Temple Knights 3
The floors below the 30th had been nothing more than a taste. From the 31st onward, the game company’s malice practically announced itself—they were cranking up the difficulty. A polluted swamp stretched out before us.
The once-lush trees of the marsh had withered into ashen husks, opening up the view completely. Thanks to that clear line of sight, those damned poison-gas trolls came charging straight at the party, splashing through the toxic pools. And it wasn’t just the trolls—every kind of undead was coming too.
The one silver lining was that while the undead would rush anything living that entered their detection range, they only ever charged in slow, straight lines. Spotting and dealing with them wasn’t much of a problem.
“Ugh, so gross for real…”
“I think dinner tonight’s gonna have to be super light. Maybe half of what we usually eat.”
“I’ll just chew on some jerky.”
“I’ll make a thin soup with a mild scent for dinner. Even so, you still need something in your stomach if we’re going to keep fighting.”
While the party complained more about mental exhaustion than physical fatigue and started talking about the evening meal, Grace strode ahead, fixing her direction on the pillar of holy power rising in the distance. With the open sightlines making the monsters a nuisance, at least the safe zone stood out clearly.
No monsters were visible near the pillar—probably thanks to the holy power—but beyond the paralysis swamp I could see a few adventurers hurrying toward the safe zone.
“Did they make that holy power pillar so people would see it and come find them?”
“That might be part of it, but I think it’s just the natural shape from the holy arts they’re casting. When you deploy a sanctuary, pillars of a temple made of holy power appear. It’s probably warped like that because they’re neutralizing the toxic miasma.”
Seeing the pillar of holy power pushing back the foul air seemed to energize Irene more than usual. Her brightened mood lifted the rest of the party; they stopped their grumbling and walked on with longer strides. It was hard to keep complaining about how drained you felt when someone was smiling that purely right next to you—unless you were shameless enough to pull it off.
As the safe zone and sanctuary drew closer, we spotted a group of adventurers walking the narrow path ahead of us. Counting the ones coming in from a side path, three parties were clustered together.
Still, no one eyed anyone else with the usual wariness. With holy power shooting skyward right in front of them and Temple Knights in pure white armor glaring around, no adventurer was about to turn bandit.
Around the time the knights’ white armor came into clear view, Irene naturally stepped ahead of Grace. From the lead adventurer group, one man slowed his pace and drifted back toward us.
He wore a loose gray monk’s robe that looked more like a sack, with the Goddess’s symbol hanging from the belt at his waist. A priest approaching because he had something to say after spotting Irene.
“…Greetings, Sister. Um, have you by any chance seen anything suspicious?”
“Hmm, nothing different from the 31st floor except for the trolls that should be on the 40th.”
“Trolls? Trolls, you say… What I saw was a grotesque snake inside a gray tree. I thought it was a safe spot and tried to rest, but paralysis tentacles came crawling out of the trunk. I came to warn you to be careful if you ever rest against something like a tree trunk.”
“Is that so? Thank you, Brother.”
Apparently he’d spotted the nun Irene and decided to warn her about the snakes hiding inside the hollow trees. But his party hadn’t run into any trolls yet; at Irene’s words he startled and hurried back to his companions with quick little steps.
Trolls were strong enough to mark the boundary between Intermediate-grade and Upper-grade, so of course adventurers had to be careful. The real problem was that a 40th-floor named monster was wandering around the 32nd floor in the first place.
After the brief exchange, the adventurers ahead picked up their pace, exchanged greetings with the Temple Knights without issue, and entered the safe zone. We followed right after and arrived in front of the knights.
“A Sister on a pilgrimage, I see. You must be working hard to carry out the Goddess’s will.”
“Hello, Brothers. Is there anything we should watch out for in the safe zone?”
“The water pool inside has turned clear, but the purification still seems incomplete—it appears to retain a faint toxicity. Even if it’s inconvenient, it would be best not to use the spring water inside.”
The knights seemed more interested in guidance and support than inspection; they let us through without any real questions.
I followed Irene as she led the way inside. Suddenly the knight on the left, who had been silent until now, lightly caught my arm. We had been walking side by side, so it left me half-turned and awkward, but he paid it no mind and stepped in front of me in his pure white armor.
“Um, Brother?”
“…What is it?”
