It wasn’t until the next day that I was able to leave the church, and even then, I still had to do the very heavy job of convincing the two padins to let me stay for another day to get my affairs in order before we left. Honestly, I knew that they’d come to take me away to the main church in the capital, but that didn’t mean that I was ready for how sudden all of this felt. It was like I was constantly getting thrown from one extreme situation to the next! Is this just what life as a Saintess was like?! No, but I’m sure that it wasn’t anywhere near this bad when I watched Inaiah’s life!

  Well, then again, her escort was in love with her, while mine-

  …Yeah, they clearly don’t seem to like me that much.

  Eh, maybe I’m being too harsh on them. For the most part, it’s more like the guy padin is just doing his job and doesn’t really care very much for anything more than his ‘duty’. And the dy padin, uh…

  Well, yeah, I don’t think she likes me.

  The amount of times that she gives me a look like she doesn’t like what she’s seeing are starting to reeeally pile up. I don’t know, it’d be easy to believe she’s just disappointed in me, but I think there’s something more than that. I’m a pretty good detector of that kind of thing! I didn’t go through a bunch of years of high school and college with Kale’s fan’s looking at me like some kind of insect or road-block for nothing! My sense for this kind of thing is very sharp!

  …Not that that’s anything to brag over.

  It’s alright, though. I can put up with her looking at me like that so long as she doesn’t try to do anything funny to me, I guess. It’s not like I have to keep her with me forever, right? I’m sure once we make it to the main church she’ll either go away on her own or I can request her to be repced. Really, it’s no big deal.

  Okay, maybe I say all that, but I really wish I didn’t have these two following me now, of all times!

  I told them I had to go out into town to say my goodbyes, but I really didn’t think they were actually gonna follow along! I guess I should have expected it, since they are my escorts after all, but… Well…

  I’m going to the brothel!

  I’m going to a ‘naughty’ pce!

  It may just be to heal, do my job as a Saintess, and keep a promise, but taking my padin escorts to a pce like this is, well…

  Even I know how awkward it is!

  At least I have Kale to hold my hand through all of this. Honestly, if he wasn’t here when I first saw how absolutely demolished some of this town got, then I don’t think I would have been able to go out. I would have totally just gone back inside and moped over what a failure I am. But if Kale’s here… then maybe I can muster up enough strength to look at the consequences of my failures. …At least for a little while, anyway.

  The destruction didn’t make it very far into the town at least, so that's good. Maybe I have the padins to thank for that. From how many houses and buildings are straight up torn apart or have had their walls knocked out, it’s obvious to see that the monsters that came through here weren’t on the small and weak side, for sure. I’m sure that if it were the dregs that had managed to come through here, if I hadn’t succeeded in running them away, then the town would have been in an even more devastating condition than this right now. But you know, if I’d pyed things smarter, and if I hadn’t died so needlessly so many times, then… I can’t help but think that this wouldn't have happened.

  “...I really screwed up, didn’t I, Kale?”

  “Saintess…?”

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared right now. When I died those other times it didn’t really weigh on me for very long. After all, it was hardly my first time, right? But now that I know that my deaths cause disasters to happen, it’s kind of hard to ignore the consequences that they bring.

