Free Web NovelChapter 2: The Saint’s Priorities Were Completely Wrong
The window hovered a foot in front of my eyes, and no one around me seemed to see it.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi
Race: Human
Class: Hero of the Infinite
Level: 1
[ Stats ]
Strength: 14 | Vitality: 15 | Agility: 16 | Mana: 17 | Intelligence: 26 | Perception: 17
[ Skills ]
> [Hero’s Blessing - Lv.MAX] (Passive) - Understand and speak every language of this world. Experience gain x5.
> [Infinite Evolution - Lv.MAX] (Passive) - Allows the host to evolve, fuse, and transform skills without any limit.
> [Eye of Infinity - Lv.1] (Active) - Allows the host to perceive the world more deeply than any other living being.
Stats fit for an extra. The kind of numbers you hand the guy who dies in Chapter two. But the middle line nailed me in place.
Without any limit.
Four years writing this exact genre had taught me to spot that at a glance. A strength of fourteen, you make up over time. A skill that says no limit, you don’t. That isn’t a gift. It’s a crack in the rules of the world.
Just keep your mouth shut.
"With Your Majesty’s permission," said the woman in the arcane robes, "I can reveal their abilities to the court."
The king assented with a wave of his hand. The archmage turned her palms toward me, and a second window opened, edged in gold.
[ An external party wishes to display your information. ] Yes/No
I could refuse — the option was right there. But I knew nothing about this world, nothing about what a name like "Infinite Evolution" might mean to these people. Maybe it meant something to them. Maybe nothing. All I could do was hope it slipped past, that no one stopped on it. And if someone did — too bad. It was only a word on a window. Refusing, on the other hand, in front of an entire staring court, I knew exactly how that would read: a hero hiding something from the very first hour.
And that was the truly insane part. I was level one. Stats fit for an extra, one active skill at its first rung, enough to get me beaten by any country guardsman. And in the middle of all that mediocrity, lost between two lines no one would read twice, a skill with no ceiling at all. No one, at this level, should have been holding a thing like that.
I chose Yes.
A murmur ran through the tiers — my status had just appeared above the circle. The archmage scanned it, her brow furrowing.
"The hero is named Kuro Shiragi. Class: Hero of the Infinite. Modest characteristics, I’ll grant. The Hero’s Blessing, which lets him understand our tongues and learn quickly. An observation skill, first rung. And—" she paused, her lips pressing thin, "—a third gift I don’t recognize. ’Infinite Evolution.’ A passive with no apparent martial value. Minor, in all likelihood."
Minor.
I kept my face perfectly smooth and nearly laughed on the inside. She had just named the most dangerous thing in the room out loud and tossed it on the scrap heap. Around me, the nobles were already nodding, already elsewhere. A hero was a hero. They’d forgotten me.
Because the whole hall was waiting on only one thing.
Alice’s status appeared in turn, and I saw it as clearly as my own.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Alice Kazawa
Race: Human
Class: Saint
Level: 1
[ Stats ]
Strength: 13 | Vitality: 14 | Agility: 14 | Mana: 249 | Intelligence: 16 | Perception: 62
[ Skills ]
> [Hero’s Blessing - Lv.MAX] (Passive) - Understand and speak every language of this world. Experience gain x5.
> [Eye of Confession - Lv.1] (Active) - Discerns the lies buried in a target’s soul. Ineffective against beings of too high a rank or too strong a will.
> [Garden of Salvation - Lv.1] (Active) - Unfolds a sacred domain that restores the vitality and spirit of the host’s allies.
Human stats, like mine. Except one. Where my mana topped out at seventeen, hers climbed past two hundred, and the archmage herself lost her voice for a second.
Three skills. One to heal, one to root out lies, and the shared blessing. Nothing else. Nothing alarming.
That was what everyone in that hall could read.
"Her class... is Saint."
The word wasn’t murmured. It was exhaled, like a breath held too long. An old man in white-and-gold robes brought a hand to his chest. A woman crossed herself. And everywhere, I felt the relief break harder than the awe — because they’d seen the omens that night. The hair gone white, the eyes turned red. Some had feared something darker. The system had just ruled: a Saint. A true one.
The king came down a step from his throne, unhurried, and took us both in with the gaze of an owner surveying a fine harvest.
