Paladin of the Dead God

The Scorched One disregarded the undead and humans who hastily fled at the sight of him.

Normally, he would have immediately chased and captured them, or interrogated them after burning them with fire, but his goal was clear now: to subdue the ringleader of the miscellaneous merchants, the so-called "Saint Beneath the Earth".

'Bishop Ramarié said that a demon had infiltrated, but that couldn't be true. If such a situation truly occurred, angels or ascendants should intervene, not us. What could we possibly do?'

If they were to truly encounter Isaac, it would bethemin trouble.

The Scorched Ones were initially consumed by mad fanaticism, enthusiastically serving the Dawn Army, but as the Millennium Kingdom persisted for a long time, that fervor had long since cooled.

Seeing that those who had undergone Transcension or Ascended were all not in their right minds, they were reluctant to go to such extremes.

"It's the market! Plunder everything, no, destroy and burn it all!"

"Yes!"

The Brotherhood soldiers, secretly aware that all sorts of goods were gathered in the underground market, were already anticipating the plunder. The Scorched One was also aware of this fact, and planned to turn a blind eye as long as they appropriately offered him a 'tithe'.

The Scorched One promptly plunged his sword into the chest of a protesting merchant.

He would usually spare those who offered appropriate bribes, but he couldn't now that Bishop Ramarié had ordered it.

Undead were mercilessly crushed and trampled. Humans weren't treated much differently. Just for trading with unholy heretics and moving to avoid the sun, they were undoubtedly heretics or barbarians.

[You bastards! I'm also a participant of the 13th Dawn Army! My corpse wasn't recovered…]

An undead man shouted as if wronged, but all that came back was a merciless hammer blow. Trampling the shattered and scattered skull, the Scorched One shouted.

"Gather the 'evidence' in one place and pour oil on all paths except the escape route! Let them wander in the smoke, yearning for the sunlight!"

The soldiers began pouring oil into the passages as instructed. Because they had brought it intentionally, the amount of oil was considerable. If this oil were set ablaze, the entire Ushak would surely heat up like a scorching oven.

At that moment, the Scorched One thought that something was off.

The New Millennium Brotherhood's detachments participating in this subjugation operation totaled five. Five Scorched Ones had also participated. However, only one of them had gathered in the plaza. Of course, it was good that he was the first to arrive so that he could seize more 'evidence', but it was strange that no one else had arrived yet.

It was then. Suddenly, a strange gas began to spread like a reverse current from various places in the passages.

"What is this! Who set a fire without permission!"

The Scorched One shouted, thinking that someone had started a fire. How could they set a fire already when he wasn't even ready to move the evidence yet?

But what came back was a bewildered cry.

"I, it's not smoke!"

"What?"

Before the Scorched One could ask about the identity of the gas, the "The color beyond" that poured out from various places in the passages instantly covered the entire market.

The color resembled no other color in this world.

It was stillness, writhing, thick like oil, and light like smoke. It whispered gruesome words with colorless lips, and peered into their insides with scentless eyes.

"What is this... Ah, a demon! It's a demon's sorcery! Everyone, prepare for battle!"

The soldiers who had already inhaled the color vomited or tore at their own bodies, feeling as if all their senses were turned upside down. The Scorched One expressed anger at the soldiers' pathetic mental state, but soon gasped as a pain squeezed his insides.

Something was filling his stomach.

'It' was bubbling in the Scorched One's gut, eating away at flesh and tearing at blood vessels. He felt 'it' spreading to every corner of his blood vessels, but he didn't even want to imagine what its identity was.

"Aaaahhhhh!"

Heavenly radiance burst forth from the Scorched One's eyes as if exploding. The Watcher's Beacon, activated belatedly, began to drive away "The color beyond". The color slowly disappeared before the brilliant radiance, vanishing from the market.

The Scorched One panted and looked around.

As all of his senses became clear, he realized that what he had experienced were hallucinations and auditory hallucinations.

