It was natural. The flame clinging to the fuel on his blade was none other than the holy flame of Saren Deputy.
“You don’t need to know anything more than that,” Oakley said flatly.
The young man with the flaming sword sprang forward.
Exploiting the brief gap in their reactions, he swept his blade once, and the first man’s Adam’s apple parted.
“Ggh—!?”
He hadn’t given them so much as a heartbeat to guard. The fatally wounded believer collapsed, drowning in his own blood and divine fire, and did not twitch again.
The others, frozen in blank shock, snapped back to their senses at the sight of their comrade’s death.
But Oakley was already moving, bringing his sword down a second time.
Before a single bolt could be loosed, the next man’s rectus abdominis was split cleanly in a horizontal line.
“Agh… AAH!”
The moment the blood erupted, the man’s body went up in flames.
The holy fire used the flesh of the heretic as fuel and roared higher.
Those who were cut down burned to ash and scattered into the white world like they had never been there.
“Don’t panic! It’s only one enemy!” one of them shouted. “Keep your distance from the flames, surround him, and hit all at once!”
The remaining five might have been swayed by Karatena’s rumors, but they were still elites.
The shock of those opening kills wore off quickly; now they moved with cold precision.
The five left… They’re the ones I fought in that one-versus-many, Oakley noted. They’re plenty wary this time.
Perhaps learning from that previous beating, the five had tightened their formation into something disciplined and compact.
Gone was the earlier confusion they’d shown when overwhelmed by Saren’s phoenix flame.
Two swordsmen stood at the front as vanguard, with three crossbowmen in the rear—clean lines, no visible openings.
But Oakley was not the same as during that earlier training, either. With his trump card, the Flame Blade, his killing power had multiplied several times over.
He lifted the fire-wreathed sword high in a classic overhead stance. The weapon seemed to howl, digging into the enemies’ instincts, eroding their will to fight and even their ability to think straight.
Letting that pressure build, Oakley watched them carefully, waiting for a crack in their guard.
He couldn’t afford any reckless moves on his side; he knew perfectly well that his only chance at victory lay in exploiting an opening.
For that very reason, the five believers didn’t move either. The stalemate stretched.
And in a drawn-out deadlock like this, the one at a disadvantage was Oakley.
If another squad appeared from the blizzard, he would be driven into even deeper trouble. The fuel feeding the flame on his blade was limited.
Drawing their eyes to the flaming sword, Oakley’s hand moved in the shadow of that spectacle. From within his cloak, he flicked a throwing knife free and sent it spinning toward them.
The small feint did its job, jolting the front line into motion and beginning to shift the flow of battle.
As Oakley let fly a second throwing knife, the three men in the rear loosed their bowstrings, bolts whipping toward him.
The projectiles crossed paths in midair.
The three bolts were swallowed by the intense heat of the flaming sword’s follow-through, burning away before they could reach him, while the thrown knife was knocked aside once again by the front-line swordsman.
In that brief exchange, Oakley closed the distance to their formation.
He swept the Flame Blade in a wide horizontal arc, and the front line flinched as the shockwave rolled over them, shrinking back from the sheer terror of the holy fire.
“Like hell we’re letting you!” one of the rearguards shouted.
He tossed aside his crossbow, drew his sword, and lunged in to cover the two in front.
But Oakley had been waiting for that exact reaction.
Rather than target the rattled vanguard, he put everything into a strike at the would-be rescuer rushing up from behind.
“Ngh!?”
He vaulted over the two front-line swordsmen, his body a blur as he launched a surprise blitz.
The man, stunned and a beat too slow to react, had his chest run through by the flaming blade.
Oakley moved at once to rip his sword free, then noticed the dying soldier wrapping his arms around the sword, clinging to it even as his body crumbled to ash.
“N-Now… Do it!” the man choked.
The others were not about to waste the opening bought with their comrade’s life.
Seeing Oakley’s Flame Blade trapped, all four remaining soldiers lunged at him from every direction.
The last thing the four men saw was the young man’s face, bending low as he ducked, lips curling into a fearless grin.
“Zeeaaah!”
Leaving the corpse skewered on the flaming sword, Oakley planted his right foot and spun clockwise.
The trail of fire carved a perfect circle in the blizzard, and in the next instant, the upper and lower halves of the men who had leapt at him parted company.
The gale sent ground-snow spiraling upward, mixing in midair with the blood and flesh of those who had died in an instant.
The arc of his blade was beautifully traced in flame for a brief, vivid moment. Then the fire went out, and the chunks of flesh suspended in the air disintegrated into fine gray ash.
So this is the power of Saren’s magic, Oakley thought. For people like us, it’s one hell of a deadly poison.
The third defensive mechanism of the city was the flame of Saren Deputy, dwelling inside its streetlamps.
Within the cities of the Holy Kingdom of Gerlaid, there existed a special kind of lamp known as the Ever-Burning Streetlights.
The discovery had been simple but revolutionary: if Saren’s flame was kindled on a special catalyst, it could serve as a near-permanent light source.
From there, the Ever-Burning Streetlights had been developed—magical holy-fire infrastructure meant not only to illuminate the cities of the Holy Kingdom of Gerleid, but to keep heretics from approaching the places where people lived.
Oakley intended to take that small, sanctified fire and turn it into a weapon for hunting heretics.
His Flame Blade was a crude design at its core: grooves carved into the steel, catalyst etched along them, fuel smeared over the surface.
Naturally, it came with all kinds of risks. To start with the obvious, it was unimaginably hot. The hand gripping the sword was already burned raw, pain roaring up his arm every time he so much as shifted his fingers.
He was handling a deadly toxin that gnawed at the minds and bodies of heretics at point-blank range.
Just by standing in the heat haze, Oakley’s body and spirit were starting to falter; he felt as though he could collapse at any moment.
A true double-edged sword.
Reeling in that blinding agony, he resumed his ambush—cutting down heretics one after another from within the storm.
The clash of steel, the screams, every sound was shredded and devoured by the blizzard.
In the poor visibility and howling wind, the bodies piled up unseen, then vanished as the snow swallowed them whole.
“More or less done here.”
By the time the corpses he’d laid to rest hit forty, he finally caught sight of the Raid Unit at the very front.
He brought down the horses first with throwing knives, then slaughtered their riders as they fell, helpless in the snow.
The blizzard had grown so fierce that even the snow Celestia had melted earlier was returning, coating the ground again in a fresh white layer.
In conditions like this, cavalry lost half their mobility; a rider whose mount had stalled was nothing more than a large, easy target.
Thanks to Joanne’s brutal training, the work went smoothly—almost too smoothly. But Oakley’s right arm was already starting to go numb.
Looking down, he realized that even catching the holy flame’s residual heat had discolored the skin. It was far more poisonous than he’d imagined. He didn’t have the luxury of wasting time.
As he ran through the streets of Jade, a new disquiet began to gnaw at him.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any civilians. And barely any Orthodox soldiers. Sure, they’d hole up indoors in this kind of blizzard, but this few?
It was also strange that the Raid Unit’s riders, who should have been at their best operating in coordinated groups, were scattered and moving alone.
The heretics I’ve killed so far… It felt like they were searching for something. Were they… looking for the civilians, just like me?
The blizzard was harsher now than when they’d first broken in.
Celestia should have been controlling the weather, and yet the snow had intensified to the point that it was stopping the cavalry in their tracks.
It didn’t match the believers’ movements. Something was off.