Haimer had barely finished speaking when the oak door of the broadcast room was pushed open from the outside.
A head of short rouge-red hair poked through the gap.
Fei blinked her big round eyes, looking first at Haimer beside the console, then stealing a glance at Eina next to him. "Kami-sama!" She squeezed the rest of herself in past the door.
"Miss Holy Emperor and Miss Kisara have arrived at the Guild. They're waiting in the first-floor hall."
"Miss Holy Emperor says she heard your broadcast go out over the whole city just now, so she knew you were here. She wants to see you."
Fei added one more thing. "She looked pretty anxious. Like there's something important she has to tell you."
"Knowing the Holy Emperor's temperament, if she's come looking for me herself, she's been bottling up something she's punishing herself over again," Haimer murmured when he heard that.
And so.
Before long, two sets of footsteps came down the corridor.
The door of the broadcast room swung open again. The Holy Emperor stood in the doorway. She still wore the pale blue dress, her short silver-white hair loose across her shoulders.
"Kami-sama."
"The Holy Emperor says she'd like to ask you to come with her and do something."
The Holy Emperor took a step forward.
Her lips moved, as if she were arranging the words first. Then she lifted her face, those violet eyes fixed straight on Haimer. "Lord Haimer."
Haimer walked over to her, his gaze sweeping across her face. The faint blue shadows beneath her eyes. Lips thinner and paler than usual.
"You heard the broadcast just now."
"Mm." The Holy Emperor nodded.
"You were at the Guild, so I thought..." She bit her lower lip. "I wanted to see you."
Tendou Kisara spoke up beside her. "On the way here, she saw more than a dozen badly wounded civilians being carried past over on West Main Street."
"The guardsmen don't have enough healers. The Dian Cecht Familia's hospital is already packed full."
The Holy Emperor raised her eyes.
"Lord Haimer, I want to do something big. I want..."
She paused, fingers tightening around the hem of her skirt. "To heal all of Orario. And this is a decision I only have the strength to make if you're standing beside me."
The words had barely left her mouth.
Eina, who had followed the others out, nearly bit her own tongue when she heard them.
Heal all of Orario?
Her adventurer's knowledge spun into motion.
Miss Holy Emperor was Lv.2, with Magic sitting at the SSS tier of the base stats, which was already absurd enough by Orario's standards. Add the amplification the "Mage" development ability gave to her magic output, and in theory the ultra-wide-area healing spell she could unleash might genuinely cover a very large stretch of the city.
But all of Orario?
The Labyrinth City's urban sprawl ran for tens of miles in every direction, held several hundred thousand people, and the casualties from a few hundred rampaging monsters were spread across every bit of it.
One Lv.2 mage, however monstrous her Magic stat, this was not work any mortal hand could do.
But.
Before Eina could finish the thought, the air at the corner of the corridor warped.
A black shape floated up out of empty space.
A body wrapped in black robes, a broad hood pulled low, the shadow of its brim swallowing the entire face.
But up close, there was no face beneath that hood. Only stark white bone.
In eye sockets stripped of flesh, two pale blue flames burned in the hollows.
It was none other than the [Sage], Fels.
A mage who had lived eight hundred years.
And now the Holy Emperor's magic tutor.
Eight hundred years had turned her into a walking skeleton, but the care and effort she poured into this one student ran deeper than anyone else's.
"Absolutely not!" Fels stepped straight over every courtesy.
"Holy Emperor, do you have any idea what you just said?"
"Your magic might well be able to cover all of Orario, but a wide-area release of 『Gensokyo』 means extending your power to every single wounded person out there!"
"You will drain your own mind dry!"
"And on top of that!" Fels' skeletal fingers clenched around the hem of her robe. "The moment you cast magic on that scale in front of the entire city, Evilus will put you at the very top of their assassination list! Every rat hiding in every crack and corner of this city will have its eyes on you!"
"A healer who can mend hundreds of people at once is exactly the thorn those lunatics have to pull out first!"
Fels' voice grew faster and more urgent as she spoke, the skull's lower jaw working, the ghost-blue fire in her sockets burning twice as bright as before.
This was no scaremongering.
She had been maneuvering against Evilus and through the Dungeon for eight hundred years, and she had seen far too many genius adventurers get their throats cut in a single night for the crime of displaying something rare.
Evilus never needed a reason. They only needed to confirm that a target was worth the effort.
But the Holy Emperor glanced back at Fels.
