The Monster Lady and the Holy Knight - Chapter 20

A piercing silence struck her ears. Words reached her, but they didn’t sink into her mind. The last time she had felt this way was when Benjamin had left his family to come to her.

Veronica froze as if her body were covered in a thin layer of unbreakable ice. She looked up at him with disbelief, then, barely managing to regain her senses, squeezed the words out of her throat.

“…What are you saying?”

“Should I explain again if you don’t understand?”

“No. Is this even something to understand? Who in the world does that to their own son? If she wanted a face like God’s, she should have done it to her own eyes.”

Leon looked at the increasingly angry Veronica for a moment, then answered calmly, “She was already blinded by love, so there was no need. That woman only wanted to gain my father’s attention, whatever it took. She thought that a well-regarded Holy Knight would care for a child closer to God.”

Veronica held her breath. Memories of past conversations suddenly rushed into her mind.

“…I didn’t know Holy Knights had a specific preference for women.”

“Didn’t you know? Half of the illegitimate children in Kart had priests for fathers.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I think so too.”

“Isn’t the story of Kart’s illegitimate child about you?”

Leon’s face, filled with amusement, overlapped with an image she had seen so many times that it bored her. His right eye was closed. In sacred paintings and statues, the image of God always had one eye closed when facing a longsword. And Leon’s scar was in the exact same spot, a long and deliberate mark like it had been made on purpose.

Veronica wet her dry lips. Her voice was hoarse and strained. “So, did things go the way she wanted?”

“Not exactly as planned from start to finish, but the outcome wasn’t bad. My father did show interest. Of course, it wasn’t in me as his child but in my holy power, so he took me away.”

Leon spoke with the indifference of someone recounting a disappointing storybook ending.

“…I don’t understand.”

“Everyone does that.”

“No, I don’t understand you.”

Leon didn’t ask her why. Hesitating for a moment, Veronica bit her lip before pressing on. “It’s strange that you share such things easily while not even telling me your age, as if it’s nothing.”

It couldn’t be nothing. It wasn’t something that could be treated lightly.

“You were hurt by the person who should have given you love. So, even if it’s not sadness, I don’t think you should cut off your emotions like that. Emotions have a purpose. Cutting them off may seem easier in the short term, but eventually, one of two things happens. Either you become numb to sadness to the point where you’re no longer human, or one day, the sadness you thought you erased comes crashing down and overwhelms you.”

“Or everything might lose meaning,” Leon added another possibility.

Veronica frowned. “Losing meaning?”

“Yes. Over time, everything loses its meaning. The funny thing is that, back then, I endured pain far beyond my age because I wanted my mother’s love, but now, I can’t even remember her face.”

Leon’s expression remained impassive as he turned his gaze toward the statue.

“I was taken to the papacy as a page when I was seven. At thirteen, I became a squire. By the time I knelt before the pope at nineteen, I truly believed I was a child of God. It wasn’t that I cut ties; they were already severed. The moment I knelt before the altar and swore my loyalty, I had no family or lineage left.”

There was no emotion in Leon’s voice. He spoke as if the story wasn’t even his own. It was like watching someone who had cut off an arm to prevent an infection from spreading to the heart. The wound no longer affected him.

“Why are you about to cry?” Leon asked with a strange look on his face, as if facing an incomprehensible puzzle.

Veronica shook her head. “I’m not crying. It’s just a habit of mine to tear up.”

Leon glanced at the tears in the corners of her eyes with disbelief. As she had promised, they didn’t fall. Eventually, they disappeared as if absorbed back inside her.

“When I was very young, I cried much more easily. I cried loudly and often. I would lie on the floor, throwing tantrums and kicking. My mother would scold me and sometimes get angry. But I couldn’t stop. Maybe because I wasn’t afraid.”

But when her mother fell ill, Veronica became a child who didn’t cry. Her father had scolded her harshly whenever she cried out loud. He had grabbed her shoulders and told her to stop crying on purpose.

“Why did you stop crying?”

“Well… in summer, only the cicadas that cry get caught by children.”

That’s why only the male cicadas sing while the females remain silent, hiding themselves away.

“Sometimes, I think about it. As if the tears I’ve swallowed are piling up somewhere inside me. Piling up and up until one day they reach my eyes, and from then on, I’ll have no choice but to cry for the rest of my life.”

Just as you’ll have to hold your breath forever if you’re buried under the sadness you’ve cut away.

