Chapter 1, Part 1 – The Executioner

In the chapel of the long-abandoned, crumbling church, there stood an oddly new altar.

It had not originally been in this place. It was an impromptu fixture Menoh had set up for her mission. This specialized Guidegear used the leylines that carried flows of power through all things to allow one to speak to someone else across long distances as though meeting face to face, and its use was permitted only to those who served the Lord, the Faust.

On the pedestal of the Guidegear communication altar, the form of a single elderly woman was projected in Guidelight.

“I see…so two were summoned from the other world.”

“Yes, Archbishop Orwell. I was able to ascertain their existence from the otherworlder I eliminated.”

The woman who was listening to Menoh’s report appeared to be in her mid-seventies and had a calm mien. Her hair was entirely white, and she had a cane to support her bent body. Yet there was resilience in her voice, and she looked to be still in good health.

This was Archbishop Orwell, who was in the distant city, the old capital Galm. She was the authority who managed all of the country’s parishes for the Faust.

“They’ve carried out a very careful summoning. It’s been quite hard work for you, hasn’t it, Miss Menoh?”

“Not at all. It is my purpose.”

Though unofficial, the Executioners who hunted heresy were agents who answered directly to the holy land. Menoh was under no obligation to report on the progress of her mission even to the Archbishop who oversaw a single nation’s church.

Yet over the course of her activities in the country, Orwell had provided her several advantages. She had even furnished the use of the church Menoh now stood in. Holding back information would have been churlish after all her assistance, so Menoh had contacted her with the details.

“Once the other’s whereabouts have been confirmed, I plan to infiltrate the castle.”

“Understood. I’d be happy to hear from you again when you’re finished, Miss Menoh.” Judging the report to be over, Orwell suddenly let her eyes soften. “Once your mission is complete, it wouldn’t do any harm to take things easy for a while. This country is your homeland, isn’t it? And you haven’t been back for a long time.”

“So it is.” Menoh blinked at the unexpected change of topic. Why should the Archbishop of all people have any notion of her personal history? She searched for an answer in a flood of doubts, and thought, Could it be. “Is it possible, Archbishop Orwell, that you are so considerate as to recall what happened back then?”

“It’s only natural, isn’t it? It may have happened ten years ago, but I certainly wouldn’t forget that town’s sole survivor. Those events leave an impression.”

Orwell, in both name and reality, stood at the top of the nation’s Faust. Unlike Menoh, who lived the life of an Executioner, she aided many people through her work as a clergy member on the open stage.

Her skills had been on display during the Human Error that had occurred there ten years ago as well.

Menoh had become an Executioner because of the disappearance of a town from the face of the world. When her home vanished, the young Menoh had made Orwell’s acquaintance, though only for a moment.

To be honest, it had been little more than passing each other by. Other than the event itself, Menoh would not have thought Orwell would remember her, one who had merely been left here.

“So that’s why, Miss Menoh, I’d like to have the chance to talk to you at length for once, if you’re amenable.”

“I would be honored. By all means, if there is the opportunity. …By your leave, Archbishop Orwell.” With a deferential bow of her head, she ended the transmission.

Menoh, who had been just a little nervous, let out a sigh and released the tension from her shoulders.

“My homeland, eh.”

Provoked by the conversation, for the first time in a long while she searched her heart to see if she couldn’t recall something, but not a bit of homesickness came to the surface.

It was true that Menoh had been born in this country. However, the town she had been born in was gone. It had been bleached away in an otherworlder’s rampage.

From the map and from Menoh’s mind both. That had been the nature of that Human Error.

“…I don’t feel anything.”

There was no reason she should. Menoh gave up on that, accepting it as how she was, and shifted her focus.

Her task still wasn’t finished. She sharpened her gaze and nimbly left the church through the site of the destruction.

The church was surrounded by a wall that cut it off from the sight of the town. Menoh stood in the overgrown garden and abruptly warned, “Come out. I know you’ve been following me.”

Informed that hiding was pointless by the reproachful voice, several men emerged from the shadows.

There were four of them, all well-muscled. Long swords hung at their waists.

Menoh’s mouth twisted with distaste as she observed their foreboding stature. “Shouldn’t it be beneath you to skulk around after a girl my age, sirs of the Noblesse?”

“A Faust executioner has no place to talk.” His reply said he was in no mood for conversation. Menoh raised one eyebrow in silence, having correctly guessed his station.

In this world, humanity was divided into three partitions.

The ordinary folk of the Third Partition, the Commons. The masses that made up over ninety percent of the population, the day-to-day laborers.

