Hero.
What exactly is a hero?
In the most literal sense, it refers to a person of exceptional courage and valor.
In some divided nation somewhere, it's also a term used to describe men in their twenties—cheap, convenient, and easy to spend.
And in a fantasy world, "hero" is most commonly used to mean the nemesis of the Demon King, or the savior of the world.
In *Saintess & Hero*, too, the word carried profound weight.
In the world of *Saintess & Hero*, the first hero appeared a thousand years ago, at the time of the Demon King's assault.
The continent at that time stood at the very precipice of annihilation, overwhelmed by the sudden tide of monster armies. The walls humanity had built crumbled. Armies were wiped out entirely. The whole continent was being painted over in blood and screams.
And then, out of nowhere, someone appeared—the First Hero, known at the time simply as "the Hero."
With no preamble and no buildup, she charged straight to the front lines with only a handful of companions, and proceeded to grind the monster hordes into nothing. In the end, she took the head of the Demon King himself—the king of all monsters—and brought peace to the world.
A walking strategic weapon wearing a human face. A natural disaster that moved on two legs.
That was the meaning of "hero" as it had been burned into this world's memory.
Gladia ran her fingers absently along the ends of her hair, lost in thought.
*A hero, huh...*
She tried to recall how heroes appeared in the game.
*Saintess & Hero*, true to its identity as a game that prized open-ended play, supported a variety of game modes. And depending on the mode, the timing and form of the hero's awakening differed entirely.
There were three play modes in *Saintess & Hero*.
The first was [Saintess Mode], where you played as the Saintess.
The second was [Hero Mode], where you played as the Hero.
And the third and final was [Custom Mode], where you played as a character you built yourself.
In the first of these—[Saintess Mode]—you played as Saintess Cruje, and the hero was whoever ultimately became her romantic partner. The system was built around that bond.
The not-quite-a-problem problem, however, was that Cruje—and it was no coincidence she had pink hair—displayed a remarkably... open(?) approach to romance in Saintess Mode. Not only could you pursue opposite-gender routes, you could even unlock a lily ending. The girl had range.
*Come to think of it, Cruje was acting strange when she talked to my young mistress... Don't tell me—!?*
No. Cruje had simply regarded Aiolette with resentment and hostility. Nothing more.
But Gladia's mind had already been colonized by the image of Cruje the pink-haired Saintess from the game, and her thoughts refused to stop spiraling.
*No, wait. It fits. It absolutely fits. There was definitely something off about the way she was looking at her!*
Looking at her, was she? Gladia couldn't see anything.
And yet, in her mind's eye, she had already conjured a perfectly vivid image of Cruje's gaze—dark, scheming, and full of ulterior intent.
In her imagination, Cruje had enveloped Aiolette in those enormous arms—and that enormous chest—and was flicking her tongue with a villainous leer.
*Your precious little mistress is mine! Keh-keh-keh!*
...Cruje had, of course, never said anything of the sort, nor had she ever laughed like that.
If Cruje had seen this fantasy, she would have had every right to sue for defamation.
The imagination kept going. But it didn't last long.
*So then... is my young mistress the hero?*
The moment that thought surfaced, Gladia let out a short, dismissive laugh at her own absurdity.
The young mistress who still occasionally crept into Gladia's room alone because she was scared of the dark—that young mistress, a hero?
*That's completely ridiculous.*
With that settled, Gladia shelved the Saintess Mode possibility for now.
Which left the remaining options...
*[Hero Mode] and [Custom Mode].*
[Hero Mode] was exactly what it sounded like—the player became the hero and progressed through the story. In that case, the hero's awakening was fixed to the player character.
*In that scenario, the most likely candidate for awakening as the hero would be... me, wouldn't it?*
Yes. In that case, the character with the highest probability of awakening as the hero was the world's only playable character: Gladia.
*Hmm. Me, the hero who saves the continent...*
She quietly opened and closed her palm, then gave a slow, serious nod.
Even by her own assessment, she was a flawless maid—combat ability, knowledge, appearance, and character(?) all without a single gap. Unless the goddess had gone completely cross-eyed, choosing her as the hero was the most rational and cost-effective decision available.
But Gladia shook her head.
*Still, I can't call this a certainty. If this were [Hero Mode], the awakening should have happened before enrolling in the academy.*
That left the last option—the third one. [Custom Mode].
Honestly, Gladia had been thinking this was the most likely scenario all along.
And for good reason: the mode she had been starting right before she fell into this world was [Custom Mode].
The problem was that finding the hero became considerably harder in this case.
*In [Custom Mode], the hero awakening is completely random...*
That was right. In [Custom Mode], the hero wasn't assigned to a fixed character—it was a role distributed randomly according to system variables.
Sometimes the player's own character awakened as the hero. Sometimes an enemy the player had been fighting suddenly awakened as the hero mid-battle and powered up dramatically.
The one saving grace, even in this scenario, was that the characters eligible to awaken as the hero were limited to Cruje and the first-year students who had enrolled alongside the player.
Upperclassmen and random outsiders were excluded from the candidate pool. The range had narrowed, and that alone was something to be grateful for.
*Phew. My head hurts. I still need to look into the First Hero's side of things too...*
Thwack. Crack—!
"Haaah—!"
A sharp battle cry and the crack of wooden swords colliding hammered against Gladia's eardrums.
That snapped her out of it. She lowered the hand she'd been resting her chin on, and let her senses spread outward past her firmly closed eyelids.
