Evil God of Darkness (2)
Tariki's opening greeting didn't end with a single flourish.
The thing kept firing off burst after burst of demonic energy, as if it wanted to fill the entire sky with black fireworks.
But every last one of those shells was helpless before divinity. The Armadi divinity I carried and Tariki's demonic power sat in a clear elemental opposition — light against dark, sun against shadow.
How could a shadow cowering in the dark hope to stand proud before power that was the very image of the sun?
Perhaps Tariki felt it too, because after hammering away for a while, the thing suddenly halted its offensive.
Just when I was thinking it must not want to waste strength on attacks that weren't landing anyway—
—a sinister energy began to writhe across the entire city.
My knowledge of magic was still lacking, sure, but these days I at least had the fundamentals down.
Which meant I could tell. That energy was a magic circle.
The magic circle prepared in this city for the evil god's arrival had activated.
So the circle's range is limited to this city.
Which means the magic circle that had been spread across the entire Burrow Territory was nothing but bait. The one Alsaetin had mapped out for us was only ever meant to intimidate. And this one was the real deal — prepared specifically to catch and kill me, the loser Chief God's apostle.
Just like I predicted.
Just as you foresaw, then.
We were still within our planned parameters. Everything so far was manageable with nothing but the preparations we'd already made.
All that remained was for the Face-obsessed Fox to handle this fall of ours, and—
What the hell is she doing?! We're about to hit the ground! At this rate we're going to splatter like free-falling flies!
As the ground rushed closer and I whipped my gaze over to the fox in outright panic, I saw her leisurely sizing up the terrain below.
Is NOW really the time for that?!
"Face-obsessed Fox! What are you doing?!"
"Fear not. I am ready now."
The moment she finished speaking, mist bloomed all around us and seized us by the collars.
Our bodies, which had done nothing but accelerate toward the ground, began to slow, and by the time we drew near the earth, the pull of the fall had vanished entirely.
Shortly after, the mist dispersed, and we touched down on the ground without so much as a stumble.
"My deepest apologies, everyone."
The spatial mage clearly felt terrible about having hurled us into danger, and the instant her feet met solid ground she bowed her head and offered her apologies — but none of us had the spare attention to answer her.
Because from far away, we could feel it: sinister demonic power, churning and roiling.
Hoh. It has stored up quite a considerable reserve of power.
Yeah. It really has.
From the mansion as its origin point, I could see the blackness spreading outward, little by little, swallowing everything around it.
It meant to blot out the sky, devour the sun, and craft a perfect darkness where not even the moon and stars were permitted to exist.
The reason Tariki's corrupted dungeon had seemed so underwhelming last time wasn't only because the thing was incomplete. Its true purpose had been reconnaissance from the start — it simply hadn't bothered to use its full strength.
Watching that darkness swallow the Burrow Territory whole, a hollow laugh escaped me. Well, what do you know. An evil god actually acts like an evil god, huh?
Ha. Yeah. This much is only proper. This is what makes it worth having sold my dignity to buy the thing. If it had turned out to be a genuine scrub after all that, I'd have felt cheated, honestly.
As I curled my lips upward and turned my head back, I spotted Phoebe and Johann making their final preparations for the ritual.
Both of them had served the Church for decades, and their movements wove together so seamlessly that not a single flaw could be found in the chain.
Which meant all I had to do was my part. I opened my inventory and drew a single sword from within it.
The thing Isabelle had given me just days ago.
A sword consecrated over long years in the Holy Land.
A holy relic forged by human hands across an immense stretch of time.
Its edge was so dulled that it held no value as a weapon whatsoever — but that was no problem at all.
This sword had never been made to be a weapon in the first place.
It was a holy blade prepared for one purpose and one purpose alone: to work a miracle.
I wrapped both hands around the pommel and raised the sword high above my head. A slow, deep breath. Eyes closed.
"Make your preparations. Those seized by the darkness are closing in even now."
I stirred the divinity dwelling within my body and began packing it into the sword, layer by layer, from tip to guard.
"I have a task I was given, so I will handle most of what comes. Your duty is simple — focus solely on intercepting anything that approaches this position."
Then, at some point, the sword began to greedily drink in my divinity.
Not enough, it seemed to cry. I need more. The blade's demand rang out so clearly that I obliged it, matching my output to its hunger.
Little by little the divinity climbed the length of the blade and pooled there, and as it did, the sword's temperature began to rise.
The pommel that had been cold to the touch slowly took on a gentle warmth — and then, as though remembering the fires of its own forging, it radiated a fierce heat in every direction.
The pain spread up through my palms in sharp, stinging waves, but I did not let go.
After the countless trials I'd endured, something like this hardly qualified as pain.
How much time passed after that, I couldn't say.
The sounds around me faded, then vanished altogether.
And just as my senses, spread so wide across the battlefield, collapsed into the sword and the sword alone—
—a voice rose from somewhere deep inside me. Firm. Unshakable. Utterly dependable.
"Now, we begin."
In that instant, the silhouette of a man reflected itself in my eyes, which had known nothing but darkness behind their closed lids.
"We shall make a place where darkness may not dwell."
"Yes, Grandfather."
Having finished the groundwork alongside Phoebe, Johann lifted his head and wiped the cold sweat streaming down his brow.
So even incomplete, an evil god is still an evil god. The darkness is moving to swallow the sun itself.
As the blackness steadily filled the sky over the Burrow Territory, Johann pushed his own divinity outward in a ring around their position, driving the dark back — making certain that none of the evil god's demonic power could work its tricks anywhere near them.
Tsk. The Evil God of Darkness wields considerable strength.
