"A non-aggression pact!?"
Grigori's voice thundered through the chamber like a warhammer striking stone, rattling the tall candelabras lining the walls. The broad-shouldered Battle Sage was on his feet before anyone could stop him, his massive fists planted on the polished obsidian table, knuckles white with barely contained fury.
"These monsters think they can bargain with us!?"
The seven gathered saints stirred around him, their reactions varying wildly. Arnaud leaned back in his chair with a quiet exhale, arms folded, his expression somewhere between tired and unsurprised. Renard's fingers drummed a slow rhythm against the table. Bacchus stared at the letter in the center of the table as though he expected it to burst into flame. Ritus, youngest of the four paladins present, had gone very still, her pale eyes fixed somewhere on the far wall.
Saare, seated to Hinata's left, simply scoffed, his silver hair catching the low candlelight as he leaned back with deliberate ease. "Let him shout," he muttered, just loud enough for Hinata to hear. "It's the only contribution he makes at these meetings."
Grigori turned on him instantly. "You got something to say, Saare?"
"Several things," Saare replied without looking at him. "None of them for you."
The argument that followed was nothing new. It had the same shape as every argument in this chamber. The same voices, the same postures, the same tired passions recycled and dressed up as conviction. Hinata had long since stopped listening to the words and started listening to what lay beneath them. Fear, mostly. Bruised pride.
She sat at the head of the table and let them go.
The letter rested at the center, unfolded, its neat script almost offensively composed for a document sent by monsters. She had read it three times. She did not need to read it again.
*Fritz and Garde are in our custody and in good health. We have no desire for continued hostilities. We propose a return of both men in exchange for the following concessions...*
The demands had been modest. Almost insultingly so. No territorial claims. No tribute. No public admission of wrongdoing from the church. Just a formal acknowledgment that Tempest existed as a sovereign nation, the release of two mid-ranking Falmuth officials who had been quietly detained, and a guarantee that no further military action would be taken against the Jura Forest without prior diplomatic engagement.
*Concessions* was a generous word for it. Hinata had read letters of surrender with sharper teeth.
'They're being careful,' she thought, her gaze drifting slowly from the letter to the arguing men across the table. 'Every word in that letter was chosen. They can't be that naive can they? They have to know we'll refuse. Or is it a trick, and they want whoever's watching to see that we refused something reasonable.'
That was what bothered her most. Not the audacity of the proposal, but the restraint behind it. Rimuru Tempest had two of her paladins. He could have made demands that would have forced a crisis. Instead, he had written something that a neutral party might look at and call generous.
The noise in the hall crested and then, one by one, died. It happened the way it always did. No dramatic intervention, no sharp command. Just Hinata shifting her gaze across the room with the particular quality of stillness that she had spent years cultivating, as she reminded people, on some level below conscious thought, exactly who was sitting at the head of this table.
Grigori noticed first. Then Saare, though he would never admit it. Then the others, settling back into their seats with a quiet awkwardness.
She let the silence breathe for a moment.
"Are you finished?" she asked.
Grigori lowered himself back into his chair, jaw tight. Saare examined his fingernails.
Hinata looked at each of them in turn, then back to the letter. "The message is from Tempest. They have Fritz and Garde, and they are offering to return them in exchange for concessions that, frankly, any reasonable nation would already have extended." She paused, letting that land. "We will not be accepting."
"Obviously," Grigori muttered.
"Obviously," she agreed. "But I want each of you to be clear on why, because the reason matters." Her violet eyes moved slowly around the table. "Not because the demands are unreasonable. Not because we cannot afford them. We refuse because the Holy Church of Lubelius does not negotiate with monsters. That is doctrine. That is the foundation this institution stands on. If we begin making exceptions based on whether the terms are palatable, we have already lost something we cannot recover."
A beat of silence.
Renard cleared his throat lightly. "And Fritz and Garde?"
