The Strongest Sword of the Gods
“O strongest sword of the Divine, I grant you the name Michael.”
A child abandoned from the beginning, without even a name, endured the Temple’s strict regimen and, upon reaching adulthood, earned a glorious name.
The name inscribed in the scriptures—the one who followed the Divine’s teachings with unwavering loyalty, standing closer to the gods than anyone else.
Even if the Temple itself was crumbling, to Michael this name was the greatest honor and the very meaning of his existence.
He lived so that no one could ever say the name he had been given shamed him.
Others called the Temple’s life an extreme trial and struggled to endure it.
But Michael regarded that life as perfectly natural.
From childhood he had known nothing but desire.
When other children cried for hunger and fought over a single potato, he had simply swung his sword once more while calling the Divine’s name.
“Is it truly a good thing that a human being possesses no desires at all…? One who sees you has difficulty judging.”
Though purity stood shoulder to shoulder with Michael, others spoke that way of their lives as well.
For this reason Michael naturally believed himself to be a being without desire.
Until the day he met Irene.
Even now, the memory of their first encounter felt utterly incomprehensible to him.
He had been solo-cleared a dungeon, accepting whatever demonic energy accumulated as long as his holy power kept it at bay.
He had heard that too much would become dangerous, but that had been a problem for later.
“The day will come when you also need a purifier.”
Every time other knights spoke those words, Michael showed no outward sign of discomfort, yet inside he swallowed his revulsion.
It was not that people despised marriage.
Under the name of the Divine, they revered their partner as half of themselves and saw bonds of faith, trust, and love as something to be envied.
But a pair contract with a purifier was, to him, a relationship he could never respect.
Forcing oneself to couple with a woman just to survive.
What difference did that make from animals?
Worse still, most knights had entered the contract not to save those suffering in dungeons, but to claim the treasure there.
He would rather die than sully the life the Divine had granted him with such lascivious acts.
That resolve had burned with unshakeable conviction.
No matter how many purifiers desired him or offered him every luxury, he felt not the slightest interest.
But the Continental Law newly enacted by the Kingdom Alliance now demanded he accept a purifier.
At first he ignored it.
Yet they barred his way, threatening to cut off dungeon access until he complied.
If they had been monsters he would have swept them aside without hesitation.
Unfortunately they were human, and Michael was human, so he was forced to obey their law.
He would not, however, allow himself to be forced into physical contact with a woman for the sake of purification.
That resolution hardened further after he met Princess Cecilia.
“I wish to stand beside you as a servant of the Divine, as well. If you are willing, would you please pair with me?”
She was the strongest purifier among the group.
With astonishingly advantageous conditions, she offered to restrict even physical contact to a simple handshake.
By all rights he should have accepted on the spot.
But the moment he looked into her eyes, Michael understood the truth.
The words about standing together in the name of the Divine were lies.
Beyond the beautiful eyes others praised, an insidious, instinctive disgust and base desire flickered.
A desire to possess him completely, to make him hers instead of the Divine’s.
She had hidden it well, but Michael knew.
Every woman who had approached him before—those who had offered him potions, those who had come to him at night in nothing but their skin—had worn that same look.
The eyes of people who saw their partner as a mere object to be claimed.
Suppressing the rising revulsion, he politely declined the offer.
Time passed once more.
Every time Michael prepared to enter a dungeon, the Kingdom Alliance’s knights blocked his path, and the suffering of the people only grew worse.
In the end he decided he had no choice but to accept the Kingdom Alliance’s proposal.
But he had no intention of moving as the Alliance and Princess Cecilia desired.
He had repeatedly confirmed the Fortress’s regulations laid down by the Kingdom Alliance.
Thanks to that knowledge he soon found a way to slip through their demands.
The Night of the Contract, when a purifier was chosen to complete the pair.
If he failed to be selected there, he would receive several months of grace.
So Michael deliberately arrived late to the event.
He reasoned that the purifiers would already have paired with other knights and none would remain.
What he had never considered was that some purifiers would refuse all offers.
The hall had already emptied; most guests had left, and the maids were clearing the tables.
Only those who had not been chosen remained—knights who had failed to secure a partner.
He could have simply joined them, announced his failure, and departed.
“Please pair with me.”
The woman clung to him with a half-weeping voice.
From the whispers among the crowd he learned she was a 10th-rank purifier who could not be sought for any other reason.
In truth he could have simply turned her away and left.
It would have violated the Divine’s teaching to help those in need, but never in his life had he been required to accept a woman.
He knew that fact better than anyone else.
Yet the moment he came to his senses, they were already paired.
Irene Rodiam.
The one person in the Fortress, surrounded by monsters, who had always stood alone and radiant.
Michael had always held a deeply negative view of the existence called a purifier.
Yet his gaze now followed every movement of Irene’s body and soul.
He realized something was wrong and immediately rebuked himself.
So he deliberately suppressed his own emotions even more harshly in her presence.
While exchanging light greetings and comments on the weather with others, he never spoke to Irene except to greet her.
Thus Irene would wander off alone and return to her quarters.
Michael watched that figure from a distance every single time.
Shaking his head repeatedly, he tried to erase the sight of her back from his eyes.
‘Is this what being a pair means?’
No magic was at work. It was merely a few lines of the Continental Law written by the Kingdom Alliance.
A connection that had no power except on paper…
Then, once, while clearing a high-ranking dungeon with other knights, he suffered a light injury.
When the knights carried the injured back out, the purifiers rushed forward in panic, embraced their pairs or kissed them, healed the wounds, and purified the demonic energy.
That scene was unbearably repulsive to Michael.
These were not creatures driven by instinct under the bright sky of the Fortress.
Suppressing that revulsion, he turned toward the Temple and had just taken a step inside when
“Sir Michael!”
Irene’s urgent voice reached him.
Without realizing he had turned, Michael found himself facing her.
The woman he had just met was already clutching his hand, gasping for breath after running to him.
Michael would never forget that moment.
The long, slender fingers gripping his hand—still caked with monster blood.
At that instant he experienced a sensation stronger than anything he had felt in his entire life.
His vision blurred instantly, the ground seemed to vanish beneath him.
Every sense in his body turned inward and locked onto the single point where they touched Irene.
The moment her skin made contact, his entire form felt as though it were boiling, yet from the contact point came a cool breeze.
That terrifying and ecstatic sensation let Michael understand what was happening.
Purification.
A cleansing of both body and soul.
Then why…
He shoved her hand away.
While the other knights clung to their purifiers for healing, only she stood there, staring blankly at him as if she had lost her partner.
Michael fixed that face of Irene’s in his memory, then immediately spun on his heel and dashed toward the Temple’s prayer hall.
Slamming the door shut behind him, he took a steadying breath and lifted his hand for inspection.
A mark where Irene’s hand had touched remained on the hand still stained with monster blood.
The place she had touched was already free of that blood.
Michael stared at his own hand for a long time, then slowly raised it toward his lips.
He pressed his lips to the exact spot where Irene’s hand had been.
At the same time he understood one more thing.
That beneath him was swollen to an ugly degree.