The sun had set completely.
Night settled over Oscalt, and the shabby inn was no longer yellow either.
I was lounging about like an idler on the first floor of the inn, stripped of its color.
"Hey."
No answer came back.
The innkeeper, sprawled face-down on the counter with his head buried, did not budge no matter how many times I called.
"......."
Two hours had passed since I first called him.
Suspicion had turned into proof.
Everyone in Oscalt was frozen.
Without a word I pushed the inn's door open and stepped out.
The surroundings were still.
To put it more precisely, not a single sound could be heard save one.
The only sound riding the wind through the sunken city.
It was the cathedral's bell, which had no business ringing in the dead of night.
'Kallen.'
An unease I could not put a name to came over me.
Rarely for me, I was tense enough that my hands and feet tingled.
The night in Oscalt was dark.
Because there was no one lighting the lamps.
I could only move by relying on fragmentary outlines of the roadside and the bell that would not stop, as though calling me.
The clanking of my plate armor grated on me unusually.
My helm, which could never feel awkward, felt stifling and ill-fitting.
Such thoughts did not last long.
Because a brightly lit lot spread out before my eyes.
"Kallen Leont."
At my voice, a figure turned around.
It was Kallen, his expression no different from usual.
Perhaps he had set his shoulder; the yellowed cloth that had bound it was nowhere to be seen.
He came slowly toward me.
There was a loaf of bread in Kallen's hand.
Now that I looked, everyone gathered in the lot before the cathedral was holding food of some kind.
"You didn't come back, so I came to fetch you."
I said that much, and shut my mouth.
I could not bear the bitterness of it in my mouth.
Kallen spread both arms wide, as though for an embrace.
I watched Kallen walking quietly toward me.
A century or so.
That was how long I had waged a bloody war with the Luxeon Cult.
For a hundred years I went on killing those bastards.
"Revolting."
Naturally, I could not help growing familiar with their methods.
Kallen lunged at me.
I saw a blade glinting inside the bread he held.
"Kallen. Can you hear me?"
"......."
"Put that down. Do you mean to harm me?"
"......."
"To try to kill me with mere bread of all things...... No, that's enough."
———SNAP
The sensation of breaking something hard ran up through my gauntlet.
A sensation I had gone past familiarity with and into revulsion for.
Kallen, his neck broken, collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
"......."
The dead do not speak.
Kallen had not spoken even before his neck bone broke.
"How bland. I thought you would be shaken at least a little."
That unchangingly merciful, benevolent voice.
Within the frozen crowd stood the bishop of the Ecclesia cathedral.
"......What would one more wound change, on a heart already turned to rags?"
Rags torn to shreds remain rags however much you slash them.
My heart had already been torn through in the hundred years of fighting those bastards.
I looked at Kallen's corpse lying still.
His face was still no different from usual.
The face that squeezed its eyes shut in the mansion in Brüs.
The face that drank water boiled from willow bark while racked with fever.
The face that hid its tears in the rain as we left the Talios Order.
The face that confessed its happiness with such innocence.
All of it had surfaced on the face of a man dead with his neck snapped.
"Let me ask."
I could not bring myself to face it, so I turned my head away.
Where my gaze landed stood the bishop, exactly as he had been in the afternoon.
"Are you Findel Morein?"
"That is so."
"Are you Luxeon's man?"
"That is so."
"Is Ecclesia Luxeon?"
"That is so."
"Then the healing miracle Ecclesia performs would be Luxeon's divine authority. Applied cleverly, the power of Sculpting could manage it. Did you deform everyone in Oscalt, Kallen included, with the divine authority of Sculpting?"
"As you see, that is so."
To use divine authority on the entire population of a city and turn them into puppets.
It was an absurd notion, but Findel must have been carrying out that work for a very long time, since before he came to Brüs.
If Eladin's divine authority is Domination, then Luxeon's divine authority is Sculpting.
A divine authority that carves and shapes the form and essence of an existence at will.
Applied cleverly, it can accomplish a fair variety of things.
For instance:
Laying a restriction that turns part of the body into poison if a certain condition is broken.
Or planting a trigger in a subject the authority has been used on and handling them as a puppet.
Though in the case of puppets the efficiency is not very good.
They do not obey their master's word; each specific command has to be sculpted in one at a time.
Kallen would have been sculpted into something along the lines of 'an existence that, upon finding Roan Belgard, approaches slowly with its arms spread and then swings the object in its hand.'
"Questions still remain. However long you spent on it, that doesn't change the fact that you performed an enormous number of blessings. How was that possible?"
"Roan Belgard. Ghost of the past. The world has changed."
Findel Morein invoked my name as though reciting a prayer.
"Seventy years since you trampled us. In that time two long-entrenched marquis houses of the Empire declined, a new ducal house was raised, and the imperial house was replaced. When even the master of this land changes, is there any rule that says we may not?"
"Are you offering me riddles?"
"I have clearly answered your question. All of this is the work of our god, Luxeon."
"......."
All of this arrangement.
Handing Formel to the lord of Brüs, turning Oscalt into puppets, standing Findel Morein before me.
He was saying all of it was Luxeon's doing.
One outrageous leap crossed my mind.
It was nothing but a leap, but when I considered the impact it would carry if it was not a leap, I could not help clenching my fist for a moment.
