A Goddess?
Has anyone ever truly felt the presence of a god?
After I set out beside the Hero, I felt it every time we met an enemy: gods did exist in this world. A power lived in his body that could not be explained without that convenient premise called divinity. And once the adventure began, whenever I came face to face with a god, there was always something I wanted to ask the One above.
Why did it have to be him?
Wasn't there someone who had wanted it more desperately?
Now the one who could give me that answer—something that could not be called anything at all—stood before my eyes.
Outwardly, she was an ordinary human. She looked like a woman in the bloom of an ageless youth, possessed of a kindness and a capacity to embrace that had no visible end. But her presence was not the sort of thing the vessel of a human life could hold. It was so wrong that even a child with no power at all would have known it at a glance. No mana, no life, no presence—a void in which literally nothing could be felt. She bore those two contradictory natures at once, a halo flashing above her head, and she was, beyond any doubt, a god.
The being I had yearned for and resented for so long had appeared before me, and still I could not bring myself to speak. I was afraid of only one thing: that she might find out all the curses I had hurled at her until now.
A voice came. It was not sound in the ears but a voice hammered straight into the skull, and the feeling was like having my brain raped.
"What an amusing metaphor."
The goddess let out a soft breath of laughter and opened her mouth. The unnecessary gesture seemed, at a glance, like consideration. To my eyes it was the arrogance of a transcendent, deigning to come down to our level. She was surely reading even that thought.
I slid a glance sideways to see how the others were taking it. The Hero looked a little startled, but he accepted her presence with composure. Lady Melia and Karin, neither of them deep in the faith, could not get their minds around what was happening; they had gone rigid as statues and only stared at her in a daze. Only the Saintess moved differently. Eyes shot with blood, she traced the sign of the cross and poured out words that might have been prayer, or might have been a scream. She looked as though she had passed beyond faith into madness, and I flinched before I knew it.
Should I be praying, too?
The thought had barely formed when the Hero spoke.
"What, you here to congratulate us?"
The insolence of it—talking to a goddess as if she were a friend—turned my blood cold. The Hero's lovers, whose sensibilities ran relatively close to mine, felt the same. Lady Melia clapped her hands over her ears as if she could will herself not to have heard, and Karin went ashen beside her. The Saintess did not change. Her heart had already been driven to its limit; whatever happened here, it seemed, would make little difference.
"Mm. It's a day worth commemorating. The Goddess of Night can't interfere with this land anymore. For the next thousand years, this star will abide by my law."
"Well, that's great. But, Goddess—since you've come all this way anyway, mind if I ask one favor?"
"A favor?"
The Hero gestured roughly at the Saintess, who was still repeating, over and over, a prayer that had lost the shape of words. I made what seemed to me a plausible guess—that he meant to ask her to calm the Saintess. But...
"Her. Body's great, but she hates demons so much she gets to be a pain. Change her personality a little. A goddess could do that without even trying, right?"
"......"
The answer he received was so outrageous it startled even the goddess into silence—something, in a sense, that only the Hero could have said.
...Is he even human?
A headache surged up at a remark that left common sense behind. From the moment I first met her, I had never once felt kindly toward the Saintess. And still he wanted her personality changed—this woman, hounded so far that even I pitied her? His intent was so transparent that no orator in the world could have dressed it up as goodwill.
What happens now?
The Saintess, abruptly faced with having her mind remade, only went on offering prayers to the sky. Like a person driven to the last extreme of terror, who can do only one thing, she kept praying. Searching for any words that might stop it, I stole a look at the goddess's face.
It was a mask, as if every muscle had been cut away, and no feeling could be read in it. Wearing an expression that stirred a fear beyond anger, the goddess sighed and spoke.
"...Wow. This isn't easy."
"Huh? Is it that hard?"
At the Hero's words, her smile returned. An expressionless face becoming a smile in an instant was like one mask swapped for another, and it raised the hair on my arms.
"No. I mean you."
"What?"
"They call me an evil god, but I like good people. When I see someone warm and gentle, I feel as if I've become a good god myself."
"What's this, out of nowhere? And what do you mean, evil god?"
"You weren't a good child. That's why I picked you. I like good children."
The Hero was not the only one thrown by the sudden, senseless words. Everyone held their breath, sensing the turn. Even he, who had always run wild like a mad colt, looked faintly cowed.
Something was going to happen. That vague certainty alone filled my head when the goddess went on.
"I simply cannot do anything too cruel to a good child. Not with my own hands. A bad child, though—I don't spare them."
"......"
"And you. You're a bad child, aren't you?"
The goddess smiled a vicious smile. That face, empty of kindness and of mercy, full of nothing but malice, pointed straight at the Hero's future.
