The Longest Week
"Hero. Comply with my conditions, and I shall grant you an audience with the Saintess within."
"…Fine. I'll hand it over, so just open the way."
"Right this way."
Before long, the Hero and the priest vanished from the scene the crystal orb had been showing. The elf who had been watching the orb waited until he had confirmed the two of them stepping into the cathedral's interior; then, with a light flick of his fingers, he burst the sphere.
"How on earth did you know the Hero would manage to get inside that building?"
"I saw it. From this exact spot, hundreds of times over."
"…Lartel. I would appreciate it if you kept in mind that I am not human. As I told you last time, neither the one who was my master nor my friend was ever the type to toss out a casual joke. Talk that way, and I cannot follow you."
Lartel, who had been leaning against the wall, turned to the elf and shrugged.
"It wasn't a joke."
"Then so be it. I'm not in the mood for jests either."
Lartel studied him in silence. A dagger, cold enough to bite, was leveled precisely at his throat.
"Speak plainly. What in the world is this 'sight' you keep claiming to have seen supposed to mean?"
"You'll put that away first, won't you?"
"I've heard things about you too, you see. That this sort of lever works best on a man like you."
"Ha? Don't tell me Kyle told you to threaten me like this the moment you came to meet me?"
"And if he had? Would you have talked freely then?"
"As if."
Lartel thrust out his neck without warning. Faster than the elf could react, the blade grazed his skin and coaxed up a bead of blood. Startled, the elf snatched his hand back — but the dagger had already been swallowed whole by darkness.
The elf fixed his gaze on the dark aura spilling from the wound at Lartel's neck.
"…Well, well. So you were that kind all along?"
Lartel's head tilted slightly to the right.
"Remember this well, Derian. If the two of you mean to see your goals through, it would be wise not to go making enemies in this neighborhood."
"So it would seem."
The darkness soon faded away entirely, baring the elf's empty hand — but of the dagger, not even its shape remained.
"So it devours even the magic of an elf…"
Derian Iterium quietly retreated a single step, then raised both hands, palms spread, into the air.
"Now then — am I to take this as a sign that I'm ready to hear you out?"
Lartel leaned back against the wall.
"You'd have heard the same answer if you'd asked Kyle. It took me no fewer than ninety-eight attempts to bring that stubborn knight to heel with words alone. Which is to say — only after dying and waking again that many times, and only after wringing out every last drop of the information those lives had bought me, was I finally able to win Kyle Erium over."
"…You repeat the same life?"
"Yes."
Derian fell silent for a moment.
"So you knew all of it — the priests of the Deimus Church going mad beside their god and rising in revolt, the kingdom over the wall becoming the Astel Empire amid the chaos? And so you made yourself an exile, slaughtered the men who had turned the monastery into a den of rape, and fled all the way here?"
Lartel nodded quietly.
"The only way I could cross that wall and arrive here without delay was to deal with the ones who had smuggled out the Letan Order's secret documents and return what they stole to its rightful owner. It was a choice I couldn't afford not to make."
Derian let out a hollow laugh.
"I did wonder what felt off. By any measure, Kyle is not the type to weave so delicate a scheme — so the mind behind pulling me out of the slave trader's hands and trying to send me beyond the wall at Kyle's side was yours, was it?"
"I suppose you could put it that way."
"Then why didn't you stop it? The way you talk, you should have been able to foresee what would befall Aria."
"Unfortunately, the hour of my revival is fixed. By the time I opened my eyes, Kyle's sister had already left this world. And in the meantime, all I could do was gather comrades capable of dragging the cursed god down."
"I see. Then what becomes of the priests here? Is the god they worship untainted by evil?"
"That's what I'm staying here to find out. The only hope I've ever glimpsed is this: you and Kyle enter the Empire, unearth the Saintess they've been hiding, and close out the matter of that church — while I protect the Saintess of this place."
The corner of Derian's mouth curled upward.
"And you sent Saintess Serina inside. Which would mean I'll be meeting her before long, I take it."
"…No."
Every trace of amusement gone from his face, Derian tilted his head slightly.
"I'm afraid that meeting will never come. By the time anyone could slip inside the cathedral, she was no longer among the living."
A moment later, Derian's eyes narrowed to slits.
"Don't tell me…"
Lartel offered up a smile stitched together on the spot.
That much was enough to seal the elf's lips.
"So see that my letter reaches Kyle. I've written my final words in it as well."
"…Could you truly not have sought me out any sooner? Given me a week or so to prepare, and I might have opened the way into that cathedral for you under my own power."
"Unfortunately, meeting you now was the fastest road there was. Perhaps luck finally favored me — I reached Serina days ahead of schedule, and thanks to that, I had one very good night."
Derian's gaze drifted toward the cathedral, then swung back to Lartel.