"You didn't receive Luxeon's divine power."
The bishop, Findel Morein, smiled with a face full of delight.
"It wasn't you who worked the divine authority with Luxeon's divine power. You're nothing but a passage through which Luxeon can interfere with the world. Luxeon borrowed your body and bestowed the blessing on Oscalt's residents directly."
"Well now...... I have nothing to say to that."
"So of course it could only be 'a thing god performs.' You're not a vessel capable of blessing hundreds; you were never a vessel at all."
The world had changed.
As an infant grows into an adult and matures.
Groups too change with the passing of time, and grow.
Over the past seventy years the Luxeon Cult had become a greater monster than I had imagined.
"Correct. Our god has begun to interfere with the world. I am Luxeon. Not only I, but everyone in the order is Luxeon. Because our every will is Luxeon's will, all of us are Luxeon."
Becoming Luxeon's passage would presumably require the man himself to accept divine power to some degree as well.
That every member of the faith directly received power was in all likelihood a lie of his.
But even so, the fact that the level of bishop-class and above had risen far beyond what it was seventy years ago was fatal.
"If such a thing were possible, the world would be under the order's rule by now. What exactly is so special about Luxeon that he's doing what no other god has managed?"
"Roan Belgard. Crisis is another name for opportunity. On that point, no amount of gratitude to you would be enough."
"......."
"Eladin, was it? The god you serve."
The lackey of the bastard who killed my lover spoke my lover's name.
How could I not shudder with humiliation?
I had to summon superhuman patience to keep from tearing his maw open on the spot.
"Are you not curious how the remnants of that one can be handled with the divine authority our god holds? No, why do you suppose Eladin was killed in the first place? Naturally, entirely naturally, our god did so because some gain could be taken from the act. Over these seventy years, what exactly did you think that gain was?"
"That's enough. Say any more and I might grind you to paste."
"What exactly have you been feeling, riding the fruit of that gain about without a second thought?"
I drew my sword and lunged at the bishop.
Tried to lunge.
Until Kallen, his head bent at a bizarre angle, caught my ankle.
With that as the mark, every human in the lot began to swell.
Bodies falling away, growing, running down, being sculpted into forms that resembled nothing at all.
In the middle of that hellish sight, I shouted.
"Do you think you can kill me with a scheme this pathetic?!"
"I cannot kill you, but I can put you in a state no different from death. Regenerate as you like; I need only pulp you each time."
A hand, no, dozens of them, seized my sword.
The sword, weakened from breaking a ghoul's bone, finally snapped in half.
With the broken, notched blade I crushed the skulls of the many humans biting into me, hacked down through collarbones, caved in faces, and pressed forward.
Whether they could still be called human, I didn't know.
"Findel Morein!"
But.
I was driven back that much further.
Things that had lost human shape pulled at me, pushed, and bore down.
"I'll kill you!"
Instead of answering, Findel Morein went into the cathedral.
The sound of the cathedral doors closing rang out loudly.
The monsters were converging on the lot from every direction in Oscalt.
The entire population of the city had been sculpted.
It meant a thousand monsters had begun to aim at me alone, and at the same time it meant Oscalt had lost the defensive strength to hold off an undead assault.
I wanted to smash the cathedral doors and go in that instant, but I could not.
Breaking through a wave of hundreds of monsters alone was impossible even for the Undying.
So for the moment I struck down every one of the bastards binding me.
When some fifteen were disabled and no more hands held me.
I began to run through the city sunk in darkness.
———SPLAT!
Monsters spilled out like lumps of meat from every window in sight.
Some crawled the walls, some ran on all fours, some dragged themselves along with no legs; the monsters were as varied in kind as they were in shape.
I had given up on returning to the inn long before, and threw myself into the alleys.
Oscalt's alleys were no different from a maze.
Thanks to the buildings thrown up every which way, I would be able to keep out of the monsters' sight as much as possible.
A long while of running through the alleys.
Perhaps because the paths were dark and narrow, footsteps echoed the whole time.
The sound of bare feet on stone.
———THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!
I looked back to find a woman with no head above her neck chasing me.
Something must have gone wrong in the sculpting; her body had only fallen away and had not grown back.
People turned into monsters, and those who could not even become monsters.
The glass ahead burst outward and a lump of flesh tumbled down.
The lump, the size of two people mashed together, gave out several voices at once.
"O Ecclesia......."
The front, wailing and calling for a god.
"SHRIEEEEEEK!"
The back, thrashing and screaming.
I leapt over the limbless lump.
There was no time to face every monster one by one.
They cried out with human vocal cords from all directions and came running barefoot as though stamping the alley flat.
The footsteps were not coming from behind alone.
Soon a wave of flesh surged in like a flood from beyond the corner.
Wherever I turned, there was nothing but human meat.
I stopped walking.
And clenched my teeth.
"......It's going to be a long day."
I could not tell how much time had passed.
My nose had gone numb to the reek of blood long ago, and the quiet city was filled with the cries of monsters.
My blood-crusted armor creaked.
I stripped off the sticky gauntlets for a moment and wiped my ruined sword on a monster's clothing.
Looking at the sky beyond the alley, light caught in my blurred sight.
Does the dawn rise even in hell?
Before I knew it, the night had passed.
And a new morning was drawing near.