What the Hell Kind of Church Is This (2)
"This may be rude of me, but... might I ask one question?"
"What sort of question needs a warning like that...?"
"I'm afraid it might come off as speciesist."
On the way to the church, I finally let out the question I'd been unable to swallow since the moment I met the priest. My grave face drew a slightly tense answer from him, and after a brief pause to think it over, he nodded.
"Skeletons... undead, I mean. They get scorched by holy power and vanish, don't they?"
"That is a question we receive rather often."
"People ask this often?"
"The pairing of undead and church is quite novel, you see."
Far from taking offense or looking the least bit uncomfortable, the priest let out a big, easy laugh and said it was something he heard all the time. I'd worried the question was ruder than I'd calculated, and that fire might come pouring out of his mouth. When nothing of the sort happened, I relaxed—and let go of Dias's shoulder, the one I'd been holding in reserve as a shield.
"Sunbae. You were about to use me as a shield just now..."
"So how do you withstand holy power?"
Dias, having caught on that I'd meant to use her as a shield, glared at me hard enough to drill a hole through my skull. I turned my head, ignored her, and asked the priest for the method.
"Once you know the truth, it is quite simple. One need only be strong enough to endure holy power."
"...Someone of your standing as a priest must be a fairly devout believer, no?"
"That is so. Which is why my body need only be stronger than my faith. Devotion kept, body kept healthy. Two birds with one stone, would you not say?"
So saying, he wrapped a hand around the crucifix at his neck and began to pray, meaning to show me himself. Smoke rose from his body almost at once—the purification reaction that strikes undead races under holy power. By all rights he should have crumbled to dust and vanished. The priest's body only smoked. It did not wither.
"Does this much serve as an answer?"
"Yes. But even so, the pain itself is still there, isn't it?"
"Of course it is. I endure by regarding this, too, as penance."
"Ah~"
"Ah?"
A word that should never have left a priest's mouth came tumbling out of one, and my brain buffered on the spot. Thinking I might have misheard, I covered my ears and uncovered them a few times. The priest nailed the point down, making it perfectly clear I had not misheard at all.
"I need not even ask another person. Prayer alone is enough to feel pain. How wonderful is that?"
"Ah... right... I see?"
"Of course, most participate out of genuine piety, so I would prefer you not hold too many preconceptions."
"Aigoo. As if I would."
Touch the wrong nerve and there was no telling what I'd bring down on myself. Cursed knowledge I'd never wanted had been beaten into my skull, and contrary to what I'd just said, I walked a step farther from the priest.
"It's a preference, so we ought to respect it, right?"
"I can respect it. I just can't understand it."
"That's exactly how I felt a minute ago."
Dias had taken in the same cursed knowledge and drifted off from the priest, forced at last to stand where I'd been standing. When I asked if she finally understood how I felt, she nodded, reluctant.
Only after about twenty minutes of walking did the church finally come into view.
"It's enormous..."
"It is the only church in this city. The faithful are quite numerous, so it could hardly be small."
A magnificent church, occupying at least twice the ground of the buildings around it. Had I been looking at it before that conversation, I might have felt nothing but how grand it was. After the conversation, I couldn't shake the sense that people in leather would be waiting inside to welcome me.
"Welcome to our Est Embert Church."
"What's the short version?"
"Most people call it the SM Church."
"This is a church, right?"
Faced with a name so earnestly devoted to desire, I had to seriously consider whether something like this was even allowed to be called a church. Half afraid that stepping inside would unfold something wearing a church's hide, I went in anyway.
"You've returned, Father Mast. Might these be the ones who are to resolve the incident?"
"They are, Sister Meriam. Would you assist them, so they may investigate the church freely?"
The priest left us with the nun called Meriam and headed off to see to his own duties. Come to think of it, every client I'd taken so far, I'd addressed only as a customer, or by whatever job they held. There was no need to get close once a request was accepted, but knowing a name seemed wise enough. I resolved to ask for names first from now on.
"Is there anything I might help with, or anything you wish to know?"
"Is the victim here right now?"
"Yes. Just the one. Shall I call them?"
"Please."
At my request, Meriam turned toward the faithful at prayer. For the record, she too was of the race called zombies—nails driven into her head, skin patched and stitched over.
"She's... one of those too, right?"
"Odds are pretty high, yeah."
Before long, Meriam returned leading one of the worshippers who had been praying.
"Greetings. I am Father Kankul, the victim."