"Teacher Fels, everything you've just said, I already went through it all on the way here."
"But when Lord Haimer is beside me, I'm not afraid."
"And besides."
The Holy Emperor turned back, violet eyes on Haimer, her trembling hands crushing the skirt hem into a wrinkled knot.
"Standing in the street just now, I saw a dwarf laborer whose leg had been broken by a falling flagstone. I saw a young adventurer with a monster's bite punched clean through his shoulder. I saw a beastwoman holding her child and weeping."
"I felt that I had to do something."
"The girl I used to be could only sit in the Holy Residence reading reports, signing documents, pretending she understood everything. Now is different."
"Back then there was a little blind girl. Someone had poured molten metal into her eyes."
"Her little sister was starving, so all she could do was kneel in the street and deliberately show her wounds to passersby, so that people would pity her and toss down a few coins."
"It was Lord Haimer who healed her eyes."
The Holy Emperor stopped for a moment.
Her eyes had reddened, but she did not let the tears fall. Only her voice shook.
"This time... I want it to be me."
"Lord Haimer, I want to heal these people."
The corridor stayed silent for several seconds.
Fels moved to speak again.
Haimer's gaze had never left the Holy Emperor's face. "Are you certain?"
The Holy Emperor met his eyes without hesitation. "I'm certain."
The moment those words were out, Fels clearly understood that Haimer's heart had already gone over to the Holy Emperor's side, and she took a step forward at once.
"Forgive my bluntness, Lord Haimer! The Holy Emperor is only Lv.2. Even if her Magic value has reached an unprecedented level, she has nowhere near the practical experience to handle a release of that scale, and if her mind collapses the consequences are beyond imagining! I beg you to—"
"Miss Fels."
"I don't think it's you speaking right now."
"It's your own fear that's talking."
Fels froze.
"You've lived eight hundred years. You've seen too many failures, too many sacrifices, so you take this child's resolve and slot it automatically into the endings of everyone you've watched across those eight centuries."
The skull's jaw moved, but no words came out.
"If a god cannot even trust his own children, what right does he have to believe himself worthy of their trust?"
"Let's go."
"You'll need to stand at the highest point in the city."
*
Ten minutes later.
The summit of Babel Tower. The highest point in Orario. From up here, the whole Labyrinth City unrolled below in the dark. Magic Stone streetlamps and burning buildings made scattered points of fire, and far off, figures of Xenos and adventurers could still be seen tangled in battle.
A circular platform of gold and gleaming stone. A griffin had just carried the two of them up, and Haimer raised a hand to send it away.
Great wings beat against the night wind, and with one low cry the griffin swept off into the dark.
Only two people were left on the platform.
Haimer and the Holy Emperor.
Tendou Kisara had meant to come up with them, but Haimer stopped her. The reason was simple: there was nothing up here for her.
Fels had not come either. She had already given the Holy Emperor her word: "This old one cannot stop you, but this old one will wait at the foot of the tower." Then she had dissolved into the shadows. There was not much a sage of eight hundred years could not do, but before a single sentence from Haimer she had chosen to yield.
The wind was strong.
The Holy Emperor's short silver-white hair streamed back from her face.
She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders.
The hem of the pale blue dress lifted in the gusts, baring her smooth calves below the knee.
"Cold?" Haimer asked.
"Not cold, Lord Haimer." The Holy Emperor shook her head.
She was trembling, that much was true. But not entirely from the cold. Mostly from nerves.
She had never looked down on Orario from a height like this. Ten thousand household lights spread beneath her feet, black smoke still rising off a few distant buildings, scattered sounds of fighting and cries for help carried up to her on the wind.
She drew in a deep breath. "Then I'll begin, Lord Haimer."
"Mm." Haimer stepped back, letting her prepare without interruption.
The Holy Emperor closed her eyes.
She brought her hands together in front of her chest. Green light spilled out between her fingers, spiraling outward ring by ring. Her short silver-white hair lifted, floating a few centimeters clear of her shoulders.
Her lips parted slightly.
A remarkably short verse of chanting slipped softly out of her mouth.
[Here I raise a paradise where no one grieves.]
Wide-area healing magic. 『Gensokyo』.
In that instant, the light detonated.
A ring of emerald radiance burst outward with the Holy Emperor's palms at its center! In the space of a heartbeat it spread in every direction!
The wave washed across the top of Babel Tower, and the stray weeds that had rooted at some point in the cracks between the flagstones visibly shot up several inches, while withered moss turned deep green again.
