The Delegation (2)

“—! —!!”

Katya’s eyes were making a violent, wordless statement.

Her whole face was screaming at him to ask what on earth he thought he was doing, but Aiden paid it no mind and pushed her back behind him.

…The worry’s fair enough.

Ask anyone to name the most powerful nations on the continent and the Holy Kingdom would make the count on one hand without fail, and its royals were the sort who, handled wrongly, could turn a whole nation like that into an enemy.

Nor was the politics the only problem. There was also the harm Layla could actually do, here and now.

Not everyone who handled divinity became a royal, but everyone who bore the title was, in one form or another, a master of divinity in their own way.

The current Pontiff stood at the summit, of course, yet that didn’t change the fact that every single royal was a threat.

“Quite the nerve on you.”

The words slid coldly from Layla’s mouth, and the divinity she had just drawn surged menacingly around her.

“Why don’t you think before you act? Do you even know who you’re picking a fight with—”
“5.”
“…What?”
“4.”

“…”

“3.”

…Ah.

He had said he’d give her five seconds, hadn’t he.

Aiden counted down with perfect composure, proving beyond any doubt what he’d said earlier, that this was neither a conversation nor a negotiation, and at the sight of it a thick vein stood out on Layla’s forehead.

Most likely it meant that from here on her side would answer in earnest, too.

“Fetch it.”

At Layla’s bleak command, the maid at her side swiftly brought over a case. Inside it lay a bell-shaped ritual implement, and every face in the room twisted the moment they saw it.

One story was as famous as the self-evident law that the Holy Kingdom’s royals handled divinity. A royal whose qualification was recognized received one unique sacred relic, and it dramatically raised the limit of the divinity that royal could handle.

In short.

It was precisely what a royal brought out when they genuinely wanted a ‘fight’.

“—Princess Layla, that is enough! Any further and it will truly be regarded as an act of hostility against the Empire!”

The moment she saw it, Stella kicked back her chair and shot to her feet in horror, but Layla, who had brought the thing out first, stayed bleak beyond words.

“You were the ones who meddled in another house’s affairs first. Weren’t you?”
“This can be worked out in talks later. At this rate it really will mean war—!”

Before she could finish, divinity burst out of Layla’s body and rushed at Aiden.

She attacked without a moment’s hesitation, so suddenly that nobody in the room could react properly. Everyone did something, Stella drawing her sword, Katya trying to sweep Aiden behind her…

But all of it was too late.

There wasn’t a person here who wouldn’t count as elite by any nation’s standard, so it spoke eloquently of just how much force divinity carried once a sacred relic reinforced it.

Which was to say.

Only one person in the room reacted properly to a strike nobody had even foreseen.

From the very start.

Aiden himself, who had been braced to take something like that.

Ki and divinity rose around his body at once, a precise response at precisely the right moment, as if he’d readied a battle stance in advance.

“—”

Yet even as she watched, a sour little smile touched the corner of Princess Layla’s mouth, because reacting didn’t mean she thought it would work.

In output, in deployment speed, in sheer force, her divinity, reinforced by the sacred relic, stood alone even among the people in this room, so she didn’t believe he could ‘answer’ it.

A fatal blow was driving into Aiden. That was how this would settle.

“Law, I swear it.”

…Which was to say.

“This lowly one offers a prayer.”

That was how it would have gone, unless there was some ‘mutant’ who could bring out divinity exactly as fast as ki.

At the same moment the Consecration and the vow were murmured together inside his mouth,

Flame of the Guardian.

A supernatural power that belonged to Aiden alone, one nobody on the whole continent had ever handled.

The ‘pure white flame’ deployed in an instant and tore apart Princess Layla’s divinity, which had come within a hair’s breadth of Aiden.

“What…!”

Layla’s eyes went round with shock.

If her power had simply been canceled out by a similar output, or had guttered out against something built for defense, she could have understood that much. But the power Aiden had just brought out was ‘attack-specialized’, exactly like hers, because it plainly took the form of divinity. And her own power had struck it and shattered without budging it an inch.

That was plain proof that his power was ‘superior’ to hers.

“You said it yourself.”

Before she even had room to gather herself from the shock, Aiden’s voice dropped quietly.

“An apology—”

The Flame of the Guardian drew back, and just as it had a short while ago, it took aim at Princess Layla’s legs.

“—on your knees.”

The flame rushed forward like a storm breaking in. It scattered every Paladin who sprang to guard Princess Layla in one sweep, punched straight through the fresh divinity she hurriedly brought out, and struck her legs like a lash, so that her standing body pitched forward.

“…”

“…”

The princess was on her knees, and at once a horrible silence set in.

For a long while Layla stared at the floor, her expression blank. It was the face of someone who couldn’t accept what had happened. She had brought out the sacred relic and struck at an opening, yet the other party had pushed her back utterly, from first to last.

“…”

“…”

Plainly every one of them shared that sense of the impossible. Nobody moved first even in an emergency of this size, and that made it certain enough.

Nobody, that is, except the one person for whom something else came before a situation like this.

Katya slammed into Aiden like a body charge, right into his stance as he wielded divinity.

“—I told you to stop!”

