Chapter 34
At last, the war broke out.
It was a fight between a cult and a state, so with a careful choice of words one might have called it persecution. But the scale of it was a war. Sheer size was part of that, yes, but in the early modern era wars so vast hardly ever happened in the first place.
The elite of the Kingdom of Anselus, and the warriors of the Church of Future Hope. Those two collided first.
Every time they killed and were killed, warmth came rushing in. Shhk, shhk.
Hehe! It had been so long since the warmth lasted, and I felt wonderful!
But the warmth burned like firewood and then went out. Not because the fighting was over. The method had changed all at once. It was no longer a war in which people guttered out like candles—not an indiscriminate clash where a foolish number of lives vanished every time the sides met, but a more efficient way of cutting one's own losses and deepening the enemy's. The Church of Future Hope was using strategy and tactics.
I knew the cause. Witga. He was exceptionally skilled at handling people. He must have fought Yasle before, and yet here he was, taking command?
Was he fighting the Kingdom of Anselus, the one that had come charging in right before his eyes? Then was Anselus going to fail? Was Tisha going to fail?
I had thought so. But Andrew approached Witga. It was not a private meeting. Isla stood on Witga's side, and on Andrew's there were people who had received my blessing.
He laid out the present situation and said Hieronymus had abandoned Witga—that it had already been over from the moment the blessed ones heading north disappeared. Then he asked Witga what his purpose was.
Witga looked around. One by one he met the eyes of everyone who had come with Andrew. Thanks to that, I locked eyes with him several times myself. Honestly.
Yes. Andrew had brought a number of blessed subordinates. Isla took up a weapon, and the moment Andrew's people noticed, their hands went to their own.
A hair-trigger moment.
With a complicated expression, Witga spoke of the fall of the Kingdom of Cogni. When Andrew asked why, he answered that he had been a general of the Kingdom of Ogla. I dug through the memories of those who knew the name and found it: a country destroyed by Cogni.
I see. So that was why he was versed in strategy and tactics, and knew how to fight. Even Isla, standing right there, hadn't known. Her eyes went wide as she stared at him.
Andrew promised that if Witga followed him, he would help him. But Witga brought up Hieronymus and asked whether Andrew was any different. At that, Andrew mentioned me. The number of people who could receive a blessing was not three, but four. He said he had gotten that answer by asking the Outer God directly, twisting the words until it sounded as though Hieronymus had been embezzling all along.
I could tell. I'm the sort who lies by speaking only the facts.
After that, Andrew asked whether it didn't mean that nothing Hieronymus said could be trusted. Witga nodded slowly, and Andrew smiled. He said he wasn't asking to be trusted, and offered a deal instead. Let the elite of Anselus run, unbroken, all the way to a certain village. Do only that, and he would raise an army of the blessed and give Witga command of it.
Witga asked whether the Outer God would truly allow such a thing. Andrew repeated the answer he had heard from me, word for word. Provide only Sacrifices, and the Outer God would bestow a blessing on anyone.
At those words, Witga's body went rigid. A moment later he asked Andrew in return whether he meant to take the Outer God away. Andrew answered that she was suitable enough to make into a new god, wasn't she?
After a long silence, Witga withheld his answer. Andrew told him to use these subordinates however he liked, and handed the blessed over to him. The ones who served as my eyes and ears heard Witga mutter that they were surveillance, and pretended not to notice. Probably because it was true.
And the next day, blessed ones with no special ability marched onto the battlefield and suffered a tragic defeat. The elite soldiers of Anselus covered on foot, in four days, a distance that normally took about a week by animal-drawn mount.
The underground temple went on emergency alert. Food and water were carried in from the surrounding villages, and a great many people armed themselves to fight. I, too, was moved from the room I had been in to a chamber deep inside the temple—the room where I had lived at the very beginning.
In all that time I never once saw Hyungkesuni. Whether they were working somewhere else or had simply fled, I couldn't tell. I had thought I would need them as well, if it came to it, and that had been a mistake. I should have stayed stuck to them, even if it meant playing cute. When you fail, you analyze the cause and improve.
So I went to find Yasle.
"What is it?"
"I want to stay with you."
I said only what I had come to say. Yasle let out a deep sigh and tried to soothe and coax me, but I had no intention of leaving. He was the most promising candidate who possessed knowledge.
Yes—why had I stayed still all this time? As the Church of Future Hope headed toward ruin, had I simply watched my warmth harvester, the very organization that gave me warmth, collapse?
I had endured. I had endured for a very long time. Because there was something I wanted, I watched the Church of Future Hope crumble at its own pace, holding back the urge to hurry the collapse along. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
Barely, Yasle had been cornered.
Yes. One little girl would cling on there. A servant who would grant the power called a blessing to anyone, at any time, so long as they offered Sacrifices. Unsettling, but until now nothing more than a beast that had taken no action at all. It bothered me that Hyungkesuni was nowhere to be seen, but I could not let this person go. He held knowledge more important than the warmth right in front of me.
When I clung to him for the first time, throwing a tantrum, Yasle finally gave up. He gave up—at the very moment Andrew was striking his bargain with the Kingdom of Anselus. On the condition that they look the other way for him, Andrew opened a secret passage and showed Anselus's elite the road to Hieronymus.
Little by little, the fall of the underground temple was at hand. I could not miss the chance. Never.
