"Adam, what do we do?" William asked.
There was no emotion at all in Adam's eyes. Logic had taken over his body, and every thread in his mind was spinning at full speed, dissecting the trick inside what they had just seen.
He did not believe for an instant in any miracle of the Supreme God. There had to be a trick buried in it somewhere.
"Adam?" William watched the Servitors, who had begun herding the mortals together, and asked again.
"Flesh and blood!" Adam said abruptly. He had remembered that eerie, evil ability he had once seen the Servitor use — mutating his own arm into a weapon. What if that ability can be applied to somebody else's body? Or made to leave his own body for a while?
"What flesh and blood?" Cristel asked, baffled.
Adam did not answer her. He simply gave the order. "Leave that Servitor and the resurrected man alive. Kill the rest."
Puzzled as the three of them were, they carried out Adam's order without the slightest hesitation.
In an instant wind, fire, lightning and kinetic blasts poured down from the sky, reaping the believers' lives in swathes. Ophelia crashed down onto the ground in a fury, her blade rising and falling, utterly unstoppable.
Seeing the four descend from the sky, the Servitor panicked for a heartbeat, then screamed, "Heretics! Blasphemers! Fiends—"
Ophelia cut a bloody path through to him and leaped up to appear beside him, seized him by the collar with one hand, and gave him a casual shake. The Servitor went limp at once and lost the power of speech. She then drove him savagely into the ground, only just remembering Adam's order to keep him alive at the very last moment — and that was the only reason the Servitor kept his life.
The fight ended cleanly and quickly. Within minutes every follower of the Supreme God was wiped out, and the mortals stared at Adam and the other three, dumbstruck. After a moment of silence they actually launched an attack on them, shouting the same words they had cried during the sacrifice, completely disregarding the gulf in strength between them.
Adam knocked out a batch of them with lightning, his face blank, only to find that they felt no fear at all and kept charging in without knowing whether they'd live or die. The other three ran into the same thing. Against followers of the Supreme God they could kill without mercy, but faced with ordinary people, none of them could bring themselves to be entirely cold-blooded.
"Come out."
At the word, the devil shot out of Adam's mind and took chaotic form. From its enormous mouth a roar of negative energy spread through the whole city, and every ordinary person there dropped into unconsciousness.
William and the others gathered around Adam, ragged and shaken. "Damn it, what is the matter with these people?"
The devil cackled. "Cack cack — because you destroyed their hope, that's why. Of course they won't let you go." The devil understood this sort of thing well; what remained of its inheritance memory held similar records. Mortals who struck bargains with devils were full of hope beforehand, then discovered they had been played by the contract, and the despair that followed the collapse of that hope stripped them of their reason.
"To pin one's hope on a so-called god — how foolish." Adam did not look at the ordinary people again. He stepped forward and hauled up the man who had died and come back, and said it flatly.
"Cack cack. Master, not everyone is you."
Adam ignored him. Holding the resurrected man, he asked the three, "Are you sure the magic just now didn't touch him?"
The three of them nodded.
"Just as I thought. The resurrection is nothing but a trick." With that, Adam tossed the resurrected man to the three of them. After each had examined him in turn, understanding dawned: the man had been dead all along, and the resurrection afterward was nothing more than his body infected and puppeteered.
"Then what about the regrown limbs?" William asked again.
Adam walked up to the Servitor, who was barely recognizable as human anymore, frowned, glanced at Ophelia, took the bone-white staff from the man's robe, and then triggered a bolt of current to wake him from unconsciousness.
The instant the Servitor opened his eyes, heedless of the pain wracking his body, he lunged straight at Adam.
William suddenly remembered what his father had told them about a Servitor blowing itself up, and warned him in a rush, "Careful!"
Adam increased the current and destroyed the Servitor's body tissue. He slumped to the ground at once, unable to move a muscle. Adam asked him, "What is the Supreme God? How do you communicate with him? Where does your power come from?"
The Servitor was completely paralyzed, left able to control nothing but the part of himself above the neck. A mad look spread over his face, and he howled, "The blasphemer shall be judged!" Then he blew himself up without a moment's hesitation.
With the apprentices on their guard, that sort of suicide attack was useless. The psychokinetic barrier blocked it with ease.
William said anxiously, "Damn it, I never got to ask him about the regrown limbs!"
Adam pointed at the resurrected man's corpse. "See for yourself."
Once the Servitor was dead, the resurrected man's limbs dropped off by themselves, and together with his body they turned into monsters that set upon each other, attacking and devouring one another. The naked eye could tell at a glance that they were of the same root and same source.
William sighed and said nothing more.
Adam looked over the three of them and said, "The Church of the Supreme God takes in believers to provide guidance for the other-plane being. The massacres are probably how they flex their muscles."
Cristel was puzzled. "But the special energy an ordinary person can offer is tiny. To pierce the plane wall and transmit information — there's no way a few tens of thousands of people could manage that."
Ophelia spoke up. "So they're cultivating Servitors."
Her words were brief, but the others understood her meaning at once: ordinary people's special energy was weak, and that was why the other-plane being granted down a method of enhancement.
"Then what about us?"
The devil said carelessly from the side, "What else can you do but kill your way through?"
Adam had no better plan either. Wipe out all the ordinary people? Mages did not much care about the lives of ordinary people, but neither would they ever permit an apprentice to slaughter at will. If he really did that — never mind whether his teammates would agree to it — the academy's next mission would probably be to exterminate him. Even if he escaped with his life, the only road left to him would be joining the Magefoes and becoming a rat.
"We can only wipe out every claw of the Church of the Supreme God beyond the west first, then attack their headquarters."
Everyone nodded in agreement. Paying no mind to what would become of the ordinary people lying unconscious all over the ground, they rose into the sky and went on searching for traces of the sacrifices.
Over the next month or so, Adam's four kept wiping out the Church of the Supreme God around the west, collecting several staffs. Ophelia confirmed that every one of them, like the first, served a single purpose.
Because of their constant purges, the Church's activity beyond the west grew more covert still. For a full week Adam's four found no further large-scale sacrifices; it seemed the Church had pulled all of its claws back into its lair.
When no breath of sacrifice came any longer from beyond the west, Adam's four set out toward the west, preparing to storm the Church of the Supreme God's headquarters and finish the mission.
Just then, from a vast distance away, a sky-high reek of blood came riding the clear wind.