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

#176  Reader Mode

#176  

Callister was so frustrated he burst into tears, his tiny body shaking with sobs. He looked so much like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum that I had to wonder, does the mind regress along with the body? 

As I watched his face get all red and blotchy, I couldn’t help but think this was probably exactly how the real Fabio acted as a kid. Mental note: next time, harvest DNA from someone with better emotional regulation. 

Like Athanas, maybe… 

“Imitation is all it knows how to do, hyung,” Pandomonium sneered from his corner. “It’s a bug playing dress-up. Not even a real kid. It’s disgusting.” 

“You’re the one being disgusting,” I muttered under my breath. 

“To make that thing a Servant… how could you!” Callister wailed, jabbing a shaky finger in Pandomonium’s direction. “I’d rather watch you swap bodily fluids with Athanas! This is completely unacceptable! Fabio, if you keep something so dirty around, you’ll get filthy, too!” 

“The hell did you just say?” 

“Both of you, enough! And Pandomonium, the ‘don’t attack Callister’ rule includes projecting your murderous intent. Understood?”  

As if on cue, Callister started trembling in my arms like a terrified little lamb.  

“I didn’t do anything!” Pandomonium protested with wounded innocence. “I just looked at him! Hyung, I swear he’s faking it. He’s setting me up!” 

“Don’t. Not even a dirty look.” 

“Then what about him? He practically tried to vaporize me with that glare!”  

“And? Did it work?”   

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, it hurt my damn feelings. My heart’s racing—I think I’m having a panic attack. Can you just look at me? Please?” 

“Shut up. I’m busy.”  

I tuned out his whining. We had more pressing problems than their petty bickering. Outside this room, the Cathedral was littered with comatose contaminated victims, and Athanas, whose body had just been hijacked by the Bell Keeper.   

It gets dark early in winter. That means the cold’s coming soon.   

In a few hours, hypothermia would set in, and people would start freezing to death. Some of the contaminated were already in critical condition. If I couldn’t resolve this contamination soon, we’d have no choice but to start hauling people indoors. Pandomonium’s telekinesis might be able to move a dozen at a time, but that was just damage control. Not a real solution. The only real fix was finding the source.   

But this? This messy melodrama trap? Could this really be it?    

The whole thing felt way too small-time for whatever master plan the Distorted One was cooking up with Athanasuki. My instincts said It hadn’t invested much in the Council’s scheme or Ledeia’s contamination incident. Why would It? Contamination was just… boring. The victims felt nothing, and for a being that feeds on emotion, that’s like being handed a bag of chips that’s 99% nitrogen. The Distorted One had always preferred a thrilling failure to a boring victory. 

And that, unfortunately, I understood all too well.  

It took me right back to my own run as the Distorted One. Everyone told me I had to go in blind. “No spoilers,” they said. “Trust us,” they said. What they really meant was: “We got emotionally wrecked and now we want to watch you suffer too.” Misery loves company, and gamers love watching someone else get their heart stomped by the same ending that broke them.   

And yeah, even braced for impact, the ending still wrecked me. It was extremely infuriating.   

The game’s premise was simple enough: as the Distorted One, your Cult Leader unit needed a single, all-consuming “wish.” One obsession strong enough to steer every decision, every sacrifice.   

I hadn’t exactly been original. I went with the most classic, most heartbreakingly human motivation there is:  

The desperate wish to get his family back.  

His wife and child. 

In a kinder world, maybe he could’ve seen them again in the Realm of Order. But fate’s a bastard. His child was stillborn, and with no baptism, was denied entry to heaven. His wife, consumed by grief, took her own life… another unforgivable sin. Believing that faith in Order would never reunite him with his family, the man turned to an Othergod instead.   

Up to that point, it was standard tragic backstory material.  

So when the time came to offer the Dark Realm to the Distorted One in exchange for my wish, I chose my words like I was defusing a bomb. I didn’t just say, “Bring them back.” Too many ways for that to go wrong. Instead, I asked for this: “A family where the child was born safely and everyone lived happily together.” 

I thought I was being clever. I really thought I’d sidestepped the classic monkey’s paw trap.¹T/N: A monkey’s paw trap is a type of trap or trick that plays on the idea of getting what you want, but at a cost that makes it not worth it. It’s named after the short horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs, where a magical talisman grants wishes, but each wish leads to horrific unintended consequences. 

And true to Its word, the Distorted One granted the wish. The “happy family” was perfectly restored. A healthy, laughing child. A beautiful, loving wife. A family full of joy.   

But the devil, as they say, lives in the details. 

The “happy family” included the husband too, just not my version of him. The Distorted One restored a version of the Cult Leader who’d never known grief. No tragedy, no obsession, no contract with an Othergod. Just a kind man, unscarred, living a simple, blissful life.   

To take his place, my character had to kill him. Stab his innocent, smiling counterpart to death just to have the life he’d damned himself for.    

And the happiness he’d sacrificed everything for? It lasted right up until the night his wife drove a knife through his heart.  

Because, naturally, the Distorted One had made sure she knew.  

It whispered the truth in her ear: that her real husband was gone, and the man beside her was an imposter who murdered him. Then It offered her a contract of her own.  

A chance for sweet, perfect revenge. 

But as Its way, the Distorted One left out one crucial detail from her contract.  

The moment the Cult Leader died, the wish sustaining that happy little reality died with him. The last thing he saw was her expression—triumph shattering into despair—as she screamed, clutching their child while it rapidly decayed in her arms. 