I followed Hieronymus with Joanna. The people of the order didn't look twice at me trailing after him. They assumed that, with things so dangerous, we were simply staying together. Fortunately, I could remain attached without the slightest sense of wrongness.
That was when Witga came looking for Hieronymus. He was silent for a long while, and then he suddenly shouted that the Kingdom of Rasbe and the Kingdom of Cogni were attacking from the north along two fronts, raging that it had come to this because Hieronymus would not give him the blessed. After pouring out abuse for a long time, he asked where Hieronymus meant to send the troops.
But his face was plastered with the lie.
To the question, Hieronymus asked what he meant by where. Witga answered: the north, where the two kingdoms were invading, or the southeast, toward the capital of Anselus? Instead of answering at once, Hieronymus asked how the war stood. Witga explained the situation piece by piece and said that if they holed up in the underground temple, they could hold well enough.
A lie. Perhaps that was why guilt lingered on his face. I pretended not to see it.
Hearing him out, Hieronymus ordered him southeast. Resignation and hatred rose faintly across Witga's face and then faded. He nodded, turned, and took hold of the door. Without looking back, he left the words that he was sick to death of lies, and went out.
He went very far. And in a place where there was no one, he told one of Andrew's subordinates that he would enter under Andrew's command.
Yasle had made a grave mistake. Being asked, a little earlier, which way to send the people had probably been the last chance. But for Yasle, dealing with the Kingdom of Anselus was the more urgent matter. Yes. He chose wrong.
That night Witga left, taking a great number of believers with him. In words, he was marching to strike Anselus in the southeast. I knew that wasn't it.
Afterward I followed Yasle as he inspected the underground temple. At first he was thoroughly uncomfortable with it, but by the time two days had passed he no longer paid me any mind.
And on the second day after Witga's departure—
Boom!
With the blast, sand sifted down from the ceiling. At last, that day had come.
There was a reason the soldiers of Anselus had not charged in, though they had reached the village at the temple's entrance two days before and had received an inside guide from Andrew. They had been waiting for Rasbe and Cogni. When the armies of those two kingdoms struck the underground temple, Anselus used the opening to burrow inside. A diversion.
With Tisha at their head, the soldiers of Anselus broke through. There were almost no soldiers within, because they had gone out to hold off the armies attacking from outside. What stood in the way were ordinary believers. All of them were killed. The man who tried to stop them, the woman who tried to seize them by the ankles, and even the children who hardly understood what was happening but ran out to block the frightening people—every one of them.
For the record, one of those children was blessed, so I knew, roughly, what was unfolding. Hieronymus seemed to know as well. The ominous energy I had seen before thrashed wildly, collapsing underground passages and snapping the limbs of the soldiers as they charged. But Tisha could not be stopped.
And at last they reached the deepest place. The very place where Hieronymus was.
A few blood-soaked young men and women, Tisha among them, stood before him. I thought the fight would begin then, but Hieronymus brought the chamber down around them and slipped into the secret passage hidden in that room. I hung dangling in Joanna's arms and followed.
We walked the secret passage for a long time. It truly was long—a dark corridor where nothing sounded but rough breathing. At the end of it we barely made it outside.
But waiting ahead, together with the army of Anselus, were Andrew and the blessed.
Unexpectedly, Hieronymus was not surprised. He looked at them with perfect calm, then drew a strange implement from his robes, and the ominous energy I had watched all this time burst from it and spread. He was strong. He killed many soldiers of Anselus, and blessed ones as well.
For a moment the reversal seemed right before my eyes. And just before that reversal, Tisha and her companions came out of the passage we ourselves had used. They were terribly strong, and in the end Hieronymus was defeated. His whole body was a mass of wounds, a fatal injury that looked ready to carry him off at any moment.
Yes. At last. The chance had come.
I had waited a very long time. It wasn't that I had watched while doing nothing. It was that I could do nothing. Even if I made someone into a superhuman, all I myself possessed was regeneration. Even if I could absorb Sacrifices, I had no way of knowing how far that would carry me. Above all, Yasle was the one who had summoned me to this place. He might know a way to summon me back out of it.
So I endured, and endured, and endured, and kept on enduring.
I told Joanna, who was holding me, to let go, and I approached him where he stood, barely, soaked in blood. Realizing what I meant to do, Tisha screamed and came running, and Andrew shouted at her that she must not kill me.
Amid all of that, I asked him. I asked the question I asked every day—the question he already knew.
With a dark expression he bowed his head, touched his own wound, and held the hand out before him. It was thick with blood.
Yasle nodded toward the Outer God.
Deep purple smoke slipped out of my body and wrapped around Yasle, and at last it touched the light. In an instant the light was dyed black. At the same time Yasle's skin cracked, and from within came a tall, slender young man. His hair, of course, was dyed purple, his skin blue, his irises yellow—the whites of his eyes black, but even so.
He had become a blessed superhuman.
In the meantime, I found the knowledge I had wanted. That he had been the leader of the Church-State of Yeongrang, that he possessed all manner of techniques—none of that mattered now. The technique for calling me into this world!
The fruit of patience is terribly sweet!
Heh.
Without meaning to, I smiled so wide it split my mouth. I failed to keep my expression in check. Please forgive me. I had finally achieved my goal.