Hinata's expression did not change. "They are paladins of this church. They understood the risks when they marched." She folded her hands on the table. "We will pursue their recovery through other means."
Another silence, heavier this time.
She had not, she noticed, said what those other means were. Partly because she hadn't decided yet. Partly because she wanted to watch who in this room looked relieved, and who looked worried.
'You're getting to me, Rimuru Tempest,' she thought, her eyes settling on the letter one final time. 'These last few weeks, this whole affair... it's been one irritation after another.'
The Jura Forest had always been a problem to be managed. A containment zone, essentially, held stable by the presence of the Storm Dragon and the mutual unease it inspired. Veldora's disappearance should have made things simpler. Instead, two nations had risen in its wake, each more troubling than the last.
Tempest, at least, was legible. She understood what Rimuru wanted, even if she had no intention of allowing it.
Hinata's fingers pressed together, just slightly.
She knew almost nothing about Maple Tree's ruler. What little she had gathered was contradictory, a human, reportedly, who had been summoned by Falmuth and survived a Disintegration cast by a coalition of their finest sorcerers and Church templars. Who had built an empire of named monsters in the eastern forest in under three years. Who had fought Demon Lord Milim Nava to a standstill over an ocean and walked away with a scar she apparently chose to keep.
Hinata had faced many powerful people. Power, on its own, did not particularly interest her.
What interested her was judgment. What a person did with their power. What they chose not to do.
And Kaede Honjou, by every account available, kept choosing to side against humanity at every turn.
She pushed back from the table slightly, the quiet scrape of her chair drawing the room's attention back to her.
"We'll reconvene in three days," she said. "By then I expect reports from each of you on the current state of your respective divisions. The crusaders who returned from Jura need to be debriefed properly. There are gaps in what we know." She stood. "That is all."
The saints began to rise, conversations breaking out in low murmurs as they filtered toward the doors.
---
The corridor outside the council chamber was empty by the time Hinata emerged.
The others had dispersed quickly, as they always did after meetings that ended without clean resolution. Grigori would be in the training grounds within the hour, working his frustration into something he could hit. Saare would retire to his quarters and spend the evening being quietly contemptuous of everyone. The paladins would debrief their respective divisions, file their reports, and wait to be told what to do next.
That was the machinery of the church. It ran whether or not anyone was steering it.
Hinata walked.
The halls of Lubelius's inner sanctum were built to inspire a specific feeling. The ceilings soared, the stonework was pale and immaculate, and the light filtering through the tall narrow windows had a quality that seemed almost engineered, soft and diffuse and faintly golden, the kind of light that made people instinctively lower their voices. It was a beautiful building. Hinata had lived inside it long enough to stop noticing.
She climbed two floors, turned left past the hall of relics, and stopped outside a plain door near the end of the corridor. There were no markings nor guards. Nothing to distinguish it from any of the other doors on this floor, except that no one ever knocked on it without an invitation or urgent cause.
She knocked.
A brief silence.
"Come in."
---
The room beyond was modest for someone of his standing. A writing desk positioned near the window. A single bookshelf along the far wall, its contents arranged with precise, almost compulsive neatness. A low table set with two chairs facing each other across a narrow space. A single candle burning on the desk even in the late afternoon light, its flame perfectly still in the airless room.
Louis Valentine sat at the desk, his back to the door, the white cloth of his veil catching the candlelight as he turned.
He was not a physically imposing man. Medium height, lean, with the kind of face that was easy to look past in a crowd. His hair was the color of old parchment. His eyes, visible above the veil, were at the moment, a pale washed-out grey that gave very little away. He looked, at first glance, like a scholar. An administrator. Someone whose hands had spent more time on paper than on anything else.
First glances, in Hinata's experience, were rarely worth much.
"Hinata." He set down his pen and turned fully to face her. "The meeting is finished."
It was not a question.
"It is," she said. She crossed the room and took one of the chairs at the low table without being asked. After a moment, Louis rose from the desk and settled into the other.