"Come to your senses, infidels! The power of demons cannot be complete under the light of heaven!"

The soldiers barely regained their senses at the Scorched One's command. But the Scorched One felt like he was about to lose his mind again as he counted the number of soldiers under the bright light. It was only an extremely short time that the color had been consuming them. Yet, the number of soldiers left was less than five.

The Scorched One could now understand what had happened to the other detachments that hadn't arrived.

"R, reorganize the ranks, and escape from this place! Tell Bishop Ramarié that a demon has appeared here, khuk."

One of the Scorched One's eyes distorted in a bizarre direction. He wasn't aware of it himself, but the soldiers who saw it from the side recoiled in horror. But the Scorched One's transformation didn't stop there. He pointed somewhere and shouted.

"An, Garamle, wen? Ship, tteot!"

It was a language in which vocabulary and words were completely destroyed. The soldiers could see the distortion that started from the Scorched One's eyes spreading to his entire face, distorting even his tongue and jaw. But the Scorched One couldn't understand the soldiers' reaction.

He was pointing at a shadow that the light did not reach, warning in the heavenly radiance emitted by the Watcher's Beacon.

A twisted shape that resembled nothing else in the world was dismantling order from the ground up. The Scorched One kept warning and shouting about 'that', but no one saw it.

The Scorched One tried to block it with his own sword, but he had no hands.

He tried to warn by shouting, but he had no mouth.

Isaac lightly took the Scorched One's death, as if picking up a cookie with his fingers.

***

Linde kicked the last fleeing soldier between his legs.

As the heavy iron boot crushed the sensitive area, the soldier screamed in terrible pain before losing consciousness. But she didn't feel sorry for him at all.

'The soldiers suffering in the market are the ones who are really pitiful.'

They had adopted a strategy where Isaac released "The color beyond" to confuse the soldiers, then Zihilrat, Linde, and Isolde would individually defeat the scattered soldiers. If it was simply that, it would be no different from using Zihilrat as bait, but Isaac's purpose was elsewhere.

His purpose was fear.

To have the soldiers who were deliberately sent back spread the fear of Isaac far and wide.

Linde couldn't know specifically how Isaac would instill fear. However, the moment she looked at the color that was unfolding inside the tunnel and inside the market, she fell into a bizarre sense of fear that threatened her survival, even though she was undead.

It wasn't a threat to life. It was a threat to existence. It was an unknown fear that seemed to fundamentally deny all the rules and worlds she believed in, and show that any understanding was impossible.

Linde couldn't even bear to watch the people suffering from that color, let alone look at it herself, so she turned her eyes away.

"Commander Linde."

At that moment, Isolde entered the tunnel. She was grabbing a soldier by the neck and dragging him in.

"He's one of the soldiers who suffered in the market. How many of them should we send back?"

Linde was about to say around three or four people, but she closed her mouth when she saw the direction she had come from. Isolde had directly broken through the area filled with the "The color beyond" that Isaac had scattered. No, she had even personally dragged out the soldiers who had fainted inside.

[No, Lady Isolde... are you alright?]

"Yes? Ah, is it because of the color? It showed me strange things while whispering something, but it didn't seem like anything to worry about, so I'm fine. I was a little scared, but I'm worried if Isaac's strategy will work with just this."

If Linde had facial muscles, she would have made a dumbfounded expression.

She wondered if she didn't know fear because she was too innocent, but she immediately denied it. If she was from the Inquisition, she would have looked into all the dark aspects of humans, so it didn't make sense that she was innocent.

'Or does the fear that Isaac shows not work on Isolde?'

Fear is relative.

Linde was also aware that Isolde was not an ordinary person. It was more because of a thorough belief than her disposition. Linde didn't know what that belief was. Whether it was faith, or faith in Isaac, or strong self-assurance.

Therefore, Isolde seemed to be unaffected or very weakly affected by this chaos.

