34. The Strongest and Worst of Humans

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/37/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

“After that, if we can just… do something about the eight knights, the country would be as good as finished, wouldn’t it?”

Leia had told me as much a little while ago.

“The only knight stationed at the castle, the one who guards the royal family—her name is Lily Clearlights.”
“She was the knight who defeated Camilla, as I recall.”
“Yes. And she’s the captain of the knighthood, too. But that person… I think she’s probably weaker than I am. If it were you, Mistress, I believe you could beat her easily.”

In other words, the reasoning seemed to be that if Lily, the captain, was only that strong, the other knights ought to be no trouble either.
And so I issued the following order to the king, whose brain I had already toyed with until he was a puppet.

“Gather every knight at the castle.”

Rotten-brained or not, he was still a king. At that single word, the knights scattered across the kingdom assembled at the castle all at once.
Even so, there was one who arrived late.
He was the man riding in the carriage running ahead of me: Saints Judgment, who called himself “the human most beloved by God in all the world.”
The name was so blatant I suspected an alias, but it was apparently his real one.
His family had been deeply devout for generations, I was told.
There is no such thing as God in this world, however, so I decided to dispose of him promptly and turn him into a puppet as well.

I moved from the shadow of grass to the shadow of trees, closing the distance to the carriage.
At last I slipped into the shadow directly beneath it.
From there, Saints’ voice reached me.
When I shifted a little, I could see inside the carriage as well.
Saints had the look of a somewhat slender, thoroughly ordinary priest.

“By the by, coachman.”
“Y-yes?”
“Do you… believe in God?”
“God, sir? Well, I believe well enough.”
“I see, I see. How fine. You are truly fine. Lately, I am sorry to say, the number of rude people who do not believe in God has increased. A lamentable thing. Truly lamentable.”

Paying no mind to the coachman’s bewilderment, he launched into a sermon of a conversation.
He was rather like a troublesome passenger pestering a taxi driver.

“However! If you are a righteous man who has faith in God, then I, beloved of God, have a duty to act in His stead. In short, I must save you.”
“Uh… right…”
“Listen well, young man. Stop the carriage at once. Then get down, and—let me see—run until you are somewhere beyond the horizon.”
“Huh? W-why?”
“Do not talk back! I am telling you to run!”

The young coachman startled at the force of that voice.

“Eek!? I understand!”

And with that, he obediently left the carriage and fled.
Apparently this man had noticed my presence.
Come to think of it, Leia had mentioned that Saints specialized in hunting monsters.

“O merciful God, You grant me once more the chance to slay a monster. My gratitude knows no bounds; the only way I may repay You is to banish this filthy ‘shadow.’ Is that not so, O God!”

I had been rather smug, assuming it could never reach me inside the shadows.
Then I sensed magic gathering in his arm within the carriage, and I hurriedly burst out of the shadows and put distance between myself and the vehicle.
It was a vast “light magic.” I would not die, but if I took it properly I would not escape damage.

“Disperse!”

Screaming in a voice that cracked, Saints struck the floor of the carriage.
His own physical strength shattered the floorboards, and the light magic wrapped some ten meters around him in a dome of radiance.
Needless to say, no shadow could exist inside that light.
My snap decision to flee had been the correct one.
When the light ceased, a huge crater some ten meters across had opened with Saints at its center.
He would have realized he had failed to finish me.
Saints slowly surveyed his surroundings, found me, and opened his mouth with a pleasant smile.

“How nimble you are. Truly vexing.”

In that moment, I understood.
There was absolutely no chance that this man was weaker than Leia.
Which meant—in my estimation—that the weakest of the knights was likely the Lily Clearlights Leia had spoken of.
After all, she alone had been assigned the nearly unnecessary work of guarding the royal castle.
A figurehead captain, and knights who had climbed by their own strength.
That the gap in power would be obvious was only natural.
I stretched an arm from the shadow at his back and wound it around his face.
To my surprise, even noticing the shadow, he did not change his expression in the slightest, and simply stood there. Was he being careless?
I poured power into the shadows—and snapped his neck with a wet crack.
That ought to have finished an ordinary human.
And yet, strangely, I felt nothing of the kind.
His expression remained a smile, and his muscles did not slacken; there was no voiding of bowels or bladder.
When I tried pulling the shadow away, Saints put both hands to his head and, with a squeeze of force, restored it to its former state.
Yes: the bone that ought to have been broken had healed with that alone.

“You are a monster.”
“An amusing joke. This is merely my constitution.”
“That is the amusing joke.”

As if such a constitution could exist.
Still, given that his bone had in fact healed, I would have to believe it.

“That look is only reasonable. Of course I understand that it is abnormal. In other words, this is the very miracle God has granted me. From the instant of my birth, I have been beloved of God! This is the proof!”

It would have sounded more plausible if he had said his parents had not, in fact, been human.
But what dwelt in his eyes was a rapture bordering on madness.
In other words, a fierce faith. Nothing I said would shake it.

