The Voices of the Dead
As the moments passed, my father's body grew colder beneath my hands.
The terror of losing him, little by little, sent my mind drifting somewhere far away, until not even a proper thread of light would flow out of me. Again and again, I struck my own cheeks. Snap out of it. You have to do something. The injustice done to them—you have to set it right, somehow. Screaming it deep inside my heart, I lashed out at myself, tears falling without end.
That was how it had been. Just like the first moment I possessed this body, there had been no warning at all.
Everyday life shatters in a single instant. No one could have expected to come face to face with the Demon King's adjutant in a backwater like this.
And it hadn't even been the Saintess they were after. If it had been, they would have struck at me—alone as I was, having slipped out beyond the village.
An unbearable regret came crashing over me. It was no exaggeration to think that had I been standing at my post, I could have held them off without any trouble.
"Hahh... S-Saintess Serina! Thank goodness you're safe!"
If I weren't a presence useful enough to warrant it, that hero would never have risked his life to come save me in a place trampled into a wasteland like this.
The hero stood before me as I cleared away the wreckage of the cruelly shattered roof and gathered up the bodies of the villagers. Rean Galef extended toward me a hand that gleamed like the Holy Sword gripped in his own.
"I've come at the Church's behest to escort you. Come, quickly—this way."
I couldn't begin to fathom the meaning of the smile that bloomed the instant I took the hero's hand. And right after that, my vision was swallowed whole by darkness—
Smack.
—because once again, I heard the sound of my cheek being struck.
My head snapped to the side this time as well. As my cheek went numb from the blows, a certainty took root in me. This power was not mine. It never could be.
Was someone playing some kind of trick on me? And if so, where had the hero gone?
I wanted to know. What on earth had happened, that this person was striking me with such terrible force.
At intervals of a few seconds, they struck doggedly at one cheek alone.
"Hngh!"
In the end, a moan escaped me.
I still couldn't see anything ahead of me. Perhaps I had gone completely blind. If not, something should have shown itself even as a blur—but I was trapped in a pitch-black darkness where truly nothing could be seen.
"..._..._...."
It sounded like someone was speaking right in front of me. It wasn't a mechanical noise—it was unmistakably a human voice, and yet I couldn't make out a single word of it.
When I focused my mind, other sounds came with it.
Srrrip. The sound of something tearing. Cloth? Or clothing? It was probably clothing.
Just like that very first day, when I had stood naked before the mirror in my room, the bleak chill of the night air settled over my skin. Only, there was none of that heart-pounding thrill.
In its place, something was groping over my body—a revulsion so dreadful it stood in perfect contrast to that day, and it was swelling with every second.
Right then, I realized that everything I had just seen had been a dream.
The bed began to creak, over and over.
I was still wandering lost inside a dream, but I felt a measure of relief. It's nothing but a dream.
Perhaps that thought had hardened into conviction, for the merciless hands that had been striking me had at some point vanished altogether.
I let myself relax.
And that was why the sounds suddenly layered on top of it made my blood run cold. Because it was as if the very act I dreaded was continuing on.
I could only pray that this, too, was a dream. The Goddess who had always watched over me would never tolerate such a thing.
She never could. Not under any circumstances... because she must not.
Creak. Creak. Even so, the sounds did not cease.
Dreams were truly wondrous things.
Normally you only realize it afterward, once you've woken—ah, so that was a dream—but this time, as if to make me remember what I had forgotten, the dream granted me awareness from the very moment I arrived at the truth.
Once I understood that, every sound and sensation vanished in an instant.
Left suddenly alone in a void, I watched a soundless play for a long, long while.
A play assembled from the shattered pieces of my own memory.
Before long, the memories of the past three days fitted themselves together in sequence, and sound was added to the reconstructed scenes.
The place where I lay trying to sleep now was a shabby inn room in the village where I had lived—one of the few structures left whole after the demons swept through and reduced everything else to ruin.
For the past three days, the hero Rean and I had been staying here, gathering the souls of the dead.