Heart-Sight gathered the information around her and painted a picture of her surroundings in her mind.
Gladia was currently at the training grounds of the Knight Division, waiting to attend the mandatory knight-track course: *Efficient Core Conditioning*.
Aiolette, naturally, had no need to attend—it wasn't a class for her. She had left earlier with Cruje to wander the academy and scout for potential hero candidates.
*Keh-keh-keh!*
For a split second, an image of Cruje flashing a villainous grin flickered through Gladia's mind. She gave her head a light shake and dismissed it.
The professor hadn't arrived yet, so there was still a comfortable stretch of waiting time—but the air around her was anything but comfortable. Battle cries filled every corner of the training grounds.
*Knights. Can't sit still for five minutes without burning something...*
Were they really so unable to tolerate the muscle loss from a brief wait?
The students around her had already paired off and were sparring freely.
"You're alone today."
Someone spoke to her.
A voice that couldn't quite hide its own confidence.
The Crown Prince of the Libertian Empire. Sixty-five points.
Gladia didn't bother turning her head.
"Hello there. Sixty-five points?"
"How long are you planning to keep dragging that out?"
Sixty-five points voiced his displeasure, but what could he do—it was simply the truth.
Realizing she had no intention of changing it, he let out a sigh and continued.
"I'm so used to seeing you constantly at Aiolette Drnaris's side that seeing you alone like this feels strangely novel."
"Well, days like this happen, don't they? Even so, people can't be attached at the hip every single day."
"You could've fooled me. You seemed attached at the hip every single day..."
Sixty-five points thought back to everything he'd observed of Aiolette and Gladia.
Their exceptional talent had caught his interest, and he'd been carefully timing his approach to speak with them.
But whenever he tried to approach them together, the other one would immediately run interference—so he'd been waiting for a moment when one of them was alone.
*Are these two really that close?*
They simply refused to separate.
There had been that one time Aiolette came to class alone, and he'd tried to approach her then—but the moment class ended, she was gone before he could get a word in.
This time, at least, Gladia was alone, and he'd finally managed to say something.
"So. What do you want?"
"Nothing particularly urgent, really. I thought it might be nice to get better acquainted—as classmates."
"Acquainted?"
"Yes. Some of our year are gathering this weekend for a social gathering. Any interest?"
Reaching out to Gladia the moment Aiolette's back was turned—the golden sun, making his move...!
But his opponent was Gladia. A perfect maid with precisely zero interest to spare for any man.
"I appreciate it, but no. I'm busy attending to my young mistress on weekends as well."
"Aiolette Drnaris is welcome to come along too, if you'd like."
"My young mistress? At a social gathering?"
Gladia looked at him with an expression that said: *are you serious.*
Her face made him realize his mistake immediately.
Right. Aiolette was a social catastrophe so severe that even the Crown Prince of her own empire couldn't reach her.
And she was supposed to attend a social gathering?
An image of Aiolette showing up and reducing the entire event to rubble flashed through his mind.
"...Well, it might do her good to meet more people."
He couldn't let it go. Gladia gave a quiet scoff and turned her head away.
It wasn't an attitude one typically showed a crown prince, but sixty-five points knew perfectly well she was a genius who had earned the right—so he didn't dwell on it.
He was about to try again when—
"Oh, everyone's at it already! I like what I see!"
A heavy set of footsteps and a booming voice rolled in from the entrance of the training grounds.
The owner of that voice—loud enough to rattle the entire Knight Division—was Krasis, the professor assigned to *Efficient Core Conditioning* this semester.
At the professor's entrance, every student who had been sparring stopped at once and turned to look.
"Yes, yes! This is exactly what a knight should look like!"
Krasis laughed with open, unrestrained energy and brought the enormous training sword he'd been carrying down onto the floor with a resounding crash. A faint tremor ran through the ground and traveled up through the soles of Gladia's feet.
"I'm Krasis, and I'll be leading *Efficient Core Conditioning* this term!"
A low wave of excitement rippled through the students at the introduction.
Knight Krasis was a legendary figure—the object of every knight's admiration.
The story of him single-handedly taking down an entire castle had spread to other nations entirely.
"Getting your bodies moving before the professor even shows up—I love that attitude! Looks like this year's first-years have some real steel in them!"
Krasis swept his gaze around the room with an expression of genuine approval.
"Still, before we get into the practical work, I should cover the basics!"
With that, he picked the training sword back up from the floor.
"We knights channel mana through the Core—a different mechanism entirely from a mage's Circle!"
In that instant, his Core detonated to life at the center of his chest, pumping mana through every part of his body.
Whoooosh—!
Above the rough, unassuming training sword in his grip, a blinding surge of blue-white mana erupted upward like an explosion.
"...!"
The crushing pressure that bore down on the entire training grounds made the students gasp, their shock impossible to contain.
That was it. That was the ultimate pinnacle every knight dreamed of reaching.
Aura Sword.
With every awestruck gaze in the room fixed on him, Krasis continued his explanation.
"If a mage's Circle is about releasing mana outward to give it form, then our Core is about how freely you can wield mana as though it were your own body—that's the heart of it. And the best way to train that Core is, simply put, actual combat!"
He finished speaking and drew his hand back. The Aura that had blazed as if it might swallow the training grounds whole vanished in an instant, as though it had never existed.
"That's theory enough, I think. Everyone follow?"
Krasis grinned—an expression that called to mind a certain medic-type from some battlefield somewhere—and opened his mouth.
"Now. Kill each other."