【What is that supposed to mean?】
Seraphia was slightly puzzled, and instinctively knitted her brows.
"You mean patients with the Corruption Sickness...?"
Shu voiced Seraphia's confusion for her.
"The disease has gone to the marrow; medicine and stone can do nothing. Once they have forgotten their own name and can no longer speak the words of a person, turning into a monster is only a matter of time."
"...But isn't this inside the city?"
There was a slight tremor in Shu's voice.
The man looked at Seraphia standing behind Shu, his gaze resting faintly on the golden halo the cloak could not conceal, and spoke again, his tone still level and without a ripple in it.
"Of course. Nominally the lower city district is part of Kaze City as well."
He glanced at Seraphia's halo.
"Doesn't the Church of the Holy Name say it often enough? God's Heaven, the mortal world and Purgatory were joined together to begin with."
The man's tone remained level.
Shu took the commission voucher in silence.
Amid his heavy footfalls, the two of them arrived before the gate that led 'to Purgatory'.
The thick city wall was the dividing line between two worlds. Doors and windows were set into the wall, and there ought to have been people and soldiers garrisoned inside; on top of the wall one could also see mounted heavy crossbows and things that looked like cannon, though the cannon of another world were presumably driven by mana.
The defensive strength was ample.
The passage from the middle city district to the lower city district let them through as a matter of course, while in the passage on the other side, the one entering the middle city district, Seraphia saw soldiers confirming the identity of everyone going in.
After a brief glance, Seraphia lost interest.
But Shu's gaze was different. His amber eyes were fixed hard on this boundary line between 【the human world and Purgatory】, and his fists silently clenched.
The lower city district gave the impression of a slum at first sight.
It was like the scenes Seraphia had watched through a screen back on Earth, in poor and backward countries.
Houses that had never been carefully planned crossed and tangled together, the roads ran crooked, and human creations, in the extremity of their chaos, took on an unexpectedly natural wildness.
Having come in her previous life from a country that was a maniac for infrastructure, she carried a pursuit of architectural beauty rooted deep in her cognition, and it produced an immediate discomfort in her at the sight of everything before her.
Her body faithfully fed back the thought that it wanted to leave this place.
Though it was daytime, people were rarely to be seen on the streets—
Probably because the entrance on this side of the lower city district led to the Adventurers' Association, and most lower-city residents who went to work in other districts would not live here and naturally would not be active here either.
Among those contorted buildings, Seraphia could still feel a number of gazes.
Shu was equally uncomfortable.
He had been born in the countryside of a poor and backward little kingdom, and belonged to the authentic sort of 【country bumpkin】.
Backward as a rural village might be, it was absolutely never as oppressive as everything in front of him now.
"I've heard about Kaze's lower city district before."
Shu spoke up suddenly.
Seraphia glanced at him and did not take up the thread.
"Someone at the Association said that most of the people here don't have a complete residency contract, and a lot of them can only stay in the lower city district their whole lives. The moment they lose their work, even the city's protection can be withdrawn."
His voice was very low, as though confirming a rumour he had once heard.
"Sounds as though you already knew what this place was like."
"Having heard about it and having seen it with my own eyes are still not the same."
Shu gazed at those crooked houses.
"I'd assumed that at the very least there would be people here responsible for maintaining order."
"There are."
Seraphia pointed at the city wall behind them.
"The soldiers on the wall are exactly that."
Shu's fingers tightened slightly.
"What they're responsible for is keeping the people of the lower city district from going in."
"And responsible for keeping what's inside from coming out."
"So in their eyes, are the people inside and the monsters the same thing?"
"It doesn't go quite that far. At the very least they hired us."
Seraphia shrugged.
Seraphia had already seen situations like this back on Earth, albeit through a screen.
Because she had once lived in a country that walled all of it off.
Shu was silent for a moment.
"This isn't right."
"What isn't right about it?"
"I don't know."
He looked deep into the street, where there were only a few tightly shut windows.
"But if even knowing where you have gone wrong has to be learned first, a great many people may already have no chance of waiting until that time comes."
By the normal course of development, at a moment like this Seraphia, as a transmigrator, ought to have taught him the so-called 【art of slaying dragons】.
Just as in those standard isekai transmigration novels, where the transmigrator from Earth uses their advanced understanding and sets about promoting development in every field of the other world.
But Seraphia was deeply aware that in this world, kings and nobles genuinely were born to their station.
And that so-called transformation is not a matter of inviting guests to dinner; it requires that people bleed and that people be sacrificed.
If she had to choose between another person's life and her own, Seraphia would choose her own without the slightest hesitation.
The understanding of a modern Earth person is advanced, advanced enough that they can treat everything happening in front of them as something happening in 'another world'.
In the end, Seraphia did not pick up Shu's last remark.
"So it really is because the Church's influence here is too weak...?"
When Shu spoke again, Miss Angel knitted her brows, feeling a faint trace of 'pity' for him.
He could not even register that the problem with everything in front of him was a problem with this country's system itself.
The patrol was dull and tedious, and because the place was so lifeless, even ordinary commercial activity was rarely to be seen. What they got instead was being looked over several times by ill-intentioned eyes.
Because Seraphia's figure was a presence not even that broad cloak could conceal, when she walked the cloak clung to her front in the wind that came at them head-on in Kaze City, tracing out that curve so far superior to an ordinary woman's.
【Gangsters...】
Seraphia met those somewhat bolder gazes. The tattoos on them and their less than friendly features made their identity clear.
Rats and insects gather naturally in a foul ditch, and these desperados lacked any reverence for so-called religious faith.
They ran their eyes over Seraphia boldly.
It was the first time she had been looked at with that kind of gaze.
Chiefly because, as a Holy Wing until now, in the places the Church of the Holy Name could influence, her appearance had been an extremely serviceable calling card.
So she had rarely felt that difference between having been male and being female.
That change to her body, given physical qualities beyond the human, had passed its adjustment period very quickly—
She had been a virgin in her previous life anyway, and having never actually had deep relations with a woman, she had felt no great emotional turmoil over the departure of her little brother. If anything, she had been astonished, on later taking up gold-mining, that a woman could obtain pleasure of such a degree at such intensity.
Miss Angel even thought that in those TS stories, the protagonists who cry out and make a fuss the moment they lose half of themselves are in fact people badly shaken by what they perceive as the loss of their status advantage in a patriarchal society.
But now it was different.
Those naked gazes, and the fact that although these fellows were all weak, Seraphia nonetheless felt a slight sense of instability.