"You can't stop her from going to the Order?"
"No. Nothing I do changes it. Either Serina dies, or I do — one of the two. And I can't even tell what happens inside that place."
Lartel held his tongue for a moment, lifting his eyes upward.
"So leave the moment you're ready. Two weeks from now, Kyle takes his own life at his sister's grave. Even after the Deimus Church is swept away, stay at his side — see to it that your friend keeps living."
"…I'll carve your counsel into my heart."
Soon after, Derian bade him farewell and departed.
Left alone, Lartel set his feet moving in silence. Ever since the fourteenth time he had looked upon Serina's cold, stiffening corpse, he had lost the will to count how many more times he had met her — and he could not bring himself to leave the inn where her traces still lingered.
A few minutes later he returned to his room, shed his armor, and lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. His head turned, naturally now, toward the head of the bed. He could still see her there, sitting and eating her bread.
"Next time, maybe I should buy bread and clothes in advance."
But it would be a pointless gesture. He had watched Serina walk to Aileum alone too many times to count, and every time, she was found in the mountains — brutally violated, broken beyond all recognition — until, unable to bear the shock of it, she chose to end her own life rather than accept Lartel's company.
He summoned up every moment he had spent tending her body. Everywhere, there had been the traces of men. The reason she had been forced to flee in such haste — unable even to put on proper underclothes — had to lie with the Hero. But Lartel had never managed to find a single piece of proof.
Even so, there had been a time he moved to act — to murder the Hero. He could save Serina in advance, and the world would simply choose a new Hero. That was all it would take.
The result was that he lost Serina more horrifically than ever before. He could still remember it with painful clarity: her limbs torn away, and still she could not die, hemmed in by demons who defiled her over and over.
The present situation was the only path he had found after all those trials and errors. That was why a single night with her — whole, unbroken — had struck him with such a bitter sting.
In the hundreds of lives he had repeated, it was the first time. He had washed her wounded body with his own hands, and watched her sleep upon the bed. He had agonized at length over what food she might enjoy when she woke. He had watched her face twist as though gripped by nightmares, and suffered for it.
He had turned it over dozens of times, hundreds. He wanted to take her away just as she was and set out for the Empire with Derian. At the end of that road she would take her own life all the same — but he had wanted, just the same, to see her living for a few days more.
Having shaken off every one of those temptations, he had now watched Lean step into that cathedral once again. All that remained was to wait for the appointed result — because in less than a week, Serina would die.
Lartel pressed a hand to his brow and bowed his head. He could feel the dampness soaking into his gloves. Had he ever resented his own helplessness as much as he did now? He doubted it. If he had been Kyle Erium instead of himself, he could have brought that cathedral down this very moment. No — in truth, that knight had actually managed to do exactly that.
Yet knowing this, the reason he had pursued a meeting with Derian rather than Kyle was what followed the Order's collapse: the moment it fell, the demons had launched a full-scale assault. That was when he understood — that the Letan Order had, in fact, been properly holding the demons in check. And that although both he and Kyle had lived as servants of demon-hunting gods all the same, the gulf between them had yawned open beyond all measure.
Lartel remembered the old days — how, even at the cost of this cursed body, his efforts had ended at the death of a single man: Cardinal Frai.
…
A sword already rested in his grip. But the only thing circling his mind was the shape of a future he could not see. There was no telling. Just as there had been no telling, the first time he brought Serina into this room. If, for once, she made it through that week unscathed, the situation could change entirely — and if so, hurling himself into open war with the Order now would be the wrong move.
In the end, he chose to let the sword go. As he had done every time before, he chose to hope that he would meet her again.
"…Serina. What in the world is happening in there?"
Only one thing gnawed at him: that he could not know, with any certainty, what went on inside that place. And the trouble was that, reading the marks left on her body, he had already arrived at a conclusion — one that told him more than he ever wished to know. In his head, he had already fixed on the likeliest answer. But he never wanted to imagine her enduring such a thing, because if it were true, then through all those countless deaths — dying over and over because she could not bear the agony — he had failed to save her, and simply left her to it.
From here on, calmly executing the plans he had laid would be impossible. By any means necessary, he would want Serina at his side. And in the end, that would mean caging her life in order to keep it.
So he hoped to find an answer even in his dreams. That, too, would be for Serina's sake — and so he wanted to act on it with conviction. Unfortunately, the woman who had never once come to see him, in any of those lifetimes, would not appear in his dreams this time either.
Lartel sank back onto the bed as though his strength had finally given out. He did not close his eyes. This week, alone among all the others, felt destined to drag. So he resolved to spend it remembering his one night with Serina. For her, it had surely been no more than a day spent with a stranger she had only just met. For him, it had been the first moment of its kind to arrive in hundreds of years. He only wanted to carry the memory of this day with him for the rest of his life.