Inside the broad hall carved out of the mountain.
For a temporary stronghold, the scale of the place genuinely shook Komachi Yua.
The novel was told mainly from the protagonist's viewpoint, with only the occasional passage from someone else's, so somewhere like this would basically never have been described in the text at all.
"It feels like a real world... ahaha, what am I even saying..."
Komachi Yua muttered it under her breath, too low for the goblin relaying messages at her side to hear.
However clear the fragments in her memory were, they were still only the past.
The sight in front of her eyes, solid and actually there, was the thing that shook you.
A world with magic and mighty powers in it, and no mistake!
Engineering on this scale, and they could throw it up without breaking a sweat!
The goblin scratched its head, a little afraid. "Lady Komachi...?"
Why did the one they called the "Soul-Draining Witch" seem so strange today?
Er — had it given offence?
"Ahem! Right! Prepare to open the council!"
Komachi Yua paid the goblin's fretting no attention, swept one hand out and sat straight down in the carved stone seat at the top of the hall, crossed her legs and looked down over the floor below.
As the "Left Hand" of the former Calamity Plague High Priest Morag, Komachi Yua had once had nine of the Church's lords under her command, each of them with a great many followers of his own.
Now, only three lord-class figures were seated below, and the seething mass of followers behind them came to a few hundred. Bleak, truly bleak...
The eyes those followers turned on her held fear, and greed, and confusion, and indifference...
Komachi Yua propped her cheek and chin on her left palm and turned all this over at her leisure, as though none of it were anything she had done herself.
"Whew. This body really has done an endless number of unspeakable, capital-offence things... and now the power is gone too, so I'm definitely going to die at any moment...
Sever it! The past is the past, now is now! Besides, none of it was what I actually wanted to do. If I can latch onto the protagonist's leg I should be able to atone, or get my record scrubbed, and keep my life..."
While Komachi Yua's mind wandered where it liked.
On the floor below, an orcrose to its feet and spoke in a low rumble. Its skin was the same grey-green as the goblin's, but its build was enormous and powerfully made, its head near enough scraping the cave roof.
It was one of the three lords still left under Komachi Yua.
"Lady Komachi, when do you intend to strike? We can't wait much longer!"
Beside the orc, a deathly pale middle-aged man in a black robe thrown over a sumptuous suit gave a small nod.
"If we can seize this chance and cut down Philia Soren, the crown princess of the Nightingale Kingdom... it is certain to please the Lord Plague Horseman, and They will look on us with favor once more!"
Oh?
Up on the stone seat, Komachi Yua raised an eyebrow, thoroughly interested.
Wasn't that the heroine who looked like the designated main girl?
The first female character Casper met, the one with a clear opening for romance!
"Mm..."
Komachi Yua did not answer at once, only made a thinking noise while her right index finger tapped lightly on the arm of the stone chair.
The two lords below grew more agitated.
Honestly, what is the hurry! In a hurry to get yourselves killed?
Komachi Yua couldn't help grumbling to herself again.
"Three months ago, with my strength still intact, this lot wouldn't have dared push me like this, leaning on me with their presence...
But now I'd go fifty-fifty with one lord at best, and if all three came at once I'd definitely die where I stood..."
And even the ones she could go fifty-fifty with were only these lords who had lost the Horsemen's favor.
Put her in front of a lord who still had it and she would simply be one-shot.
After a small sigh, Komachi Yua raised her right hand.
Five faint threads burst from her fingertips and bored instantly into the orc lord's body!
This was one of Komachi Yua's abilities, and its name was the Hand of Woven Thread!
The mana threads could resonate with the flow of mana inside a target, punching through any blockage in that flow so it ran faster and struck harder.
They could equally knot that flow tight, slowing it, or stopping the target's mana dead — bringing on symptoms like laboured breathing and blocked blood, until the target died on the spot.
"Guh!"
The orc lord, invaded by the mana threads, began to struggle.
"Quiet down. I'm thinking through a plan with no holes in it... If we miss this chance to cut down Philia Soren, how else do you propose to please the Lord Plague Horseman?"
The big stick and the words working in tandem, the two agitated lords on the floor gradually went quiet.
At this point the last lord spoke.
"Lady Komachi... you look as though you have a plan?"
This lord was a werewolf, a sly light in both eyes, clearly a cut above the other two in intelligence.
Though as one who had lost its strength and stayed under Komachi Yua anyway, desperate to please the Plague Horseman, its head was nearly turned as well.
"I do."
Komachi Yua finally had her lines ready. "I put it to you that taking Philia Soren and her guards alive would please the Lord Plague Horseman rather more than cutting them down.
Mm — that is, if we only kill her, the Nightingale Kingdom still has other heirs. But if we take her alive and wash her mind, then from that day on the Nightingale Kingdom has a hidden line running straight to us..."
The whole hall went silent.
Just as Komachi Yua's nerve began to fail — had she said something wrong? — she heard the pale middle-aged man's delighted voice.
"Lady Komachi, your wisdom is a thing I can only admire!"
"Real insight!"
"Just so! Alive is worth more than dead!"
The villains all talked at once, thrilled to their bones.
Komachi Yua badly wanted to pull a face, but that would look suspicious, so she held it in.
Taking her alive? You'll all be one-shot by Casper before you so much as cut at her!
The lot of you have lost the Plague Horseman's favor and power both — where is all this mystery confidence coming from!
Still, this way the protagonist's party would be that much safer.
Komachi Yua made a small feint with her right hand, quietly cutting off the magic threads inside the orc lord.
Hold them any longer and the orc would notice just how far her strength had withered.
But she could not show a flicker of fear in front of this pack of purebred, cast-iron villains, or they might fall on her and kill her at any moment...
Mm-hm. Bundling this lot up and delivering them to the protagonist Casper so he could wipe them all out — that counted as ridding the people of a scourge, really.
"It seems all of you agree with my strategy."
Komachi Yua stood and swept out her right hand.
"Then let's move out!"
Every lord and follower rose and bowed, wild with excitement.
"Yes! 'Soul-Draining Witch,' Lady Komachi!"
***
Konsti, the second city of the Nightingale Kingdom.
For a world with magic in it, technology had not come along much, but the general standard of living was not low at all.
Mages intervened directly to keep the seasons kind, so food, cloth and ore were more than plentiful — and once the basics were abundant, the culture industries flourished enormously too.
At the heart of Konsti, where land cost its weight in gold, a ring of gardens lay in flowering, leafy, peaceful abundance.
At the centre of those gardens stood several four-storey classical castle villas.
The residence of Grand Duke Soren. The home of Philia Soren, one of the heirs to the throne!
In a room of clean sunlight and drifting gauze.
A richly dressed girl with long blue hairset down the bone-china teacup in her hand.
"Casper, is it time to leave?"
"Mm, let's head out together!"