Kaito took a step inside the Treasury. Rectangular steps floated in the gloom at fixed intervals, forming a gentle spiral. When he peered down from the edge, nothing but the steps were visible. A tepid wind simply blew upward. Kaito nodded once and then leaped down onto the second step.
“Here we go.”
The stairs had no handrails, but Kaito took wide, unfaltering strides down them. After a short while, rubbish and torture devices began coming into view around him.
“…Somewhere around here maybe?”
Kaito stopped and then began looking for something. The thing that he was looking for was something that didn’t get used incessantly but not too infrequently, either. Elisabeth had probably tossed it in the Treasury’s upper levels.
Eventually, Kaito spotted his target at the feet of a bloody, rusty Iron Maiden.
It was an orb made of thin paper, a magical device that the Church had used to contact Elisabeth when they were ordering her to carry out the Kaiser’s subjugation.
“There we go. Now, as for turning it on… Although even if I can, there’s no guarantee it’ll connect…”
Kaito nervously set it atop his bloodstained palm. Blood soaked into it, turning the paper crimson. However, it suddenly made a noise and then returned to its original shade of white.
The blood had vanished, pigment and all.
The orb then began emitting a pale-blue light, as though it had used the vanished blood as a power source.
It then floated in the air, shining as it began rotating. Eventually, a figure appeared on the orb’s surface.
Having won the first of his gambles, Kaito clenched his fist. The transmission had connected with someone. The next problem was where and who it was connected to. Kaito tried to make out who the figure was. However, the image was blurred, as though covered in a layer of fog, and it was difficult to even make out their features.
Kaito frantically strained his eyes, knowing that if he could at least make out the front of their neck, he’d probably be able to tell if they were a member of the Church or not. While he was doing that, the figure suddenly spoke curtly.
Kaito recognized that overly characteristic voice.
“…What business do you have, Elisabeth?”
“Godd Deos… For real? Damn, looks like I pulled a winner.”
Kaito mumbled in amazement. It looked like he’d successfully contacted the person he’d expected to.
Godd Deos was a head executive of the Church and the person solely responsible for dealing with Elisabeth. Kaito doubted that he was the kind of person who one could just randomly get ahold of. It appeared that his hypothesis—that the orb was a special piece of magical communication equipment, a rare item with a direct link to Godd Deos—had been correct.
Godd Deos was also the person who’d passed down the order to believe in Elisabeth’s vow not to form a contract with a demon, promising that in the unlikely event that she did, he would offer up his own life to seal her away. He was quite possibly the best person to make an appeal to regarding Elisabeth’s poor condition. However, he was also the person who’d ordered her to defeat the Kaiser, telling her to do some good for the world before she died.
Kaito braced himself. However, before he could talk, Godd Deos spoke in his usual calm, doubtful voice.
“That voice isn’t Elisabeth’s. Who are you?”
“I’m Elisabeth’s servant, Kaito. Kaito Sena.”
“Ah, the ‘Good Soul’ Elisabeth summoned from another world. What business do you have with me? Did you get Elisabeth’s permission before using my precious orb?”
“Godd Deos, Elisabeth is in critical condition right now. Please hear me out. Her death would cause problems for you guys, too, right?”
“Give me details.”
Godd Deos’s response to Kaito was to the point. He then closed his mouth.
Kaito took a deep breath. It appeared that he didn’t need to worry about being immediately hung up on. He’d cleared the first hurdle. The rest was all up to his explanation.
He wet his tongue and then began rapidly thinking and talking.
“First of all, the Kaiser’s death set the Grand King into motion. By using up the hearts of the other demons, she can cast Sacrifice…and with it, she sealed away Elisabeth’s power.”
Stumbling over his words, Kaito somehow finished his explanation, up through the back-and-forth battle at the port town and the Grand King’s declaration. He should have been able to properly convey Elisabeth’s poor state. He finished with an entreaty.
“At this rate, the Grand King is going to kill Elisabeth. At best, they’ll take each other out. You guys over at the Church have to do—”
“I see. That’s more or less how we perceived the situation from our end.”
“…Say what?”
Unable to parse the information he’d just been given, Kaito let out a dumb exclamation. Godd Deos offered no reaction to his display of impoliteness.
You mean…the Church already knew?
Finally, Kaito understood what that meant. He flared up at the silent orb.
“What are you talking about?! Elisabeth’s about to get killed! If the Torture Princess dies, that’s a problem for you Church guys up in your spectator seats, right?! If you already knew all that, then why—?”
“If the Church were to send every paladin in their employ to reinforce the defenses at Elisabeth’s castle, there is a possibility that they could turn around her situation. However, doing so would amount to throwing away the defense of the capital and all our major cities.”
“Say what?”
Kaito let out another dumb exclamation. Godd Deos spoke in a tone without sentiment, a tone far removed from anything so imprecise as sentiment.
“The capital accounts for three-tenths of our total population and is the center of our economic and political systems. If it were attacked, humanity would find itself in quite the predicament. The Grand King is no fool. If we deployed our paladins, she would strike in their absence. And a few reinforcements would amount to nothing more than a drop in the bucket. After all, there’s no guarantee we could defeat her, even if we were to deploy our entire forces. And what about transporting Elisabeth to the well-defended capital, you might ask? There was great backlash to even leaving her alive. At worst, she could be taken to the stake on the spot.”
