Confronting the Past

It was by sheer pure luck that the Head Pastor couldn't run after me with her ankle twisted so severely. That, coupled with my high agility and endurance, meant that she couldn't hurt me if I kept my distance.

So I made sure that I was just out of harm's way, but still close enough that she wouldn't lose interest in me. I knew that if she was focused on me, she wouldn't bother Mr Mobito and Mr Saizo.

I didn't know how long I had led the Head Pastor on this chase, but I was so intensely concentrating on running that I had zoned out of the conversation Mr Saizo and Ryuu had. When there was a moment to take a small break, I listened in.

"Ryuu!" Mr Saizo's voice yelled in my head.

"Sorry, I'm here," Ryuu replied. His voice sounded like he was out of breath.

"What happened to you? You went silent and then you started laughing uncontrollably?"

I stiffened as I remembered how Ryuu reacted when his arm morphed over Mr Nato's body in the previous task. Even the way his body moved, made it seem like he was a different person.

"It's okay, I took care of—"

"Come here you bitch!" the Head Pastor screeched, and a fireball flew by and crashed into where I had been standing. She howled a curse as I could see energy start to swirl around her. She was preparing another spell.

Now and then during the chase, I had to dodge out of the way of spells that she threw at me in the hopes of catching me off-guard, but it seemed like she struggled to cast the spells. Like it took a lot more effort for her to form as well as taking a lot longer to cast.

"When you can, send me another POI location Kat," came Ryuu's voice through the voice function in the System. I quickly concentrated on activating the Detect skill and had planned to post a location on the Party's map of the closest one I found when I saw a farther away POI disappear suddenly. I opened my mouth to say something, but a Warning Window jutted into my vision with the message:

[WARNING!

DUE TO MUL|pl3 ANOmMAleeeeS\\...

STABILITY OF QUEST PARAMETERS DEGRADING]

"Anybody else got that message?" Ryuu's voice called out.

The Head Pastor's scream made me jump a little.

"GET THAT MESSAGE OUT OF MY SIGHT! I don't care about the Quest Parameters!" She grimaced as she turned her attention back to me. Another spell was now ready, and she threw it towards me, but I managed to dodge it once more.

"Yeah, I did too," I answered as I placed the location on the map and disabled the Detect skill. My head spun a little bit, and I tripped over my own feet as I had to move out of the way of the Head Pastor's attack before deactivating my skill. Luckily, I managed to catch myself and continued to keep my distance away from the mad zombie woman.

"Seems like the other side got the message too," I continued.

"I got it here also," came a sullen reply from Mr Saizo.

As I jogged, I reached an area of the ruins that looked a little bit like the courtyard at my family's old settlement. Before they moved closer to the Tower. The only differences were that this courtyard was almost twice as big as that old one, and it had some sort of stone carving piece in the middle that looked like a person with water at their feet. I only guessed that the piece was of a person, as all that was left were two legs that led up to nothing, and the legs looked human enough.

As I ran around this central piece, I nearly ran into some rubble. I realised that the courtyard had only one entrance, and when I turned around, I could see the Head Pastor prepare another spell as she limped towards the mouth of that one entrance.

I looked around at my surroundings and paled when all that I could see were towering mounds of brick and ruin. What kind of buildings would have required so much stone? I couldn't imagine how massive these buildings would have been before the destruction.

I could hear the Head Pastor's cackling and I screamed when the central stone piece blasted into smaller pieces. I covered my head and face from any pieces that might have hit me from the explosion and was relieved when none did.

"Kat?!" Both Mr Saizo and Ryuu called out.

"It's okay, I just got a bit scared," I mumbled quietly.

"Lookie here," the woman chuckled menacingly as she stood on the opposite side of the courtyard, "looks like the little bitch got herself trapped. Lucky me."

"Damn it, I'm coming to help," Mr Saizo offered, but I quickly stopped him.

"No! We all have a part to play," I was sure that my quivering voice was not convincing at all, but I continued, "I can do this."

"You can do what?" the Head Pastor smiled, "you think you can do anything to me? Little weak you?"

I ignored her and snuck a peek at the map. I gulped when I realised that I had somehow made my way around the Eastern side of where Mr Saizo and Mr Mobito were and were now right near them to the northeast. I was only about 150 metres away.

For a small moment, I regretted saying no to Mr Saizo's help but clenched my fists tighter and got angry at myself. I had to be brave. I couldn't rely on everyone else all the time.

