Faith's Sword (1)
Faith's Sword (1) — Third Floor of the Hanmaum Guwon Cult
Morning broke over the Hanmaum Guwon Cult.
Unless something unusual happened, the cult officers—the Saintess, the Gatekeeper, and the Vice Cult Leader—were expected to gather on the third floor.
In accordance with Han Guwon’s doctrine of mysticism, they finished a substantial breakfast with what had now become an indispensable course: dessert.
Later, I would eat with the lay believers on the first floor, so for now I watched the three women elegantly arrange the fruit on their plates and eat it.
With three people, even their eating habits came in three different varieties.
Yoon Ayoung wore a smile that would not leave her face, dutifully chewing a slice of apple. Whether it was because of the “healing” she had received the night before or not, seeing her chew so carefully for so long brought to mind the tteokbokki I had given her during her first days with us.
“Is it good?”
“Yes―hehe―”
Yoon Ayoung beamed at me from across the table. Joo Joohye, seated opposite her, was another matter entirely.
How to put it...
She was simply fast.
Without even swallowing the fruit in her mouth, she snapped her silver fork across the plate, stabbed a cherry tomato, and carried it straight to her already-puffed cheeks.
Chomp, chomp, chomp―
The juice-squishing sounds were so adorably noisy that I had to bite back the complaint rising in my throat.
“...Good?”
“Mm, it’s so good! Daddy, eat some too!”
“No. You finish it. There’s more.”
“Hehehe―”
There you go. If you’re happy, that’s enough.
I let out a light sigh and turned my attention to the last of my officers, Seong Gaeul.
Rustle―
Her eyes darted across the page as she read something, flipping through the papers with practiced efficiency. Even breakfast had stopped at the exact limit she had set for herself, marked by the little Snack icon.
Seong Gaeul seemed to sense my gaze, then opened her mouth.
“So... there are other awakened like you in Daegu?”
“That’s about right. I don’t know their classes or skills yet, but they seem to belong to roughly the same category.”
I had brought up what Kim Cheolsu and I had discussed the night before while we were eating. There was no reason to hide it, and it was always more efficient to have several people work out a response than to sit alone with the problem.
Seong Gaeul kept her eyes on the document as she answered.
“It was still the right decision. Even if you’d rushed off to Daegu like a flock of birds startled by thunder, I doubt it would have surprised you much.”
“...What do you think people are?”
Of course, we could have made it to Daegu if we had left in time. But every moment after that would have been uncertain.
There was no reason to take a gamble when our safety still wasn’t guaranteed.
“Still, brainwashing. That’s impressive. All it takes is one little word and you’ve got a believer, even without going through all the effort we did.”
“Vice Cult Leader, brainwashing is hardly an ability that works just because you say so.”
The way the brainwashing awakener in Daegu had “consumed” people was enough to make that clear. If the skill really erased a person’s identity, he would not have discarded a woman the way he had.
There had to be clear restrictions and risks.
Besides...
“Those one-shot brainwashers have endless ways to counter them. Once we identify their base, I’m going to collapse the entire building with telekinesis. They’ll be crushed to death before they can even resist.”
It doesn’t have to be a building. I could collapse the ground itself.
Either way, there was only one ending for him: crushed beneath the rubble along with his own puppets.
“...You really know how to come up with a brutal little plan.”
I shrugged at Seong Gaeul’s admiration.
To begin with, the chance of a brainwashing awakener defeating me was almost nonexistent. The only method would have been to brainwash me first, but...
Would the system really permit someone to brainwash the foremost Tank without lifting a finger?
That tight-fisted cheat of a system had rejected even Complete Recovery as an imbalance the moment I tried to create it as a skill.
Besides, Seong Gaeul’s tone had been unusually thorny today. Something was clearly bothering her.
“Vice Cult Leader, you’re committing blasphemy against Divinity as naturally as breathing. Do you realize that?”
“Bring out a mat. I’m going to commit a proper act of blasphemy against Divinity today.”
Calmly shooting down my nonsense, she handed me the document she had been reading. I caught the paper as it slid across the table as if riding a sled, telekinetically holding it in front of me.
UNDERSTANDING THE CULT’S URGENT PROBLEMS
Unlike the Cult Leader’s Guide I had received previously, this wasn’t written in Seong Gaeul’s meticulous handwriting. The letters were plain black type against the white page, printed from what looked like a word-processing document.
There was nothing strange about that. I had permitted the officers to use electronic devices.
“What is it?! We want to see it too! Why did she only give you one copy?!”
“I’m saving ink. It’s enough for you two to listen.”
Seong Gaeul walked over to the whiteboard installed in the officers’ room and calmly answered Joo Joohye’s complaint.
Apparently, there was a system much like mine within the cult too.
I gestured for Joo Joohye, whose cheeks were still puffed out, and Yoon Ayoung, who looked visibly nervous, to come closer.
“It’s fine. Come watch with me. Both of you.”
“Oh, right! Then that’ll work!”
With her face suddenly brightening, Joo Joohye climbed onto my left thigh.
“This is my spot!”
“Ayoung-ie, come take a seat too.”
“Yes, yes―”
Even Yoon Ayoung, who had been hovering hesitantly, settled onto my right thigh. Two sweet fragrances delightedly played across my nose.
I remembered how the other two had made quite a scene of inventing signature scents of their own after they saw how positively I responded to Seong Gaeul’s perfume.
“Mm― Too fragrant? Here, here. I’ve got flowers on both hands now.”
“Hehe― That’s right! Joohye is Daddy’s own flower!”
“I... I want to help, too...”
As the women squirmed and wriggled, each trying to spread her fragrance over me, an explicitly displeased voice cut through the scene.
