Panic of the Good-for-Nothing Goddess (1)
An awkward silence, heavier than any before, hung in the air.
"Mmm..." A low groan escaped Yohan's lips.
First, let's stay calm. And let's figure out what the hell just happened. He forced his temporarily frozen brain back into gear.
An entity that didn't just resemble the Goddess's adult form but looked absolutely identical to her had emerged from none other than the Central Church's Original Scriptures. What kind of situation was this?
He slowly turned his head to check his side. Right next to him, the pint-sized Goddess was staring straight ahead, her eyes wide with shock.
Just in case, he reached out and gave her cheek a gentle pinch. The soft, squishy texture of her flesh felt perfectly real.
Next, Yohan gave his own cheek a hard pinch. A sharp, stinging pain radiated across his face.
This was no dream, and his dummy of a Goddess was right here beside him. Which meant there was only one explanation for the entity currently sticking its upper body out of the wide-open Original Scriptures...
"Wait... why the hell are you popping out of there?" Yohan blurted.
It was undoubtedly Justia, the Main God who was supposed to be sealed away in the Holy Capital.
"Y-you... you know who I am?"
"Of course we do."
Justia asked in a panicked voice, and Yohan and the Goddess nodded in unison.
"R-right. No, that doesn't matter! Please, hurry and save me!"
But... no matter how he looked at her, Justia's state was far from normal.
Not long ago, right after the Main God Justia woke from her slumber.
Having slept for over a thousand years, Justia had decided to close her eyes for just a little longer to shake off the lingering drowsiness.
But when she opened her eyes for the second time, the sight of the Papal Palace office that greeted her was vastly different from before.
The room was in complete disarray, as if a violent gale had swept through it.
The neatly stacked documents on the desk were scattered everywhere, and an overturned inkwell had spilled its contents, which had dried and hardened onto the floor.
And for some reason... it was incredibly dark inside.
Although a deity's body differed from a mortal's and did not require an external light source to see, the sheer gloom was enough to arouse her suspicion.
"..."
Justia tilted her head as she surveyed the trashed office. What had happened?
Her first thought was a sudden wave of anxiety: had her other half, who had awakened around the same time, marched all the way here? No, that couldn't be it. Justia was certain that guess was wrong.
If her other half had truly led her forces to invade the Holy Capital, Justia herself would have been absorbed long ago.
In that case, this situation was highly likely the result of a third party's intervention.
If a problem had arisen, it had to be resolved. Justia scanned her surroundings. Absolute silence, and a darkness that let in not a single ray of sunlight. It was bizarre.
She climbed completely out of bed and made her way toward the wall with the large glass window.
Crunch.
As she walked toward the window, her feet repeatedly kicked through the clutter strewn across the floor. Shards of glass shattered into tiny pieces beneath her soles, and books rolling around the floor were pushed aside.
Though her feet didn't suffer a single scratch, the atmosphere of the office—so vastly different from right before she fell asleep—evoked an unbearable sense of dread.
Reaching the window, Justia peered outside. Normally, the window of the Papal Palace office offered a panoramic view of the Holy Capital Justia.
But what met her eyes now was... a barrier completely enveloping the Papal Palace building.
It was a high-tier miracle art, structurally similar to the barrier that covered the entire Holy Capital.
A third party powerful enough to infiltrate the heart of the Holy Capital and wreak such havoc... It couldn't be her other half, whose divine power was practically depleted upon her recent awakening.
That meant the true culprit behind this disaster was... those cursed demons.
Justia reached her hand out toward the barrier. The barrier itself was undoubtedly powerful, but to a deity who enjoyed eternal life sustained by the faith of countless believers, it shouldn't pose any obstacle.
"..."
Or rather, it shouldn't have.
Yet, for some reason, she lacked the strength to shatter the barrier. Justia blinked in sheer bewilderment.
"My divinity..."
Soon, she realized the reason. Her divine power was gone. It hadn't vanished entirely, but compared to before, it was literally reduced to a mere speck.
It was as if she had been imprisoned for thousands of years after having all of her believers stripped away. For an ordinary human, this was the literal equivalent of being on the verge of starvation.
Worst of all... this barrier was being maintained by consuming her own divine power. A sealing barrier that used the target's very life force as fuel. What a diabolical technique.
To stop it, she had to destroy the barrier, but she lacked the power to do so.
"Ugh..."
The moment that realization struck her, Justia felt an unfamiliar emotion.
Thud.
She suddenly collapsed to the floor. Pulling her knees to her chest, her entire body began to tremble violently.
The terror of death washed over her. A god drained of divine power would simply cease to exist. Since a deity's very existence was parasitic on the collective unconsciousness of mortals, a god could not survive without believers and faith to sustain them.
"Haa, haa..."
Her breath caught in her throat. Justia panted heavily, her eyes wide with panic.
The death of a god. She had known of this concept since ancient times. However, from the moment the once-unified Goddess of Justice was split into two, Justia had been degraded into an imperfect being. She had begun to experience emotions—concepts utterly useless to a perfect god.
