“In that case, allow me to reinterpret the meaning of the Holy Scourge! It has all been misunderstood up until now!”
He knelt down before me and darted his eyes back and forth as if turning the pages of the scriptures inside his head.
“Akuto, chosen by God themself! Summoned from another world, and bestowed the special power of acquisition and thus the ability to obtain all sacred artifacts! This is the will of God, and God’s revenge against we who imitate the culture of that other world! Yes, it is Akuto who should rule over the people of this world! He is chosen by God and is the new, righteous, high priest!”
He raised both hands above his head, turned around, and spoke to the cathedral in a loud voice.
“My power is nothing in comparison to Akuto’s. I humbly step down as high priest. But as I am also skilled in wielding the Holy Scourge, if you would see fit to sometimes bestow one on me…I would be honored to work as your right-hand man.”
I could feel the concerned gazes of the people around us as he spoke.
I must have looked like I was ready to take over as leader, having just been overwhelmed by the power of God’s tool.
“I see now…why you don’t doubt the ‘righteousness’ of this power.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not doing it.” I smiled back at him. “I don’t want to become a high priest.”
“What?”
“Thanks to you, I understand why I was called to this world. I thank you for that.”
I folded the Holy Scourge in my right hand under my arm and held the handle of the left Scourge in both hands.
In front of his eyes, I started putting force into my hands like I was cracking a glow stick.
“A sacred artifact with unlimited physical power…a godly power that makes its holder want to command the people…”
The handle of the Holy Scourge was being bent by the hands of its owner.
And the man who had been its owner until just moments ago looked on in disbelief. “Y-y-y-y-you wouldn’t!”
“Who needs…”
Crack! Fissures started to appear.
“…a thing like this?!”
Craaack—!!
The Holy Scourge was smashed into pieces!
The body of the whip lost its power and began breaking into pieces. The pillar of mud collapsed, and the end of the whip dried up like grass and began to wither away.
“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!”
The man who had just stepped down as high priest of his own accord screamed with his eyes wide in shock.
“What have you done?! The Holy Scourge… The Holy Scourge… THE HOLY SCOURGE!!”
Crawling on the ground, he gathered up the fragments of the whip’s handle.
But as he touched them, the fragments turned to dust in his hands.
“For the holder of the Scourge to destroy it themself… There is no going back from this!!”
“So what? We don’t need it.”
I got down from the human chair made of the second Holy Scourge as I spoke.
“It’s the ‘physically strongest’ artifact…? More like the most violent. It’s not needed in a peaceful kingdom like this.”
“Hah, hah—but…to simply destroy it?!” He clawed at his head.
“Actually, we were ready to destroy the Shard of Judgement, too. We only decided to hold onto it because it seemed it might come in useful to meet God. But we don’t need this old thing anymore.”
If it fell into the wrong hands again, it would only cause more conflict.
“Why?! With the oldest artifact in your possession, you could have become a being of ultimate righteousness!”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘righteousness’?”
“It is the same as your judge! To stand above others, know everything, and rule over others!”
“You and Tsukasa are not the same!”
I spoke to Gilvert who was kneeling at my feet.
“My sister has never said that she is right over any other person. That’s exactly why, if she has even a shadow of a doubt about something, she investigates. She thinks, and thinks, and thinks it over again. And she asks me to stop her if there’s even the smallest chance that she might be wrong. And if we’re still wrong, it’s better to let the people of this world do as they please. Even if that means whipping me or burning me.”
His robe was coming undone, and his white hair he had been pulling at had fallen to the ground.
“What did you want so badly, that made you go so far? Did you just want to believe that you were right? That on its own only brought more uncertainty. How can you prove that every single thing you say is correct? In the end, the only thing left that you could do is brainwash everyone.”
“B-but there was no other way…,” he said, sounding sad, “to achieve absolute peace of mind!”
“There’s no such thing as absolute peace of mind. Just like there is no such thing as an absolutely righteous person. That’s why everyone has to learn and keep trying, so that we can try to do the right thing.”
“Everyone…?”
“Everyone gathered here today. These people who were made to suffer by you, even though they did nothing wrong.”
“Their suffering…caused by lack of faith…?”
I wasn’t getting anywhere with this.
“I guess I’ll just go ahead and break the other one.”
