The Agitation of a Forgotten Deity
"Whoa..." Judas, who was watching the chief deity Justia devour the scriptures firsthand, could not hide his sheer astonishment. He stood frozen, his mouth hanging open in front of the very being he worshipped.
Yohan, on the other hand, watched with a completely indifferent expression. After all, Justia looked identical to his own Unnamed Goddess. Hadn't his goddess already devoured everything from heavily rusted statues to swords and armor meticulously maintained with holy oil over the years?
"Whew." Having finished devouring the Original Scriptures, Justia let out a soft sigh.
"Feel like you're actually alive now?" Yohan asked, looking at her. Justia merely nodded in silence.
"Indeed... Thanks to you, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Though I suppose I must rewrite the scriptures now."
"Take it from someone who's been there—it's totally doable," Yohan replied with a smirk at Justia's lament. Beside him, Judas widened his eyes and tilted his head in confusion.
"By the way, I am surprised you knew that consuming a Sacred Relic could restore divine power. Did my other half tell you?"
"Yeah. Back when things were really rough in the beginning, we did nothing but hunt for sacred relics."
"Gathering believers would have been much faster and easier, would it not?" Justia questioned again at Yohan's response. Yohan let out a dry chuckle.
"If we had started gathering believers right off the bat, the fanatics under you would've come to beat us to death."
In fact, around the time Yohan and the Goddess began their activities, an Inquisitor from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had arrived in Balifield and Junk Town. Of course, the inquisitor's original purpose in Balifield was to hunt down the traces of a demon nesting in the Undercity, and that very inquisitor had eventually joined them as an ally of the Goddess's faith.
"..." Justia wore an awkward expression. It seemed she had no excuses to offer, even if she had ten mouths.
Flash! In that moment, the Unnamed Goddess suddenly manifested in midair. While Yohan and Justia merely looked slightly surprised, Judas reacted as if he were about to faint on the spot.
The Goddess spared a brief glance at the trembling Judas before quickly turning her head to lock eyes with Justia. And so... the two goddesses, who were once a single entity, reunited after thousands of years.
A heavy silence descended upon the room as the two goddesses stared at each other with expressionless faces. Who would be the first to speak?
Considering Justia was the one who had shoved her other half into a dusty corner of the continent to starve to death, it wouldn't have been surprising if the Unnamed Goddess threw a punch right then and there to settle her ancient grudge. Our Goddess might usually speak with grand dignity, but once she snaps, she goes straight to swearing and throwing hands. Yohan chuckled to himself, mentally eating popcorn as he watched the drama unfold.
Ignorant of the dramatic history between them, Judas could only blink in bewilderment, staring at the two who looked identical save for their apparent age difference.
"Now that we have restored a bare minimum of divine power to handle the emergency, it is time to proceed to the next step." Contrary to Yohan's expectations, the Goddess set aside her personal grudges and got straight to the point. Justia nodded with a solemn expression. Both deities seemed to agree that resolving the immediate crisis took precedence over ancient resentment.
"Now... we must completely dismantle the barrier surrounding this building. It continues to sustain itself by draining my divine power. If we leave it be, the divinity I barely managed to recover will eventually be depleted once more."
Having spoken, Justia quietly gazed at the pitch-black darkness beyond the window. Indeed, ever since entering the Papal Palace, Yohan had felt as though the sacred energy radiating from Justia was being sucked into the barrier.
"However, with my current strength, I cannot break the barrier." To use a human analogy, Justia was currently like a starving person who had only managed to swallow a few spoonfuls of thin gruel. She had recovered her basic vitality, but she still lacked the strength to do anything significant on her own.
"How vicious. A barrier that uses the person trapped inside as fuel, and can't even be broken by ordinary means."
"Is it any wonder, considering it originally enveloped the entire city? Since Miracle Arts ultimately borrow a deity's divine power and authority to manifest immense strength, this barrier is fundamentally powered by my other half's own energy," the Goddess replied to Yohan's lamenting remark.
"Right. Either way, she's the fuel tank. So, wouldn't the problem be solved if we just smuggle the fuel tank somewhere else?"
Justia, trapped inside the barrier, was the very power source keeping it active. What if they forcibly took her outside of it? Naturally, the barrier would collapse once its power supply was cut off.
"Alright. Let's give it a shot like we did earlier." Yohan summoned his Light Sword once more and stepped forward, standing before the massive glass window on one side of the office.
"Apostle." "What is it now?" Just as Yohan was about to gather his divine power again, the Goddess suddenly approached and spoke to him.
"If getting outside is the key, would it not be better to simply teleport using my power rather than going through the hassle of breaking the barrier again?"
"Oh..." Come to think of it, she was right. Yohan scratched the back of his head with an embarrassed look.
The Holy Knights, having entered a state of emergency, guarded the vicinity of the Papal Palace day and night. This was by no means to protect the palace from external threats. On the contrary, it was to prevent the entity sealed inside—the one who dared to impersonate the primary god Justia—from escaping.
Under the command of His Holiness the Pope, every member of the Holy Knights was prepared to risk their lives to defend the barrier surrounding the Papal Palace.
Boom! Or rather, they should have defended it.
"W-What is happening?!" "The b-barrier! From the inside!" In the middle of the day, a light as bright as the sun flashed, and a portion of the barrier surrounding the Papal Palace collapsed from within, triggering a massive explosion.
