Don’t Look for the Resurrected Villainess - Chapter 250
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 250
At my assurance, Samuel made a strange expression.
“Do you trust my sword?”
His ambiguously twisted lips soon drew a crooked smile.
“You’ve been unable to trust me all this time, and now suddenly.”
At first glance, those words sounded like resentment, and also like complaints.
“Of all places, in this place that betrayed you.”
“Samuel Bent.”
With his sword tip drooping to the ground, Samuel Bent slowly approached me.
Jeon’s shoulders, which had been relaxed for a moment, tensed up again. He hid me behind him while preparing to face Samuel’s sword at any moment.
Samuel’s gaze passed by Jeon indifferently.
“You asked about my rest.”
Jeon gripped me tightly and slowly moved toward the castle. Conversely, Samuel was walking toward the cliffs where we had been standing just moments before.
“I never expected you to ask about that.”
A hollow voice flowed from Samuel as he stood gazing beyond the cliffs.
“My rest, you say.”
He chewed on the word ‘rest’ several times, as if he had heard something amusing. Then he glanced back at me.
“If I were to ask for it, would you give it to me?”
Behind Samuel, I could see the setting sun. I had thought the blue light was stronger just moments ago, but in the span of just a few words, the sunset glow was growing stronger.
Samuel, who had turned completely toward me with that sky at his back, spoke in a dry voice.
“You might have in the past, but I know that the current you would not.”
Samuel’s gaze turned to my hand. It was the hand that had been flashing green light all this time while granting rest to the Knights of the Round Table.
But now, not even a speck of light flowed from it.
It wasn’t that I lacked power. I still had strength remaining. It’s just that…
I simply wasn’t thinking that I should use this power on Samuel.
Samuel, who had confirmed my plain hand, smiled bitterly and muttered.
“I’ve confirmed to a sickening degree during my entire journey here that I haven’t entered your circle.”
* * *
Not everyone desired freedom.
Some felt stability in the fact that they walked the path God had shown them. So they actually resented the Agent who had cut the threads of fate.
The Knights of the Round Table, who called such people foolish, worried whether the Agent might have suffered any wounds to her heart.
So they praised endlessly. How noble the Emissary of the Goddess was, how great their cause was.
“Even if some refuse, we will ultimately liberate this world.”
The Agent said this to her knights with a smile. It was an undoubtable truth.
Because this liberation wasn’t simply for all the living beings in the world.
It wasn’t such a righteous work of simply giving free will to God’s playthings.
At the end of this journey, the Goddess would finally be able to cast off her heavy power and enter eternal sleep.
“Because that is the Goddess’s will.”
The Avatar of the Goddess now understood. The reason she had to reach the end of this path.
As long as she was a fragment of the Goddess, as long as she was liberated by the Goddess, as long as she wielded the power of death…
The Goddess’s wish was her path.
“Death is merciful to all but cruelly merciless to one person.”
But Goddess, can you truly say that the rest you desire is the same as my rest?
“Yes?”
“How truly contradictory. Don’t you think so, Samuel Bent?”
The first knight made a puzzled expression as if he didn’t understand her words. He seemed not to think at all that there might be any hidden meaning in her words.
He always accepted her words straightforwardly.
His consistent honesty made the Agent feel comfortable. That must be why. Why she kept revealing her inner thoughts in front of him.
“Do you think forcing unwanted freedom on them truly makes them free? In their eyes, I too will look like a puppet of death. They’ll ask what makes me different from them.”
“They say such things because they haven’t experienced it.”
“Don’t you agree with their thoughts?”
“Of course not.”
When conversing with the first knight, the Agent always felt a strange sensation. As if she had peered into a person’s heart, he always said what she wanted to hear.
“I know that you have free will.”
What great comfort those words brought her.
The Agent smiled brightly and swallowed the truth back down her throat.
Her knight’s words were wrong. She had never been free from the beginning.
She was the only puppet the Goddess held and shook in her grasp, and would become the only being who wouldn’t receive that mercy at the end of this path.
* * *
“Do you know? Death is merciful to all but cruelly merciless to one person.”
Those were familiar words. Where had I heard those words before?
