While Oakley and the others were off in the Northeastern Branch, the restoration of Metasim quietly came to an end.
Once, Metasim had been a small, lively town where the orthodox faithful lived their days in peace. Now, wrapped in the brambles of Pawk Tedlotus, the place exuded a stagnant, poisonous air. Any trace of its former bustle was gone.
The outer walls that rose like cliffs for defense had been crudely patched back together. Over that warped stone ran an unbroken layer of thorny vines, woven so densely that not a soul could approach.
The only part of the walls that hadn’t been consumed and ruined by those venomous thorns was the patrol walkway atop the ramparts. Up there, cultists were stationed at the four cardinal points, watching the distant horizon for signs of enemy approach.
Metasim lay on the fringe of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid. Hardly anyone passed through this region to begin with, and now that the city had been removed from the official maps, travelers almost never came close.
On top of that, a broad-area perception ward cast by Aros covered the entire Metasim region. Thanks to his spell, the area had become a paradise for heretics, utterly devoid of Orthodoxy presence.
The fall of Daskel had helped as well. After a certain believer’s efforts annihilated that city, it had become a de facto buffer zone between Metasim and orthodox-controlled territory. All of it together made it nearly impossible for Orthodoxy executives to mount a reconquest of Metasim.
In practice, the answer was obvious: months had passed since Metasim and Daskel both fell, and the orthodox side had shown no movement at all. Losing Celestia, a spiritual pillar of the Kenneth Orthodoxy, had been a wound too deep to rally from so quickly.
Even if someone did draw near the Metasim region, they would only be able to get so close before turning away.
They would pass right by, never reaching the city itself. The ward made sure of it.
Even if their eyes happened to land on Metasim’s walls, the next instant, their attention would slide off to something else.
It was like those moments when you feel on the tip of your tongue that you were about to say something important, only for it to dissolve like mist the moment you try to speak.
Aros’s perception-blocking magic worked by reaching into a person’s unconscious mind and brute-forcing the priority of certain targets downward.
No matter how large Metasim was, once he marked it with that spell, its very presence would fade. Be forgotten.
There were limits on what kinds of things his ward could apply to, but the fact that it could warp concepts at all made it a truly broken piece of magic.
“Oh? That’s rare. Looks like we’ve got a visitor for once,” Pawk murmured.
Perched on the outer wall, she pushed herself up from where she’d been sitting to admire the newly reconstructed streets.
Several kilometers beyond the walls, far out across the empty land, a lone man in travel-worn clothes was striding toward the city.
“Any closer than that’s gonna be a problem! Ah, no, no, no… That’s bad…” Pawk said, her voice turning sharp as she leaned out over the wall.
The androgynous beauty in men’s clothes shouted monologues to no one in particular, as if this were nothing more than a way to kill time.
One hand rested on an oversized, reinforced ballista whose string was woven from poisoned thorns. Pawk operated the siege weapon like a child playing with an amusement park ride.
The notched, fletched spear she’d drawn back was aimed squarely at the traveler’s torso.
An innocent passerby had become the target of her madness.
“Hmm, what to do,” Pawk mused, lips quirking. “Haven’t hunted any outsiders in a while. Maybe I should go for it?”
The spear, its metal tip corrupted and warped by the toxic brambles twined around it, no longer resembled ordinary steel.
Once she loosed it from that special thorn-strung bow, the thing would streak forward at supersonic speed. A single graze was all it would take to ensure a slow, inevitable death by poison.
And even if the traveler somehow dodged a direct hit, he’d still be finished.
The thorn buds embedded in the spear would burst outward, hurling their stalks in a radial explosion and filling the area with invisible death.
The man on the road had no idea he was a heartbeat away from a hopeless end. But without ever realizing it, the traveler slipped out of danger.
The moment his eyes fell on the bizarre heretic city, his gaze went strangely distant. A second later, he simply resumed walking, this time veering naturally onto a path that curved away from Metasim, as if being guided.
That was perception-blocking magic, a lawless power that could erase even a person’s intent and cast their thoughts back into the void.
Pawk took her hands off the ballista and puffed her cheeks out slightly in disappointment.
Aros-sama really is something else, she thought. It’s not even an exaggeration to say the Temple Cult only grew this big because of his perception ward…
Bored and vaguely reassured of her leader’s overwhelming authority, Pawk watched the traveler’s back grow smaller in the distance.
From what the wall sentries had told her, this was only the third time anyone had passed through the Metasim region since the fall.
No wonder the Kenneth Orthodoxy hadn’t even managed to slip in a spy.
There were, realistically, only two ways to enter this city.
