Chapter 188
Pure hatred flared in the eyes of the old priest. It made sense from his perspective, given that a bunch of godless cockroaches had just crawled into his holy place while he was busy prepping a masterpiece for the Great Star. The disgust he felt right now was exactly what a chef with extreme OCD would feel if he walked into his kitchen and saw dozens of roaches scurrying over his clean counters.
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
The ritual hadn’t been shut down properly, so the casters were still stuck in place like statues. Because of that, the bishop of the Cult of Ruin squeezed out the power he had already harvested to show everyone who was boss.
That crimson mist floating around was nasty energy sucked out of human pain and misery, and it started twisting into the shape of a massive vengeful ghost. The moment Do-Jin saw that, he started blasting away with Flash Lance.
Usually, a massive spell like this took a lot of effort to start and even more to shut down. If someone messed with it during the process, all kinds of side effects could happen, and the whole thing could just explode.
Do-Jin had been holding back because of that risk, but then he realized something. I suppose if we lose, we’re all dead anyway.
He couldn’t just turn tail with survivors still waiting to be rescued. As a gaming addict, it was instinct for him to fully commit, no matter how bad the situation was. This went for the players who had jumped at his recruitment as well. The moment Do-Jin surged forward, the raid members dumped everything they had. Spells and skills erupted one after another like fireworks over a battlefield.
“How dare these sacrilegious filth throw a fit!”
Still burning with rage, the bishop forced a scream through the crudely stitched body of an evil spirit. The sound tore across the battlefield like hundreds of people dying at once. It was more than nauseating. The attack crashed down over a wide area, driving a Confusion debuff into everything it touched.
As they were especially vulnerable to magic and mental attacks, all the physical damage dealers clutched their ears and broke down on the spot. Panic tore through the ranks in seconds, and the formation started to unravel.
“Healers, get your mental defense spells up!” Do-Jin shouted.
He blasted cold and wind at the ones starting to lose their grip. It hit like a bucket of ice water thrown on someone who’d blacked out, and the group’s confusion cleared quickly. Still, those few seconds were enough. The wide-area debuff had everyone off-balance, and they weren’t ready to respond to the follow-up pattern.
“Watch out!”
The bishop stretched a hand toward the side with more confused targets. The massive evil spirit formed above the Magic Circle mirrored the motion and reached out as well. No loud impact followed. Just coming into contact with it triggered overwhelming magical damage.
“Guhhhk!”
Those caught in the attack snapped their heads back and twisted their bodies like zombies staring at the sky before collapsing onto the ground.
“Your sin of obstructing a holy feat can never be cleansed. Even after death, you will suffer eternally beneath the great Lord Laves.” Before the bishop had even finished his sentence, the fallen started rising one by one.
“Ah! Look over there!”
A player’s corpse rising as a zombie was bad enough. But when a teammate who’d died without a scratch suddenly lurched up and drove a blade forward, the entire raid seized up, confusion rippling through the group.
“Just think of them as monsters and kill them. Anyone with room to move, hit that Magic Circle first!” Do-Jin made the call faster than anyone else could even react. The instant the dead bodies twitched, he unleashed wide-area magic and wiped them out before they could even push themselves fully upright.
“Y-you crazy bastard! You attacked your own allies just like that!”
The sheer speed and decisiveness in Do-Jin’s attack rattled even a bishop of the Cult of Ruin. Normally, raising fallen allies to make them butcher each other should have caused panic and hesitation. That reaction was the entire point of the pattern. Do-Jin’s response went far beyond what the bishop had imagined.
From Do-Jin’s perspective, the choice was obvious. If they were dead and zombified, they were already gone, and they needed to be put down fast. And if they’d only been knocked out and forced back to their feet under domination, it still made sense to kill them on the spot. Burning time and resources trying to cleanse hypnosis or mental control could get the entire raid wiped.
It’s annoying, but it’s not a hard choice to make.
Wide-area confusion and mass zombification were both patterns that could cause a full wipe on their own. Objectively, the fight should have ended with the raid getting chained from one pattern into the next until the whole party collapsed.
Do-Jin never gave them that chance. He struck first, then followed up with orders before anyone could panic. With the command tower steady, the raid’s instability never had a chance to snowball.
I need to end this as fast as possible.
Do-Jin cast spells without a single break. He attacked the enemy, supported his allies, and controlled the battlefield all at once. He kept making the best possible choices in real time as the situation kept shifting.
The massive evil spirit reeled under the combined assault from Do-Jin and the raid, twisting violently as it reached toward the materials sealed inside the glass containers.
“Theresa, shield please!”
A classic boss pattern kicked in, and the boss began to look for something to feed on so it could recover health. Do-Jin had anticipated it, so he deployed Theresa immediately. Her relic shield shut down the evil spirit’s attempt to feed. With a heavy crash, its hand slammed into the barrier and bounced off.
“Aaaaargh! Oh, Lord Laves!” With every plan predicted and shut down, the bishop made a choice he could no longer avoid. He decided to use the other priests conducting the ritual inside the Magic Circle as fuel.
“Kyaaaaaaak!”
The priests, who had been chanting prayers in a mindless trance without understanding anything, screamed as they died on the spot.
They were part of the Magic Circle while performing the ritual, so having their lifeforce drained was inevitable. The damage didn’t stop at their vitality. Their mana circulation collapsed, and their circuits were completely fried beyond repair.
“Graaagh!” The massive evil spirit swelled with power once more.
