Chapter 42
“Y- Your Excellency, the Duke. Please allow me to live!”
Viscount Rohas was dripping sweat from the extreme pain from his twisted arm, and he groveled for his life on the ground.
Richard stared down at the Viscount and got rid of the clouds.
“I see that you want to talk now.”
“I- I‘ll tell you everything that I know.”
“Are you the one who went into the infected land?”
“Although it’s true that I was there, I was not the one who went into it!”
“Then who was it?”
“That’s…… .”
At that moment, two unidentified men appeared from behind Richard. They rushed towards Richard with raised swords.
But Richard was much faster than them.
After he created a significant distance between them, he struck them with lightning.
The unidentified men just barely avoided getting struck by the lightning. And then they started to run away and retreat.
Richard was about to chase after them but stopped his sword. There was no way his opponents would have thought that they would be able to overpower him with just two people.
But this had been such a vain attempt to fight him if the opponent was really trying to gauge Richard’s power.
Suddenly, Richard realized what the opponent’s aim had been.
‘Their aim wasn’t me.’
The opponent’s goal wasn’t to overpower Richard but to kill and shut the mouth of the weak Viscount. That would have been a more effective method for them.
Richard quickly turned his head towards the Viscount.
Just as he had thought, other unidentified men were rushing towards the Viscount.
Richard used his powers to blow the men away with wind, but he was distracted by the sudden pain he felt in his back.
It was a pain that had gotten more and more severe ever since he left the Dukedom two days ago.
‘Why would the pain get so severe right now, of all times……!’
The unidentified men reached the Viscount and raised their swords.
Richard ground his teeth as he looked at them. At that moment, a black aura rose from his body.
The black aura seeped under the men’s feet and swallowed them.
“W- What is this…… Ack!”
“Augh……”
The men, who had been swallowed up by the aura, frantically writhed in pain while letting out agonized yells and then suddenly went limp.
Richard strode past the fear-stricken Viscount and went to check on the unidentified men.
Although there was no sign of injury on the men, they were not breathing.
‘Did I kill them?’
Richard looked down at his hands as if he couldn’t believe it. The black aura that had surrounded them just a little while earlier had suddenly disappeared.
‘What was that just now?’
Richard was still wondering about the nature of the black aura when desperate calls came from behind him.
“Your Excellency!”
Thomson, who had come a beat late, stumbled over to Richard.
“T- There’s a big problem.”
“What happened?”
Thomson caught his breath.
Richard had thought that Thomson would complain to Richard about leaving him behind as usual.
But the words that came out of Thomson’s mouth were completely unexpected.
“They said… the Madam disappeared.”
In the slums in the outskirts of Akroa, Arensia’s capital city, there was a great temple.
Because of the saying ‘god will always reside in the lowliest of places,’ every temple built in Arensia was built in the slums where the poor and the sick lived.
This was done so that those who needed god the most would always be able to reach god. So the temples were always open for those in need.
But just because they were open to everyone didn’t mean that everything was allowed inside the temple. Even the Emperor himself was not allowed to do things that would go against god in the temple.
The person who was in charge of running such a place was the Pope.
“Your Holiness. It is time for the morning prayers to begin.”
At the sound of the priest’s voice, a man with dazzling golden hair got up from his seat in the prayer room.
Some new recruits of the temple came in and put the pope’s robe on the man.
He was tall and had broad shoulders, so when he put on his robe, the man looked like an angel who had been sent down to the ground by god.
He was Pope Aiden Serriott.
He was the Serriot family’s last surviving member, so he was the current temple’s leader.
People who had never seen him before were always shocked.
Many people imagined that the Pope was some kind of old man with whitish hair, but Aiden was a handsome man who was in his late 30s at most.
“Let’s go.”
Aiden left his personal prayer room with the priests surrounding him.
The Serriotts were called the ‘Serriotts of life,’ and they were a family with a very deep history.
The popes had always come from the Serriott family.
If there were many children born to the family, the child with the strongest holy power became the next pope in the next generation and another child would become the head of the family.
In some cases, if there was only one child in the family, the child would become the pope and run the family.
The Serriotts believed that giving their holy power to their descendants and making them serve god was doing god’s work, so they were able to become pope and run a family.
However, nobody needed holy power in times of peace. Now, the pope was only there for formalities.
In addition to that, the current emperor was always wary of the Serriotts and did not want them to become powerful.
Before the current emperor came to power, another problem had arisen in the canyon.
Since Aiden was the patriarch of the Serriott family and the Pope, he went to the canyon to protect the empire’s citizens.
However, while he was there, he had suffered from an unidentified attack and fell into a coma.
While he was unconscious, the previous emperor was assassinated.
The current emperor, Roam, killed his half-brother, who was suspected to be the perpetrator, and rose to the throne. In the process, Aiden’s wife, Yulia, was accused of treason.
