The Church of Judddak (2)

Death by burning—the cruelest punishment devised by man.

The agony of scorching flesh was widely acknowledged as the single most excruciating torment any living creature could endure. It was not a matter that could be conquered through simple willpower or sheer mental grit. The very instant the flames sank their teeth into flesh, every instinct in any creature would scream a single, undeniable truth:

Ah, fuck, this hurts like hell.

It was agony beyond mortal comprehension.

And yet, Darian had hurled himself straight into the raging inferno of his own free will.

"Y-You lunatic!"

"Aaaagh...!"

Beyond the wall of fire, the bishop's cronies—who had set the blaze in a desperate bid to buy precious time—gasped in unadulterated terror. Some shrieked as if staring down an archfiend dragged straight from the nether realms, while others sank to their knees, shuddering uncontrollably in pure panic.

The gallery users collectively assumed he had an ace up his sleeve. After all, the man held the official title of Hero. Surely he possessed some divine ward or passive resistance protecting him from harm.

Except he had nothing of the sort.

The madman had literally dove into an open blaze in nothing but his bare skin and armor.

The moment the realization struck that the Hero was completely unprotected, pure pandemonium erupted across the gallery.

Yet even as the seconds crawled by, and even as his outer flesh began to scorch and blister, Darian neither screamed nor blinked. Forging an unyielding path through the roaring wall of heat, he advanced toward the bishop's forces with steady, measured strides.

"Pain does not exist," Darian declared amidst the deafening roar of the conflagration.

"I shall prove my faith."

Watching this bizarre, harrowing spectacle, I found myself muttering in absolute disbelief.

"The hell you mean it doesn't hurt? That hurts like a motherfucker!"

Darian was human.

If you burned a human to a crisp, he died. How was what he was doing right now any different from a petulant toddler shouting, I'm gonna die! You see this? I'm really gonna die right now! straight to my face?

"Still... he's one of our forum members."

I couldn't just sit back and watch a living soul burn to cinders. I frantically rummaged through the system interface, suddenly recalling an administrative prompt that had surfaced back when I had officially designated him.

"Right, this popped up earlier."

The prompt had materialized the moment I appointed him as the Gallery Master, practically begging me to allocate points into his skill tree like a video game character. Navigating deeper into the menu, a cascading roster of awakenable traits unfurled before my eyes.

"Hmm, these are a bit vague."

Those were the first two that caught my attention. Number one sounded impressive on paper, but Darian was currently walking across blazing coals. Holy immunity wouldn't do jack shit against thermal combustion. Number two was equally ambiguous. It didn't specify the exact numerical scaling or parameters of the physical enhancement.

"Willpower?"

Fortunately, there was one final option at the bottom. The problem was the utterly baffling description attached to it. Here I thought deciphering a speaker's hidden intent was a nightmare confined to high school Korean literature exams.

"Hmm."

Thankfully, I had been a humanities major. Piecing together the breadcrumbs in that sparse, one-sentence tooltip, this seemed like it had the potential to be the most absurdly overpowered cheat ability of them all.

With sufficient willpower, nothing is impossible.

If your willpower was strong enough, didn't that imply you could stride through a sea of fire unscathed, mend catastrophic wounds instantly, and accomplish anything you set your mind to?

"Granted, who knows how high the threshold for that 'willpower' actually is..."

Still, watching the lunatic casually wade through an ocean of flames, it felt tailor-made for him. The only lingering concern was that glaring parenthetical warning: (NOT RECOMMENDED!)

The ominous disclaimer gave me pause for a brief second. But having already made up my mind, I pressed option ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠three.

"Well, I'll find out once I pick it."

Completely oblivious as to why the system had pleaded with me to avoid it in the first place.

"Mmh."

Wading through the licking tongues of flame, Darian checked the system alert and let a broad, reverent smile spread across his face.

"He calls upon me to prove my faith."

At first glance, it appeared to grant no tangible passive bonus. But a heartbeat later, an inexplicable, overflowing sensation welled up from the core of his soul, coursing outward through every vein and sinew.

"!"

Muscles that had been incinerated beyond function suddenly began to regenerate. It was as if time itself were rewinding. Every microscopic cell in his body sprouted anew the microsecond the heat consumed it.

"Aaaah!"

Overcome with rapturous emotion, Darian shed tears of pure, ecstatic devotion as he stepped entirely clear of the blaze.

"..."

"Are you fucking insane...?"

