Blood on the Saint's Hands
Stop it. I can't go any further. Please — just let me rest. That was how I'd wailed and begged, over and over.
And every time, all he'd done was burn hotter and slam his cock into me all the harder. Every bit of it had spread, drop by drop, into resentment for this body.
......Enough of that. That was the same self-torment I'd rehearsed with every thrust of his cock. It was past time to stop.
"Haa..."
Time to think of something pleasant. Something fun. In moments like these, a born imagination had its uses — and so there I was, trying to steer my thoughts elsewhere, racking my brain for any way to make my own mind laugh.
Hmm. If I made myself the subject, wouldn't that fill a whole storybook? Pathetic, that this was what I was pondering — but nothing else came to mind. It would be diverting enough, at least.
The tale of a saint ravished by the hero would have to center on how she'd spent the small hours being violated without a moment's respite, reduced to a vessel for his seed. Making readers grasp a premise so steeped in dissonance would take endless pages of supplementary explanation backed by boundless imagination, so the material would never run dry. Fold in the moans I'd poured out all through the dawn and the moments my composure had shattered in real time, and it might even turn out to be a decent piece of work.
A first kiss. A first penetration. A lost maidenhood. The act itself. Climax. The seed spilled inside her.
That was the sum of everything the ill-fated woman had endured in a mere three days — one who had possessed the saint's body, savored days of peace, lost her home and family to the demons, and then been raped by the very hero who had come to save her. And as a bonus, the one inside was a man. The perfect twist.
"Nn... it hurts..."
The mood had soured. My wrists, where the bindings had dug in, seemed to have swollen up. The senses that pleasure had devoured into numbness all came flooding back at once, it seemed, now that the violent coupling was over. Left alone they throbbed and ached, knitting my brows together.
And it wasn't only my wrists — everywhere ached, everywhere cried out in pain, and the sight dragged up the face of the bastard who'd climbed atop me and pounded away to his heart's content. I felt filthy, so I decided to simply focus on what each part of me was reporting.
The corners of my eyes were puffed and swollen from endless weeping; my hair hung in wild disarray, and my face, still burning with fever, was soaked through with sweat. Looking down at my chest, where the marks of his hands were pressed deep, there would no doubt be kiss-bruises on my neck as well. Even with my hands freed, I doubted the courage to face a mirror would come with them.
Hmm. Shall I pick up where I left off, then?
Nothing could be more dreary than dredging up memories steeped in disgust with my own two hands — but sitting idle, wallowing in self-torment, was far worse than nursing my hatred while carving Lean's face deeper into my mind. Before long, I reached for the thread of my broken thoughts.
Bound to that bed, it had taken a good two hours for me to take him once with my mouth and three times with my cunt.
Then, unbidden, a thought surfaced. Mightn't some reader spare a worry for the hero, who'd worked his hips so diligently through it all? If he threw his back out, after all, he wouldn't be able to rape me for a while — and then the story couldn't advance. Someone might think exactly that.
A strange smile seemed to have taken shape on my lips. It couldn't be helped. However real it felt to me, this place was, beyond all question, a world inside a novel. Even content about raping a woman until her mind gave out — taking a saint who'd guarded her maidenhood, violating her, making her a sex slave? For a reader whose tastes ran that way, precious little else could promise such titillation.
And so, when a man of such peculiar appetite fixed his gaze on my blood-red wrists, I'd had to fight with everything I had to smother the smile rising in me.
"Lady Saint. If it hurt, you should have said so. These are hands meant to tend my body with the utmost devotion — however will it do, leaving them in such a pitiful state?"
Even your bullshit should have known its limits.
Crack.
If you didn't want to be hit—
It had been a reflexive act, born of nothing but the will to survive. A defense mechanism to keep her mind intact. She was certain it was the only means of escape from this moment — and from the hell still to come.
And so, the instant the strap binding her wrist came loose, Serina swung her right arm with everything she had — to bring the mace that bloomed in her flashing hand down upon Lean's skull.
However long she turned it over in her mind, she could not shake the conviction that it was that strap which had sealed her holy power. And so she had aimed there.
Crack.
Her judgment had struck true. She heard one side of a head give way, crushed.
Thud. The great body pitched off the bed and slammed into the floor.
