Three Will Come

[ CAUTION ]
[ Public Combined Underground Drainage Tunnel ]
[ 9th Deep Layer End-Processing Zone: Angra Mainyu ]

Below the sheer cliff that was several kilometers deep, there was no need to worry about it collapsing even if they climbed down a ladder. Once again, the fairy’s golden stitching embroidered the air, and the scenery around their footing twisted as if crumpling cloth.

“This is…….”

As the name Public Combined Underground Drainage Tunnel implied, countless streams were flowing in along pipes everywhere. Solomon stood over the drainage channel where black filth was rushing and stared at the current.

Rapids that you couldn’t get out of once you were swept in. And it wasn’t even liquid. Even the word sewage fell short. Black, sticky tar? No. It was something deeper and darker.
Something where you couldn’t guarantee life or death just by touching it, and worse, something you’d have to worry about what comes after death.

The black filth flowing along the drainage channels converged into one within the processing zone. As if being sucked into a beast’s mouth. Into a swamp of the end where all things dark, impure, and filthy became one.

“Is it really okay to just walk around…… in such a seemingly dangerous and important facility?”

Crossing that passageway, Solomon asked. Jean Baudri let out a hollow laugh.

“There’s nothing in particular stopping us.”
“No, I mean, no matter what, who would have malicious intent toward a facility like this…….”
“Do you think they could?”

After laughing, he asked back.

“This is a wardrobe where all the city’s mages and developers, all the famous nobles and bourgeois, shoved what they ultimately couldn’t handle. No one bothers to peer into a facility like this. ”
“Yeah, bro. There’s nothing left to screw up here.”
“……That’s true too.”
At the end of that flow, the 9th Deep Layer End-Processing Zone. That place was a cavity that corresponded to Angra Mainyu’s heart.
And what filled the very center of that cavity was only one thing.

A pitch-black vortex.

“!”

It wasn’t liquid, it wasn’t sticky filth, it wasn’t some pollutant-like substance. Even words like filthy or polluted couldn’t fully describe its impurity.

“What the hell is that…….”

Angra Mainyu.
Evil was swirling there.

The girl was there too. Right there where evil swirled, perched on the edge of the center. Her white, beautiful legs swayed up and down over a chasm whose bottom couldn’t be seen.

“Marie Molesworth!”

Seeing her, Solomon shouted. Not caring about the commission or objective. Worried about the girl perched precariously before that bottomless chasm.
Solomon’s shout rang out like an echo. In this absurdly vast place, he couldn’t even tell if it reached her properly. The girl only stared into empty air with unfocused eyes.

“Hey, fairy. Can’t you do some stitching right now here?”
“Are you out of your mind, bro? Do you know ‘what kind of mess’ it’d turn into if I did that here?”

Seeing the fairy freak out, he understood immediately. Solomon kicked off the ground without hesitation.

“Wait, Mr. Solomon!”

Late, the troll clergyman followed after him, and the man, troll, and fairy moved along the edge of the end-processing zone.

“Ah, are you the people from the hotel……?”

Then, the moment she saw them, the girl perched on the edge of the vortex turned her head this way. Smiling brightly.

“Yeah.”

Solomon answered.

“I came to grant your prayer.”
“My prayer…….”

Not to poke knife holes into her. Hearing that, the girl, Marie Molesworth, giggled.

“Do you know what I prayed for?”
“We start by hearing that.”

Solomon said carefully. As if carefully persuading a girl who might jump at any moment.

“I heard about the saintesses.”
“Did Father…… tell you?”
“Yeah.”

Watching that, Jean Baudri, the troll clergyman, added calmly.

“It doesn’t look like you ran away because you didn’t want to accept your fate…….”

He was right. The Marie in front of them wasn’t someone running away to avoid her coming fate. It was different. Solomon could sense that too.

“I……”

Marie Molesworth opened her mouth.

“I want to save them.”
“You want to save them?”
“My sisters who suffer because of this city’s evil.”
“……”

Her sisters. Solomon could easily guess it didn’t necessarily mean blood-related sisters.

“From some day on, in my dreams…… I heard my sisters’ voices of pain.”
“You mean the saintesses.”
“That’s what the people of this city call them.”

Marie said, sounding sadder than ever.

“So I prayed every day. That they wouldn’t suffer, and could be freed from that suffering. And if that was impossible, that I too could willingly share my sisters’ pain.”
“……”

「A child born in a greenhouse, unable to understand the world’s evil and pain within unstained purity, knowing nothing but this world’s goodness and beauty.」

Just as those words said. Marie Molesworth wasn’t cursing that fate, but rather affirming it.

“So I didn’t refuse the fate of becoming a saintess. Just like all my sisters did.”
“……”

「Therefore, that child’s purity and spotless heart aren’t easily tainted even before this city’s filthiest ugliness and grime.」

There wasn’t a single lie in the word saintess.

“And then, one day.”

The saintess spoke.

“Someone answered my prayer.”

Answered her prayer. Solomon frowned silently. At the very least, it seemed obvious that whatever had answered her prayer was not an easy-to-understand ‘Lord.’

