With her divinity suppressed, Yimi couldn't pull off miracles on any grand scale.
A village might only be a village, but even so it held at least a hundred people, and the twisted, misshapen forms they'd been turned into could be anywhere. Some had lost the ability to think entirely; others kept their minds but had been remade into creatures with no sight and no hearing, so that even if they retained consciousness, crying out did them no good at all. Just tracking down the missing ones took real effort.
The light in her hand fell on a revolting green blowfly. The power that had completed its metamorphosis back in the spirit world stripped the misfortune rooted in its body structure clean away, and where the blowfly had been, there now stood a little girl about Yimi's own size, bawling her eyes out.
Her mother rushed over, soothing her while giving Yimi a small bow.
"That's awful." Emilia clenched her fist. "Turning everyone into ugly things—whoever did this has to be an ugly freak too."
Sitting in the dragon carriage, Beatrice sipped the tea the village chief had handed her, her eyes never leaving Yimi as she "treated" the villagers. The things the villagers had become were mostly flies and cockroaches, the kind that make your skin crawl on instinct. Any other time, if Yimi so much as touched one of them, Beatrice would have held her back and spent half a day scrubbing her paws clean.
"Everyone in the village is here now. There's no way we could ever repay your kindness, so please, at least accept this and let us do what little we can." The chief, having finished counting heads, offered up not some priceless treasure but a plain coin purse.
He held it out toward Emilia, who looked the oldest—but it was Beatrice who reached out and took it.
Beatrice opened it for a glance. "Enough to buy plenty of sweets, in fact. You wouldn't happen to have any strange newcomers who just moved in recently, would you?"
The business with Meili was still fresh in her mind.
The chief shook his head. "The newest resident of the village is a child born seven years ago."
"Tired." Yimi scampered back to Beatrice's side and gazed up at her, wide-eyed.
Puck leaned in by Beatrice's ear. "Go on, praise her."
"Ah... good work. You were amazing." Beatrice patted her head, the words coming out a little stiff.
The kitten stretched her neck out, proud.
"Do you know who did it?" Emilia asked.
This would have been the perfect moment to reveal her true face and make a good impression, yet she stayed wrapped in that cloak that hid her features. Of all the candidates, she had to be the least politically shrewd.
"It was a dragon."
"A dragon?"
"It was Diego!" Yimi poked her head out, only to be pushed back down by Beatrice.
The chief pointed at the sky. "A black flying dragon spilled its blood over us. It didn't destroy anything, didn't steal a thing." As if it had just done it in passing, on a whim.
"So we can't even catch the culprit?" Emilia lowered her head. Doing something this cruel with nothing to gain from it—it was exactly like a Sin Archbishop of the Witch Cult, the kind who'd take one look at a Gospel and start following its instructions to the letter.
"If it's the Witch Cult, that's trouble." Puck floated beside Yimi, then licked her cat ear in revenge for having his own fur licked earlier that day.
"Meow!"
Yimi swatted at him, annoyed, and he dodged with pinpoint timing.
Puck flew up out of reach. "Their Gospels are only shoddy knock-offs full of gaps, the kind of thing that might backfire on whoever uses them—but if there's one thing this pulled off, it's keeping Lia stuck here, hasn't it?"
"Stuck here?"
Emilia looked blank. She couldn't see what good her staying would do. If someone wanted her dead, wouldn't they just lie in wait for her here?
She glanced at Yimi again, then quickly asked the chief, "Could I trouble you to prepare a land dragon to pull a cart... and it'd be even better if there were a coachman too."
The chief bowed his head. "I'd love to help, but when the flying dragon came down, every land dragon in the village bolted in fright. If you're not in a hurry, you could stay the night—a dragon carriage should pass through here tomorrow."
From the Royal Capital to Roswaal Manor, this spot didn't even count as the halfway point. There was no way they could run all the way back. For now, it seemed, they were stranded here.
"You uncultured piece of gutter trash, how dare you infringe on my copyright—"
Regulus shoved Subaru Natsuki away with a slap, but the moment his mouth opened, before a single word got out, Subaru grabbed a rock and jammed it in.
