Then What Were the Real Poor People the Saintess Saw Like?

Chapter 84

"……Huh."

"No, I……."

My bold, upright, and utterly admirable, refreshingly hearty attitude made a few of the old professors suck in their breath.

By contrast, the old headmaster chuckled heartily and gestured us over.

"Student Cassian. And Viscountess Müller and the Saintess. Please, come here and sit down."

I lightly pushed Lily's back and headed toward the empty seat at the round table.

Beside me, Viscountess Müller took a seat with relaxed grace, and across from us was Cardinal Barneo, bound and kneeling in a hideous state.

"……You bastard."

Barneo snarled at me, glaring with bloodshot eyes.

"How dare you hide the Saintess behind you and try to pull some wicked stunt!"

"Ah, old man."

I lounged back crookedly in my seat and dug at my ear with a finger.

"Looks like you still haven't figured out the situation. The one who got caught red-handed pulling the most wicked stunt here is you."

"W-What?!"

"And I didn't hide her. The Saintess is standing behind me of her own free will. Isn't that right, Lily?"

"Yes! Because it's safest behind Cassian!"

As Lily answered with a spirited show of defiance, Barneo's face turned red as if it might burst.

"Saintess! Don't be deceived by the tongue of that wicked heretic!"

"Please be quiet, Cardinal Barneo."

At that moment, Pope Heinz, who had been silently watching the situation, sharply cut in with a low, heavy voice.

"We did not arrange this meeting to hear your side alone. We are here only to face the truth."

At the Pope's stern command, Barneo clenched his teeth and hung his head.

The Pope looked at Lily with kind eyes and asked softly.

"Saintess Lily."

"Yes, Your Holiness."

"Is it true that you are staying at this Academy of your own will, and that your refusal to return to the embrace of our Church is also your own wish?"

Every gaze in the conference room turned toward Lily's small lips.

Lily gave my sleeve a tight squeeze once, let go, took a deep breath, and answered very clearly.

"Yes, it is."

"Why did you make such a decision? The temple is your home, is it not—the place where, as a saintess, you were to devote your life to God's service?"

The wide, cold conference room.

I stole a glance at Lily, sitting demurely beside me.

'Will she be all right?'

Honestly, I was a little worried.

Everyone gathered here was a pope and cardinals who could make or break the empire, along with countless knight commanders and old professors.

The pressure would be intense for a timid soul who usually only knew how to wag her tail after gobbling up the jerky I gave her.

But I didn't particularly want to tell Lily, in so many words, say it like this, answer like that.

'It's easy for me to step in for her.'

But then Lily's sincerity would end up amounting to nothing more than playing parrot for me.

And someday far in the future, it might remain a painful regret for Lily herself—that she had never been able to speak with her own true voice here.

So I decided to just watch silently.

"Saintess Lily. Is it difficult to answer?"

Pope Heinz's heavy question fell.

Every breath in the conference room stopped.

Lily took a small breath, neatly folded her hands, and opened her mouth.

"The temple certainly was."

"……."

"There was a time when I thought it was the only home that had warmly taken me in after my family fell apart and I had nowhere else to go."

Oh.

Look at that, what smooth talking.

Her voice was perfectly composed and calm, without a trace of tremor.

"But."

Lily's pale light-green eyes turned straight toward Cardinal Barneo, bound across from her.

"Your Eminence always forced me to pray while enduring terrible pain, saying it was to train my heart."

"The reason was—"

"It was supposedly to help me understand those who live at the very bottom. In truth, it was just an excuse."

Ah.

I'm the one feeling refreshed.

Even if that was the hardcore version of the punishment, with a stone slab on her knees, which she was experiencing for the first time.

There must have been routine petty abuses in the past too: subtly starving her, leaving her in the cold, depriving her of sleep.

"When I was little,"

Lily gave a faint, bitter smile.

"I thought it was really true, that it was a holy trial I was receiving because I was lacking."

"……So you mean it's different now."

When the Pope asked carefully, Lily nodded.

"Yes. It is completely different now."

"Why is that?"

"Because that 'prayer to be in the lowest place' that Your Eminence had ordered me to pray in the past always felt somehow uncomfortable and off to me."

Lily's voice gradually began to carry more strength.

"Whenever I faced that unknown discomfort and suffocation in my heart, Your Eminence scolded me, saying my prayers were not sincere."

"……."

"But now I understand clearly. In truth, those cruel prayers were not demanded because I failed to sincerely ache for the poor."

"Then when were they demanded?"

"Only when I had become

Lily said firmly, driving the point home.

"a puppet who did not obediently follow the words of Your Eminence the Cardinal."

"……!"