“A beautiful…… goddess.”

As she whispered that, the girl’s eyes were already filled with an unknown rapture.

“A goddess overflowing with mercy and love.”

At that time, Sun Street. The second floor of Director Molesworth’s mansion.
In the princess’s room, a girl perched on a canopy bed draped in silk lace smiled sadly.

“Do you know?”

Before long, another man was perched behind the smiling girl. Without even a presence. Without even the girl on the bed, or rather the hotel’s thirteenth-floor VIP evil spirit guest dwelling in her body, realizing it.

“When a woman gets pissed, frost falls in June, and when my father gets pissed…….”
“Sulfur and fireballs pour down in the dead of night.”

The Maiden of June, Blanc of Black Snow, shrugged.

“To the point a couple of cities would turn into a wasteland.”
“Oh, good. I’m glad you know.”
“So when this city ended up like this, what was that proud father of yours doing?”

As if giggling with cold derision.

“He knows what he’s doing, right?”
“What, you think I wouldn’t know even that?”
“I’m doing this because you look like you don’t.”

Kwachik!

That was when it happened. The man perched behind her had already grabbed the back of the girl’s neck. He was a man dressed neatly in a pure-white suit.
Spreading eight wings behind him, drenched in blood, bones exposed, twisted grotesquely.
From those blood-soaked wings, white feathers drifted down, shining as pure and white as snow.

“I only accepted a commission. According to the hotel’s rules.”

For the first time, a light of fear flickered in the eyes of that evil spirit of cold that could freeze even a god.

“Can you really say that’s all?”
“Isn’t that what professionalism is?”

Even as the man revealed those eight wings over his pure-white suit, the hotel’s thirteenth-floor evil spirit only shrugged without blinking once.

“Even if it’s a commission from the Black Museum.”

“A goddess of endless mercy and love.”
“……”

Marie Molesworth whispered.

“She didn’t stay silent when I prayed, didn’t ignore it, and didn’t reject it. She was by my side, listening to my story more willingly than anyone, aching for me, and shedding tears. With overflowing love and compassion.”

She doesn’t stay silent. When you reach out while praying, she willingly answers.

“I wanted my sisters to no longer be sacrificed to this city’s evil, and to no longer suffer. So I wished that I alone could willingly bear it. That’s my prayer.”
“……Do you think that’s possible?”

It was an absurd prayer. Not even something that could be granted or not.

“That’s right. There’s no way it’s possible.”

Marie Molesworth smiled as she readily agreed.

“That’s why I pray.”

After smiling, she said.

“To grant a miracle we can’t achieve with our own strength. To let me fulfill a mission that human weakness can’t bear—.”

It was a holiness that suited a saintess more than anyone Solomon knew in this world.

“—Right, Lady Ishtar?”
“!”

Gulleong, gulleong.
At the same time, the vortex beneath her, the one she was perched on, writhed. The essence of evil and impurity with no visible bottom began to raise up tendrils, like a living creature itself.
Before long, branch-like extensions from the vortex intertwined like a bundle of tentacles, forming a human silhouette.
It was the shape of a beautiful woman. Made of all this city’s impurity and evil, she elegantly spread pitch-black wings behind her.

—Ah, my lovely daughter.

Without even fear or resistance, the girl smiled at the figure rising from that vortex of evil. Within the pitch-black wings that wrapped around her like an embrace.
Even as the evil goddess coiled around her like a hug, she didn’t fear it, and gently clasped that hand like a mother’s touch. At a glance, like a close mother and daughter……

[Insight Success!]

The notification that followed sent chills down his spine.

‘No, why is this a success?’

There wasn’t even time to be flustered by that fact.

“Oh, the situation is quite bad.”

Jean Baudri, the troll clergyman, added.

“You’re saying that now?”
“Yeah, no kidding. You think you’re the only one here with eyes, bro? What? Do trolls have three eyes or something?”
“No, I mean……,”

Ignoring Solomon and the designer fairy’s scolding, Jean Baudri added as if flustered.

“What I mean is, it’s worse than it looks.”

With cold sweat running down his back.

“You said you’d grant my prayer, right?”
“Doesn’t look like there’s anything for me to grant or not.”
“No. We are already granting her prayer.”
“……What?”

Solomon asked back, flustered. Marie Molesworth smiled quietly.

“Three will come.”
—Three will come.

Along with that, Ishtar’s voice rang out. As if performing a solemn rite. Three will come.

—The three Magi from the East see the baby and his mother Ishtar together, and they fall down and worship the baby, and open their treasure boxes and offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Hearing those words ring out, Solomon realized they were strangely familiar.

He realized soon enough.
That it was the story in the Bible of the three who came to find Jesus, the redeemer of sin, at the time of his birth.
And there were three of them there as well.
A fairy, a troll, and a human.

“With this, my prayer has been fulfilled.”

Wrapped within Ishtar’s wings, Marie Molesworth smiled brightly. It wasn’t worship offered to the goddess coiling around her. It was clearly directed at the three people there.

“Thank you, for granting my prayer.”

She was there too.
A saintess and Messiah who sought to atone for this world’s evil.