Roderick stared blankly at the scene before him.
It had all ended in an instant.
The clearing, emptied of Bjorn’s mercenary mob like a receding tide, was a wreck.
Splintered wood, chunks of rock scattered everywhere, a dust cloud that hadn’t yet settled.
And at the center of it all, Sirin lay face-down in the dirt without so much as a twitch.
No—she would have to be called Sirin’s corpse now.
A sword wound through the heart, its exit mark still visible on her back.
The blood that had seeped out was clotting with the dust, pooling in the earth.
The Witch who had, just moments ago, been toying with the crowd through bizarre sophistry and a razor tongue—gone without a trace.
All that remained was a frail body, growing cold.
Roderick was swept up in a tangle of emotions: bitterness and unease, all mixed together.
He had known about the arrangement between Sirin and Bjorn.
Bjorn was to avoid the vitals when he struck, and Roderick was to help clean things up afterward.
But for some reason, the blade had gone straight through her heart.
So this was how this strange transaction ended.
“Tsk, tsk. So she goes like this.”
Peter’s voice reached him.
Peter seemed to examine the body for a moment, then quickly covered her face with a cloth.
That, at least, was a relief to Roderick.
He hadn’t been sure he could look Sirin in the eyes.
Peter turned toward him.
“I’ll handle the body. Don’t let anyone else touch her.”
“But…”
“Don’t you have your own duties to attend to?”
Peter said that and looked toward the villagers.
Roderick found himself nodding without thinking.
Honestly, he had not the slightest desire to deal with that Witch’s corpse himself.
He almost felt grateful that Peter had volunteered.
“…Understood. Then I’ll leave it to you.”
Roderick forced himself to appear composed.
He turned toward his subordinates and the villagers, who were watching from a distance with fear in their eyes, and called out.
“Everyone disperse! There’s nothing more to see here! Return to your homes!”
The baker’s widow had collapsed where she stood, staring into nothing.
Roderick watched her with a heavy heart as he prepared to leave.
The night was deepening.
The road back to the outpost felt unusually desolate.
Roderick’s mind was still a mess.
Keeping the peace was his responsibility and his duty.
But throughout this whole affair, he had failed to fulfill that duty.
Above all, he bore responsibility as the one who had presided over the arrangement.
He hadn’t intended for Sirin to die—but responsibility was responsibility.
That thought kept dragging Sirin’s final image back to the surface of his mind.
That gaze.
Those eyes—mocking, yet somehow hollow.
The way her tongue had moved, grotesquely.
And those last words she had whispered through blood, words he couldn’t make sense of.
Years of frontier postings had brought him no shortage of strange tales.
Curses from dark-god worshippers.
Vengeful spirits of the wronged dead.
Stories he’d always dismissed as superstition and laughed off.
‘If she really is a Witch…’
The Witch’s ghost might come to hold him accountable.
Roderick spent the night at the outpost, unable to sleep through his unease.
Three days passed.
#
The most noteworthy event of those three days was that the mercenary company had finally left.
Almost simultaneously with the return of the Goddess’s Scales, a courier arrived from the Empire.
The bounty payment for the mercenary company had been confirmed.
The moment Bjorn’s company heard the news, they moved without hesitation.
Whether out of fear of the Witch’s curse or something else, they cleared out of their camp as if fleeing.
Roderick smiled bitterly.
Probably one of the higher-ups had a promotion review coming up.
Word of the mess with the trial by combat getting out wouldn’t do anyone any favors, so they’d rushed the bounty payment to shut the mercenaries up and bury the whole affair.
The report Roderick had filed upward had likely vanished without a trace.
The village had returned to a strangely peaceful state.
No one spoke the ominous words anymore—Witch, trial by combat.
As if none of it had ever happened.
But Roderick had spent all three nights wide awake.
Lying on his bunk at the outpost, closing his eyes, her image would surface.
That grotesque tongue.
Those hollow eyes.
What had become of the body old Peter had taken away?
Had she been properly buried?
Witch.
The word the mercenaries had spat out in terror kept circling in his ears.
‘…Is it over?
Really?’
It was while he was spending yet another night in that fog of anxiety and self-reproach that he heard a knock.
The first visitor in three days.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
Father Peter’s voice.
Roderick hesitated a moment, then opened the creaking door.
The old man’s face, backlit by moonlight, was without its usual warmth.
“…What brings you here at this hour?”
“There’s something you need to see.”
Peter said nothing more and led the way.
The priest guided Roderick toward the church.
A chill night wind brushed Roderick’s cheek.
Roderick swallowed against a bad feeling and followed the old man.
Where Peter led him was a small vegetable garden behind the ramshackle church.
There was nothing there.
Or rather, there should have been nothing there.
