"Senior, it's your turn to step in."
Hel smiled as she looked at Leflina.
At present, although Leflina had plenty of ideas of her own, the environment she had grown up in made her instinctively fearful of nobles and royalty. She could speak up for the oppressed workers in a café, but that didn't mean she truly dared to lay hands on nobles.
In fact, when facing the bullying of those nobles, she still appeared somewhat timid. And timidity was an emotion that absolutely could not exist in a revolutionary.
That was precisely why Hel had brought Leflina here—to force her to personally take action and completely cast aside her fear of the nobility.
"No need to hold back. Beat him however you want."
"Beat him… however I want?"
Leflina weakly took the scabbard Hel handed her. She clenched her teeth, then swung it fiercely at the other party's head.
Amid waves of miserable screams, a flock of white doves feeding at the church entrance were startled into flight.
And this very scene happened to be seen clearly by two figures standing on the church balcony.
"Hiss… a fourth-rank Life Knight. Even within the Church, this little one should count as a genius, no? Doesn't the Radiant Knight wish to recruit her?"
The speaker was an elderly man with silver hair combed immaculately, dressed in a black velvet robe threaded with golden patterns, holding an ivory staff that symbolized authority.
Judging by his attire alone, his status was clearly extraordinary—yet at this moment, his smile toward the person beside him was extremely obsequious.
Standing next to him was Irina, the Radiant Knight from the Knight Empire.
However, as Irina gazed at the girl in the white dress in the distance, she felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity.
"We'll see. My purpose for coming this time isn't recruitment."
"Quite right, Radiant Knight. Welcoming the envoy from the Holy See is what matters most."
"An envoy from the Holy See?"
Irina frowned slightly, a trace of worry surfacing in her thoughts.
They had gathered all the scholars from the three great empires of the southern continent, yet the solution they ultimately devised still couldn't completely quell the plague. Would the people of the Holy See truly have a better method?
It wasn't that their plague-dispelling magic was ineffective—it was that the requirements to learn it were far too harsh.
Not only did the practitioner need a life attribute, but the spell itself was already at an advanced level. Basically, only fourth-rank mages met the conditions to learn it.
Even if they sent out every life mage who had mastered the spell, they still wouldn't be able to save many people in the end.
That was why the Church had once again taken the lead in convening this meeting.
"I've only heard that the Holy See will be sending two Saint-rank scholars this time, but I don't know whether they can crack this plague. After all, this is a ritual the Witch prepared for so long. If it truly comes to it, we may have to ask you, Old Chui-de, to provide a batch of healing potions."
"That's easy enough to say. As long as the Church is willing to pay, our Chui-de Royal Family would be more than happy to help with such a small favor. However, this isn't a small sum. According to our calculations, a healing potion to save one person costs at least ten gold coins—and the three great empires have close to a billion people…"
At this point, Old Chui-de stopped speaking and instead fixed Irina with a sharp gaze.
He seemed to have said nothing—and yet, seemed to have said everything.
Leaving aside whether the Chui-de Royal Family could even produce that many healing potions, even if they did, the astronomical cost alone would be enough to make the three great empires wince.
Irina could easily imagine that the nobles of the three great empires alone would be unwilling to spend such a huge sum to save ordinary people.
In their eyes, commoners dying was no big deal—after all, the world never lacked ordinary people.
And within the Holy Tribunal Church, although they were still gathering scholars from across the continent to seek a solution, some of the Church's upper echelons had already prepared for the worst.
That was: if they could not stop the plague, then before it killed those people, they would send them to their deaths themselves, thus preventing the Disease Witch's apotheosis ritual.
In their view, when weighing the birth of a demigod against the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary people, the former was undoubtedly more important.
"I'll persuade the higher-ups," Irina nodded, her heart heavy.
'Let's hope those lunatics don't carry out the worst plan…'
Irina thought silently. She had no doubt whatsoever that those Church elders possessed the resolve to massacre hundreds of millions.
After all, such acts of slaughtering their own people were not unprecedented in the tens of thousands of years of the Holy Tribunal Church's history.
In the Church's internal records, the number of kingdoms they had personally annihilated to prevent witches from completing apotheosis rituals was already uncountable.
This time was merely larger in scale—and it wouldn't even affect the nobles. To those Church elders, it hardly counted as anything at all.
Still, Irina felt it was wrong.
Although her upbringing taught her that those in power must know how to choose and sacrifice, she herself was never a ruler. She was merely a knight—a foolish knight who upheld the Eight Knightly Virtues and fought bravely to protect the nation and its people.
'If the Church and the nobles didn't possess absolute power, perhaps the three great empires would have already been overthrown, just like the imperial dynasty three thousand years ago.'
As Irina pondered this, she was about to shift her gaze away from Hel's group and return to the meeting hall.
A faint fluctuation of battle aura appeared.
She looked once more at the beautiful girl in the white dress, and the corner of her mouth unconsciously curved into a smile.
"What an interesting little one."
...
After Leflina finished a round of "friendly communication" with the blond noble,
Hel finally squatted down beside him at an unhurried pace.
"Be glad this isn't the Knight Empire."
Hel tapped the other party's cheek with the flat of her sword, then looked smilingly into his terrified eyes and spoke slowly:
"I'm actually quite afraid of trouble. To be honest, even if I killed you in a duel today, I wouldn't face any consequences. But I really don't want to bring trouble to my friend over the death of an idiot like you.
If my friend—or my friend's family—suffers retaliation, regardless of whether it's from the Greiro family or not, I will challenge every single member of your family to a duel."
As she spoke, Hel quietly released a portion of her fifth-rank battle aura.
The pressure of battle aura spanning two entire major ranks pinned the other party firmly to the ground. Poor Baron Greiro, before losing consciousness, only heard a faint female voice drifting slowly into the distance:
"Believe me. I have the strength to do it."