“...How about coming back in two hours?”
“No, no. Judging by this, it’s clearly important. We’re starting now.”
I straightened my back to show that I was concentrating. At the sound of the page turning through telekinesis, Seong Gaeul raised her dry-erase marker.
A FORCE THAT DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON THE CULT LEADER
“In some ways, this is our biggest problem. Even Seo Taesan, whom we’ve put behind us as a bodyguard, isn’t carrying a single piece of equipment. He’s completely useless as anything but decoration.”
The very first item on the list was enough to give me a headache.
It meant that even a cult in full swing still had plenty of unresolved problems.
No wonder our Gaeul had been in such a foul mood. She must have been tearing her hair out over all of this.
I gave a small nod of agreement.
“True. Even inside the Heavenly Barrier, we need to prepare for the unexpected.”
“That’s not the only issue. The awakened inside the cult are a problem too.”
The two women perched on my thighs shifted uneasily at Seong Gaeul’s words.
“Prophecy is good, sure. But why hasn’t it grown any further? There’s no guarantee as to when the second skill will unlock.”
Yoon Ayoung, the target of Seong Gaeul’s gaze, trembled.
I reassuringly ran my fingers through her loose hair and waited for the Vice Cult Leader to continue.
“The Gatekeeper has the same problem. I asked Joo Joohye earlier, and she has plenty of mana, but no one has entered through the Gate of Salvation. Apparently, the sort of salvation it demands is far more demanding than we expected.”
Really?
I looked toward Joo Joohye as a silent question. She gave me an anxious nod.
Level two? Three? If a skill like that were too overpowered to make any sense, I suppose that would be different.
“And that leads to another problem. The Gate of Salvation opened in Daegu as well, right? Does that mean it can open overseas, too? If a foreign believer comes through, who’s going to handle communication?”
“Er...”
I genuinely hadn’t considered that possibility.
Yoon Ayoung and Joo Joohye both shook their heads slightly as they met my gaze. Even Seong Gaeul, my last hope, lowered her head and spoke.
“English might be possible, but Japanese or Chinese would be impossible.”
“...Holy shit.”
Just hearing everything she had brought up was enough to make my temples throb.
“All right. I’ve thought of possible solutions to these problems, but I’ll save them for last.”
Seong Gaeul erased the whiteboard and wrote the second problem beneath the first.
ABSENCE OF A MEDICAL SYSTEM
“This one is very serious. Nothing has happened so far, but if it does, it could undermine the cult leader’s absolute authority.”
I imagined the scene.
One of the believers in The Sanctuary suddenly collapsed. The others would naturally come looking for me, but I had no ability related to treatment whatsoever.
“We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Exactly.”
Seong Gaeul tapped the whiteboard with her dry-erase marker and continued.
“Hospitals and pharmacies aren’t somewhere we can solve this by simply farming them. We don’t have a class that specializes in handling them.”
“So we need medical personnel, or someone whose ability is healing.”
“Or an item. That brings us to the final issue, in turn.”
Without showing the slightest sign of fatigue, she began listing the next problem.
Building a group like this involved far more than one or two considerations.
My goal had never been to rule some tiny patch of ground, so every one of these problems needed to be addressed as quickly as possible.
THE SYSTEM, RELIGIOUS FACILITIES, AND REWARDS
“All of these problems ultimately come together,” Seong Gaeul said. “The system said that becoming a Saintess requires a Saintess Hall, but it doesn’t appear in The Sanctuary’s management tab.”
A Saintess Hall, clearly a facility related to saintesses.
A Guardian Shrine, dedicated to guardian spirits.
A Promotion Hall connected to the Court of Faith, where offices were appointed, and to the religious shop.
None of them existed in the religious facilities tab.
Nor were there any obvious facilities I could imagine, like a school or a university.
“We’ve been busy building whatever we wanted, but those facilities had something in common. They were all necessary for laying the foundations in the early stages.”
I nodded in agreement.
I had suspected as much myself, and I had already wondered whether future updates might be linked to an increase in believers and the growth of the class itself.
Even though our follower count was approaching eighty, nothing was different from when Yoon Ayoung had first joined us.
Class, skills, store, management tab.
Not one of them offered a system reward.
Seong Gaeul placed a map on the whiteboard.
Click― Click―
Four magnets snapped to the edges of the map and held it in place.
Her fingertip pressed against Incheon Central Library. Starting from a red circle, it began moving upward and to the right.
“Show me the status windows. There are skills and stores. You’re following the structure of an RPG perfectly, so why...”
Her finger stopped at a single point.
“Why are there no quests or items? It’s as if that entire part was cut out and put somewhere else.”
Her fingertip pointed at the place she had reached.
Seoul.
The capital of the Republic of Korea, where most of the country’s population and infrastructure was concentrated.
It lay beneath the unidentified membrane that had spread across the world when the apocalypse began.
The answer is there.
The system footage returned to my mind—the reporter who had turned to the prime minister while speaking about the unidentified membrane spreading over Seoul.
I remembered the post in the group chat recruiting volunteers to accompany me to Seoul, where every communication link had been severed.
I also remembered the view of the ruined capital from the rooftop of Hanmaum Apartment before we left.
Smack―!
I brought my palm down against the table, drawing every gaze to me.
Now was the time to decide.
At my signal, the dry-erase marker in Seong Gaeul’s hand flew through the air.
“Let’s begin with the easiest problem: arming our believers.”
The marker swept forward and pressed against one section of Incheon.
The place where it would be easiest to obtain powerful and efficient weapons.
The graves of armies that had been overwhelmed by massive zombie waves.
Government-designated zombie shelters.
“We reclaim the Saints’ Arena first.”