I get up and begin my routine with my sword. My scarred arm is functional, even after I used it to help with blacksmithing yesterday. I am fine with being scarred, but I probably should have considered if the new scars would open up. The monk is stretching with Logan, the prince is making sure his shirt has no wrinkles, and the saintess is still waking up this morning.

  Logan looks over at the prince and calls out, “Michael, do you mind going with me today? I want to buy a book on dark magic so we know what to expect from The Great Evil when we fight them.”

  The prince goes over to Logan and discusses the finer details of buying such an incredibly illegal book. I don’t catch everything they say, as I overhear the saintess and monk talking about going to a seamstress to get the bear hide cut for our armor. The monk begins rolling it up to leave before I stop her.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The monk looks at me confused. “Alice and I were going to get our armor made, so I was picking it up.”

  “We are moving in groups of two to keep each other safe! You cannot defend anyone while carrying that thing and the saintess…” I simply point at the saintess. “Alice wouldn’t overpower anyone given that she only just began to regain strength from sleeping for years on end.”

  The monk just looks at me. “Then you carry it. We’ll move in a group of three for today.” The monk looks at the saintess. “We should probably wait for another day to finish what we were talking about yesterday, right?”

  The saintess just shook her head and sighed. “I don’t mind him hearing.” She turned to me. “We talked about the fact that my soul, which is what I consider to be me, might not be from around here. What I know of the summoning ritual for saintesses is that they use the same setup every time as it brings souls from the same place, but nobody knows what that place is. The place may be the afterlife, it may be another country from here, it may be another world entirely. We don’t know. I don’t know much about this country, but I don’t feel like I belong. It’s… It’s just a nagging voice in the back of my head. You guys have told me that a path helps to urge someone in the direction of their path. This feels very weird and… not saint-like.” she pauses for a moment before quickly adding, “I don’t know how to better describe it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to such a comment, but the monk either waited for me to give input or had nothing new to add. I silently stood next to them before the saintess said that we should probably move out.

  I hold the bear hide as we walk to the seamstress, taking extra precautions due to the three of us being together while the wanted posters are still around. We head inside the seamstress’s shop, a large building within 2 minutes of our inn.

  Upon entering, a middle-aged lady in a large apron greets us. “Are you two Faith and Alice? We’re ready to cut the bear hide. the leather worker and seamstress are both here. It may take a while due to the strength of the material we are using. We also will need to use a thicker needle for sewing to pierce the material properly. As such, the thread will need to be thicker, but we aren’t using spider silk thread, so do note that the threading can still be cut.”

  The lady gives us a perfect business smile while explaining everything to us. The monk replies “We’ll wait until the material is fully cut out to leave, we need to see how much is left over after the large pieces are cut for other defensive pieces of equipment to be made.” The receptionist frowns but nods, walking away. When the saintess turns to the monk to ask why, the monk whispers. “The material we have is worth more than the job, they may try to claim there was not enough usable material left to finish and make other things with the material to sell elsewhere. We promised them the material left after our job was finished. Still, our priority should be taking steps to ensure the material goes towards our job.”

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  “I never thought about that,” the saintess whispers. I silently nod as well.

  “Do you think I will ever feel like I belong here? Off topic, I know. Whether here is to the country or the team? The five of us were put in a team without knowing each other and we haven’t really bonded yet.”

  I try to find words to put her at ease, when she says, “Never mind, I was still thinking about the earlier conversation”.

  “Well, I don’t fit in here either.” The words had left my mouth before I realized and I tried to make it less insulting. “I worked my entire life to become a knight, to make my family no longer seem like former knights without a future. I belong standing among knights, or at least among squires. Instead I am here, practicing what I can to keep up with squires in hopes that I could one day rejoin them.” I paused. “What do you enjoy or want to do when this is all over saintess?”

  “Don’t call me saintess.”

  I look over to her.

  “Don’t call me saintess, please. Call me Alice. I don’t want to be the martyr of a church that basically cursed me with this weak body and a lack of knowledge. I hate-”

  The monk covers her mouth. The monk whispers something into her ear and the saintess nods. We sit in silence for a minute.

  “Running.”

  “Hmm?” The monk looks over to the saintess.

  “I enjoy running, and magic, and trying to make new friends. Those don’t seem like good goals to work towards or base a life around.”

  The monk shook her head. “I disagree. I heard the goals of wanting to be healthier, wanting to learn more about a topic, and wanting to interact with others more. Sounds to me like you want a relatively normal life.”

  The rest of the afternoon became a blur to me, as the monk and I tried to cheer up the saintess, who didn’t seem to want to be a saintess. It was mostly the two of them talking with me unsure of what to say. She was vulnerable and confused. She didn’t have bonds with anyone at the church because she barely knew them, she barely bonded with us either. She didn’t have common sense, skills, resources, or connections. Despite this she wasn’t asking for pity like many would, but trying to find direction for herself and understand why everything happened to her. The monk tried to give simple philosophies to answer what she could, but the saintess seemed to have almost as many questions as this morning. She didn’t have any major revelations while talking, but it seemed to help her just being able to talk through everything and working through some of it mentally.

  Alice regained some of her previous confidence by the time they finished cutting the fur garments. They may have rushed it because they wanted the rest of the material, but the equipment was good enough for the price the monk agreed to and the monk let them keep the rest without asking for my opinion.

  Alice had a small skip to her step as we got back to the inn, opening the door to hear Logan arguing with the prince.

  “We shouldn’t have bought that diary! That was most of the money you had! We don’t even know if it is real!”

  “Trust me when I say it is real enough. Plenty of these went into circulation and got copied repeatedly, and illegally. Stop asking me to explain myself.”

  The prince sees Alice walk in first and hands her a book. “Here, it is a copy of the first saintess’s diary. Read everything and hopefully, it will shed some light on what I can’t say.”

  The monk and I enter the room, closing and locking it behind us. I put down the armor that was just made.

  Alice looks up with furrowed eyebrows. “What did I walk into?”