I held the other Holy Scourge in my hands the same way I did to shatter the first one.
“I-I’ll apologize! I’ll apologize, so please stop! I’m sorry!”
“Saying you’re sorry won’t bring back Cumba. And it won’t heal the pain caused to the people who were brainwashed.”
I had so many regrets in the back of my mind. And the smell and the feel of the compost still clung to me.
What I could do right now to help Alba’s pain…was to find out the truth.
“I need you to confess everything you did.”
“Y-yes! Oh, Akuto, God’s chosen…”
With tears in his eyes, he began to talk.
“I had no idea about malignant tumors. There is nothing written about them in the scriptures. The church’s treatment, God’s Panacea, works by heightening the natural healing power within one’s body. But using it on a tumor caused it to activate and spread throughout his entire body.”
The words now coming out of his mouth had zero affectation.
“In the rare case of any inconvenient casualties, I was instructed by my father to use the Compost Room…which I inherited from him along with the Purgatorial List. That was around the same time I received my Power of Words from my Shard of Judgment. As I became more and more skilled in brainwashing people, I had a dream. A dream where I saw a beautiful scene of our cathedral packed full of devout followers of our faith…”
Gilvert’s gaze wandered, tracing the air in front of him. Like he was seeing a different place and a different time.
“Before he died, my father often lashed me with a whip. Our creed was correct. Do not dare doubt it, he would say. And he told me I would never fill our cathedral with followers. That I was a mediocre boy who would never surpass him. I wanted…to see our cathedral filled…”
His dream may have been fulfilled for an instant.
But now, the gazes of the people surrounding us were not filled with faith.
It was pity.
“I decided to use Cumba Nols, since he was going to die anyway. So I had to make his brother Alba disappear, too. It would be easy to hide the deaths of two war orphans that had been picked up by my father. Since Lyra Boucher knew about his illness, I would use her to experiment with my Cleansing Prayer as well as silence her. Just as I had resolved to do so…the Black Scales came to me and lent me their power—the power of forbidden magic.”
Shaking all the while, he spilled his motives to us.
The crowd looked on as he did. The gallery of spectators that had followed from the Grand Bench started to file in through the huge hole that had opened up in the cathedral.
“I thought I had come up with the perfect plan. A setup that the complacent and peaceful people of this world would never see through. I thought…I could banish that Miss Judge who had been summoned and made her declaration of her intention to judge God. And I could get rid of this otherworld culture… I could bring the kingdom back into the church’s control…”
The high priest’s torn robe began to slip down over his shoulders.
All over his exposed body, I could see innumerable scars that must have been made by the lashes of a whip.
It was evidence of the abusive upbringing he had been subjected to by his father.
“After confirming in advance that I could really use the forbidden material transfiguration magic…on a rainy day that blood would be washed away…I used the Nols brothers as my timer…and collapsed the building right in front of the otherworlders’ eyes… I emphasized the wrongdoing of our current monarchy…made the bodies into compost… I thought back to my father…believing I could obtain absolute peace of mind…using the Holy Scourge and the Power of Words… I could…this kingdom…”
Gilvert drooped his head like a child who had just understood that something he wanted was unattainable.
“Father was wrong… I…was wrong…”
Tears fell from his eyes onto the ground of the arena.
Seeing him like this made me feel all sorts of conflicting things. But…
“Tell us more about the Black Scales.”
We needed to push him for more information. For the truth that was lurking in the shadows of this major incident…
“Were they involved in the Hero’s Case?”
Before, Gilvert had called Laman a “foolish old man, who believes his wife and friends died in an accident.” It was possible that that fire was devised by the Black Scales, too. If we had pronounced Laman guilty and sentenced him to death without knowing that…I couldn’t bear the thought.
“Th-that…I cannot say.”
“That’s too bad. Time to break this thing…”
I put my hands on the remaining Holy Scourge once again. Fissures began to appear in the handle as it cracked.
“S-stop! Please stop! I beg you!”
“Then will you tell us about the Black Scales?”
“Y-yes! The Black Scales are…”
But before he could say anything meaningful, something strange happened.
Starting from the top of his head, Gilvert’s body started to become drenched in black.
And suddenly, floating in the sky above the arena, the Black Scales had appeared.