"...You didn't misspeak and mean the perpetrator, did you?"
"Pardon?"
"Sorry. That slipped out."
An orc introduced himself as the victim—an overwhelming height, enough that you'd have to stack two of me to even come close, and muscle fit to split his skin. A build so massive I had to crane my neck nearly to a right angle just to see his face. I had real doubts this was a victim's physique and not a perpetrator's.
"Could you explain what happened then?"
"The hour was late night, the moon already risen. At the request of the other priests, I was on patrol, so that no incident might occur."
"Night... and after that, you lost your memory and collapsed?"
"To be precise, I was seized by a sudden compulsion that I must pray. I closed my eyes, offered the prayer, and then I collapsed. When I came to, the strength had left my entire body, and I could scarcely move."
"Here is a list on which the victims are recorded in detail."
Meriam had slipped away for a moment; when she reappeared, she handed me a list of the victims. I ran my eyes down it, studying their races. Bull, elephant, horse, orc, whale, and the like. Most of those hit were races with large builds to begin with.
"How long has it been since you were attacked?"
"Roughly two days."
"Think any scent would still be hanging around after that? Dias, give him a sniff."
"Okaaay~"
Unless someone was picking them on purpose, a victim list that consistent had no business existing. Two days had passed, so I wasn't sure the culprit's scent would remain, but if even a trace lingered, Dias could track it. I had her try.
She shoved her face in close to Kankul and sniffed a few times, and a puzzled look rose over her features.
"Do you happen to wear perfume, or anything like that?"
"No. Nothing of the sort."
"None of the orcs I've met so far smelled like this... so there really is a culprit, huh."
"Think you can track it?"
Dias sniffed at the empty air a few more times, then shook her head, firm that she couldn't. In the end, all we'd learned was that most of the victims were large-bodied races, and that a person had done this—not some phenomenon.
"So there's only one answer."
"We're waiting here till night?"
"What else am I supposed to do? We took the request. Anyway, was it a smell you'd smelled before?"
"No. First time in my life. Kind of sweet-and-salty? What's for sure is, if that were the original scent, it'd be sweet enough to enchant you the second you smelled it."
A race that could give off a sweet scent by nature. Dias had never smelled it, so the odds favored either a rare race or one that didn't come outside. Or maybe she had smelled it and forgotten, her memory running nicely inverse to her physical ability.
"Times like this, you ask the gallery and it all comes spilling out."
"When I ask, they only ever tell me nonsense."
"That's because you don't know how to ask."
The second the bait landed, replies came down in a heap. Useless ones made up most of the pile, but a few pieces of actually decent information were in there too.
"But Sunbae. If we stay here, won't we get hit the same way?"
"No. Scent or whatever else, they're definitely inflicting a status ailment, so we can prepare for it."
Once that groundwork for catching the culprit was laid, night came on before I knew it, the insects in the grass striking up their orchestra.
I put on a priest's robes and wandered every corner of the church, playing a priest who knew nothing. I patrolled the whole place, confirmed nothing was wrong, and was just about to shut the doors and step outside.
Fwww...
A smell drifted in, as if a dessert someone had violently packed with sugar were sitting right under my nose. The instant I caught it, I stepped up to the statue carved in the image of a god, knelt, and offered prayer like a devout believer. Steady footsteps sounded behind me.
Heels filling a church with no one in it—enough to stand the hair up on my neck. I didn't move an inch.
"...Um."
"Now!!!"
BANG!! The instant the culprit reached to lay a hand on me, the signal rang clear all the way outside the church, and Dias kicked the doors in and charged. WHAM!!! KRAAASH!! No time to react. The figure we took for the culprit smashed through the statue and went tumbling.
"...Did I hit too hard?"
"Hit like that, they're dead."
Stone dust was still coming down. I brushed at my body and shifted my race back to human. What I'd been transformed into was a golem. Their build isn't like other races' from the body up, so status ailments don't take on them by nature. Anyway, I started over to check whether the criminal—hit hard enough to break a statue—was alive or dead.
Click... click...
The sound came again. Dias and I stared, fully on guard, at the culprit pushing out of the thick dust. The figure that emerged was...
It was a nun, clutching the abdomen Dias had struck, her body twitching. She wasn't twitching because the pain was bad enough to kill her. She was twitching because the pleasure was so rapturous she looked ready to collapse where she stood.
Heart eyes. A face drowned in bliss. One finger raised. At the sight of her, our expressions twisted, and a horror we had no words for came over us.