You Need a Beating
"You need a beating."
"Th-that's impossible. How can the likes of you wield holy power…"
There were currently seventeen people in the Holy Empire who could handle holy power.
The twelve Holy Knights. And the five Saintesses.
Counting myself, that made eighteen.
So of course he was losing his mind over it.
"How the hell can a good-for-nothing who doesn't even know the proper rites of ordination wield holy power?!"
He was so damn noisy I dug a finger into my ear.
"Beats me. Maybe the Goddess cares more about looks than what's on the inside."
I'd have liked to ask her myself, if I could.
Why give holy power to someone who'd walked an entirely different path?
But the Goddess only ever handed me the power. She never sent an answer, or even a breeze of intent.
As if she were leaving every choice to me.
"Haha! This is truly absurd. With an attitude that blasphemous, Ella still passed you holy power?"
The intensity of his reaction was starting to piss me off, so I glared at Mordin.
"That was the Goddess's choice. What exactly do you want me to do about it? At the very least, I'll send every last one of you bastards to heaven, so it'll do a little good for the continent's peace."
"Haha. The continent's peace?"
Mordin sneered.
"Isn't that the perspective of the weak? Of humans who die even when they do nothing? I…"
"Ah, spare me the tired speech."
I raised a hand and cut him off.
"Let me guess. True peace only comes when you're strong enough not to die from disease or accident. I've heard that line until I'm sick of it."
"……"
"I'll grant you this much—I agree with you to a point. But the moment you defiled my family and ruined the villagers' harvest, your words lost every scrap of persuasive power."
I pointed a finger at him.
"In short, the second you became a demon, everything you say is pure bullshit. You following?"
"Someone born strong like you wouldn't understand."
"Wouldn't understand what? I lived with death for a long, long time. I heard more dying men's stories than anyone else, and I crawled out of a mountain of corpses to survive."
Wherever I went, corpses and bloodstains had always been strewn in my wake, and despairing screams had clung to my ears.
After my family fell, I'd only wandered for about three years—but those three years had been longer than any other stretch of my life.
"Wait. Thinking about it, this is all your fault."
Heat surged through me all at once, and I fixed Mordin with a murderous glare.
"That's it. You need a beating. I'll let you taste the sword I brought back from hell."
"You lunatic…"
"You're the one who made me a lunatic, you mongrel bastard!"
I kicked off the ground and tore forward like the wind.
After that, a blade wrapped in a gale and his massive frame collided and tangled together.
Mordin's monstrous strength was a threat even to me, so I focused on dodging his attacks while slowly carving wounds into him.
I'd already dealt a heavy blow to his chest earlier, so the situation was firmly in my favor.
He treated my holy power as a real danger and no longer tried that reckless trade of bone for flesh the way he had before.
Boom! Boom!
Blood flew in the ferocious clash, and the cathedral began to collapse around us.
Naturally, every drop of blood spraying through the air was his.
I flitted around him like a mosquito buzzing at his temple, focusing more on evasion than injury, waiting for his stamina to drain away.
"Come and get me!"
Mordin ground his teeth as he watched me dart about.
I wasn't joyful right now—I was full of rage—but I could still freely unfold the sword of Joy.
Once you reached a stage, you could use the techniques even without being steeped in that emotion.
Whoosh! Swish!
Then didn't that mean that having reached the stage of Joy, I could control joy itself?
In other words—could I free myself from the emotion of joy?
Shall I try it?
I recalled the moment in this life when I had first reached the stage of Joy.
A garden where the grass lay quiet and still.
There I had watched Aren's swordsmanship, light as a sparrow's wingbeats, and traded small talk with him.
Then, following Aren's gaze, I had looked up…
And a sky dyed red not with blood but with sunset had greeted me on a cool breeze.
"……"
And now, as if on cue, a red sunset was pouring down through the broken ceiling.
Was it coincidence, or a vision born of me sinking into joy?
Either way, with the wind streaming along my blade as well, I felt good—and a light laugh slipped out of me.
Whoosh!
At the same time, my sword paths grew sharper than before.
You could use the sword of Joy without drowning in joy, but of course the happier you were, the stronger it became.
"Ahaha."
Wearing a faint smile, I swung my blade.
Mordin's red blood sprayed up like flower petals, and scraps of flesh occasionally fluttered away like butterflies.
Slash! Slash!
