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Chapter 72: The Return (1)
Anise Slywood.
The woman that Eugene remembered was someone who both did and did not suit the word faithful. Her beliefs and faith might have been sincere, but her usual conduct definitely did not match the definition of the word ‘faithful’ or her title as a ‘Saint.’
Anise liked alcohol even more than Sienna. If Sienna liked to have fun while drinking, then Anise just liked to drink. She always carried a small bottle of wine with her, but she insisted that the liquid contained within was holy water and not alcohol.
She did have a saintly appearance, though.
Whenever they were faced with a lot of corpses, Anise would get down on her knees and offer a prayer.
Hamel used to wonder if there was any meaning in praying for a corpse that was long since deceased. The corpses had already decayed, so their souls had either already left or had become a plaything for the demonfolk.
Anise must have known these facts better than anyone. Even so, she did not skip praying for them. Even if it had no other meaning than paying her respects, Anise would still pray that the deceased person would find their peace and rest.
Anise had always been a strong drinker, but whenever they passed by a lot of corpses, she would drink even more than she usually did. Even when they told her not to, since she would just get drunk, Anise would still do it anyway. In the middle of a battlefield filled with the hellish stench of rotten corpses, Anise still could not restrain her intoxication.
—When will this world be peaceful and happy?
Anise used to ask this question often, whenever she had been forced to use the smell of alcohol to cover up the stench of rotten corpses.
—Things should be peaceful and happy once we’ve killed all the Demon Kings.
—Even if we kill all the Demon Kings, that doesn’t mean all the innocent people that they have killed will come back to life.
—But we can at least save their souls.
—Hamel, do you believe in the afterlife?
—Doesn’t it make you feel more comfortable to believe that there is one?
—But I thought that you don’t believe in the gods.
—That and the afterlife are two different things. Although I don’t know about hell, I definitely hope that there’s a heaven. And don’t you think that it’s funny that you’re the one asking me this?
In the Holy Empire of Yuras, the main god that they worshiped was the god of light. Although there were countless faiths that could be found throughout the continent, even amongst all of them, the one that could be considered the main faith was the god of light, who also served as the patron deity of Yuras.
You accumulate good deeds throughout your life, and when you die… your good deeds become light, and your evil deeds become darkness. If the light is bright enough to banish all the darkness, you can ascend to heaven.
Darkness does not exist in heaven. The world’s sins arise from darkness where there is no light. In other words, in the heaven ruled by the god of light, since there is no darkness, there is no sin, and since there is no sin, there is no suffering.
—Sometimes I have doubts.
Her cheeks were flushed red with drunkenness.
—So many people have died. To the Demon Kings, the demonfolk, the demonic beasts, and the monsters. In the long history of this continent, the number of people who have met such an unfortunate death is so large as to be uncountable. Is the god that I serve… really so omnipotent that he has enough light to brighten the darkness of all those souls who have died?
—Is a Saint like you really doubting your god?
—Yep. I am doubting him. Yet the almighty god whom I serve hasn’t said anything, let alone punish me for my doubts.
~
The place where they had held such a conversation was in the middle of a battlefield filled with corpses. It was after they had blocked the advance of that savage bastard, Kamash, the chieftain of the giants. Countless human corpses and giant corpses alike covered the battlefield.
Molon had done his best to protect the common soldiers. While raining down light, Anise had cared for the wounded. Sienna’s spells had driven the giants away from the soldiers, while Hamel and Vermouth had defeated Kamash.
Nevertheless, allied casualties were unavoidable.
A large army of demonic beasts had accompanied the giants. Powerful demonfolk had been mixed in here and there. Where they had gotten mixed up in the battle, thousands of people had been killed or wounded. The priests of the Holy Empire who had been sent as support and the doctors scrounged up from all over the place had taken care of the wounded, but those dying had still died. This was unavoidable.
~
—If god truly is all-powerful, shouldn’t he be the one shedding blood in the place of the blood shed by his young lambs?
—Anise.
—If he really is the light that illuminates all darkness, why doesn’t he personally illuminate this suffocating darkness?
—Hey.
—Even at this very moment, when the world has been plunged into a deep darkness. Right now it’s night. The dawn that will be coming soon will not illuminate those who have taken their last breaths in this pitch darkness. The only things that will be illuminated by the dawn… are corpses. Hamel. Do you know how many people died here today? And it isn’t just here. Everywhere in the world. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Countless people have died in the dark, and even in places illuminated by the light, they have died and will continue to die.
—You’re drunk.
—I truly do want to believe in my god. However I can’t fully understand his will. No matter how beautiful the heaven that we will reach after death must be, the world is still so miserable. Why doesn’t god shine his light down on the world?
—...We have Vermouth.
This was what Hamel had said at that time.
