Chapter 689: Let’s Listen

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be imperiled in a hundred battles.

As early as her first arrival in the Northern Border, when faced with the massive invasion of the Church’s knightly order, Lyra had obtained from the seized spoils the new Holy scripture, currently the most widely circulated among the faithful, and also the most radical in viewpoint.

In the time that followed, she read it carefully, trying to glean from those lines of text the primary force driving their series of fanatical invasions.

Later on, Lyra also laid eyes on the previous version of the scripture provided by the Saintess Monica, one that had not been revised by Hebrew. Some of its doctrines could not merely be called "slightly different" from the prior generation; to say that, in its overarching direction, it had executed a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn would not be an exaggeration. Calling it the complete opposite would be perfectly apt.

From broad to narrow, from gentle to extreme, if the former Church of Light had been a compassionate savior, left hand bathed in holy radiance and right hand gripping a longsword, then the current one had wholly erased, on the arcane level, the healing nature of light-element particles, exposing only its sharp, unhidden edge.

Lyra hovered alone high in the sky. As far as her eyes could reach were glittering points formed from magical arrays. Sunlight fell upon the bricks and tiles of the Holy Radiant City, making the entire scene unreal and splendid, yet the tense expressions and gazes of the defending knights upon the walls, along with the knightly swords in their hands adorned by cold gleams, added a chill of killing intent beyond the dreamlike beauty.

Seeing that the Church’s knights still maintained a measure of restraint, the light-wings behind the pink-haired knight trembled unceasingly. Fine, broken brilliance scattered across the six wings like glittering motes shaken loose from the blazing sun.

"Many of you should already know of my existence, Lyra Beckett, defined by the Pope as an apostate who usurped the Lord’s authority, and who seized holy relics for her own use."

Her cherry-pink hair danced in the wind like blooming sakura. The flower ornament in her hair swayed lightly as well, lending an added touch of elegance to the already unadorned young girl.

Lyra quietly exhaled, blue eyes fixing on the people gripping weapons atop the wall.

"Before we discuss who I am, I ask all of you to spare a little thought: we are all people bathed in holy light, so why, at this very moment, are we standing off against one another across an illusory wall of light?"

There was no need for a display. With a faint beat of her wings, her extraordinary affinity with the light element naturally endowed the girl with a visible radiance. Even if Lyra simply stood quietly in the sky, the dazzling brilliance above her head was willing to linger for her sake.

After a brief pause, she swept her gaze across the crowd on the wall. Her face was grave as she parted her pale pink lips.

"Several months ago, the Pope of Light Hebrew, under the name of faith, declared a holy war upon the Valeria Empire. He led his army straight into Duke Charles’s territory, destroyed the Liya Tower Fortress, seized the commercial arteries, amassed forces at White Maple Town, and attempted to decide the war in a decisive battle against the Empire’s elites."

"Throughout the war, whether it was the Kingdom of Velys or the Valeria Empire, bishops, knights, soldiers, or civilians, all suffered baptism by flames of war, bearing scars that will never fade."

"Some parents lost their children in this war. Others lost the lovers dearest to them. Infants wailed in swaddling cloth. The sick gathered in droves, howling within the plague tents. The elderly had no descendants to rely on, falling one after another into the wind and snow like stalks of straw."

"And the cause of all of it was that single marching order, born of the Pope of Light Hebrew’s arbitrary and absurd judgment of the scriptures."

Hearing Lyra’s words from afar, the knights stationed on the wall did not choose to lay down their weapons. They continued sustaining the defensive arrays. Yet that did not mean they heard nothing.

People always subconsciously beautify the path they did not take. The citizens of the Kingdom of Velys, tormented by war, had suffered most, and thus were all the more prone to fantasize about that fork in the road that had once been placed before their rulers, brimming with possibility.

If Hebrew had not chosen to launch the holy war, would everything now have never happened? Would the kingdom’s future have been different?

Without the prolonged drain of armament expenditures, without those several crushing defeats that yielded no results at all, the Valeria Empire would have had no righteous pretext to dispatch troops, nor would it have lightly made war upon a human kingdom with abundant military strength.

