Chapter 135: Twenty Thousand Years of Hate
[Sara POV] Year 5, Day 208 (Night)
Sara flew high through the night sky — higher than she needed to, just because it felt good.
[Happy. Finally. Everything Sara needs is three fast heists away. Pope rock, queen diamond, true dragon heart. Three items and the dress gets its shiny new toy.]
And the best part — Sara wouldn't even have to look hard for any of them. Completely different from the chain, where Sara had dug up half the desert on nothing but a feeling.
«Blood-blood.»
The dress pulsed warm against her, content and eager both.
[Chain is happy. Feels the promise coming — soon he gets a new toy, a shiny new piece of himself. Sara likes making gifts. Sara likes making friends happy. Best kind of feeling there is.]
Sara let the names roll through her mind again, savoring how simple it all sounded. Pope. Queen. True dragon.
Pope. Queen. True dragon.
Then she stopped hard in the middle of a lazy roll, wings snapping flat, hanging frozen against the stars.
[...Pope. Queen. True dragon.]
"SARA, ARE YOU IDIOT?!"
The scream tore out across the empty sky, loud enough that a distant flock scattered somewhere below.
Something in Sara's head stuttered and recalculated, the warm happy glow draining away as the actual weight of what she'd promised settled in cold and heavy. This was not a simple heist. These were not three items sitting in some forgotten desert waiting to be dug up. These were three of the most insane targets in the entire world.
[Sara got excited. Sara heard "just three items" and Sara's brain skipped the part where each one is impossible.]
The true dragon first, because that one felt closest to manageable. Finding one would be easy enough — Sara could fly to the cloudy continent fast, just a quick hop over the sea, and true dragons didn't hide themselves. They sat on their hoards proud and open, daring the world to come try. And killing one? Given Sara actually managed to pull it off — and Sara thought Sara could, probably — that was the smallest of the problems.
[But dragons would hunt Sara forever for a sin like that. Sara heard true dragons have long memories. Not years. Not centuries. Forever kind of memories. Kill one and the rest never forget, never stop, never let it go. Sara would trade one heart for an eternity of dragons on Sara's trail.]
The Pope wasn't any better. Yes, Sara had seen him once — giving some kind of prayer on top of a mountain in the Church State, that divine rock glowing on his staff. But could Sara actually make a fast fly-pass and just grab it? Sara didn't believe that for a second.
[There are defenses. Things Sara doesn't see, doesn't know, can't sense from above. And those are always the most dangerous kind — the ones you don't notice until they already have you.]
Sara still had panic seasons about that secret Empire base and its forcefield. If Sara had gotten trapped inside that dome, Sara would be dead. No question, no escape, no clever trick to save her. And the Church State's holy city was ancient — full of old things, and old things were almost always powerful things. The kind of powerful that didn't announce itself.
Even thinking it through makes Sara's head hurt. [The Pope walks around wrapped in every protection thousands of years of divine paranoia could build. Sara can't count defenses she can't see — so how does Sara plan around them? Sara can't. Sara would just have to fly in blind and hope, and hope has never kept Sara alive.]
And the Queen — Sara had killed a few queens before, but those had all been baby-queens. Little rulers of little city-states, soft things that fell easy. This one ruled a massive kingdom, and that meant strong fighters, standing armies, and whatever else a real power kept close. Plus she had that famous battlemaid — Sara had heard some genuinely scary stories about that one.
[And Sara has no idea how to even find her. Queen lives in the Kingdom capital, in a castle bigger than most whole cities — armed, walled, defended top to bottom. And where does she even keep the diamond? Does she walk around with it every hour of every day? Or is it locked in some vault Sara would have to dig through the whole castle to find?]
Worse still — a kingdom would not take kindly to someone stealing a diamond right out of its crown. Would they start hunting Sara the way dragons would? They could send people after her, wave after wave, for as long as it took. Even Sara had to worry about that kind of attention.
Sara felt a massive headache building behind her eyes, the kind that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the sheer scale of the hole she'd talked herself into.
[The more Sara thinks, the deeper it goes. Not one of the three is survivable, and Sara needs all three. Dragons never forget. Kingdoms never forget. And the Pope — Sara wouldn't even live long enough to be remembered. Sara flew home five minutes ago the happiest monster in the world, and now Sara can't find a single way this ends without Sara dead.]
Then a better thought cut through the spiral. Dominos — friend.
[Sara has a friend now. First friend ever. And friends help with problems. Maybe friend has some idea how to climb out of this mess.]
It didn't fix anything, but the panic eased back a little. Sara held onto that and started flying again, slow now, drifting toward the cave while working out how to explain all this without dying of embarrassment along the way.
[Sara went out to fix ONE problem. Sara came home with three new ones, and every single one wants Sara dead. That's not a good report to bring a friend.]
There was a worse worry underneath it, though. When Sara explained the whole thing in detail — really laid out how impossible it all was — the dress might start to cry. Sara could still feel it pulsing happy against her skin, warm and eager, dreaming about its new toy. The thought of turning that happiness into sadness made something in Sara go tight and miserable too.
