Paladin of a Ruined Order - Chapter 43

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Order

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Chapter 43: Liar (4)

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While they waited for the village chief to wake up, the Goddess of the Rusted Shield gave an oracle.

"Elbridge. I went and asked the God of the Brass Cup."

The God of the Brass Cup symbolized many things.

Its chief meaning was the peace and well-being of a community.

In other words, it matched what Osric had said the God of Eternal Voyaging stood for.

There was another important trait of the God of the Brass Cup. That god was known as one of the senior gods among the many gods of Heaven.

It was said that when the God of the Brass Cup ascended, people still did not know how to work iron. In those days, brass and bronze were the finest metals.

Because the God of the Brass Cup had ascended so early, that god would surely know whether another god with the same power had appeared. In many ways, that made the god ideal for uncovering the truth behind this incident.

The oracle continued.

"The God of the Brass Cup says that, except for you, there is no god that symbolizes the peace and well-being of a community. That god has never even heard the name God of Eternal Voyaging..."

Elbridge nodded slowly. "Understood. Thank you, Goddess."

* * *

The three of them took away Tibo's staff and bound him to a chair.

A mage could not use magic without a staff. There were some high-ranking mages who could still cast without one, but even then their power dropped a great deal, so it was not a major issue.

"Ugh..."

After waiting a while with every precaution in place, Chief Tibo groaned and woke up.

When he realized he was tied up, the chief panicked and looked around.

"W-what is this?"

The group watched Tibo in silence. Tibo looked like he was trying to figure out why he had been tied up here.

Elbridge wondered what Tibo would say first. Please let me go? Spare me? Something like that, perhaps.

But Tibo's first words were different from what he expected.

"So this day has finally come."

Tibo said that and went completely limp.

Strangely enough, this was the most relaxed he had looked since arriving in this village.

Bracing himself on his sword like a cane, Elbridge asked Tibo, "Village chief. Why did you trade on the name of a god that didn't exist?"

That question made Marcus and Rombel even more confused.

"What? The God of Eternal Voyaging doesn't exist?"

Since it would have been difficult to repeat the conversation he had just had with the Goddess of the Rusted Shield, Elbridge gave a vague answer.

"That seems to be the case."

"I thought this guy was just pretending to be an archbishop..."

Rombel and Marcus's reaction was, in a way, natural.

Whenever a fraud related to religion appeared, those people always claimed to be some high-ranking cleric and tried to steal whatever they could.

But Chief Tibo did not contradict Elbridge's guess. It was almost as if he were admitting Elbridge was right.

"My goodness. Really?"

Impersonating a high priest was already a serious crime, but inventing a fake god...

This was a kind of blasphemy Elbridge had never seen before, so he did not know what to do with Tibo.

Marcus asked, "What were you thinking when you did this? You didn't seem like the kind of person who'd do something this idiotic."

Tibo answered.

"Would it be all right if I took a little time? It's a long story."

Elbridge nodded.

It was not because he felt any kindness toward the village chief. He only needed enough information to make an accurate judgment.

Tibo thought back for a moment, then slowly began his story.

"Like any other mage, my master wanted to become a god. But he was far more skilled than most mages, so my apprentices and I believed he would become one."

Tibo's voice stopped for a moment, then continued.

"But in the end, my master never became a god. He did not rise to Heaven. He was buried in the earth as a human, just like everyone else."

Countless mages wanted to ascend to Heaven. But only a tiny number ever did. Most met the same end as Tibo's master.

"It left me hollow. If even my master could not become a god, could I become one? So I left the Magic Tower. But in the end, I could not give up that dream. So I thought hard about it. Why was it that my master could not become a god?"

Tibo's voice turned gloomy.

"The conclusion I reached back then was that my master did not have enough followers. Unlike my master, who had only a few disciples, I had heard that most other gods already had many followers even before they ascended. The essence of a god was not the one who led, but the ones who were led. In other words, maybe it was the followers... That was what I thought when I was young."

Elbridge's group still said nothing.

No words were needed. They could already picture what the young Tibo had been trying to do just from hearing this much.

"I wanted to test my theory. So I wandered through a sparsely populated area and found a tiny village."

"That was here?"

"Yes. It was a remote village that even merchants never visited. No, calling it a village was already generous. It was just a place where maybe twenty or thirty slash-and-burn settlers had gathered..."

Elbridge, who had been listening quietly, said, "You committed a terrible thing, village chief."

Tibo did not deny it.

"I was young. Reckless, and thoughtless. I did not think of it that way, but... maybe I was evil. I never thought about how other people would take it. With the single-minded goal of proving my theory and becoming a god, I invented a convincing name, the God of Eternal Voyaging, and said that I was the archbishop of that god."

Gods stayed in Heaven, and believers stayed on the earth.

No matter how young Tibo had been, he probably could not have claimed that he himself was a god. So the alternative he chose must have been archbishop.

"Without divine power, how were you going to make believers...? No, I see. Damn it."

Rombel began to ask Tibo a question, then realized the answer on his own.

"Yes. Of course I had no divine power. That was when the God of the Brass Cup came to mind. I thought maybe I could imitate something as vague as community harmony. But if that had been all, no one would have followed me. So I lied."

Tibo took a breath for a moment, then said it as if he were spitting it out.

