Rise of the OtherGod Apostle: Not a Cult Leader, but a Serf?!

#170Reader Mode

T/N: Hey everyone quick update!
Bad news first: my computer completely crashed (yep, blue screen of death 😩).

Good news? I had everything backed up, so no work was lost! 🙌
Even better, I just need to replace a part. It’s already ordered and should arrive in about a week. Once it’s fixed, I’ll be back to uploading chapters like normal.

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the delay! 💙

#170

“Callister…”

I started to ask if he was okay, but then I actually looked at him.

“…Why the hell are you naked?”

“My clothes fell off while I was crawling.”

I blinked. Behind him, his clothes were laying on the floor strangely. The tunic and pants were still holding their shape perfectly, like their wearer had just… deflated and oozed away.

How does that even happen?

You know what? I didn’t want to know.

“Just… put them back on.”

“If that’s your command, then of course I’ll dress.”

I looked back at where I’d slipped. My hand had definitely hit something that reeked of copper and rust. Fresh blood. But when I checked the floor, nothing. Totally dry. I ran my hand over the stones again. Still nothing. Even checked my palm. Clean.

Did I imagine it?

Maybe Callister had cleaned it. Maybe there’d been nothing there at all. My thoughts felt slippery, unreliable.

I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on the sound of Callister getting dressed. At least he was doing it like a normal person. Well, normal-ish.

“All dressed!”

“Good.”

Still no sign of Athanas. The guy had practically scaled that ladder in seconds, but apparently climbing down was a whole different ordeal.

I waited. And waited. Must’ve been ten minutes by now. Then I heard it, the soft chime of the church bell. The small one that rings every fifteen minutes.

Wait.

Someone was still up there ringing bells?

Why would anyone…?

No. Has to be automatic.

The Astrolabe kept perfect time without a single gear. If Order’s power could do that, it could definitely handle a bell schedule without needing some poor guy to sit up there. The great bell needed actual people to manually ring it as an act of worship, but these little time bells? They probably just rang themselves.

Nobody would make someone sit in a bell tower pulling ropes every fifteen minutes. That’d be absurd.

“I’m going to check on him.”

Callister moved to follow, but I ordered him to stay put and grabbed the ladder. Athanas had looked ready to collapse before he even started climbing, so he probably passed out the moment he reached the top.

Please just be unconscious up there.

But my mind immediately spiraled to darker possibilities. What if Nyapoleon had planted a delayed trap, something meant to go off once the bell stopped ringing, right when we’d finally let our guard down?

Or maybe…

Maybe Athanas was having a divine encounter. They say Roklem, the God of Order, reveals Himself to those who perform great services—offering revelations, blessings, the full divine treatment. In a crisis like this, converting even one unit to His cause would be a massive win.

What does Order think of me?

The thought made my stomach twist. What if Order saw my trait’s blocking ability as a threat? What if Order took it personally? All He’d have to do is send a command, and Athanas would drive a blade through my chest without hesitation.

Then again, if Order wanted me dead, I’d already be dead.

I’d survived Order’s attention once already. That had to mean something.

Clinging to that fragile hope, I started to climb. Rung by rung. Breath by breath.

“Athanas?”

The bell chamber was open to the wind, icy air slicing through my clothes like knives. Athanas was standing there unharmed, thankfully, but something felt wrong.

Holy crap, it’s freezing up here.

“Hey, you finished? What’s got your attention?”

No response. He didn’t even twitch. He just stood at the edge of the platform, staring down at the Cathedral grounds far below. Too close to the edge. Way too close.

“Athanas?”

Still nothing. No flicker of recognition. Like I wasn’t even there.

Did the bell damage his hearing?

Or maybe he’d cast a soundproofing spell and forgotten to drop it. I crept forward, each step fighting the urge to look down. No railing where he stood, just open air and a bone-crushing drop. My palms were slick with sweat despite the cold.

Just step back. Please, just step back.

I reached out, stretching as far as I dared, and tapped his shoulder.

“Athanas!”

He turned. The smile that bloomed on his face was soft. Serene. And utterly wrong.