[Don't want to make dress sad. Dress is excited. Dress trusts Sara. Making dress cry would be the worst part of all of this.]
Then Sara remembered something that might actually help.
When Sara had taken the friend-oath with Dominos, Sara had gotten all of friend's memories along with it. Most of them were long gone now — there was only so much a bird brain could hold when centuries of someone else's life arrived in a single burst and then had to be filed away somewhere. Most of it had simply slipped through.
But not all of it. And one piece surfaced now, clear enough to grab.
[Friend came from a conservative family. And even now — cold-blooded killer without a single doubt — friend still carries a cross. Friend was in the Church State one summer as a small girl, part of some kind of camp. And she kept going back over the years, no obvious reason Sara could find.]
Sara turned that over as she flew.
[Some hope of atonement, maybe? Not a chance — not for friend. You don't pray away that much blood, that many screaming years, all those people friend took apart nice and slow. But Sara doesn't know much about churches, and churches are popular for a reason. People go there for something. Maybe they've got some special juice Sara just can't see.]
But the point stood, and it was the first solid thing Sara had touched all night. It was worth asking. Friend might know something real about the Pope, the divine rock, how the Church State actually worked. Maybe friend knew nothing useful — or maybe friend had exactly the kind of information Sara couldn't get any other way.
Sara flew faster now, chasing the thread — friend, churches, the Pope, all of it tangled together somewhere in those half-buried borrowed memories. She dug through the fragments as the cave grew closer below, then tipped into a dive, wings folding, dropping fast toward the dark mouth of it to land.
And halfway down, the rest of the memory surfaced.
Everything in Sara's head just... stopped. One frozen, disbelieving moment where the only thought Sara could hold was no, that can't be a real memory. Then the freeze broke and the words ripped out of her before she'd decided to say them — the second scream of the night, louder than the first.
"FRIEND! DOMINOS PENTHANTE! WHY THE HELL DID YOU HAVE SEX WITH A POPE?!"
More birds scattered across the distant dark, a second wave of them fleeing into the night. Sara felt a small pang of guilt for them — living in an S-rank hunting ground was hard enough without a crazy harpy screaming across the sky in the middle of the night.
Sara found herself hovering a meter above the ground in front of the cave — she'd dropped the whole way down while screaming without quite deciding to.
Down here the effect was the opposite. Total, complete silence. Even the handful of ex-guards the snakes were using as training dummies cut off mid-scream, clean and sudden.
Everyone turned to look at Sara — the snakes, the guards, even that annoying officer. Even the dress had gone still against her skin, waiting to see what happened next, though it probably didn't understand any of it.
[Oh no. Sara shouldn't talk about sex in front of the dress. Dress is like a kid — innocent, still learning. Killing is fine. Torture is fine. Petrifying people into statues is completely fine. But sex? Too age-rated for dress's innocent little mind. Sara is a bad influence.]
Sara's gaze snagged on the officer — watching her slack-jawed, like a fool who still hadn't worked out how much trouble he was in.
[Sara really wants to go kill that officer. Might improve Sara's mood. Might improve everyone's mood, honestly.]
Then friend came running out of the cave, some kind of bathrobe thrown on crooked, hair a mess — clearly yanked straight out of sleep and into a panic by the screaming.
The sight reset something in Sara's head. What was Sara about to do? Kill the officer. No — unrelated. Sara pushed that aside and reached back for the actual point.
[Right. The Pope. Ask friend about the Pope.]
So Sara asked, direct as ever. "Why did you have sex with pope?"
Then, a half-second too late, the reasoning caught up.
[Damn. Wrong question. Sara should have stepped one more back. This sex thing is a strange story at best — probably nothing, probably just weird. The rock is what matters. Sara should have started with the rock.]
Friend just watched her, clearly thrown by the question. "...How did you even know about that?"
It took her a moment to collect herself. Then understanding arrived. "Ah. The oath. You got that too."
"Yes," Sara said, waving it off. "But not important. What do you know about the rock?"
Friend's face did something complicated. "Rock? What rock?" She shook her head slowly. "...But if Sara wants to know, fine. I have no secrets in front of Sara anyway."
She gestured at the table and chairs set up not far from the cave mouth. "Sit, Sara. How long were you hovering up there, anyway?"
Sara landed and settled onto a large rock beside the table instead of the chairs — worried the nice furniture might not survive her weight. Friend took one of the good chairs, pulled a box of divine cookies from her Item Box, and set it carefully in front of Sara.
"Eat. You look like you need it."
[She said it gentle, the way she always does — friend fusses over Sara like Sara is the fragile one. Sara likes it. Sara will never say so out loud.]
Then friend began.
"It was a century ago, give or take. Republic and Church relations have always been complicated — the Church as it exists now grew out of the old state religion the Empire once ruled with, and the Republic was born rebelling against all of that. So the two have never sat easy together."
She continued, settling into the telling. "And almost every pope has made the trip to the Republic at least once — each of them hoping to be the one who finally mends the rift and writes his name into the history books for it. This one was no different. Came to try, and failed, same as every pope before him and since."