The party members who had gone ahead turned back to look at us, and even the knight who had been giving the explanation stared at his colleague in surprise. Under all those eyes the man still looked me up and down without hesitation.
Meeting the sharp gaze that flew out from inside the white helm, the thought crossed my mind—Have I done something lately to get on the Temple’s bad side?—but the question the Temple Knight asked was something I never expected.
“Have you, by any chance, received a revelation from the Goddess?”
“…Why would you ask that?”
“Because you carry holy power.”
…Was his level high enough that he could sense the traces of holy power dwelling in my shield?
Temple Knights cannot become adventurers.
They are a military order that has devoted themselves to the Goddess’s embrace and move according to oracles and revelations. Of course they cannot carry holy power and make adventuring their main profession. So to a Temple Knight’s eyes, I must look like a truly bizarre existence.
Just as archers specialized in detecting living beings and thieves were experts at disarming traps, reinforcing armor and weapons with holy power was a Temple Knight technique. Seeing an adventurer walking around openly using it, of course they would have questions.
“Huh, what? Roland isn’t supposed to use holy power? Wait, holy power? Roland’s using holy power right now?”
At the question that had been thrown out, the Temple Knights at the entrance, the viewers, and even the party members all turned curious eyes on me. Come to think of it, after meeting the Goddess last time and receiving holy power, I had only experimented on my own. I had never actually told the party, “Hey, I can use holy power now.”
The barrage of stares was burdensome, but unfortunately my brain wasn’t clever enough to craft some elaborate story for a situation like this.
“When I received the Goddess’s revelation in the Blessed Forest, holy power settled into me.”
“A revelation! You received a revelation?”
“Yes. Sister Irene here and the rest of our party heard the Goddess’s voice as well.”
And when that was the case, a frontal charge was always best. It wasn’t as if some group of fallen priests was scheming inside the Temple, so if we could get support, great—there was no reason it would get in our way.
The moment I said it outright, the Temple Knights looked at me with eyes full of emotion, while the party members stared at me in flustered surprise. Being a bunch of sensitive women, they had probably been treating the Goddess’s revelation like some secret only our party knew.
…Especially our northern little brat. Her glare was sharp enough to sting.
“It’s a hard story to believe, but seeing the holy power dwelling in you, it cannot be a lie. May the Goddess’s grace fill the path ahead of Sister Irene and you adventurer brothers and sisters.”
Thankfully, the Temple Knight I had expected to grill me with endless questions simply bowed his head and stepped aside without the slightest hesitation. Once we entered, a tent village came into view, arranged around a large central hearth.
It looked like people picked empty tents to rest in and used the big communal fire pit in the middle to prepare their own meals.
“Roland! Can you just—can you just say that out loud like that?!”
Once the knights’ gazes fell away and no other adventurers were nearby, the first one to charge at me was Katie, her cheeks puffed out. She must have been drunk on the secret mission only our party knew about; she was full of complaints about my little reveal.
With Katie stuck to my side and shooting me fierce looks, I plopped down in front of an empty tent. The rest of the party settled in a circle around me, surrounding me as if to say, Alright, explain yourself.
“It was going to come out sooner or later. And the holy power has just been increasing little by little—I simply never mentioned it.”
“Since when, exactly?”
“I told you—after I met the Goddess. The mana inside my body started gradually turning into holy power.”
I clenched a fist and showed them blue mana, then raised pure white holy power above it. The party members’ eyes went round. In this world’s common sense, using two different energies was nearly impossible, so even seeing it with their own eyes they found it hard to believe.
Well, even if Heroes Chronicle had form-change type characters, in the ten years I had spent in Heroes Chronicle I had never actually met one.
For me, the holy power was still so weak compared to the mana I possessed, and with dimensional travel, reincarnation, holograms, and the quest to help Han Se-ah all piled on top of each other, I hadn’t given it much thought. But to the NPC party members other than Han Se-ah, it must have looked like I had gained a special ability right after the Goddess’s oracle.
“This is… almost like…”
Irene, staring at my holy power with eyes full of emotion, was about to say something when—
BOOOOOOM—!
“Wh-what was that?!”
“An explosion? Did someone mess up a spell or what?!”
“Aaaaaah, h-help!”
A thunderous roar and a blast of hot wind came rushing into the safe zone.