—I… I don’t know what the doctrine of the god of light is. But, I do know that bastard Vermouth is an unspeakable monster. Haven’t you said it several times now? That Vermouth is a miracle sent by god.
—....
—Since god can’t come down here to take care of the world himself, he proved his existence by sending us a living miracle in the form of Vermouth. That’s why he’s the hero, and why the Holy Sword recognized him as its master. Isn’t that right?
—...I never thought that I’d hear those kinds of words from you.
—I also don’t want to say this sort of stuff either. However, it’s just as annoying to listen to your drunken ramblings. Now, I don’t think that you were really asking me to comfort you, since I’m not the type of guy who people turn to for comfort.
Therefore, Hamel just tried to be as honest as he could.
—Just think about it this way. What’s the use of getting angry at a god who doesn’t give you any answers? All we need to do is kill all of the Demon Kings and save the world. If we succeed, then everything after that… will turn out okay. All the souls captured by the demonfolk will be saved and rise up to heaven, and the world will be a peaceful and happy place.
Hamel had just said whatever came to mind. He wasn’t sure if he had managed to convince Anise. However, in Hamel’s view, he just wanted to offer her a clear purpose as an alternative to resenting a heaven that might not exist or a god that she could no longer have faith in.
—...Will we really be able to do that?
—We can do it. We have Vermouth… and we also have a saint like you. There’s Sienna, Molon, and me as well. We’re strong, strong enough to kill all of the Demon Kings and save the world.
Even if it was vague, she needed hope.
—So that’s why you should stop talking about such pointless things and let me have a drink. Don’t just guzzle it all down by yourself.
—This isn’t alcohol, it’s holy water. I can’t give it to someone like you who lacks faith.
—I’ll also become a believer in the god of light from today onwards, so give it here.
—False faith is a heavier crime than any other sin. As someone who has been called a saint, I cannot offer any grace to one who has false beliefs.
In the end, Anise didn’t give him even a single drop of alcohol that day.
That snake-like woman. That was what Hamel and Sienna had used to call Anise.
Anise had a bad temper that didn’t fit her image as the saint, and although she was faithful, she also had a tendency to casually break the doctrinal rules. Nevertheless, when necessary, she was faithful enough to be called a saint, and her divine magic shone more brilliantly than any other priest.
She also secretly — no — in fact, Anise had a blatant habit of messing with people. Apart from Vermouth, everyone had suffered at her hands more than once.
When Molon, who always kept running ahead of the party, had had his legs cut off, Anise had once swapped the two limbs while reattaching them in order to try and fix Molon’s bad habit.
Among the many priests in existence, only Anise was capable of performing the miracle of reattaching severed body parts. She had hoped that this prank would change Molon’s habit of running ahead, but it had turned out that Molon was able to run very well even with his legs on the wrong sides.
—Attach this bastard’s legs properly!
—To do that, we need to cut off Molon’s legs once more.
—I… I’m fine with my legs like this. I can still run very well, and I can also fight well.
—Don’t spout such nonsense. Whenever you occasionally stumble, I’m the one who gets hit instead. Get over here, I’ll cut them off in one blow.
—Don’t wanna….
—Sienna! Put this bastard to sleep!
Eventually, Sienna’s powerful sleeping spell had been able to put Molon to sleep, during which Hamel had cut off Molon’s legs.
“What a nasty bitch.”
Although it wasn’t as bad as that, Hamel had also been pranked by Anise a few times. He had once conspired with Sienna to steal Anise’s holy water and drink it all by themselves; in retaliation, Anise had waited until it was her turn to cook, and after they were done eating, she had laughed and told them that Sienna and Hamel’s stew had been boiled using monster urine.
If Molon hadn’t stepped in to stop them, Sienna, Hamel, and Anise would really have fought until one of them died.
As he recalled that time, Eugene smiled bitterly.
Holy Land of Light, Hogani.
Outside the city, there was a statue of Anise kneeling down and praying. The statue’s face was almost covered by a large hood, and it didn’t bear a lot of resemblance to the appearance of Anise that Eugene remembered.
That said, it did have a sacred feeling to it. Even Eugene, who wasn’t a believer in the god of light, felt a sacred aura from the statue, so true followers of the light must have been overwhelmed by it.
Around the statue, there were of course believers from Yuras, but members of the church of light in countries all over the place had found their way here to kneel and pray. Eugene glanced over them as he spun around.
It had been a week since he first arrived in Hogani.
Eugene hadn’t been able to find anything here. He had thought that Anise might have perhaps left a clue here, but he hadn’t been able to spot anything like that.
It was just like in Aroth. Exactly like how the wizards of Aroth felt about Sienna, the believers from Yuras also desperately wanted to find Anise. If the two had indeed left something behind, then someone should have discovered it already.
