Shikikoza/Story

During a standard trombe extermination mission, Shikikoza and the layknight Damuel are assigned to guard the apprentice blue shrine maiden and keep her safe, so she can perform the healing ritual once the feyplant is destroyed. The High Priest gives specific instructions that not a single hair on the girl shall come to harm.

While the High Priest and other knights are fighting the trombe, Shikikoza uses his position to bully both Myne and Damuel. He pulls on Myne's hair and kicks her in the stomach, before transforming his magical wand into a knife and threatening to gouge out her eyes.

When the girl in fear and desperation reaches out toward the Head Priest, he ends up cutting her hand. Where the blood falls on the bare earth, new trombe sprouts come out of the ground and quickly entangle Myne. Damuel immediately begins to apply the God of Darknesses blessing to his own weapon to try to free the girl, but without success. Shikikoza retreats to a safe distance and tries to apply a blessing to his weapon himself, but takes even longer than Damuel.

Eventually, the High Priest and the other knights defeat the trombe that have grown around Myne, and Damuel gets rid of the last few vines binding her. Shikikoza took so long to apply the darkness blessing to his knife, that by the time he finished, the other knights had already defeated the feyplants.

When the Knight's Order Commander and the High Priest question him, he just states that he has no need to defend himself, since the shrine maiden is a mere commoner.

Ferdinand reminds Shikikoza that the Knight's Order Commander had ordered him to guard Myne and that the Head Priest himself gave the explicit order that not a single hair on her can be harmed. Furthermore, Myne's elevation to a blue shrine maiden was approved by the archduke himself and thus calling here a mere commoner is tantamount to speaking out against Lord Ehrenfest himself. Disobeying the orders of archnobles as a mere mednoble and speaking out against the archduke in such a blatant fashion are all severe crimes.

Under normal circumstances, Shikikoza would have been publicly executed and even his family was in danger of being killed alongside him, but since Sylvester felt it served his plans for the girl better to keep this incident out of public knowledge, he offered Shikikoza's father a deal. If he and his wife signed a magic contract that they would never interact with Myne again, he would let them get off with a stiff fine, and their son would be executed behind closed doors and officially reported as having died honorably in the line of duty. Viscount Dahldolf agreed to the generous offer and ordered his wife to do the same.

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