MHHC Chapter 160

Two Years Later

"My lady, Saint."

"The Saint of Reichenau has returned to us."

"God has not abandoned us after all……"

"Long live Ansgar!"

"Please, deliver us……"

An immeasurable tide of joy and supplication broke at her feet.

Adelheid rose unsteadily from where she had been kneeling, bewilderment written plainly across her face as she looked out at the people who had begun, without her permission, to believe in her.

Then her palm stung.

The wound torn open in the cave had begun to bleed again. She looked down at it.

'This is—'

Over the original wound, something new was being written: a dark crimson mark, etching itself into her skin as though always meant to be there.

A circle. A line piercing through its center. The symbol of Morig.

Whatever horror she felt at the sight of it was beside the point. The practical advantages a stigmata could offer were perfectly clear.

She could now act as a saint in truth. She would no longer need to conceal her abilities for fear of being burned as a witch.

'But who did this. Who.'

In that moment, she thought she heard laughter drifting from somewhere impossibly far away.

I did tell you, did I not. That I would give you a gift……

Two years later.

"We cannot hold any longer."

The interior of the command tent was as somber as a crypt, and nearly as dark. A handful of candles guttered against the gloom, casting unsteady light over the round table and the faces gathered around it—faces ground down by exhaustion and defeat into something harder and less forgiving than the people they had once been.

The man who had spoken first shook his head slowly as he continued.

"Allied forces have sustained over seventy percent casualties. Supplies and reinforcements have been insufficient for some time now. If we push any further, we will be annihilated to the last man."

"And so."

"We must abandon Bitzleben. Schleicher and Lingen at minimum—and the northern reaches of Ansgar as well."

The proposal detonated in the room like a cannon shot. Mostly, what followed were sharp-edged recriminations. Someone slammed a fist against the round table—bang—and cut across the noise with a fierce snarl.

"Impossible! Abandon Bitzleben? Even if we did as you say, there is nothing but open plain beyond the forest. No cover whatsoever. How in god's name would we hold against the monsters in terrain like that?"

"There is Ingrid's Wall."

The voices rose, swelling past each other in jagged, competing currents. Every man pressed his own argument with the sharpness of someone who believes, at his core, that he is already speaking to the dead.

"Absolute madness!"

"And what happens when Ingrid's Wall falls too?"

"So your proposal is that we stand here and wait to die together?"

"We won't die—not with the saint among us——"

"The saint first manifested the divine authority of Morig two years ago!"

The man who had first proposed abandoning Bitzleben raised his voice over the din, and the room suddenly fell quiet. Every gaze at the round table turned, in a single motion, toward Adelheid.

She had been sitting in her place without moving, without speaking. She kept her expression composed even as the weight of all those stares settled on her. The man's voice gathered confidence in the silence.

"Look at where we stand now. Can anyone here claim we have achieved anything of meaningful significance in recent months?"

"Are you suggesting the saint bears responsibility for the current state of this war? You—the man who got every soldier under his command killed?"

The speaker's face flooded red at the jab. He fumbled for the thread of his argument.

"I—naturally, no one here can deny that the saint has contributed to our overall fighting capability……"

A few people laughed—hollow, mirthless sounds that scraped the silence rather than filling it.

Since the divine power had first awakened within her, Saint Adelheid had ridden at the head of the knights, taking the vanguard in battle after battle, large and small alike.

She had called down fire from the sky. She had split the earth open with earthquakes. She had driven a blade charged with divine authority clean through the throats of monsters without hesitation or ceremony.

Such power could not be reduced to contributed to our fighting capability.

Had the monster forces not swelled in the explosive, almost incomprehensible numbers they had—had the enemy simply held still while she cut through them—the outcome of this war would have tipped toward humanity long ago. On the strength of Adelheid alone.

"I am not attempting to diminish what the saint has accomplished. But have we not all seen the evidence with our own eyes? It is impossible for a single person's power, however extraordinary, to hold back the full weight of the monsters pressing down on us."

"Then what is your point, exactly? That abandoning this fortification will somehow produce hope where none existed before?"

"Count, that is not what I——"

"It sounds remarkably like it. If you have nothing to offer but empty talk, kindly keep your mouth shut."

"We cannot even speak freely now? His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince sits there in silence, and yet we——"

"Right now——"

"Enough."

The voice that cut through the escalating argument belonged to Mikhail.

He was leaning back in his chair, head tilted at a slight angle, surveying the faces around the table with an expression of hollowed-out boredom—the kind of fatigue that has long since passed through anger and come out the other side into something colder. The young supreme commander spoke with unhurried precision.

"I understand the positions being argued. However. Do not forget that we have already retreated three times since abandoning Nassau Castle. If we are pushed back from this position as well, we may never set foot in the northern lands again."

Silence.

"I ask you plainly: knowing this—do you still wish to abandon this ground?"