"What, what, what?" the Head Pastor increasingly got louder with each repeat of her question, "stop yammering in my ear about things I don't give a damn about!"

She looked like she was getting more and more agitated by whatever was said in her team's voice comm function until she roared and started to hit the side of her head.

"Shut up! Shut up!" she screamed.

I watched in horror as she grabbed hold of her ear and started to rip it off the side of her head as she continued to scream at her teammate. I couldn't take my eyes off what was happening, although I wished that I could. Tears started to form in my eyes as the dread started to creep in.

Even after she had tossed her ear away, she scratched at the open, festering wound that she left and laughed almost half-heartedly in defeat, and almost in sad relief.

"For Great Demon's sake, I can still hear you even after I tore my ear off. That makes sense," her head slumped in disappointment.

For a moment, I was stuck in place out of fear. She stood practically in the middle of the one entrance to this courtyard, and even though I'm fast, I was still scared that she might manage to grab hold of me somehow if I ran right past her.

"I swear on the Demon's name that I'm going to get this little bitch. No matter what you say to me Mirou. I don't care about this task…" the Head Pastor mumbled. I could barely hear what she said.

The spell she prepared was finally completed and she threw it at me. This time, it wasn't a fire-based spell, instead, it looked like a box of light.

I managed to shake off enough fear to move out of the way of the spell at the last moment.

The Head Pastor growled in anger, "you're lucky that my spellcasting has been slowed down so much in this…state." She waved her hands over herself as she emphasised the last word.

Another Window with the same Parameter Degrading message interrupted us.

"Why," the Head Pastor screamed while she angrily swiped the Window away, "does it seem like the whole world is against me lately?"

The Head Pastor took a step forward that caused me to step back reflexively.

"I was so dedicated and so good. I was such a good girl in the Church…rose in the ranks. I gained some power for myself. Life was going so well for me. I was knocked down, but I built something for myself up again," the Head Pastor paused as a low growl started to seep out from her chest.

When she spoke again, the growl developed into a deep rasp, "and then one day, a selfish, selfish man came around into my area of power and settled his weak community right in the middle of everything.

"All my plans, all the time I spent trying to forget what happened to me suddenly came flooding back and I just couldn't help myself. I really couldn't. So I plotted, and I waited, and one day, everything just clicked into place."

She took another step and I nearly tripped over a brick when I took another step backwards.

"I cannot tell you how good it felt to do the Great Demon's bidding and murder everyone in your little commune. It felt so just, so right, but then I realised something was missing.

"The most important person was missing, so I didn't get my proper revenge, the revenge that I so rightly deserved. And you know what else?"

She paused and grinned maniacally at me.

"My followers told me that a little bitch had escaped from her death also! But you know what? I didn't care. The little bitch could run and run, but realistically, chances were she was going to die in the forest somewhere. All that mattered was the other one who escaped. He had to die. I was so angry. So, so angry that he escaped."

She looked down at the ground for a moment before she raised her head and gave me an extremely uncomfortable smile.

"There was nothing I could do though, so I resigned myself to missing my opportunity to exact revenge. At least my church branch got rid of a disgusting campus of One Creator freaks.

But then, a few days later, a group of adventurers came and lo and behold, they came around with the little bitch all bound up? I thought my luck was turning around for the better! And then…everything happened after that. But you know what got me so riled up?"

I waited tensely in silence as the Head Pastor glared at me.

"Answer the question!" she burst out in anger which caused me to jump in my skin.

"I— I don't know. What got you so riled up?" My voice quivered as I tentatively answered.

"What's happening?" Ryuu asked in my ear.

"Katsumi?" Mr Saizo echoed Ryuu's sentiment.

"Konoko told me what she saw when she held that late bloomer's hand," the Head Pastor continued, "she told me that he was one of the ones we were waiting for. That he was a Saviour-Vessel."

The woman started to burst out into uncontrollable laughter.

"At first, I couldn't believe it. I mean, the way he ran away protecting you was so comical. A Saviour-Vessel, protecting a stupid One Creator skank? Impossible!

"But with the very last of her strength, Old Konoko was so sure that he was a Saviour-Vessel. A conduit for the Great Demon, our Lord. And he abandoned us for you."

The venom in her voice made me shiver as she lingered on her last word.

