The Church (3)
Man, can’t they just get it over with? Why do they keep droning on with all these excuses?
Whether they offered explanations or not, the fate of those wretches remained unaltered, as did the grim duty before us. So why drag it out? What was the point of all this posturing?
When standing on the precipice of a decisive battle against a demon, purging every soul tainted by demonic corruption with holy incendiary magic was common sense. It was a foundational truth, chiseled into doctrine through the spilled blood of countless forebears—an indispensable, unavoidable necessity. Fail to do so, and the moment combat was joined, those very corrupted thralls would plunge daggers into our backs under the demon’s thrall.
Regrettable as it was, their sacrifice was a prerequisite for the greater good. So why waste so many damn words on it?
“Execute them!”
“Understood!”
At long last, the overseer barked the command. Thank the heavens, finally done with the preaching. Good. Let’s wrap this up quickly so we can go hunt that fiend down.
“Please… I beg you…”
“Tsk tsk.”
To subject people to such vile misery just to test their faith—demons truly were the scum of creation. These prisoners might still wear the shape of men, but they were men no longer. They were larval abominations, nothing more. What hesitation could there possibly be in slaughtering fiends wearing human skin?
Granted, they had been ordinary folk until quite recently. But so what? Saturated with demonic magi, they were now nothing more than ticking time bombs, liable to mutate into ravenous beasts at any given second. One must never squander pity on demons disguised as men. Never.
Now then, time to begin.
“Holy Inlay—”
Shhk.
…Hm?
What just happened?
All at once, the sky and the earth traded places. The world that had been standing upright only a fraction of a second prior suddenly flipped on its axis… Huh?
Wait, why did that man’s head just get cut—
“Uh… ah…”
At first, he was certain his eyes were deceiving him. A faint, imperceptible blur had whipped through the air, and a heartbeat later, the heads of every single executioner tumbled to the flagstones in unison. But no matter how hard he pinched his cheek, the nightmare refused to dissolve. No matter how fiercely he scrubbed his vision, the scene before him remained unyielding in its carnage.
They were dead. All of them, dead in an instant. A whole contingent of men, snuffed out like candles in a gale.
“Defensive barriers! Prepare defensive magic at once!”
“Where is the demon?! You bastards, why weren't your detection spells active? What the hell were you doing?!”
After a suffocating silence that felt both infinitely long and agonizingly brief, frantic shrieks erupted in all directions, condemning the catastrophic failure. Some screamed to mount an immediate response, while others roared accusations at those who had failed to prevent the slaughter. Yet beneath the dissonance of their panic, they all sought the exact same thing: to violently bellow battle cries approaching hysterical screams, desperate to stoke their will to fight while drowning out the paralyzing terror gripping their hearts.
“Y-Your Excellency! Your Excellency!!”
“…Quiet. I saw it with my own eyes, so speak clearly and with composure.”
“B-But—!”
“Did you not hear me say silence?! If those at the helm lose their heads, the rank and file will fall into utter chaos! Shut your mouth and hold your ground!!”
You think I don't feel the same crawling dread you do? The only reason I'm clenching my teeth and bearing this is because if I succumb to terror, we are truly doomed.
Curses… This was why common-born trash could never be trusted under pressure. Where was it? Where in the abyss was the monster lurking?
It was an unfamiliar form, but that was indisputably magic.
And not just ordinary sorcery—it was an arcane phenomenon of such an elevated dimension that its circle could not even be fathomed. Minute rifts had torn open directly flush against the executioners' necks, and a split second later, their heads had dropped. The sheared surfaces of the corpses were so uncannily smooth that they gave undeniable testimony to the precision of what had occurred. There was no gaudy flare, no grand, earth-shaking incantation. Yet that absolute lack of ornamentation made it infinitely more horrifying.
Was this not magic that eschewed the adoration of mortals, existing purely and solely to slaughter the enemy?
A chill swept through the square.
…Ugh.
The realization that one of those invisible rifts could manifest around his own throat at any given second sent a numbing frost prickling across his skin, setting his neck shivering. Damn it all… Should they sound a retreat? No. Having advanced this far, attempting to flee now would only invite instant butchery. First, they had to locate the fiend.
“Locate the demon! Every surviving mage and priest is to pour every drop of their mana into detection spells!”
“B-But if we do not raise defensive wards, we will be—”
“Shut your mouth and do as you are ordered!!”
“Hic… Y-Yes, sir…!”
What earthly use was a defensive barrier against a lunatic who opened spatial tears directly inside a man's collar to lop off his head? Setting aside their blatant inability to grasp the situation, to waste precious seconds questioning commands in a crisis made him want to purge the lot of them himself.
"Your Excellency, that demon is far stronger than any entity I have ever witnessed. I beseech you, muster even greater strength before you engage—"
…Damn it.
He had dismissed it as the hysterical babbling of a broken man, but it was all true. Though he had yet to lay eyes upon the demon’s visage or witness the casting with his own senses, a ferocious instinct screamed that everything the parish priest had reported was absolute, unvarnished reality. Wielding holy-element magic, reversing the flow of time itself, and now using spatial portals connecting distant coordinates as nothing more than a guillotine’s edge?
Ha. What a cruel, cursed jest.
What proved even more chilling was the manner of the execution: the demon had slaughtered them cleanly, granting an instantaneous death devoid of suffering.
Does it truly possess no appetite for despair?