"I told them that the ruin of this world was approaching. That they could be saved only by believing me... I told them lies they could not help but believe, lies that would make them trust me if they wavered even a little."

"A lie that was beyond what anyone could bear. Foolish."

"Yes. One lie called forth another. The fact that I was a mage was a problem too. I had never believed in a god myself, so how could I have imitated a real priest and a real order?"

Tibo hung his head and stared at a shard of pottery rolling on the floor, at the pattern carved into it.

"The first thing I did was invent an emblem to symbolize the god. But that was only the beginning. People asked whether our order had symbols or relics, so I made those myself too. I even bought old things and just stamped the emblem on them."

"People really fell for that?"

"I know. It was crude. But these people were pure enough to be fooled by that crude lie. They could not even read... They trusted me completely."

"..."

"Even so, I could not relax. So I helped them to win their favor and avoid suspicion. If they had no complaints, they would not grow suspicious, and if they did not grow suspicious, then even that vague power called community harmony would not be questioned."

Tibo let out a long sigh.

"Whenever I opened my eyes, new slash-and-burn settlers kept showing up and settling in the village. Twenty became fifty, then a hundred... At first, I thought things were going well. But before I knew it, there were more than five hundred people. The village grew far faster than I expected, and only then did I start to get scared. Was this really all right?"

"Of course it wasn't."

"Yes. It wasn't. Once I realized that again, I wanted to run."

Rombel clicked his tongue.

"But in the end, you didn't run. Was your greed to become a god that great?"

Chief Tibo shook his head.

"No."

"Then your words don't add up. If you had no intention of becoming a god, you should have left. In the end, couldn't you just not let go of your greed?"

"...I could not run for another reason."

"What reason?"

"There were too many people who had gathered because of my lie. What was I supposed to do if I ran after deceiving so many people? They were building houses because they wanted to stop living as slash-and-burn settlers..."

He had started the lie for selfish, evil reasons, but Tibo was not wicked enough to brazenly push it all the way to the end. At the same time, he was not good or brave enough to confess his sins and beg forgiveness.

That was how every person Elbridge had seen so far had been.

No one was purely good from birth to death, and no one was purely evil from head to toe.

"Since I was afraid of attracting even more people, I warned them not to spread any talk about ruin and salvation to outsiders. I told them that if our village got any bigger, there might be people who couldn't get into our village in Heaven..."

The adults probably went along with Tibo's story. But the children couldn't. The pure goodwill Osric had shown had shattered the lies Tibo had built.

The lie had been that fragile. Fragile enough for a child's single remark to bring everything down.

Tibo smiled bitterly.

"Even after I had already sinned, I hated being pointed at. At some point, my only goal was to keep other people from finding out. After death, there was nothing I could do about it, but I thought I could keep it hidden until then. And so almost thirty years passed."

The Goddess of the Rusted Shield whispered in a voice full of pity.

"How foolish. If you do something beyond your station, the day always comes when you have to bear the consequences..."

There was only one difference between Tibo and ordinary people.

Thanks to his ability, he had been able to keep the lie hidden a little longer.

Tibo continued his story.

"But for the last six months, trouble had started. I said the world would end, but I had never really thought it would, and then signs of the world truly ending started to appear."

"You're talking about the demonic beasts?"

That was only a conversation between Tibo and Marcus, but Elbridge subtly avoided Tibo's gaze.

The appearance of demonic beasts was not Elbridge's responsibility. If Elbridge had any responsibility at all, maybe it was that he had only managed to keep the seal going for two hundred years.

No, even that probably was not Elbridge's problem, but a flaw in the seal itself.

Even so, whenever Elbridge heard about demonic beasts or demons, he felt a faint guilt.

No one existed to tell Elbridge it was not his fault, no one to take that burden in his place.

"Most demonic beasts I could drive off. But in the end, one appeared that I could not deal with. That was when I had to think of a new solution. I thought about it every day. Should I ask for outside help and solve the problem that way?"

"If it were me, I wouldn't call anyone. I'd rather move the village."

When Marcus cut in with his opinion, Rombel shot back.

"What if you move the village and the same problem shows up again?"

"Is there any other way? What if you bring in outsiders and everything gets exposed?"

"Yes. That was why I could not bring myself to ask for help either. No one knew better than I did how flimsy my lie was. It would fool only simple, innocent people who knew nothing. There was no way it would fool paladins who knew so much about faith and Heaven. And it wasn't as if I could explain everything to the villagers afterward and then make them keep quiet..."

Lies called forth lies, and bigger lies called forth even more lies.

No matter how skilled a mage Tibo was, he could not carry the lie to the end.

"Neither one thing nor the other. I was agonizing over it when you all came. The first time I saw you, my heart dropped, but at the same time I thought it might work out."

"..."

"I even hoped maybe I wouldn't get caught. But well... In the end, I was caught. That's the end of it."

Tibo gave an awkward smile, then quietly closed his eyes.

His expression looked a little lighter.

What had only grown more complicated was Elbridge, Rombel, and Marcus.

How should this liar be punished?

After a long silence, Marcus asked Elbridge, "Sir Elbridge. I have a question."

"Please speak."

"How did the Order of the Rusted Shield punish someone who impersonated a high priest?"

"There has never been such an incident in my order. But every order punished them the same way."

"What way?"

Elbridge answered.