  -And it’s scaring me a lot that I don’t know what my most recent death has caused yet.

  ~~~

  Thankfully none of the girls at the brothel were harmed by the monster wave at all, since they were tucked at the other end of the town. I heard that Ferr was actually a part of the force that fought off the wave inside of the town, but luckily she wasn’t harmed all that much, so that’s also a blessing too. Of course, I made sure to heal her first just to make sure that she wasn’t lying to me just to look cool or anything, but it’s still pretty amazing that she got away with such minor injuries, if the tales of her heroics that the other girls have been telling me are true.

  I kind of knew it already, but Ferr really is strong, isn’t she?

  …I wonder if there’s any kind of way that she could be my escort instead of the padins that are currently waiting for me outside?

  Nah, if I did that then Chel would cry.

  For the record, while I was worried about all the girls at the brothel after the monster wave, my true reason for coming here was actually to keep a promise that I’d made before. Now that I’ve made it past level 20, I was finally able to buy [Greater Cure] so that I could fix that poor girl’s cancer, just like I said that I would all those weeks ago. I have to admit that it hurt me to spend 3 out of my 6 avaible skill points to get it, but seeing the surprised and ecstatic look on the girl’s face when she realized that she was all fixed made it pretty darn worth it, I’d say. Really makes you feel like a Saintess when you pull off what everyone thinks is a freaking miracle like that. And obviously I know that having a souped-up version of my [Cure] is totally gonna get some use again one day in the future, so there’s no way I wouldn’t have taken it.

  But you know, now I only have 3 skill points left… which is only enough to get 1 more skill.

  I’ve known for weeks now that the skills get a lot more expensive after level 20, but still, now that I’m here it really uh… hurts. I can’t help but feel like I’m gonna miss out on a bunch of important stuff that could have maybe helped me. Then again, I guess a skill tree is only really a skill tree if you have to make choices in it, huh? It’s rare to find a game with one that lets you take all of the skills, after all. But you’d think that being a super special ‘Saintess’ in a fantasy world would give me a bit more leeway though, right? It’s kind of a bit of a letdown that I’m gonna have to pass up on so many…

  Oh, well, I suppose that doesn’t have to be the case actually; Didn’t I get a few quests that have rewarded me with more skill points in the past? So if I keep doing the sudden big quests that get dropped on me, then there should be a way to rack up enough extra skill points to make a big difference one of these days, right?

  Honestly it’s kind of a surprise that this particur set of events didn’t spawn some very rewarding quest for me at all, since it seemed like that’s how the others all worked.

  There’s no way that I missed the quest, is there…?

  Oh well. I’m saying all this stuff, but it’s not like I find the other 5 skills that I can get all that necessary anyway. The level 18 and 19 skills were just detection skills: [All Seeing Eyes], which would just let me see hidden things, I’m guessing kind of like an x-ray, and [Divine Seek], which would let me sense anything of a divine nature near me. The first one is… meh, you know? Like, I’m not superman, I don’t need x-ray vision. I’m sure the second one would be pretty important if I was gonna keep looking for more relics, but it feels kind of like a waste for me to get, even if it is still only one skill point. Can’t Kale pretty much already do that anyway? Why should I waste my precious points when my handy dandy Kale can just do it for me?

  The skill at level 20 was of course [Greater Cure], which I had already long ago engraved into my mind, and level 21 was yet another detection type of skill, [Detect Evil], which just lets me detect any monsters and demons in the area. I’m sure it’d be a useful skill some time in the future, but it costing 3 skill points to get makes me kinda not want to get it just yet. Idunno, so far everything actually ‘dangerous’ that I’ve fought has been big and came barrelling towards me immediately, so I’ve never really had any trouble finding them. Maybe it would have been useful for detecting that devil that killed me that one time, but I know myself well enough to know that I totally wouldn’t have used it on those poor people we rescued, even if I’d had it at the time. Really, I just don’t think I’d ever know when to use it, you know? Idunno, maybe I would if I ever went back to adventuring, as unlikely as that seems...

  Anyways, level 22 offered me [Medium Dimensional Space], which seemed like a cool option to me at first, until I realized that I still don’t even use the [Small Dimensional Space] that I already have. I don’t even really know how much it can hold yet because I’ve used it so little! Eh, maybe I’ll get it in the future once I have stuff, but for now it’s completely unnecessary. What did catch my eye though was the skill for level 23, my current level:

  {[Desperate Prayer]: Pray to the Goddess to find the right path! Offers 100xp to the Goddess in exchange for a ‘hint’.}

  See, that just sounds ominous! It’s basically telling me to give it my hard earned life-force in exchange for something incredibly vague! It’s like telling a vampire to spit up all the blood it sucked if it wants help with anything!

  Well, I guess I’m getting to the point where 100xp isn’t too incredibly much. Just from healing that girl’s cancer alone I got 200xp, so I guess I shouldn’t be looking at it like it’s some ungodly sum. But still, it feels kind of bad to have to give it up all the same! I need that stuff to keep living, so I really don’t like the idea of anything taking it away, for any reason!

  Then again, if I’d had that option earlier, would I have tried to get a hint from the Goddess about the right way to fight the dregs? If I’d had it, could I have stopped this stupid camity from ever hitting this town in the first pce, all for the cost of 100xp…? Honestly, I think I totally would have done it, even if I thought it was a complete gamble, so long as there was even a chance that things would have turned out better than this. It could be that a nudge in the right direction was all that I needed to fix all this.

  Or, you know, it could have chimed back something stupid at me like ‘Just kill them’. If it did that after I spent 3 skill points and 100xp on the damn thing, I think the church would have to lock me away for bsphemy for sure. There’s no way they wouldn’t find out either, now that they’ve stuck their padins onto me.

  …Yeah, I think it’s best that I keep this skill tucked away for now…