Brother Artorius found that consciousness returned to him in a slow and hazy way. At first he recalled little to nothing, but slowly and surely, memories returned to him, his past, growing up happily in a privileged family as his father was one of the Bishops of the Temple. Those memories eventually led to the expedition he was to undertake, where a group of young and promising priests and guards from the Temple were made to delve into an active dungeon to temper themselves and grow their power.
Such troublesome matters were normally beneath him, with his position as the local bishop’s son, but due to the war with the demons, every skilled priest and guard was called upon to serve. As such, Artorius had dusted off his old barely-used mace and went to the dungeon as part of a party of thirty chosen priests and guards from the temple.
In his mind, he was likely safe. They likely wouldn’t let anything untoward happen to him as they didn’t want to risk his father’s displeasure. Besides that, their party even had the local Temple’s strongest three, who were all in their fourth tiers. Certainly such a party would be more than enough to complete a dungeon delve in perfect safety.
He recalled entering the dungeon with confidence. As a priest his duty was to stay in the back and to support the guards assigned to him with his skills and spells, which he did as best he could because while Artorius was rather lazy, he did quite like the feeling of getting stronger. If he could reach the fourth tier that would win his family great prestige and he was certainly not against that!
The boredom of walking through the forest dungeon was something he recalled vividly, and vaguely, he recalled asking whether they had reached their destination yet or not many times, likely to the irritation of the others, which he couldn’t care less about. Then his memories caught up with more recent events, and the nightmare played once more in his mind.
Not like he would forget the ugly sight of the squat, furred demons that suddenly emerged out of the undergrowth and rushed him. He remembered the feeling of being pushed by a great force he couldn’t do anything against and how he lost consciousness after the brute crushed his body between its shield and a great tree.
That was a nightmare, right? Certainly he wouldn’t be remembering it if he was actually dead and was in the promised afterlife?
Vaguely, Artorius started to be able to perceive his surroundings. He could make out the forest canopy above, if barely. It was dark, so he sighed in relief as it looked like he had just dreamed the whole thing. He had only just done so when he couldn’t help but notice an oddity, namely how everything around him seemed to be bigger than they should be.
Then he noticed some blurry figures in his surroundings that his eyes started to make out. He thought they were likely his compatriots. Maybe he ate something bad and the nightmare exacerbated his illness or something and he was hallucinating because of it, he thought. It was only when his sight slowly cleared that he tried to rub his eyes with his arms only to realize that he could not move his arms.
Or anything, for that matter, for all that remained of him was but a mere wisp of a disembodied soul that floated in the air somehow.
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“Looks like he’s starting to realize the situation he’s in,” noted Esperanza. She was the one responsible for allowing the soul of Brother Artorius to manifest using her [Soul Manifestation] skill, which by that point was so well-used that it had leveled enough that she could use it a couple times a day if she wished to. Most of that practice was naturally from the late villagers of Navef, who she regularly allowed to manifest just so they could get some relief from the eternal limbo that was their current state.
Many of the villagers have asked to be allowed to rest in peace after they had a final chat with their surviving children, so Esperanza left them undisturbed in order to respect their wishes. Some of the others though, were willing to actively advise and suggest things to her group, mostly the ones who had more experience in life, like old Adan-Zil for example. She used her skill to let them manifest on a regular basis, partly to train her skill as well through the constant usage.
Esperanza had not really used her skills on enemies much, though she did make use of it on the demons a couple of times to get more information out of them. This time she did the same to the dead humans, opting for one she figured would be the most likely to squeal once he understood the situation he was presently in.
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The older fourth-tier priest and the two veteran temple guards were almost certain to know more, but they were also far less likely to crack under the pressure. From her limited observations, this one priest whose souls she manifested was one who acted like a typical spoiled brat from a privileged household. Those tend to break down far more easily than fanatical priests or veteran warriors, in Esperanza’s experience, so he got chosen for the dubious honor.
She could feel the realization sink in and how fear began to seep through the soul she manifested as it likely recognized the figures of the demons around it. Esperanza herself was hidden, her shape shifted to blend into the ground and the forest around her, all with the intention to give more of a sense of mystery and horror to the manifested soul when she started to address him.
Of course, she heightened the effect by allowing the soul’s memories to recover slowly, so that he remembered what happened only at the very end, while at the same time she limited what he could perceive to the minimum and only slowly allowed the limitations to loosen as time went on. Those were things she learned to do when she was interrogating the souls of the demons she caught, so it was something quite practiced by now.
