Chapter 31

Chapter 31: Remnants

Vanna looked up at the woman in the black dress who was checking the cultists’ mental state. The woman noticed her gaze, looked up as well, and gave her a small nod.

The woman looked only a bit over twenty, yet she had a calm, steady air that felt far more mature than her age. Her black hair was coiled up at the back of her head. Pale blue crystal earrings hung from her ears, catching and reflecting the light of a nearby gas lamp when they swung.

“…Heidi is here too… Did City Hall send her?” Vanna asked the young guardian beside her.

“No. When this happened, Heidi just happened to be nearby. She came as soon as she heard the news. Is that a problem?”

“No, nothing is wrong. Heidi may be an employee of City Hall, but she has worked with the Church for a long time. We can just file a field record afterward,” Vanna said, shaking her head. She quickly turned her attention back to the matter at hand. As she examined the cult priest who had lost his mind and died, she asked casually: “What else did the cultists who could still talk say? What was the situation at the time?”

“Their words were very confused. Two of them said that the normal sacrificial ritual had already ended. Then someone suddenly caught a runaway sacrificial victim near the hall. So the envoy decided to offer this sacrificial victim to the Sun,” the guardian said, trying to recall the details. “Those two cultists were standing far from the altar and did not see clearly what happened on the platform. They only said that the sacrificial victim had a hole through his heart but did not die. Instead, he shouted the Sun’s name at the top of his lungs and named the envoy as the new sacrificial victim. Then the envoy was sacrificed.”

“…A person chosen as a sacrificial victim called out the name of an eldritch god on the spot and just like that turned the ritual leader into the one who got sacrificed?” Vanna felt as if she had heard some wild story. It sounded absurd, but these words came from a guardian of the Church who had been strictly trained and was loyal and reliable. She had no choice but to take it seriously, and her expression grew strange. “How could something so ridiculous happen? If this really worked, then at all those cult rituals, wouldn’t any victim who could talk fast enough be able to turn the tables and kill the heretic priests?”

“Exactly. Even the worst priest still holds absolute control when leading a ritual. How could a weak ordinary person push the ritual into such a runaway state with a single sentence? Besides, we have examined this priest. He clearly bears the marks of corruption from projections coming from the deep layers of the world. He was a true ‘baptized one’. And according to the cultists at the scene, he was holding a ritual dagger with divine blessing at the time…”

The young guardian shook his head as he spoke, then walked over to another body lying nearby.

“But… please take a look at this. This is the ‘sacrificial victim’ who turned on the priest.”

Vanna glanced at the guardian, then let her gaze fall on the lifeless corpse. In the next second her eyes sharpened.

It was a thin young man. He was so skinny that his build was closer to that of a boy. The most striking anomaly on his body was the empty hole in his chest.

“…He had already been sacrificed…”

“Yes. This was a sacrificial victim who had already been offered up,” the guardian said in a serious tone. “Judging from the traces at the scene and the cultists’ statements, this ‘sacrificial victim’ had probably already lost his heart before he was pushed onto the platform. So the real situation then was that a walking corpse, in front of everyone, went up onto the platform and killed the priest leading the ritual, treating him as the new sacrificial victim.”

“…A necromancer’s trick?” Vanna muttered to herself as she thought it through. “No. The power of the Black Sun greatly restrains necromancers. Their walking corpses could never stroll right up to the totem of the Black Sun. Was it a revenant controlled by some anomaly?”

“Have you checked the lighting nearby?” she suddenly asked, looking up at the guardian beside her. “Within five hundred meters, is there any underground space that is completely dark?”

“We checked. There are no lightless caverns. Even cultists know how dangerous lightless caverns are. In the caves where they dumped bodies, they still left torches and oil lamps. They were very careful about that.”

Vanna did not speak for a moment. She bent down over the young man’s body, filled with doubt. She carefully examined the “sacrificial victim” who had, in front of so many witnesses, managed to sacrifice an extraordinary priest and send the ritual into a complete runaway state. At the same time, she reached out and lifted the corpse’s stiff eyelid, trying to find some trace left by heretical power.

Suddenly, it seemed as if a faint light flashed at the edge of her vision. She thought she saw the young man’s corpse crack its eyes open a little. Pale green fire flickered in the empty eyeballs. A tiny spark leapt out and landed on the tip of her extended right index finger, then drifted away on the wind.

Vanna’s gaze turned cold. In an instant she drew the dagger at her waist with her left hand and, without any hesitation, sliced off her own right index finger. Then she reversed her grip and drove the dagger straight into the corpse’s forehead. The priest’s dagger, its blade covered in runes, suddenly burst into roaring flames that swallowed the corpse whole.

She took less than a second to do all of this. By the time the fire engulfed the body, she had already straightened up and stepped back two paces. She pulled out a small bottle of holy oil, which had been blessed with divine power, from her belt. She bit out the cork and poured the oil onto her right hand, which was gushing blood. When the holy oil touched flesh and blood, it gave off a loud hiss and thick white smoke.

Stabbing pain rushed through her hand, but Vanna’s face did not change at all. She saw that the guardian who had been beside her all this time had already drawn the steel sword at his waist. With one stroke, he chopped off the head of the “sacrificial victim” burning in the flames. Then he threw a dose of medicine into the fire, a mixture of seaweed extract and silver powder.

With sharp crackling blasts and flames that surged up almost to the ceiling, the twisted corpse turned to ash in the blink of an eye.

The fierce fire did not spread to any of the other bodies nearby.

The guardians around them had all reacted. Half of them drew runic steel swords and closed in around Vanna. The other half pulled out large-caliber revolvers and quickly formed a ring of guards farther out. The two priests on site also drew revolvers from beneath their robes. As they pointed the guns at the raving cultists who had grown restless because of the sudden change, they held censers over the gun barrels, blessed the weapons with divine power, and chanted the name of the storm goddess Gamona.

“Inquisitor!” The young guardian with the steel sword finally rushed to Vanna’s side. “Are you all right? Just now…”

“There was some kind of power left in that ‘sacrificial victim’. It slipped past all the protections the goddess gave me and even past my psychic ward,” Vanna said, waving her hand. Her gaze dropped to her right hand. The goddess’s gift was taking effect. The finger cut off by the dagger was wriggling as it slowly grew back. Yet even as the pain slowly faded, she did not feel any calmer.

“Something is wrong. This was not just the work of the Black Sun. Some other powerful force also visited this sacrificial ritual… and that force has not fully left. It still wants something,” the inquisitor said quickly, making her judgment. “Move everyone and everything we have seized to the Cathedral and keep them under strict watch. All further examinations and interrogations will be done inside the Cathedral. This whole site must go through complete purification. Is there anyone else in the area?”

A guardian beside her answered at once: “Yes. We rescued a group of people from another cavern nearby. They were imprisoned as ‘future sacrificial victims’. They are being kept in a nearby pipe room for now.”

“Take them too. Bring them all to the Cathedral. They may be victims, but they must still go through strict checks before we send them home,” Vanna said quickly. Then she seemed to remember something. “Where is Heidi? Is she all right?”

“I am here.” A calm female voice sounded nearby. The woman in the black dress, the “psychiatrist” hired by City Hall, walked over at an unhurried pace and nodded to Vanna. “Do not worry. I did not react at all just now. So what exactly happened?”

“…Just like in many classic tales, the cultists provoked something more evil than themselves,” Vanna said, giving the “psychiatrist” a look. “I strongly suggest that when you examine these cultists and put them under hypnosis later, you add extra layers of protection. Something that should not have appeared showed up here… and it has left remnants behind.”