Hinata's eyes stayed level. "Returning Fritz and Garde through negotiation is not an option. Accepting any terms from a monster nation, regardless of how modest those terms appear, would signal to every nation watching that the church can be bargained with. That we have a threshold of pressure at which our doctrine becomes flexible." A brief pause. "We don't."
Louis poured two cups of tea from the pot on the low table. He set one in front of Hinata. She didn't touch it.
"Tempest sent that letter because they believe they have leverage. Fritz and Garde, the optics of a reasonable offer, the implication that refusing makes us the unreasonable party." Her voice remained even. "I want to remove that leverage entirely. I will take the saints and the crusaders into the Jura Forest and eliminate Rimuru Tempest and his senior officers personally. Quickly and completely, before this situation hardens into something that costs us significantly more to resolve."
Louis looked at her over the rim of his cup. "Only the saints and crusaders."
"Yes." Hinata's tone carried the quiet firmness of someone who had already thought this through entirely. "A full mobilization is unnecessary, costly, and conspicuous. If the church were to move a punitive force, it could start a war with the western provinces. The saints are more than sufficient to handle Tempest's upper tier. However, we still need something to manage the volume, the lesser monsters, the peripheral settlements, the logistical disruption of a large-scale engagement." She met his eyes.
A small silence.
Louis set his cup down with deliberate care. "Falmuth."
"Their last campaign was a failure," Hinata said, before he could frame it as an objection. "I'm aware. But that failure was a product of poor intelligence and overconfidence, not an absence of military capacity. They have the numbers we need for ground coverage. We pressure them into committing their forces, they absorb the friction of the broader engagement, and the saints operate cleanly above that layer." She paused.
"And when Falmuth fails again," Louis said, his tone carrying no particular judgment, simply the flat acknowledgment of probability, "as they are statistically likely to do, given their track record, what then? We have expended political capital pressuring a sovereign kingdom into a campaign they lose. The church's association with that loss does not disappear simply because our forces performed well independently."
"The church's association with Falmuth's failures is already established," Hinata said. "That ship has sailed. The question isn't whether Falmuth embarrasses themselves, it's whether we complete our objective before they do. If the saints eliminate Tempest's leadership and retrieve Fritz and Garde before Falmuth's ground forces collapse, the narrative becomes a church victory undermined by unreliable allies. That is recoverable. A prolonged stalemate is not."
Louis considered that for a moment.
"There is also the matter," he said, "of Falmuth's reliability as an instrument going forward. Their king has demonstrated a pattern of independent action that has repeatedly complicated the church's interests in this region." He turned his teacup slightly on its saucer, that small, absent gesture again. "I have been giving thought to a more permanent solution to that particular problem. A friendlier administration, shall we say. One less inclined toward independent ambition."
"That is your concern," Hinata said. "Not mine. I need their army for this campaign. What happens to their political structure afterward is a separate matter."
"Indeed." Louis looked at her. "Though it would be convenient if the two timelines aligned. A Falmuth that suffers another significant military loss would be considerably more receptive to the kind of administrative guidance we might otherwise struggle to offer." The pale eyes held a quality of mild, detached calculation. "There are worse foundations for a puppet state."
Hinata said nothing to that. It was not her domain and she had no interest in making it so.
Louis was quiet for a moment, his pale gaze moving across her face with unhurried attention.
"And if you fail," he said.
The room was very still.
Hinata looked at him across the narrow table with an expression that didn't shift so much as cool.
"I'm sorry?" she said.
"It is a reasonable question," Louis said, his tone carrying no apology whatsoever. "The last engagement against Tempest produced no kills, two captured paladins, and the routing of a crusader force. You personally failed to eliminate a slime monster of modest origin. I am not questioning your capability in general terms. I am asking what contingency exists if this campaign produces a similar result. The church cannot absorb a second visible failure against the same target."