As a rule, demons prioritized harvesting the negative emotions of their prey above all else. It was both their depraved indulgence and the vital sustenance that preserved their very existence in the mortal coil. Yet the demon that had manifested in Montpellier showed no such inclinations. Why? Why would a high-ranking fiend display utter indifference to human agony—
Fzzzt.
“…!”
The atmosphere shuddered. It was no mere poetic exaggeration. The very air vibrated with a razor-sharp density, scraping against exposed flesh with such force that any loose grit clinging to their skin would have been stripped bare in an instant.
“Hmph.”
There, standing in the empty expanse where no one had stood a fraction of a heartbeat before, was a figure that appeared as though he had inhabited the space from the beginning of time. In stark contrast to his corpse-pale flesh, horns and scales the color of congealed blood adorned his imposing silhouette. Yet unlike common demons, he was clad in an archaic, majestic suit of armor that bore an uncanny resemblance to a high mage’s ceremonial robes.
Though he lacked the leathery wings that served as the hallmark of demonkind, the sheer pressure of demonic magi sending violent tremors through the marrow of every man present made verification entirely redundant.
This was the demon.
Well… everyone is certainly terrified.
Then again, having their comrades' heads lopped off out of thin air without a word of warning would naturally scare the wits out of anyone. …Though, to be completely honest, I had actually been aiming for their hands, not their necks. Ugh. Why did my spatial calibration slip at the last fraction of a second?
More importantly, though… I’m genuinely numb to this.
I had intervened in a fit of genuine fury because innocent civilians were about to be slaughtered on my account. Yet looking at the priests who had just died by my hand, I felt nothing at all. Truly, it felt no different than crushing dry autumn leaves beneath my boot while strolling down an untended street.
…Good grief. It felt a bit late in the game to dwell on it, but I really had turned into a monster, hadn’t I? The sheer identity crisis was dizzying.
If I let down my guard and surrendered my conscious will to the physiological instincts of this demonic vessel, I could vividly see the future where I transformed into the textbook archdemon. I had to prevent that at all costs. Once this ordeal blew over, I would sit down and fill an entire journal with memories of my life as a human and my fundamental moral compass. I’d make a habit of reading through it every day while meditating, ensuring Faust’s monstrous vessel never swallowed my ego whole.
Crackle—!
“…Hmph.”
Ah, right. These guys were still here. Frankly speaking, nothing they threw at me was capable of dealing even a scratch, so I had completely spaced out and forgotten about them for a moment.
“H-How… How can this be…”
“Pray, provide fair warning next time. Had it been anyone other than myself, a grave calamity would have unfolded, would it not?”
Since I had severed the executioners’ heads, the opposing side had flown into such a berserk state that rational communication was utterly out of the question. So I had simply stood there, allowing the Church’s forces to rain down spells until their temper ran cold. But there had been zero sign of them letting up. I had grown so profoundly bored waiting that my mind had wandered off entirely.
Though this latest volley was slightly different from the rest. Up until now, their spells hadn't even registered on my sensory threshold, whereas that last hit actually carried a faint tingle—not that it did any damage, of course.
“Quickly! We must finish him before he can invoke that decapitation spell again!!”
What in the world was he babbling about now? Finish me before I could cast it again? Where did he get the idea that—ah. Wait, of course.
Skills in Noah always had cooldowns.
Every game implemented skill cooldowns for the sake of mechanical balance. As a general rule, the more devastating the skill, the longer the cooldown; the weaker the skill, the faster the recycle. Given that this world mirrored the architecture of Noah with uncanny precision, the same underlying logic likely governed their perception of magic. Through their eyes, my spatial decapitator would have looked like an ultimate, instantaneous-death spell. Naturally, an instant-kill spell would carry an absurdly prolonged cooldown, making their tactical deduction reasonable enough from an in-game perspective.
Pity for them that the premise was completely wrong.
Whirrr.
“Thou speakest of this, I presume.”
“…!”
The moment a miniature spatial portal flared open above my outstretched palm, the jaw of the man who seemed to be leading the exorcism task force clamped shut in stunned silence. The rest of his underlings were still shouting frantic nonsense, but he, at least, had frozen solid. Oh, so he was the one who had actually seen the portal sever their necks. Given their pitiful overall performance, I hadn't expected anyone here to possess the kinetic vision to catch it. Consider me pleasantly surprised.
“H-How… To evoke such high magic in immediate succession… There should be tremendous arcane backlash…”
“The world is vast, mortal.”
To be perfectly frank, opening a spatial portal wasn't even an offensive spell. It was essentially opening a pocket dimension inventory. Had I ever faced a system restriction or a cooldown just for opening my dimensional storage box? Never. I was just the weirdo who decided to weaponize the inventory boundary as a guillotine blade.
Still… aside from that spatial tear, I hadn't actually tried machine-gunning the exact same spell in rapid succession yet. I'd have to run some practical tests later to see if my body was subject to any cooldown mechanics.
“Hast thou found the inclination to converse now?”
“Converse?! We do not parley with foul demons!”
“Incomprehensible. Are we not already exchanging words as we speak?”
“…”
To me, it was nothing more than a casual quip, but the Church's brass clearly didn't take it as a joke. The priests who had been snapping back with self-righteous zeal fell abruptly, completely silent.
Ugh, this is so suffocating.
Why were they moving at a snail's pace? How much longer was I supposed to stand around waiting for them to find their tongues? Maybe I should just kill them al—wait, no, no! What the hell was I thinking? My body might be that of an archdemon, but my mind was still human. I had to exercise patience and wait them out. Yes, deep breaths.