“That’s—”
“In short, we have no cards to play. Losing Elisabeth is regrettable, but at the moment our best option for victory is to have her fight the Grand King. With no risk of dragging others down with her, the Torture Princess should be able to go into the fight prepared to conclude it in mutual defeat. Afterward, we plan to attack the Grand King in her weakened state. The worst-case scenario would be deploying all our paladins and then having them wiped out along with the Torture Princess and losing all our defense. That is a gamble we are not prepared to make.”
“All that option amounts to is buying yourselves a little extra time. Or are you saying that you guys can take on the rest of the demons?”
“We likely won’t be able to destroy them. However, with the Kaiser gone, we should be able to fortify the capital and major cities to the point where they can stave off invasion. Many in the outlying regions will die, but humanity won’t perish. After that, we’ll likely enter a long period of equilibrium with the demons. During that time, we plan to search for options.”
“…But you’re just going to throw her away? You’ve made her fight all this time. Now you’re saying that you don’t care if she dies?”
“We are not throwing her away. We simply have no cards to play. And don’t forget, servant. While she is an effective tool, she is also a sinner. In the end, she will be executed without fail. It’s no different if she dies now—either way, her death will be ghastly.”
Godd Deos laid out the truth dispassionately. He spoke mechanically on the nature of Elisabeth’s offences.
“That woman has left far too many corpses in her wake. The
slaughtered masses will not permit compassion, and the butchered knights will not approve of amnesty. No matter how many good deeds she piles up, the numbers of the dead will never shrink. In following, the fact that she is a sinner is the reason that we unsparingly whip her like a bound dog.”
Kaito clenched his fists. A kind of truth lurked with Godd Deos’s cold words.
The reason the Church was making Elisabeth pile up good deeds was not to commute her sentence but likely to save her soul after she died. No atonement she could make would reach the dead. The sentence for the crimes she’d committed in life had already been handed down.
Furthermore, it made complete sense for the Church to prioritize the safety of the people over that of the Torture Princess. Leaving the capital exposed for her sake would be like sacrificing one’s king in chess to protect their queen. In spite of that, though, anger bubbled up in Kaito’s chest.
He wrung a dry, composed voice out of his throat.
“So basically, it’s all your guys’ fault for being weak, right?”
“…Excuse me?”
“You guys, who didn’t pay a dime, who sacrificed nothing, are casting stones at someone who pulled a sword out from a mountain of corpses. You commit no crimes, and you don’t falter for an instant. And that amounts to jack shit. You’re doing jack shit, after all. But you still see fit to hand out your lofty opinions. Still, you call others sinners.”
“Servant.”
“If you guys had just been stronger, the Torture Princess wouldn’t have even been born, would she?”
Kaito ripped into one of the Church’s chief executives. He didn’t know why the Torture Princess had chosen to fight. She’d never once said. He didn’t know if that interpretation was right. But he would spit on anyone who ignored that possibility and cast stones at her.
After a few seconds’ silence, Godd Deos surprisingly affirmed the rebuke in his unchanging tone.
“Indeed, our powerlessness is a sin.”
“If you agree, then—”
“However, servant. At this point, it is impossible for us to muster enough power to be of support to Elisabeth. And the fact remains that the Torture Princess is a person who deserves to be reviled. As the representatives of the masses, we cannot pardon her of her crimes. Elisabeth Le Fanu pulled a sword out from a mountain of corpses. We are the representatives of those corpses. Just as you stand by the side of the Torture Princess, we stand with the long ranks of the deceased and their bereaved.”
Kaito stared silently up at the orb. He couldn’t make out the eyes or nose of the figure within, but he felt a gaze back from it.
Godd Deos was staring directly at Kaito, without a shred of shame.
“She trampled corpses, drank their blood, and obtained power. Do you think that we can praise anything built with that power? No matter what reason she may have had, evil is evil. Without judgment, the world’s order will be thrown into disarray. That is the kind of thing she became. And she knew that.”
“Elisabeth…”
“I ask you again, servant. Did you receive her permission to use my precious orb?”
This time, Kaito glued his mouth shut. An awkward, heavy silence fell. Then Kaito curtly responded.
“No. I didn’t get permission.”
“I suspected as much…fool. However, as a friend of her father’s, it brings me joy to know that she has a servant who worries for her. For her to have obtained a companion such as yourself at the end of her bloody path… Surely, she too is the recipient of God’s grace.”
“…God’s, huh?”
Murmuring softly, a deep frown stretched across Kaito’s face. He began pondering something. The orb was probably designed primarily to transmit sound, and as such, Godd Deos most likely couldn’t see his expression. Even so, when he continued speaking, his voice contained a surprising degree of sincerity for someone talking to a servant of the Torture Princess and a boy who was the target of an inquisition.
“As Elisabeth is one of God’s children, we sincerely hope that she overcomes the trials placed before her and that the good deeds she commits allow her soul to find salvation in the afterlife.”