I stumbled back on instinct alone.

“…Who are you?”

The thing wearing Athanas’s face began to move its hands in graceful, flowing patterns. Sign language, but nothing I’d ever seen before.

[SYSTEM: Due to ‘Heaven Above, Earth Below, I Alone Reign Supreme,’ Divine Sign Language comprehension has been nullified.]

When I shook my head, the entity looked… almost embarrassed. It reached out with Athanas’s hand and traced glowing letters across my palm.

「I am the Bell Keeper.」

Bell Keeper?

That told me absolutely nothing. What kind of entity hijacks someone’s body just to announce that? Still, it had to be aligned with Order—possession through descent was kind of their thing. Resurrection was off-limits, a major sin in their doctrine, but borrowing someone’s body for a divine drop-in? Totally fine. Summon a god with the right epithets, and you’d get a huge power boost, plus whatever miracles came bundled with the name.

But why now? Why this?

「I have been commanded by the Lord to keep the time.」

…You’re kidding.

Yes, the bell tower mattered, but we were literally fighting for our lives down there. Once the sanctuary’s protection ended, ringing bells wouldn’t do much beyond sounding the countdown to our deaths. The next Bell of Worship wasn’t even due for another three hours.

And yet Order burned divine energy to stick a celestial timekeeper up here? Dutifully chiming the quarter-hour while everything collapsed below?

I grabbed Athanas’s hand and traced my reply in glowing letters:

「Until when?」

Something flickered behind those dark blue eyes… something cold and alien that made my skin crawl.

「Until the next command is given.」

And when the hell would that be?

My teeth ground together. If you’re going to give orders, at least make them specific. Set a damn endpoint. Tell a high-faith unit to “wait,” and they’ll stand there for decades, literal decades, until they crumble to dust.

What the hell is Roklem thinking?

「If I bring someone else to ring the bells, will you release Athanas?」

「No. I follow only the Lord’s command.」

Are you kidding me?

The curses bubbling in my throat were holy-war blasphemy level. What kind of tactical genius uses a divine possession to babysit a bell?

Roklem just burned divine-grade resources to turn one of our best fighters into a celestial cuckoo clock.

This is exactly why Order keeps losing.

They’ve got home-field advantage, god-tier powers, the backing of an entire Empire—and still, Roklem plays like someone button-mashing through their first real-time strategy game.

I clenched my jaw and traced more glowing letters into Athanas’s palm.

「Why does the bell tower need guarding?」

「I follow the Lord’s command.」

Seriously? You don’t even want to know why you’re following orders?

Of course not. Critical thinking had been entirely outsourced to their higher power. I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste blood.

Maybe Roklem had other units in play, some grand strategy I wasn’t seeing.

But even if that were true, wasting a divine descent on bell duty was tactical lunacy. The resource cost alone had to be huge.

What’s the actual plan here?

「What am I supposed to do?」

「I am the Bell Keeper. I keep the time.」

「Not you. Me. What should I do?」

「I follow the Lord’s command. You should follow whatever command the Lord gave you.」

Fantastic. Full conversational dead end.

I stared at him in silence. The Bell Keeper gently let go of my hand and glided back to the platform’s edge—same exact spot, same stiff posture, same blank stare locked on the Cathedral grounds below.

Like watching an NPC reset to its idle animation.

The wind up here cut straight through to the bone. I pressed against a pillar for cover, while Athanas—the Bell Keeper—stood fully exposed in the howling gale, letting it rip through him without a single flinch.

Fifteen minutes crawled by.

He stepped to the smaller bell, rang it once with mechanical precision, and returned to the exact same position. Same spot. Same angle. Same empty stare into the void.

Modern NPCs have more personality than this.

At least game devs gave their characters idle animations these days—weight shifts, breathing cycles, the occasional blink. The Bell Keeper moved like one of those old animatronics from haunted pizza chains: stiff servos, looped motions, zero soul.

Thirty minutes later, he performed the three-quarter hour ritual. Ring. Return. Stare.

Almost time for the big one.

The Astrolabe’s protection had to be long gone by now. I clamped my hands over my ears before Athanas could reach for the main rope.