She screamed it while pinning him down. Her golden eyes glistened. She was angry, and thoroughly so.

“I told you not to get angry! I said there’d be hell to pay—! I told you I’m fine—!”

“…”

…That she was angry out of worry for him did look rather nice.

But Aiden, quite against the mood, only blinked and answered evenly.

“You don’t need to worry that much, Katya.”
“…What?”

While Katya was still bewildered, Aiden gently pushed her aside and got to his feet.

A powder keg had tipped over into a lull, so the silence settling over the room was all the more dramatic, and thanks to it Aiden’s words carried clear and distinct to every corner.

“Princess.”

“…”

“Bring just one guard. No point blowing this up any bigger. Let’s settle it between the people involved.”
“What do you think you’re—”

Katya opened her mouth in alarm, and Aiden quietly held out a hand to her. It was exactly the gesture Katya herself had used a moment ago to stop him, and what it meant was probably much the same.

I’m fine, so don’t cut in.

As though to say just that.

“I’ll be back. To clean this up.”

…Clean-up, he called it.

To Katya’s ears it sounded like nothing but a declaration that he was going to show the louts who kept picking fights with him what for.

Fortunately, Princess Layla went along with Aiden’s proposal without any real resistance. Presumably she’d become certain that pushing the hostilities any further here would get her nowhere against him.

And so.

The four of them, Aiden and Stella, Princess Layla and her maid, stood on the headquarters roof, quietly regarding one another.

A cool night wind blew across the roof.

…Though between the four of them the air had frozen so hard that the night wind felt like a tropical breeze by comparison.

“You will pay a price to match this, Princess Layla.”

The first to speak was Dame Stella.

She always carried herself something like a block of wood, so she often came across as cold, but right now she was giving off a bleakness sharp enough to flay skin. She was plainly doing a great deal to lower the temperature around them…

“You are the ones who plainly committed a hostile act. For this, responsibility will most certainly be—”

“No, Dame Stella. There’s no need for that.”

…Sorry as he was to do it in the middle of her anger, Aiden scratched his head and cut in.

Dame Stella’s head whipped round at once, that bleak gaze still in place.

“Sorry?”

The answer meant stay out of this and keep still, but unfortunately that was a demand Aiden couldn’t comply with.

Because.

“There’s no way to hold her responsible. The person called Princess Layla doesn’t exist in the first place.”
“…Sorry?”
“In the Holy Kingdom, anyone who can handle divinity past a certain level is granted royal status. That’s why it has the most complicated family tree on the whole continent.”

Aiden said it evenly, and his gaze slid aside.

“Which means someone high up could slip in a royal who doesn’t exist as a ‘false identity’, and hardly anyone would notice.”

“…”

Stella blinked blankly, no doubt unable to follow what Aiden was saying.

“What you are saying is…?”
“I’m saying the person called Princess Layla exists only in the records. And the one who came here as the representative isn’t her, either.”

He’d had the sense that something was strange from the very beginning. However he looked at it, could a man who held the key information of the original really forget someone this distinctive?

The precondition itself was wrong.

It wasn’t that he’d been missing information. A human being who hadn’t existed had simply ‘come into being’ out of nowhere.

“So… anyway, you can drop the act now. Everyone else was cleared out precisely so we could be frank with each other.”
“…I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Layla’s face was still expressionless, but Aiden looked at it without interest and batted the words lightly back.

“You’re a puppet, aren’t you.”

Grant, in advance, the hypothesis that this person was no royal at all,

and the strange wrongness he’d felt when he first saw this woman’s face explained itself at once, too.

Aiden knew this person. She wasn’t important enough to leave more than a vague memory, and by rights she would never be in a place like this, which was the only reason he hadn’t placed her right away.

“You’re not a royal or anything else. You’re not even human. You’re a phantom someone is moving.”

This was one of the ‘faces’ a certain someone liked to bring out when deceiving others. The mask of a person who, by rights, must never turn up here.

“What on earth are you—”

Aiden let Layla’s words simply flow past, and his gaze slid off to the side.

“So let’s leave it there and talk properly.”

He said it with a sigh.

“I’m talking to you.”

…Aiden’s gaze.

had come to rest on the maid standing straight and silent beside Layla, her head bowed.

She was the same maid who had handed Layla the sacred relic a moment ago, and her eyes went round at being addressed like that.

“Y-Yes?”

“…”

“E-Excuse me, I don’t know what you could possibly mean, I’m only a maid—”

Her tone was genuinely flustered. To anyone else watching, it would have looked as though Aiden had seized on a perfectly innocent person and was talking nonsense.

But innocent or not, Aiden pressed on with the air of a man whose sheer irritation was rising.

“This is in poor taste.”

“…”

“And you can stop testing people, too.”

Silence.

A silence like a drawn curtain came down on every side, long enough to drink a cup of tea with time to spare.

And while Dame Stella, still unable to follow the conversation, darted her eyes wildly between Aiden and the maid he’d called out, Aiden carried on with the air of a man who could barely be bothered with this any longer.

“How exactly did the head of the Holy Kingdom manage to slip into the Empire unnoticed?”

“…”

“Your Holiness the Pontiff.”

The maid froze where she stood.