The Ecclesia faith.
An order that, borne up by the Empire's wholehearted backing, had swollen in a single stroke to a size without precedent.
Their founding dated back a mere fifty-odd years, giving them a history it was embarrassing to set beside the other orders in the Empire.
No thread had ever connected them to me, so I had never been entangled with them, and it was true that for that reason I had paid them no particular attention.
To me, the Ecclesia Order had registered as roughly a rising power that had captured the Empire's leadership in one stroke.
But now.
My assessment of them could not help but be revised entirely.
"I'm a free knight, but I also serve as a paladin of the Talios Order. There are a few things I want to ask."
The bishop gazed steadily at the sigil I held out, and then smiled.
"This is not a fitting place to talk. Would you wait a moment?"
The bishop soon begged the pardon of the crowd in the cathedral and dispersed them all.
Discontent would certainly build among the people, but not one of them showed it outwardly.
It was a sight that explained in a single stroke what the cathedral and the bishop were to the residents of Oscalt.
Before long the bishop returned and led me into a small room.
I shook my head to decline the priest who offered me something to drink.
"What is it you are curious about, brother?"
I weighed several possibilities in my head.
Asking in a roundabout way, or asking outright.
After considering the outcome of each choice and its repercussions, its usefulness and its impact, I reached a conclusion.
This was a question I had to throw straight at him.
"How is such a thing possible?"
"Such a thing being?"
"What else would it be? I'm talking about the blessing."
"I wonder in what respect you are asking."
"The miracle of curing the sick in an instant. That much I can understand as Ecclesia's divine authority. But that's exactly where the problem lies. Do you think it makes sense to work a god's divine authority upon thousands, or at the least hundreds, in so short a span?"
"Of course it makes sense."
"How so?"
"Because it is what the god does. To doubt an omniscient, omnipotent existence is foolish. If the god wishes to use me as a bishop, then so it becomes; if the god wishes to relieve the citizens through me, then so it becomes."
"No, gods aren't omnipotent. That's the sort of thing ignorant bumpkins who know nothing go around parroting. Aren't you and I both men who stand in contact with a god? You can't be unaware that even those fellows up there who toy with us like puppets have things they can't do."
"I will not deny it. But precisely because of that, precisely because I sit in a seat that touches a god, must I not believe that god is omnipotent? Ecclesia intends to use me. I must believe that Ecclesia will unfold omnipotent works through me."
"......You're muddying the point. Do I have to repeat myself? I asked how that utterly omnipotent one is doing this."
"I too have only the one answer to give. The agent of this work is the god, and the god is omnipotent."
The bishop was a man there was no talking to.
After that he did nothing but keep turning my words aside, and I got no clear answer to anything at all.
"Must I speak more plainly? Bestowing a blessing requires divine power. And the citizens of Oscalt who are to receive that blessing come to nearly a thousand. By what means does a mere bishop handle that much divine power?"
"I have already given you my answer."
"......Now you're not even trying to dodge the question."
Further exchange was meaningless.
I kicked back my seat and left the cathedral.
The bishop did not stop me either.
The bishop's riddling words circled in my head the whole way as I walked.
'This is what the god does.'
'It's not a god doing it, it's you. Are you saying you've become a god?'
'You are laboring under some misunderstanding.'
The blessing is a thing a god does.
A god is omnipotent, so doubting the method is foolish.
The bishop's claim was nothing but sophistry.
Dusk was already falling, so I hurried toward the inn.
Shabby as ever, unchanged from when I left it, the inn had taken up the light of sunset and was stained yellow.
I opened the inn's door, and just as I meant to go straight up to the second floor, I stopped.
Because Kallen was down on the first floor.
"Ah, you're back."
"Why are you down here?"
"Well......."
Kallen abruptly cast a glance at the innkeeper beyond the long counter.
Rather than gauging the man's mood, it had the look of tattling on a wrongdoing.
"I asked for a splint to brace my arm, and he says there's nothing like that here and I should go to the cathedral."
"A splint?"
Now that I looked, a fairly long stretch of Kallen from his right shoulder blade down to his arm was bound with yellowed cloth.
It would be the result of his own first aid.
"Come off it, this city doesn't even have common herbs. One trip to the cathedral and you're cured clean, so what do you need a thing like that for?"
"No, hold on, does that make any sense? The cathedral heals you clean for nothing, just for showing up?"
Kallen looked at me as though in protest.
He seemed to expect some word from me, but flustered as I was, I had little to give him.
"......It's true."
"What?"
"They heal without payment at the cathedral."
Kallen's lips worked as though he could not believe it, and in the end he shut his mouth.
Only when the dusk had fully come down did he seem to accept it at last.
"......Uh, then I'll go and be back quickly."