Having lived for countless eons, the emotion of terror, felt for the very first time, inflicted an unbearable mental agony upon her.
"Angelo."
Justia suddenly recalled the name of the current Pope. When they first met, he had been filled with nothing but fear, but he had soon resolved to become the faithful servant of the Main God.
"Angelo?"
She called out her servant's name again, but no answer came. Let alone Angelo, who would normally have rushed over to bow his head, there wasn't a single trace of a human presence in the entire office.
"Angelo!"
Justia screamed her servant's name at the top of her lungs. Still, silence was her only reply.
"Is anyone there?! Someone!"
She bit her lip and shouted repeatedly, but only a deafening silence returned.
She needed help. Someone's help. Justia desperately searched for a way to make her voice reach the outside world.
"R-right."
Finally, she remembered a way. She could use the sacred relics scattered across the continent as terminals to project her voice.
First, this powerful barrier had to be broken from the outside. Only then could she restore her divinity, even if she had to devour sacred relics to do so.
She closed her eyes immediately. Gathering her nearly depleted divine power, she linked her mind to a sacred relic.
She didn't have the luxury to target a specific relic. Since she hadn't designated a target, the connection would naturally establish with the relic containing the greatest amount of divine energy.
"I-it worked!"
Finally, her mind connected to a sacred relic outside the barrier. Overjoyed, Justia projected her image to the location of the relic.
Yohan barely managed to calm down the hysterical, rambling Justia.
"Phew... so that's how it is."
The suddenly materialized Justia had explained the general situation to her other half and her Apostle—including the fact that her real body was currently trapped in the Papal Palace, and the upper body projected through the Original Scriptures was merely an illusion.
To be honest, upon hearing that story, Yohan had briefly contemplated taking his Goddess and running away. After all, Justia—the very being he had firmly believed to be their ultimate enemy—had essentially invaded his single-room.
Since she was just a projection incapable of doing any physical harm, he could have easily tossed the sacred relic somewhere in Patermachi and made a run for it.
But looking closely, the circumstances were different, and there was no real reason to run.
"And so, I am completely unable to move. I had hoped to use my sacred relic as a terminal to contact any of my believers, but..."
Justia trailed off, looking at Yohan. To be precise, she was looking at both Yohan and the dummy of a Goddess beside him.
"Well, sorry about that. We're not exactly your believers," Yohan said.
As expected, Justia was completely helpless, sealed inside the Papal Palace.
"Seriously... ugh..."
Justia whimpered, looking like she was on the verge of tears. She had gone through all that trouble to make contact, only for the recipient to not only be a non-believer, but the Apostle of her rival other half.
"Hmm."
What do we do about this... Yohan pondered, looking back and forth between his Goddess and the Main God Justia.
"Actually, we were just about to head to the Holy Capital to save you."
"What?!"
Justia gasped, her face lighting up with hope. She shot a glance at the Unnamed Goddess, as if asking, Is what this guy saying true?
"I mean, even if I'm an Apostle, we're just a small-time group with barely two thousand believers. So at first, we figured we might as well convert the Central Church's followers to our side to boost our own power. That was the plan."
"Wait, that method is..."
"Yeah. But then we realized that if the Central Church completely vanished, you wouldn't have any believers left either. So we gave up on that."
At Yohan's words, Justia let out a deep sigh of relief.
"But, my other half. According to your explanation, are you not currently on the verge of fading away due to depleted divinity, much like I was not long ago?"
Meanwhile, the Unnamed Goddess, who had remained silent until now, finally spoke up.
Justia nodded with a stiff expression as she looked at the Goddess.
"I do not know exactly what state you were in, but it is true that I am on the verge of fading—Aaaah!"
Justia screamed out of nowhere mid-sentence. Startled, Yohan and the Goddess instinctively hugged each other before immediately jumping apart.
"Damn it, why are you screaming all of a sudden?!" Yohan yelled.
"T-there is no time for this! Please, hurry! Save me!"
"That's why I'm telling you to calm down first—"
"Waaaaah! Even as we speak, my life is—!"
Eventually, Justia's projected image began to sob uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face. At this pathetic sight, Yohan pressed a hand to his forehead, while the Unnamed Goddess squeezed her eyes shut, looking strangely embarrassed.
"I mean..."
Until now, Yohan had regarded the Main God Justia as their greatest adversary, acting with the utmost caution to deal with the Central Church. But the sight of the sniveling, snotty Main God Justia crying before his eyes...
This girl... no, both of these girls... are absolute, complete trash. Was this always their true nature?
Yohan suddenly turned his gaze to his own Goddess. Her ears flushed bright red, she immediately avoided his eyes.
"C-cough. Anyway. What I was trying to say was..."
The Goddess cleared her throat in a desperate attempt to change the subject.
"My other half. Is the sudden depletion of your divinity not because the believers who fell into madness are no longer truly your believers?"
At the Goddess's question, Justia stopped crying. At the same time, Yohan's eyes widened in sheer surprise.