Why He Sought the Light (2)

Desecration Bug, despite being classified as a lowest-tier demon, was a species with some truly nasty traits.

Its greatest feature was the countless strains of demon DNA packed into that tiny body.

Depending on the environment it was raised in and what it was fed, a Desecration Bug could evolve into a completely different kind of adult form.

The Spider Queen was a specimen especially focused on reproduction.

It dug burrows, laid eggs, raised its offspring, and built up a legion.

That alone was the Spider Queen's purpose. Its fate.

Raul kicked the blue-haired idiot, Feigl, in the ass to wake him up and put him on guiding duty.

When they reached the sewer entrance, Raul briefly thought, I’m lucky for once.

And the reason was obvious: the giant sewer ceiling was hideously packed with countless pupae.

Looking at the worker spiders that greeted him, Raul thought that if all those pupae had already hatched into soldier spiders, he would have been in a situation even he couldn’t handle alone.

“Horus.”

Raul called for his guardian as he cut down the worker spiders flailing their blade-like forelegs with brute force.

No words were needed between guardian and master.

The moment Horus lifted its head, its eyes began to shine.

[ ᚥ ᚨ ᚸ ᚡ ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ᚯ ]

Rune magic, a system without the concept of casting, blazed in an instant with the color of sunset.

BOOM—!

Under Raul’s protection, Horus unleashed indiscriminate fire on everything in sight.

The heat was so intense that the steel bars woven through the ceiling bent in great twisted clumps.

Raul breathed in the stench of charred demon flesh as the creatures burned and melted red-hot, and then mulled over a completely random comment.

“Well, at least they didn’t skip the rebar here.”

Then he headed straight into the queen’s chamber.

Wrapped in pure white sanctified light all the way to his shoulders, Raul swung the blazing Sun King’s Sword in a diagonal arc.

Smack—!

The Spider Queen’s peach-colored arm was instantly covered in the hard, glossy black of an insect’s shell as it met the blade head-on.

Orange sparks scattered where arm and sword collided.

A normal blade would have ended there.

But the legendary sword only made the spider limb before it shimmer with a searing haze.

Crack-crack-crack—!

With the crackling sound of lightning snapping, white flame swallowed the creature’s arm.

At the same time, Raul kicked off the floor and layered sanctified light over the Sun King’s Sword once more.

Thud—!

The blocked slash became a deep thrust through the follow-up strike.

Raul twisted the blade rapidly in four directions after driving it through the woman’s arm and into the left side of her chest.

“Kyaaaaaaaaaagh!”

The agony of being sliced apart in such a disorderly fashion still worked perfectly well on a demon, if not on a human.

“One.”

Raul spoke the short word with familiar calm, then yanked the sword free.

The very next instant, eight spider legs shot straight at his face.

They were the daggers of the monster that had grotesquely torn through the woman’s back and burst out.

Raul held his breath.

The Saint’s instincts surged up.

In the world that slowed around him, all he had to measure were the spacing, the position, and the speed of the legs.

Before Raul’s eyes, armored in composure, his afterimage danced as he cut down the eight separate trajectories with the smallest possible motion.

And so the rest was simple.

He raised his sword along the lines of those shapes and moved only to the rhythm of his beating heart.

Claaang—! Kzshhhhh—!

Two different roars of impact rang out at once.

Then, with a thunk, what fell was the spider woman’s upper body, split cleanly in two, along with all eight severed legs.

“Two.”

Even with its head severed and white fire burning through the wound, a demon that had evolved into a special specimen did not die.

“Graaagh! GRAAAAAAGH! What are you? Where the hell did a monster like you come from?”

The severed head screamed, while the remaining body lurched on its own and dashed toward the cabinet in the corner.

Raul looked back and forth between the two, then drove the Sun King’s Sword straight down into the fallen head and said, “That’s rude.”

Thunk!

He immediately hurled himself forward after the headless body.

A purple eye had grown on the Spider Queen’s shoulder blade, just as the previous spider had.

Raul, charging like a storm tide, drove a dagger straight into that eye.

“Kyaaaaaaaaaagh!”

The demon mouth that had sprouted from its elbow let out a scream.

Raul watched it with cool eyes and continued.

“You were just talking about me, and you don’t even know who I am?”

At that, a sharp intake of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠breath came from the head now pinned like a skewer.

Raul turned toward it, and the head muttered, “No way... the Saint?”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“There’s... no way. The Saint is in the East...!”

“Aren’t you focusing on me a little too much? Why don’t you answer something for once?”