"May I speak without restraint, Your Imperial Highness?"

The voice came from a knight who had been sitting quietly the entire time. Mikhail gave a nod, and the man rose from his seat. He looked slowly around the table before he spoke.

"The tide of this war has already turned against us beyond recovery. There are no more young men left to take up arms, and the farmlands are dying. The side that will lose this war is, unmistakably, humanity."

No one spoke.

"A week. Perhaps a month. With extraordinary luck—perhaps half a year. But the fall is a foregone conclusion. The only question is when."

This time, no one interrupted him.

Every person in this tent knew, in their bones, that the war was going badly. Catastrophically, irreversibly so. They simply had not yet found the courage—or the despair—to say it aloud at a table such as this. They were holding on because they had no other choice. Because they were, as they told themselves, the last bulwark of humanity.

"Making Ingrid's Wall our final line of defense. It is a pretty phrase and nothing else. Nothing but a hollow illusion. That wall will fall in time as well. The monsters are tunneling beneath it. They fly over it. The sky itself is no longer ours."

Silence.

"And yet—if you are asking whether I would rather retreat to Ingrid's Wall than die here: yes. I would. To speak with complete honesty, Your Imperial Highness—I no longer wish to waste the time I have left on a fight that has no meaning."

The knight sat back down. A terrible silence settled in behind him.

Every person in the room, to varying degrees, recognized what they had heard in his words. And felt, however bitterly, that he was right.

Beyond the barricade—boards nailed hastily together, crooked and crumbling, liable to collapse at any moment—the monsters pressed against each other in a solid, lightless mass that moved like black seawater flooding in through a breach. One glance was enough to feel the crushing disparity in force.

Without the saint's power, they would not have held even this long.

"I don't disagree, but……"

"The danger……"

One by one, voices began to murmur in reluctant agreement with the middle-aged knight's assessment.

Adelheid sat still, her eyes lowered, and waited for the meeting to end.

She felt someone's burning gaze on her face and did not move.

"Then we will have everything in order by tonight. We retreat at dawn."

"We must also issue evacuation orders immediately to the residents of Ansgar, Qüehiller, and the Lingen territories."

"If the saint has no objections……"

"None."

Adelheid answered without hesitation, and rose from her seat.

She accepted a few parting acknowledgments from the assembled men and left the tent as quickly as she could manage without appearing to flee. She had been trying to hold herself steady, to look unmoved—but her heart had already quickened, pulling at her like a thread drawn taut.

'I have waited too long for this. Only for this day to come……'

She had awakened to divine power—that much was true. But from the very beginning, the vessel holding that power had been a human soul.

No matter how much she poured into the effort, it had never been enough to protect everyone. Never enough. Always too small, too mortal, too limited.

Had she not been here at all, the front line would have collapsed even faster. The waves of monsters would have swallowed every last human settlement whole.

But if everyone retreated to Ingrid's Wall now.

If they held there as the final line of defense—at least a year. Perhaps more. And in that time, she could——

"Adelheid."

She stopped walking.

The man blocking her path was one she knew well. Adelheid measured him with cool, dispassionate eyes, then bent her knees and straightened again in a curtsy that communicated her feelings precisely.

"……Your Imperial Highness."

"What are you planning."

"I don't take your meaning."

"Try deceiving someone else. Do you think I don't know you?"

A thin smile curved his mouth. He closed the distance between them with a few swift steps, and took hold of her wrist—not roughly, but with the firm, proprietary grip of a man who considers himself entitled to the gesture.

"You're planning something dangerous right now."

"Your Highness."

Adelheid took the hand that held her and peeled it, with deliberate force, from her wrist. She let it fall.

Her tone was perfectly level, perfectly cold.

"I believe I have told you before. Do not approach me in this manner. I find it unpleasant."

She half-expected him to lose his temper. He had grounds for it, certainly. But Mikhail only shrugged, lightly, and regarded her with that infuriating expression of his—the one that suggested he had already anticipated everything she might do and found it mildly diverting.

"Humanity's last bulwark has crumbled. So—where does a saint go from here?"

"I have no obligation to account for my movements to Your Highness."

"Your divine power? You still have no intention of handing it over to me?"

"None."

"Why? It would be far more useful to the humans you seem so devoted to, if it were in my hands."

"You have been perfectly capable of gathering up what Valentin scatters and putting it to use. You've managed well enough without mine."

"Heartless woman."

"I am busy. If you have nothing further to say, please step aside."

He narrowed his eyes—and then something shifted in his expression. The languid cruelty fell away, replaced for just a moment by something sharper. He drew a soft breath, as though the answer had just presented itself to him.

"Now I understand. You're going to leave us behind, aren't you. All of us."

Adelheid met his gaze without flinching. The thin line of Mikhail's mouth curved slowly, knowingly, to one side.

"You're going to Valentin. Through all of that—through every last one of those monster-infested lands."