CLANG!

Goddamn.

Even with my ears covered, the sound slammed into my skull. But at least this time, my guts didn’t try to escape through my spine. The smaller bells were bad, but nothing weaponized acoustics quite like the main bell at high noon.

The Bell Keeper completed his circuit and settled back into place, still as stone.

So the duty continues even after the sanctuary ends.

Roklem had truly doubled down on this colossal waste of resources.

My breath came out in silver clouds, dissolving into the winter wind. Standing here any longer was useless. The Bell Keeper would carry out his ritual with or without an audience, and every second I lingered gave Nyapoleon more time to tighten the noose.

Find answers. Fix this mess. Get Athanas his “next command.”

“Athanas.”

I pulled off my hat and carefully placed it over his dark hair. His blue eyes—familiar, yet no longer his—turned toward me.

「It’s cold.」

My fingers trembled as I traced:

「Take care of yourself.」

It’s not your body to break.

Something flickered in those borrowed eyes. A trace of warmth… gratitude, maybe. Recognition. Or maybe just—

CLANG!

The Bell of Worship roared to life.

I slammed my hands over my ears as the sound detonated through the tower, shaking its very bones. The bell swung with wild, chaotic force—completely unscheduled. Completely wrong.

What the hell was that?

No one had touched the rope. I saw it myself, cut clean on the floor below.

So how the hell was the bell ringing?

It wasn’t supposed to. Not now.

If the Bell Keeper’s divine programming was built around maintaining precise bell timing, then this sudden, unscheduled chime could only mean one thing…

I turned just in time to see Athanas step off the platform’s edge into open air.

“Athanas!”

The scream tore from my throat as I lunged against the pillar, leaning out far enough to see him catch an ornamental ledge with inhuman precision and swing through a window below—fluid, flawless. Like something out of an action movie.

Not even the game’s physics engine would let you get away with a stunt like that!

I stood frozen, brain rebooting, until the pieces finally clicked into place.

Someone else is here.

No follower of Order would dare ring the bell off-schedule. Which meant…

A player.

Had Nyapoleon stationed backup in the tower from the start? Or sent reinforcements when the first wave failed?

But why ring the bell? To signal his position? Flush us out?

You’re really broadcasting your location? The same spot your last squad got wiped out in?

My knees buckled. I slumped against the pillar, trying to process what this meant. The logical move was obvious: stay put. Let the Bell Keeper deal with whatever was down there and return victorious.

What was I supposed to do, anyway? With 25 durability, one lucky hit would splatter me across the stones. I’d just be another liability—dead weight Athanas would have to protect while fending off whatever horrors Nyapoleon had cooked up.

And if the Bell Keeper loses?

Then I’d die up here, freezing to death while cursing Roklem’s strategic genius with my last breath.

Not exactly a rich menu of options.

A figure suddenly burst through the opening where Athanas had vanished—light blue hair whipping in the wind, dangling halfway out the window.

“Pandomonium?”

He twisted his head up. Our eyes met across the gap.

Shit.

Steel flashed toward his chest. In a blur, Pandomonium’s hand snapped up, catching the blade mid-strike like he was batting away a fly. One clean twist and the weapon wrenched free from his attacker’s grip, spinning off the tower with a shriek of metal on stone.

Not my problem.

I didn’t have time to worry about this lunatic. I was already reaching for the chat interface to tell him to fall back when Pandomonium did something impossible.

He backflipped out of the window, launched himself upward through open air, and started gliding toward me like he was flying.

How the hell is he doing that?

This wasn’t Heretic Slayer. There were no aerial combat mechanics. Not even Apostles could just switch off gravity.

“Hyung!”

Right. Telekinesis.

Now I saw it. The way his clothes twisted in strange directions, fabric pulling against invisible forces. He’d wrapped psychic threads around the tower, winching himself up like a human crane.

No wonder he looked like a low-budget tokusatsu hero mid-flight. ¹T/N: A tokusatsu hero is a character from a Japanese live-action series or film known for dramatic transformation sequences, flashy costumes, battle poses, and enemies launched into the stratosphere. Think Power Rangers or Kamen Rider.

