IBTRFL Chapter 21

Why had she staged her death?

The answer already existed inside her. But it wasn't something she could say aloud.

Not yet—but a collision with the Cult of Extinction was a scheduled future. Ahead of anyone else, she would kill the cult's faithful, burn its headquarters, and wreck its plans. And when the cult's enraged blade came looking for the one responsible, it had to find only her.

The cult was tenacious and cruel. Anyone who stood in its way, and everything connected to that person, would be annihilated.

That was one of the reasons Aer had to disappear forever, using death as her instrument.

She wanted to protect the orphanage—which had become a precious place now—and the peaceful days of the man she thought of as a father.

Even if, someday, they too would be swept up in the fires of war regardless.

That was the duty of someone who had returned.

Her fingertips had gone cold. Aer rubbed her hands against her thighs and spoke, low.

"I told you I was a mercenary."

"You did."

"After you came, things changed, but the orphanage as it was—that was hell. Beaten every day, starved, made to beg, made to work. In the end I got dragged off to the Bishop's operation and nearly died more than once, rolling around with chaos beasts."

The fists resting neatly on her knees trembled.

She still couldn't forget it. The scream of the child whose arm had been eaten by an escaped beast. And the administrators of that place, dragging the child along afterward.

After that day she'd endured hellish time after hellish time, vowing revenge. She'd escaped, prepared to die, and told the world what had happened there, and everything had ended—in a way that left a bad taste in her mouth, but ended.

Left alone, Aer had been thrown naked into a freezing world.

"Gotta eat somehow. So I picked up a sword. Nothing else to it."

"….."

"You know how a sixteen-year-old survives in a place that rough? Figured it was just me—that was it. That if I died there, there wasn't a single person who'd bury my body, not one person waiting to see me off on the road to the next world."

Her violet eyes flashed, sharpened with something like malice.

Overwhelmed for a moment, Valor's shoulders gave a small shudder. The look she'd never shown him before resembled the gleam of an old, seasoned beast of prey.

What kind of life did you live? The question he couldn't bring himself to ask circled beneath his tongue.

Aer leaned forward, bracing both hands on the ground. Her eyes, which had been glinting with killing intent, had settled into something a little more subdued, a little more sorrowful.

"I know it's hard to understand, but that's how I survived. All I knew was how to live alone, how to hold on alone."

"….."

"I didn't want to leave anything behind me. Because if I had somewhere to come back to, if I had someone waiting for me, I thought I'd get weak. Yeah, I know it's selfish. But that's how mercenary Aer lived. Sorry for scaring you."

Aer mocked herself.

Another reason she'd had to die. Happiness and peace made her weak.

Values that weren't permitted to the mercenary Aer. She'd found herself falling into them, and had torn them away from herself by the cruelest method she had.

Because that was the only way she could keep going. That was the only way she could know her own place.

Aer erased the look on her face that seemed about to cry, and pulled the corners of her mouth up with effort.

"And on top of that, if I said I ran away, you'd have caught—"

Aer's eyes went wide.

A warm, wide embrace wrapped around her. Valor's hand patted her back, gently.

"You've been through hell."

She wanted to answer with something teasing, but the words wouldn't come.

The first reason was that it was the same thing Valor had said to her once before, hearing the story of her life. The second was that the hand comforting her now, telling her not to cry even as she died, was the same as it had been then.

This man hasn't changed a bit.

Her eyes stung and burned, going red at the rims. Aer clenched her teeth hard against tears even as she hugged Valor back.

"I hope you're not carrying too much."

"…..How could I not. If I want to live, I have to struggle."

"Then at least let me carry some of it with you."

"It's fine, there's no need for both of us to suffer together."

Aer pulled out of Valor's arms and scrubbed roughly at her eyes.

Valor knelt on one knee and watched her quietly. The child who had come back from the end of a life was still, after everything, so very young. Regardless of the time she'd endured to get here.

Aer glanced sideways at Valor and asked, carefully.

"You're not going to stop me, are you?"

"…..If I stopped you, would you stay?"

"No. I'm going. No matter what."

Her violet eyes shone with firm resolve.

Valor knew it already. A river gives beasts water to drink, makes the fields rich, lets people live.

Dam that same river and it festers, rots. It blocks the way forward for everyone, the river included.