For all their might, magitech weapons were still only in their infancy; facing the Kingdom of Velys at its peak, that level of strength was far from enough. Not to mention that the Fourth Imperial Princess Amalia had only just ascended and was busy with the transfer of power, she simply had no ability to stir up a war without cause.

And if there had been no war, there would have been plenty of hands to deal with the plague. They could have suppressed this terrifying disease completely, perhaps even strangled it in its cradle.

Perhaps every problem traced back to that one day: a single sentence from the Pope of Light swelling within so many knights’ chests, a fervor that longed to carry faith into other lands.

Sensing the change in the army’s mood, Knight Commander Kales furrowed his brow. His holy-white knightly sword hung down by his boot, lightly tapping the floor tiles formed of light-element particles.

Whatever Lyra ultimately wanted, whether to win without fighting, or to use this speech as a pretext to strike, one thing was clear: their morale was already starting to slip.

So now... should he find a way to cut her off?

Lyra Beckett was an early tier Arcanist Mage specialized in light, and also an early tier Crusader with terrifying physical prowess. To move against her would require at least two powerhouses of equal tier; otherwise, their odds of victory were less than twenty percent.

Moreover, no matter what, as an Arcanist Mage Lyra had not publicly attacked the Church’s knightly order. If they struck first, one, Kales could not bear responsibility for losing control of the situation; two, it would instead make their side look guilty.

If faith were flawless, utterly pure, how could it be shaken by a few words from an enemy, leading to doubt of oneself?

Since he could not solve the one raising the question, only one road remained for Kales: have his subordinates deploy a silence barrier, blocking the spread of wind and sound.

"..."

As the overall commander of this elite force, Kales ought to have issued the order at this moment. Yet as he looked at the pink-haired knight not far away, backlit by the sun, radiant beyond measure, his motion hesitated.

Then the crisp sound of high heels echoed in Kales’s ears. Turning his head, he saw a brown-haired Saintess with a voluptuous figure approaching with slow grace, silk sleeve ribbons cradled in her hands, her alluring eyes rippling like water.

"Knight Commander Kales, I’ve heard from the knights what just happened."

Unable to tell whether Monica had come to question him or for some other reason, Kales bowed in salute toward the Saintess who arrived with a fragrant breeze, then spoke.

"Lyra Beckett is speaking words that are profoundly blasphemous to the Church’s faith."

Including, but not limited to, claiming orthodoxy, questioning the Pope’s decisions, and putting herself in the knights’ shoes, suggesting they were being used as a gun.

Hearing Kales’s words, and with the clear female voice drifting from the distance, Monica tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear and murmured softly.

"Tell me, what rebellious things did she say?"

"I was praying inside just now. I didn’t catch it clearly."

While Kales recounted it, Monica divided her attention to listen to Lyra’s speech, her arms slowly folding across her chest to keep that surging fullness from spilling outward.

Last night, she had used a holy relic of the Light to contact Lyra and Astrid, practically a rehearsal in advance. She had a rough sense in her heart.

Some words were not suitable for those within the Church to speak with their own mouths. They required an outsider to step forward and pierce them.

Certain matters everyone understood, if you didn’t poke them, they could remain hidden beneath the surface forever. But once you poked them and set them on that scale, it would not be easy to climb back down.

Whose desire had started the war? Whose responsibility was it that the war went poorly? Who would remedy its vile consequences? One by one, piece by piece, believers not speaking of them did not mean they didn’t want to.

This was sometimes how faith collapsed. And in any case, though the Church of Light now had countless followers, most had gathered for their own private interests. Long ago, fissures had already formed within, along with what people called a "church within the church."

After Kales finished recounting, Monica nodded thoughtfully, just in time to hear Lyra in the sky mention the differences between the new Holy scripture and the previous scripture.

"As the bearer acknowledged by the Sword of Light, as one upon whom the Lord casts His gaze, I too once felt great curiosity toward the Church of Light, toward those who, like me, possess an exceptionally high affinity with the light element and seek the path to mankind’s salvation."

