Chapter 94
“Huh?”
When Lilith came to her senses, she was already in a white space.
“Where is this….”
A space painted pure white in every direction—front, back, left, right, above, and below.
As she looked around at this endless whiteness with no visible end,
- Zzt!
“Ngh!”
Lilith recalled what had happened to her before she crossed over here.
In other words….
- Gurgle, gurgle!
“Guuuuugh!! Guuuuugh!!”
Those clerics who had fetched something like a funnel, stuck it in her nose, and poured coffee through it.
“Keh heh heh!! Behold her suffering!”
“It was definitely right to heat up the coffee!!”
On top of that, they had boiled concentrated coffee and brought it over to make her suffer even more.
They had poured that boiling stuff… through her nose!
“Hiiik, hik, haaak, ha…!!”
Having only been able to cross over by twenty percent, Lilith had been forced to take deep breaths like a mortal.
It wasn't as though she had never endured torture that bad… but coffee in particular was lethal to her body.
From the moment it entered her body until she finally lost consciousness,
an unidentified energy invaded her body without pause, making her feel as if her entire body were burning.
It had even affected the eighty percent of her true body that was not here,
and she thought her soul was being burned at the stake.
“Damn it, those Heavenly Lord's mutts…!”
Still, judging by the fact that she had come to her senses like this… she must have escaped instinctively, or something.
The divine power flowing through this space was unsettling, but anyway.
Swearing to take revenge on those Heavenly Lord fanatics, whom she couldn't kill brutally enough,
Lilith rose to her feet.
- Clank!
“Huh.”
She did not rise.
Her limbs were bound in white shackles.
“Hello. Your first time here?”
A shadow fell over her from someone looking down at her.
Lilith, the great demon of lust.
Given her lofty rank, she had always prided herself on having sharper instincts for assessing others than anyone.
“Hah, haaah…?!”
- Tremble, tremble!!
Those instincts warned her again.
The being before her was the very one she had been interfering with….
“If you were going to be this frightened, why did you sneak into someone else's fields and nibble away at their souls, Lilith?”
“H-Hea, Hea, Heavenly Lord. That was…!”
The Heavenly Lord, mother of all of them, who had raised billions of sentient beings and was the de facto owner of this planet.
- Grip!!
“Ghk…!”
“Why did you suddenly shut up? Keep babbling.”
Lilith's head was seized by the hair by the Heavenly Lord and forced upward.
In her eyes,
“Eek, eeeek.”
she saw the Heavenly Lord's angry face, which invoked a metaphysical terror that would have caused an ordinary sentient being's brain to burst and kill it instantly.
“Ghk, keh, grrk…!”
- Pshh! Drip, drip….
It ended with blood spurting from her eyes, nose, and mouth only because Lilith was at least a great demon.
“Why do you Clifford lot keep crawling in here when you can't even withstand this….”
Of course, they had been rampaging because the Heavenly Lord found it difficult to interfere with the lower world.
If the Heavenly Lord could have intervened easily in the continent of Ilias, would the black mages have been allowed to rampage like this?
“M-Mercy, meeeercy….”
Under that basic premise, beings from other dimensions, such as demons, had been running amok.
Naturally, she had never imagined being dragged before the Heavenly Lord like this.
With blood streaming from her eyes, nose, and mouth, Lilith clasped her hands and begged desperately.
“Meeeercy…!”
“Don't worry. Would I carelessly kill valuable talent like you?”
And perhaps that worked, because the Heavenly Lord smiled sweetly and released her by the hair.
- Snap!
- Crackle!!
“Kyaaaaaaaah!!!”
“I will completely wash your twenty percent clean with divine power and turn you into a new apostle.”
In the Heavenly Lord's mercy, Lilith was to be completely laundered in divine power.
That divine washing would not stop until every trace of outer-dimensional substance remaining in Lilith's body had been replaced with divine power.
If there was any unfortunate news for Lilith….
“Kyaaaaaaaaaah─!!!”
“Wait… whoa! It's affecting your true body too?!”
The passage forcibly created by the concentrated coffee was delivering divine power all the way to the rest of her true body in hell.
Thanks to that, the remaining eighty percent of Lilith's true body was being incinerated in real time.
“Ahaha! Just as expected of my singularity!”
Wasn't this all a snowball Akion had created?
Deciding that Akion deserved something nice, the Heavenly Lord adjusted Lilith until she became good.
* * *
─And so, we cleanly blew away the barrier engraved with the resentment of a thousand people!”
One day after the start of the second semester.
When Akion received a letter requesting that he visit the Papal See, he thought, ‘Here it comes!’
To make matters more suspicious, the letter had been written by a cardinal, someone high-ranking in the Papal See,
and then that cardinal had personally come to deliver it, apologizing, ‘I'm sorry a mere cardinal like me sent you a letter.’ One suspicion stack.
“It's all thanks to espresso!”
“Indeed, indeed! Precisely!”
So when Akion went discreetly and politely to the Papal See, the normally solemn saint was beaming,
and Akion added Suspicion Stack No. 2.
Having resigned himself to it, he listened impassively.
“So that's what happened.”
“Indeed. Saint Akion, thanks to your espresso, we even gained the glory of capturing a great demon.”
They brewed coffee with beans that had undergone the washed process, and it gave them even more strength,
then they took along a concentrated espresso version and drank it, after which
“I see….”
The saint swung the 0.1 Excalibur a dozen or so times, nearly destroying a barrier powered by sacrifices from a thousand people,
and the holy knights, battle priests, and nuns finished it off by body-slamming it?
Akion had honestly expected all of this. It wasn't as though this sort of thing had happened only once or twice.
He had already seen them get somewhat stronger after drinking espresso, anyway….
