietly. Her pulse did not flow. She refused to eat or drink, and the fact that she never slept for even a single moment made one wonder whether she could even blink.
Thanks to the ferocious divine power raging inside her body, she remained alive. Yet Beltein could not say with certainty that something without a heartbeat, without breath, and sharing no resemblance to any living creature could truly be called “alive.”
It had been hell. Sitting blankly on the Audience Chamber floor and staring into empty space at what had once been her younger sister, Beltein had barely—truly barely—suppressed the murderous urge to slaughter the disgusting people who rejoiced and called this the greatest masterpiece of a Saintess in history.
Because there remained the slightest chance that her sister might return. She knew all too well that it was nothing but an optimistic, hopeful assumption. Still, she had believed that if her sister ever came back to her side, it was the older sister’s duty to prepare a warm nest where she could rest. It was a shabby escape from reality, too crude to even call atonement. Yet there was no doubt that this tattered belief had supported Beltein’s heart each time it had nearly collapsed.
That was why the moment the man appeared and the Saintess began to move and live again, it had felt like salvation itself. When she first witnessed her sister—who had been reduced to an object one could call an ornamental statue—moving her limbs, asserting her own desires, and acting spoiled, Beltein had sat on the floor for a long time, unable to rise through the flood of grateful tears.
Swish.
Carefully stroking her own smooth cheek, which bore not a single burn scar, Beltein renewed her resolve once more. He had already awakened the Saintess’s mind once and healed wounds that should have been incurable. The logic behind those successive miracles did not matter. As the saying went, if something happened three times, it was fate. Having been saved by miracles again and again, it was only natural that Beltein would come to believe with blind faith that he would produce yet another miracle.
She had already set her plan in motion. Because the Saintess possessed an adult body but the mental age of her original self, the utmost way she could express affection was a kiss. It could not be helped. There was no way a Saintess surrounded by secular laws could possibly know any greater method of expression.
Therefore, to seduce that timid virgin priest, they needed to expand the variety of affection attacks beyond their current level. The scheme she had come up with was to plant erotic novels.
It was obvious what would happen once the current Saintess—who had matured enough to absorb every piece of knowledge she heard like a sponge—read them.
There was no need to enhance the Saintess’s appearance any further. No, it was impossible. Her mystical beauty, which seemed not of this world, could make people faint just by showing a glimpse of it from afar. Before her official guardian priest had been chosen, the attendants had consisted solely of devout female believers to prevent any unforeseen incidents. Nevertheless, quite a few had tried to lay hands on the Saintess as if possessed, only to end up like the previous Lanoel priest—turned into living taxidermy.
Although their minds returned to normal soon afterward and it never escalated into a major scandal, those who knew the story sometimes compared the Saintess to the forbidden fruit that had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Therefore, the chance that the priest felt no attraction to the Saintess’s outward appearance was extremely slim. Beltein had already confirmed beforehand that he was not without sexual desire.
She remembered it clearly. Whenever she stretched her arms high toward the ceiling, the priest’s gaze would occasionally drift subtly toward her chest. He seemed to think he had gone unnoticed, but even the solemn nun’s habit could not fully conceal Beltein’s figure, which was perfectly shaped to capture a man’s eyes. Naturally, she had grown skilled at detecting such lustful stares.
If he turned out to be the type who felt no interest in women with small breasts, then she would use this.
Gazing down proudly at her secret weapon—one arm alone could not fully support it—Beltein reaffirmed her iron will.
She felt almost no resistance. Unlike the gazes of other men, his stare felt strangely burdensome yet not unpleasant.
She had never learned techniques for seducing men, nor had she ever felt the need to. Still, while selecting the erotic novels to plant inside the Audience Chamber, she had absorbed enough theory to fill her head with groundless confidence.
It was exactly then.
BANG!
The Audience Chamber door Beltein had been leaning against suddenly flew open. Carried by the momentum, she tumbled to the floor, and a sharp scream burst from her lips.
The shocking scene that greeted her the next instant stole her breath away.
Priest Regis, his entire body bound tightly with some unknown white rope. And the Saintess, trudging out of the Audience Chamber while gripping the back of his neck as if dragging along a giant teddy bear.
The priest’s desperate cry echoed inside her awakened mind like a cave’s reverberation, brimming with unbreakable determination.
It was only natural that Beltein’s mouth fell wide open at the Saintess’s abrupt declaration of running away—made on the very eve of the Grace Bestowal Ceremony.