The cathedral of the Ecclesia faith in Oscalt.
Behind the chapel inside it was a single passage leading down to a cellar.
It was not anything special, nor was it particularly hidden.
Merely a stairway that existed there.
"They say there is nothing on the ground floor."
"So this is all that's left."
Twenty paladins had searched the cathedral as though hunting rats, but nothing connected to Luxeon could be found.
In the end the space beyond this was the Luxeon Cult's real domain.
We trod the stairs quietly.
There was no need to exchange grand signals.
I took the lead, Drik stood behind me, and the twenty paladins followed after.
The stairs continued in a spiral.
Cobwebs had settled on the torch brackets along the walls.
The passage was dark and quiet, but that silence felt natural, if anything.
The brackets must have stood here unlit for quite a long time.
"A door."
It was a mold-spotted wooden door.
When I pushed it, it slid open with unexpected ease.
That was possible only because people passed through it often.
"Everyone, keep your guard up."
Drik's voice echoed off the high ceiling.
An enormous underground colonnade.
Perhaps because no light was lit, moss had grown on the stone-built walls.
We moved forward.
The damp air and the clanking of armor made our feet heavy.
Luxeon.
Why had he only now begun to stretch his claws toward me?
The Ecclesia Order, his camouflage, was a body created half a century ago.
By comparison, handing Formel to the lord of Brüs was relatively recent.
It wasn't hard to guess that the act itself was his plan, designed to draw me here.
But why?
Why now, of all times?
On the basis of his conduct so far, I could form several hypotheses.
Luxeon has business with me.
That business is connected to this place, Oscalt.
The elements needed to settle that business have only now all come together.
And what are those elements?
'He has secured a force sufficient to face me...... or it could be a matter of funds.'
Nor could I rule out the possibility of some strange being I couldn't conceive of.
Suppose I had learned all those elements, and even his purpose.
What would change?
'......Nothing.'
I would still have been walking this dark underground colonnade.
One way or another, I had to settle things with him.
Whatever his purpose, I did not welcome this present situation.
Moving as his game piece, according to his intent, could not be called pleasant even as a joke.
"Brother."
Drik's call dragged me out of my brooding and back down into the cold, damp underground colonnade.
"There is something ahead."
Up ahead, the structure of the underground colonnade changed.
"This is almost like......."
"Yes. A cathedral."
It was a structure that looked as though the cathedral above had been transplanted whole.
If not for the wide, empty space that must have been the chapel and the dizzying doors that seemed slapped on at random, it could have been mistaken for the very same building.
"What are they doing that they need so many rooms?"
The paladins carefully began to search.
While they examined the space, I opened one of the small rooms.
There were no unusual objects.
The only thing that caught the eye was a blanket, perhaps.
"It seems they ate and slept here."
The small rooms all appeared to be the quarters of Luxeon's faithful.
I was poking at a bundled-up blanket with my scabbard when one of the paladins shouted.
"I think you had better come and see!"
The place he stood was likewise a wide hollow, the space that corresponded, above ground, to where the city's crowds had queued inside.
He stood before something large covered by cloth.
"What is this?"
"Well......."
"......."
They were the corpses of monstrous beasts.
And not one or two, but stacked high.
By the degree of decay they seemed not long dead.
"Damn it all."
Why the bastards had piled such things up was not the important part.
That corpses of monstrous beasts of varied size and species were stacked in this cellar meant there was another passage of a matching size.
The spiral staircase from before was, by any reckoning, too small to carry a monstrous beast the size of Formel.
"Let's hurry. We may already be too late."
Dead or alive, monstrous beasts live outside Oscalt.
To haul them in, that passage too would have to run all the way outside Oscalt.
'......Findel Morein.'
Come to think of it, sculpting the city and then going into the cathedral was a staggering self-defeating move.
Was it not the same as isolating himself?
Until now I had not had the leisure to wonder at it.
But now that I looked, if the cathedral had a hidden passage out of the city, I felt I would have done the same.
I called the scattered paladins and Drik together and explained my conjecture.
"This is trouble. There was nothing unusual here either."
"Then all that's left is what lies beyond that door."
Beyond the door the woman priest had led me to.
The answer to everything was there.
I readjusted my grip on the longsword in my hand.
It was the finest sword the Talios Order possessed, given to me by Camilla.
After a short breath.
I pushed the wooden door.
"......Hah."
The first thing I saw was two paths branching onward.
And Findel Morein, seated between them.
"Findel Morein."
"Well now, you have brought guests. I do not recall inviting your side."
"Who said we were invited? I am a robber who came to strip this place. If you have complaints, come to the Talios Order's Pirberg chapter at a later date."
"Drik, where in this world is there a robber who states his identity?"