The royalty and gentry of the Second Partition, the Noblesse. They led the Commons and oversaw most functions of government.

And then, the clergy of the First Partition, the Faust.

That they knew Menoh was of the Faust was not an issue. Once could tell as much by a glance at her garb.

However, that he had correctly named her an Executioner was something she could not overlook.

“And all of you, then, must rank as knights within the Noblesse, correct?”

Neither she nor the men let an imprudent confirmation of their position cross their lips.

Yet no one other than knights, not even other Noblesse, was permitted to carry a sword at their waist within the city bounds. While there was such thing as run of the mill criminals who broke that law, the construction of the crests on the sword hilts made it certain.

“Which is to say, you’re dogs of the schemers who summoned the otherworlder.”

“We’re not here to pick a fight with you.” The knights took Menoh’s scorn manner-of-factly. “You killed what we were here for. Hurry up and get out of the country. Having people like you around is an unsightly thing.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t leave yet,” Menoh said, bluntly discarding the knight’s advice. “I have one more job left to do.”

For the first time, the knights’ expressions changed.

The guess she had made from on the information she’d gotten from the boy now changed to a certainty.

“I see, I see. I’d been wondering why you chased out one of your otherworlders, but it turns out you’re not as stupid as I thought. To make a long story short, from the very beginning you knew you wouldn’t be able to hide the summoning ritual from the church.”

The knights wiped away their expressions at Menoh’s words, but it was too late.

Summoning an otherworlder was, even among the numerous kinds of sorcery, a great undertaking. It invoked the great Power that could be called the planet’s lifeblood by connecting the two varieties of spiritual leylines, those of the earth and those of the sky. There was no hope of hiding the disturbance caused by that ritual from the church, as it was always watching over the leylines in order to safeguard the zones of human existence.

“The plan was always to throw one of the two to the wolves, wasn’t it. That boy was bait to satisfy the Executioners. …Which is to say, you called him here just to be murdered by me. Is that right?”

Orwell’s comment to Menoh that it was a ‘careful summoning’ had been an indication that she had seen through the plan. The Noblesse must have meant for one of the otherworlders to be killed by an Executioner, who would then mistakenly assume their mission to be complete. Advising her to go home just now was to make sure of that.

What had fallen outside of their calculations was that the otherworlder boy they sent out as bait would catch sight of the other one.

“You’ve done me a favor by being so foolish.”

One of the knights clicked his tongue at the sharp light in Menoh’s eyes.

“You would’ve done well to be satisfied with one death and left,” he spat with loathing, knowing that evasion was useless.

The Noblesse often attempted to bare fangs at the Faust. As the Faust’s position made them overseers of the Noblesse, the rift between them ran deep.

“But I wasn’t convinced. You don’t think you’re going to escape Church questioning about this, do you?” Menoh said, voicing her doubts as she drew her opponent into the lax pace of conversation.

It was on the point of evading their crime that the plot was incomplete.

By the time an Executioner brought their blade to bear, the Church was already aware that the summoning of an otherworlder had taken place. The Faust’s proper retribution would surely fall upon the nation’s Noblesse who had carried it out.

The official process resulting in a trial was only a matter of time.

The power of the Faust, the clergy who served the Lord and whose influence was felt over every inch of the continent, outstripped that of one nation’s Noblesse. There would be no outrunning their pursuit forever.

An answer came from the knights’ mouths. “His Majesty is fully prepared. We sacrifice one otherworlder and safeguard the other, hiding them from the Executioners’ eyes. The king may be put to death by you Faust bastards— but we obtain the power to smash through the tyranny of the Faust and the Lord you fawn over!”

“An admirable resignation. It’s a shame you Noblesse can never manifest that spirit of self-sacrifice as something productive.”

The time for dialogue was coming to a close. With flashing eyes, the knights bared their swords.

The moment that Menoh learned that two otherworlders had been summoned, their plan was in shambles. If the knights wished to fulfill their objective, there was only one path left to take.

“You know too much to let you escape. Allow us to put an end to this, bloodhound of the Faust!”

“…be at peace.” Just for a moment, Menoh’s eyes went to the corpse of the boy still fallen within the church.

The pitiable boy who had been been used as a decoy to lure out Menoh and conceal the fact of the other’s summoning. He who had, to serve such a vulgar motive, been made a sacrifice to a villain like her.

Menoh fixed a cruel gaze on the knights before her. “Disposing of some rancid Noblesse won’t make my heart ache.”

“I could say the same, arrogant Faust assassin!”