“Father, what on earth—”
Before Roderick could finish, someone stepped out of the darkness.
A familiar silhouette revealed in the moonlight.
A slight frame, long trailing hair, a veil covering her face—and above it, two eyes that were somehow clear and vacant at once.
“Hey. Captain.”
It was Sirin.
The woman who should have been dead was standing there.
“W-Witch…!”
The Witch’s ghost had come back.
“AAAAAAGH!”
Roderick’s brain refused to process what was in front of him.
He went down on the spot, foaming at the mouth, and passed out cold.
“…”
Sirin was dumbfounded.
“What the hell is wrong with this guy? Is the Imperial Army so short on talent they’re hiring epileptics?”
Peter, standing beside her, looked at Sirin with exasperation.
“If you go around looking like a demon of the night like that, anyone would be startled. What on earth are you doing? You’re a perfectly normal-looking young woman.”
“…”
Sirin felt a small pang of guilt.
She’d only wanted to have a little fun scaring him—she hadn’t expected him to go this far.
Rather than answer Peter, she nudged the sprawled Roderick with her foot.
“Captain. Get up. Don’t get up and I’m pulling your hair out.”
“What kind of manners are those? Step aside.”
With Peter’s help, Roderick barely managed to come to his senses—only to start convulsing again.
“W-Witch…!”
He demonstrated the undignified feat of crab-walking backward across the ground, still seated, as he spoke.
“Y-you were definitely stabbed through the heart! How are you alive?!”
“…”
Sirin had no answer for that.
She hadn’t anticipated this particular question.
“…It’s fine. It was a gentle stab.”
“That’s nonsense…!”
Seeing Roderick about to convulse again, Sirin quickly pressed on.
“That… what was the big guy’s name? He used some incredible technique. The sword went all whoosh-swish-flicker-flash.”
Bjorn’s Phantom Sword.
Roderick had seen it too.
“Maybe the mercenary captain pulled some kind of trick. He showed us dozens of swords flying around at once—so couldn’t he also make it look like someone got stabbed?”
“You’re the one saying that, and that’s supposed to help?”
“Oh.”
Peter rebuked her from the side.
Roderick glared at Peter, who was speaking so casually.
“I saw it clearly! This woman’s heart was pierced! You saw it too, Father!”
Peter only chuckled to himself and said nothing more.
Before Roderick could open his mouth again, Sirin cut in first.
“We keep getting sidetracked, but that’s not what matters.”
Sirin’s calm voice was enough to help Roderick claw back some grip on reality.
The Witch—no, Sirin—looked like she had something to demand of him.
If she were a vengeful spirit, there would be no need for a conversation like this.
“…W-what does matter?”
Sirin crossed her arms and spoke.
“I heard the mercenary company left. And that the bounty was paid out properly.”
“…That’s right.”
“So. Tell me. Whose doing was it that everything wrapped up this cleanly?”
Roderick bit his lip.
Sirin’s words forced the scattered puzzle pieces in his mind to click together.
The troublesome mercenary company.
Those parasites on the village that his meager forces could never have touched.
Who had dealt with them?
Sirin.
Sirin had first snapped Heres’s neck—the worst of the lot—and lit the fuse of the conflict.
Then she had channeled that fury into the controlled framework of a trial by combat, preventing the entire village from becoming a bloodbath.
In the duel itself, she had systematically broken Heres’s remnants one by one, crushing the mercenary company’s momentum.
And finally, Sirin’s own death.
That death had brought the whole affair to a close.
By executing the Witch before his men, Bjorn had reclaimed his standing as captain and the company’s honor.
The mercenaries had gotten their revenge and their satisfaction—and at the same time, so terrified were they of the Witch’s curse that they would never set foot near this village again.
The Imperial Army received not a troublesome report but a clean outcome: bounty paid, mercenary company withdrawn.
Roderick himself, far from facing censure, could even be packaged as a capable commander who had quietly resolved a thorny problem.
The village had its peace back.
He had escaped accountability.
The mercenaries had left with their honor and their money.
Everyone except the dead Heres had come out ahead.
The one who had designed and executed all of this was the very ‘dead’ woman standing before him.
Roderick had been nothing but a useless bystander.
Enough to make him ashamed of the title Detachment Commander.
A debt he didn’t want to acknowledge.
Roderick clenched his fist.
“…It was thanks to you.”
“Good.”
Sirin smiled.
“Then you’ll be repaying that debt.”
Roderick swallowed.
#
The next day.
Roderick didn’t manage to leave the outpost until the sun was high in the sky.
He went straight to the Order of the Savior.
He didn’t go inside.
Sirin had said she was staying at the church.
Roderick didn’t trust himself to face her.
When Peter came out, Roderick got straight to the point.
