IDIBC Chapter 110

Ricardo’s Return (2)

Stuart kept silent about the world only he remembered.

He particularly feared Ricardo might develop negative feelings toward Judith, but he couldn’t hide everything.

On a night heavy with drink, Stuart finally released the words he had kept hidden all along.

At that time, Judith had hated Lienne enough to want to kill her—Lienne who had helped achieve Rochester’s manifestation that she herself had failed to accomplish.

After tormenting Lienne through all manner of vicious and petty methods, Judith ultimately failed to achieve Ricardo’s awakening and finally ceased all lamentations and prostrated herself before God.

When three days and nights of crying, fasting, and clinging to God showed no sign of Ricardo’s awakening, she donned clothes made only of plain cloth and set out on a pilgrimage.

Leading countless people from the Grand Temple and the Imperial Court.

This was after she had spread rumors throughout society that the world would end because of Lienne, creating a belief bordering on certainty.

The empire’s citizens rose up like flames at the sight of her walking barefoot on dirt roads, a picture of desolation.

The Emperor and Grand Priest, who feared Ricardo, tried to settle the matter by exiling Lienne to another country, but Judith vehemently opposed this.

She insisted that a witch’s only fate should be burning at the stake. As a result, Lienne ultimately stood in the great plaza before the imperial palace.

This was all Stuart revealed in response to Ricardo’s seemingly indifferent questioning. This was all he had learned over the past ten years from that descendant of Schneider blood, vicious and shrewd beyond measure.

But that alone was enough. Even if Judith were a saintess of divinely bestowed character without equal in the world, nothing would have changed.

If Lienne had managed to achieve Ricardo’s awakening as well, Judith’s very existence would have been negated, so it wasn’t that he couldn’t understand her wicked and desperate schemes.

It was simply her misfortune that those schemes had been directed at Lienne. Surely then, Judith Fan Monzania herself was the greatest victim of God’s whims.

Ricardo gazed at the woman who now had nothing to do with him.

“A pilgrimage?”

A faint anger mixed with the greed in Judith’s eyes.

“What I mean is… if you live virtuously enough, God will look upon you with pity, Saintess. After all, God likes it when humans behave virtuously.”

He lightly moved away from her. Thump, thump—as the sound of his boots faded, Judith bolted upright and whirled toward him.

“No divine oracle has yet declared that it won’t be me. Just you wait and see. Do you think I’ll simply take this lying down?”

Yes, that’s how you should be—Judith Fan Monzania.

Ricardo shook his head and rubbed his weary eyelids with his thumb. Clear irritation showed on his face as he trudged down the long, dark corridor as if on his way to meet God himself.

****

The Grand Priest, who had gathered the priests in the prayer room all night, was ridiculously asleep in a large bed. God’s domain, which no one had ever entered without permission, was remarkably poorly guarded.

When Ricardo and his Demahen Knights appeared, the priests and clerics passing through the corridor in front of the Grand Priest’s bedroom looked as shocked as if they had witnessed the end of the world before their very eyes.

However, they dared not resist and retreated to one side of the corridor.

Even when the door burst open, the Grand Priest didn’t wake from his sleep.

“Wake up, Grand Priest.”

Ricardo looked at the bedside of the Grand Priest who didn’t respond to the call. On the nightstand sat an empty wine bottle and a half-finished glass.

“Lord Johannes.”

When Ricardo approached closer and called out loudly, the Grand Priest twisted his body and opened his eyes.

With a sharp gasp of fright, he drew in his breath and immediately sat up. He scrambled to his feet and stood on the opposite side of the bed from where Ricardo stood.

“Wh-what is the meaning of this? How dare you enter the sacred temple with a blood-stained sword.”

“Don’t be so alarmed. Circumstances weren’t favorable, so I simply skipped some procedures.”

When Ricardo smirked and left the room, the knights who had been following him grabbed the Grand Priest’s arms as if arresting him and dragged him from the room.

“Wh-what do you think you’re doing? I am God’s apostle. You cannot do this to me in the temple.”

“We only wish to talk, so there’s no need to invoke being God’s apostle.”

“What could you possibly have to say that requires dragging me out in the middle of the night?”

Though the Grand Priest shouted in rage, the Demahen Knights moved in silence.

Sensing fear from the stench of blood emanating from the knights, the Grand Priest shouted toward the priests who had retreated to one side of the corridor, milling about in confusion.

“To His Majesty the Emperor—inform His Majesty of this matter.”

“It’s useless. My knights have already surrounded the entire temple, so word won’t reach the Emperor. And even if it did, nothing would change.”