"What you read on these faces is not greed," he said. "It is hope. No Saint has walked this earth in generations, and Heaven sends you both at the precise hour we need you most. Be welcome in Pangracya. You will be treated according to what you are: my most precious guests."
I bowed slightly. And I asked the question a man in my place couldn’t afford to leave unasked.
"Your Majesty will forgive my curiosity. You spoke, when we arrived, of four kingdoms. Does that mean other heroes were summoned elsewhere tonight?"
A glint passed through the king’s eyes. Satisfaction, maybe, that someone had finally asked him something other than a complaint.
"You see far already, for someone who just arrived," he said slowly. "Yes. Four human kingdoms still stand against the tide rising from the west, and each performed the same rite as you, tonight. Each now has its heroes. In theory, we form an alliance. In practice, the glory of saving the world is a trophy every crown would rather carry alone. Your counterparts are allies, let’s say. Allies it is wiser not to let outpace you."
Official alliance. Real competition. I filed it with the rest.
And that was when Alice spoke up.
"And once the war is won," she said, without the slightest detour, "what guarantees you’ll let us go home? Because so far, all I hear is what you expect from us. Nothing about what we get out of it."
I briefly shut my eyes. There. It was said.
A scandalized shudder ran along the tiers. A noble in an embroidered doublet half-rose, his face red.
"That is an unacceptable way to address the sovereign! You are offered a destiny thousands would envy, and you haggle? Learn some respect, girl, before—"
"That is enough, Lord Verlaine."
The king’s voice hadn’t risen. It fell like a slab all the same, and the noble froze, ridiculous, halfway up.
"Never forget who you are speaking to. This young woman is a Saint. By her status, she stands at my level, not yours. You owe her the same regard you owe me. Am I clear?"
Verlaine paled, sat back down, and bowed to Alice with painful stiffness.
"I... beg your forgiveness, Lady Saint. My outburst was unworthy."
And Alice did the most terrifying thing of the whole evening.
She smiled. Soft, luminous, without a shadow.
"But it’s nothing at all, really," she said in her gentlest voice. "You were loyal to your king. I can’t hold that against you. Think no more of it." freewebnσvel.cѳm
The noble thanked her, relieved, and the entire court melted. What a Saint. What a heart. I read it on every face.
I alone, perhaps, had caught the smile settling on her lips half a beat before it reached her eyes.
And even then. Even I wasn’t sure of anything.
The audience ended soon after. The king insisted on escorting us himself, and it was while crossing the palace galleries at his side that I saw, for the first time, what this world really looked like. Halls tall as cathedrals, tapestries of knights charging beasts I didn’t know, and through the windows, a city of russet roofs tumbling down to the ramparts. I marveled despite myself, and hated it, because it pulled me away from thinking.
"You will stay here a week," the king explained, never breaking stride. "We’ll give you masters. You’ll learn the use of your bodies, the handling of weapons, everything a child here knows from the cradle. Then I’ll entrust you to a very high-ranking adventurer, who will take you out onto the roads. That is where heroes are forged. Not in a palace. In danger."
I decided to test something.
"And if I wanted to go out one afternoon? See the city, alone, to understand where we’ve landed. Would that be possible?"
He didn’t slow. His smile didn’t move.
"But of course. You are my guests, not my prisoners. I’ll simply have you accompanied by an escort. For your safety. A Saint and a hero unprotected in a city at war — I couldn’t allow it."
There were the bars. I’d just touched them, and they were exquisitely soft. I nodded as if the answer satisfied me completely.
"Your masters will present themselves tomorrow morning," he added, stopping before a carved door. "Rest. The day has been long, for you more than anyone."
He left us at our quarters, and the door closed on two adjoining rooms — and on two guards who took up position in the corridor at once. For our safety, of course.
The silence settled, and all the day’s tension left me at once. I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.
Alice didn’t sit. She crossed the room, planted herself in front of me, and lowered herself to half-kneel between my legs, her hands on my knees, her face raised close to mine.
"We were so close, you know," she murmured. "Earlier. Before that stupid circle tore us away from everything." Her fingers slid up my thighs. "The universe has absolutely terrible timing."
"Alice."