Across the clearing, the gathered heretics froze, their faces drained of color and locked in utter shock. They stared as if witnessing an eldritch aberration that had no right to exist beneath the heavens; whatever shred of courage they possessed evaporated into thin air. Spearpoints drooped toward the cobblestones, and mages scrambled frantically into corners, curling into balls to hide.

Darian strode through their disordered ranks as casually as if he were taking a morning walk in his own home, scanning the grand hall with relentless focus.

"Bishops!"

"!"

And there, at the far end of the hall, scuttling toward a discreet side passage in a frantic bid to flee, were the last remaining bishops.

"Aaaagh! F-Fuck off! Stay away from me, you monstrous freak!"

All living things were bound by the circumstances of their birth. Some, like dragons, were born majestic and supreme, sitting atop the food chain by divine right. Others, like humans, were frail and pathetic, forced to claw and scrape through the dirt merely to survive. No matter how desperately a human struggled, he could never become a dragon.

Yet Darian, through sheer, unadulterated fanaticism for his Head Mod, had shattered the boundary of his very species.

"E-Eek...!"

The elite guards sworn to defend the bishop shuddered in terror and parted like the Red Sea. Abandoned and utterly helpless, the trembling bishop pulled a golden crucifix from his waist sash and thrust it out toward Darian.

"Get back, you spawn of Satan!"

What kind of holy Hero dove into a raging sea of fire and emerged smiling like a lunatic? At that moment, a spotless hand—devoid of even a speck of soot—clamped firmly around the crucifix.

"!"

As the bishop recoiled in sheer bewilderment, the holy symbol was casually plucked from his grip. In its place, something metallic and cylindrical was deposited into his open palm.

"...A can of tuna?" the bishop muttered dumbly.

Schwing!

Before the words could fully register, a silver flash severed the bishop's neck. Amidst the dead silence of the hall, Darian reclaimed the can of tuna, thrust it high into the vaulted ceiling, and bellowed at the top of his lungs.

"Kneel and revere the new God!"

"!"

"The canned tuna is His holy flesh, and the cola is His divine blood! This Cathedral shall be reborn anew!"

It was the dawn of a new order for the Cathedral. Or rather, the historic moment the Church of the Head Mod drew its first breath.

The Cathedral underwent total normalization.

The corrupt old guard was slaughtered, and systemic rot was excised through brutal, physical enforcement. The financial records of every surviving clergyman were combed through with a fine-toothed comb, turning the public square into an endless, non-stop guillotine festival.

In a metropolis like Adrian, where citizens openly scoffed that bribery is just a second legal currency, Darian was nothing short of an invasive apex predator wrecking the local ecosystem.

"Well, up to this point, it's actually great..."

Up to this point, he was the picture-perfect image of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠an immaculate, righteous Hero. Refusing under-the-table kickbacks, purging systemic corruption with unyielding fervor, wielding overwhelming strength—everything was ideal. Even when he announced a complete overhaul of the Cathedral, public sentiment couldn't have been higher.

...Right up until he went completely off the deep end, not only overhauling the church but declaring the founding of the "Church of the Head Mod" dedicated to deifying and worshipping me.

The Holy Church had long been rotten to the core. A corrupted religious institution was nothing more than an ugly, pus-filled abscess. Lancing the boil was all well and good, but replacing it with this meant sprouting a brand-new malignant tumor directly on top of the open wound!

"Who in their right mind would actually buy into this?"

From any angle, it was blatantly an unhinged pseudo-cult. Neither the remaining Cathedral clergy nor the Gallery community could possibly endorse such lunacy.

"Wait, what?"

There were shockingly a lot of them.

Head Mod worship had jumped the fence from an ironic forum meme straight into physical, terrifying reality.

"This cannot stand."

I couldn't just let this slide. Above all else, I vastly preferred being an ordinary forum administrator over being deified as a pseudo-cult messiah.

Naturally, the gallery degenerates were not the type to listen to words.

Hell, when Darian, their de facto ringleader, was out there diving headfirst into literal firestorms to prove his devotion, talking was completely off the table.

"I really didn't want to resort to this..."

Resolving the Cathedral crisis was a relief, but this runaway train of religious mania desperately needed to be hit with an industrial fire extinguisher. It was time for the classic carrot-and-stick routine.

Lately, the gallery had been crawling with far too many disruptive trolls and shitposters anyway.

"Which means it's time for your 'Reward', doesn't it?"

And that meant the whip had to come down first.