Before I knew it, I was driving Mordin back like a dog that had found its prey.
If I kept going, there was no telling what I'd do while lost in joy, so I reeled the happiness back in.
And I understood.
So that's it.
At last, I had become free of the emotion called joy.
I could rejoice whenever I wanted to smile, and I could suppress it whenever joy needed to be swallowed down.
Joy was now a sword entirely under my control.
"……"
Strangely enough, the moment I suppressed joy, rage began to lift its head.
Because I had not yet reached the stage of Wrath.
"Because of you!"
But I didn't bother holding it down. I drew up old memories and brought my sword down.
"Because of you I became a madman and wandered the world!"
Then Mordin, barely managing to catch my blows, spoke.
"No. You were always…"
"Shut up! Shut up! Die!"
I carved with my blade in a frenzy, and on the final horizontal slash Mordin went flying backward in a spray of blood.
Thud!
With a heavy crash, his body sprawled across the floor. I planted my foot on his shredded chest.
"Go on. Say something else."
"……"
Mordin couldn't answer, much less push himself up.
In my past life and in this one, the victory was mine.
The only difference from the previous life was that this time, my family was still intact and free of him.
Which made it a flawless, perfect victory.
"Nora…"
Then Mordin murmured emptily at the sky.
"I'm sorry, Nora…"
In truth, I already knew why Mordin had joined the Evil Book Society. I'd asked him before killing him in my past life.
He had a younger sister who had been frail from birth, and she hadn't lasted long because of her chronic illness.
After that, Mordin had come to despise the existence of weak humans and begun to pursue strength.
And my answer, after hearing that story, had been this.
Thrust!
I drove my sword into his heart.
"Don't apologize. You don't even have the right."
He coughed up a mouthful of blood.
"If a world of the dead really exists, the two of you will meet for a moment. But you'll be torn apart again soon enough."
I leaned my face in close to his eyes.
"Why? Because you abandoned being human."
"You…"
"Your sister will watch you drift away and cry, 'Brother? Brother!! Where are you going! That's hell!' "
His pupils began to fill with despair. I grinned as I watched it take hold.
"Now get lost."
I twisted the blade hard, and blood spread quickly across the floor. Losing the light from his eyes, he forced his mouth open with the last of his strength.
"Your family…"
"……?"
"It wasn't only my personal greed…"
Mordin lost the rest of his life and his head dropped. I'd wanted to hear more of whatever he was trying to say, but he was already dead.
Was he trying to say that targeting my family hadn't been only personal greed?
It seemed that way. But there was no way to know whether it was true.
Above all, he'd never said anything like that in my previous life.
Did he just spit out whatever came to mind to leave me with a question?
I couldn't be sure of that either.
But there was nothing I could uncover right now, so I decided to leave it there.
For the moment, simply savoring this joy was enough.
Still, my hunger burned on. Mordin had only been the starting point of the calamity.
There were still any number of people who would gnaw away at my nest and at this continent I intended to walk.
In that case…
I briefly clasped my hands together.
There was a fastest way for a Holy Knight to grow stronger: kill a demon and offer it to the Goddess.
Goddess Ella, receive this. I don't know if you were the one who sent me back, but if you were, consider this my modest offering.
Black light began to rise in thin threads from Mordin's body.
It was what they called demonic energy—the source of a demon's power.
The flowing energy gradually turned white, as if being purified, then suddenly surged toward me.
"……!"
I was startled by the considerable holy power spreading through my insides, then calmly regulated it.
After a brief focus and circulation, that holy power had already become mine to command.
"Hoo. That gave me a start."
The reason I'd been surprised was simple. Ordinarily, it didn't work this way.
As I understood it, the Goddess took the demonic energy a demon held and purified a portion of that amount to return as holy power.
But this time, it seems she purified most of the demonic energy Mordin held and handed it over as holy power…
Thanks to that, I now possessed holy power comparable to the mana capacity I'd held when I defeated Mordin in my previous life.
Even granting that my mana back then and my holy power just before this hadn't been wildly different, it was still a considerable amount.
I looked up at the sky.
"Is this your answer, in your own way? That I should use this power?"
Naturally, no reply came.
"But I will use this power however I please. Which is to say, I cannot grant your wishes."
I kept talking.
"If you don't answer, I'll take it as permission."
"……"
"Mm. This power is mine now."
