Ch.339Chapter 339 – Putting the Cart Before the Horse (1)

Shortly after, Chris and Kara arrived at the prisoner camp within the resistance barracks.

Though grandly called a prisoner camp, it was essentially no different from an ordinary barracks.

The only difference was that it was surrounded by a wooden fence with resistance soldiers standing guard around it, watching those inside.

Chris greeted one of the soldiers guarding the prisoner camp and quietly asked,

“How are the people inside doing?”

“They’re fine. As the Goddess instructed, we’ve been treating them with respect and courtesy.”

The soldier replied while showing deference to Chris.

Chris carefully asked another question.

“How are they feeling?”

In response to Chris’s question, the soldier slightly bowed his head and said,

“Most of them are spending their time listlessly.”

“I see.”

Chris looked into the barracks with concerned eyes.

Then she soon turned to the soldier and said,

“I’d like to go inside. Would you allow that?”

“Of course. However, for an escort…”

“Not necessary.”

Kara stepped forward and said,

“I’m here, so there’s no need.”

“And who might you be…?”

The soldier asked, looking at Kara.

He glanced back and forth between Kara and Chris.

Kara stepped forward and said,

“Call me Kara. I am the first disciple of the Goddess here.”

“Kara?”

Chris called out to Kara with concern.

Diana had introduced Kara as a saint of the Evgenia Order, so she seemed worried that claiming to be her follower might make things confusing.

The soldier, on the other hand, seemed to have misunderstood in a different way.

“…First disciple… Is that why you resemble the Goddess?”

“Not exactly, but you can think of it that way.”

Kara appeared too bothered to explain further.

“I’m confident in my abilities. May we enter now?”

The soldier looked at Chris once.

Understanding the meaning of his gaze, Chris nodded, and he nodded in return.

“You may enter. If anything happens, please call out loudly.”

“We will.”

Soon he stepped aside, and the two women entered the barracks.

“By the way, Kara, if you say you serve me there…”

“It’s not a problem.”

Kara said firmly.

“Since my official affiliation became the Evgenia Order, I’ve been going around as a saint of the Evgenia Order, but I don’t think I ever said I was a saint who believed in Evgenia.”

“…Isn’t a saint of the order supposed to believe in Evgenia?”

“But the god I believe in is Christina, not Evgenia. This is something I cannot compromise on.”

And then, Kara added,

“Chris, since you originally belonged to the Evgenia Order, you’re a deity born from Evgenia, so believing in you is essentially the same as believing in Evgenia, isn’t it?”

“…Is that so?”

“It is.”

Kara looked at Chris and said,

“You’re Evgenia’s chosen successor, aren’t you? So I think it’s fine to equate you with Evgenia.”

“I… suppose so.”

In fact, since Chris had become a deity through Evgenia’s divine power, Kara’s words weren’t wrong.

For Chris, the idea of succeeding the deity she had originally believed in was too overwhelming to have considered.

“Don’t worry about trivial things. Be shameless. And be confident. More importantly, now that we’ve just entered the barracks…”

Kara looked around and then said quietly,

“Everyone seems so lifeless.”

“Yes.”

The people inside the barracks were just sitting quietly.

They stared at the floor, the ceiling, each other, or their own hands.

They looked at various things, but no vitality could be felt.

This was precisely why Chris had brought Kara here.

“They’re worse than I was.”

Kara said firmly.

And as if hearing Kara’s voice, one of the dazed individuals turned his head.

It was the captain who had led the people here.

“The Goddess has come.”

“Hello.”

Chris bowed her head in greeting, and he returned the greeting with a weak smile.

Compared to the other holy knights, he seemed to be in somewhat better condition.

“How are you feeling?”

“As you can see, we’re also priests, so we’re fairly skilled in medicine.”

Moreover, even in that chaotic battle, they hadn’t been seriously injured.

Most of them had fought against the royal guards yet remained largely unharmed.

The fact that they could fight against a nation’s elite knights without sustaining major injuries was a testament to their combat prowess.

Of course, this was possible because they were also elites within the order, but it was still impressive.

‘People like Lord Kay defeat such skilled fighters easily, so others tend to underestimate them.’

Chris thought that her companions’ combat abilities had set her standards for measuring others’ strength unreasonably high.

“By the way, who is that person beside you? She looks just like you, Goddess…”

The captain paused briefly.

Then he quietly said,

“Could it be that you are…”

“Do you know me?”

Kara asked.

The captain nodded.

“You’re Saint Kara, aren’t you? …I’ve seen you praying to Emiris from a distance.”

“I see.”

“Why are you here…”

The captain hesitated for a moment.

Then he quietly asked,

“Did Emiris send you to us?”

The captain asked, as if grasping at a thread of hope.

“Was what we saw, what we heard back then wrong? Did she tell you to let us know?”

By now, the surrounding holy knights were looking at Chris, Kara, and the captain.

“No.”

Kara shook her head and said,

“Rather, I too have been abandoned.”

“What?”

“I was abandoned by Emiris, that’s what I’m saying.”

At Kara’s words, the captain smiled bitterly.

“So what we saw and heard back then was true?”

“Yes.”

The captain quietly bowed his head.

And after a moment.

“Hahaha…”

The captain started laughing.

It was laughter filled with emptiness.

