What the Hell Kind of Church Is This (3)
"...Did you pull your punch because you were scared you'd kill her?"
"I wasn't going all out, but I hit her for real... She's terrifying. We can run, right?"
"Honestly, I'm thinking about ditching the job and running myself."
The nun had taken a blow hard enough to shatter a statue, and far from showing pain, she wore the face of someone about to ascend to heaven on the spot. No—more precisely, she was feeling the pain. It had simply been converted into pleasure, so she couldn't register it as anything else.
"Aaaah... To be struck in the stomach without even the chance to resist... I never knew it could feel this rapturous...♡"
"Senpai, I don't think there's any saving her. Blood ought to be coming out, at least, but she's drooling instead."
The nun crept closer, saliva spilling from her mouth like a beggar set before a feast. The problem was that the feast in front of her was us. On top of that, her abdomen had been hit hard enough to break a statue, and she didn't have a scratch, let alone blood. Setting aside how dangerous her proclivities were—dangerous enough that we ought to be running right now—she wasn't an opponent we could handle in the first place.
"Would you do it just one more time?♡ ...And if not... will you give me some other kind of pain?♡"
"...Let's talk this out first! We're rational beings, aren't we? Rational beings?"
"For that to work, we'd have to not have attacked first without even talki—"
I clamped a hand over Dias's mouth. No sense of the room at all—she was trying to win with facts instead of spin and fabrication. At my words the approaching nun came to a halt, as if she'd slipped a little way back toward her right mind. Her body had stopped. The look in her eyes had not. She was still watching us like nothing more than tools for producing pleasure, and it was skin-crawling.
"My name is Han Arim. I run an errand agency. Who are you, and why are you doing this?"
"Oh my. I was late with my introduction. I'm Melis, the saintess of the SM Church."
"Never mind that you've given up on hiding it... a saintess? You?"
A genuine masochist who enjoyed taking a punch that could stop a truck? That was a saintess? I found myself wondering whether, in this world, the "saint" in saintess had been named for sex rather than sanctity.
"Yes. Unlike the other sisters, the church's saintess wears white like this, with gold embroidery."
It was true that Melis's clothes, unlike the habits I'd seen on the nuns that morning, were a pure white without a single stain. Which meant the genuine masochist standing in front of me really was the saintess...
"So what, then. Is the god this church believes in a masochist, or a sadist?"
"Ah, the god we believe in is a genuine sadist. He enjoys the sight of the faithful in pain."
"And we're allowed to call that a god?"
A church whose priests and nuns were mostly masochists, and whose saintess was a genuine one on top of that. I'd thrown the question out half as a joke, wondering what sort of disposition a god believed in by a church like this could possibly have, and Melis introduced her god with a gentle smile and a thoroughly violent vocabulary.
"Anyway. Why have you been knocking out not just the faithful lately, but the priests as well?"
"Pardon? This is the first I'm hearing of it. I only just got back from vacation, you see."
Melis tipped her head to one side, wearing the puzzled look of someone hearing the story for the very first time. Watching her, I could tell it wasn't a lie. She really didn't know.
"Then why are you at the church this late at night... and why did you touch my shoulder?"
"There was someone still at prayer so late. I was worried, so I meant to advise them to stop for today, go home, and get a good night's sleep."
For all that her proclivities were badly warped, she was thinking exactly like a saintess, and the cognitive dissonance hit me hard. At the same time, the real culprit still hadn't shown themselves. I set a hand to my chest, ready to change my race back into a golem.
"Race Transfo—!!"
"Too late~"
A beat faster than I could finish, a lovely voice rang through the church. The moment it did, my body locked in place, as if time itself had stopped. To use the ability, my hand absolutely had to be touching my body, and I had to speak the words Race Transformation. My hand was touching me. My mouth had stopped, and the activation was cut off before it could begin.
"That was close~ If she hadn't been the saintess, she'd have died as a donut."
"........"
"Oh, right. You can't talk, can you? Looked like you were about to do something just now..."
The moment the real culprit's hand touched my frozen arm, the binding came loose. She peeled my hand off my body and froze me again. The instant my hand left me I could move my mouth freely, and it didn't mean a thing.
Wavy hair shining violet. Red eyes that seemed liable to blur my consciousness just from meeting them.
"A succubus..."
"Correct! Then you can guess why I've been attacking men all this time, right?"
"Let me guess. Running low on essence?"
"Kihihi! Bingo!!"
An inverted-triangle tail stretching long from the base of her spine, wings that called a bat to mind, and horns rising behind her head told me exactly what the culprit was. Unlike the succubi of fiction, who can't live without a man's vital essence, the succubi here could get by on an ordinary meal. Of course, I'd heard that their race's overflowing lust and their striking looks meant they mostly worked in that particular industry. But essence was tied to life itself, and I'd also heard that these days succubi hardly absorbed it at all...
"Then go to a brothel. Why are you messing with believers who didn't do anything to you?"
"The ones who come to brothels barely have any essence to begin with. Churchgoers abstain, so they're packed absolutely full of it. I was only helping them let a little out."
"If the person didn't want it, that's extortion. Far as I know, most succubi don't absorb essence. Why are you doing it?"
"It's supposed to be a secret~ but I'll make a special exception and tell you! I'm going to gather up tons of essence and become the Succubus Queen!"
She must have been stifling herself, cramming the secret back down until it was unbearable, because the plan came spilling out of her.
"Once I'm the Succubus Queen, I'll have the authority to command every succubus by force. With that, I'm going to restore the succubi to glory."
"I'd love to know how little you think of this city's police, to cook up a plan like that."