However, the Magic Circle had barely been keeping it stable, and the spirit slowly slipped out of the bishop’s control.
You idiot. The only reason you could control that thing was the Magic Circle you were standing on, and you just smashed its foundation with your own hands, Do-Jin thought with a sneer.
While the bishop struggled desperately to rein the spirit back in, Do-Jin exploited the opening and squeezed out every bit of advantage he could. Do-Jin disrupted the control link, hammered the spirit’s main body, and destroyed parts of the Magic Circle.
“The boss is shrinking!” a player exclaimed with relief.
After a certain point, Do-Jin’s side had total control and hammered the Magic Circle, the bishop, and the evil spirit with no real resistance. They should have fused just to stay alive, but instead, the bishop and the evil spirit flailed around separately. The remaining priests clawed at the ground in agony, fighting to save themselves. At that point, they weren’t a threat anymore.
Pulling tactically brain-dead plays is practically a proud tradition of the Cult of Ruin at this point.
That kind of stupidity only worked when some stats-obsessed freak could brute-force their way through it. There was no out-of-spec monster like that here.
“We’ve got it!” someone shouted at the exact moment the evil spirit lost its strength and scattered.
With allied damage dropping to a manageable level, even raid members assigned to healer positions joined the attack. The result was inevitable.
“Guhhh...!”
Of everyone inside the Magic Circle, only the bishop still clung to life. Every other priest had already been converted into fuel for the evil spirit during the fight and died as a result.
Well, this didn’t exactly go as planned, but at least the sacrifices were minimized.
After confirming that the threat had fully settled down, Do-Jin turned his attention to the victims they hadn’t yet rescued. He had done everything possible to reduce the damage, but he couldn’t block all of it.
“Fuck.”
They were already weakened to the brink of death, and many of them ended up losing their lives. Without Do-Jin needing to say anything, people rushed forward to rescue the survivors. The healers, despite suffering from severe mana depletion, cast healing magic without restraint and used potions just as freely.
Do-Jin headed for the spot where he’d confirmed Orfen was still alive. As he moved into a secluded corner, he fired a spell at the bishop, who lay groaning on the floor like a bug. The bishop had been trying to draw something with his own blood, but his head burst apart and he died.
Do-Jin pulled Orfen out of the shattered glass tube where he lay limp. The boy’s body was small and frail.
“That’s... my body,” said the boy in wraith form.
“You’re still alive. If you go back, you can live.”
His body itself was in good condition, and only his soul had been separated, which left him in a coma.
Orfen shook his head. “I can’t. I already became one with the other kids. Going back isn’t possible anymore.”
Orfen looked around the Magic Circle. “The friends who died here kept suffering. I did too. That’s why we ran away together.”
Do-Jin had been wondering whether the boy’s missing memories had returned, and that retelling confirmed his suspicions.
“I couldn’t leave my friends behind when they were hurting. So we ran away together.”
Orfen was a child born with a natural talent for handling souls. In the middle of his pain, he had instinctively used that ability and separated his soul from his body. He could have escaped alone, but he couldn’t abandon his friends, so he took everyone with him.
“At first, we were running to find an adult who would help us, but I forgot about that. I wanted to ask the man next door for help, but he turned out to be a bad man...”
Children were deeply shaped and influenced by adults. When the adult they trusted turned out to be the villain who dragged them into hell, those children must have opened their eyes to revenge.
Despite having become evil spirits through the malice of adults, the children still smiled brightly.
“I’m glad you came to save us. And so did all these people.”
Do-Jin didn’t say anything. He felt like his face would crumple if he opened his mouth.
“Our moms and dads can finally rest in peace now, too. They’re tied up over there but the people have let them go.”
Orfen’s face faded, and another child’s face surfaced in its place. The child sobbed so hard he could barely breathe, choking on each broken gasp. “Mom... Mommy...”
Do-Jin didn’t ask why. He couldn’t bring himself to ask whether the child was calling for a mother who had already died or a mother who still lived somewhere out there. Either answer carried a weight that crushed his chest.
“How does it end like this...” he murmured.
It was awful. The children were dead, and their families, whether alive or dead, were trapped in the same irreversible tragedy. This story had never had a happy ending from the very beginning anyway. Do-Jin had known that, but facing it head-on still made his stomach churn.
“Thank you, sir. Mom was right after all. She said there are more good people in the world.”
When Orfen appeared again and said that, Do-Jin closed his eyes. The heartbeat of the boy in his arms slowed little by little. Around them, healers poured out healing magic while crying openly, but the boy’s life kept slipping away at an alarming speed.
“Do-Jin, we’re scared... Can you hold our hands?”
As the children spoke with forms growing faint, Do-Jin silently took their hands. He only held one hand, yet it felt like gripping hundreds of small hands at once. At that moment, starlight bloomed from within their grips, and a system message appeared.
[As an Apostle of the Star, you guide them to their final rest.]
The children who had become evil spirits returned to pure souls. They departed for the Star of Creation, a cradle and sanctuary, where they would rest until the day they could be reborn as new life.
Do-Jin felt nothing but gratitude that the first ability he awakened as an Apostle turned out to be this. Not only the children, but also the souls of the innocent victims who had died unjustly were cleansed as starlight washed over them.
[World Boss Early Unlock Notice]
[A new World Boss is attempting to awaken ahead of the scheduled time.]
An ominous message cut across a radiance far too beautiful for the tragedy it contained. It had always been like this. Anything tied to the Cult of Ruin always ended in a complete mess.