"Why are you even with him?" The Head Pastor growled as she continued to make her way towards me, "why is he allying himself with you when he's a Vessel for the Great Demon? He's the literal antithesis of the One Creator. How can the One Creator exist, when the Great Demon is real? And why does he care for you?"

At that moment, I remembered a particular lesson that my father taught me when I was growing up. He apologised to me when I got into a fight with another kid about interpreting the Scriptures. The boy had insulted my dad and I got angry.

When he apologised, I couldn't understand why he was the one apologising. He sat next to me afterwards out in the garden on my family's property and said in that calming voice that he had:

"As you're growing up you might meet people that don't believe what you believe or what I believe," he started slowly, "everyone we know is so strict and so narrow with how they understand the Scripture, and most of the time, they don't like anything different."

He turned to me then and said, "I hope that your faith will be strong, and it might be too proud of me to say, but I hope you believe as I believe. Nothing is impossible for the One Creator, and He will utilise anything and everything to showcase His glory. And I hope that you see examples of that too."

As I remembered, a Window popped up in front of me and Mr Saizo announced that he had managed to ward off another small group of zombies.

The bright blue Window hung in the air as the Head Pastor yelled at me to answer her question.

[LEVEL UP!

LEVEL 5!

HP REFILLED AND (+10) CAPACITY

MP REFILLED AND (+10) CAPACITY

…]

"Why am I with him?" I repeated as I tried to buy time to gather up as much confidence as I could, "because he promised that he would keep me safe, and I believe in him."

The Head Pastor froze in shock as she struggled to process my answer before she started to cackle even more maniacally.

"You believe in him? That's a good one," she said in between her laughing fits.

"And even if he is a conduit or a vessel or whatever for the Great Demon, he's still more human than you or any of the other Churchgoers that you controlled ever were," I said after I had gathered as much confidence as I could. My voice sounded okay. It sounded like maybe I did believe what I was saying.

I mean, I did believe what I was saying, it just felt like some of that belief might have been lost in translation as I said the words out loud.

The Head Pastor did not like my words, however, as she abruptly stopped laughing and glared back at me with her off-white, stale eyes.

"You know what, I changed my mind," growled the undead woman as she glared at me.

"I don't think killing you quickly is going to cut it for me anymore," she continued as she started to make swiping motions. It seemed like she was looking through her own System Windows before she continued, "lucky for me, I have just enough Mana for what I want to do to you."

The tone in her voice was confident and I started to worry. I looked behind her at the solitary entrance to the courtyard that she was blocking and started to calculate inside my head to figure out whether I could just run past her.

"You know what's great about Curse spells?" the woman asked which distracted me from my thinking.

"You can't outrun them." She said as she chanted a short incantation and a dark smoke formed around her and shot out straight at me and sunk into my chest in the blink of an eye. It didn't cause any pain, and I felt fine, but I was still frozen with fear.

"Of course, there is a delay before the curse spell takes effect, depending on the strength of the spell and the proficiency of the caster, but once a target is selected. All that's left to do is to wait."

The Head Pastor started to shuffle her way closer to me as I looked down at my chest where the smoke had gone through my body. The Head Pastor continued to taunt me as she slowly moved closer.

"Unlucky for you, both the spell and my proficiency are quite high, so the effect should come in about three…" she counted.

I looked up at her in horror.

"…two…"

I tried to speak up, I wanted to call out to Mr Saizo. I wanted to call out to Ryuu. I knew that if I managed to squeeze my voice out of my throat, Ryuu would make his way over.

"…one…"

I don't know why, but when he promised to look after me, I fully believed him. Even with the other monstrous side that I got a glimpse of in the previous task. I scrunched my face in anticipation of the curse effect, time was up.

But nothing happened. I felt no pain, no effect. I slowly opened an eye to see what happened.

"What?" Head Pastor Maru snapped.

A chime and it seemed like both the Head Pastor and I received a notification Window.

I read my message in disbelief, and when I glanced over at the woman, her face contorted and compressed in anger at what I assumed was a similar message to mine.

[CONGRATULATIONS!

YOU HAVE UNLOCKED A UNIQUE STATUS EFFECT:

"HOLY FAITH"

YOUR FAITH IS PURE AND UNFLAPPABLE.

HOLY FAITH — PERMANENT BUFF EFFECT

GRANTS THE USER IMMUNITY TO ALL CURSE-TYPE SPELLS AND ABILITIES.]