Howling, the man struck at her. Four opponents. One was leaping toward Menoh, and the other three were moving to surround her.

Though the numbers put Menoh at an overwhelming disadvantage, her expression showed no unease. She remained even-keeled as, with scripture in her left hand and dagger in her right, she drew Power from her soul.

Menoh’s body was girded in the pale light of Guidance.

Her physical abilities enhanced by cladding herself in it, she stepped into her foe’s space without fear of his longsword’s reach. The knights did not take this standing still, and one scythed his sword sideways to keep her from closing the distance.

Menoh swatted it away with her blade held one-handed.

“Ghk…!?” the knight grunted at the weight of the attack that should not have been able to come from a short blade, let alone a weapon in a girl’s grip.

The great Power that filled the world sprang forth out of the concepts that were the wellsprings of the spiritual leylines, and flowed to every corner of the planet, residing at the roots of all things. This Power, also called Guidance, existed in human souls as well, and with a resilient will could be controlled to manifest endless possibilities.

Supplementing her lesser muscular strength and weight with Guidance, Menoh met the blows of men over twice her size on a more than even footing.

“This little brat…!?”

Not to be outdone, the knights reinforced their strength with Guidance as well, but there too they could not match her.

Their fundamental physical abilities were far beyond that of Menoh, who was a young girl. And yet with a stunningly smooth invocation of Guiding Strength, she was competing with the brawny knights in melee combat.

She had a clearly different style of fighting. With attention to the number of blows and footwork that skillfully feinted and controlled distance, it was a style that prioritized the survival of one fighting against many.

Never letting her feet go still, Menoh continued to manage her opponents’ attacks.

She made free use of feints to keep from letting them into her blind spot, and with one short blade held off the longswords of four men. There was a killing intent and mercilessness that said an instant’s negligence would mean a cut throat. It was a level of training of mind and body unexpected in a young girl.

In the brief engagement, both sides became aware: in a one versus four close-range battle, the knights had a slight advantage. But there was something they knew as well.

What made the girl in front of them fearsome was not just a matter of melee. She had not yet shown them what made the Faust the Faust.

Cutting in before their opponent could play her card, two fell back from the front line and immersed themselves in their consciousness.

With their finely-honed spirits, they drew out the Power that composed all things from their souls.

The force called Guidance that was siphoned up from their souls and governed by their spirits was transmitted into the swords the knights held. Guidance flowed into blades that had been carefully selected through scholarship of materials, and a sorcerous phenomenon unfolded in compliance to the seals carved in accordance with the scholarship of crests.

“Guidance: Connect — Sword / Crest —Invoke Flame Blade.”

Flames manifested.

This was the use of magic through Guidance. Its essence was not entirely in the physical art of strengthening one’s body. It was in the pseudo-miraculous phenomena called sorcery that its value was displayed.

The Power that made up the raw materials of all things in the world was converted into flames by the laws of the carven crests and hurled toward Menoh.

“…fools.” Menoh felt a touch of pity for the knights, who had kept their distance in order not to be caught up in the flames they had themselves released. The moment they had not pressed the truly slight advantage they had in a close-range battle, what might have been their single chance at victory was lost.

The scriptures clutched in Menoh’s left hand gleamed with Guidelight.

“Guidance: Connect — Scripture Chapter Two Verse Five — Invoke: O, know ye that the wall that encloseth the pious sheep shall never crumble.”

The Power that had been drawn from Menoh’s soul passed through the conduit of the scriptures, and completed the sorcerous construction and deployment to activate as a phenomenon.

What appeared was a glittering wall whose pure white seemed to sing that it could never be blemished. The faintly wavering barrier of light intercepted the two knights’ gouts of flame.

“Wh—!?”The overwhelming speed of the sorcerous construction, the subtlety of the developed apparition and the mass of Power left the knights speechless.

The priests of the Faust were without exception wielders of sorcery. The scriptures those women possessed were high-grade arcane texts, and the sorcery engraved in them was both powerful and plentiful. The knights had been warned that Menoh was no different.

However, the manifestation before them now was outside of their purview.

“It, it can’t be. What is that!?”

“It’s too fast…! Could she be using sorcery through the book and not activating a crest at all!?”

To draw Power from one’s soul and construct, then deploy sorcery took a high degree of spiritual control. The ordinary route of using sorcery mid-battle was to divide into forward and rear guard, as the knights had.

Furthermore, to activate magic through the scripture was several degrees more difficult than using a crest.

