You Brood of Vipers
You Brood of Vipers
For another three weeks or so, I visited the princess every day.
It might sound strange, but it felt similar to taming a wild animal. I packed snacks and tasty food to feed her, and sometimes brought a few picture books to read to her.
Every Tuesday at 2 PM, she would become neurotic and try to self-harm or act violently, as always, but whenever that happened, I held her tight and soothed her.
I sang every song I could—nursery rhymes, pop songs, anime tunes—and stayed with her until she fell asleep, sobbing and trembling.
Was it thanks to all that effort?
"I'll go. Tomorrow... again..."
Today, before I left.
Iomene gave me a smile.
"She smiled... Iomene smiled..."
When I told them this, the Emperor and Empress could not hide their tears.
Right.
Even though I was only doing this to avoid my own ticket to hell, seeing them so happy didn't make me feel bad.
Judging by her condition, it would be soon.
It didn't seem like it would be long before the Fragment of the Evil God inside Princess Iomene's body transferred to me.
It was bittersweet.
My life in this otherworld was mostly filled with bad memories, but thinking that I wouldn't see these people again still made me sad.
Especially... Erpa.
I'd just started to find someone to have a fling with, and now I was leaving.
But what could I do?
My life came first.
"Saint. My son!..."
"My mother can't see!"
I kept healing the sick, over and over.
They were people I'd never see again anyway.
It would be best to leave after treating them diligently one last time.
The poor and the rich.
Without distinguishing between nobles and commoners, I had spent three weeks diligently running around, healing the sick and injured.
Thanks to that, donations and offerings from the nobles increased even more, and the slums prospered further with those funds, but now, well.
I didn't care anymore.
Nor about the ill-suited act of playing the saint.
Nor about the utterly vulgar descriptions of my skills.
It was goodbye forever now.
I almost felt a sense of liberation.
Well.
The slums were normalized, anyway.
What else could possibly happen now?
"Saint!! Saint!!"
"Saint Amael!! My daughter..."
"My wife suffered burns! Saint, please!!"
Something did.
One morning.
While I was still half-asleep, a group of people suddenly came knocking on my door.
Rushing outside because of the incredibly urgent voices, I found countless people collapsed on the street, their faces melting and foaming at the mouth.
"Quickly!! Bring the potions! Hurry!!"
The priests of the clinic were frantically flying around treating people, but even so, there were still far too many to treat.
Most were women.
And young girls.
In that moment.
I realized who they were.
The 15 matchstick girls I had saved in the back alley.
They were just like them.
"A fire broke out at a nearby factory! Saint! Please save my wife!!"
The voices of people shouting and wailing jolted me wide awake.
"Bring the critically injured to me! Right now!!"
As I shouted, the well-trained Lilia priests of the Order of Grace, seemingly accustomed to this situation, quickly sorted patients and brought them before me.
I frantically healed the fallen women.
Their faces were all in an equally horrific state.
One was burned and groaning in agony.
A woman whose entire head had burned into a grotesque lump of flesh.
A child poisoned by white phosphorus, her jaw melted away so badly the bone was entirely exposed.
As I kept healing them in a daze,
familiar faces began to catch my eye.
"Saint! Please heal us!"
I remembered a young girl whose face had melted away after being exposed to chemicals while making white phosphorus matches.
That very girl was now before me, suffering from the same condition I had once healed.
A woman whose severed fingers I had once treated—forced to keep working at a factory for a pittance, enduring backbreaking labor because her impoverished household had too many mouths to feed—now lay before me with burns all over her body.
As I restored these human beings from crushed lumps of meat back into human shape, I recognized the faces of the women and children from my memory.
The anger began to boil over.
Why. Why! WHY!!
Why, after I'd fixed them up, were they appearing in front of me in the same state again!
I knew.
"The jobs in the factories in Slum District 3 pay the highest wages. We are doing our best to attract businesses, but... the majority of workers still travel to the factories on the outskirts of the capital. We cannot have every poor person in the capital living on a daily wage of one Saled."
The words Jonathan Karma had said to me surfaced in my mind.
I clenched my fist so hard it felt like it might break.
After treating the dozens of critically injured patients brought before me, I left the priests who were still treating others and walked forward.
"Where is the factory that caught fire?"
"The fire isn't fully out yet! It's dangerous! Saint!"
"Lead the way! Right now!!"
Because I rarely raised my voice, the slum dwellers were startled and hurriedly guided me.
As I followed them, the smell of burning human flesh and acrid smoke tickled my nose.
Unable to bear it, I used Body Modification to enhance my muscle strength and began sprinting at incredible speed.
There might still be a few more people I could save.
If I could just get there a little earlier. I could save them.
Thinking that, I ran like crazy, but...
"Aaaah!! My daughter!! Aaaah!!"
"Mom! Mom!!"
"No! No! Please!"
Dozens of bodies, charred into black lumps of charcoal barely recognizable as human, were already laid out on the street.
Families were clutching the charcoal lumps and wailing.
I approached a charcoal lump and tried using a skill.
[Skill can only be cast on living organisms!]
[Skill can only be cast on living organisms!]
[Skill can only be cast on living organisms!]
[Skill can only be cast on living organisms!]
Repeatedly.
I kept trying the skill, but the result was the same.
I couldn't save them.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't bring back those who were already dead.
Fuck.
What the hell was this shitty feeling?
As I stood there, staring down helplessly at the horrifically burned corpses,
"My daughter!! My daughter is still up there!"
