“…And that’s about everything that took place in heaven.”
“Um…so you hardly did much real fighting at all?”
One week after they had all stormed heaven, Suzuno was visiting Chiho’s room at her family house in Sasazuka, giving her the not-exactly-triumphant circumstances behind the assault’s conclusion. She was sitting properly at her low table, wearing her usual kamawanu-pattern kimono and tucking her legs under her body. It was a common sight for Chiho to see, but that just made her story all the more fantastic and unique.
“The most injured out of any of us was Acieth and the Malchut girl, Eleos. Both of their faces were quite a mess—but it appears they will escape any permanent scarring. And Alciel did not kill any of the Heavenly Regiment.”
In terms of casualties, the nations of Ente Isla had suffered far more in the sporadic Central Continent skirmishes that took place during the Crusade just before the summit.
“Ignora’s original goal was to make the Tree of Sephirot recognize the angels as the ‘first’ species of mankind that belongs in Ente Isla. That would let them stand above us natives and create a perfect world for their perfect species. That was why she engineered all the miracles and mythologies that formed the cornerstone of the Church.”
“Oh? Didn’t Laila build the Church? I think Yusa mentioned something like that when we were talking about Yesod fragments…”
“What Laila created, in order to compete against Ignora, were the legends about holy swords—the folklore related to the Yesod fragments, and how to use them. She waited for the religion Ignora established to gain a firm foothold, and then, as the weaker opposing force, she deftly spent years and centuries spreading the word about the holy swords. That, and the concept of Ignora, the heavens, and the angels being a different race from humanity. This led to differing religious sects, and to different people in Ente Isla devoting themselves to the angels in different ways. That, it seems, was one major reason why the angels were not recognized as the ‘main’ species by the Sephirah until that moment. That is what Copyhara said, at least, and I cannot ascertain how true it is.”
Suzuno didn’t seem too confident about it as she spoke, occasionally pausing midway.
“Their home planet, you see, was stricken with a genocidal disease they could do nothing about. They escaped before the species was wholly wiped out, but I would assume there is no life remaining there. And when Caiel and Sikeena began to oppose their research into immortality, that was the deciding blow that led to Ignora’s current situation. It was a denial of the idea that supernatural aid was something to ever expect… A denial of God, essentially.”
“A denial of God…”
“Did it ever strike you as odd, Chiho? We are the Church, and figures like Lord Sariel, Gabriel, Raguel, and the Sephirah appear in our holy scripture…but the name of Ignora, the ‘God’ herself, never does.”
“But she’s still the primary figure, isn’t she?”
“No. The name appears in the scripture zero times. It remains only in the ancient name of a body of water, but not in our own words.”
“It doesn’t?”
That surprised Chiho.
“Our scripture talks about the legends of multiple higher-plane figures, but never about anyone leading them. That is why our ancient theologians and clerics theorized the existence of a ‘great ruling God’ that governed the world and its heavens, and that idea permeated the Church. That, too, was something Ignora failed to anticipate.”
God, in this religion, was not a person. And Ignora had already gone through the trauma of being judged for blocking the natural evolution of a human race. That was why she’d laid the foundation of the Church so a God could never be born. But it was Laila who foiled that—her, the angels on Satanael’s side that defied Ignora, and…
“…and the ancient Ente Islans, who clung to the concept of a God.”
At this rate, the Ente Islans that dominated the world would be recognized as the planet’s official, Sephirah-approved human race. The angels would once again lose a potential planet to settle on and perhaps even be persecuted by the Sephirah. And now, when multiple civilizations were flourishing in Ente Isla, Ignora was feeling the heat. Her solution: a Devil King Satan–driven invasion of Ente Isla, so that the human race would taste bitter defeat.
Ignora had taken a two-pronged approach to using Satan’s world conquest, as well as the Church that failed to develop as she meant it. First, she would create a Hero, someone born from the power of heaven and the angels. This would help advertise the angels as higher-level creations, the defenders of mankind. It would be an effective way, she thought, to root out Laila, who had long since left heaven by then. The result of all this: Emilia Justina, the girl with a Yesod fragment in her body.
But here, too, Ignora made a miscalculation. Emilia Justina was not purely Ente Islan. Her body reacted to the holy sword, and to the Cloth of the Dispeller driven by her Holy Silver, and it was “transformed.” She adopted the genes of the angels and their trademark look.
They reasoned quickly that the Hero Emilia had inherited blood from the archangel Laila. And the potential fallout from this made Ignora shiver in fear. To her, Emilia’s existence proved that the still-immature civilization of Ente Isla was hereditarily homogenous with their much more advanced civilization. If Emilia went on to save the world, would the Sephirot recognize the angels’ pitch that they were the higher beings?
So the heavens engineered the most chaos the world had seen since the Devil Overlord Satan’s disaster. Ignora’s faction, seizing the initiative in the race to keep the angels alive, just slightly outnumbered the others, but many of her peers began to posit whether her approach to Ente Isla’s Sephirot was the wrong one. The opposition was led by Sandalphon, who had long supported Ignora up till then.
In an even greater shock to Ignora, Lucifer was part of the Devil King’s Army invading Ente Isla. To Ignora, who had never forgotten the face of her child after all this time, seeing her own descendant—the epitome of the “higher race”—side with the lower classes of the planet’s natives and broadly impact the whole world came as an intense shock. Even worse, Lucifer lost to an inexperienced girl of a Hero, from an inexperienced human race. Now, not only would they never get the Ente Islans to see angels as the superior species—slander could go around that they were just a greedy race of tyrants seeding chaos worldwide.
So, through an old contact of Emilia’s named Olba, Ignora secretly had Lucifer recovered. She reasoned that one of the Six Archbishops, the highest echelons of the Church that followed the angels, would be easier to manage—but, once again, her hopes were betrayed.
“But Olba wasn’t anything like that, was he?”
“No. He was the sort of man who had grave doubts about the existence of any god. He also questioned the existence of Emilia, and the truth behind the holy sword and Cloth of the Dispeller. And while he didn’t confide it to Emeralda, he had a direct connection from heaven, and that is undoubtedly what drove him over the edge. The rest, you know well, Chiho.”