"You really are hard to kill, huh. Don't tell me your Stasis is permanent? With a filthy mouth like yours, if it weren't a passive skill you'd have been quietly offed ages ago."
The malice on Subaru's face hadn't faded in the slightest. Throwing punches and kicks really was a fine way to vent the frustration boiling in his chest, but the fact that this guy took no damage at all only made him more uncomfortable. So he dropped all pretense of dignity and started running his mouth. "That really baffles me, though. From my own experience, when you're in Stasis you can't get it up at all. If you're stuck like this forever, what do you even need a wife for?"
Hearing that, Regulus bit the rock in his mouth clean in half.
The Authority of Greed could likewise lock his own time in place, and combined with his power to keep an object at its initial velocity, he was arguably the strongest of all the current Sin Archbishops. Even Reinhard probably couldn't kill him—and might just get launched to the moon for trying. But his strength lay entirely in his Authority. He himself wasn't even worthy of making the Dragon Sword Reid leave its sheath. In fact, if you analyzed it carefully, his reliance on his Authority left him with virtually no technique whatsoever, his attacks amounting to little more than flinging sand.
Once distance was between them, the enraged Regulus turned toward Otto over there. Even with one hand severed, the man had still dragged the near-broken girl back to safety. Except by now Otto no longer knew whether he should fear Regulus, or fear both of them at once.
Regulus swept out a gust of air and obliterated the dragon carriage beside Otto. "Kneel right now and apologize for infringing on my rights—if you don't, I'll just make them die in your place!"
"Hah?"
Watching him defend his pitiful pride this way, Subaru actually cooled down a little.
"Mmn, comrades turning on each other? At this time, in this place—could such a chance meeting be love?! O beloved Witch!"
A voice that sounded a bit off suddenly rose from behind Otto. It gave him a real fright, but with his wrist screaming in pain he had no chance to react.
"This feeling—could it be Pride? Or Greed? How comical, what a rousing, rousing sight! My very brain is trembling!" The speaker cocked his head, his tone abruptly dropping lower. "You two—how very slothful of you."
"Who are you?"
Subaru looked toward the voice. The manic way this guy spoke made his skin crawl, but he was honestly a little relieved by the sudden interruption—because he hadn't been sure whether his conscience would cave to that overgrown baby or force him to watch those two die, and he didn't want to see either.
It was a guy with soft green hair, a face pale and ugly, the kind of face that told you at a glance he was a lunatic.
In that instant, he seemed to briefly recover his calm for a few seconds. "I am a Sin Archbishop of the Witch Cult—the one representing Sloth, by the name of... Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti!"
"Dori, weren't you off dropping someone off? How'd you lose the cart too?"
Subaru looked around in a daze, gasped for breath, and coughed a few times. This scene—had he saved here, back when he ran into that coachman fleeing home by the fruit stall?
Just his luck. He'd stayed in Stasis the whole time fighting Regulus, and the second that Sloth showed up his Stasis vanished—and in the end it wasn't even Regulus who took his head. He only knew Yimi always said he smelled bad, without any idea what the smell actually was, and nobody had ever told him, so of course he couldn't sync up with Petelgeuse's logic. Then, with his blood boiling, he'd cursed out the entire Witch Cult the way he'd cursed Greed, dragging the Witch into it too—and got killed by Petelgeuse for it.
Subaru held his head and calmed himself a bit. This was fine, actually. There was still time. Knowing in advance how to negotiate with Otto, he could save himself a huge chunk of it—maybe even save that village. He really couldn't just turn a blind eye after all. And these Witch Cultists were probably the culprits behind the demon beasts hemming Emilia in.
"Kitty Yimi, Kitty Yimi?" Beatrice nudged the spaced-out Yimi and, worried, gave her a gentle pinch. "What's wrong?"
"Time. It rewound." Yimi kicked the pillar beside her in anger.
"Ngh." It didn't hurt. She transferred the impact away.
Because she'd spent half a day working herself ragged to save the whole village—so, so tired—and now time had rolled back to the exact moment right after she'd saved the very first person!
That damned 486!
"Yimi, are you saying Subaru rewound time?" Emilia furrowed her brow.