The Saint’s Manual for Redemption - Chapter 27

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 27
If I’d had the chance to bring Wilson Junior, I could have made a far more overwhelming impression. I hadn’t even time to grab it before being hauled here—and that was something of a shame.
Though I’d proven myself before them all, as an elder it was only proper to instill some discipline in the younger generation, to teach them the price of attempting to deceive God.
So I decided to impress upon their minds, indelibly, both the cost of such deception and the proper fear and reverence due to the Divine.
I raised my head.
Golden flames began to climb toward the dais where the Archbishop and his cardinals stood.
The cardinals shrieked in shameless panic.
The fire did not indiscriminately devour them.
It crept up the walls and consumed the dais, licked along the legs of the cardinals’ chairs, climbing with deliberate slowness. This was fear technique born of understanding human nature.
“Surely now you’ll acknowledge that this is the Divine Choice?”
My voice rang clear across the entire plaza.
“How dare you assault the leadership of the Church! This is heresy!”
And then it happened.
Above the golden flames, light gathered in the sky’s center, then coalesced into the shape of a hawk.
A vast luminous pattern, wings spread, overlooking the plaza.
Anyone gathered in this square would have recognized it.
Caritas.
The true master of this cathedral, the object of worship for this entire Church, the symbol of mercy and judgment.
The Archbishop’s face drained white at this undeniable manifestation of the Divine—even as he’d been about to condemn me as a heretic.
“Oh, merciful God! Caritas, Most Gracious!”
“It is the will of God! The Lord has answered!”
“Oh Divine One, we beseech you, look upon us with mercy!”
The faithful began to cry out in prayer. In moments, the plaza descended into pure frenzy that even the Holy Knight Order patrolling the square could scarcely control.
“The will of God!”
“It is the will of God!”
While those cries swept across the plaza, the Holy Flame attacking the Archbishop and cardinals did not cease.
At last the fire had half-consumed the chair legs, beginning to lick at the shoes of the Archbishop and his cardinals.
The hem of the long vestment dragged across the floor, charring black as it brushed the flames, and one cardinal lost his balance as he hastily gathered his robes and collapsed to the ground.
With the Divine’s mark suspended in the heavens and actual Holy Flame, infused with Divine Power, burning around them, to deny this was to deny the God they served—they were indistinguishable.
Blasphemy was such a grave sin that even a cardinal could be immediately referred to Religious Trial.
“Well then, you’ll acknowledge it now?”
When I pressed for an answer, the Archbishop ground his teeth, then finally spoke.
“…I acknowledge it.”
His face, uttering those words, seemed to have aged decades in a single moment.
“I proclaim that Ciela is a Saint chosen by the Divine.”
The Archbishop’s eyes glared at me with lethal intent, but when the golden flames at my feet began to surge upward again, he quickly averted his gaze.
If you’re going to be frightened by something like that, why provoke it in the first place?
In my time, I endured threats with fire set to my scalp, stubbornly insisting that a burnt head was nothing a Healing touch couldn’t restore.
The hawk-shaped light in the sky still spread its wings wide, gazing down upon the plaza with serene detachment.
Caritas, now that you’ve witnessed this, surely you’ll grant a reward. Perhaps around a hundred golden beams would suffice—though I certainly wouldn’t refuse if you offered more.
***
The moment the door closed, the air in the room grew harsh and distorted.
“This is utterly shameful! How did things go so wrong!”
The first to explode was one of the cardinals. The hem of his vestment still bore scorch marks, and his hands trembled faintly.
“To suffer such a spectacle before the faithful, in the middle of the plaza!”
“Isn’t that because you failed to maintain your apparatus properly?”
“My responsibility? How is it my responsibility that the fire transformed into Holy Flame!”
Harsh voices clashed. The Archbishop and cardinals gathered in the room looked nothing like those who served the will of God.
Their faces, locked in mutual glares, were tangled with rage and fear and responsibility hastily suppressed beneath the surface.
“If there had been such a variable from the start—”
“What do you mean ‘from the start’? Are you saying we should never have admitted that orphan girl to the cathedral? At the Baptism Ceremony, how many witnessed that girl receiving the Divine’s call! How are we to silence so many mouths!”
They were moments away from an outright brawl—or as they say, five minutes before chaos broke loose.
“Who could have known the apparatus would become so useless? Upon investigation, it wasn’t even broken. When we activated it again, it functioned perfectly.”
Silence fell for a moment. Everyone exchanged glances toward the cardinal who’d broached the subject, busying themselves with gauging the Archbishop’s reaction.
Archbishop Marius sat without speaking, but the veins stood raised across the back of his hand gripping the staff.
The moment when the flames had crept up to his very feet in the plaza remained vivid before his eyes.
Everyone in this room knew that the person in charge of the apparatus was the Archbishop’s closest confidant. Yet none dared question his responsibility or assign him blame.
“…What matters now,”
he said, his voice low and grave.
“is not that we’ve suffered a setback, but that we are not yet finished.”
Several of the cardinals looked up.
“We had no choice but to acknowledge Divine Choice—but only in that moment.”
The Archbishop continued slowly.
“In the Square. Before the faithful. When Holy Flame and the heavens themselves pushed her forward.”
A chill smile crossed his lips.
“But we still have one final chance to dispose of that troublesome orphan girl.”
He turned his gaze deliberately, studying each cardinal in turn as he spoke.
As the cardinals grasped his meaning, a heavy silence descended over the room.
One last opportunity to eliminate her before she officially became a Saint.
“This time, we needn’t rely on any such… devices. A cleaner business altogether.”
The Archbishop’s booming laugh was echoed by the cardinals, who nodded in agreement, eager to humor him.
The faces of the Archbishop and his cardinals, once clouded with defeat, now bloomed with fresh smiles—the machinery of their dark designs already turning again.
***
After proving before everyone that I bore the undeniable mark of Divine Choice and stood as a Saint, the Main Cathedral finally moved me to a new chamber.
The very room I had occupied during my time as the Third Saint. For reference, that chamber had been almost a private suite.
Setting aside how the space had grown dozens of times larger than before, it was deeply moving to face this room so familiar to me, thick with memory.
The reverence shown to the Third Saint must have preserved it well—the chamber looked almost unchanged from how I remembered it.
When I placed Wilson Junior on the same shelf where I had once kept Wilson, it felt even more like the old days.
I turned slowly through the room with distant eyes, recalling those memories—the most grueling but also the most radiant days of my life.
Knock, knock.
A formal rap sounded at the door.
[Arden Haewelin (Holy Knight)]
A name and title were hastily scrawled on the parchment affixed to the door—an analog version of the intercom system I had installed during my time as the Third Saint.
Made from Holy Power, it wasn’t quite purely analog, but it was convenient to know who was calling before opening the door.
“Come in.”
When I opened the door, Lord Arden entered with a weary face, observing the formal courtesies of a knight with evident care.
His expression was cold and gaunt, dark circles shadowing his eyes with an almost decadent quality, yet his hair and uniform bore not a single thread out of place.
Lord Arden stepped into the chamber and looked around at my vastly expanded new room.
“So you’ve been assigned the Third Saint’s chamber.”
Lord Arden had recognized it immediately. If he disliked the Third Saint so much, knowing the room well enough suggested he had more than a passing interest in her. Some kind of reluctant admiration, perhaps?
He exhaled softly and turned to face me with a question.
“It’s quite well-known that the Saints who dwelled in this chamber fell gravely ill and died before a month had passed. Were you aware of this?”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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