The pink-haired girl’s gaze was resolute, every word in her mouth distinct. Backlit by the sun, her pale-pink hair seemed plated with a layer of sacred gold, complementing her translucent wings.

"Saintess... should we deploy a silence barrier to stop Lyra from continuing to spread her heretical thoughts..."

With a superior in name now present, Kales set aside his momentary hesitation and asked for Monica’s opinion instead.

Noticing the red-haired man’s gaze at her eyes, carrying a faint hint of probing, Monica fluttered her lashes and paused two or three seconds before replying.

"If faith is pure, it will not be sullied by a few words." Before her voice fully fell, she softly added, "...and the reverse is also true."

If there were unreasonable parts, then even without deliberately dragging them out, as problems accumulated day by day, sharp contradictions would gradually emerge.

The Church of Light believed in the existence of the omniscient and omnipotent Lord, and in His mercy and majesty. Yet the reason they chose to believe in Him rather than some bizarre evil god was not merely because He was the Father of the gods and the Mother of all things.

His protection, His compassion, the light and warmth He ceaselessly radiated, these were the essential foundations by which the Church of Light had expanded its faithful since its founding. In other words, only because God loves the world is there such a thing as the world loving God.

Kales hesitated a moment after hearing this, then spoke meaningfully.

"So... we do nothing?"

Just maintain vigilance and let Lyra speak to the end.

"Mhm." Monica gave a light hum. Her long, delicate legs in white stockings stepped forward, the tassel-like ornaments behind her hair swaying faintly and drawing along the relic’s light.

"I also want to see just how far she can go."

"...the one watched by the Lord?"

...................

"The Pope is the supreme existence within the Church of Light, bearing the duty of communicating with the omniscient and omnipotent Lord while steering the helm for the mortal world. And at the very beginning, that old code which recorded the Highest God’s words was the saving medicine the Lord bestowed upon the first Pope. He called it the Words of Simplicity, mankind’s self-salvation."

"Confirmed by countless Popes across the ages, the Words of Simplicity also possess certain special properties. They transcend the shackles of time and space, sharing similar traits with the omniscient and omnipotent Lord. As divine speech, they are both one and all, both beginning and end. They change with time and shift with the space they inhabit. It was upon this point that successive Popes revised and interpreted the doctrines of each era."

"But on this day, with the reform of the new Holy scripture, the other half of the holy relic, whose aura had not appeared for thousands of years, surfaced within the faithless Valeria Empire, grasped by one favored by light. Meanwhile, the plague spread on a vast scale through lands controlled by the Church of Light, and no cure can be found."

"In such a scene, everything without exception proclaims the wrath of God."

Once, the Church of Light, because a plague had erupted along the Valeria Empire’s border and affected the logistics corps, mistook itself for walking the correct path, carrying out God’s will.

Now the boomerang had flown back. No one could refute it, especially since the Valeria Empire was no longer plagued by disease, and all manner of intelligence pointed out that the one who resolved it was precisely that silver-haired Regent and Lyra, the Empire’s bulwark who held the holy sword.

An apostate who usurped the Lord’s authority... Perhaps the holy sword could fall into a villain’s hands, but how was one to explain that affinity with the light element, greater even than the Pope of Light and the Saintess?

Could it be that even the omniscient and omnipotent Lord could be deceived by a mortal?

Impossible. His grandeur and wisdom surpassed imagination. The sun was but a speck of dust at His fingertips. With a lowered gaze He could survey all living beings in the world. How could such an existence be tricked by the life He created?

By comparison, who had been deceived was self-evident.

A biting wind swept across the City of Light, threading through the gaps in armor. The Church’s knights gripped their swords, feet as though rooted, planted within the sacred hall.

"If you still refuse to believe, if you would rather close your eyes and ears, then in the end you will only stray ever farther from that noble road paved with radiance and flowers."

As her words fell, Lyra raised her hand. A strand of holy light adorned her pale fingertips, like a second sun beneath the firmament.

"But before that, at least spare some thought for those innocent sufferers."

"I hope to cast the Light of Healing upon the lands ravaged by plague, just as I once did in the land of my birth."