Honestly, I'd been nervous. What if she actually answered?
It was a relief the Goddess was the bashful type.
Just as I was relaxing and lowering my head—
"……!"
I sensed something and quickly hopped a step to the side.
Something white came falling from the sky.
It wasn't sacred holy power. It was filthy bird droppings.
If I hadn't dodged, they would have landed square on the crown of my head.
"Surely not?"
I looked up, cold sweat prickling my skin.
"I'll believe it's not. A noble Goddess would never do something like that."
The sky was red with sunset, and somehow that landscape made it look as if the Goddess were blushing.
"Heh. Bad luck, then. Yes—I simply had bad luck."
With a smile, I brushed the stray thoughts aside and pulled my sword from Mordin's chest.
He had returned to human form.
Normally, when a demon's corpse was offered to the Goddess, it vanished into ash. Mordin had originally been human, so the shell remained.
Or perhaps the Goddess had forgiven even a human like this.
"Are you all right?!"
At that moment the knights kicked open the cathedral doors and poured in. It seemed everything elsewhere had already been cleaned up.
"As you can see."
"Y-you're truly incredible. He was clearly a formidable enemy, yet you're so unscathed…"
Roban, the one who had guided me into the cathedral, exclaimed in admiration.
He was right—Mordin had been strong. If I hadn't been able to handle holy power, his regenerative ability would have dragged the fight out for a long time.
"What's the situation elsewhere?"
"The others are gathered in one place. The only fatality is Cardinal Bianco. The wounded are receiving treatment, and the remaining cardinals are waiting for news from here."
"I see. Then I'll leave the cleanup here to you. Roban, guide me to where they are."
"Yes, Young Master Cael."
Roban observed the formalities and led me without further comment.
Following him, I found the others waiting in a broad clearing in the forest.
Renika spotted me first and came over.
"You're unharmed, Brother. I'm so glad."
"I told you before. I've killed plenty of demons and plenty of humans."
"So you have."
Renika covered her mouth and laughed softly.
"Your way of speaking has gone back to when we first met, though."
"Ah. My head's been a bit all over the place. I'll be careful."
"No, no. I prefer this side of you. You'll be at the same priestly rank as me soon enough anyway."
"I see."
I nodded, and Renika wore a bitter little smile.
"In any case, I think I've faced a little more of reality. Things like this will keep happening, won't they?"
"Staying forever in a sunlit flower field isn't so bad either."
"But sunlight alone will make the flowers wither. Only when darkness is there as well do flowers truly bloom."
The blue eyes watching me did not waver.
Someday, each of the Holy Empire's five Saintesses would be swept up in calamity and die.
Well—once the Holy Empire itself fell, the rest of them wouldn't fare any better…
Still, at this rate, Renika looked like she wouldn't break under anything short of a real typhoon.
"So you're saying you're the flower?"
"Pardon?"
Renika flustered and waved both hands.
"Th-that was only a metaphor…!"
"I was joking."
"Ah…. Yes."
After a single dry cough, Renika recovered her solemnity.
I gave a light snort of laughter and looked toward Barun nearby.
"Cardinal Barun. I've returned."
"Yes. As expected, you came through unharmed."
"There's something I'm curious about, however."
"You're wondering what becomes of the Inquisitor examination, correct?"
"I've been watching, and your sharp instincts are truly a pleasure, Cardinal Barun."
"Keh-heh-heh… My thanks."
Barun continued.
"I was just about to address it. The raid began before we could even conduct the Inquisitor examination, after all."
"Then will there be a retest later?"
"No. On reflection, I believe the examination has already been more than sufficiently conducted. Today all of you faced heretics yourselves."
Barun looked over the other examinees.
"I apologize for this, but the other cardinals and I possess no martial strength, so we observed your battles through magical tools. How you prepared for the raid, whether you possessed the force to repel heretics, and so on."
The examinees swallowed dryly.
"Therefore, from this moment I intend to confer with the other cardinals and select the Inquisitors. Including the deputies, of course."
Barun started toward a large carriage.
"Please rest comfortably, all of you. It shouldn't take long."
The remaining two cardinals followed Barun to the carriage.
As he brushed past me, I spoke.
"I'll be looking forward to good news."
Barun gave his characteristic laugh. He murmured, unnecessarily secretive.
"Yes. You have more than earned it."