After thinking for a while, I recalled that I had heard them in a scene Diearis had shown me before.
They were words Samuel had said when he pointed his sword at Diearis. Along with the words that the captain’s soul was needed to complete the final power.
“And death has always been cruel to you. In the past when it tried to annihilate your soul, and now when it revived you against your wish for resurrection.”
Samuel continued slowly.
“This is the atonement I chose, and the single opportunity I begged from the Goddess.”
Samuel’s words were too vague and didn’t flow smoothly.
I, who had been standing behind Jeon, stepped forward slightly and replied.
“Samuel, I’d like you to speak in a way that’s easy to understand.”
Instead of answering my words, Samuel raised the sword he had been letting droop.
Is he perhaps trying to point his sword at me?
The suspicion I had for a moment immediately disappeared. Samuel had indeed reached his hand toward me, but he wasn’t pointing his sword at me.
“The method for performing the final power is simple.”
He was offering me the sword’s handle.
“Imbue this sword with power and cut me down.”
I lost my words and stared at the sword extended toward me.
The sword, rippling with white divine power, looked like a large white feather.
“Then, pour out all the strength you have and perform the final rest. Just as you’ve been doing for the knights.”
The rest I had given the knights wasn’t something that required tremendous skill. I had simply sent out the power I possessed, filled with the desire to grant what they wished for.
Then was Samuel now asking me for rest?
“…Are you telling me to kill you and give you rest?”
Even as I said it, I wondered what on earth this was about. As I looked at Samuel’s sword with a suspicious expression, Samuel gave a rather firm negative answer.
“My share of rest was not given to me.”
Then to whom exactly was I supposed to give rest? Still not understanding, I asked again.
“If I don’t kill you, I can’t complete the final power?”
Did it turn out that the final power required a sacrifice?
“To be precise, I must exhaust all of my divine power. Because…”
Samuel, who had been trailing off, spoke in a slightly lower tone.
“That is the price.”
“Price?”
“Yes.”
Samuel, who had been facing me distantly, slowly lowered his gaze.
“The price for giving you rest.”
* * *
“You are my final mission.”
The Agent sometimes said such words to her knights. Those words were truth without a hint of falsehood.
The twelve knights were those who assisted the Agent and took the lead in shouldering the heavy duty together. Their sacrifice would be recognized for its value before the final power.
Unlike others who had merely become free, the twelve knights had the right to obtain rest.
In whatever form they desired.
“I will never turn away from your devotion.”
At the time when the Followers of the Birth were losing their momentum, when the Temple serving Birth was burning, and when countless threads of fate bound in tangled skeins were snapping and fluttering away.
The Agent finally sensed that the time had come. She traveled throughout the world cutting threads of fate, and even the handful of followers that barely remained could not regain their strength.
All of Birth’s excellent agents had fallen.
The Agent’s final duty was to grant rest to her Knights, then abandon even the divine power that had created her soul.
Beladia Castle held an excellent position in that regard. The river flowing through this place would extend to all corners of the continent, embracing even the smallest lives that the Agent had failed to see.
If she perished here, perhaps the power of death she abandoned could spread throughout the world.
By that time, she had let go of everything. Since this body was revived through divine power anyway, it was only right that this body should die when the power disappeared.
Though it was sad that even her soul would disappear, since it had belonged to the Goddess from the beginning, what would be strange about returning it to the Goddess?
“…Everything is finished. There are no Knights left to block my path, and you may set down the heavy burden the Goddess thrust upon you.”
If only her Knight had not spoken the words she had so longed to hear.
Looking at the Betrayer’s sword soaked in blood, the Agent sighed.
Why do you speak the words I want to hear until the very end?
Though she felt despair as all her long-prepared plans went awry, the Agent felt a faint sense of relief, as if she could breathe again.
All power flowed backward as the price of failure, the Goddess despaired, and Birth struggled desperately.
In the world collapsing into chaos, the Agent slowly moved her lips.
“For now, I just want to rest.”
At last, she had truly chosen with her own free will.
It was the first time in her life.
Since the Agent’s memories ended there, she had no way of knowing.
The feelings of the First Knight who witnessed her first act of will.
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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