Ricardo led the Grand Priest to the prayer room right next to the bedroom. That there was a prayer room beside the bedroom was exactly the same as Hadeima.

Ricardo briefly surveyed the interior of the prayer room. While the temple was covered in all manner of lavish decorations, the prayer room felt bare—there was nothing in it.

Apparently, the display of integrity and distance from luxury was limited only to the prayer room.

When only the two of them remained in the room, Ricardo slowly approached the holy water font prepared for washing hands before prayer.

“There seems to be some misunderstanding…”

The Grand Priest couldn’t bear the silence and spoke, but was immediately cut off by Ricardo.

“There’s no need for useless words. I didn’t come at this dawn hour to clear up accumulated misunderstandings.”

Only the sound of splashing as he washed his hands in the holy water filled the silent space between the two men.

“Lord Johannes.”

The Grand Priest found his own name, suddenly called, quite unfamiliar. Since ascending to the position of Grand Priest at a relatively young age, no one had called him Lord Johannes.

“It’s been twenty years this year.”

“Wh-what has?”

“Since you became Grand Priest.”

Ricardo approached the Grand Priest and pressed firmly on his shoulder. The Grand Priest collapsed helplessly into a chair with a thud.

Ricardo stared at the modest wooden table and chairs, which didn’t match the Grand Temple’s splendor at all, before opening his mouth.

“Do you know where I’m coming from right now?”

“……”

“Hadeima.”

He passed the Grand Priest and approached the altar in the center of the prayer room, lighting a candle. Though dawn was breaking and the room wasn’t completely dark, the moment the candlelight blazed was vividly bright.

“Sur…ely not?”

“Ah, don’t worry. I didn’t stain this sword with the blood of priests. Of course I would have if necessary, but there wasn’t particularly any need to go that far.”

“……”

“You’ve been quite busy while I was away from the empire.”

The Grand Priest’s shoulders hunched as chills ran through him at the toneless voice. Ricardo drew a heavy letter from inside his chest.

“Do you know what this is?”

The Grand Priest recognized it at a glance. It was the letter he had personally written declaring the deposition of Crown Prince Stuart.

When Ricardo brought the paper close to the candlelight, it brightly illuminated the room once more as flames spread across the document.

“Thanks to my arriving before this letter, the priests have less work to do.”

“Do you understand what you’re doing right now?”

“Of course. I’m undoing with my own hands a decision made by the Emperor and Grand Priest. The reason is simple. Stuart Reid Schneider must remain in the position of Crown Prince for now.”

As Ricardo stood with his back to the candlelight, the Grand Priest drew in a deep breath.

“If-if you truly wish it, delaying the timing wouldn’t be much of a problem.”

Ricardo chuckled at the Grand Priest’s words and sat across from him.

“If you say so, then I too shall delay the timing a bit for you.”

“What… do you mean by that?”

“I’m saying I’ll extend the time Lord Johannes keeps his position as Grand Priest.”

The Grand Priest is Dermeier’s highest priest and commander of the Holy Knights.

Since the empire’s founding a thousand years ago, Hadeima had maintained its power in balance with the Imperial House.

During the time when the empire’s Imperial Court consisted not of bureaucrats but of elder senators, the Imperial House threatened to suppress the temple’s power under the pretext of Emperor Burtianus III’s will.

When the priests’ resistance to the thorough oppression policy proved formidable, the Imperial Court tried to completely control the temple by installing a governor.

According to historical records, a great drought and floods successively engulfed the empire at that time, and the people believed this was heaven’s wrath. Because of this, the senators became targets of the empire’s citizens.

Fearing this, the senators pushed the position of governor onto each other. Thanks to this—or unfortunately—power didn’t concentrate in any one place afterward, but a period of great chaos came between the Imperial Court and the temple.

It was the current three ducal houses that quelled all this chaos and reorganized the system.

Rochester, Chaplin, and Paquin moved the Grand Temple to Resotia’s border and directly installed a Grand Priest to balance power with the Imperial Court.

The method of appointing the Grand Priest continued to change afterward, and at some point the temple came to be regarded as having completely independent authority separate from the empire’s laws.

“You haven’t forgotten, I trust. What influence Rochester holds over the temple.”

“……”

“What we’ve tolerated all this time hasn’t been surrendered entirely—you wouldn’t be unaware of that…”

After his victory at Daneger, Ricardo headed straight for Hadeima.

He went prepared to risk armed conflict with the Holy Knights, but Ricardo soon faced a new situation. From within, they had actively expressed their intention to remove Johannes.