“Father Peter. That woman—is she truly not a Witch?”
“My, what a grim thing to lead with, coming out of nowhere like this.”
“This is no time for jokes. Tell me plainly!”
“Well. To my eyes, she just looks like a foul-tempered young person.”
Roderick ground his teeth, but Peter only kept chuckling.
Before Roderick could say anything more, Peter waved a hand.
“You shouldn’t be coming to me with this.”
“Then where?”
“Go to the Pantheon. They might have an answer for you.”
Peter’s tone made it clear he had nothing more to say.
An obvious dismissal.
“…”
The Pantheon.
Unlike the Order of the Savior, which the Empire took no responsibility for, the Pantheon was an official religious body under Imperial protection.
Peter was right, as it happened.
If he wanted to discuss a Witch, he should have gone to the Pantheon from the start.
“…”
His feet were reluctant.
But as Detachment Commander, Roderick had a duty to confirm whether Sirin was a Witch.
When Roderick posed his question, the Pantheon priest unleashed a torrent of profanity.
“Roderick, you thick-skulled idiot!”
The priest didn’t even let Roderick finish.
“I told you over and over not to join the Empire if you didn’t want your brain to turn to rock, but no—you had to go strutting into the Imperial Army, the one place in the Empire where they gather only the most rock-headed of all the rock-heads, and now look at you, you’ve gone and become the biggest rock-head of them all!”
The priest beat Roderick with a fire poker as he spoke.
“If that woman were a Witch, I would have had a fit long before now!”
“B-but, I clearly saw—her heart was pierced, I saw it with my own—!”
“Sounds like she received some divine blessing you know nothing about, you thick-skulled fool!”
Roderick was beaten and thrown out of the Pantheon.
He lost count of how many times he’d been called a thick-skulled idiot.
His body still ached all over.
The priest was remarkably spry for his age.
How he managed to land every blow so precisely when he could barely see was beyond comprehension.
When Roderick limped back to the outpost, a subordinate was waiting for him.
“Captain.”
“What is it?”
“About the site where the mercenary company was camped, sir. It seems we need to clear away some of the rubble… Captain?”
“…It’s nothing. We’ll need to send some men.”
Roderick now flinched at the mere word ‘rock.’
“…”
Roderick gave his subordinate a rough set of instructions and headed to the clearing where the duel had taken place.
The clearing was strewn with the wreckage of shattered boulders and splintered trees.
Roderick stared at the debris blankly and tried to sort through his thoughts.
What two priests had told him.
First, the Order of the Savior.
The Empire did not officially recognize them.
More precisely, the Empire and the Order of the Savior simply did not involve themselves with each other.
The Empire regarded the Order of the Savior the way a cow regards a chicken, and the Order of the Savior took care not to antagonize the Empire.
There had been a time when the Empire had persecuted the Order, but that was ancient history.
The Empire granted the Order no titles or responsibilities, and therefore bore no obligation to protect them.
Yet Father Peter was the first to appear whenever anything happened in the village, large or small.
He distributed bread to the poor, cleaned the wounds of the sick, and listened to the last words of the dying.
He took on all the thankless work the Empire had abandoned.
Father Peter’s words carried weight worth heeding.
And then the Pantheon.
The Pantheon’s priest served as the official representative of the Empire’s divine authority.
That cantankerous old man had swung his fire poker and ranted himself hoarse, but his words were as good as the Pantheon’s official position.
If he said she wasn’t, she wasn’t.
Detecting Witches was one of their most essential duties.
Finally, Bjorn’s sword.
After the duel, Roderick had retrieved and examined the sword Bjorn had discarded.
It was no ordinary longsword.
A faint torch emblem engraved on the hilt.
The standard blade of the Torch Legion—a kind of artifact that reacted to malevolent presences.
But that sword had not reacted to Sirin.
Bjorn’s Phantom Sword was nothing more than Torch Legion swordsmanship.
Sirin truly was not a Witch.
Reaching that conclusion, Roderick let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
Knowing she wasn’t a Witch, he felt something like relief.
Repaying a debt to a living woman was far preferable to having his soul held hostage by a ghost.
All that remained, then, was for Roderick to keep his promise.
Roderick headed back to the outpost with a sigh.
There was a great deal of paperwork to process for Sirin.
A question surfaced in his mind.
A being sheltered by the Order of the Savior, one whose mere connection to the Pantheon was enough to send the priest into a rage—and yet, unmistakably not a Witch.
What on earth was that woman?
#
While Roderick was lost in deep contemplation, Sirin had no such weighty thoughts on her mind.
If anything, she was being rather insufferable about it.
“That was a scene worthy of playing at a funeral.”
Sirin was replaying the highlight reel of her own duel in her head and snickering to herself.