"The police? One whiff of this scent and I can puppet them however I want. How would they stop me? That's how I become king of a city ruled by succubi! And while I'm at it, I'll keep the handsome men as my subordinates."
"That last part's the real goal."
A power that could freeze a body with nothing but a smell was, admittedly, a pretty good one. Races it didn't work on could be counted on one hand, so if she could only find a way to spread the scent over the whole city, the plan might actually succeed. She could talk like that only because she had no idea what the police who kept this dump from flying apart were really capable of.
"Anyway, you've heard my plan, and I can't leave the witnesses who saw me ali—"
"What's a washboard bitch yapping about?"
"...What did you just say?"
"I said washboard bitch. Why? You're so flat I could lay you down and prep ingredients on top of you."
The succubus had been a breath away from setting a hand on my head, draining every drop of my essence, and turning me into a mummy. Dias, who like me could move nothing but her mouth, provoked her instead. The taunt landed dead center. Killing intent poured off the succubus thick enough to sting the skin. It must have been a complex of hers to begin with, and having it poked by Dias—whose chest announced itself with considerable presence—made her react far more than she needed to.
KRAK!!
"Ghk...!!"
"You asked to die first, so I'll oblige. Special for you: I'll kill you with the most painful suffocation there is."
"I'll admit it, a sloshing wave pool beats a wall that wouldn't budge in an earthqua—"
"Why are you in such a hurry to die?"
The succubus clamped my throat hard enough for the veins to stand out in her hand. The oxygen coming through my neck dwindled, my vision slowly blurred, and my consciousness began to sink beneath the surface.
A light tap.
"The pain of a throat squeezed until the air is about to cut off is quite the delicacy, but these people don't want that, so I'd appreciate it if you stopped~"
"...Figures a saintess would have some resistance. If you can move, the smart thing would've been to get out and call for help."
Just before my breath gave out, Melis—unlike the two of us, who still couldn't move—came up behind the succubus and touched her shoulder. Her divine power must have let her resist the ability. The succubus took her hands off our necks, cupped Melis's face, and began to draw out her essence.
"Kihihihi!! A saintess, all right! The essence you've stored up is insane?!"
"............"
Saintess or not, standing there and letting her essence be drained like that was dangerous. Melis had to know it, and she didn't so much as resist with her divine power. Ten minutes passed with the essence still being sucked out. I was just starting to wonder whether the process always took this long when the succubus reacted.
"W-what is this amount of essence. Even for a saintess, this much is impossible...!!"
So it wasn't supposed to take this long. The succubus broke into a cold sweat, badly shaken. She tried to pull her hand from Melis's face and stop the absorption, but Melis snatched that hand with a fierce grip and wouldn't let it leave.
"Come to think of it, I introduced my name, but not my race."
A soft rush of air. A slither.
The instant Melis finished speaking, a tail and wings identical to the succubus's sprouted from her. The veil on her head came away, revealing the horns it had hidden, and her clothes changed as well—not the robes of a saintess, but a dress of pitch black.
"The church's saintess is a masochist succubus queen. This place is running just great."
"So this is what it feels like to have your essence drawn out of you. I asked other succubi to try, and they were so horrified I never learned what it was like... thank you, truly."
"H-hiek...!! I— me— no! I was wrong!! I can't absorb this much!!"
The essence pouring from Melis in her true form had grown so thick that even my eyes, an ordinary human's, could see it. The succubus begged her to please, please stop. Melis only wore that same saintly, benevolent smile, and took one step closer.
"You let me experience having my essence sucked out, so I'll give you all the essence you wanted."
"No...!! Don't come any closer...!!"
Clamp!!
Pale with terror, the succubus stumbled backward, and in the end she hit the wall and her retreat was cut off. Melis pulled the cornered succubus into a tight embrace, and the transfer of essence—until then limited to her hand—spread through the whole body, the volume becoming overwhelming. The succubus's vessel had already been on the verge of overflowing. Far from stopping, the essence poured in, and the vessel didn't merely spill over. It shattered.
A wet gurgle...
Force-fed far too much essence, the succubus foamed at the mouth, rolled her eyes back to the whites, and fainted. The moment she did, the freeze on our bodies came undone on its own, and I offered Melis my thanks.
"You saved our lives. I'll pass the commission fee along in their place."
"I only did what a saintess ought to do~"
"But what are you going to do? A saintess's robes are pretty expensive, aren't they?"
Dias fretted over the clothes that had vanished when Melis changed into the Succubus Queen. At her worry, Melis smiled, bright and easy.
"It's fine~ I can just paint them on again."
"Oh~ just paint them on again... paint them?"
"It takes a little while, though~"
Dias asked again, wondering if she'd misheard. I pinched my own cheeks a few times, in case the aftermath of not being able to breathe was still on me.
"The depravity of standing naked before the faithful at their devout prayers, without a single thought for a saintess's duty...♡"
"..........."
"..........."
Melis twisted herself into knots and started drooling all over again, and the two of us promptly forgot how to speak. A genuine masochist, exhibitionist succubus queen for a saintess. Around here, the saintess really was a saintess in the carnal sense.
"Ah. Instead of the commission, could you perhaps let me feel a different kind of pain?"
"...One thing does come to mind that would suit you."
I thought it over for a moment at Melis's request, then decided to let her experience the very first person who came to mind from my past life whenever someone said saintess.
Just as the gallery post I'd been reading said, I burned Melis on a cross, the way Joan of Arc met her end. An ordinary burning at the stake seemed to disappoint her a little, but now—with everyone watching her burn, and photos being taken—she looked satisfied, worked up with excitement. At the same time, I resolved that I was not going anywhere near that place if I could help it.