"Emergency! This is an emergency!" "The barrier has been breached! The wicked imposter has finally broken the barrier!" Realizing what had happened, the Holy Knights shouted in panic, rushing toward the site of the thunderous explosion.
Soon, through the shattered outer wall of the Papal Palace, two men—one black-haired and one blond—and two women who looked so alike they could be sisters or mother and daughter, emerged.
"You absolute lunatic! We could have slipped out quietly! Why did you have to cause such a scene?!" "Oh, shut up! We have to finish our business here anyway, so why bother with the hassle of teleporting?!" The exceptionally small girl among them shrieked at the black-haired man, who yelled back at the top of his lungs, refusing to back down.
"Hey, you demon bastards! I know you're all here, so show yourselves already!" Yohan then bellowed a warning toward the Holy Knights gathering around the outer wall.
"You are the only demon here!" "Indeed! I can feel a foul demonic energy. The one who usurped the name of our primary god was a demon after all!" They could no longer tolerate the spawn of a demon running rampant in the heart of the Holy City. Burning with fighting spirit, the Holy Knights tightened their perimeter around the breach in the wall.
"Sigh..." The woman who had remained silent all this time let out a deep sigh. Flash! At that moment, a brilliant white flash erupted once more, engulfing all the Holy Knights gathered in the area.
Once Justia was freed, the situation was practically over. "O-Our Lord God!" "Ah, ah..." Although her divine power had been on the verge of depletion, she was still the deity of a massive religion that anchored an entire nation. Justia unleashed the Exorcism Rite—a miracle that ordinary priests struggled to cast on even a single person—across a vast area all at once. Thanks to this, the Madness plaguing the Holy Knights gathered around the Papal Palace was cured in an instant, and after that...
"My divine power... is returning." As the number of cured believers grew, Justia's divinity steadily recovered, and the reach of her influence expanded in tandem. It was a spectacle that spread like wildfire, resembling a highly contagious plague—though, in truth, it was the rapid curing of one.
Yohan quietly watched Justia cleanse the believers of their madness. In just a few minutes, the thick shroud of insanity that had blanketed the entire Holy City—a crisis that had seemed utterly hopeless—vanished without a trace.
Although those who had suffered from the madness had lost their recent memories to varying degrees, it hardly mattered now that their primary god, Justia, stood right before their eyes. What did a few missing memories matter when their deity had physically manifested? The Holy Knights, inquisitors, and all the believers in the Holy City fell to their knees in unison, offering up their prayers.
"Whoa..." Yohan was genuinely impressed. Beside him, the Unnamed Goddess also wore a look of quiet surprise.
"Hey. Didn't you say you were way more popular than this back in your prime? Why are you so surprised?" "S-Shut up!" When Yohan teased her, the Goddess huffed and playfully rammed her head into his ribs.
"Finally..." Judas, who had suffered more than he ever bargained for after catching Yohan's eye, fell to his knees with tears streaming down his face. Though he was covered in filthy sewer water and smelled terrible from their trek through the underground passages, at this moment, none of that seemed to matter.
Justia's divine power recovered at an astonishing rate. Although it was still a far cry from her peak when the entire Holy Kingdom worshipped her, the sheer pressure of the divinity she radiated made even Yohan flinch. Of course, this did not mean their work was finished.
Yohan had previously encountered a demon of Pandemonium in Patermachi and thoroughly destroyed it after a fierce battle. Therefore, there was a high probability that another demon was hiding in the Holy City. Any demon would have definitely noticed that the madness blanketing the city had cleared, replaced by Justia's overwhelming divine power.
"It's about time they showed up..." Yohan muttered under his breath, scanning his surroundings. Sliiiide. Before long, a figure materialized before Yohan's group, rising like a shadow from the solid stone floor.
At a glance, he looked like a shabby old man, but Yohan immediately recognized that this was no ordinary human—it was a High-level Devil.
"You have constantly interfered with our plans, and now you have gone so far as to ruin our grand design." The demon in the guise of an old man spoke, his voice dripping with venomous malice directed at Yohan. This confirmed Yohan's suspicion that the creature belonged to Pandemonium.
"So Balifield, the troll village... it really was all your doing." Flash! They weren't exactly on terms to exchange pleasantries. Yohan immediately channeled his divine power and summoned his Light Sword.
Seeing this, the surrounding Holy Knights drew their weapons in unison, pointing them at the elderly demon. No matter how powerful a high-level devil might be, escaping from this spot seemed nigh impossible.
"Don't even think about flying away like the last guy. I won't fall for that twice." "Heh..." At Yohan's threat, the demon let out a sinister chuckle. Irritated, Yohan lunged forward, thrusting his Light Sword straight into the demon's chest—yet, strangely, the demon did not react at all.
"This bastard..." Yohan soon realized that the figure before him was merely an illusion controlled by the demon. The actual body had either fled long ago or had been remotely corrupting the Holy City from a safe distance from the start.
"We shall meet again soon." "I've never seen anyone who says that end up well. Now get lost." The only reason the demon had bothered to project an illusion was to deliver a provocation—a declaration of war. With that, the illusion of the elderly demon melted away in an instant, vanishing without a trace.