So he had to trust the river, and simply let it flow.

Valor tilted his chin down slightly as he spoke. His warm brown eyes carried a trace of mischief.

"However I look at it, this doesn't seem like it's balancing out for me."

"…..What doesn't?"

"Let's call it even—the astrology story, for letting you go."

"Hey, that's not fair at all!"

Aer leapt up, shouting.

Valor chuckled and pulled something out from inside his robe, holding it out. A crude leather pouch, wrapped in a strange, radiant holiness.

Aer wrinkled her nose and asked.

"What is this?"

"A holy relic."

"…..Excuse me?"

Aer leapt this time for an entirely different reason.

A holy relic. A rare treasure imbued directly with the goddess's power, holding within it several forms of immense strength.

Wasn't there a strict law that no one but the clergy could possess one?

Aer stared at Valor as though looking at something grotesque. The Pope's own Inspector-General, having just broken one of the Church's gravest laws, spoke with a perfectly unbothered face.

"What."

"No, I mean—is it okay to just give something like this away?"

"I'm the one who received it, so it's my business. I'll take responsibility too. Ah, right. Take this as well."

Valor pulled the ring off his finger and tossed it over. Aer caught it, more out of reflex than intention.

"With just that, you shouldn't have any trouble passing through. Most of them are rotten to the core, so it probably won't help much, but if there's a bishop with his head screwed on straight somewhere, you might be able to ask him for help."

"….."

"Just so we're clear—I'm not giving this to you. Lending it."

"…..Got it."

Aer fussed with the corners of her mouth as they crept upward. Valor, smiling contentedly, sat himself down on the ground.

"Right, then. Get going now."

"You're sending me off just like that?"

"If you don't go now, I'll catch you."

"Got it!"

Aer scrambled to stuff the relic and the ring into her bag.

Sitting there placidly, Valor voiced a curiosity he'd been holding onto.

"Aer, before you came back—what was my future like?"

Aer, in the middle of shouldering her pack, answered breezily, as if to ask why he even needed to.

"You made cardinal. Bossed your underlings around, lived it up. Drank every single day too."

Valor let out a booming laugh.

"That so?"

"Yeah. I'm going now."

"All right. Travel safe. And make sure—make absolutely sure—you come back and return that."

Aer, wearing a strange little smile, waved and turned her back. Valor sat on the hillside and watched the retreating figure grow smaller.

Down a dark road that even adults feared, the child walked on, steady and unafraid.

"You lived a good life….. you little liar."

A star, appearing suddenly one day out of the darkness. A resilient violet star, shining clear and unmistakable even in the shadow of the gloomiest night.

He had believed that brilliance would go on. Even in an empty, silent sky he had never faced—where the stars had guttered out and even the moon had died—endlessly.

But the star had begun, before long, to fall. Its fierce color scattered away into nothing, and its once-clear light flickered as though it might go out at any moment.

A star—even its fall is beautiful, but a sky without a star is never beautiful.

Unable to simply watch, Valor had gone in search of the star's owner.

The place he arrived at, guided by the heavens. There, as if by fate, he had met a child. A brave child, guarding the last of her light even inside a cruel despair.

"…..So you really came back."

The quiet voice carried a bitterness it could not hide.

He had thought her the makings of a hero, and instead she had come back from the very end of death. He was grateful she had told him the secret, and at the same time a great weight of guilt pressed down on his heart.

The child had not told him everything. She had hidden, and hidden again.

What she had told him just now was only the barest fraction of the countless tragedies she'd lived through. It must have been a time too cruel, too sorrowful, to ever put into words.

Valor lowered his gaze.

He remembered the small tremor he'd felt beneath his hand. The child had whipped herself even as she thought it only fitting.

A mission too harsh and too heavy for one person alone to bear. And yet she would take it all on, and keep moving forward.

Valor lifted his head and looked up at the sky.

The star shines. The dazzling violet star.

It does not waver anymore. Upright and unbending, steadfast even in the vastness of despair.

Valor knelt reverently and prayed.

Merciful Goddess. Your humble servant beseeches you. Watch over the bravest of your lambs. Grant her the strength to press on, unbroken by any trial. And at the end of that road, grant her happiness beyond measure.