Rise of the OtherGod Apostle: Not a Cult Leader, but a Serf?!
#168
#168
Once a sanctuary is activated, and the Cathedral bell rings, its sound sanctifies everything within earshot. But there’s a catch—the protection only lasts as long as the bell keeps tolling. At most, a few dozen seconds.
Perfect timing. It’s almost noon.
The Cathedral bell tower would strike twelve times at midday, just as it always did. We could ignore protocol and ring it wildly to signal an emergency, but that would forfeit Order’s divine blessings entirely.
Because keeping precise time is itself an act of worship.
The Bell of Worship rang six times daily, marking the hours from dawn until dusk. Each scheduled chime reinforced the protective barrier around the Cathedral grounds which would be our last defense.
“We need to reach the bell tower before noon.” I squinted up at the imposing structure piercing the sky. “That’s where we’ll activate the sanctuary.”
My stomach clenched at the sight.
That thing is massive.
Someone once said there were over 600 steps. And even once we reached the base, it’d take us at least ten minutes to climb to the top.
Assuming nothing tries to stop us…
“How are you holding up? Can you run?” I asked, eyes scanning the horizon.
“What about you?” Athanas nodded toward my hand. “Will you be alright?”
“This?” I flexed my fingers slightly. “I’m fine.”
And I was. Bizarrely, wonderfully fine.
The healing blessing had kicked in instantly after the amputation, stemming the blood before it could even flow. As for pain… it was barely worse than stubbing my toe. The endorphin rush was so intense I felt almost high, floating on a wave of chemical relief.
“This is nothing!” I insisted. “Even without blessings, the human body pumps itself full of natural painkillers when injured. If we collapsed every time we lost a fingertip, our species would’ve died out ages ago. I’m good to go whenever you are.”
Athanas said nothing, his face drawn and ashen.
“Still feeling unwell?”
I reached out with my left hand and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. His exhaustion seemed to seep through my palm like ice water. Part of me wanted to tell him to rest, to let me handle the bell tower alone…
But sending a heretic to ring Order’s sacred bell felt like begging for divine punishment.
“Athanas, you’re the only one who can ring that bell. I know you’re struggling, but we need to move. Callister can carry you—”
“Excuse me?” Callister’s head snapped around. “Carry him? Me?”
“You promised to listen to me.”
“At least make him take the armor off! I can’t run with all that weight unless you give me more blood or—”
“Fabio.”
Athanas pushed himself upright, silencing our bickering with just his posture.
“We’re running out of time. Save the arguments for later.”
Is he really okay to move? Maybe we should power-walk instead. Less stamina drain.
“But I need to be clear about something.” His eyes locked onto mine, intense and unwavering. “Never harm yourself again. Under any circumstances.”
“Oh, um. Got it.”
Does he think I enjoyed that?
Hell, I was someone who’d canceled laser eye surgery because the thought of microscopic corneal shaving made me queasy. The mental gymnastics required to deliberately cut off my own finger…
But then again, Athanas hadn’t asked me to do it. That particular flavor of insanity was all mine.
“Still, you don’t feel anything? Not even a slight improvement with your headache?”
“The relic I carry is sufficient. Your… gift provides no additional benefit. You’ve harmed yourself for nothing.”
Ouch.
Did he seriously just tell me my severed finger had worse stats than his current loadout? That it was basically vendor trash?
“See, Fabio? I told you he wouldn’t appreciate it! Next time, give your gifts to me! I’ll treasure anything from you. Even your vomit!”
…Right. Because everything somehow just vanishes into your personal garbage disposal unit.
Even Athanas looked repulsed, shooting Callister a withering glare.
“Oh, glare all you want! You’re about as scary as a grumpy kitten with wet paws!”
Athanas didn’t dignify that with a response. He simply turned and started walking, his stride purposeful despite the exhaustion hanging on him like a shroud.
I tried to reframe his rejection in my mind.
Maybe he was being harsh on purpose.
If he’d admitted the finger helped even slightly, what would stop me from escalating? Today a finger, tomorrow an entire arm. He’d recognized the slippery slope and shut it down immediately.
From his perspective, watching me cheerfully dismember myself would be horrifying. Because let’s be real—sacrificing body parts for minimal stat boosts was objectively unhinged.
Like when someone gives you dubious health supplements.
You say you’re feeling “a little better” to spare their feelings because they meant well, and suddenly your kitchen is packed with cases of $80 miracle juice that tastes like fermented lawn clippings…
Just thinking about it pisses me off.
Maybe Athanas’s harshness was strategic. A preemptive strike against future acts of self-mutilation. He’d always been coldly logical like that.
And a bit of a control freak.
Even when missions succeeded, his face would harden at every “near miss” in the debriefing. I guess that comes with being a holy knight of Order—that obsessive need to track every variable, every risk taken without his express permission.
“Always report before attempting anything dangerous.”
An occupational hazard, probably.
Though honestly, isn’t ignorance sometimes better? He couldn’t be everywhere at once. Why saddle himself with problems he couldn’t solve? That level of hyper-vigilance would break most people.
But that’s exactly what makes him hero material. The Savior of Order.
That unshakable conviction to think: ‘I’m the only one who can fix this. It has to be me.’
It takes a special kind of arrogance to shoulder the world’s fate. The kind that stares at impossible odds and says, “I’ll handle it myself.” Most people would collapse under that pressure. Athanas wears it like armor.