“As soon as that Apostle fight ended, I started wondering where the hell you’d disappeared to.” Pandomonium landed on the platform like he was stepping off an escalator. “A bell tower? Really? You’ve got a talent for picking the worst hiding spots.”

“Marcello Teres.”

“That’s me. What’s up with your buddy? I thought he was on your side, then he tried to stab me.”

A dozen questions collided in my brain.

“Why didn’t you message me?”

“Wait, you were expecting status updates?”

“Of course I was!”

“Well, you didn’t message me either.”

“Because I didn’t want to break your focus if you were mid-boss-fight or dying!”

Blood had soaked through his shirt in dark patches. Fresh.

Let’s just assume that’s all from monsters and not, you know, something worse.

“Nah, don’t stress about it. Even mid-fight, getting a message isn’t really—”

“Behind you!”

Athanas appeared at the platform’s edge, pulling himself up with eerie, mechanical precision.

I jumped between them, yanking the Saint’s relic from inside my clothes.

“Athanas—I mean, Bell Keeper! Sir!”

It worked on Oblivion. Please, let it work now.

“Hyung, what are you doing?” Pandomonium sounded more amused than alarmed. “Playing meat shield? You know you’ve got like 25 HP, right?”

You idiot!

Did he seriously not understand what he was looking at? That thing wasn’t just Athanas—it was a divine override wearing his skin. And he was standing next to one of Order’s most powerful relics.

He’s about to smite you from existence, you absolute moron!

The Bell Keeper lifted his holy warhammer from its resting place, every movement terrifyingly smooth and deliberate. Cold fear crawled up my spine as he took a step forward.

“Athanas…”

He looked right through me like I wasn’t even there, then turned with inhuman calm, tapped the smaller bell once for the quarter-hour, and returned to his post.

Same spot. Same empty stare. Like nothing had happened.

“What the hell was that about?”

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t even know how.

“Is he broken? Oh wait—” Pandomonium’s laughter rang out behind me, bright and cruel. “This is perfect. Order just stole your Heretic Slayer. So, hyung, what’s the master plan now?”

Ice shot through my veins.

This bastard…

“Actually, ‘stole’ isn’t even the right word, is it?” His voice dripped with fake sympathy. “You were just keeping him on a leash with a little mind control. Technically, Order just reclaimed what was already His.”

“What the fuck do you want from me?”

“Nothing at all. Your face right now is payment enough. You look devastated.”

“You think this is funny?”

“Why wouldn’t I? That guy was your entire net worth, wasn’t he? Sure, you’ve got that little pet bug, but let’s be honest—it barely qualifies as an asset.”

Bug?

My heart sank. If Pandomonium had used telekinesis to ring the bell from below… that meant he’d run into Callister. And I had told him to explicitly to stay put.

What did you do to Callister?

“Hyung.”

The floor lurched beneath me as my feet scraped helplessly across the stone. I was spun like a toy, a weightless rag doll, until I was forced to face him. I thrashed, muscles burning, but it was like fighting steel cables.

Oh shit.

As if to punish me for resisting, my arms were yanked upward, pinned high above my head. They hung there, limp and completely useless.

“What the hell are you doing?!”

“Stay still,” he said, maddeningly calm. “You’ve only got 25 durability, remember?”

Then came the pressure.

I gasped as invisible threads coiled around my chest, winding tighter and tighter until every breath turned into a battle.

“Safety first!” he said cheerfully.

“What safety?!”

“This, obviously.”

My arms moved without permission—jerked forward and locked around his neck. He yanked me close until I was flush against his chest, my cheek pressed against him. His smirk widened as he looked down at me, a flicker of pure, smug triumph in his eyes.

“I’ve always wanted us to try this together.”

His words. His grin. The unbearable closeness. It all clicked into a single, horrifying picture in my mind.

“No. No, absolutely not. I’m not doing this. Fucking hell no—”

“Introducing the Dark Realm’s very first cordless bungee jump!”

“I SAID NO!”

