Eden (1)
East and west.
Watching an impossible dawn break simultaneously across opposite horizons, a faint prickle of dread crept down my spine.
"Stan..."
—I'm busy! Spit it out, and make it quick!
Had he already engaged in combat? Hearing the sheer urgency in Stan's voice, I cut straight to the point.
"The person you're fighting right now—are you certain it's Cult?"
—Who else besides that monster could possibly wield power like this?!
The creak of a bowstring strained to its absolute limit was loud enough to carry through the receiver, followed an instant later by a sharp twang and the vicious whistle of an arrow tearing through the air.
"Before he unleashed that power, how did you confirm it?"
—I saw his eyes! The second you lay eyes on them, an instinctive reverence hits you out of nowhere. You just know. That isn't something anyone can fake!
"Right. Of course."
I forced the fragments of information Stan had given me into place. Cult's eyes were singular. Merely meeting their gaze commanded an instinctual awe from anyone standing before him. They lent undeniable conviction to every word he spoke, disarming doubt before it could take root. Yet that charisma was merely a fraction of their true nature. Bestowed directly by God, those two eyes were the inexhaustible spring from which his Holy Power surged.
That was precisely why Cult had kept them bound behind bandages—because anyone would recognize them at a single glance. The moment someone caught sight of them, even a stranger who had never heard his name would instantly know who he was.
Which meant...
"Did you get a clear look at his face? And were both of those Prophet's Eyes you saw actually his?"
—What...?
If those eyes were transplanted into another living vessel, anyone looking would believe without question that they stood before the Prophet. Stan claimed he had confirmed the eyes, but had he truly verified the face beneath them? Almost certainly not. Overwhelmed by that divine radiance, he wouldn't have been able to tell one silhouette from another. Even if the body was completely different, those eyes alone would force anyone to conclude they were facing the Prophet.
At that moment, Cult's true intention finally snapped into focus.
He was wary of the Oracle, certainly. But the Oracle wasn't his only adversary. Princess Lobelia's faction, the Imperial Knights, and the members of the imperial family were his enemies as well—and in truth, they posed the far more immediate, physical threat.
—Just give me the damn conclusion!
"That lunatic might have gouged out his own eyes."
This wasn't just bait. It was a calculated ploy designed to pin down everyone who could stop him.
Cult Hereticus quietly brushed his fingers across his hollowed brow.
Immediately after confining Yohan to the room, Cult had gouged out both of his eyes without hesitation and grafted one into each of two body doubles. Because both decoys possessed an innate aptitude for Holy Power, the surgical transplant had presented little difficulty. Naturally, no mortal frame other than Cult's could long endure the immense burden of the Prophet's Eyes; the vessels forced to bear them would not survive twenty-four hours.
Even so...
"That is more than enough time."
Cult intended to summon God down upon this earth before this night ran its course. Though he had parted with his physical sight, he was far from trapped in darkness. No matter whose flesh they had been grafted into, those two eyes remained the sacred proof of the Prophet. Even severed from his mortal body, they belonged irrevocably to him.
"Found you..."
The doubles were merely bait—sacrificial lambs meant to mask the real Cult's location and buy precious time for his ultimate design. To keep both the Oracle, his greatest wildcard, and Princess Lobelia, his most substantial threat, in check, such an extreme gamble had been necessary. The Oracle's foresight operated by tracking significant events rather than specific individuals, so he had deceived her sight by staging manifestations of the Prophet's authority across the city. Reading the currents of the future took an immense toll on anyone, whether on him or the Oracle.
Even if that trick proved insufficient, it no longer mattered.
"I have finally found you, Oracle."
Through his transplanted eyes, Cult had locked onto her presence, granting him the clarity to pierce her own timeline. And in a clash where both sides peered into the tapestry of what was to come, Cult had no intention of losing.
"Heh... Hehehehe!"
Cult chuckled softly as he wiped away the thin trails of blood leaking from his hollow sockets. Nothing remained that could obstruct his path. All that was left was the final act.
"Helena..."
Tonight, Cult would end Helena's life and draw the Holy Relic from her heart. Every preparation for the sacred rite was complete.
"Forgive me."
All he needed now was to wait for his eyes to return to him. There was no reason to rush. The moment either decoy fell—whether at the hands of the Oracle or Princess Lobelia—he would reclaim the relic from the corpse. The deeper the city plunged into chaos, the harder it would be for anyone to root him out from where he lurked. The doubles had fulfilled their purpose the moment they engaged their respective marks; now, they needed only to burn away the last dregs of their lives to see his will done.
"Brother."
"Yes, Helena?"
"Do you feel regret?"
"One can never truly know if regret awaits until the deed is done," Cult answered. Even as his frame twitched from the agonizing void where his eyes had been, a gentle smile curved his lips. "Yet, there are times when one must press forward, knowing full well that regret will follow."
"When you believe it to be the right thing to do?"
"Yes."
"What is right?"
"In truth, there is no definitive answer."
His hands were soaked in blood. He had snuffed out the lives of countless innocents along this road.
"Yet there is one truth beyond dispute: the dead are never granted a second chance."