“That makes sense.”

“Really?”

“No.”

The man who had been engaging in this odd wordplay suddenly reached out and cupped her face, tracing where the tears should have fallen. From the corner of her eyes, down her cheeks, and along her chin. When her eyelids fluttered shut, the sound of the world deepened in the darkness.

In the silence, their two breaths intertwined, mixing and rising together.

When she opened her eyes again, she was met with Leon’s face. How could she describe it? No, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. After all, this was the real face of Leon Berg.

Veronica engraved him onto her retinas as if seeing him for the first time. His mask had cracked, revealing his true face, exposing a deep, bottomless abyss.

“Shall I cry for you?”

A dizzying sense of danger, like looking into a bottomless well, gripped her. Before she could escape, he seized her breath, roughly capturing her lips. The kiss, ravenous like a starving beast, devoured her with the ferocity of a storm. After the tempest passed, he nibbled and teased her lips with playful cruelty, biting and releasing them.

The heat of the moment was so intense that Veronica forgot the kiss was something she was obligated to do. This was merely the exchange of breath and saliva, like when God created mankind. That’s all.

“You can’t let it spill.”

As saliva trickled down the corner of her lips, Leon lifted her chin with his thumb and whispered. His tone was completely different from when he had wiped away her tears. His face, stripped of any warmth, was unbearably dry and cold.

His rough fingers traced the path of the saliva, pushing it back into her open mouth. When she obediently opened her mouth, his hand, which had momentarily hesitated, began moving again as if it had lost all sense. His fingers rubbed her tongue, grazed her teeth, and even caressed the inside of her mouth.

Like a pomegranate laid bare, Veronica accepted him, gazing at the man in front of her. The fire in his eyes flared brightly, igniting something deep inside her, pulling it to the surface until she couldn’t breathe anymore. The sound escaped her throat as a sharp, high-pitched cry.

At that moment, the blackness in Leon’s pupils flickered back to life. His bright, shining eyes dimmed and gradually sank into a dark abyss. Finally, his hand pulled away.

Harsh, erratic breaths filled the space between them. Veronica didn’t cling to him this time, not because she wasn’t aroused but because the contempt she had seen briefly in his face had been too stark. Too real.

“Pepigi foedus cum oculis meis ut ne cogitarem quidem de virgine.”

Leon murmured a verse from the Scriptures against her lips. His voice was low, and the words were so refined that only the learned could understand them. However, by coincidence, Veronica knew exactly what he had said.

When she had first taken an interest in dancing, she had been dragged to church and forced to read, write, and memorize the Scriptures every day. Veronica gasped for breath as if pulled from deep water.

‘I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?’

An indescribable sense of unease crept up from her toes. Looking back, perhaps it had been a premonition of things to come. Like the dawn, bright and white, pouring in to signal the end of the tender night.

***

They got up and left the temple. Leon acted as if nothing had happened. It was a mask. In the moment of vulnerability, as if he had never shown his true face, the calm mask was back in place. However, the difference now was that he no longer made eye contact with her.

“We’ve left the wilderness. As I mentioned yesterday, we should reach the Holy City around noon.”

Just as he said, sparse trees and fields began to appear. A road had formed as well. The chirping of birds, which seemed like something she hadn’t heard in years, made her realize they had returned to civilization. Though it had only been about a week that the two had been alone together, it felt like they had wandered a distant land for much longer.

The ever-closer Blasen mountain range, covered in eternal snow, looked like a white crown on the landscape. No one gazing at that towering mountain would know that somewhere, in the black-and-white mountain range, Bahamut was lurking.

Kart, the Holy City, filled the horizon below the blue sky. As they climbed a high hill, the grand spectacle of the city revealed itself, stretching from the left end of her field of vision to the right. It was a magnificent display of human civilization, brilliant and sprawling.

From behind her, Leon asked, “Is this the city you saw in your vision?”

“I think so. But in the vision, I was looking down from the mountain, not from this side.”

As the horse descended the slope, excitement and tension surged. From all directions, she saw people moving like insects, crawling toward the city.

It was the capital. They had arrived in Kart. Seeing the diverse crowd—from the southern people with curly hair and dark skin to the Romins with gray hair and coppery skin—Veronica felt a sense of relief and her heart began to race. Everyone was seeking the refuge of a sanctuary that could never fall. Bathed in golden sunlight, the city shimmered like a paradise.