While the Serriot family was not totally wiped out by the Emperor, it was destroyed.
By the time Aiden miraculously woke up, Yulia had already gone missing after attempting to run away from the punishment for the crime she had been accused of.
Aiden searched for her like a mad man, but when he finally found her, it was when she had returned to his arms as a cold corpse.
Aiden, who had lost his wife in a blink of an eye, thought that he had no reason to live anymore.
To continue the family, Aiden could have married another woman and have children, but he did not.
The only thing he wished for was revenge, but the priests and the empire’s citizens did not want him to die yet.
‘We still need a pope, Your Holiness.’
‘Your Holiness, please don’t throw us away.’
In the end, Aiden found that he could not leave them.
It was because Yulia, his beloved wife who had been an orphan when she was younger, had always loved and cherished them.
Aiden decided to live the remainder of his life for these people, just as his loving wife Yulia had.
And 20 years had passed since he had made that decision.
He lived his days peacefully.
That is, before he felt an aura that was dangerous enough to put this peace in danger.
Aiden, who had been in morning prayer with the other priests, opened his eyes in a flash when he detected ominous energy.
‘What was that just now……?’
Putting Akroa at the center, he detected some strong power that strengthened and then waned in power from the west of Akroa.
Although it had only been there for an instant, Aiden knew that he had definitely felt it.
He had felt this aura before in the canyon 20 years before.
When the priests saw Aiden’s shock, they came over to him.
“Your Holiness? What seems to be the matter?”
Aiden answered while leaving the temple with a hardened expression.
“Priest Silica, will you call the Chief Paladin?”
The sounds of the birds’ chirps pierced her ears.
Elisha felt much better and light on her feet, which was different from what she felt normally.
When Anne saw that Elisha was awake, she immediately came over.
“Madam, how are you feeling today?”
“Hm, I feel a lot better today.”
Anne felt Elisha’s forehead with a heart half-filled with joy and half-filled with doubt.
As Elisha had said, the fever that had been plaguing Elisha for the past few days was finally gone.
Anne was finally relieved and looked at Elisha with tears of relief.
“I’m so thankful. Your fever was soaring for these past few days and I was so scared something might actually happen to you, Madam…… .”
“You’ve suffered a lot for me, Anne. I’m so sorry for making you worry.”
Elisha felt bad for making Anne worry so much and pulled the crying Anne into her embrace.
Anne quickly stopped crying and asked Elisha a question.
“Are you hungry? Should I bring you your meal?”
“Yes. Can you also call for Lady Settil?”
“Yes, Madam!”
Anne soon left the room.
Settil was the doctor the temple manager had assigned to Elisha.
When the manager saw how sick Elisha was 3 days earlier, she had guided Elisha to a small summer house in a nearby summer village.
‘No matter how much of a hurry you are in, it’s not good to go on a trip while your body is in this kind of state. Even a small cold can become serious if it isn’t treated at the right time.’
‘That’s true…… .’
‘There’s a summer house that I personally own. You can hide there for a few days. The house is in such a small town in the mountains, that people don’t really visit it very often.’
Elisha was in a hurry to get away, so she decided to follow the advice of the manager. She knew that she couldn’t put any more stress on her body if she didn’t want to harm the baby inside of her.
As the manager had predicted, that night, Elisha suffered greatly from her fever.
Although Anne was greatly concerned, Elisha was deeply relieved that she didn’t faint on the streets even while she was suffering.
‘Now that my body is a lot better, we should probably leave.’
Since they had already wasted so much time, they had to hurry.
Thankfully, she didn’t feel any more pain in her stomach, and the doctor’s report was also good.
“It seems that the baby is also okay, so you should be able to leave soon.”
“Then I think I should leave today.”
“Still, what do you think about resting for just one more day, just to be safe? If you suddenly stress your body, it may not be very good. The puddles outside haven’t even dried yet.”
The ground outside was damp from the spring rains that had fallen in the two days Elisha lay sick in bed. It wasn’t very good weather for carriages.
“I understand.”
Elisha paused for a moment and then made a proposal.
It was that Anne would prepare to leave now so that they could leave quickly as soon as Elisha was rested.
So Elisha ate her meal and snack and even slept as the doctor had suggested. And soon, the bright morning awaited her.
“It’s good weather today.”
It was a cloudless day filled with warm rays of sunshine and a gentle spring breeze. In short, it was a perfect day to leave.
Elisha and Anne finished their final preparations to leave and went to the front door.
Settil and 2 mercenary soldiers that the manager had given Elisha were waiting for them.
“Then let’s leave.”
Elisha started to get on her carriage. All of a sudden, the sound of horses filled the air.
Elisha turned her head towards the sound with puzzled eyes.