Pov: The inquisitor.

“So, inquisitor? What do you think happened here?” the young pursuer asked me. He had only graduated from the academy and subsequently joined the corps a few months ago, but already he was acting like my right-hand man. If it wasn’t for his background, I would have long since kicked him out. Unfortunately, politics still held a grip on me, even after all these years.

That didn’t change the issue at hand, though.

“Question me again and I’ll have you drawn and quartered for insubordination, child. Back to your station!” I barked, making the kid jump. A moment later, I was left to my thoughts. Finally. Helios knew I needed it.

Usually, the job of an inquisitor stationed in the holy land of Alterian itself was a cushy one. Lots of paper-pushing, but very little action. After all, who would dare inconvenience the church within its own borders?

Unfortunately, that also meant that when something did happen, it was usually serious business. This case was shaping up to be nothing but, as I had anticipated.

The first sign of unrest had been a report from the Caltian temple, a destitute place only surviving because of its role as the start of the pilgrim’s way. Normally, some ordinary cleric would have been sent to calm the masses. When it came out that a statue of Helios had been defaced, however, I realised that something more sinister was happening.

The other inquisitors had grown too fat to leave their cushy chairs, both metaphorically and literally, so the task of finding the culprit had been left to me.

When I first saw the defaced statue, my initial suspicions had been thrown out of the window immediately. Instead of an ugly coat of paint, the previous, heroic statue of Helios in his younger years had been replaced by a completely new one. It depicted a young boy embracing an older, yet still young, man, who had been pierced by swords from all angles.

This strange scene evoked melancholy, grief, regret, and a tinge of courage, all in one. Had it been up to me, I would have called this an act from Helios himself and closed the case immediately. The new statue was far more meaningful than the previous one, even though no holy man would ever be caught admitting it for fear of retribution. The fact of the matter was that this statue was seen as a blemish on the perfect image of Helios that the church liked to taut. If I wanted to complete my ambition, I would have to play along, no matter my personal opinion.

Unfortunately, there were signs of human intervention. At the base of the statue, a key-shaped crack had formed. My skills told me the change had started from there, but the mana affinities involved stumped me.

[Delusion eye] allowed me to pick up traces of mana after changes to objects and people had occurred. For the first time ever, I had encountered some mana types I simply didn’t recognise. The crack was tainted with holy, dream, light, and nature mana, among many others. One of them stood out like a beacon in the dark, however. Dark affinity mana.

Something was strange about this mana, though. The trace amounts that lingered behaved erratically, like boiling water or sizzling oil. It refused to stay still, for some reason.

Under no circumstances would Helios ever use such mana to illicit any kind of change, which made it clear that at least one person of the dark affinity was involved somehow. With this knowledge, the threat of the issue increased from a strange occurrence to a terror attack.

A few days had passed since my initial investigation, but no new clues had turned up. The few that we did have were quickly devolving into a dead end. When I interrogated the witnesses, they only told me of a few suspicious people, none of which I could act upon. So what if a pilgrim had touched the original statue at one point? They did that all the time! So what if a young woman fell asleep during her prayer? Was I supposed to hunt down everyone who had ever fallen asleep during prayer?!

As I said. Dead ends.

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That was, until I got a new report on my desk this morning. It spoke of a wound undeniably inflicted with dark mana, found on a body near the corpse of a recently cursed beast. One that was left by a sword, rather than a claw. This distinction was important, because, despite my fellow holy men’s claims to the contrary, Alterian did have dark-aligned monsters wandering about.

They weren’t common, certainly, but they existed, despite our best efforts. The deceased cursed beast was a perfect example. It had taken the intervention of a prideful foreigner to finally kill the beast, if what I was told was true.

The wildernesses of Alterian were simply too expansive and too plentiful to comb through properly. I knew of a few other cursed creatures and creatures with a dark affinity that still roamed the wilds. Hearing of a wound left by a sword, however? That, that I hadn’t heard of in a long time…

And so, I had arrived here a few hours ago, to inspect the corpse mentioned in the report. While I had been surprised to find not one, but several dozen corpses, that had paled in comparison to my shock when I first inspected the body with the dark wound.