Anyway, looking at her, Linde felt more at peace. It was a different kind of charm from Isaac.

[It would be better to send them all back. Since the purpose is to spread fear, if there are only one or two, they might be silenced. But they can't silence a hundred mouths.]

Among them, the Scorched Ones were to be left as evidence.

The Scorched Ones who were defeated by Linde, Zihilret, and Isolde were waiting for resurrection in a miserable state, but it was doubtful whether the resurrection of the guys who were defeated by Isaac would be properly carried out.

Not only that. The tentacles that crawled out of the bodies of those who had been consumed by the color were twisting and distorting, unable to regenerate, as if they were confused.

'Is this why those who were defeated by the priests of the Dawn Prayer Meeting can't be resurrected?'

It seemed like it would take a considerable amount of time for them to be resurrected.

But there was no need to wait long.

Suddenly, the ceiling became as hot as if it were heated up, and then it exploded and scattered in all directions in an instant. Linde groaned as she saw the light and heat that was pouring down from the ceiling of the underground market, making it difficult to even open her eyes.

Transcended Ramarié, he finally revealed himself.

***

Ramarié silently looked down at the underground market below.

Soldiers were screaming or burning as they were crushed under the molten ceiling rocks.

It was a pathetic sight, but at least the goal seemed to have been achieved: to draw out the demon, or the impious person called the Saint Beneath the Earth.

He hadn't confirmed their appearance yet, but Ramarié didn't even think about looking. He raised his fingertips and pointed to the ground.

The second ray of light was fired from the church steeple, the 'Beacon', built on the outskirts of Ushak.

Some of the Beacons used during the Dawn Army's siege warfare still remained in the occupied territories. Among them, one of the Beacons whose wheels were damaged due to too rapid movement during the Ushak battle was left abandoned in Ushak. Ramarié was able to easily dominate Ushak with fear using that Beacon.

The Beacon's ray of heat seemed to fly towards the horizon, but it refracted right above Ramarié's head and descended vertically as it was.Kwadududududu!Tremendous heat burned the entire underground market.

The Beacon was closer to an Archangel or a siege weapon than a tool for burning people because of its performance. As the heat covered the market, the internal temperature soared to a high temperature of thousands of degrees, no different from a melting furnace.

On the other hand, Ramarié leisurely basked in the ray of heat as if it were the afternoon sun.

"I should have done this sooner."

Even if it was the demon Isaac, he would have certainly burned the Saint Beneath the Earth with this. The moment Ramarié thought so and tried to stop the Beacon's beam of light, he felt a gruesome killing intent rising from the ground below.

"......"

Ramarié tried to evade in the air, but something that soared up, cutting through the light, instantly cut off his two legs diagonally.

No, it bit them off.

Ramarié widened his eyes at the intense pain he felt in his legs and hurriedly moved.

'What is this? A demon? Even if it's a demon, can it move so calmly in the light of the Beacon?!'

If he had stayed in place, his entire body would have been torn apart in an instant. In the meantime, the overheated Beacon stopped working. He had to wait until it cooled down enough to use it again. Ramarié was tense at the judgment that the opponent was a much greater monster than he had thought. He had heard countless rumors about the Holy Grail Knight during the Dawn Army era, but he had never seen one in person.

He had hoped that he would have suffered considerable injuries in the fight with the Lighthouse Keeper, but he still seemed powerful.

Ramarié emitted a brilliant radiance, driving away dust and darkness.

Only then did Ramarié gasp at the sight of the human figure that came into his sight. On top of the sizzling ruins, Isaac was blankly gazing at him. Ramarié thought he was beautiful even in the midst of that.

Beauty reminiscent of an angel, as mentioned in numerous prophecies and revelations.

But in the middle of a ruin full of blood and ashes, such an appearance was rather disharmonious and gave an unrealistic and bizarre feeling.

'The demon has the mask of an angel, but has the inside of a monster.'

That was clearly a demon that no one could deny.