“That face says you do not believe me. Ah, how pitiable—born without even being human, and thus unable even to believe that God exists. As I thought, a monster must be purified by my hand!”
“I was originally human.”
“Then it is all the more pitiable! Unable to receive God’s favor, you have debased yourself into a filthy thing called a monster! Pitiable, pitiable, pitiable—ohhh, why has it come to this! This is a tragedyyyyy!”

The smile vanished from Saints’s face, and in the next breath he began to shed tears in streams.
His emotions were wildly unstable. How had a man like this become a knight in the king’s direct service?
The selection criteria, I was sure, consisted of nothing but strength.

“As I thought, purification is required… You there—what is your name?”
“Haa… Chigusa.”
“Chigusa! I see. A tragic name. I have carved that name into my soul. Your sad history is already a part of me; it shall never be lost again. So you may rest easy—”

Saints spread his arms in an extravagant lament, then clenched the open palms, wreathed them in light, and glared at me.

“Be called unto Heaven.”
“I must decline.”

The ground seemed to gouge itself out, and in an instant Saints had moved to stand before me.
I hid myself in shadow and circled to his back.
Then, to kill him quickly, I sent my claws toward his heart; he turned and flicked them aside with the back of his hand.
That reaction speed, at least, was worthy of a knight.
I could have praised him more honestly if not for that unpleasant smile.
Then again—I had no intention of leaving a man alive in any case.
I tilted my head to slip past the fist he threw, thrust my hand forward, and tried to seize the “shadow” inside his brain and crush it.
That is the quickest way to break a human.

“Hmph!”

But Saints, with a shout, blew my shadow away.
That he could perform such an absurd trick—was he truly human?

“Just now, you tried to destroy my insides with shadow, did you not? Useless. Body and soul, I brim with light. For I—am beloved of God!”
“When a delusion goes this far, I find myself impressed.”
“Magic is entirely a matter of conviction. If you believe you can, it comes to pass; if you believe you cannot, it vanishes. My will was simply the stronger.”

I see. So my confidence in my shadows was inferior to his faith.
That might well be true.
I cannot become a fanatic, which meant that trying to kill him with tricks would be useless.
Resigned to meeting him head-on, I dragged nine shadows from the darkness at my back, like a nine-tailed fox, and set them writhing.

“I see. You mean to win by volume of attacks. Then I shall oblige—and you will accept it: that there is no future in which a monster defeats me, who am beloved of God.”

Exasperated by this excessively rich character, I nonetheless snapped the shadows quickly toward Saints.
The shadows came at him from every direction; he parried them all with both hands alone.
He twisted and wrenched his whole body at a speed the eye could not follow, and with each attack he broke his own arms, using the spin to add force.

“God dwells in my fists! God dwells in my legs! God dwells in my body! God, God, God! Ah, from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head, I am stuffed with Goddddd!”

Even so, he could not, of course, handle every attack.
Wounds were gradually carved into Saints’s body, but by the time I noticed, healing had erased them as well.
A nuisance. Exhausting, too; I did not want to increase them more than I had to.
At this rate we would get nowhere, so I increased the number of shadows committed to the attack.
Eighteen in all.
Once the shadow-whips had doubled, even a knight could not dodge them all.
His healing could not keep up either, and Saints’s body was rapidly reduced to a wreck.

“Yes—this exaltation! The sensation of being alive that I feel only in the instant I face a monster—that is truly God’s blessing!”

And yet, in contrast to his worsening wounds, Saints’s cheeks flushed, and his face filled with a broken smile.
His lower body appeared to be erect as well; it was obvious that he took sexual excitement from fighting monsters.
In the end, for all his talk of God and faith, he was likely a serial killer devoted exclusively to monsters, one who found sexual pleasure in killing them.
In a sense, very human—and filthy enough that I wanted him gone at once.

“Hahahaha, this—this is it! The climax God has granted me! Ecstasy of the divine realm—ecstaaasy! Kuhahahahahahaaaaa!”

I had no wish to watch him arch and finish.
I slipped between his leaping fists and pierced Saints’s heart with a shadow.
In that instant, his body jerked in a spasm.

“O… ohhh, God… I, too… shall be… there…”

He murmured it with thoroughly spent eyes, spat blood, and went limp.
I slid the shadow out of his chest, immediately filled the wound, and restored his corpse to the state it had been in while he lived.
In a few days it would rot, but even as a corpse it would serve as a puppet for a while.
If Saints failed to appear, the knights gathered at the castle would grow wary, so I would use this as a substitute.

“Fuu… Still, what an outrageous human he was.”

If the first one was like this, the other six knights besides Lily were probably no decent humans either.
I had thought gathering them all at the castle and netting them in one sweep would be simple, but it seemed I would need to proceed with care.
A blunder might produce casualties, and that, at least, I wished to avoid.

“… For the moment, I am worried about everyone still at the castle. Shall I go back?”

So murmuring, I crawled through the shadows and hurried back toward the castle.