I Retired, Didn't I? So Why Is There Never a Quiet Day?
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
An egg far larger than anything a chicken could ever produce was bouncing around…. An egg, bouncing around…. Even I had to admit how absurd that sounded, but it was the only expression that accurately captured the reality my two eyes were witnessing with perfect, undeniable clarity. Not that the egg had grown legs and was scampering about on two feet, mind you…. Whatever was going on inside, the whole egg would leap high into the air, land, and immediately jump again — thump-thump-thump — successfully hopping its way along.
I was the one saying it, and yet I found myself questioning whether I was even mentally sound for describing such a thing…. But it was a reality I could not deny. Fearing something serious might go wrong, I had tried to scoop it up and stop it….
In the end, all I managed to confirm with absolute certainty was that no guardian can ever truly defeat a child. That much was only natural. A guardian who defeats a child can hardly be called a guardian at all. The very word protection carries within it the meaning of yielding. Of course, simply papering over a child's mistakes or spoiling them rotten would be wrong as well…. Which ultimately meant that being a guardian was an extraordinarily grueling task.
"Are you sure you're all right?"
Thump! Thump! Tumble!
"…Yeah."
When the party in question insisted so firmly that everything was fine, there was nothing left for me to say. All I could do was swallow it down and endure, the way countless guardians before me had done….
"At least it's snowing, so maybe that's a blessing?"
Being on snow made me a little less worried…. Or wait — no, the slipperiness meant it could get hurt even worse, so shouldn't I be more worried?
Still, that eggshell was incredibly hard.
Harder than steel, even — truly befitting a dragon's egg. But just because the shell was hard didn't mean the child inside was guaranteed to be fine, did it? So I had no choice but to be careful, and then careful again, just in case. And yet, if it was capable of bouncing around like that…. Did that mean there was actually nothing to worry about? The fact that the shell was as hard as steel naturally meant the egg carried considerable weight, and the fact that whatever was inside could still make it hop around despite that weight could only mean it was extraordinarily, overwhelmingly sturdy — far beyond any ordinary human child.
But what on earth was it doing inside the egg to make bouncing around like that possible? If I could use magic, I would have cast a clairvoyance spell just to check — but unfortunately, magic was beyond me.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
"What is it? Did you find something?"
…Huh?
……
…Hmm.
"Am I just seeing things now?"
Perhaps I had never woken from my dream at all. Perhaps the sight of Rhea the dragon egg bouncing around was nothing more than something I'd seen in a dream — not reality. Yeah…. In many ways, that felt far more realistic.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
But Rhea the dragon egg answered that thought by bouncing away with all its might, as if to say, Snap out of it! This is reality!
"…Right. So this is reality."
But if this was reality, it still didn't make sense.
If this was reality….
Then why was there a girl in a nun's habit buried in the snow right in front of my hermitage?
"Mmm. Nom-nom. Zzz."
And she was sleeping soundly, at that….
The soft smacking and snoring sounds at least spared me the need to wonder whether she might be a corpse. Having a sleeping girl in front of me rather than a dead one was… clearly better for a child's emotional education as well…. But before any of that — why was a girl in a white nun's habit lying on a white snowfield, sleeping soundly even as the snow covered her, in a place where no one should ever set foot?
Thump! Thump! Thump!
First things first — I needed to deal with my kid, who was currently thump-thump-thumping on top of the sleeping nun girl as if she'd discovered a brand-new playground. Jumping on people was something that needed to be stopped for the sake of a child's emotional education — and once she grew into a massive dragon, it would be truly unacceptable.
That was when it happened.
"Mmm."
"You awake?"
"…Uh…."
"Why are you here? More importantly, how did you get in?"
I knew full well — without needing Las to explain it in detail — that while the mountain was arranged so that no harm would come to me, it was also fortified with every possible defense to keep intruders out. So I couldn't understand how this girl had ended up sleeping right in front of my hermitage.
"Before that…."
"Before that?"
"…Heavy…."
"……"
Rhea the dragon egg had a shell as hard as steel. Of course she was heavy. So the nun girl had made a perfectly valid point.
"Get down."
Thump…. Thud….
Rhea the dragon egg climbed down with an air of Tch! Boring! about her. Feeling once again how truly difficult education was, I somehow managed to swallow the sigh that tried to escape. A guardian must never sigh carelessly. After all, there was no such thing as a ward who wasn't sensitive and delicate.
"First of all, my child made a mistake."
"Your child…?"
"She's a child I'm looking after, so yes — my child."
"Hmm…."
Still lying down, the nun girl moved only her eyes to look at Rhea the dragon egg with a gaze full of some deep meaning. Then she let the strength drain from her eyes….
"Sleepy…."
"Don't sleep here. No matter how much holy power you have, this is the kind of cold where it's not strange to freeze to death with your face twisted."