With a crackling sound like lightning, Raul closed the distance in an instant and seized the Sun King’s Sword.

The moment he clenched his hand, the blade once again gave off a faint shimmer of heat.

He drove it deep into the sewer’s stone floor.

Crush—!

Looking down at the demon’s head, now unable to move a single inch, he asked, “Why do lowly creatures like you go out of your way to chase after holiness?”

The conclusion, at least, was simple: Raul could get no information out of the Spider Queen.

So it’s not just the name that makes it a queen.

Even after the Spider Queen had been turned into a mounted specimen by the Sun King’s Sword and lost all ability to resist, it still refused to say a word.

Its combat ability was already inferior to that of some of the hatch-ling soldier spiders, but its mental fortitude was certainly worthy of the label special specimen.

“Congratulations. You’ve set a new record.”

Raul stared down at the spider queen reduced to a pile of black ash and sheathed the sword across his back.

The Spider Queen had repeated burning death and regeneration a total of eighty times, and by the end had become exactly what he saw now: a handful of ash.

It’s a shame I didn’t get any information with a nice explanation attached, but...

That didn’t mean Raul had no other methods.

Without lingering on it, he turned and examined the Spider Queen’s quarters.

The evidence was scattered all over the room.

First was the cabinet in the corner that the beheaded creature had instinctively run toward.

Rattle.

When he opened it, he found a large quantity of wine and a number of strange purple glass bottles mixed in among them.

Anyone else would have mistaken them for anonymous bottles of wine, but Raul saw something else entirely.

Holiness?

Those glass bottles carried a very faint trace of divine power.

More than that, it was an exceedingly bizarre mixture of miasma and holiness, just like the soul stone he had obtained in the past.

The dark mage, Tod.

Come to think of it, he had also mixed thick miasma and Mimir’s holiness into the soul stone.

Divine power and miasma were like oil and water. Or fire and water.

And yet somehow, here they were, coexisting in the form of a liquid.

Hah. Unbelievable.

Even Raul, who knew the world of Exeria inside and out, couldn’t make sense of that problem.

Come to think of it, this wasn’t the first time demon-kind had shown delight at coming into contact with holiness.

Those slave traders he had encountered on Tetra Mountain in the past.

Hadn’t they said something like that when they saw him?

-They buy clerics’ spinal fluid for an absurd price!

Clerics’ spinal fluid.

Back then, he had just let it go in one ear and out the other, but now the pieces were starting to fit.

These bastards had been researching and producing this purple potion for a very long time.

And of course, the ingredients would have been thick miasma and, as they ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠said, clerics’ spinal fluid.

Raul slowly retraced everything he had seen so far, going over even the smallest details again and again.

The Abyss Archduke’s resurrection had now been confirmed.

The monster was already controlling the core of the Western Kingdom, Therion.

So why didn’t it show itself?

Because it had no way to oppose the three great churches.

Then what was the purpose of this purple potion it was making?

Raul suddenly widened his eyes at a chilling possibility that came to him all at once.

Pop.

Without hesitation, he pulled the cork out.

It smelled like wine, and even looked like wine.

But if his guess was right, then this was...

Raul upended the purple potion and poured it over his left hand.

At first glance, nothing seemed wrong.

Then a sharp numbness surged up from the hand that had touched the liquid.

A sensation that vaguely resembled paralysis.

But this isn’t just ordinary paralysis.

Raul narrowed his brow and held both hands up side by side.

Then he gathered the same amount of holy power and manifested the same authority.

A stream of white light rose from his right hand, flowing like water.

It was Holy Armor.

And yet, on his left hand, which had gone through the same process, there was no reaction at all.

Raul sensed the seriousness of the situation and tightened his eyes.

Crazy.

No matter how hard Raul clenched his left hand into a fist, no matter how completely he mobilized every sense in his body to gather holy power, nothing changed.

The identity of this purple potion was none other than a potion that paralyzed holy power.

Raul kept his eyes wide open and focused on his own senses.

When the count he was keeping in his head grew larger and larger, light finally began to gather belatedly in his left hand.

At that moment, Raul spoke the number he had been counting.

“Seventy-six...”

The paralysis lasted an estimated one minute and sixteen seconds.

And that was only from having it poured onto his skin.

“Hah...”

This was a very serious problem.

If this substance soaked into a wound, the paralysis time might easily double.

Holy power paralyzed for more than two minutes in the middle of battle?

If this potion were mass-produced, it would be a genuine catastrophe capable of altering the balance of power across all Exeria.

Come to think of it, why did this potion have the same color and smell as wine?