"As you're well aware, Saintess, places where people have been sacrificed to the demons are notorious for binding the victims' souls until a proper purification can be performed. No matter how much of your full holy power is added to the rite, performing the purification with only the two of us is beyond us. But with the Holy Sword in my possession, we can look after the souls still wandering the earth. As an urgent stopgap, how about we bring the Holy Sword into contact with their souls?"
That was Rean's proposal. Left as they were, the dead would have to burn in the demons' flames for a long time to come—so we would use the Holy Sword's light to snuff out the hellfire, if only for a time, and plan for what came after.
The "after" he spoke of was the point at which the Demon King's adjutant was slain.
Though it was a novel I'd only managed to read half of its first chapter, I knew at least why he had set the adjutant's death as his goal. It had been written plainly enough: each time the hero slew a demon adjutant and claimed its heart, he could perform a mass resurrection spanning an entire region.
From the standpoint of a man who wanted me standing beside him as the Saintess, finding a way to set my heart at ease must have seemed far easier than proposing we simply walk away and leave it all behind.
As Rean himself had said, the Holy Sword touched the souls of those sacrificed to the demons and stored a portion of them away. So once the collection was finished, if I lent him everything I had as he set out to hunt demons, it would be no impossible thing.
Above all, the aura of the demons that had attacked this village had split off toward several different places—which meant this raid had been nothing more than a prelude.
The Church, too, had belatedly realized how dire the situation was; that was surely why they had asked the hero to take charge of the Saintess who had been drifting through the frontier.
I accepted Rean's proposal.
It was surely a thought no Saintess should ever entertain. But I believed that anything was acceptable, so long as the villagers could be brought back to life.
The people I had grown attached to over the past year. The Father of the church. Every one of them precious to me.
I wanted it so desperately.
On the third night, having succeeded in touching every soul in the village, we finished our preparations to leave at daybreak and retired to our separate rooms to rest.
Just as I was doing now.
The problem was that I remembered nothing at all after this point.
"Saintess. There is something I would like to show you—might I trouble you for just a moment?"
There was no reason to refuse, so I let him into my room.
"Agh!"
The situation turned in an instant.
The moment Rean set foot inside, he shoved me against the wall without a word of warning. It was so far beyond anything I had imagined that I went down easily—but before I could even gather my scattered wits, I had already drawn up more than enough holy power.
Even half-collapsed as I was, my hands were shining, my counterattack ready.
Rean held the advantage in every respect. And yet, barred from wielding the Holy Sword, he could not overwhelm me. So long as neither of us truly meant to kill the other, no one would break.
"Hero. What is the meaning of this?"
I had no intention of harming him, either. Convinced that this had to be some misunderstanding piled atop another, I asked him.
But instead of answering, he brought the Holy Sword in his grip crashing down into the floor of the room.
Before I could react, a brilliant light spread outward, and scenes more familiar to me than anything in the world unfolded before my eyes.
The auntie who always pressed bread into my hands whenever I went to market. The grandfather who laughed so cheerfully whenever we sat down to a game of Go. The children who gifted me little ornaments they had carved from wood with their own hands. And last of all, my father's kindly face.
I understood. The Holy Sword had raked up even their memories.
But the question never had the chance to take root. Before it could, the light died, and the scenes before my eyes shattered into fragments and rained down onto the floor.
"Aaagh!"
The next instant, my body gave out all at once. A headache like an awl driven through my skull—I couldn't endure it without clutching my head.
And that was only the beginning.
The sound that had been no more than a faint buzzing soon took on the shape of real words and swelled inside my head. Someone's scream—save me—began to echo.
At first it was only an old man's voice, but there was such terrible anguish bound up in that cry that I couldn't bear to shut my eyes. Even this headache that felt like my skull would split seemed like nothing beside that sorrowful scream.
The next moment, another voice joined in. Then another. And another. Ten.
When the voices had multiplied beyond counting and I finally recognized, mixed among them, the voices of people I knew, I tasted what it was to feel my mind slip away—if only a little.
It could only be a little—because deep down, I already knew whose voice would be the very last to join that chorus. More than the death of anyone else, the loss of the man who had been my father, taken before my very eyes, was a wound that could not help but run the deepest.