AN: Sorry this one's a week late, I've been busy nursing my dog's bleeding/infected paw since Tuesday while none of the other people who live here who say they love him ever freaking helped. 

_____

 

So, from what I understand from the brief summary that I made the lord of Tarsus give me, it’s kind of actually indirectly my fault that he stole the relic... although it’s not like he’d know that.

 

See, it all started from when I died that one time and caused the monster wave. The lord of Tarsus, who had of course heard about the destruction and devastation going on everywhere, started feeling a bit antsy. Two, almost three villages/towns got absolutely annihilated because of it, right? And it was not new news at all that monsters were starting to get more rampant and uppity as of late… So he decided to make a choice to protect his people.

 

After performing the routine surveying of his lands so that no one would be suspicious, he left on a secret mission to pilfer the nearby relic.

 

It was a well known fact that Teer’s relic had been enshrined on this mountain. With the way that any monster that ever approached the shrine or its surrounding area had immediately been ripped to shreds by the relic’s power, it was obvious how useful it was; Especially to a man worried about being attacked by monsters. Honestly, if the idea weren’t so darn risky and heretical, it was a completely good idea.

 

For starters, of course doing something like this was going to piss off the church once they found out. The lord knew this just as well as anyone, but he decided that it was worth the risk, knowing that once they’d successfully got the relic to their town, it would take a very long time for the church to gather the resources and prepare all the proper procedures and rituals to bring it back. Even if they decided to throw him in jail or possibly pass down a death sentence to him, he was certain that at least the people of his lands would be safe afterwards. In a way, seeing how much resolve the man had to keep his town and his people safe, I could kind of understand why the townspeople seemed to believe in him so much, you know?

 

Still, however good your intentions are, a crime’s still a crime.

Just because you think something bad’s about to happen, that doesn’t give you free reign to just steal whatever it is that you want, especially not something that’s literally sacred.

 

According to the lord, the idea that he killed any of the priests was completely wrong. Apparently he’d done everything that he could to make sure that nobody had to get hurt. At first he’d attempted to bribe the priests that watched over the shrine, but they'd refused to be bought, either because they were too pious or just plain too smart to let themselves do something that would make the church angry with them. And in the end, the lord of Tarsus could only take the relic by force.

 

Of course, the priests weren’t just going to let him take the relic without a fight. The lord commanded his knights not to harm the priests any more than necessary to secure the relic, but during the attempted non-lethal tussle, the priest closest to the relic unfortunately fell onto it, making contact with its glassy exterior. The fighting immediately ceased when the other priests shouted and turned on the fallen priests, mercilessly killing him in one fell swoop. Apparently it was protocol or whatever. Guess they didn’t have anyone watching the shrine who was strong enough to cure the relic’s curse.

 

Anyways, to be safe, some of the priests quickly removed the now dead priest’s outer robe and wrapped it around the box, explaining the bloodied robe that I’d seen.

If I’m to believe the lord of Tarsus, that’s where it came from, and not from anything else that he’d done.

 

Still, it’s not like he didn’t make his men tie down the priests once they’d finished with all that and hide them in the shrine’s cellar, so it’s not like he’s somehow not the villain of this little tale. He’d already known that the relic was dangerous to touch, since it’s a fairly easy to learn subject when you’re studying up on relics and everything, so he’d brought along the serfs that I’d seen earlier to help carry the thing. Despite how easily I can pick up the jewelry box sized relics, apparently to everyone else the things are heavy as boulders, so they had to wrap the relic in multiple layers of fabric and have multiple men carry it around on what basically amounted to a lesser form of a palanquin if they wanted to move it. It was grueling, tediously slow work, especially while trying to safely descend a mountain like they were. And with how much the men were struggling, it was inevitable that accidents happened from time to time, like what we’d managed to stumble upon.

 

And according to the lord, that’s basically everything that led up to now.

 

Really, a part of me had been wondering why the church had decided to leave so many of the saintess relics where they were and build shrines around them all this time, but now I knew. It wasn’t really about respecting where a holy being had died and using the relics as a marker for where to build a shrine like I'd thought; It was because the relics were such a darn hassle to move that it was easier to just build shrines around them instead!

 

Now that I think about it, from what I’ve seen when I've touched those relics, I guess that heaviness must just be the weight of a life, huh? …Or maybe even a soul.

 

If that's the case then I’m glad that the things are so hard to move, although I don’t much care for the curse that they all carry on them.

 

Either way, I learned a lot from talking to the lord of Tarsus. I learned new truths about the relics that I’d been curious about, why the people of Tarsus believed in their lord so damn hard, and that my failings had had a butterfly effect on the world around me in a way that I’d never even thought about or expected.

 

Because I’m weak and untrustworthy, or maybe just because people don’t really feel that there’s a saintess in the world right now to protect them in the first place, desperate decisions are being made. Things that should have never been considered are now being thought of as necessary.

 

And as the current saintess, it’s up to me to put things right, even if they aren’t completely my fault.

 

~~~

 

I’d been feeling off ever since I convinced us all to start our decent back down the mountain. From the moment the notification told me that Teer’s skill had ended, I’d constantly been looking all over the place, paranoid that any second some unseen monster would sneak up on our convoy and kill us now that we lacked her protection. It was silly really; These were the exact same monsters that I’d killed the entire way up here, but now with the weight of all this new knowledge, and all this new guilt and responsibility, suddenly I no longer felt good enough to handle it.

 

...Perhaps I’d also felt a little off because I hadn’t been able to properly punish the lord of Tarsus for what he’d done.

 

If the reasons that he’d told me for what he did were true, then I couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty for it as the current lacking saintess. How could I, who felt partially responsible, possibly pass judgement down onto him? It’d almost feel hypocritical.

 

I’d just used the fact that the relic’s protection was ending as an excuse to delay punishing him and make us all leave, but really I was just trying to give myself some time to figure things out.

 

By the time everything started getting dark and we’d stopped to make camp, I’d felt completely exhausted by how much I’d been stewing over things and remaining constantly vigilant. I’d half expected to pass out the moment that I had any time to relax, but for some reason, when the carriage stopped and I had nothing to do, my mind still absolutely refused to calm down.

 

In the end, I was forced to distract myself with the only way I knew how: By scrolling through my list of skills.

 

To tell the truth, I’d really gone to look at them because I’d been debating whether or not to just give up and use [Judgment] on the lord of Tarsus and let the Goddess sort him out… although the idea of her possibly just mercilessly killing him was horribly likely. If she could just kill Teer so easily, one of her own saintesses who’d done a super big deed for her in getting rid of that demon lord, then why couldn’t the Goddess just absolutely annihilate this one well-meaning relic-stealing lord? It was completely possible!

 

Still, I went to read the skill’s description again, in the hopes that there was somehow something in there that I’d somehow missed.

…And surprisingly, I found something new.

 

At the end of the skill, a strange new button had appeared, one with two arrows chasing each other in a circle. And when I clicked on it out of curiosity, a new pop up was suddenly shoved into my face.

 

{Select an attack:

-[Smite]

-[Righteous Holy Fire]}