‘I had hoped that their clues might appear in response to my soul.’
But nothing like that had happened.
That statue was located at the site where Anise had offered a prayer hundreds of years ago before leaving for the other side of the desert.
The records of Anise’s journey ended here. Following that, Yuras had dispatched several missions to pursue Anise’s trail, but in the end, Anise was never found.
‘Why was she in Nahama of all places?’ Eugene wondered.
He could make a vague guess regarding this.
In the present, with the development of magic, warp gates had been installed in every country, but this wasn’t the case hundreds of years ago. If you were to take a ship across the ocean from Yuras, you would arrive at the port city located to the north of Hogani.
From there, she had started her ‘pilgrimage’. Anise was… probably…
‘She probably came here to pay her respects at my grave.’
Sienna’s seclusion and Anise’s pilgrimage, these two events didn’t overlap completely.
Sienna had gone into seclusion a few years earlier; afterward, Anise—who was revered as a saint in Yuras—had embarked on a pilgrimage.
Eugene recalled, ‘My grave was sealed up.’
His grave had only been rediscovered six years ago.
It had probably been revealed shortly after he had found Hamel’s necklace in the Lionheart treasure vault. In response to this discovery, the ‘seal’ on his grave must have disappeared.
‘Anise couldn’t have entered my grave.’
If she had managed to enter, Anise wouldn’t have left it looking like such a ruin.
As he stared at Anise’s statue, a bitter feeling washed over Eugene.
‘...Vermouth.’
The man had faked his own funeral, survived his supposed death, and then broken into Hamel’s tomb. There, he had gotten into a fight with Sienna. Vermouth had managed to defeat her, then he had sealed both the Moonlight Sword and the grave.
This had all happened two hundred years in the past.
Anise… a picture of her wandering the desert was drawn in Eugene’s mind. As she had wandered in search of his undiscoverable grave, what on earth could Anise have been thinking?
‘Could Vermouth also be involved in Anise’s disappearance?’
Eugene couldn’t know this for sure, as Anise hadn’t left any clues behind. At least for now, the only one who had left a clear clue to their current location was Sienna. Eugene’s focus drifted briefly to leaves of the World Tree that were stored inside his cloak.
“My Lord,” Laman, who had been quietly standing next to Eugene, spoke up with a cautious expression. “Have you changed your mind?”
“...No,” Eugene said, shaking his head.
Before they left the city, he had just wanted to look at the statue one last time. He hadn’t been able to find any clues, and Eugene didn’t have the confidence to go searching for any clues that may have been left in this vast desert two hundred years ago.
That being said, he couldn’t head over to Molon’s kingdom either. The Demon King of Incarceration knew that Eugene was the reincarnation of Hamel. Since he had even received a warning from the Demon King, heading north to a country that bordered Helmuth was far too dangerous.
‘For now, that is.’
His strength was insufficient.
Eugene keenly felt this truth. Ever since he had been reincarnated, he had never been so desperate for power, but now he craved it.
He had almost been killed by a Death Knight in an imperfect state.
He had also almost died at the hands of Amelia Merwin.
Even when the Demon King of Incarceration was in front of him, Eugene hadn’t been able to charge in to try and kill him.
Eugene confirmed, “We’re heading back to Kiehl.”
It had been two years since he had left the Lionheart clan’s main estate.
It was time to go home.
* * *
Kiehl Empire’s Capital City, Ceres
The whole of the large forest outside the capital was part of the Lionheart estate, and it was also the only place in the capital where a warp gate had been installed within an estate.
Cyan Lionheart was standing with his arms crossed in front of the warp gate. He, who would soon be turning into an adult on his twentieth birthday, was almost certain to become the Lionheart clan’s next Patriarch.
However, Cyan couldn’t accept this fact, nor could he enjoy it.
This was because of Eugene, who would be returning soon.
‘...That son of a bitch,’ Cyan cursed to himself.
Cyan couldn’t help but feel complicated. Was he supposed to feel happy or sad about meeting with this sibling, who shared not one drop of blood with him, who was returning after two whole years?
Apart from that, there were a few other factors.
After the main wife, Tanis, and the eldest son, Eward, had departed from the main estate, Ancilla had taken full control of the estate’s servants. As her son, Cyan had been at the forefront of these efforts.
In these two years without Eugene, Cyan had spent every day fruitfully. He had not neglected his daily training, and he had even sparred regularly with his father. Along with his mother’s intense training on how to be the perfect successor, Cyan had also kept up his practice with the White Flame Formula. He had hung out with the younger knights, and while bowing his head to the knights who had been serving the main family for a long time, he politely asked for their assistance.
At first, Cyan had hated this strict schedule, but he had gradually come to accept it.
Cyan wanted to become the Patriarch.
