“It is the task of judging the heathens and purifying Sarania so it may be dedicated to Rem once more. Such an opportunity is far too generous for a lowly wretch like you, a girl who hasn’t even awakened divine power.”

About a month ago.

Inside the carriage on the way to Tolin, the capital of Saranthum.

The carriage was lavishly decorated with religious symbols to flaunt the Holy Kingdom’s honor and wealth. Inside it, Riella was lost in worry. There was no room for the excitement of riding a carriage and visiting another region for the first time in her life, nor for any delight in wearing fine silk clothes for the first time ever.

She was on her way to a political marriage with an enemy nation whose face she couldn’t even picture, one that fought the Holy Alliance forces for more than ten years until just three months ago.

Naturally, she felt anxious and on edge. That was on top of her psychological revulsion toward the unbelieving foreign people the Holy Kingdom sought to subjugate in the name of god.

‘They say Saranthum’s ruler is a sl*ughter-mad lunatic with horns on his forehead…. What if they call me a lackey of the Holy Kingdom, t*rture me, and eat me?’

The rumors about the man who would become her husband were also so ominous. Riella never imagined she would marry anyone in her life, so there was nothing about it that didn’t frighten her.

Worse still.

‘I can’t let it slip and get exposed by mistake.’

She harbored a secret, and if it came to light, she would even end up ruining the great undertaking of the peace treaty through her own carelessness.

Riella’s deep eyes sank gloomily.

Ten days since leaving the Holy Kingdom. It felt very much like going to her death.

The enemy nation, Saranthum. A country of unbelievers, founded about a thousand years ago when a foreign people originating in the northern mountains recklessly planted their banner on the land of the one god, Rem.

Claiming to be descendants of dragons, they revere the logic of the survival of the fittest and, having grown up alongside beasts, are savage, cruel, cunning, and ingratiating.

…Or so it is known.

Dragons were a symbol of greed and evil, said to have been punished by the one god Rem in ages past and driven beyond the polar reaches of the north. So wasn’t a Saranthumian, in the eyes of the church that believed in Rem, wicked heresy itself? Accordingly, the Holy Alliance forces were dispatched to subjugate them as many as five times in the interim.

But every time, the Holy Alliance forces knelt before their ferocious wildness, and as a result an uncomfortable coexistence continued for nearly 300 years. In the meantime, the heathens, grown prosperous through trade with other lands, took on the shape of a proper nation and drew a dragon on their royal crest. The Holy Kingdom could no longer overlook those heretics, so it gathered its long-endured will to eradicate evil and ended up dispatching the Sixth Holy Alliance forces.

Did their longing reach Rem? Or was the fervor for judging heretics, condensed because it could not be vented all this while, simply that powerful? Unlike before, the Holy Alliance forces did not retreat in one-sided inferiority, and with an evenly matched exchange of offense and defense, the war lasted ten years.

The anomaly came last year.

When the king of Saranthum passed away and the young, newly enthroned king stood at the vanguard of the front line, the tide of war turned.

A barbarian warrior who sold his heart to the devil, an incarnation of a cursed evil dragon, a butcher wielding a red blade, the blind sl*ughter-maniac of Orden Canyon.

Every description of him coming from the battlefield was horrifying. Perhaps because none of those who saw him up close returned alive, the epithets only grew more grandiose. That was only natural, since after the new king took the vanguard, the Saranthum army did not lose a single battle.

Could their people really have some connection to the wicked dragon and be wielding sorcery?

Piling up defeat after defeat, the Holy Alliance forces were pushed back to the vicinity of the capital of Mardur, a northern country. Judging that they could no longer shed the blood of the faithful, the alliance abandoned the war.

The card they played in one last display of recklessness was an end to the war and amity.

As an apology for starting the war, they would send the Holy Emperor’s daughter, and they asked Saranthum to promise peace by forming a political marriage between her and its ruler.

Giving up the Holy Emperor’s only blood relative and one and only saintess was a tremendous sacrifice for those who waged war in the name of the one god.

The problem was whether the offer would even please Saranthum, a nation declared war upon six times under the pretext of religious conflict… but somehow the king of Saranthum readily accepted the proposal. Even for those who drafted the negotiation plan, it was fortunate, yes, but so surprising that they couldn’t suppress the thought.

The central figure who ended up going to the land of the barbaric heathens for a peace treaty concluded so shamefully and luckily was none other than Riella.

Riella was the daughter of the Holy Emperor, the ruler of the Holy Kingdom, the suzerain state of the Holy Alliance, and the being closest to god. She was also a saintess to appear in hundreds of years. Among the Holy Kingdom’s daughters, she was the one who currently monopolized the one god’s love, manifested divine power, and received the devotion of all who believe in Rem.

Unfortunately, there was one problem with such a Riella.

That she was not actually a saintess.

“Public opinion seems not to believe it, in any case. There has never been a saintess who awakened at twenty in history. But well, what would those heathen bastards know? We should just keep our own people’s mouths shut.”

“Conduct yourself well. If it’s exposed that you’re a fraud without a speck of divine power, the continent’s peace will be broken because of you.”

“…Yes, Your Holiness.”

“Don’t worry. Would those barbarians ever imagine that she inherited Your Holiness’s noble blood and is nothing but an empty husk?”

“With the war over, those ignoramuses seem to know that justification and bloodline matter for stabilizing royal authority, so they won’t rashly touch her.”

She recalled the whispering the Holy Emperor and the high priests did about her before she left the Holy Kingdom. Riella’s shoulders instinctively hunched.

‘Right, it’ll be fine. I won’t have to use divine power there anyway.’

Anyway, weren’t only those who believed in Rem interested in the existence of a saintess?

The Saranthumians, on the other hand, revere the divine dragon as their ancestor. To them, the power of another god said to have driven dragons from the continent would be neither important nor coveted.

She even brought along sacred artifacts left behind by former saintesses, just in case, so she could somehow fool their eyes.

‘Besides, small wounds are something I can somehow heal myself.’

Riella did in fact possess divine power. Compared to what the church expected, it was very faint, and its effect was so maddeningly slow that she was only dismissed, told she couldn’t be venerated as a saintess.

None of it would matter in Saranthum. To them, her value would be only the symbolism of being the Holy Emperor’s only daughter and a saintess, nothing more.

So no situation would arise in which it would be exposed that she wasn’t a real saintess. The same went for being an illegitimate child never acknowledged by the Holy Emperor her whole life.

The king of Saranthum, having accepted this political marriage, would not dare treat her, the Holy Emperor’s daughter, carelessly.

Even if horns were attached to his head.

Even if he was a descendant of the evil dragon and a sl*ughter-maniac said to have cut down hundreds of holy knights on the battlefield.

“…Yeah. It’ll be fine.”

Murmuring once more the words she rolled on the tip of her tongue over a thousand times since starting the carriage journey, Riella quietly cast her gaze out the window. It was to shake off her fear of the bloodthirsty, horned half-man, half-beast.

‘I wish he wouldn’t take any interest in me at all. I’m really used to that.’

Neglect and contempt. Those were what Riella received all her life, and until the political marriage was decided a few months ago, she could count on one hand the times she stepped outside the Holy Emperor’s residence.

Before she knew it, the scenery outside was gradually changing. The rows of coniferous forest that filled the carriage window ended, and a wide plain appeared.

A fortress wall towering at the edge of the horizon.

Saranthum’s royal castle. It was Tolin.