Adelaide…
The name alone made something twist in my gut. That girl had kept fighting to save the world even as everyone sneered at her. The Grey Saint, the disgraced one. Sixteen years old, and after every blood-soaked mission, she’d look Athanas in the eye and say, “The sin is mine. You merely followed orders.”
Taking all that weight on her narrow shoulders.
Meanwhile, Pell… that self-righteous bastard was probably lounging in heaven. The man who had happily ‘deleted’ the ability to commit suicide because “Suicide leads to damnation, so I made it impossible~”
How was that fair?
Shouldn’t Pell be the one burning instead of Adelaide?
By any measure, Pell was the real monster here.
“Fabio, you’re shivering. Here.”
Callister put something fuzzy into my hands. A winter hat with earflaps.
“Where did you get this?”
“Picked it up along the way.” He grinned. “I was going to wear it myself, but you need it more.”
This shameless bastard.
His definition of “picked up” clearly meant “stole from someone’s head.” The hat was still warm from its previous owner.
I looked to Athanas for backup.
“Athanas—”
“I saw where he ‘found’ it. Wear it.”
So you watched him steal it and said nothing?
But I got it. We couldn’t waste time on moral debates about petty theft. The clock was ticking and we had less than twenty minutes until noon.
I yanked the hat down over my ears and picked up the pace. The fur lining was actually decent, warming my frozen ears as my breath plumed white in the biting cold.
The bell tower loomed ahead. Its massive height made it impossible to miss from anywhere in the Cathedral grounds because all paths eventually fed into the plaza at its base. Convenient design, at least.
What wasn’t convenient and bad news was the emptiness. No resistance, no guards, not even a single cultist lurking around.
In games, enemy encounters usually signal you’re on the right track. But any halfway decent player defending their base would stack units at chokepoints rather than scattering them across every possible approach.
They’re waiting at the tower.
Makes tactical sense. Defenders on stairs have ridiculous advantages—high ground, limited angles of attack. At least the bell tower had proper stairs instead of those nightmare medieval spirals where you couldn’t even swing a weapon without hitting stone.
If that’d been the case, I would’ve given up on climbing entirely.
The bell tower’s interior featured wide stairs that hugged the walls, spiraling upward around a massive central shaft. A railing provided some protection, though time had claimed sections of it, leaving gaps where one misstep meant a long fall and sudden stop.
Every few flights, the stairs widened into small landings which are perfect ambush points if enemies tried to block our path. In theory, you could bait less strategic opponents right over the edge.
But we’re dealing with Nyapoleon or another player.
They would’ve anticipated that. Prepared counters. Whatever cheese tactics worked in Heretic Slayer would be useless against someone who knew the game’s mechanics as well as we did.
Besides, the real bell tower was nothing like its in-game version.
“It’s too quiet…” I muttered.
The structure stood perfectly intact. No crumbling masonry, no convenient weak spots like in the cutscenes. I ran my fingers along the smooth stone railing, cold and unyielding beneath my touch.
In the game, this place was already half-collapsed.
“I’ll take point,” Athanas said. “Likely an ambush.”
His words unleashed all the paranoid scenarios I’d been shoving down. What if they’d planted explosives halfway up? One detonation and we’d drop with the collapsing stairs. Or maybe creatures were hanging from the underside, just waiting to drag us over the edge.
Were we walking straight into a death trap?
“Actually, Athanas, I’m having second thoughts.” The words rushed out. “This feels way too exposed. Maybe we should find an Apostle of Order first? If they avoided the bell tower, they probably had good reasons—”
“Hand me the Astrolabe, Fabio.”
I hesitated, then pressed the star-clock into his palm. Athanas closed his eyes for a moment, and when they opened, the air around us practically hummed with power.
“I’ve activated the sanctuary.”
“You what?”
“The holy protection will last over an hour. We can climb safely now.”
“But the sanctuary—”
“Moves with the relic, yes.”
Oh.
Of course. Even in Conclude, the sanctuary followed the Archbishop wherever they went. I knew that in theory, but experiencing it was something else entirely. In Heretic Slayer, we’d never wasted precious holy power on mobile buffs like this.
In the game, Athanas had only climbed this tower after Adelaide died—a desperate last-minute rush as the relic’s power drained away. That sense of urgency must have burned itself into my brain, because even now, with a full hour of protection ahead of us, my pulse was hammering.
We’re actually safe? We have breathing room?
But Athanas was already moving, taking the stairs two at a time.
I scrambled after him.
Why is he always so impatient?
The sanctuary protected us from spiritual threats, not physical ones. What if Nyapoleon had scattered caltrops across the steps? Strung hair-thin tripwires? Athanas had fallen for environmental traps like that before, and here he was charging ahead like none of that mattered.
Damn. How is he moving so fast?
My legs burned as I pushed harder, but he kept pulling ahead. A hundred steps blurred past before I finally caught up, my lungs on fire.
“Athanas—” I wheezed between gasps. “Slow down. We need to check for traps.”
“I am being careful.”
“That’s not what I—” The words dissolved into desperate gulps of air.
Something dark plummeted past my peripheral vision—fast and heavy. I jerked toward the railing, but Athanas’s hand was already there, pressing warm against my face as he blocked my view.
“Don’t look.”
The impact came a split-second later. A wet, meaty THUD that echoed up from the depths below.
What the hell just—
“The unclean can’t enter sanctuary ground.” His voice was quiet, close enough that his breath warmed my ear. “It tried to escape upward and lost its grip.”
I swallowed hard, my brain catching up to what had happened.
So we just… walk up? And our enemies conveniently throw themselves off the tower trying to get away from us?