“…a curse mark…” I had mumbled, wide-eyed, before I could stop myself. Even among the dark-aligned, such a skill was incredibly rare, let alone one this deadly.

From my autopsy, it became clear that this woman, whoever she was, had entered into a prolonged battle with her killer, which ended with a gaping wound in her torso. After that, a curse mark had been applied. This particular one had some kind of corrosive effect, which had broken down the woman’s body and turned what was left of her into a pile of steadily crumbling ash. Even now, the younger clerics weren’t allowed to touch the body, in case the curse mark managed to spread.

Regardless, this had been a painful death. Her companions had gotten luckier, because their wounds were far more mundane. Clearly, they all belonged to the same unit, because they wore a similar uniform. One I recognised the savanna tribes often wore. For a moment, the possibility of a tribal war came to mind. Those happened semi-frequently, almost always involving a territorial dispute. It was their way of life. I quickly discarded the notion, however. All the remaining tribes were extremely devout. The church had made sure of that… None would ever take in a person with a dark-affinity, no matter the circumstances. Such an act would doom the tribe, and they knew it.

Suddenly, I became distracted by a curious detail I managed to pick up on.

Without the thick veil of the curse mark lingering over their bodies, however, it became clear that their killer was the culprit of the statue incident from a few days earlier. The mana that lingered behaved in the same erratic way as the mana from back then, making me draw the connection.

I sighed, wiping my bloodied hands on my ruby-colored cassock. I never did like murder scenes, especially when I only had the faint image of a perpetrator in mind. A dark-aligned whose mana behaved erratically. That was it. That was all I had.

“Sir! Sir! You may want to inspect their bodies too, sir!” Rodrick, my right-hand man, shouted. We had been working together for decades. He was one of the few men I would trust not to betray me at a critical moment, so I tended to take him seriously. This time was no different.

I found my old friend a few leagues away, at the other end of the battle zone. There, more corpses were strewn across the savanna plain. They hadn’t escaped my notice, but I had yet to inspect them more closely.

“What’s going on, Rodrick? Why did you interrupt me?” I asked, though my words held no bite.

“These corpses, sir… The mana traces… they have a holy affinity!”

“What?!”

A holy affinity? But how?! There wasn’t any trace of holy mana near the other half of the battlefield! Had the dark-aligned escaped before this person could engage them? But why were they fighting the same tribe? Did they have a common enemy?

I shook the thought from my mind and quickly went to work inspecting each and every corpse, determined not to miss anymore important details. It turned out that the vast majority of corpses were left by the holy-aligned classer. This person wielded a spear and, apparent from the battlefield itself, hadn’t been particularly careful with whether or nor their attack struck true. Instead, it looked like the holy-aligned had gone on a rampage…

“What’s on your mind, sir?” Rodrick asked. Since he had been the one to ask, I decided to indulge him.

“Several things, Rodrick. Why would a holy aligned work together with a dark-aligned, no matter how temporary? And why would they fight in such a self-destructive manner? Questions that remain unanswered, for now.”

“Any idea who the dark-aligned could be, sir? Wasn’t that rogue gravity wielder in the area?” Rodrick proposed.

“Dalius, you mean?” I asked, considering the thought. “No, that seems unlikely. Of the two suspicious affinities, he possesses neither. His philosophy and actions are known to be barbaric and cruel, but I don’t suspect him. That being said…” I wondered aloud, when, suddenly, a thought struck me.

I had been getting tunnel vision. Even if Dalius hadn’t been involved in this particular battle, that didn’t mean that he hadn’t met the two perpetrators… Unfortunately, the cursed-beast corpse was entirely covered in gravity mana, making it impossible for me to find any traces of them there, if they ever were there in the first place.

That left me with but one option, to find Dalius and question him.

I groaned. The very notion of getting anything out of such a man gave me a headache. We hadn’t even found him yet…