If they had not seen it with their own eyes, no one could have imagined just how cruel humans could be toward their own kind.
The whole royal city had become one vast field of slaughter, and the killing never stopped for an instant. The Servitors frantically drove the common folk on, ordering ordinary believers to build small altars at the appointed places and to perform blood sacrifices a thousand lives at a time.
Conscience and pity had been cast off entirely. Driven mad by a reality they had no power to resist, the mortals had turned into new beasts.
They began attacking everyone around them, people who might once have been friends or family, with whatever weapon they could lay hands on, offering up those lives as proof of their loyalty to the Supreme God.
And when the rest saw that the beasts had gained real power and been spared from death, they went even madder. By then no Servitor or believer needed to force them; they butchered their own kind of their own accord, more savagely than the Servitors ever had.
Inside the royal palace, Brown sat on the throne, listening in rapture to the screams clamoring across the city. This was now the safest place in the whole royal city; compared with the madness outside, it held an eerie kind of calm.
"Viscount Brown..." said the former knight under his command, now a white-robed Servitor, kneeling on the floor.
"Call me Servitor. Servitor Brown." He gave the white-bone staff in his hand a little flourish and corrected his subordinate's form of address.
The white-robed Servitor adapted without missing a beat. "Lord Servitor Brown, the final preparations for the blood sacrifice are nearly complete. The one hundred and thirty altars in the royal city have all been built as you commanded."
Brown looked surprised. "So soon? Those base, ignorant commoners — are they all dead already?"
The Servitor's face turned strange. "No, my lord. They... they no longer need us to lift a finger. They've started killing each other, swearing loyalty to the Supreme God with the lives of their companions. Most of those still alive have become believers of the Supreme God; only a few of the base ones are still resisting."
Mockery flickered through Brown's eyes, but his expression turned solemn. He rose and spoke in an ethereal voice. "All living souls are the children of the Supreme God, yet mankind was lured into corruption by greed and folly. And now the Supreme God is about to descend upon this world once more and establish His supreme kingdom of God,"
Brown paused. The Servitors had no idea why he had said it, but they chanted together all the same: "Praise the Supreme God."
Brown looked at them with satisfaction.
"God says, 'Those who once fell cannot receive My love, and the lowly and base cannot enter My kingdom.'"
The Servitors all fell to their knees to listen to the oracle, and Brown's tone turned lethal.
"We are the sons of God, His apostles. It falls to us to cleanse the world for the Supreme God and choose God's people, so that His kingdom may be pure and noble and untouched by filth. We must test the constancy of the believers. Therefore every ordinary believer shall take part in the sacrifice to God as well. If they truly trust the Supreme God and are loyal to Him, God will grant them rebirth."
Even though they stood in the same camp, hearing Brown's words the Servitors could not hold back the chill that rose from the bottom of their hearts and grew stronger by the moment. They knew what his words meant. It was very nearly an order for indiscriminate slaughter.
Adam and the other three halted just as they were about to enter the west, and looked back over their shoulders at the same time. No one needed to be reminded and no one had to ask; every one of them had caught that thick reek of blood carried on the wind.
"Where is it?" Adam asked the devil.
The devil shook his head. "I don't know. A long way off."
The other three all wore grim faces. Over the past month the devil's sense for flesh-and-blood energy had grown keener and keener, often enough to locate a source from a hundred kilometers away. If it could not sense this one, the source must be very far indeed — and yet from that distance they could still smell such violent bloodshed. The Church of the Supreme God's sacrifices this time must be beyond all reason.
"Adam?"
"We're going."
Adam did not hesitate; he simply gave the order to set out toward the source of the blood. The west was the Church of the Supreme God's home ground, but the Church had been there for two years now, and if anything was going to change, it should have changed long ago.
This blood sacrifice, however, was real and happening now. The beings of the other plane gained their coordinates through the believers' power of faith; the bigger the sacrifice, the more Servitors could be converted in one go.
If a fourth-rank or higher other-plane powerhouse truly succeeded in descending on the deserted island, Adam dared not gamble on whether it could destroy Madeira Island in a single blow. The pressing matter now was to wreck this blood sacrifice.
Otherwise, even if the Mages killed the other-plane powerhouse afterward, their lives could never be won back.
The four flew at high speed in the direction the smell of blood came from, and found every town and city along the way reduced to broken walls. Not one inhabitant was left in any of them; scattered over the wild countryside, the ruins looked like the relics of some ancient age.
A day later they came to hover above a giant city that stood alone upon the land. Unlike the grim severity of Cold Maple City in the Northland or the bustle of Southern Seaport City, this city was majestic and weighty — but they had no time to admire it now. They were enraged by the massacre going on inside its walls.
To their eyes the whole royal city was wrapped in the color of blood. One hundred and thirty altars ringed the site of the former royal palace like stars around a moon, linked to one another by blood-red chains. The palace William had once seen was gone, replaced by a towering platform built of countless bones; on each of its steps stood white-robed Servitors, differing in number, chains in their hands, watching in silence as the figure at the very summit drove his staff into the center of the altar.
William recognized him at a glance and bellowed, "Brown! Have you lost your mind? You're a noble — do you have any idea what you're doing?"
His voice gave away the four's position. Adam shot William a cold glance and said, "Fight. Leave none alive."
William knew he had done something stupid, and did not dare offer a single word in his own defense. Mana surged through him, and he was the first to charge the royal city.
Brown lifted his head and looked at the sky. His body, enhanced by an energy converter, let him pick Adam out at a glance, and a crazed grin spread across his face. He made no sound at all; he paid no heed even to the magic falling from above, and drove his staff hard into the center of the altar.
At once every blood-red chain blazed with red light, and all one hundred and thirty altars began the sacrifice together. Countless lives died every second; flesh and blood gathered through the blood-red chains at the center of each altar, then were converted into energy and fired into the core altar where Brown stood.
The radiating waves of it formed a shield that blocked the four's magic completely. Brown stood high above, waiting for the energy to pour in, and roared, "The heretics shall surely perish! The blasphemers shall never be reborn!"
Then he looked at Adam in the sky and said without a sound, "Little bastard. You're going to pay for this with your life."