The next day I was getting a bad feeling. None of us had heard from Sam, Alex, or Clover all night and while I wasn’t expecting them to keep me updated about what they were doing every second of every day…telling us they were investigating a cult and then not hearing anything was giving me horror movie vibes. But at the same time I didn’t want to overreact and invade a small town with…I did some quick mental addition…seven capes if I brought everyone.

Damn, that was more than most Protectorate teams.

Oddly enough, reminding myself that I had enough firepower on hand to conquer a small town did a lot to calm me down and I was able to get through the morning without pacing in circles.

That didn’t mean that the rest of my group was as calm though.

“Still nothing from them?” I asked Crystal who was sitting in the corner, staring at her phone and nibbling on a thumbnail.

“No messages, and all their phones are turned off.” She replied. “I don’t like it.”

I simply nodded. I didn’t like it either.

One or two of the girls I could maybe excuse as forgetfulness or bad luck. All three when they knew we would want to check up on them later? That meant something happened or they were in an area where they couldn’t use their phones.

“I’m going to give them till noon to check in. If we don’t hear from them by then we can head into town and look around.”

“Why not now?”

I started rubbing at my neck. “I’m trying to trust them and avoid being a micromanager. They’re not helpless and I don’t want them thinking I’m never going to let them do their own thing without breathing down their necks.”

Crystal nodded but still looked worried.

“And if we find out something did happen and we’re too late?”

Something dark burned in my chest but I did my best to not let it show.

“Then we deal with it the best we can. And depending on what happens, burn everything they own to the ground and salt the earth behind us.”

-o-

Needless to say, we didn’t hear from the girls by noon.

At this point all of us were at least slightly concerned, so we packed up the house and headed down into the town.

It was a nice place. Lots of bright brick buildings with colorfully painted trim that reminded me of something out of a hallmark film, I wouldn’t have guessed there was some kind of hidden cult if I hadn’t been told about it. But what was worrying was that there were absolutely no other people on the streets despite the time and nice weather. Even if most people decided to stay in for some reason or another, there should have been at least a few that were getting something to eat or running to a store.

…or people that would be running those stores, but I glanced through the window to what looked like a deli and saw no one at the counter

It was like we had walked into a ghost town.

“I don’t like this…”

I wasn’t sure who whispered that, but I completely agreed with them.

Without a single person besides our group on the streets, the town quickly went from hallmark to horror.

And then a church bell went off in the distance which really didn’t help.

“Anyone want to bet that’s where everyone is?”

I managed a chuckle at Gloria’s comment. “No, but we should definitely check it out.”

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“Uhm, is that going to be okay for you guys?” Vicky asked from behind us. “Cause, you know, devils and churches don’t really mix?”

I paused and everyone looked at me. To be honest…I had no clue. On the one hand, I was clearly affected by something resembling the Heaven System because invoking Big G’s name gave me migraines. But on the other hand, I doubted a normal church would have anything like that backing it up without someone with the ability to do so specifically putting protections down.

“...we should be fine.” I said eventually. “And if we do run into issues we can just have Vicky knock down the doors and drag everyone out.”

“Hey!”

I smiled at her protest and simply walked away. My small jab had done what I wanted and broke up the tension we were all feeling. I could hear some of the others chuckling at the Blonde’s outburst and making some harmless jabs of their own.

It was nice but unfortunately it didn’t last once we got to the church.

Unlike the rest of the town, the church was surprisingly dark. It didn’t look neglected or anything like that, but the dark brown almost black wood looked weird against the bright brick surrounding it.

The other weird thing was that the doors were standing wide open despite the fact there were still no people anywhere to be seen.

‘What do you think? Trap?’ Ddraig asked while we headed over.

‘I don’t think so.’ I replied back, pleased that there was nothing stopping me from entering the building. I guess just ‘being a church’ wasn’t enough to give it any powers over devils like me. ‘If it was, they should have left someone outside just so we weren’t as suspicious. Now we know something is wrong and everyone has their guard up.’

‘Double bluff? You know something is wrong so they are counting on nothing being wrong?’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

Ddraig gave me the mental equivalent of a shrug. ‘You would know better than I would. Most dragons aren’t great at subtlety or complex plans.’

I didn’t say anything to that. I had a feeling there had been plenty of dragons where Ddraig came from that were perfectly good at those things and he just never noticed because he was strong enough to bulldoze his way through nearly anything he wanted.

No one said anything as we went deeper into the building. I looked into a couple side rooms on a hunch, but just like everywhere else there was no one there. That didn’t matter much though, since we were soon right outside the main room. If there was anyone here…well, they would be in there.

