GRP Chapter 27

"Ah. Right." Garthe gave brief acknowledgment. "Forgot this was home."

Old memories surfaced.

More than a hundred years had passed, but the image of Paradise remained clear enough to trace. The god had been beautiful. She had soft, mild eyes, and her face wore the expression of a benevolent woman even as she smiled with the clear, sunny brightness of a child. But it was not by that beauty alone that she had ruled humans.

Every being on the continent was held to be a fragment of the divine—all of them once unified, in the distant past. So when people met someone they were drawn to with the pull of fate, they believed that person must be a shard of their own soul. The instinctive pull could not be explained otherwise, and the vague concept called love had been layered onto it.

Paradise possessed the power to make each individual believe that she herself was the other half of their soul. Impressive as it sounded, it was simply another kind of ability working on the mental register—fairly common in Heimdrykze.

But in those days, to humans, a god was elevated and great by its mere existence, needing to do nothing more. The faith that arose from fear and awe of the unknown—onto that, Paradise had added one more layer. With beauty and the power of fascination, she bored into each person's heart one by one and drew out love.

As a parent loves a child. As a child loves a parent. As lovers love. As friends love. Every form of love that existed in the world, blended together and turned toward herself. To see Paradise's smile, humans did not hesitate to remove their own hearts. They smiled in ecstasy even before death.

Garthe had been the only outsider among them. His divinity, not yet awakened, had protected his mind. What is special makes itself visible wherever it is buried. That Paradise had selected Garthe as a sacrifice had been the expected sequence.

"That such a glorious day has come!"

The moment Paradise's finger pointed to Garthe, his father wept with joy. A child is an extension of the parent. And so if the son became one with Paradise, he himself would also become one with her.

Whatever the facts were, the man had believed this, at least. After meeting Paradise, he had paid the boy no attention at all—but now he shoved him into the frozen lake water and scrubbed him down with rough, clumsy hands. 'Father, I'm cold. It hurts so much.' There was so much he had wanted to say, but his lips had frozen blue and his body was shaking too badly—Garthe couldn't manage a single word. He let out only faint groans as he was dragged to the altar.

Facing her exceptional offering, Paradise smiled with the fond delight of a child receiving a birthday gift. Garthe shook on the altar. The bitterly frozen stone stripped away the last scrap of warmth from his body in rapid order. His vision flickered. Cold was the immediate suffering before him—not fear.

'Cold.'

That was the only thought. Perhaps the particular circumstances of that moment were what had awakened the ability to wield fire. Divine power stirred at the threshold of death, and Garthe's flames pierced Paradise's heart. Paradise—who had always worn a beautiful smile—twisted her face grotesquely and screamed.

Garthe smiled faintly for the first time at the warmth that bloomed in his own hand. That was the extent of what people knew as 'the birth of the hero Garthe.' What came after had not been recorded. It was not an appropriate story for the birth of a hero.

The zealots' beloved, their friend, their parent, their eternal paradise—she had been burned to ruin by a scrawny child. They ran amok and rushed to kill the apostate. Among them was Garthe's father, who had been beside himself with anticipation at the prospect of being embraced by Paradise.

Facing thousands of hostile forces bearing down, Garthe ran. He killed some of those trying to kill him along the way. The number exceeded several hundred, but the zealots refused to abandon the chase. Without an unexpected stroke of luck, he never could have shaken them.

He left Olgidphaenn. Sometime later, he heard that the Great Disaster had struck the entire region, freezing everything solid. 'Heavenly judgment apparently does exist after all.' Working odd jobs for room and board in a small mercenary company, Garthe thought this briefly—and then forgot about it and lived on. There had been no time to think. Pain that seemed to gnaw through his nerves had begun to take over his entire body. The manifestation of the curse.

"Ah, beau-ti-ful, Par... a-dise...!"

The monsters' howling pulled Garthe out of his reverie. He surveyed the creatures before him once more.

These monsters had apparently fed on the humans who had been in Olgidphaenn at the time. A remarkable coincidence. Come home, and familiar faces are there to greet you. It was something his subordinates often said. Humans who returned to their homelands as heroes received unqualified support and devotion from those who remembered them—a sentiment practically all his subordinates held in common.