Serina freed her remaining hand from its strap in a flash and flung herself at him without hesitation. There was no time to find her footing; from a half-crouched stumble she brought the mace down. A clumsy blow — it didn't matter.
Squelch. As that sound proved, the Goddess had not abandoned her. The blood and gore fountaining from Lean's head proclaimed the Goddess's mercy.
The light of a saint was boundlessly indulgent toward its wielder — but only when turned against the wicked. And this particular villain had raped none other than the Goddess's own child. Hero or not, Lean's sin was one that death itself could never repay. The saint hardened her conviction. And so she did not hesitate.
Ten times. Twenty times. She brought the weapon down. He no longer drew breath — and still she wanted at least that vile face unmade, wiped beyond all shape. She wanted to scour every trace of the hero called Lean from this world, and then have a new hero bring her family back to her. It was an act done to set all things right. She had to believe that.
"I...... I killed a person..."
It was the only way to keep from going mad.
Soon the light guttered out, and the mace vanished from sight. Serina lowered her head and began taking stock of her own body. Even on her blood-smeared nakedness, the semen trailing down her thighs caught the eye.
And it became her shield. The best defense is a good offense — she had resolved to attack so that she might protect herself at her utmost, and in the end she had managed both. So all that remained was to plead her own case, and be at peace with it.
"I-I did nothing wrong..."
But her desperation had shone only in the moment her life hung in the balance — no further. Here, abandoned in the wake of savagely killing her attacker, she had no idea how to defend herself. She who had never once found a means of protecting herself — the only thing those outstretched hands had ever managed to seize was murder. It was only natural that a saint who had known happiness in nothing but the caring for others could not bear its weight.
"B-because Lean, he, he was wrong first... because he was... I-it's f-fine."
Half of it was dissolved in tears, and so her voice shook. The bare fact that a person had killed a person was enough to make her heart feel ready to burst.
And yet the woman she had become was a saint. It was true that for a year she had shown the world a saint's compassion. But not all of it had been a performance. Becoming such a person had been her one and only dream.
Serina flinched, hunched her shoulders, and turned her head this way and that. It felt as though someone were watching her. Impossible — and yet she couldn't shake the sense that this scene had been witnessed. Her body shook violently until even breathing became an effort. She dragged one ragged breath after another until, at last, her stance gave out and crumpled.
"I never dreamed the Lady Saint had been scheming something like this. Why, I almost feel obliged to compliment you?"
Held fast — by Lean, who had appeared at her back. Serina's rigid body was gathered, whole and unresisting, into his embrace. She stared down at the arms crossing over her chest, and a groan slipped from her lips. The blood splattered across the room, and Lean's corpse along with it, had vanished without a trace.
".........What...... why...... nngh."
A chill swept through her body in an instant. And so the moan that spilled from her once more at the sensation in her lower half carried pleasure and terror in equal measure.
"Do you know what it is you overlooked, Lady Saint?"
Lean caressed her sex with one hand while the other seized her jaw and turned her face aside. The moment their gazes crossed, the saint's expression hardened at terrible speed.
For past Lean's face, which was going blurry, another scene was coming into focus before her eyes. A young child, forced to its knees on the floor, was staring straight at her.
"Don't...... please...... stop......"
"I'd rather not."
The child was barely six years old. Then both of the child's arms came away — severed by the keen dagger of the hero standing behind it.
Reflexively, Serina covered her face. She could not watch another moment. Her palms began to soak with tears.
Lean tore her hands roughly away, caught both her wrists in one grip, and hauled them up high.
"A saint ought to know how to engrave even such a sacrifice upon her heart. Did Cardinal Gelf not teach you as much?"
Not a single word reached her ears. Terror-stricken, Serina's body had turned to stone. And like the child's unbroken screaming, the hero's hands never stopped moving. At the last, he killed the child — only, the method was too cruel, too merciless, for so tidy a word as killing.
"Aah...... AAAAAHHH!"
Nothing could have been better suited to drive Serina into a despair beyond all despair. It was a despair born of two realizations: that Lean possessed the means to torment her at will — and that he had reached those souls not to help her lay the dead to rest, but to hurt her.
She had been used, thoroughly and completely.
Serina surfaced from the illusion.
"As you've just seen, the Holy Sword places few real limits on tormenting souls. Which means an illusion of the Lady Saint killing me is something I can produce quite easily. Do you understand now?"
