By following the intruder from the night before, Raphael came upon a village.
An unremarkable village really, with all the children his age already considered full adults working either in the fields with their dads or at home sewing.
The miscellaneous works were distributed evenly among them.
The girls already of marriable age were being molested more frequently than ever to make the most of the little time left with their families.
The pretty boys had it easy, just having to wait until they grew enough to be too aesthetically manly or more useful as labor force.
Today in the early morning, a gang of alcohol ruined men was approaching the village, with a dashing boy at the front and a frail girl in a hooded cape at his side.
The men, preparing to get to work by tightening their belts to not feel hunger later on and the women, bringing them the cold nearly freezing water in a large bowl to wash only their faces, all peeked out of their wooden houses to look for the source of the noise the obstreperous crowd was making.
It was Raphael , who came with his gang of good for nothings, ready to find even a sliver of evidence against the village before massacring them all.
That's right, he only needed the merit.
Maybe the old him would sing about how it was a necessary sacrifice for the good of the world, but now, if it wasn't in front of a meaningful crowd, it didn't matter anymore.
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It wasn't his business if he was serving meaningful justice or the village people weren't in cahoots with the spy and they were only being sacrificed for the greater good of making him gain greater power.
To be brutally honest, the latter had way higher chances of being true, but again, that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that this time it wasn't going to be as simple as fabricating a random piece of evidence.
Since Raphael highly suspected the spy to be part of the Cult of Dʰéǵʰōm, he had to be very careful.
Not in the "not being discovered by the cult" type of careful, of course.
But in the "make his fake motive and leads look enough like the work of the Cult but not enough to be too revealing of it since he isn't supposed to know about them" type of careful.
After all, if every random low level clergyman knew that their god was just one of the two powerful gods of Dyēus and Dʰéǵʰōm, what kind of laughable hegemony could the Church ever hope to accomplish?!
If it wasn't for the information the literal hypnosis machine Judas gave him, then probably not even a lifetime of climbing the power ladder would have been enough to get to that information.
Of course, that is considering his background as a commoner child.
Anyway, a single thing was certain to happen, and that was, every villager there would be dead after today.
After all, who would Raphael go to to cry when one of them got away with random information that could easily destroy the fine line he was trying to thread here.
Turning to his gang, he gave the order to hold their position with a small smile of self assurance on him.
Then, he turned again to face the village.
But this time, he didn't see the mud and the rotten wood houses, nor the random dog shits and caustic chicken poops, but a white marble hall with golden motifs and colorful frescoes that called to him like the first day he entered the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Marina, and a true, wide smile resembling a full spring sun finally graced his befitting youthful and chubby face.