"I'm special…. So I'm sleeping."
"For heaven's sake…."
To put it excessively, in the temples, holy power is status itself. To put it even more excessively, the temples are a holy-power-supremacist collective. So if someone possessed such overwhelming holy power that they could pour it out like a waterfall and still fall asleep without issue in this kind of cold….
There was nothing else that came to mind.
And I was certain that was correct.
But if that was the case — then why was a girl of such immense standing that she could be called a "Saintess" sleeping like this in front of my hermitage?
"This is troublesome…."
Thump! Thump! Thump!
As if agreeing with me, Rhea the dragon egg bounced her body.
Hmm….
Why….
I was supposed to be living in seclusion. So why was there never a quiet day?
"What kind of person is the Saintess?"
Leo the Hero candidate asked, his eyes sparkling with the same passion they always held.
The Saintess!
Just speaking those two syllables was enough to make reverence well up. Leo's reaction wasn't strange. Across countless legends and histories, Saintesses had left behind sacred achievements generation after generation. So of course Leo assumed the Saintess of the present age would also be an immensely holy and extraordinary person.
"I'm curious too!"
Misha — disciple of the Sword Ghost, and currently enduring the same training hell under Sera alongside Leo — felt the same way. Having finally escaped training hell for the first time in a while, Misha was simply delighted, and the prospect of meeting someone as special as a Saintess had her thoroughly happy. Naturally, her expectations for the Saintess were growing by leaps and bounds as well.
Sera, Leo, Misha.
All three were Hero candidates, and they had set out to participate in the Hero Candidate Assembly.
First Hero Candidate Assembly
Exactly as the name suggested — a gathering of Hero candidates.
With the center of power having gone entirely to the First Prince, this was proceeding independently of the Emperor.
That was only natural.
The First Hero Candidate Assembly had been convened by a Hero Selector.
It wasn't Mercenary King Balik.
He had already selected Sera, after all.
A man who only planned to make the announcement when the time was right would never bother with something as troublesome as a Hero Candidate Assembly.
It was another Hero Selector who had convened it.
And that person was none other than the Saintess.
But that was strange. The position of "Hero Selector" had been a hastily concocted stopgap by the Empire to fill a vacancy — created because the temples, as stakeholders in this Hero candidate plan, had determined that they themselves could not perform the selection. So for a "Saintess" to be sitting right there in a process that had started with the premise that the temples were out of the picture was an oddity no matter how you looked at it.
…That would have been true of an ordinary Saintess.
But the Saintess who was the protagonist of this story was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill Saintess.
"It sounds impressive when you say 'Saintess,' but the one we're going to meet is the 'Saintess of Wandering.' Don't get your hopes up."
"The Saintess of Wandering?"
"I've never heard of her either."
"…Well, of course you haven't."
The Saintess of Wandering.
Exactly as the name suggested — the Saintess chosen by Ulford, the God of Wandering.
The problem lay in the origin that defined them: wandering. They simply wandered and wandered…. Bound by nothing. Naturally, they had no ties to the other temples either. They simply wandered. And so the Saintess of Wandering, too, could never stray far from that origin of wandering. The moment you looked at her expecting the image of a Saintess from legend or history, the only word that could come out was "disappointment." And precisely because even a Saintess of Wandering who bore the name of Saintess was distant from the temples, she had been given the position of "Hero Selector."
They probably forced it on her when she didn't want to take it….
…But that made things convenient from Sera's perspective.
She always ends up choosing me anyway.
Whether it was because she was a Saintess and could see something special, she always selected Sera as the Hero. Sera didn't even have to do anything — she selected Sera. That had been true even in the first timeline, before any experience of regression. The problem was that her selection had forced Sera to suffer hardship after hardship after hardship. A Holy Grail given to one without power is nothing more than a reason for that powerless one to be destroyed.
And so, to the powerless Sera of those days, the Saintess of Wandering was….
A truly, genuinely difficult being to describe.
It doesn't matter now.
She just needed to receive the selection from her.
As always, she would select Sera and then vanish.
True to her name, the Saintess of Wandering had vanished from the world and wandered even as the world was ending.
Just select me already and disappear.
A Saintess possessed vast holy power. So she would undoubtedly be a powerful asset in the battle against the Demon King's army. But Sera knew. No matter what happened, she would not fight. She would simply wander and disappear, as she always did. Even in this loop, where so many things had changed, that was unlikely to be any different.
So, hoping she would at least properly fulfill her role before vanishing, Sera headed for the temple where the Saintess of Wandering was.
What awaited Sera there was….
"The Saintess of Wandering is missing?"
"Y-yes. She suddenly disappeared…."
"……"
The news that the Saintess of Wandering — who was supposed to stay put and select her as the Hero — had gone missing.