Soon others began to laugh as well.

The laughter spread like an epidemic.

Watching them laugh for a while, Chris didn’t know what to do.

Just as she was about to step forward to say something, Kara grabbed her hand.

“It’s alright.”

“What?”

“Leave them be for a moment.”

Kara said this while quietly observing the people in the room.

After a while, the captain stopped laughing and looked at Kara.

“Then what exactly were we believing in?”

The captain said quietly.

“God always watches humans from heaven. He always listens to the prayers of his followers… Someday, we too would be promised an afterlife by his side.”

He muttered lifelessly.

Then Kara spoke.

“That’s one of the doctrines commonly spread by the order’s priests.”

“Usually only spread in rural areas, though.”

He laughed.

Kara asked him,

“Why did you join the Emiris Order?”

“…The reasons for joining are actually quite varied. Some want to gain power by serving in the continent’s largest order, some want to help those in need, and some, like the holy knights, joined because of childhood dreams of becoming strong warriors.”

“……”

“Or some might have joined simply because it guaranteed a stable life.”

“Forget about others. I didn’t ask about them. Tell me why you joined.”

The captain fell into thought for a moment.

Then he said dejectedly,

“I can’t remember.”

The captain said quietly.

“…I don’t think it was about gaining power or anything like that. Not in my case.”

“Why can’t you remember?”

“You know our order’s doctrine well, Saint.”

Even though she was no longer a saint of the Emiris Order, the captain still called her by that title.

Kara nodded and said,

“Discard the unnecessary. Thereby become closer to perfection.”

“That’s right. …Are motivations for joining or childhood dreams necessary for working as a holy knight or priest?”

The captain said.

“Even if that wasn’t the case, constantly fighting monsters made me forget many things over time.”

“I see.”

“So, I suppose such things could be considered unnecessary.”

“Is that so.”

The captain bowed his head.

“…After discarding this and that, living that way, our god didn’t look after us.”

“You feel you dedicated a significant portion of your life to the deity but received nothing in return.”

“That’s right. Perhaps I’m being too selfish.”

The captain sighed.

“When the god we had served for so much of our lives, sacrificing many things, appeared as a hideous mass of flesh and didn’t listen to us at all, but rather tried to eliminate us along with his enemies, I wondered what we had been believing in all this time.”

Kara nodded.

She sympathized with him to a large extent.

The captain quietly asked,

“Saint.”

“Yes.”

“Is it our fault for doubting him? Did we do something wrong? Is the god wrong? What went wrong?”

He asked quietly.

“Do you know why our god doesn’t listen to our prayers?”

“I don’t.”

Kara said firmly.

“As a saint, I occasionally felt the mood of the god in heaven, but ultimately, I don’t know what intentions he had.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Come to think of it, I occasionally felt his mood, but that was all. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.”

Kara referred to Emiris as a person.

In her mind, Emiris was no longer a god.

“Later, I realized I had been thinking foolishly.”

“How so?”

“Think about it.”

Kara said.

“…How much interest would a god who only looks down from heaven have in human lives?”

“……”

“How much would someone who only looks down from the sky understand about the lives and hearts of those walking on the ground?”

At Kara’s words, the captain remained silent for a moment.

Kara continued,

“Perhaps that’s why he speaks so lightly. Dreams, goals. He says such things are all unnecessary.”

“Don’t you think they’re unnecessary, Saint?”

“Rather, I’ve come to think they might be the most important things that make humans human.”

Kara said quietly.

“Having always lived by Emiris’s doctrines, I think it’s because I gained my own dream after being liberated from him.”

“What kind of dream…?”

“I want to travel around the world like a certain kind deity I know.”

Kara smiled sheepishly.

“My world was too narrow. …I had never been anywhere unrelated to the Emiris Order. I had never lived freely. So I think that’s why I came to have such a dream.”

“I see.”

“It made me think. Perhaps dreams and goals derive from the environment one has lived in. It’s like an instinct to fill what’s lacking in oneself.”

Kara said.

“…Of course, since everyone’s environment is different, most people can’t easily achieve their dreams.”

“That’s true.”

“So perhaps people come to rely on gods who are said to be omnipotent. ‘I want to achieve my dream,’ ‘Please help me achieve my dream,’ ‘I will achieve my dream under you.’ Just like why you all became holy knights.”

Kara said quietly.

“Perhaps that’s why people have lost their way.”

“Lost their way?”

“Believing that god is omnipotent, praying for his help… at some point, don’t people become more focused on pleasing him?”

Kara said quietly.

“It could be called putting the cart before the horse. We believed in god for ourselves, but at some point, we were grinding ourselves down for the sake of god.”

“Is that so?”

“I think it is.”

The saint continued,

“That’s probably the cause of your sense of loss now. You believed in him for your own lives, then sacrificed your lives for him. Giving yourselves over to fanaticism. And when he discarded you as unnecessary, as a result, you had nothing left.”

Kara said quietly.

The captain bowed his head deeply.

“What should we do now?”

“No one can answer that. No one knows what you originally wanted.”

“I see.”

The captain said quietly.

“So you’re saying we believed in god for ourselves, but ended up losing ourselves.”

He seemed slightly depressed.

Toward him,

“You fool.”

Kara lightly swung her staff to hit the captain on the head.