Cordless means no elasticity. No recoil. No shock absorption. Just instant death for someone with 25 HP, you absolute deranged lunatic!

He hadn’t even tested it. I was the test. The disposable crash dummy.

“YOU PSYCHOTIC PIECE OF SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT—!!”

“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—!!”

My scream was swallowed by the wind as he leaned back, dragging us both over the edge. The ground rose to meet us fast.

I’m going to kill him with my bare hands.

The second we reached the ground and his telekinesis grip let go, I collapsed instantly, gasping like I’d just broken the surface after nearly drowning.

“Ah, that was fun.”

“…You son of a bitch.”

“What’s the issue? I got you down fast. Way more efficient than wasting time rigging up safety gear like some kind of amateur.”

“There were stairs. Actual, functioning stairs. Right fucking there.”

“Stairs ruin your joints,” he said, casually rolling his shoulders like he’d just wrapped up a light jog. “Especially with your whole 25-durability thing. You’d probably blow half your HP just walking down.”

“And cordless bungee jumping is better for my health?”

“Felt refreshing to me.”

Asshole.

Callister was still up there. Which meant I’d need to climb all 600 steps back up, assuming my legs were even interested in participating.

Is he doing this on purpose?

Separating us. Isolating me. But why? What was his angle?

I tried to stand and instantly regretted it. The world tilted, and my knees apparently decided they were just for decoration.

Pandomonium stuck two fingers between his lips and let out a sharp, piercing whistle.

What, is he calling a horse?

As if some random mount was just going to trot up out of—

The thought died the moment I heard it: the heavy thud… thud… of hooves striking stone. Something massive was approaching from the gloom.

Oh, fuck me!

“Sweet ride, right?” Pandomonium beamed proudly.

What stepped into view wasn’t a horse—it was a siege engine in equine form. Its hide was the color of coal smoke, stretched tight over a frame built for carnage. Twin red embers glowed where its eyes should’ve been, and each breath came out in thick, sulfurous clouds. It locked its molten gaze on me, then pawed the ground, as if daring me to move so it could turn me into roadkill.

“Is this one of the War God’s Servants?”

“You can tell?”

“It’s not exactly subtle.”

Only the idiotic God of War would design something so aggressively conspicuous.

The thing radiated bloodlust. It looked like it ate normal horses for breakfast and used their bones for toothpicks. And how the hell had he stashed it anywhere near the Cathedral without getting immediately incinerated for heresy?

One glance at this demon stallion in the stables and they wouldn’t bother with a trial. They’d go straight to building the pyre.

Before I could get another word out, Pandomonium scooped me up like a sack of grain and slung me onto the creature’s impossibly broad back.

“Where are we going?”

“My estate.”

“Now? The Cathedral’s in chaos around us!”

“Exactly. Which is why we’re leaving.”

Questions crashed into each other in my head, a full-on mental pileup.

He was fleeing?

Wasn’t he the one who started this mess?

Had the players’ plan gone sideways?

Where had he even been all this time?

Whose blood was soaking through his shirt?

What did he do to Callister?

Did he know what was happening with the Apostles? The Council?

Every question felt urgent. Every answer more important than the last. And now he was taking me to his estate? No packing, no prep, just a casual ride into the apocalypse?

Has he completely lost his mind?

Wait no. I never agreed to this!

“Let me down—”

“Alright, let’s ride, Arma-Geldon!”

He named it WHAT?

The sheer, blasphemous audacity of that name short-circuited my brain. By the time I remembered how to think again, we were already galloping into the fog.

Fine. He’ll have to stop somewhere to gather supplies.

The second he stopped, I’d make my move. Though realistically… what could I do? The Saint wouldn’t answer if I called, not with everything else going on. And with my laughable stats, any escape attempt would end before it even started—

“We’re here.”

“Already?”

“I’ll let you down now.”

He set me down gently, and I blinked at our surroundings. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“This isn’t…” My voice caught in my throat.

I should’ve known. Should’ve figured that anyone who named their demon horse Arma-Geldon had long since parted ways with sanity.

“This is the Main Building of the Cathedral…”