My Castle received a visitor.
A woman visiting alone was a first.
The visitor was a Saintess.
Wrapped head to foot in a white robe, as befits the clergy. In her hand, a magic staff set with a blue orb.
"How do you do. I am—"
"I know. The Saintess of Nation K, yes?"
"…Indeed."
The Saintess bristled, but she kept up appearances and refrained from any barbed remark.
Though I do happen to know that inside she was looking down her nose at me: "How rude of this brat, cutting off the greeting of a Saintess such as myself."
"So? What is it. Out with your business."
So I said—though naturally I knew it without needing to ask.
"I have come to negotiate peace. If only humankind and demonkind could—"
"Hey. Are you the sort who simply carries out whatever she is told to do and then stands about waiting for the next instruction?"
I had cut her off again, and the Saintess bristled harder.
Unable to keep her feelings down, she answered back with a little barb in it.
"And what is it you wish to say? You will not even hear a person out to the end."
"Your whole pitch is aimed at the wrong party. I am not a demon. Whether humankind and demonkind fight or get along has nothing whatsoever to do with me. You did not research the person you came to negotiate with in the slightest, did you."
"I was told only that it was the Demon Lord."
"I killed the Demon Lord. Quite some time ago. Keep your antennae up. You seem to think I am the rude one here, but getting your negotiating partner's species wrong is a great deal ruder."
"…Then I do apologize for that."
The Saintess clicked her tongue quietly before apologizing. I heard it perfectly well, of course.
"And one more thing."
"What is it now?!"
Her reply came out somewhat hysterical. She is normally addressed as "Lady Saintess," so being called plain "you" has her furious.
"Look, you turn up armed to the teeth and open with 'I've come to negotiate peace'? Come on. If you want to negotiate peace, come unarmed. That staff is the magic staff you need to draw out that supposedly tremendous magic power of yours, isn't it? You fully intend to attack me the moment talks go badly."
"This is for self-defense."
"I know perfectly well that you are itching to attack me. Because you want to keep the people's respect as a Saintess, you always let the other party strike first and then hit back, calling it self-defense. Correct? And what you do isn't self-defense, it's excessive force."
…………
The Saintess fell silent. Her insides were boiling, but she could not manage a word in return. She wanted to know why the inside of her head was an open book, and her pride would not let her simply ask.
"Talks have broken down, so why not attack? Wipe me out and there is no one left who could ever know you struck first."
The last thread of the Saintess's patience snapped clean through, and with a demon's face she leveled the staff at me.
"SHUT UUUUUUUUP!!"
What she loosed was explosion magic: a dense mass of energy fired from the staff's tip, ignited by a burst of flame to produce an enormous detonation.
The room filled with flash and heat and roar and blast.
The Saintess was protected by her highly magic-resistant robe and by a magical barrier.
"Oh dear, have I done it again? And I only used a little magic."
People around her always gasp, "That was only a little?!" and she feigns composure while preening inwardly. A solid lump of self-regard.
She was quite sure she had blown me away. Believing in the result she had pictured without so much as checking is, as ever, remarkably shallow.
"You look awfully pleased with yourself. What is it you've done, exactly? Wet yourself?"
Naturally, I was unharmed. So was the Mofu asleep on my lap.
Light, heat, sound, wind—every part of the explosion I cut off directly in front of me.
"What?! How are you unharmed after that?!"
Quite the shock for her. For all her talk of only using a little magic, in her heart that was everything she had.
"Why not drop the pride already? You're dying to know what I can do, aren't you. For the record, I know all about you without having to ask."
This Saintess presents herself as though her magic power were the remarkable thing, when in fact it is only the staff she holds that is remarkable.
At her reincarnation, this Saintess used the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to ask for [Inexhaustible Magic Power]. As a result she became able to see the source of magic in the atmosphere—mana, they call it—and to draw on it to work her spells.
Other saintesses and mages use the mana within themselves, so their reserves have a limit; this one draws on the power of the natural world, and is therefore a stranger to running dry and can cast without end.
And thanks to that, the force behind any single spell is considerable as well.
"Haah… What are you?"
"I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. So however powerful the magic you can cast, you absolutely cannot match me."
"Well, there is nothing to be done about that. I give up. I am going home."
Sulking, at a moment like this. She has no grasp whatsoever of the situation she is in.
She is, quite simply, stupid.
"Hey. You try to kill someone and you think you get to go home in one piece? How coddled has your life been? What are you, a delicate flower raised in a greenhouse? Wither and die."
Blood jetted from the Saintess's eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and every pore of her body, and she fell.
The white robe was dyed crimson.
The corpse, mummified now, I burned away to nothing with an instant of hellfire.
"Sending a worthless creature like that—Nation K must be a fairly worthless country itself."
I had thought to torment Nation K a little before crushing it, but I judged that a country this worthless was not worth the slightest trouble on my part, and so simply dropped a monolith on it in the usual way—a black mass twenty kilometers tall, cut to the shape of the country.