For Garthe, it did not apply. Every familiar face was dead. And even if they weren't, none of them would have been the sort to welcome him.

"Glo-o-rious, ah, beau-ti-ful god-dess—show us—that bri-il-liant, smi, smi-ile!"

And yet, here they were welcoming him after a fashion. Calling him beautiful, begging to see his brilliant smile—by its own logic, even a kind of unqualified devotion.

Contempt gathered at the corner of Garthe's mouth. He waited, watching. When he simply stood without moving, the monsters began tearing at the corpses of their own kind, strewn carelessly across the ground. The sound of hearts and chunks of flesh ripped out and gnawed filled the air.

The beautiful Paradise, who had once placed countless humans beneath her feet, and these monsters—what they did was not particularly different. Watching their behavior, revulsion settled in. Since when did he wait around for anyone's mealtime.

Heat began to rise around Garthe. The monsters were caught in black flames before they had a chance to flee. Acrid smoke stung his nostrils, and from within the writhing black fire came screams and laughter.

His head began to throb. Garthe dragged a hand across his face. From the moment he had left the fortress, the curse spreading from his heart had filled him to his fingertips, his toes, the crown of his skull—and had by now taken over his entire body.

The pain felt more agonizing than before. The reason was clear. The same principle by which the cold feels sharper when you step outside from warmth than when you have been standing in the cold all along.

"My... beau... ti-ful... God-dess—!"

When the pain was this strong, thought ran unconsciously. He knew the beautiful goddess they cried for was Paradise. Another's image formed in his mind regardless. Silver hair that shone like opal. Transparent pink eyes. A beautiful goddess. Mariaeks.

"My... on-ly... par-a-dise...!"

My only paradise.

"What happened in Jüllaphan?"—Samthyeon's polite way of saying Garthe's personality, never good on a normal day, was today particularly shit.

Being in pain from the curse was nothing new. And yet Samthyeon, who had known him for a long time, had specifically singled out today as unusually bad—so it must have been noticeably so.

Garthe wasn't unaware of the reason. The moment he reached the fortress, he had sensed Mariaeks's presence hidden behind the crowd. Even without seeing her, he had known she was there. The wind had carried her scent.

A forest blanketed in snow.

Before he had even identified what the scent was, his body had already loosened and eased. The same reaction his body showed when inhaling the smoke of the burned herbs. No—more deeply, more intensely imprinted than that. He had known Mariaeks for less than a week, and already he was this conditioned.

An irresistible force kept pulling at him. He found himself wanting to love her blindly, the way those humans of the past had luxuriated in Paradise's embrace. Because he knew how sweet a peace she brought.

For the first time in over a hundred years, Garthe could understand those zealots' hearts. But he also knew that an eternal paradise was nothing but a phantom—and what became of those who chased it.

He was no longer the child who had prayed to gods for mercy. He sought no salvation either. And so he had no need of gods.

"Mariaeks."

"...Out of nowhere?"

The answer to "what happened" had been "Mariaeks." Samthyeon's puzzlement lasted only a moment.

What had happened at the outer wall when Garthe returned flashed through Samthyeon's mind.

'Come to think of it, his condition had been off since he arrived...'

He had poured killing intent on Mariaeks without provocation, hadn't he. Samthyeon was watching Garthe with a peculiar look when Garthe opened his mouth again.

"Kill her?"

"...Out of nowhere."

The voice was as flat as always, but Samthyeon couldn't dismiss it as a joke. Something cold in those light words sent a chill through him.

"No." Samthyeon was quick to add: "We haven't learned nearly enough."

"Too late."

"She's been opening up, bit by bit. I'll move as fast as I can—wait."

"No. Too late."

Garthe laughed. Sharp and cold.

"I'll do it myself."

A body burned black flashed through Samthyeon's mind. It was the end of some criminal—but it was also what another "I'll do it myself" produced. The sight of everything in Garthe's wake reduced to ash was nothing unfamiliar, which was precisely what made the words land so heavily.

Samthyeon's face went white.