He had no power to see what was coming, but he could tell a crisis when it was already on top of him. He spun at once and hurled his whole body outward, dropping low and leaping for the window just as he had when he first came to this castle—but...
"Ghk—!!"
That transcendent spring of his legs never came. The body that had launched itself forward simply pitched onto its face and rolled across the ground. At the same time the Hero's power, which had dyed everything around him in his own color like a sun, withered away. What remained inside that vast vessel was a small, frail light that might have gone out at any moment. Feeling it die, his face twisted, the rims of his eyes reddening as if the tears might burst at any second.
The goddess—no, the evil god—approached him and spoke weakly, as if airing a complaint.
"You've killed seventy-two people so far? You've only been alive ten years—h-how did you manage that many? And that's only counting the decent ones."
"Don't...! Please, don't...!!"
"Rape, fifty-two times. Adultery, thirty-two people. Coerced abortions, eighteen. What kind of life have you been living? Six of those years you were on the battlefield, weren't you? You shouldn't have had the time—so how, in four years..."
"I-I'll apologize.... I'll be good from now on, so please, give me my power back...!! Th-that's all I have...!!"
"Why would this be your power? It's mine. And I haven't taken all of it back yet, you know? Honestly, I wanted to play with it a little longer. But I'm done with that now."
So there was still something left for her to take. The word death flickered through my head, and the Hero suddenly began to scream.
"A-gaaaaah—!!!"
It was the sound of meat on a fire, the kind that stirs the appetite. But no one looking at the scene before us—a human being wrapped in flame—could have felt hungry. Not even if that human was someone they hated and resented with everything they had.
The scream went on and on. Through all of it we could do nothing. We only prayed that the moment would pass quickly.
When the fire at last went out, what remained was not the Hero we had known. I don't mean the body was so horrific it no longer looked like him. What was there, literally, was not the Hero.
"Ah—aah...!!"
Where he had stood six foot three, this frame might have reached five-three on a generous day. Unlike before, the flesh had gone soft and plump; he looked like a short-legged pig. This person was not the Hero. And yet, looking at him, something deep in the heart insisted on recognizing him as the Hero anyway. It was not only that we had watched the change happen in front of us. Something other than magic compelled us to know this person as the Hero.
Stripped of his power, stripped even of his face—stripped, in the most literal sense, of everything—he howled.
"G-give it back...!! I said give it back...!!"
The voice of the Hero who had lost everything was no longer the thick, commanding thing it had been, brimming with power. Thin and frail, the voice of a boy just crossing into puberty, it carried no weight at all, and it stirred pity. It was the sight I had hungered for every night I lay listening to Karin's cries of pleasure—and still I could not bear to watch it with my eyes open.
"...Why have you done this?"
Who had said that? Astonishingly, the words had come from my own mouth—the mouth of the one who had hated the Hero most. The eyes of his lovers, all save the Hero himself and the Saintess, turned on me at once: surprise that I, of all people, would say such a thing, mixed with a startled rebuke. Have you lost your mind?
"Oh my. Are you pitying him? After everything he did to you?"
"...It is true he was a villain. But if you had never given him that power to begin with, no one would have been hurt. Isn't that so?"
She claimed to love the good—so why had she brought about a result in which the good suffered? I don't know what courage it was, but when I pressed the evil god with that, she answered as if it were nothing.
"Human goodness shines brightest in pain and in darkness. And if there is no darkness, well—I can always make some, can't I?"
"A moment ago you said you couldn't do wrong by good people—"
"Right. Not with my own hands. Not with my hands."
Faced with a being that did not see humans as human, I could find nothing more to say. This was not a matter of cruelty, or of anything on that order. Just as a bird's way of thinking is fundamentally unlike a human's, the gulf between her and us was vaster than the one between human and beast.
What was she? What could she be, to be so cruel, so without mercy, toward other thinking beings? I didn't know. Gather every sage in the kingdom and debate to the end of days, and still there would be no answer. I only prayed that this being beyond words would please, quickly, vanish from before my eyes.
Had she heard that prayer? The evil god smiled a smile that was somehow sad, spread her arms, and spoke to me.
"Still—the courage to shield the one who tormented you, and talk back to me! Truly astonishing. So I'll give you a gift, as a reward!"
With that, the evil god was gone. As when she had first appeared—without warning, as if she had never been in this place at all.
I couldn't even think to see what her gift had been. I looked at the Hero collapsed on the floor.
The Hero, collapsed on the floor.
No. I looked at someone who had been the Hero. The Hero was dead, and now a nameless villain who had once been the Hero began to wail as if he would shake the whole castle.
"A-aaaaaaagh—!!!"
On this day the Demon King died. But the Hero died as well.
And from this day forward, the final war between the demonkin and humankind entered a new phase.