I took a deep breath and threw open the doors to reveal…

…nothing. No one was here either.

Now what?

“Hey, look over there…” Gloria trailed off, seemingly deciding to check out whatever she noticed by herself with Vicky and Eric trailing after her to what looked like a storage cubby. Curious, I decided to follow after them.

I didn’t even get to look inside before Vicky turned around, shoved Eric out of the way, and called for her sister.

Everyone else wisely got out of the way until the mousy brunette went by and immediately followed after to see what the alarm was about.

Since I wasn’t too far away I got a decent look at the three women that had been stuffed into the cubby before everyone started crowding around. All three were tied up and unconscious but looked otherwise fine, something Amy confirmed after taking some time to investigate the three.

“Well, I guess we know where Alex, Sam, and Clover went.” Crystal sighed.

I looked at her. “You think they knocked these three out, stole their cult outfits, and went to investigate by themselves?”

“I could see them doing it.”

“Well someone with magic knocked them out.” Amy cut in. “All three of them have traces of it on them.”

“You can tell that?” Vicky asked my Bishop, making me a bit proud of her. She was picking up the basics pretty quickly. More importantly she was remembering to use them. I had expected to need to check myself because everyone was so new to the idea of having magic but Amy had beat me to it.

Or maybe it was because she was so new to it that she remembered. Either way I was proud of her for remembering.

“Yeah, Rias taught us how to sense it. I can’t tell what it’s doing but these three have it on them…should I try removing it?”

“Leave it for now.” I ordered. “If the girls did put a spell on them they are definitely part of the cult and we don’t need them alerting the rest somehow. If someone else did, we don’t know how their magic works and could end up hurting these three.”

Amy shrugged. “You’re the expert. So now what?”

I opened my mouth to respond, only to come up short.

What did we do now? We ended up here because of the bell, but we still didn’t know where to go. The only leads we still had were currently busy drooling on each other and we had literally just talked about how waking them up was dangerous.

Would we have to just risk waking them up?

“Hey you guys done over there? I found something!”

I was surprised by the call out. I hadn’t even noticed Carl broke off from the group to explore the rest of the room while we all went to check out what Gloria found.

But hey! Possibly a new lead on where everyone went!

Our group wandered over to my Pawn to see…

“Okay, is it just me or is every door we’ve come across been open for some reason?” Eric pointed out.

…a hidden door leading down to an underground passage.

“It’s not just you.” Crystal agreed. “Every door we’ve seen so far has been open, even cabinets and closets. What do you think, parahuman power or magic?”

I shrugged because honestly? It could have been either of them, both, or something completely different. I also didn’t feel like guessing because we were more likely to guess wrong and I didn’t want to make plans on assumption.

“Don’t know, but I guess we'll find out when we find everyone else.” I muttered and started down the stairs.

-o-

“How the hell did someone build this without someone finding out?” I exclaimed several minutes later.

We were still heading further down with no sign of anyone around. And considering I was sure we had walked for at least a couple miles already…this was either something someone had devoted years of effort into building, or they had one hell of a support power to dig for miles without anyone noticing.

“Anything in that book about someone with a tunneling power, Gloria?”

“Nothing yet, but I doubt it. I’m almost finished and it looks like it’s just the typical end of the world, the true believers will inherit the Earth type stuff.”

Gloria had found a book made by the cult in the cubby and had been updating us whenever she found something interesting.

The whole thing was a little goofy in my opinion. Another Christian offshoot where a person’s importance in the galaxy was determined by the colors of the rainbow, with red being the lowest and violet as the highest. The most interesting thing to me was that the book had actually called out Adam and Eve as only being on the fifth level because of their supposedly blue eyes instead of the most important. They also considered black or tan skin to be the equivalent of indigo for some reason.

Of course I didn’t waste much brainpower trying to figure that one out because apparently violets were space aliens that were going to come and uplift humanity so whoever created the cult clearly wasn’t working with a full deck of cards. It was interesting to see blonde hair, blue eyed caucasian wasn’t the definition of perfection though. A little refreshing compared to the normal.

The rest of the group was having fun trying to argue whether Eric dying his hair blue made him a blue or if that was cheating and if I was at the bottom of the ranking because of my hair or the top because of my eyes.

It was harmless fun and a good distraction from the oppressive feeling of walking down a near featureless tunnel for so long but at the same time I really wanted to get to the end and find my three wayward pawns. Who knows what those three had gotten wrapped up in by now?