I won't be able to hold out much longer.
The young lady must finish her preparations before this old man reaches his limit.
"They come pouring down in droves."
At the voice of the forest's guardian spirit, who presided over the entire vast woodland, Johann tore his eyes from the sky and looked down — to see the shapes of humans sprinting toward them from every direction like things possessed.
They were people, and yet they were not people anymore.
These unfortunates had been beguiled by the evil god's power without ever knowing it, and were now scarcely different from puppets dancing on its strings.
Ordinarily, they would never have been granted a chance at salvation. They would have gone to ash alongside the city.
But not now. The great Chief God had sent His own apostle for their sake — and so they would reclaim their lives.
"Come, beasts."
As the Lord of the Forest called out to the horde bearing down on them, an opaque mist began to spread from where she stood.
Had it been ordinary fog, it would have scattered harmlessly into the air — but this was a thing set apart from anything mundane.
The mist the forest's guardian conjured with her own power took shape in midair, one form after another, until Johann's eyes beheld what looked like a pack of enormous foxes.
"Chase them off. Ah — do not kill them. Kill them and I suspect it would not be my Lord who punishes me, but Her."
The moment the command left her lips, the fox-pack fanned out in every direction.
They were foxes and they were mist, and they crossed the ground at speeds far beyond anything a living creature could achieve, closing on the human shapes in seconds.
And the instant a fox of mist brushed against one of the puppets, the man collapsed to the ground as though his strings had been cut.
"Lady Rina. What happened to him?"
When the Aln knight guarding the line raised the question, the Lord of the Forest gave a careless shrug.
"I merely made them dream. When all is finished, I shall wake them — so there is nothing to worry over."
The foxes never slowed, even while their mistress spoke. And one by one, as the people drifted off into the world of dreams, the charge of the enthralled began to lose its momentum.
So this is the true Lord of the Forest.
Listening to the young lady's exasperated voice while she wore that melted, dreamy expression, Johann had honestly doubted her mettle — but her true caliber did not lie.
So long as Her Ladyship keeps the perimeter held, we need not fear being crushed under the tide...
A warmth at his side — warm past bearing, positively blazing with divinity — made Johann's thoughts cut off mid-sentence, and he turned his head.
"Hoh."
Johann knew the sword Lucy carried.
A holy blade forged within the Holy Land of the Church of the Chief God.
A sword consecrated over long years for one purpose: the ritual.
Johann had risen all the way to bishop.
He had personally consecrated that very sword more times than he could count, and he had even conducted rituals with it on several occasions.
He had witnessed the ritual being performed more times than memory could hold.
And yet not once — not a single time in all those years — had he ever seen that holy blade burn as brilliantly as it did now in Lucy's grip.
That was what it meant to be truly beloved of God.
That was what it meant to be chosen as His proxy on earth.
Was every preparation complete? Lucy exhaled one long, slow breath and lifted her eyelids, and her crimson eyes came into view.
Glowing bright with housed divinity, those eyes gazed at the sword — the sun she herself had brought forth.
After regarding it for a quiet moment, Lucy let slip a small, amused snort and reversed her grip on the hilt.
The blade that had been raised toward the heavens now pointed down at the earth.
Lucy pressed her lips together and brought the sword down — and in that instant—
The blade saturated with the apostle's divinity.
That blunt, dull, utterly unusable excuse for a weapon.
It sank into the city's road the way a blade parts the surface of a lake — with such effortless ease it was almost insulting — and planted itself firmly into the bedrock below.
"From this very moment—"
The instant Lucy spoke, the divinity pooled within the sword began to spread outward, following the clear, beautiful voice of the Chief God's apostle.
"That gloomy, disgusting piece-of-shit darkness is going to feel ashamed of itself and run away."
It washed past Johann and Phoebe where they stood guard.
"The loser light is going to bask in the care of my noble divinity and become just a little less of a loser."
It steadied Alsaetin and Carl as they suppressed the ones who had broken through the mist.
"And I, Lucy Aln, proxy of the loser Chief God, do hereby declare—"
It flowed past the Lord of the Forest without pausing, pushing ever outward—
"That this pervert is going to guard this place with her life, because it is HERS."
It repelled the darkness invading this ground and gave birth to a domain.
The Divine Domain.
A place that cast out evil and cradled the light in its arms.
What a truly bizarre thing this is, Johann thought.
The apostle's mouth was full to overflowing with blasphemy — so why did the divinity that filled this space contain nothing but reverence?
His fingers had closed hard around his cross of their own accord. With a helpless laugh at the absurdity of it all, Johann turned his head to the other side.
"Saintess."
Phoebe—
had scattered upon the ground the soil that had guarded the Holy Land since long before it was ever called the Holy Land.
Had traced her ritual circle over it with powder ground from an angel's wings.
And now stood at its very center, an ancient saint's staff clasped in both hands.
Her eyes met Johann's, and she gave a single, solemn nod, her face set firm.
"Yes, Bishop."
"It is our turn now."
Looking upon her, Johann sprinkled holy water over her head — so that she might be joined to the divinity of the Chief God that now saturated this very space.
"Are you ready?"
"Whenever you are."
With the final confirmation exchanged, Johann drew a small orb from within his robes — an orb that still held the warmth of the Chief God — and—
"Then let us begin."
tossed it into the empty air.
A sphere that should have obeyed gravity and fallen to the earth instead came to rest in the space between Johann and Phoebe, and did not move again.
Every preparation for the miracle was now complete.
"For the glory of the great Chief God."
"For the glory of the great Chief God."
The hour had come to raise a sun above this darkened earth.