"I’m only saying we hadn’t finished, you and I." Her smile widened, and in the dimness her red eyes held a fixedness I hadn’t known in her the day before. "And now there’s no one to interrupt us. We’re alone, the two of us, in a world where we only know each other. Admit it’s almost perfect."
I laid my hands over hers to stop them rising, like a thousand times before.
"What I think is that we just got kidnapped by a king who smiles way too much, that we’ve got two guards behind that door, and that we’d better think very seriously about how we survive this."
She sighed, half-amused, half-disappointed, and finally sat beside me, her head against my shoulder as if it had always belonged there.
"You’re hopelessly unromantic." A pause. "But go on. You’ve got a plan, I can feel it."
"I don’t have a plan," I admitted. "Not really."
And it was true. I’d built nothing, decided nothing. Just a bad feeling that hadn’t let go of me since the throne room.
"Just... watch out for the smiles, here. His especially. The way he defended you earlier — that wasn’t kindness. People aren’t kind for free with what has value."
She didn’t answer right away. And I thought, without quite knowing why, that she was probably better placed than I was to know what a beautiful smile could hide. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
"What I want," I went on, "is for us to find a way, one day, to do without them. The king, the kingdom, all of it. But not now. Right now we’re level one in a gilded cage. So we keep our heads down, we go along with them, we give them what they expect. And we wait for our moment."
Alice stayed quiet a moment, her cheek against my shoulder. Then she gave a small, soft laugh.
"You know I don’t care about any of that?" she said. "The king, the kingdom, leaving, staying, getting strong. Honestly, it’s all the same to me." She raised her eyes to mine, and her smile had that softness that always tightened my chest in a strange way. "As long as I’m with you, anything works. Truly anything. The rest is your fight, not mine. I already have everything I need."
I didn’t know what to say to that. I never did, with her. So I did what I always did when she threw me off: I changed the subject. I called up my status.
And this time, instead of reading it, I stopped on that line — Infinite Evolution, without any limit — and I stared at it, concentrating, pushing on it the way you push a door to see if it gives.
The system answered.
[ Skill Infinite Evolution acknowledged by the host. Activating. ]
My breath caught. My eyes fell on the Hero’s Blessing, at its maximum. Maximum. You couldn’t raise it any higher.
But raising it wasn’t the only thing you could do with it.
Evolve, I thought.
Heat rose in my chest, and the text rewrote itself.
Hero’s Blessing (MAX) evolves...
-> Divine Blessing - Lv. 1
| Understand and speak every language of this world
| Experience gain x10
I stared at the lines without breathing. A maximum skill had just dropped back to level one — but of something higher. The experience gain had doubled.
And it wasn’t the bonus that made my head spin. It was the implication. A ceiling had just collapsed to be reborn lower and higher at once, ready to be climbed again. Once. Ten times. A hundred times. Without end. Infinite. That was the exact meaning of the word the whole court had shrugged at.
"Kuro?" Alice had straightened. "You’re making a strange face."
"Wait. Just a second."
There was still my active. The one the archmage had barely deigned to name. Without knowing what I hoped for, I called it.
Eye of Infinity.
The world changed.
As if a veil I’d worn all my life had been torn away. The room was the same, and yet everything in it vibrated with a new light. Golden filaments drifted through the air, slow, lazy. The stone of the walls was steeped in it. By the window, warm currents swirled where the city breathed. It was everywhere. The whole world bathed in an invisible substance I was discovering this very instant, and it was beautiful enough to choke me.
Then my gaze landed on Alice.
And it stopped.
Where everything glowed, there was something else on her. A shadow. Not an absence of light — a presence, dense, coiled against her like a second skin, drinking the mana around it instead of reflecting it. It stirred faintly, at the very edge of what my brand-new eye could grasp, and the more I stared, the less I understood. It wasn’t a Saint’s aura. It wasn’t a light from Heaven. It was cold. Patient. And it looked like nothing I’d just seen in this room drowned in gold.
I blinked, and the world went normal again. Alice was watching me, her head tilted slightly, her soft smile back on her lips.
"...What is it? You’ve gone strange all of a sudden."
She couldn’t know what I’d just seen. What I was still seeing — the echo of that cold thing coiled against her. I forced myself to hold her gaze, and to give her back something that resembled a smile.
"...Nothing," I said.
