Anna Gratz walked alone through the streets of Balse. Her shoulders slumped ever lower, as if mirroring her sinking spirits.
The primary reason Anna felt so downcast was not because Lady Rose had judged her to possess less talent than that colossal apostate—Kai Heinemann.
Of course, she had initially been quite disheartened, even infuriated, by Lady Rose's words.
However, Anna's family, the Gratzes, was an honorable holy knight lineage that had served royalty for generations. As a member of the Amelia Kingdom's low-ranking nobility, she had been granted the privilege of serving at Lady Rose's side. With their ages relatively close, Anna and Lady Rose had grown up like sisters. Petty squabbles were an everyday occurrence between them, and she was not the type to stay depressed forever over a simple rebuke from Lady Rose.
No, the reason Anna felt so thoroughly miserable this time lay with that incompetent fool from the Heinemann knight-baron family—Kai Heinemann.
Kai Heinemann's Gift was "The Most Incompetent in the World."
A Gift was a special blessing bestowed upon humanity by Ares, the Holy God of War and patron deity of the Amelia Kingdom. In the Holy Amelia Kingdom, a person's virtue had traditionally been judged by the caliber of their Gift. If the quality of a Gift was high, that person was beloved by Lord Ares; if it was low, they were deemed to possess only enough virtue to be shunned by him.
This standard permeated the kingdom, dictating everything from employment and marriage down to personal friendships.
The Gratz family, in particular, was a traditional line of holy knights, and Anna had been thoroughly drilled in that philosophy since childhood.
By that metric, possessing "The Most Incompetent in the World" was synonymous with being the person most unloved by God in existence. In other words, he was a natural-born apostate who possessed the least virtue of anyone alive.
Lady Rose had always been a kind soul. That was why she treated even apostates without proper Gifts as equals. It was surely why she had extended her hand even to that apostate who dared call her a pest.
However, Lady Rose's Gift was Saint—the talent most beloved by God. Merely making contact with someone so despised by God would surely taint her. As a holy knight, Anna's duty was to prevent that at all costs.
That was her mission. It was supposed to be. And yet, no matter how hard she tried, Anna simply could not view Kai Heinemann as such a defiled creature. Part of it, undoubtedly, was that he had saved her when her virtue was almost stolen.
Even so, he was an unforgivable blasphemer who had gone so far as to call Lady Rose vermin. Even setting aside her debt of gratitude, he was a man she ought to despise, someone who should have provoked a visceral disgust.
Yet whenever Kai was near, she found herself strangely at ease. She felt a sense of relief. And that was something Anna simply could not forgive in herself. Allowing herself to feel that way seemed tantamount to endorsing his insolence toward Lady Rose.
That was why she had gone out of her way to avoid Kai entirely. Lady Rose surely understood Anna's conflicted feelings, as she had not once chided her for keeping to herself ever since.
(What on earth am I doing...?)
She simply did not want to face Kai. That was the sole reason she was wandering the streets of Balse right now. Behaving like a throwing-a-tantrum child over feelings she could not even comprehend left Anna feeling utterly pathetic.
Suddenly, a man's furious shout cut through the air.
"Walk faster!"
"I-I'm sorry..."
Looking toward the commotion, she saw a burly man dressed in black lashing a silver-haired girl with a whip.
The child belonged to the beastfolk race. In all likelihood, some shameless soldier had abducted her amid the chaos of war and sold her off to a slave trader.
Anna despised slavery. It was not the slaves themselves she hated, but the nauseating practice of buying and selling human beings like objects or livestock. In truth, it was not just the slave trade. Anna harbored a deep revulsion toward many things considered common sense in the Amelia Kingdom. That was precisely why she had tried so desperately to blend in and conform. But in the end, she could not do it. No matter what, she simply could not stomach it. In all likelihood, Anna was a failure of a holy knight.
After all, here she was, picking a fight over something any proper holy knight of the kingdom would have ignored without a second thought.
At the climax of the confrontation with the traders, just as Anna's temper flared and her hand went to the hilt of her sword, that guy had stepped in and settled the whole dispute on his own terms.
He had promised to purchase the silver-haired beastfolk girl within twenty days for the staggering sum of two million Aul. Buying a slave—the very concept repulsed her, yet thinking calmly, it really was the only viable solution. In fact, she should have been grateful to him for fulfilling her wish without causing trouble for anyone. But with Anna's stubborn pride, she could never bring herself to say it.
At first, he had possessed such an irritatingly spineless personality, but ever since that incident, his demeanor—and even his way of speaking—had transformed completely, leaving him acting as though he owned the world.
And yet, while his arrogant attitude and actions annoyed her, they never provoked genuine disgust. She really was broken inside.
On their way back to the inn where Lady Rose waited, he had suddenly stopped as if remembering something, turning back to face Anna.
"Oh right. Good job, Anna."
He said it with his usual fearless smirk.
Hearing him call her by name for the first time, and being praised by him, felt inexplicably heartening.
"Let's hurry up and get back to Lady Rose!"
Desperately fighting down the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, Anna yelled at him and marched briskly ahead.