The tome was an advanced magical tool wherein crests were taken down as words and combined in hundreds and thousands. Crests that each manifested a single phenomenon were written out on a scale of thousands that spanned hundreds of pages. To set them into motion took sending accurate and unparalleled Guidance into the intended words and weaving subtle fluctuations of Power to construct the phenomenon’s deployment.

Without so much as opening the text and even while she maintained the Guidance that strengthened her entire body, Menoh had materialized a work of delicate sorcery. However carefully selected the Executioners were from among the Faust, it was an exceptional level of Guidance control and technique.

When he set eyes on the volume of power that had leapt forth, one of the knights put together a guess. “A crest-worked short blade, outrageously fast sorcerous construction…the infamous Flare!?”

“Don’t be an idiot! It’s been a decade since that devil was ran amok. This one’s too young!”

“That’s right. She turned Master and instructor ages ago,” Menoh cut in quietly on the faltering knights and gave herself an introduction. “I am the art she created — the successor, Flare’s Heir.”*

Menoh’s reason for unnecessarily revealing her true identity was simple.

While her shaken opponents sought who she was, Menoh had already prepared the killing blow. She sank inside herself to pull Power from her soul, and the focus of her consciousness fixed on the knights.

“Guidance: Connect — Scripture Chapter Three Verse One — Invoke: What rang in the ears of the oncoming adversary was the toll of a sonorous bell.“

The Power invested in the tome Menoh held unfolded into sorcery.

“Forw—!” The order the man tried to shout as he sensed the attack magic activating was too late.

Constructed from the scripture where Menoh’s Guidance flowed was a bell of Power. The symbol that hung high in a belltower and told the people of the church’s holiness with the chime of the hour manifested above the heads of the knights.

The bell of majestic Power swayed from side to side.

The sound of the Power that seemed to warp space took hold over the area. The bodies of the knights caught directly beneath were destroyed from the inside out. The only one to escape this gruesome death was the leader knight who had been on the advance. He had gone forward in the belief that the safest territory was that near where the magic-user Menoh stood. His judgment was both right and wrong.

To greet the knight who leapt forward to flee came Menoh and her readied blade.

“Gh, oh, oooohhhh!”

“Hmph.”

He didn’t lack for spirit. However, what the knight who came tumbling in did lack was a solid stance.

Menoh let out a short breath and deflected the sword of the opponent who had not taken the Power’s brunt, parrying it toward his chest. She continued the motion of her short blade to stab for his lung and kidney, and twisted as she thrust in.

“Ah, bh—” The knight staggered back, then lost the strength to support his body and fell.

Mixed blood and froth ran from the corner of his mouth. His breath sounded as though it were escaping from a torn bag, clearly presaging death.

Aware of his end approaching, the knight turned baleful eyes on Menoh. “Why, do all of you…damned fools…with so much power…waste it…on the Lord…”**

“…I will be gracious enough not to have heard any disparagement to Him.” Menoh tucked her scriptures under her arm and turned the blade in her right hand downward. Its point was aimed at the dying knight’s heart.

To release him from his suffering, she stabbed downward.

“Ah—”

He wanted to leave words behind. For his lord, perhaps, or for his family. Or words of hatred for the church.

The knight’s life left him before he could say anything at all.

“I am the villain, but I won’t say you’re an innocent.” The only corpse left whole was his. Menoh moved her hand over his lids to close his eyes. “You have summoned a monster far beyond me… And he was something it would be absurd to compare me to: an ordinary child.”

Involving someone who had been living in peace and using him for their plans was the sin that had incurred the knight’s death.

“Though I sympathize with you only in having your punishment handed down by a villain like me,” Menoh said with a touch of sadness in her eyes, and offered a prayer over for his death.

What form would the punishment that would someday befall her take, she wondered.

As she imagined it, she prayed for the soul of the man she’d killed.

[Notes]

*[“Flare” is written with the kanji 陽炎, “heat haze,” and with katakana beside it to tell you to pronounce it as furea. Menoh gives her own title as 陽炎の後継, “heat haze’s successor,” with the pronunciation fureaato. I’m not quite sure if this is playing on the ato reading of 後, as in “after,” to make it like “Afterflare” but punny. I admit I was tempted to go with Flheir, but that wouldn’t really make sense out loud.]

**[This is one of those sentences that dramatically trails off before it gets to a verb, so I have to make a conjecture. Plus what he calls them is kisamara, which is “you(in a mean, derisive way) (plural)”, so I tried to get the feeling across with “all of you damned fools.”]

[The chapters are long, so I’m splitting this one in half, especially since there’s a good natural break point there after the fight.]