A human life was fragile enough to snap beneath a single word, a single thoughtless gesture from on high. It was terribly, agonizingly fragile.
"Helena, you once asked me if I could see only the ugly side of this world. You asked if there were truly no happy memories in my past."
"Yes..."
"Do you recall what I answered then?"
"You said that because you knew how beautiful the world could be, its ugliness felt all the more glaring..."
"Precisely."
A single tear slipped from the corner of Cult's empty socket. As the clear droplet tracked down his bloodstained cheek, it mingled with the crimson streaks, steadily surrendering its purity until it was colored entirely in red.
"Charon's dream was simply to become a farmer. His only wish was to eat his fill from crops he had nurtured with his own two hands."
Yet Charon's neck had been snapped without a second thought, murdered first among them simply because a wandering slum child had annoyed a passing nobleman's eyes.
"Asher used to say he wanted to become a scholar. We scavenged through gutters and trash heaps to bring him discarded newspapers, torn books, and scraps of paper."
Yet Asher had died with a blade driven straight through his heart.
"The world is profoundly unfair."
No opportunity had ever been granted to them. In a solitary breath, they had all been reduced to cold corpses, butchered merely because their presence on the street was deemed an eyesore.
Why, then, had Cult resolved that the world had to be remade? Merely to avenge their deaths? To honor the sorrow of their passing?
No. Had that been his only motivation, Cult would never have warped into what he was today. Why, then, had he adopted the very methods of the monsters he despised? Why had he chosen to live the exact same kind of life, acting with ruthless selfishness and harvesting the lives of others, just like the men who had slaughtered Charon, Asher, and his dearest childhood companions?
"There is no afterlife."
It was because the world was fundamentally constructed that way. Those who died were never offered a second beginning. The spoils seized by the selfish vastly outstripped any reward the virtuous ever received for their goodness. And in this wretched existence...
"If there is neither heaven nor hell, why should anyone strive to live a righteous life?"
There was no final reckoning. There was no ultimate destination awaiting the soul. In such a reality, what meaning could virtue possibly hold? Who would ever reward those who lived blameless lives only to be slaughtered without reason? Who would comfort their weeping spirits?
"In a world stripped of even that barest shred of hope, what purpose is there to exist at all?"
Cult sought to reshape everything.
A world where no soul could ever feel deficiency.
A world where greed could find no soil to take root.
A world where genuine equality existed between every living being, where no person would ever be forced to suffer the sting of inferiority. A world where good and evil were distinctly marked, with their final ends absolute and unyielding.
"And so, I shall forge a paradise where the very distinction between good and evil is rendered obsolete."
Such was the Eden he envisioned.
"And within that world, I shall be the solitary sinner."
With that resolve, Cult was entirely prepared to plunge into the lowest depths of damnation.
East and west.
Staring at the divine light rising from both directions at once, my mind raced at full throttle. Cult wasn't at either location. We had fundamentally misjudged his objective from the very start.
"...Cult's victory condition isn't winning a fight."
His goal was to use the Holy Relic to bring about the descent of God. He had no need to eliminate his pursuers; he only needed to evade their interference. By deliberately setting up conspicuous sacrifices, he was slipping into the deep shadows cast beneath his own false auroras. In a commotion of this magnitude, concealing a single man was child's play.
"Yuna!"
"Yeah!"
"Head to the Andvaranaut Merchant Guild right now and tell Cattleya!"
We needed bodies. To comb the city and drag a single person into the light amidst this sheer pandemonium, overwhelming numbers were mandatory. For that, Cattleya's aid was non-negotiable. As the master of the sprawling Andvaranaut Merchant Guild, there was no one on this continent more adept at deploying private manpower than her.
"Tell her to loose every mercenary, runner, and merchant she has on payroll to track Cult down!"
Time was bleeding away. If Cult had gone out of his way to redirect everyone's attention like this, the ritual was almost certainly already underway.
"Eight twenty-four in the evening! That's roughly when Cult slipped out of the estate! Since he couldn't have sprinted at full speed while moving covertly, tell her to calculate the search perimeter based on that timeline and tighten the net!"
"Yohan, what are you going to do?"
"Leave me and go! We don't have the luxury to worry about that right now! I've got my own loose ends to tie up, so move!"
"Got it!"
Without another word, Yuna bounded across the rooftops, disappearing in a blur of motion toward the headquarters of the Andvaranaut Merchant Guild.
Think, damn it. Even when a man tries to deviate from his usual patterns, ingrained habits always bleed through. Cult acted like an impulsive fanatic, but beneath the surface, he remained ruthlessly calculating. I had to retrace those calculations. But before that, there was a far more pressing matter to resolve.
"Is the artificial heart done yet?" I muttered into the empty air.
To an onlooker, I might have seemed like a lunatic talking to the wind, but I wasn't speaking to myself.
—Just finished. I dispatched it through Emily, so rendezvous with her and retrieve it.
A voice laced with metallic, synthesized distortion resonated directly inside my ear canal. It was the nanomachine comms link belonging to the head of Ex Machina, Screenwriter Deus.
"At least you deliver what you're paid for!"
