I closed my eyes and offered myself up as a sacrifice. I spread my arms wide and welcomed him closer.
Raven’s afraid. Afraid of this world—afraid of others. Over and over, the things he cared about were stolen and lost. That’s why he stopped being able to trust others—to trust the world. So...
“I’ll trust you.”
This man, more than anyone else alive, understood the future that the Demon Lord had sought. So I wanted to accept his rage and his suffering—I wanted to share that burden. If what we wished for was the same, then we ought to be able to understand one another.
But the champion refused to accept my self-absorbed decision.
“Ngh... What the fuck are you doing, you stupid brat?!”
“S...Sir Veiss...”
The blow never came, and I opened my eyes to see Veiss shielding me from Raven’s fangs with his body and his greatsword. As I watched, he was on the verge of being overcome—but even as he sank to one knee, he endured the pain and kept roaring at me.
“Your dumbass ideals ain’t worth shit if you’re dead!” He forced his body forward, landing a blow that sent Raven flying, and his shoulders heaved as he glared at me. “I don’t give a fuck about letting brats have their dreams or whatever—that’s your job, and it ain’t my damn problem. But that shit’s a curse, got it? Don’t push all your crap onto the people you leave behind!”
The wolfman’s roar was overlapped by another one. He turned around to deliver another strike, then carried that momentum into a leg sweep and a wide swing of his sword...
Veiss continued to yell while he fought it out with Raven. “Just look at this fucker and think for five damn seconds! This how you want her to end up?!”
If I offered up my life to Raven for the sake of my ideals, just like the Demon Lord had offered up his life to Cion, then Cion would carry a grudge against Raven, and the cycle would just keep going—that was what the wolf was saying. He was reprimanding me, but I had a feeling it was also meant as a lesson for his own apprentice who’d taken on sins too heavy to carry alone.
“If you ain’t got what it takes to stick with her, then get lost!”
Veiss struck back again and again, driven by pure spite. But he simply couldn’t handle all of Raven’s attacks with only one arm, and his body was gradually getting soaked with blood. Even now that he’d turned into a wolf, his figure as he fought still felt every inch a champion.
I let out a frustrated hiss.
My life would’ve been so much easier if I were an agreeable enough person to shut up and let someone else have the last word. It also would’ve been easier if I could just throw away all my resolve and all my feelings and live freely as I pleased.
But I was a bride, and I’d felt something I couldn’t unfeel—I wanted to stand beside that girl.
“You certainly love to run your mouth, don’t you?!” I stood alongside Veiss, taking the place of his missing right arm. As I beat back and lopped off the fangs, claws, and tentacles trying to carve into him, I howled right back just as loud. “You’re the one who ran away and shoved everything onto me!”
“You—” he started to say.
His left arm faltered for a moment; I kicked away a leg in his place and turned to smile at him.
“She needs you too.”
“Oh, screw you!”
Defending Veiss left my back unguarded, but he defended me in turn. Covering up each other’s openings, we steadily pushed back Raven’s fierce blows and moved in to launch a counterattack of our own—but then, just for the briefest moment, I let my focus slip.
“Wha—?”
A tentacle sprouted up from the ground at my feet and wrapped around my ankle. With my reactions slowed, Veiss lunged in to shield me with his body, and a claw gouged deep into his flank. Ever the sore loser, he threw his sword at Raven’s head in a last-ditch attack. But as it spun through the air, it missed its mark by a fraction and flew away over Raven’s shoulder.
Time slowed to a crawl as a frustrated dread filled me.
Raven raised an arm to strike. There was no way for me to dodge it.
I could at least save Veiss if I shoved him away, but I wasn’t getting out of this...
“No more champions. No more brides. I’ve had enough of you...” The devil’s eyes had lost almost all trace of sanity. “Die.”
But behind him—behind his arm as it swung down and his wide, outstretched wing—a single small ray of light pierced through the cloud-covered sky. It shone down on the Hero as she caught the sword the champion had thrown to her.
“GRAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
With a battle cry like a piercing scream, she sliced the sword inexorably through Raven’s single wing, slashing into his body. His sliced-off arm missed its target and thudded to the ground.
“Youuu...”
Eyes ablaze with fury, he tried to reach out with his other arm, but the wolfman pounced on him to hold him back.
“Cool it, asshole!”
The devil’s burning eyes and bulging veins exploded with rage as—
“Nghaaaaaaaah!!!”
—the sword rebounded off the ground and swung straight back up to lop off his remaining arm. All he had left was his tail.
“Do your damn job, Glasses!”
I shot out a small lightning bolt to mark the target—and the wrath of the Gods pierced the earth.
The lightning strikes up until now had aimed to incapacitate, but this was unmistakably a lethal blast. It burned the devil’s tail away to cinders.
“Wha—?!”
As Raven stood agape in shock, an inappropriately cheery voice sounded in my ear.
“Dear me, what a demanding inquisitor I have...”
More lightning bolts suddenly shot out sideways, stabbing through the mock humans all around us.
“You... How dare you...” the devil hissed, still trying to fight back.
I gently placed a hand on him and began to drain out all the mana, all the foreign matter he’d overfilled himself with.
“Scarlet Brave.”
“Aghaghaghaghaghhhh!”
Forcibly extracting it all was like flaying the meat from his bones and gouging out his organs. As he groaned and writhed with the pain consuming him from within, the Hero, the champion, and everyone else left on the battlefield stared at him uncertainly.
“It’s over, Raven,” I said softly.
He’d lost both of his arms at the elbow. He knelt on the ground, withered and emaciated—almost like a slave.
“Sh-Shut up...” he muttered.
“Please, surrender. You don’t need to do any of this. You can still carry on his vision.”
“Nonsense... That is a privilege only for those with power—only for those who rule over others!”
Cion briefly braced to strike, but I held her back.
It’s all right. He doesn’t have the power left to fight.
I reassured her wordlessly, then turned to face Raven.
“I don’t know whether the God you speak of truly exists. But if our origin produced the creatures of the earth from his own body, then I believe it must have been from love.”
If that omniscient and omnipotent being, truly akin to a God, had grown tired of his solitary existence—had birthed a Goddess, had sired children—then it must have been from loneliness. The existence of other beings would give rise to division and strife. But even understanding that obvious truth, the world’s primal originator had longed for the presence of others.
“That’s why I want to save every life I can.”
I turned my back to him and walked across the battlefield, touching my hand to the corpses lying around us as I softly sang prayers to the Gods. I was adapting Scarlet Brave and my orisons to operate in concert. With every word I wove, the plaza overflowed with light. Drained of all their mana, the divine soldiers and imitation humans crumbled away and dissolved into sand.
“Nothing but pretty ideals...” Raven hissed.
“What’s wrong with things being pretty?”
The light floated onto people’s injuries, closing up wounds and accelerating healing. I couldn’t work miracles like resurrecting the already-departed, but the Gods would let me get away with this much at least.
“I don’t believe in Gods,” I said, staring at my direct boss. “But I do believe in miracles.”
Even if orisons had just been developed as a power play to give the Church authority on par with the nobility—even if faith was just another word for subjugation—I still wanted to believe that the people who’d created it all had held more in their hearts than pure malice. I wanted to believe that there’d been some good in there as well.