So he had anticipated the saint and clergy entering a Super-Saint-Man mode thanks to the concentrated coffee.
“And when we fed coffee to Lilith, that bitch let out the most agonized screams!!”
But what was this ‘nose-presso’ supposed to be?
Not nose soup, but nose-presso.
Besides, hadn't the black mages already been punished by divine retribution after drinking the espresso even before this demon named Lilith?!
To make it hurt even more, they had boiled it using the black mages as firewood, then shoved it up Lilith's nose again.
- Tremble, tremble…!
And when they kept feeding it to her, she suddenly vanished engulfed in holy light,
and when the saint checked, the Heavenly Lord had delivered a revelation saying, ‘Well delivered,’ and awarded the delivery service five stars.
“S-Saint Akion?”
“Surely you aren't angry…?!”
“Fuuuuuck, Hallelujaaah─!!!”
For the record, the profanity was directed at the Heavenly Lord,
and the hymn of praise to the Heavenly Lord that followed was a lie.
“To think that that lewd bitch who'd even fuck her own parents is being punished by the Heavenly Lord's side—how thoroughly satisfying!!!!!”
“Ooooooh!! Even Saint Akion is delighted!!”
“Aaaah!! Hallelujah!!!!”
It was nice that everything was working out, but how had drinking a little coffee sent a demon to the Heavenly Lord's side,
and turned the clergy into outright berserkers…?
Once again, Akion silently gave the Heavenly Lord the middle finger in his thoughts.
Silently, and only in his thoughts.
“Fuck you, Heavenly Lord, hallelujah!!!”
“But… doesn't the hymn Saint Akion is shouting sound like he's cursing the Heavenly Lord…? It sounds like he's cutting off the words, doesn't it?”
“Nonsense, man! Would an apostle of the Heavenly Lord do such a thing?!”
“Aha!”
Akion vowed that if he ever met the Heavenly Lord face-to-face, he would seriously punch the Heavenly Lord once.
*
Akion suffered at the Papal See like that.
And after calming the clergy's rampage over making him a saint and finally leaving….
“It's already noon….”
The sun was already pointing to noon.
They had definitely summoned him in the morning, yet they had wiped out the entire morning!
Akion could not contain his fury at losing both his peaceful everyday time and his research time.
“Hee hee, the grace bestowed by Saint Akion is enough to fill a great lake and then some. Please don't feel so burdened.”
And accompanying him to the Papal See as today's escort was the Saintess.
For some reason, Akion always suffered whenever he received positive reports,
so from her perspective, she really ought to comfort him.
“They say it was you who told the Papal See about the concentrated espresso version, Saintess.”
“Ahaha….”
In fact, the Saintess had been the one who informed the Papal See about this concentrated coffee, making it all the more so.
At present, the people with the most opportunities to drink espresso of anyone were… the people around Akion.
Among them, the Saintess was the one who showed the strongest obsession with espresso.
On top of that, the Saintess had secretly taken hers away and even researched it instead of drinking her portion.
“Um, erm. I'm sorry, Saint Akion… I'll accept whatever punishment you give me.”
Honestly, things had worked out every time only because fortune had favored them; what if something had gone wrong?
Akion might have ended up taking the blame, after all.
So the Saintess added a word in the spirit of repentance,
“Should I? It feels wrong to let it slide every time just because things turned out well.”
“Oh.”
Akion, who always let things go with an admonition to reflect, had suddenly pressed the matter, and she was a little flustered.
Was Saint Akion going to punish her?
Saint Akion?
“Um, Saint Akion is going to punish me….”
“Pick one.”
She began imagining what sort of punishment from Akion would be best….
- Smack!
“Ah!”
“Tell me, who were you thinking about?!”
“Haaah, haaak, Saint Akion…!!”
She had imagined being struck with a whip by Akion.
But in that imagination, the Saintess was somehow blushing faintly and looking embarrassed.
If one asked whether that embarrassment came from shame, the answer was no.
“Ah. Ah…?!”
It was… excitement.
Excitement because she liked it.
“What's wrong, Saintess? Why did your cheeks suddenly turn red?”
“It's nothing!!”
The daughter of the Heavenly Lord was getting excited while being whipped by a saint so excellent that he could be called the Heavenly Lord's apostle?!
The Saintess, who had counseled countless believers, was also quite skilled at self-reflection.
The very fact that she was thinking such things….
“Hmm, I suppose you do seem to realize it's shameful and are repenting….”
It meant that the Saintess herself believed Akion was a good enough man for her to do such things with him,
that she held that perception herself.
“It seems my older sister Aysirel's family home wants to host a monastery. The more holy knights living there, the better the security… Could you coordinate that within the Papal See?”
“Th-that much, of course I can do!”
Even so, the Saintess tried to dismiss it as her own delusion, thinking, Surely that's not what it is.
But upon hearing that hosting a monastery was possible….
“Thank you.”
“Ah.”
The gentle smile Akion gave her momentarily cut off her train of thought.
It brushed against her in a faintly ticklish way.
“Saintess?”
The Saintess fell into deep thought.
Once Akion had started occupying her mind, he began occupying it endlessly…!
“Saint Akion.”
“Yes.”
“After I escort you to your laboratory, I think I need to stop by the Papal See again.”
“Huh? Sure. It's your choice, Saintess.”
This was the sort of thing that was useless to agonize over alone.
It was something she needed to ask the senior members of the Papal See about—her seniors in life, that is, the grown-ups.
“Thank you, Saint Akion. Then… heave-ho!”
“Wait a moment. Why are you suddenly slinging me over your shoulder—”
“I'll take you to your laboratory right now! Hup!”
- Boom!!
“Gwaaah!!!!”
A saint, perhaps, or the pope, perhaps.
Or perhaps the Heavenly Lord Himself.