The wave went down.
The middle levels of Babel Tower.
Farther down.
Central Street.
But it did not take long.
Cold sweat began to bead on the Holy Emperor's forehead. Her knees started to shake.
After all.
Her Magic base might be an SSS-rank 1180, and paired with the amplification of the "Mage" development ability, the theoretical area of coverage really was terrifying.
But between theory and reality lay a trench.
That trench was called experience.
The Holy Emperor had been part of the Familia for less than a week. She had no practical experience at all with a release on this scale.
But she did not stop.
She clenched her teeth and held on.
And then the skill "Virtue Sustains All" triggered!
The power to bear and embrace the suffering of others.
All pressure, pain and grief she carried herself, and even her perception of the world's suffering, would be converted into a wellspring of magic.
In that moment.
The green light under the Holy Emperor's feet blazed brighter by a whole degree.
Her magic surged. All that suffering was rendered down into fuel and poured back into her circuits. The coverage pushed outward again, several streets further.
South Main Street.
A squad of Ganesha guardsmen was locked in a running fight with a rampaging giant lizard, three of them wounded.
The green light swept over them, the wounds sealed shut, and after a stunned pause the guardsmen broke into cheers.
But the price was accumulating in step with the miracle.
The Holy Emperor's complexion went from pale to ashen gray.
Her lips turned purple.
Her body pitched forward, her left knee striking the tiles.
She braced herself and barely held her balance.
The coverage had reached its limit.
Out in the darkness toward Southeast Main Street and the Pleasure Quarter, there were still wounded people waiting.
But she was already losing consciousness. The edges of her vision were blackening, her ears ringing.
She couldn't hold on any longer.
Still the Holy Emperor set her teeth and refused to let go.
One more second would do.
One more.
One more street covered—
And yet.
What the Holy Emperor did not know was that the gaze behind her had never left her back.
From the instant she began her chant, Haimer had stood at the rear of the platform.
His eyes had never once left her.
He was watching.
[Authority]:
Instinct: As a god of the Lord of Arms concept, he possesses by nature an understanding of every form of craft beyond what any species could imagine. Smithing, swordsmanship, magic, hand-to-hand combat, one glance and he sees straight through to its essence!
A god who descends to the Lower World may wear a mortal body, but pair a mortal body with a god's eye.
The limits of the Lower World's rules had never once been able to bind a god's artistry.
In that stretch of time, Haimer had already seen through everything about how the Holy Emperor cast 『Gensokyo』.
And so.
The next second.
Above the platform, the wind whipped harder still.
A thin, choked sound escaped the Holy Emperor's throat.
Her lips were bitten open into a deep red split, blood dripping down off her chin, and within moments her vision went entirely black.
The wailing that came flooding back through "Virtue Sustains All", the sensation of flesh being torn apart, all of it turned into tangible fuel and forced her fragile mortal channels to keep burning.
She could no longer feel her own legs.
All that remained was one obsession, hanging on to her last breath and refusing to let it go.
A little further.
One more street.
And in the very second her body lost its balance entirely and she was about to pitch face-first onto the stone, a hand caught her steadily by the back.
"That's enough."
The Holy Emperor's unfocused eyes rolled blankly toward the voice.
Haimer stood behind her.
His left arm circled her slender waist, his right hand smoothing down her back.
"You did well."
"This miracle belongs to you, but throwing yourself in as firewood isn't the style I want from my children."
"From here, let me guide you in how to wield this vast magic of yours."
With that, Haimer took onto himself the greater part of the crushing mental backlash pouring in through "Virtue Sustains All".
"Lord Haimer..." The Holy Emperor started to say something.
And then, in the next instant.
[Here I raise—a paradise where no one grieves!]
"Hmmmm—!!!"
As Haimer's words fell, the green light in the Holy Emperor's palms, already guttering toward exhaustion, went off like a detonating emerald sun!
The radiance spread in an instant! It swept out flat along the dome at Babel Tower's crown!
It brushed over the smithies of Northwest Avenue, flooded across the roaring slaughter in the arena, drove onward in a headlong rush and rolled straight over Daedalus Street with its rivers of filthy water!
In the end, it grew so brilliant it was painful to look at!
So bright that all of Orario was completely swallowed by that light!
Even Sanjouno Haruhime, kneeling on the tatami inside a building in the Pleasure Quarter, could only stare, dazed, at the "emerald sun of magic" blazing up in the direction of Babel Tower.
____
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