—I merely added meat to the existing framework. It was hardly a difficult task. In fact, stepping in to claim the achievements of a subordinate researcher mid-stride feels rather humiliating to someone of my standing.
"You're truly a marvel, you know that?"
A marvel, in that wounded pride was the first emotion he registered rather than any shred of remorse.
"Regardless, you saved my neck. I appreciate the cooperation."
—As you should.
I had established contact with Deus through Emily and successfully secured his assistance. The price hadn't been overly complicated: I had simply agreed to formally become an operative of Ex Machina. At this rate, I had crossed so far beyond the gray zone that I couldn't even pretend to be an innocent bystander anymore—I was practically an overt criminal. But there hadn't been a choice. Deus was the only entity on this continent capable of manufacturing a functional artificial heart in such an impossibly short timeframe.
"By the way... do you happen to know where this bastard Cult is hiding?"
—I do not. Furthermore, I have no desire to become entangled with that creature. Involving myself with him does not merely result in broken machinery.
Useless old fossil... For an organization that monitored the entire empire with microscopic nanomachines, their surveillance net had plenty of holes.
—Exposure to that man's Holy Power wipes even my remote backup data.
"Holy Power really has a ridiculous degree of utility, doesn't it?"
—Indeed. That thoroughly bothersome wretch... Do you have any idea how many of my delicate apparatuses he has rendered completely unserviceable?
Deus launched into his characteristic grumbling. With the voice vibrating straight against my eardrum, there was no way to shut him out. To be blunt, I had zero interest in listening to him whine; it wasn't as though we were close friends shooting the breeze. However...
"Wait, how does Holy Power manage to purge backup data stored elsewhere?"
That piece of trivia was remarkably useful. I knew that the fundamental authority of Holy Power was defined as 'Wholeness,' but I had never imagined that absolute reversion standard would extend to mechanical data. More importantly, that wasn't the core takeaway.
The crucial point was that Deus's machinery fried whenever it was exposed to Cult's Holy Power. In practical terms, didn't that turn his network into a makeshift Holy Power detector? If I kept him talking, the exact moment the transmission cut out would give away Cult's approximate location.
—Do you even comprehend the concept of backup data, boy?
Fortunately, the Screenwriter took the bait. Men of his archetype were universally incapable of shutting their mouths whenever a subject aligned with their obsessive interests came up. I needed to keep stoking that curiosity.
"Starting from there? Of course I understand. Come to think of it, didn't you mention earlier that you weren't particularly curious about how I possessed foreknowledge of the future?"
—Hmm. No, now that you mention it, my curiosity is somewhat piqued. I find myself inclined to gauge the depth of your knowledge. Recite what you know.
"You'll have to answer what I'm curious about first."
—Very well. Among true scholars, fair exchange is the only acceptable transaction.
Alright. Now all I had to do was hum along to his lecture while prowling the surrounding district. With my pathetic stamina, I had no idea how much ground I could cover on foot, but it was infinitely better than standing around twiddling my thumbs.
—Look ahead, fledgling.
"Huh?"
BOOM!
A deafening crash shattered the cobblestones right at my feet, cutting off my path forward. A massive iron hammerhead was embedded deep in the shattered stone, swung down by a towering figure clad from head to toe in heavy plate armor.
"None may pass beyond this point. If you value your life, turn back."
It was a Paladin of Eden.
Fortunately, he didn't seem to recognize my identity. He was merely playing the part of an impassable gatekeeper. While his martial aura didn't suggest top-tier prowess, I couldn't afford to waste precious seconds trading blows with a sentry.
"I'm sorry! I'm leaving right away! Please, don't hurt me!"
"Get lost."
I spun around on my heel without missing a beat.
—Were you not searching for Cult?
"He won't be past that checkpoint."
Even at a glance, that guard was bottom-tier fodder. A low-ranking zealot brazenly blocking a main thoroughfare was almost certainly a decoy meant to draw attention. By now, the entire empire was aware that Cult had made his move; the presence of such crude sentries made the enemy's intent painfully obvious. The moment a single Imperial Knight appeared on this avenue, they would plow straight through these roadblocks like a carriage on a paved highway.
These paladins were nothing more than sacrificial pawns deployed to slow that single knight down by a few seconds.
—A rather flagrant waste of manpower.
"They're staging an all-out war on their end, after all."
A thousand zealots could die.
Ten thousand could be butchered in the street.
None of it mattered to Cult, so long as he survived long enough to achieve his divine descent. How many members of Eden perished in the process was of no consequence. They were fanatics to the bone, genuinely convinced that their Prophet would deliver them to a transformed world.
—Now then, to resume our prior discussion. What Holy Power fundamentally represents is...
At any rate, this eccentric old fossil was remarkably consistent, maintaining his philosophical composure even while the ground beneath us teetered on the brink of disaster. He was the kind of scholar who would be peacefully planting apple trees even if the world were scheduled to disintegrate tomorrow.
—Are you listening?
"Yes..."
Still, thanks to his unbothered droning, the frantic knot of anxiety in my chest loosened just a fraction.
Whether I should actually feel grateful for that, however, remained an entirely different question.