“…God, huh?”
Again, Kaito responded with that word alone. Suddenly, all his tension drained away. As a matter of fact, his entire body relaxed, and he sat down upon the stairs. Dangling his legs off the stair’s edge, he gazed absentmindedly off into the gloom in a pose that made it look like he was relaxing.
Out of nowhere, his eyes flashed with the innocent light of a young boy.
Abruptly, Kaito began talking about something completely unrelated.
“You know, I don’t think heroes exist.”
“Heroes? I don’t quite follow.”
Godd Deos’s response was one of confusion, which was perfectly reasonable. Kaito laughed foolishly at him. With distant eyes, he looked off at somewhere other than where he was.
“You know, like crusaders or champions. At first, I wanted someone like that to save me. But before long, I stopped thinking that anything like that existed in this world. There’s nobody who unconditionally protects the weak, who saves others, who puts an end to injustices or brings about righteousness. If there was, then there wouldn’t be people like me who get beaten up and eventually killed off, would there? And you know…”
“—”
“…that sounds a whole lot like God.”
Kaito spoke quietly and bluntly. Godd Deos’s reply was a beat late.
As one of the heads of the Church, it was a declaration that he could have denied, even if he had to lie. The argument was crude, certainly not something that could be used to cast suspicion on long-standing religious doctrine. Perhaps the reason Godd Deos’s response was delayed was because Kaito’s voice had the awkward, pure tenor of a child’s to it.
With the voice of a child asking if God exists, Kaito talked about how he didn’t.
“I guess He doesn’t exist, after all.”
“God is one who offers prayers, one who saves—”
“No, your doctrine’s all well and good. But I’m talking about me here.”
As he spoke, Kaito’s energy returned, and he rose to his feet.
He looked as though he’d forgotten something. He stuck his hand in his trouser pocket and then heaved a heavy sigh.
“I’m sure there are places where God and heroes exist. But what I’m saying is, they don’t exist where I am. I’m saying that they weren’t there for me… But your explanation made sense to me.”
“It certainly doesn’t sound like it did.”
“Nah, I can see that I was being a dumb-ass. If someone were to ask if the Torture Princess was good or evil, then obviously the answer would be evil. It was crazy to ask the allies of her victims to come and save her. If I were on the side of her victims, then I’d be cheering from the rooftops to work her to the bone and then put her to the stake. Which means that this doesn’t have anything to do with you guys. I’m the one she summoned, and this is really all just me being selfish, so it’s really my problem.”
“Servant…what do you mean to say?”
“What I’m trying to say is that person who saved me wasn’t God or a hero. It wasn’t faith, and it wasn’t you guys.”
Kaito looked up directly at the orb.
The things he was saying were little more than a joke. There was no meaning or logic behind them. Even so, he spoke his mind, the uncertainty and anguish in his expression gone.
“It was the Torture Princess—the most evil woman in the world.”
Once, a woman had forced a miracle onto a young boy who lived in a world without gods or heroes. She’d granted a second life to a person who’d been worked to the bone and known nothing but pain.
That had been—
It had been a pain in the ass, it had been awful—and it had been wonderful beyond compare.
“So I’m not going to rely on you guys, Godd Deos; I’m just going to do what I can. I’ve made up my mind.”
“Wait, what do you intend—?”
“I don’t have any regrets. So no matter what outcome awaits us, you guys should make sure that you don’t, either.”
Kaito raised his bloodstained hand. A spear of ice shot out of his palm. With a sharp sound, it pierced through the orb. The call cut off.
Kaito stuck his hand back in his pocket. He breathed in deep and then exhaled.
Then he tightly grasped the stone, which was emitting heat from within its cloth confines.
Kaito ascended the gentle slope of the Treasury’s stairs. The higher he went, the more the gloom cleared up. Light shone down from the rectangular entrance at the top.
As he followed the light with his eyes, he saw Hina standing beside the hole.
Her face was strained with tension, and she was looking down into the gloom.
“Hey there, Hina.”
“Master Kaito…”
As she noticed Kaito and their eyes met, her beautiful face relaxed and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Kaito, having finished climbing the stairs, stood in the throne room.
At some point, the sky outside had taken on the hue of twilight. It appeared that the thick clouds had drifted away in the wind as though swimming through the sea. The room was filled with golden light.
The massive, delicate tapestries decorating the walls were also lit by splashes of light, and Hina’s silver hair shone even more beautifully. Facing her, Kaito spoke.
“Sorry for running off on you like that. How are Elisabeth and the Butcher?”
“Lady Elisabeth is sleeping at present. As for Mr. Butcher, he said that due to the late hour, he plans on leaving after having dinner. Until then, he plans on watching over Elisabeth, which is why I came here.”
“Still sticking around after all that… I can’t say I’m not grateful, but damn, that guy’s got nerves of steel.”
Kaito spoke with a voice full of admiration, although the fact that his mental image of the Butcher was giving him a big thumbs-up irritated him somehow. Then he realized that his hand, which was sticking halfway out of his pocket, was drenched in blood. His butler uniform was covered in dark-red stains.
Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen, Vol. 2 Page 13