“Why have you come here? What brought you here to disturb us with your presence?” she asked, purposefully making her voice sound more ethereal and ghostly, especially with the way it seemed to echo from all around the disembodied soul. The effect was probably heightened with how the rest of her group – including Ani’s people – merely stood there, their lips sealed, with their arms crossed before they chests like mute sentinels.
In reality, though, Esperanza simply spoke from multiple mouths at once, from all directions. Her shapeshifting was capable of handling such fine details at present, even with the finicky way she had to adjust her vocal chords in order to produce the ethereal-sounding voice. It was a feat she wouldn’t be able to pull off in the past, at least before her skill evolved to its current state.
“D- Demon! Ghost! What- Why- How do you have me in your clutch!?” yelled the disembodied soul in obvious panic, or at least, what pitiful mewling it managed to pass off as yelling. She had only manifested the soul with the least capabilities, something she could adjust at will with her skill, as there was no reason to allow the dead priest the same sort of semi-autonomy she allowed Adan-Zil and the others when she manifested them. “I am bound for the promised afterlife, Heretic! I command you to let me go or suffer the consequences!”
Esperanza nearly chortled out loud at the show of false bravado the soul put out at the end there, but she held it in and turned it into a chorus of haunting, mocking laughter instead. Her actions clearly further unnerved the soul as it shrunk down into itself in fear and nervousness, an effect she desired. She figured that this soul was definitely the right choice. It definitely felt cowardly enough to spill all the secrets it knew about given the correct nudge.
“Your so-called pretenders who call themselves gods have no power here, mortals. Also, you do not question us. You provide answers, or else…” she replied in the same ethereal tone of voice, though this time Esperanza inflected her voice with a bit of authority and made it a command. “Instead of the so-called promised afterlife we can offer you an eternity of being devoured alive. How do you feel about that?”
In order to drive her point home more clearly, Esperanza shifted part of her body into long tentacles that had toothy maws on their tips and closed in on the soul from all directions, the maws making a show of opening and closing as they did so. She even nibbled at the edges of the disembodied soul carefully, as her teeth were coated in her [Soul Armament] skill. As such, the tiny nibbles brought great agony to the dead priest’s disembodied soul.
The effect would not have been so exaggerated if the priest still had his body to mitigate the effect somewhat, but as he was reduced to a disembodied soul, he took all the pain from the damage caused to his soul in a far more direct manner, with no buffer between the torturous pain and his perceptions.
“Now speak, mortal, or be devoured. There are many of us and we hunger.” stated Esperanza coldly as she had Gordy approach closer in her mist form. This time, however, Gordy allowed the form of countless toothy maws to be visible from the mist that was her body, which made the disembodied soul shiver and shake as it was frightened by the horrifying display.
“I’ll speak, I’ll speak!” yelled the soul in a panicked voice as the slavering maws inched ever closer to him. He then launched into a far too detailed explanation of who he was and his life at the temple which led up to the reason behind his presence in the dungeon, namely that the war effort called for all ‘talented’ priests and temple guards to increase their power before heading to the frontlines.
What the dead priest said was quite insightful, and Esperanza guessed right that he was born into privilege, which played to her advantage as that also meant that the man knew more than what most in his position would be aware of. Most of what he said lined up neatly with the information she received from Alissa, that the temple was making a play for power and tried to make it look like they contributed greatly to the victory against the demons in the current war.
It was not that Esperanza doubted Alissa, but she did not completely trust the source from which Alissa acquired the information, so it was always better to make sure. As Alissa admitted to her, the semi-independent faction of knights who warned her about the temple had their own interests which ran contrary to what the temple and its priests desired.
The politics of the human kingdom was a total mess with the factions all fighting for their own benefits despite how they were at war with the demons, in Esperanza’s opinion, but that was probably just part of human nature. In some ways, it made her job easier as long as she stayed undiscovered, as it should be relatively easy to pit the already antagonistic factions against each other.
Of course, in order to do that, she would need more detailed information to be able to frame something she did as the work of one faction or another, as the situation asked for. Since they were going to stay at the kingdom for a while more before shifting their operations back to the demon side of the border, Esperanza figured that learning more about the kingdom might well be something she needed to do.