First: tail a heretic into Holy Metasim and brute-force your way past the ward, riding in on their presence.
This was the method Celestia had attempted in the chaos right after Daskel’s fall. The operation itself had been sloppy, and she’d been beaten back, but so far, infiltration by pursuit remained the most plausible scenario.
As for the second method—killing Aros himself and breaking his perception magic—that one wasn’t worth seriously considering at all.
Even so, there was always a chance some random traveler passing through the Metasim region might happen to notice something they shouldn’t, so Aros had ordered constant surveillance, just in case.
Pawk hopped down from the outer wall and started wandering aimlessly through Metasim’s interior streets.
“If Oakley and Joanne were still around, I wouldn’t be this bored…” she muttered. “But the Orthodoxy hasn’t made any recent moves, so things are really dull…”
Grumbling to herself, the cross-dressing beauty drifted toward Oakley’s old room and peeked inside.
Obviously, its former owner hadn’t magically come back. Dust motes spun lazily in the stale air.
Ever since Oakley had left, Pawk had found herself cleaning that room for no particular reason. Maybe it was the trauma of what had happened in it—the pristine new quarters she’d prepared, turned into a slaughterhouse of Joanne and Oakley’s blood and gore.
Clicking her tongue at the memory, she stretched out a thorn-tipped tendril and got to work dusting and scraping, using the poisonous brambles as makeshift cleaning tools.
“Ugh, it pisses me off when I think about it,” she complained under her breath. “Who makes an executive clean up their post-coital bloodbath? Those two idiots are seriously the worst couple ever…”
Not that she was waiting for Oakley to come back. Of course not. She just… felt like it would be nice if the guy happened to be there. That was all.
Pawk kept going until the room was spotless, polished to a shine.
She spent the whole morning killing time like that, and when she was done, she checked in on the network of zombies she’d planted across the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.
No abnormalities, no alerts. Everything was quiet. Too quiet.
She let out a long sigh. Nothing was happening. She was bored, and the ennui just kept leaking out of her in the form of little weary breaths.
As a rule, she only got called into action during emergencies or when a major operation was underway. In peacetime, her role left her with a lot of empty hours to fill.
“Even playing with my puppet zombies is getting old,” she said, voice flat.
Peace that lasted forever would mean one thing: Aros’s grand plan wasn’t moving an inch.
She wanted something to happen. Anything. News that the Orthodoxy had finally launched an attack would do. Whatever the trigger, she just wanted some shift on either side that would push this war for the kingdom one step closer to realization.
I just want to build a country where we can all live happily, as soon as possible… Pawk narrowed her gray eyes, toying with the short hair gathered at the back of her neck.
The memories of the abuse she’d once endured surfaced in her mind, raw and unhealed, and she let her eyelids sink shut in a powerless, quiet motion.
Pawk was born in an island nation far, far away from the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.
Roughly a tenth of that country’s population was made up of a minority known as the Terrace people. That was the bloodline she carried.
When she was still a small child, a plague swept across the islands.
With the sea hemming them in on all sides and nowhere to flee, the nation drowned in corpses and sickbeds, painting the landscape in pure ruin. And in the middle of all that horror, a strange rumor began to spread: the blood of the Terrace people could cure the plague.
It was baseless, a fabrication with no source and no proof. But a portion of the populace swallowed it whole.
Driven by superstition, envy of the Terrace people’s famed brilliance, and deep-rooted prejudice, they turned into a mob and descended on the Terrace settlements.
Violence came before dialogue ever had a chance. Bodies, strewn as far as the eye could see. Blood. Entrails. People on their knees, lapping up pooled bodily fluids as if in a trance. No one there could really be called sane anymore.
The settlement was destroyed.
Because of a rumor whose origin no one could name, Pawk and the rest of the Terrace people were scattered to the winds. Her parents barely escaped that island-country massacre alive and wandered a vast, uncaring world with their daughter in tow.
In the end, they washed up in the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid.
As a child, Pawk lived in a shadowed corner of one of its cities, having almost no contact with the townsfolk.
Terrace people, terrified of a repeat of their island’s tragedy, hid their faces under deep hoods at all times, blending into the alleys and side streets.
Then one day, inquisitors from the Kenneth Orthodoxy forced their way into their home.
Avoiding the neighbors, keeping their true faces hidden—that behavior had brought them attention. Someone in the city had found them suspicious and reported them.
They were subjected to an inquisition.
It was, in principle, a formality, meant to smoke out heretics and rebels. Under normal circumstances, it should have ended without much trouble. But during the questioning, one orthodox man made an offhand remark.