"You can't go in!"
"Daughter!! Daughter!! My daughter!! Please save her! My daughter is still inside!"
I saw a young girl hesitating beyond the third-floor balcony of the factory, amidst the roaring flames.
She was still alive.
At that thought, my body moved on its own.
"You mustn't go in! Saint!..."
Before the police officer trying to stop me could finish his sentence, I activated Time Stop.
I didn't know how long the child could hold on.
I had to hurry.
As I had always done, I released Time Stop locally.
How? In a way that allowed me to walk straight up from where I stood to the balcony where the child was.
Within the space where Time Stop was released, I began stepping on the layers of frozen air as if they were solid objects, climbing upward.
I'd instinctively wondered if I could use it like this, and fortunately, my plan was working.
Using Air Step, I reached the balcony in an instant, then smashed through the window and jumped inside, finding the young girl right before me.
The girl, whose skin was already severely burned, lay collapsed on the floor, foaming at the mouth, likely unable to breathe properly because of the smoke.
I released Time Stop on the young girl's body and picked her up. Then I used Body Modification. Her body healed instantly.
As the pain vanished and she became perfectly fine, the child looked at me with surprise.
"Saint?"
I didn't have the energy to answer her.
Fuck. Just walking up that short distance had already drained my mental energy significantly. This damn skill mechanic, seriously!
Still, it was a manageable level.
"Hold on tight to me."
The child obeyed and clung tightly to my body.
I needed to focus. If I made a mistake, I didn't know what would happen to me, but the child could get hurt.
Just as before, I stepped onto the frozen layers of air and began slowly descending.
And before long, I was standing outside the factory with the child.
"...Saint! It's dangerous... Huh?"
After Time Stop was released, the police officer who had tried to stop me was about to shout and rush at me, but stopped in shock when he saw the child in my arms.
To him, it must have looked as if I had been standing still just a moment before, then suddenly appeared with the child in my arms.
Gently, I set down the young child, who had been neatly healed by Body Modification.
"This child... to her mother..."
"Adel!!"
Before I could say anything, the child's mother ran up and hugged her tightly.
"Aah! Thank you! Thank you! Lady Lilia! Saint! Thank you... Thank you."
Seeing the mother and child weeping and sobbing, I smiled a little.
"Bring the patients to me. I will heal them."
I did my absolute best and healed people, over and over.
I didn't want to see any more people turned into those charcoal lumps.
As I struggled on, firefighters from the capital and mages from the Magic Tower rushed in, dousing the fire with water and magic to suppress the factory blaze, and only then was I able to catch my breath.
"What is the meaning of this!"
While I was leaning against a wall, resting my weary mind for a moment,
I heard someone shouting.
"Who gave you permission to take water from the warehouse! That is all property of the Leota Company!"
I saw a fat, middle-aged man yelling.
"If we hadn't brought that water, the fire would have grown even worse!"
"I don't care about that! I will measure the amount of water taken and charge you for it! This is lawless! Using company property without permission!"
The middle-aged man paid no heed to the firefighters' words.
At his words, the workers who had been lying on the ground began to get up one by one, their eyes sharp with hostility.
"You! This is all because of you!!"
"Factory Manager! If you had just told Baron Hanson, the president of Leota Company, to install proper fire prevention facilities in this factory, my family wouldn't have burned to death! You son of a bitch!!"
The bereaved families of those turned to charcoal screamed in fury, but the man called the factory manager didn't give a single shit.
As if he had been smoking, he spat out yellowish phlegm and drawled,
"You noisy lot. You're throwing a fit to squeeze money out of me, aren't you? Fine! I'll toss you a little compensation. One Saled per dead person should be more than enough, right? No complaints, I assume? Since it's more than three months' worth of your wages."
The factory manager chuckled.
"You bastards who were born poor were all cursed by the gods. Fire prevention? It's cheaper to hand out one Saled to each of the burnt corpses than to spend a fortune building that stuff. So why bother? Feeling wronged? If you're wronged, you're all fired. Fired! Wanna lose your jobs along with your families?"
"You devil!! You demon!"
"Your soul will fall into hell! You fucking bastard!"
The sound of wailing filled the air, but still, no worker rushed at him.
This was because the police, armed with pistols and there to manage the fire scene, were standing by near the man called the factory manager, and behind them, large men who looked like bodyguards were openly glaring at the crowd with pistols exposed at their waists.
Right. Of course they were scared. Getting shot hurts.
Besides, even if they managed to overpower those bodyguards and the police and beat them up, the repercussions would be even more frightening. Getting fired. Losing a job is sometimes scarier than getting shot.
I understood. But what about me? Police and bodyguards. Do you have the guts to shoot me?
I'm the person treating the Emperor's daughter. I'm a saint recognized by the Pantheon. I guarantee it. You can never shoot me.
And the repercussions? My body is returning to Korea soon anyway. I'll be cursed, my soul will crumble, and I'll go back to live in Korea, where there's no damnation to hell or anything. So...
[Body Modification! 20x Muscle Strength!]
I could do this.
After casting Body Modification on myself, I looked around for something to use as a weapon, then unfastened the belt from my waist and gripped it in my hand.
And then I charged at the factory manager with incredible speed.
With 20x my muscle strength, I swung the belt at the spouting factory manager.
Smack!!
With a sharp crack, the factory manager's teeth scattered like kernels of blood-red corn through the air as he slammed into the door of the car he had arrived in.