It was something that his mother had always talked to him about when he was young, and Cyan himself was desirous of the Patriarchal seat. Now that Eward had been disqualified, Cyan’s succession as the next Patriarch was almost guaranteed.
Fortunately, there was no rivalry with his twin sister, Ciel. Ciel had given up her right of succession because she wanted to become a member of the Knights of the Black LIon.
If only Eugene wasn’t there, Cyan becoming the next Patriarch would have been a certainty.
“Damn it,” Cyan cursed.
Cyan hated being seen like that, and he also hated it when his thoughts turned to that. If it was against that fool Eward, he might not care, but Cyan couldn’t bear to compete with Eugene.
Against Eugene, Cyan felt both a competitive rivalry and a sense of looming defeat.
Even though they hadn’t met yet, Cyan was already thinking about his own ‘defeat’. Cyan was annoyed at this side of himself, and he hated how thoughts of Eugene would ‘grate’ on him.
Eugene Lionheart, that guy was a son of a bitch. After he had been adopted six years ago, Cyan had suffered under the hands of Eugene every day. They were beatings disguised as sparring. Contrary to the merciless beating that he had suffered, Cyan had never managed to defeat Eugene even once.
“Cyan,” Ancilla, who had been watching her son’s expression stiffen, spoke up. “You don’t seem to be happy that your brother is returning.”
“...I’d be happy to see him return, but I’d be just as happy if he didn’t,” Cyan admitted.
“Cyan.”
“If he says that he wants to become the Patriarch, I will probably step aside for him,” Cyan said as he shook his head with a deep sigh. “Because he’s more suited to becoming the Patriarch then I am.”
“...According to Ciel, that child, Eugene, has said that he doesn’t want to become the Patriarch,” Ancilla reminded him.
“That was two years ago. He may have changed his mind since then,” Cyan argued pessimistically.
“As long as you don’t step aside for him, there is no way that Eugene will become the next Patriarch.”
“But would that be the right decision for the Lionheart clan?”
“Cyan, you need to have a firm resolve.”
“The Patriarch of the Lionheart clan must be the strongest heir in the main family.”
“You may have been weaker than Eugene two years ago, but now….”
“That bastard has to have sweated just as much as I did,” Cyan ground his teeth together as he glared at the warp gate. “...Mother, I don't believe that blood should be thicker than sweat. If Eugene is stronger than me and wants to become the Patriarch, then I… just what should I do?”
“See, you still want to become the next Patriarch,” Ancilla noticed his hesitancy, but she couldn’t just dismiss her son’s words as immaturity.
She truly wanted her son, who had inherited the blood of a great hero, to stand tall and become the next Patriarch of the Lionheart clan.
But instead of pressuring him, Ancilla said, “...You are no longer a child. As such, you need to make this decision yourself. If you want to become the Patriarch, then you can just become the Patriarch. And if you want to step aside… then you can just step aside.”
“...But that’s not what mother wants for me,” Cyan noted with surprise.
“It seems that I have raised you overly strictly,” Ancilla said with a sigh as she patted Cyan on the shoulder. “I… I don’t want to become like Tanis. By that, I mean that I don’t want to ruin my child with my own excessive ambition.”
“...I’m different from Eward,” Cyan insisted.
“That’s right, you are different,” Ancilla agreed. “So you should do what you feel is right. As for me… no matter what you choose, I’ll be proud of you for doing the right thing. I want to respect your will.”
Would she really be able to do that?
Although she had said this sort of thing, Ancilla felt like she should question herself. Ever since she had become the second wife of the Lionheart’s direct line, she had wanted to make her son into the next Patriarch. If it hadn’t been for the incident with Tanis and Eward… she might have been enraged by her son’s uncertain words. She wouldn’t have been able to hold herself back as she had done just now.
Was it because she had seen how a mother’s presumptuous meddling and stubbornness could ruin her son?
“...Cyan, my boy, just keep this in mind. Just as you have your own thoughts and desires, Eugene will also have his own thoughts and desires,” Ancilla reminded him.
“...,” Cyan listened silently.
“You have no idea what your brother desires. Who could have guessed that Ciel would truly become a Black Lion? Neither I, Ciel’s mother, nor you, Ciel’s twin, knew about Ciel’s desires.”
“...My brother.”
“That’s right. Eugene is your brother. Even though you don’t share any blood, you two are still siblings. That’s why the two of you should meet and talk with each other before deciding anything. The Patriarch’s successor… it won’t be too late to decide who that will be after you’ve had a conversation.”
“...Yes,” Cyan slowly nodded his head.
It felt like he was slightly more at ease.
‘Let’s just see how much stronger you’ve gotten.’
The warp gate began to glow.
Cyan sharpened his gaze and waited for Eugene to step out of the warp gate.