Holy shit!
Forcing down the goosebumps crawling all over me, I cursed the old Archbishop up and down in my head. If our earlier chat hadn't convinced me he wasn't the type for pointless theatrics, I would've thought he'd built some kind of haunted-house escape-room prank just to mess with me.
I was about to blow up and ask him what the hell this was supposed to mean, when I noticed the two people beside me were acting… wrong.
In the candlelight, the old man's wrinkled face looked unnaturally pale, like wet paper. His eyes were clenched shut, hands clasped tight against his mouth, lips moving rapidly as he murmured under his breath—like he was rattling off some urgent litany.
And the Lady Inquisitor… she'd gone deathly white.
One hand was clamped over her mouth, her throat making a stifled, rasping sound, like she was fighting down a cough—or the urge to vomit. Her body trembled faintly. Her steps wobbled; she had to brace her other hand against the wall behind her to keep from collapsing.
I reflexively sniffed.
Besides the stale air you'd expect in a sealed chamber and that heavy candle-wax stink, I couldn't smell a damn thing. No corpse-reek, thank the Emperor. But then what was with those two? Putting on a show for me? Some shared medical episode? That didn't seem likely.
While I was still guessing in circles, something icy wrapped around my right hand.
It felt like shoving my hand down the collar of my shirt in midwinter. I jolted like I'd been hit with a live wire—my whole body spasmed, then locked up, every muscle going rigid.
My neck creaked as I turned, inch by inch, eyes wide, and saw that the Lady Inquisitor had moved right up in front of me at some point—and was gripping my right hand in a death-clench.
Her ocean-blue eyes were locked onto me, pupils constricted to pinpricks. Her nostrils flared with each breath. Her breathing was rough and heavy, hot air spilling over my face, and at some point she'd started sweating—fine beads of cold sweat covering her skin.
"Ghk." I swallowed with difficulty.
Her sudden, inexplicable move had turned my brain into static. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. As a lifelong single who'd never even held hands with a woman, I'd certainly never done anything remotely… "intimate" like this—let alone with a striking beauty in a very particular kind of uniform.
My brain was basically porridge. The only thought that still functioned was: Yeah, yeah, racial differences. From far away she looks smooth and flawless—up close, her pores are huge. Bigger than mine…
That bizarre atmosphere held for maybe a dozen seconds. Then she seemed to crawl back from some kind of extreme discomfort. Her breathing steadied a little. The crushing grip on my hand loosened by half a fraction.
Her lips moved. She muttered something so soft I could barely catch it—something like "anchor" or "anchor point," a meaningless word at the time. Then her gaze slid off my face and snapped to the side.
She issued an order, directed at me: "Go and support the Archbishop. He's old. He doesn't look well."
Her voice was still hoarse and trembling, but the command tone had returned.
I, of course, answered with a rapid-fire string of "Yes, yes," fumbling like an idiot. I yanked my hand free from her icy, sweat-damp but oddly soft palm, and hurried to the old man still bowed with his lips moving nonstop.
When I awkwardly but carefully took hold of his elbow and asked in a low voice whether he was all right, he reacted like someone jolted awake from a nightmare—his muttering stopped dead.
He looked ahead at the dried corpse, then shifted his gaze to me. There was something deeply pointed in his eyes, like he was appraising a tool that had just passed the final test.
"Thank you, child," he rasped. The roughness in his voice was worse than before. "I'm fine."
He straightened, raised that withered hand, and pointed toward the corpse.
"There," he said. "The thing is right there…"
"That mummy is your relic?" I blurted before I could stop myself.
The Archbishop's brow knitted instantly. The expression was so familiar it could've come straight from my old department head whenever I botched a report.
"Do not show disrespect to a saint," he said, voice hard with unquestionable authority. "The Nameless Saint sacrificed far more than his life for us."
I couldn't help grimacing. "You call him a saint, but you don't even know his name? I'm pretty sure even the Vatican doesn't play it like that…"
The Archbishop shook his head. In those deep-set, clouded eyes lay a grief so heavy it looked like a dried lakebed.
"…We once knew," he said, trembling. "We once remembered his name, his deeds, his glory. But now… those yesterdays—including his very name—have withered and died. No one remembers anymore…"
He took a few unsteady steps forward, then lifted his hand again and pointed more precisely this time.
"It is because of this."
Holding down the nausea and the prickling dread in my gut, I stepped closer, leaning in toward the dried corpse. Only then did I see what he was pointing at.
It looked like a sword.
I couldn't be completely sure at first—because it was wrong in ways my brain didn't want to classify. It had branches.
I moved to the side and finally got a full view. The shape reminded me of the seven-branched sword from old Eastern legends: a dull, dark blade that split asymmetrically into six protruding prongs along its length. With the main tip, that made seven points in total.
At first I hadn't noticed it because it didn't look like a proper weapon at all—no gleam, no cold shine. The opposite, in fact. It was coated in rust and grime, but not the normal reddish-brown kind.
This was a black rust mottled with dark green specks, as if the thing had soaked in a reeking ditch for centuries and then spent endless years being battered by wind and rain—like a rotted rebar bar dragged out of some abandoned slum canal.
In the wavering candlelight it didn't reflect. It swallowed light. Like a hole cut into the world.
And what grabbed my eyes—what made my scalp crawl—was this:
The corpse's hands were still gripping that filthy hilt. Gripping it tight. Too tight.
Judging by the posture, he'd used that broken, ill-suited blade—something that didn't even look designed for stabbing—to drive it into his own chest and abdomen. Inch by inch. Then he'd pinned himself to the wall behind him with it, nailing himself there.
Hiss—
This time my teeth actually ached. A chill surged from the soles of my feet straight up into my skull.
What a monster. A real one.
A thread of reluctant respect slipped in with the horror. I studied him more closely, but found no answers. Apart from a strip of cloth that had almost rotted into threads around his waist, and a rust-stained gold skull pendant—Mark I—hanging at his neck, there was nothing else. No insignia. No gear. Nothing that could tell you who he had been.
"It really is this sword!"
The Lady Inquisitor's voice hissed behind me, teeth clenched. It was full of bone-deep hatred and barely restrained fury.
"The cursed relic that has plagued the Odysseus Sector for a thousand years. The instigator behind at least two large-scale wars and one extermination decree."
Her voice tightened into something like a snarl.
"The Chaos daemon sword—'Corruption Star'!"
(End of Chapter)
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