As Raul wondered that, he found the answer almost immediately.

...I see. This wasn’t made for combat use in the first place.

Maybe the amount they could produce, or the paralysis duration, had never been to their liking if it was meant for direct battlefield use.

Then what was the potion’s true intended purpose?

Consumption.

Apparently, this drug revealed its true value only when it was drunk.

And the target they’d want to make drink it would be...?

He didn’t even need to think about it for long.

Obviously, it would be someone with holy power—a cleric.

Celia...

For the first time, clear concern for her stained Raul’s eyes.

He quickly searched the cabinet and found more purple potions hidden among the ordinary wine bottles.

They were concealed very skillfully, but because he could clearly sense the holiness within them, the search itself wasn’t difficult.

In total, he gathered five bottles.

Raul stared at the purple potions for a moment with a skeptical expression.

Only five, and they’re keeping them in the room of a mid-level officer?

As expected, with clerics’ spinal fluid as the main ingredient, this was still nowhere near mass-production.

Ending with that at least somewhat welcome piece of information, Raul began to scan the corners of the occult chamber.

Maybe there was something else hidden elsewhere.

And then he found something strange.

Ring—!

The moment his hand touched it, a familiar notification tone rang in Raul’s ear.

“Huh?”

Startled by the bizarre phenomenon, Raul picked up the diamond-shaped crystal that had appeared under his fingers.

Then a message surfaced before his eyes.

“A quest?”

When was the last time he had seen one?

Raul was inwardly surprised that a quest could appear even here.

He calmed the slightly tangled mess in his head and opened the quest details.

The very first line made his eyes widen.

So this crystal is the code document?

They were even using the blunt wording of “kill them all” directly in the quest itself.

This was a quest with a very different atmosphere from Exeria, a game that usually respected the player’s choices and the consequences that followed.

No, maybe he should think about it the other way around.

In other words, he had to kill every executive if he wanted to change the fate of Therion.

“If even one of them survives, Therion was already doomed to fall...”

Raul had heard a little about it, but hadn’t the kingdom’s own knights already turned their backs on Therion in that executive meeting just now?

...The situation in Therion is a lot worse than I thought.

Maybe Raul would end up facing not only the Abyss Archduke and its pawns, but the entire kingdom of Therion itself.

And there was a solid reason for that worry.

It was the reward listed on this very quest.

The reward was Holy Power +20 SP.

Exeria was always a game that matched its risk to its return.

The holy power stat he had spent a year and a half grinding every possible way to raise was being offered in one gulp—twenty points of it.

If it were any other stat, maybe I wouldn’t care. But for me right now, twenty points of holy power is practically three years’ worth of stats.

Unless he could visit one of the holy lands monopolized by the three great churches, that was one thing.

But for Raul as he was now, twenty points of holy power was priceless.

Which meant the difficulty of this quest would almost certainly be absurd.

“Phew.”

Raul let out a short breath and sorted through the thoughts swelling chaotically in his head.

The quest was good. That much was certain.

But Raul was currently in a race against time, where every single day mattered.

If he got dragged into preparing for war with the Western Kingdom, he might end up derailing the Saint’s main quest line instead.

What’s the best move?

Raul narrowed his brow and thought it over for a moment.

But surprisingly, the answer didn’t take long.

Why am I even thinking? Do both.

In terms of difficulty, the job of becoming a Saint had already been labeled unclearable from the start.

In contrast, this side already had a compass that could point him in the right direction the moment he wanted it to,

and on the other, Raul already knew an expert in deciphering codes.

In other words, both were within reach if he just stretched out his hand.

How could he let a chance like this slip away in front of him and still claim to clear the Saint’s own impossible difficulty?

Exactly.

Raul nodded and accepted the quest before him.

Still... if I’m deciphering a code, and it’s the north...

He stroked his chin for a moment, imagining what came next, and then the corner of his mouth lifted by the faintest amount.

...Then I’m bound to run into Celia.

Her and the Saint Pursuit Squad.

There was no avoiding an encounter with them.

Having already set his plan in order, Raul immediately headed for the sewer exit, where sunlight had begun to spill in by now.

An encounter with the Saint Pursuit Squad, huh...

That would almost certainly turn into an event that involved combat, but in truth, a fight with them wouldn’t be a major loss for Raul either.

If I’m lucky, I might even get a high-level authority out of it.

And he might be able to warn the white-haired woman with hair as pure as a snowfield, Celia, about the existence of this dangerous item.

Raul’s steps toward the streets of Coyard were, for some reason, unusually light and brisk.