Then her voice cooled. "I was woken in the middle of the night by a group of holy knights. They told me my soul was damned, and that I had to come with them to be cleansed before it was too late. I was escorted straight into the pope's bedroom — and this pope turned out to be nothing but a horny old man who wanted to play some very strange games."
"They'd dug up something about me somewhere — that I'd been born to a proper family, raised devout, then fallen about as far as a person can fall. A pure girl turned to every sin imaginable. So we spent a few hours acting out some story where I was a lost soul and he was the holy shepherd redeeming me." She shrugged, unbothered. "I'd seen and done stranger by then. It was almost fine. And getting divine magic poured over you a hundred times in one night is genuinely a lovely feeling — though I'm fairly sure it was never meant to be used for that."
"When we were done, they led me out. And one of the holy knights hit me with a Purification — far more mana than the spell ever needs." Her voice went flat and clinical. "Purification is an ugly thing when it's turned against a mind on purpose. Done wrong, it lobotomizes — wipes a person clean. Fortunately, I'd been expecting they might want to tidy up the evidence, so I was ready for a mind attack. I played along, let my eyes go empty and my face go slack, acted like it had scooped everything out of me. They believed it and just dumped me in the slums."
This story was stranger than even Sara had braced for. So Sara asked the thing that mattered most to her, purely out of professional interest.
"They never checked on you later?" Sara tilted her head. "Sara knows no mind magic. But Sara has used artifacts that do similar things — and those are never bulletproof. You always have to watch the target afterward, days later, to make sure it actually took. Otherwise mistakes slip through."
Friend laughed — a real one, surprised out of her.
"Sara, you are probably the only person alive who would ask that." She wiped at the corner of her eye. "But you're not wrong. I wandered the slums playing the drooling idiot for a few days, until it was clear nobody was still watching. After that I kept my head down for a month — right up until I heard the pope had been killed."
Sara's head tilted sharply, cookies forgotten. "Who killed a pope?"
Friend's face lit with a slow, savoring cruelty, like the memory still tasted good. "Guess. Someone we both know."
Sara had no idea. She turned it over — who did Sara know that was actually psychopathic enough to kill a pope? Only one name came to mind.
"Null?"
Friend shook her head.
Sara thought harder. If not an outright psychopath, then maybe someone clueless enough to do it without grasping the consequences at all.
"...Twins?"
Friend's brow furrowed, thrown by that one, but she shook her head again.
Sara came up empty. Nobody else she knew was that unhinged. "Honestly, Sara has no ideas."
"Ealdred," friend said. "Or so the rumor went — that he did it because the pope abused one of the maids he trained." She recited the rest with open relish. "'The pope fell against a wall. Twelve times. Accidentally.' Case closed. Everyone knew it was complete bullshit."
"Yes," Sara said, nodding slowly. "Sara knows coverups. Just beat the pope to death and walk away."
Something rose warm and almost reverent in Sara's chest — was this what people felt in church? [Master trainer good enough for emperors and popes, and he beat a pope to death and walked away free enough the story still gets told a century later. That's a whole different level. Sara can't wait to meet him.]
Sara ate a few more cookies. They really were good.
The dress had loved the story too, once Sara explained just how badass it was to kill a pope like that — a pure legend in the making. And happily, the dress hadn't understood the parts about the games with the pope. Friend was wise like that, talking around the grown-up fetishes so carefully that even a kid could sit through it.
[Good friend. Protects dress's innocent little mind.]
So Sara kept eating, enjoying the evening. Friend brewed herself a nice herbal tea and settled in, enjoying the quiet time with Sara just as much.
[Sara should ask about the pope rock. But not now. Now is nice. Let the moment last a little longer.]
The screaming from the training pit stopped.
Sara noticed it the way you notice a clock you'd stopped hearing — pleasant, mostly. The snakes had probably worn one out. Friend sipped her tea.
Somewhere further out, the night birds stopped too.
Then Sara felt it.
Something powerful, approaching fast. And ahead of it came waves of hatred — so strong the air itself seemed to freeze, so heavy it pressed down on everything at once. Sara had felt serious resentment before, over long centuries of it. Nothing had ever come close to this. For one full second it made Sara doubt whether the world around her was even real.
Once Sara managed to collect herself, she looked up.
A massive azure dragon with silver-white wings hung in the sky above the cave. An S-rank hunting ground is never quiet — and there was almost no sound anywhere now. Everything under A-rank had simply died from the dragon's presence alone.
«BLOOD-BLOOD!»
The dress screamed against her skin, pure panic — and Sara had already connected the dots, the pieces falling into place from the chain's old memories. This was the same true dragon the hero party had ridden. The ones who had killed the chain's first master. Twenty thousand years ago.
"DIE." The word boomed out of the dragon and kept going, rolling out over the haunt long after the jaws had closed.
Time seemed to stop. Sara watched, slow and terribly clear, as the dragon's massive jaws cracked open and fire bloomed at the back of its throat — a burst attack building.
Sara moved without thinking. She threw herself over the table, seized friend, and wrapped her wings around her in a tight cocoon — putting every layer of herself between friend and the sky.
Then the burst hit, and Sara blanked out from pure, total pain.