Having learned that external wounds could be healed in an instant at the cathedral, Kallen set out saying he would take treatment himself.
The bishop I had spoken with left me uneasy somehow, but I did not bother to stop him.
However much I doubted it, the fact that the cathedral had cured the ailments of a great many residents was clear.
"No need to hurry. They seem to take people until late at night."
Kallen tilted his head, but left the inn.
Far off, the cathedral's bell rang faintly.
***
Kallen walked streets steeped orange by the falling sun.
Walking alone through streets with few people about, Kallen recalled the days of searching for Findel in Pirberg.
It was around then, too, that Kallen had properly set foot in the world of the divine and the orders.
A person can become superhuman through divine power, and beyond that can even gain a body that regenerates without limit.
The cathedral must likewise be using such unknown power to heal people.
That was what Kallen had been guessing.
And that guess turned into certainty when he saw the bishop restore a severed hand in an instant.
A man whose hand had been cut off had come running to the bishop, who was handing out food in the wide lot outside the cathedral, and the bishop had healed him as though it were nothing.
Kallen suddenly realized that not much time had passed since the cathedral's bell rang.
It was the supper hour for the poor.
"......."
Standing well back from the lot, Kallen watched the poor crowding in by the moment, and the bishop and a few priests.
A stabbing pain ran through his shoulder as though urging his steps on, but Kallen had no intention whatsoever of approaching the bishop.
Instead, only a conversation he had once had with Roan was filling Kallen's head.
'What is the Luxeon Cult?'
'The order Findel Morein belongs to.'
Kallen was now holding several doubts.
Wasn't the knight chasing Findel Morein?
Could it be that the reason he was looking for him was to have a peaceable talk?
No, that doesn't make sense. The knight hated the Luxeon Cult.
It has to be so.
So why did he say nothing earlier?
'That bishop is Findel Morein.'
The cathedral's bishop, handing out food in the open lot.
He plainly wore the face of Findel Morein as Kallen remembered it.
'Wasn't Findel Morein a believer of Luxeon? That man is a bishop of the Ecclesia Order?'
Then that meant the Luxeon Cult Roan had been chasing was the Ecclesia Order itself.
It was a factor that, had they known it in advance, would have changed everything about how Roan and Kallen moved, from the ground up.
Kallen thought briefly about why Roan had not said so, and arrived at one conclusion.
'......Have I ever told the knight what Findel Morein looks like?'
Something so obvious that it had been passed over for that very reason.
Roan himself did not know that the bishop was Findel Morein.
So even having faced Findel Morein, even having met him alone, he could not have known.
Roan had not refrained from seizing Findel Morein; he had been unable to.
Having finished the reasoning that far, Kallen suddenly felt gooseflesh rise over his whole body.
"It has been a while, soldier of Brüs."
Kallen could hear the bishop's voice clearly.
A voice that should have been blocked by the many poor and never reached him.
"......What have you done?"
The surroundings were silent.
The poor in the lot, the priests, even every human within the range Kallen could sense.
Oscalt stood frozen in that moment.
"Surely you have far more questions you would rather ask than that."
"If I ask, will you answer?"
"Of course."
Findel Morein smiled.
"I will not. Asking questions is not your role."
Kallen felt as though his breath would stop.
The sight of every existence within his view frozen as if time itself had halted was that grotesque.
But even so, trembling as he was, Kallen steadied his mind.
"Whatever I do now, I'm in your grasp. Isn't that right?"
"Something of the sort."
"Then be my conversation partner a moment. A word or two before dying should be all right."
He had to draw out as much information as possible.
Information was power, and at the same time it was what Roan needed most.
Kallen meant to wring information out of Findel Morein come what may.
To lend Roan even a little strength.
Findel Morein was silent a moment, then opened his mouth.
"You wish to stall for time. Well, I see no reason not to."
Kallen took a deep breath, as unnoticeably as he could.
And he tried to shove the miscellaneous thoughts churning through his head far away.
"......Are you going to kill me?"
"That depends on the case. Your role is to bring him here. If killing you helps toward that, I will kill you; if not, I will not."
"Bringing the knight here is my role? Then why didn't you touch him this afternoon?"
"I could answer that I have a rather strong perfectionist streak."
That could be read to mean he had not been ready to receive Roan in the afternoon, and that now every preparation was complete.
Findel Morein had already perfected a method of dealing with Roan and was waiting for him.
Learning information is useless if it cannot be delivered.
Kallen clenched his teeth.
There was nothing he could do.
"......You'll be struck by divine punishment for doing this. Don't you even fear the gods?"
Findel Morein laughed aloud, as though he had heard a very fine joke.
"A god sending down punishment? This is the very will of a god. As if a god would lay a curse upon itself."
With those words, every frozen human lunged at Kallen.