Chapter 249: Being What He Needs to Be (1/2)

Jason could barely stand in the wake of Neil’s spell wearing off, but he determinedly pushed himself to his feet.

“We need to move with alacrity,” Shade said. “The cult’s forces approach.”

Jason nodded, pausing only to spare what was left of Anisa a brief glance. He was again reminded that most of the people he had first met on arriving in this world were dead. Most of the Vane family, their servants, Farrah and now Anisa. For all the wonders his new home offered, it took its price in horrors, and Jason was unsure if he had become one of them.

“Shade, grab her dimensional bag and mount up.”

The possessions of the archbishop had automatically been looted by Jason’s power when his execute ability completely annihilated him. Looting powers could extricate goods from personal dimensional spaces, although Jason didn’t stop to check what he had taken.

The team left the ruined building behind. Shade had taken the form of some large lizards, well-suited to navigating the terrain. Sophie and Clive had already helped Belinda onto the back of Onslow. Having taken a spirit coin, she was in worse shape than Jason and Humphrey. Jason and Neil rode Shade out, Humphrey rode Stash, while Sophie easily kept pace on foot. They didn’t stop for hours, making sure to get well clear of the site of their battle.

Once they were confident there was no one trailing them, rest became the next order of business. Jason pulled out the cloud house inside a building they found with an internal space large enough to contain it. It was a church, although not to a god any of them recognised. Any lingering divine aura the building might have once hosted had long ago faded away.

Sophie took watch, keeping an eye out for cultists scouts. Humphrey, Jason and Belinda retreated into the house to recuperate, as neither spirit coin usage nor Neil’s spell could be rushed through recovery using magic. They quickly fell asleep in the comforting embrace of cloud chairs while Neil kept an eye on their conditions.

Before collapsing, Jason had divested himself of everything his looting power had plucked from the archbishop’s personal storage space. Clive went over it, along with the contents of Anisa’s dimensional bag.

There was a very large number of potions and a startling amount of money. Hendren, it seemed, had taken a large chunk of the church of Purity’s coffers with him on ‘sabbatical.’ Those things he put aside, in favour of a good-sized collection of documents and a very full bookcase.

“It’s mostly correspondence from higher-ups in the church,” Clive said to Neil, going through the documents. He had taken a quick peruse of all the items and was now taking a closer look at the documents.

“Anything useful?” Neil asked.

“I’m not sure how much of it will be of use to us,” Clive said. “The Adventure Society will definitely want to get their hands on these, though. There is correspondence here with explicit statements about the agreement between the church and the cult.”

“Anything about why the church of Purity would throw in with these people?” Neil asked.

“Not at a glance,” Clive said. “It’ll take me a while to go through it all properly. It does seem that the ones siding with the cult are only a fraction of the church, though.”

“That makes sense,” Neil said. “If the whole church knew, there’s no way they could have kept it a secret.”

“There also seems to have been a concern that a lot of the church members would not be accepting of the arrangement.”

“You mean they thought priests who literally worship Purity wouldn’t be accommodating to a cult that fills people’s bodies and souls with evil magic junk? That was probably a good assessment.”

“I have to think that most of Purity’s worshippers aren’t secretly evil,” Clive said.

“I suspect Jason would disagree.”

“Well, Jason has his biases,” Clive said. “He comes from a world where the gods apparently don’t show themselves at all and let the people wage wars over the truth. Then he comes here, and the first clergyperson he meets is that priestess we just killed. She wasn’t exactly a good ambassador for the virtues of faith.”

“Then it turns out an ostensibly good church is in league with an evil cult,” Neil said. “I can see why he might end up wary of the whole thing.”

“Even the Purity church members who are in on it clearly don’t like the people they’re allied with,” Clive said, gesturing absently with a sheet of paper. “This is a letter to Hendren, more or less telling him to put up with it and do what he’s told. While the faction working with the cult certainly believe they have their god on their side, they seem very unhappy with the alliance. It seems the cult had to pressure the church into coming along on this expedition at all.”

“I would have been happy for them to stay at home,” Neil. “I imagine they would be too, now their leader’s been dissolved into nothing.”

Neil glanced warily over at the sleeping Jason.

“Does Asano ever scare you at all?” he asked quietly. “Most of the time he seems ridiculous, but sometimes he really, really doesn’t. When he just walked into that town and killed all those bandits. The way he looked at them, like they were nothing.”

“Jason is good at being what he needs to be, in order to do what he needs to do,” Clive said, likewise speaking softly. “Sometimes, what he needs to do is kill a lot of people. And yes; seeing what he becomes to do that does scare me a little.”

“Hopefully, it scares the Builder, too. From the Builder’s perspective, pulling in the church for this must seem like a waste, now. He brought along an extra silver-ranker who didn’t accomplish anything but die.”

“Their rush to put us down cost them one of their most powerful people,” Clive said. “Whatever else, we can be certain that the Builder isn’t happy.”

“This has worked out very well,” the Builder said. “Losing Hendren’s power is a blow, obviously, but he was a reluctant ally at best.”

“You want to step up the kind of procedure we use on his people,” Zato said.

“Precisely,” the Builder agreed. “Now that the church’s leadership here is dead, there is little concern about any survivors reporting to their god when we are done here. We no longer have to take half-measures in converting the clergymen, to protect Hendren’s sensibilities.”

“There are other bronze-rankers in their number,” Zato said.

“None who held a leadership position like Lasalle. That they died together helps us more than either of them surviving. None of the remaining clergy will be able to pull the rest together and effectively resist our intentions. Take them into custody and prepare the iron-rankers for immediate conversion.”

“What do we do with their bronze-rankers?” Zato asked. “We can’t convert them with clockwork cores we get from sacrificing our iron-rankers.”

“That is a question,” the Builder said. “The failure to summon the clockwork king and the cores it could produce truly was the beginning of things going wrong with your operations. If your former superiors had the ability to adapt to circumstances you have demonstrated, we would be in a better position right now. You have demonstrated a talent for making the most of what you are given. What do you suggest?”