"The fact is, every time I tried to move according to my own will and sense of self, those prayers were demanded as punishment to control me."

Murmurs erupted!

The conference room was turned upside down in an instant.

The old professors whispered in shock, and Dean Hicks openly frowned and glared at the cardinal.

"A frame-up! It's all a frame-up, Your Holiness!"

In the end, Cardinal Barneo could not hold back any longer and shouted, veins bulging.

"Your Holiness! Please listen to me! You know me, do you not? The Saintess is now being deceived by that wicked Academy's glib tongue and is insulting the Church! You know I am not someone who punishes the Saintess out of personal feelings!"

"Cardinal."

Pope Heinz pinned Barneo down with a cold gaze.

"Do not silence the Saintess. Please continue, Lily."

Under the Pope's ironclad protection, Lily did not waver at all.

Instead, she brought up the real turning point that made her realize the true nature of this horrific abuse and come to completely distrust the cardinal.

"I came to that realization painfully thanks to this region tour."

"……By region tour, do you mean the Academy's slum practicum?"

"That's right, Your Holiness."

Lily clenched both hands tightly.

"Until then, inside the temple, the poor people Your Eminence showed me were truly pitiable and lovable."

"Lovable……."

"Yes. If you gave them a piece of bread, they would shed tears and thank God, and they would kiss the hem of my clothes and obey. I thought loving them was a very easy thing to do."

A bitter light flickered across Lily's eyes.

"But the real poor people I faced with my own eyes during the region tour were nothing like that."

Pope Heinz leaned forward slightly.

His eyes held, in full, the deep anguish he felt as the head of the Church.

"Then what were the real poor people Saintess Lily saw like?"

"They were frightening."

The impression that came from Lily's mouth was brutally honest and startling.

For the Saintess to confess that the poor were frightening.

And yet no one could blame Lily.

"Because they were the utterly abandoned poor, they were terrified of the world to an extreme degree, and at the same time deeply distrustful of it."

"……."

"They had the eyes of beasts that looked ready to starve to death at any moment, and they couldn't even show anger at a world where they had nowhere to go and nowhere to vent it."

I remember those eyes from back then too.

The people of the slums who couldn't express a single complaint to the Academy students who treated them like filth.

It was raw reality on a different level from the docile flock prettily packaged by the temple.

"The moment I saw them."

Lily stole a sidelong glance at me, then said proudly to the Pope again.

"I realized for the first time how difficult, frightening, and bone-cuttingly heavy it is to truly love the people at the very bottom."

"……Hah."

A deep, heavy sigh flowed from Pope Heinz's mouth.

A sigh of genuine repentance, as if he were looking back on his own faith, which had grown dull through habit over long years in the Church.

In the face of that.

"So I can boldly say this."

Lily stared straight at Cardinal Barneo and delivered her verdict.

"Everything Cardinal Barneo taught me was thoroughly twisted and nothing but sophistry."

"L, Lily……!"

"By merely bruising my own body and causing myself pain in a warm room, you can never understand those wretched people who live at the very bottom."

Lily's voice rang thunderously through the conference room.

"Rather, it is nothing more than feeding your own hypocrisy while deceiving the world and the poor by claiming you suffer like this in order to understand them."

'Wow.'

I almost blurted out an actual exclamation aloud.

No, had she always been this articulate?

I thought she'd been possessed by some top-notch political lecturer.

"Only after gathering people who had been carefully preconditioned in advance to say, 'Thank you' when given a piece of bread."

"……."

"And performative charity, where you smile gently for show, cannot open the tightly shut hearts of the true poor who despair at being completely ignored by the world, nor can it give them even a shred of hope."

"……Ahh."

"Likewise, it is nothing more than deceiving them by saying, 'I love you this much.'"

Silence.

A silence without a single sound dominated the conference room.

A silence so overwhelming that even the sound of a pin dropping would have sounded like thunder.

I quietly turned my head and checked the Pope's expression.

'Look at that—his face is absolutely ashen.'

A face that looked so bitter and miserable it was beyond words.

Of course.

This wasn't even at the level of exposing the misdeeds of a single cardinal.

It was the moment the Church's showy hypocrisy and corruption, which they had been committing as routine until now, were confirmed to the world through the Saintess's own mouth.

"Deception! I'm being wronged, Your Holiness!"

In the end, Cardinal Barneo rolled his eyes back and began to thrash.

"Your Holiness! Please listen to me! You know me, do you not? The Saintess is now being deceived by that wicked Academy's glib tongue and is insulting the Church! She's not in her right mind!"

"Be quiet, Cardinal."

Pope Heinz shook his head firmly.

"I will hear Saintess Lily's position first. So mind your words."

A very clean cut.