"Is that so? Then do not come."
Findel Morein was calmly watching Drik.
"......Talios, is it? So you were not merely idling for seventy years."
"As you said, the world has changed. Shouldn't I have changed a thing or two as well?"
I felt a flow of air brushing my armor.
It was wind blowing from the passage Findel Morein sat with his back to.
The assumption that this place led outside had become established fact.
"Arrogant. Why didn't you run?"
Findel Morein was smiling the whole time.
A boundlessly merciful, human smile.
And for that very reason, a smile that resembled a human less than anything.
"How should I know? Do your hands and feet move as you intend only once they have understood the true meaning of the orders you give?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I am nothing but hands and feet."
Findel Morein rose from his seat.
"This is not my will. It is the will of my master in the heavens. But for that very reason, it is also my will."
Presently his body began to collapse.
An arm fell away.
Two arms grew, and those too fell away.
Repeated metamorphosis and molting.
With the divine authority of Sculpting the user matters, but what matters more is the one it is used upon.
Breathe divine power into an ordinary person and sculpt them, and they become a lump-of-flesh monster.
If a high bishop already steeped in divine power sculpts himself, what does he become?
"So by my own will, I intend to try dying here today."
He becomes something that cannot be named.
Long black arms braced the floor like a beast's legs.
Findel Morein's trunk came to hang in the air like a spider.
'He senses that his defeat is inevitable.'
Findel Morein had declared he would die here of his own accord.
Was that simply a calculation that accounted for my being Undying, or did it carry some other hidden meaning?
There was no way to know.
Now was the time to move my body, not my head.
'There are no faithful here besides Findel Morein. They will all have left. Then catching him alone should settle it.'
There were no end of murky points, but I was already issuing orders to the paladins.
"Nobody approach carelessly! Don't be fooled by what you see!"
Findel Morein moved like a spider.
Crawling over in an instant, he seized one paladin with a huge arm.
It was a speed barely possible to react to.
The paladins did not panic even before an inexplicable enemy.
Instead they tried to sever the arm of Findel Morein that held their comrade.
———CHOMP!
Teeth sprouted at the point of impact of another paladin's descending sword and bit it.
The mouth that had formed on Findel Morein's arm chewed and swallowed the metal sword like a sheet of paper.
At the same time, the paladin caught in Findel Morein's grip screamed.
Blood poured out as though wrung from him, and grotesque sounds rang endlessly through the passage.
———CRUNCH! CRUNCH-CRUNCH!
Findel Morein was chewing the paladin alive through his grip.
Drik swung his sword.
The swift blade severed the arm of Findel Morein that held the paladin.
Blood spurted from the black cross-section.
"So it has to be cut before the teeth grow."
Easy to say, but in the end it amounted to telling us to attack at a speed he could not react to.
The only one here capable of such artistry was Drik.
"For now, everyone rush him. He'll have a hard time reacting to dozens of swords at once."
The paladins moved as one.
There was no need to exchange particular hand signals.
For them, a combined assault was as natural as breathing.
When one man's sword was caught, another swung; when that sword was held, another did.
It was a simple attack, but the result was by no means simple.
Dozens of specially trained superhumans moving with a single purpose.
Paladins are individually monsters already.
When nineteen such men move as a single organism, they become monsters that hunt monsters.
Findel Morein was faring reasonably well against the paladins, but he was gradually allowing wounds.
If Drik joined their combined assault it would only get in the way.
Drik watched the situation for a while from a step back.
And when he was certain Findel Morein had no capacity left to defend his main body.
Drik swung his sword.
———CLANG!
Drik's sword failed to cut the bastard's skin and threw off only sparks.
"......Damnably hard."
Findel Morein sculpted his body once again.
Teeth and mouths no longer grew anywhere on him.
Instead he became outrageously hard.
Drik's sword, which could cut steel as though it were a joke, was stopped.
Sharp blades were now useless, and the paladins likewise had nothing left they could do.
Having neutralized in one stroke every move we held, Findel Morein rampaged at random.
He swung his arms, seized and crushed, tore and devoured with his whole body.
We, on the other hand, could not even respond, so the number of men rendered unable to fight climbed exponentially.
"Brother! What do we do about this?!"
Blows weren't landing.
Block his breathing?
He would simply open an airway somewhere else.
Try burning and searing him?
He would obviously sculpt himself to match.
An opponent that could turn into a body able to respond freely to any situation.
Fights with the Luxeon Cult were always like this.
'I can't use my usual method.'
I generally held out until they tired and collapsed.
Since I never died, if I dragged a fight to the moment they could no longer sculpt, I could kill them.
Of course, it was not a method Talios's paladins could use.
The situation was racing toward despair.