And then, in Its infinite cruelty, the Distorted One froze her in that exact moment.  

Still screaming. Still cradling the corpse of her child.  

It turned her into a statue and gave it a name, of course: The Statue of Endless Disappointment. 

Then, claiming It was absolutely delighted by the outcome, It bestowed the statue upon me as a commemorative, account-bound trait. 

A trait that lets me summon that statue, at any time, anywhere, to share in my own disappointment.   

Because the statue is trapped in eternal disappointment, just placing it somewhere generates Faith Points and turns the area into a sanctuary for the Distorted One.  

It’s a powerful Trait, but I’ve never used it. 

The thing is, I’d only been playing Conclude for one reason: to build a world where Adelaide could finally be happy. So that ending, with all its casual, calculated cruelty, didn’t just suck. It felt personal.  

I should’ve deleted the game right then and there. Any sane person would have. But instead, I dove back in—hooked, obsessed, consumed by a new singular goal:  

Make the Distorted One suffer. 

My strategy was elegantly petty. I systematically scrubbed the Dark Realm clean, wiping out every last trace of negative emotion until it was a happy, sterile utopia. The Distorted One hated it, complaining nonstop about how mind-numbingly boring everything had become, how this sanitized world wasn’t even worth devouring anymore.  

For a while, I really thought I was winning. 

Then came Its final message… the one that ripped the rug out from under everything I thought I’d accomplished.    

「Oh? Was all this effort just to disappoint Me? Is that what you were hoping for?」   

I still remember the way It laughed. That awful, gleeful sound echoing through the screen as It taunted me. 

「How adorable, the way you hunger for My disappointment. The way your devotion festers into obsession, all so you can hold My gaze for just a little longer. It’s endearing little mortal. Utterly thrilling.」   

I never played as the Distorted One again after that. 

Which is all a long way of saying: if the Distorted One really wanted to destroy the world, the prelude would be a hell of a lot more interesting than this. This whole setup just isn’t Its style. 

Which means this Contamination incident was probably House Lizard’s doing, and his alone.   

His motives clearly aren’t about winning the game. If they were, he’d be using this chaos to wipe out other players systematically, forcing game-overs left and right. And he definitely wouldn’t have let Reyes slip away so easily via suicide.    

No, this didn’t feel like a strategic move. It felt more like… a catastrophic discovery. Like he’d been digging around under the system’s hood, poking at things he didn’t fully understand—maybe looking for exploits—and accidentally tripped some kind of fatal system error. The Research Director must’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time, overheard whatever this “Ultimate Answer” was, and that’s what triggered the contamination in Ledeia.   

A terrorist act not born of malice, but from a chain reaction of fuck-ups. 

As ridiculous as it sounds, it was still the most plausible theory I had. History’s full of disasters that started with tiny mistakes, like that Mars probe that blew up because someone mixed up metric and imperial units.   

So for now, I’d operate under the assumption that House Lizard wasn’t actively trying to murder everyone. Which left the real question:  

How the hell was I supposed to stop this “Contamination” before half the Cathedral froze to death? 

The obvious path lay before me like a trap with its jaws wide open: descend to the 24th basement level. But every survival instinct I had was screaming that crossing that threshold would be like stepping off a cliff.  

Whatever was down there, there was no coming back from it. 

So I needed an alternative. House Lizard had said knowledge alone couldn’t break a mind. So then what the hell was Contamination? What was the actual mechanism?   

Maybe it worked like Oblivion. Perhaps the name itself acting as a key. The moment you recognized it, understood it, something inside you cracked open. Like a door or “pathway” in your mind, inviting the entity to step through.  

But that kind of effect should only work here, in the Dark Realm where everything was saturated in Its influence. On Earth, the name “Oblivion” meant nothing. Just a word. You could shout it from every rooftop and it wouldn’t do a damn thing.   

So where was the power coming from? What kind of mechanism could let a piece of information shut down a person’s consciousness?  

Is the System itself acting as some kind of enforcer? 

That led me to a new possibility. What if the “Ultimate Answer” wasn’t just knowledge? What if it was more like cracking open the developer console and typing in a kill command for the world’s operating system? A line of malicious code disguised as truth, something that could crash the system just by being understood.   

If that were true, the censorship wouldn’t be about hiding a secret. It’d be self-defense. The System wasn’t covering something up. It was trying to contain a virus. 

It sounded plausible. Reasonable, even. But House Lizard’s words kept scratching at the back of my mind like a splinter I couldn’t dig out. He’d said I’d never understand it, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how long I pondered over it.  

Not while I was still under the System’s influence. 

Which meant every theory I came up with, including this one, was wrong by design. I was trying to solve a puzzle with missing tools, thinking inside a box that had been built to keep me from ever seeing the truth.   

I let out a short groan of frustration. If I took House Lizard at his word, then the only path to understanding this so-called “Ultimate Answer” led straight down into that basement, into territory outside the System’s jurisdiction.  

So what now? Go chasing after some cosmic truth I’d already been told was beyond my comprehension?  

And for what? The grand revelation behind the world?  

At this point, I couldn’t care less. Even if the 24th basement level held nothing but a glowing red button labeled [LOGOUT], and pressing it summoned some STGames developer with a clipboard and a fake smile saying, “Congratulations! How would you rate your experience with Conclude 2?”… it wouldn’t change a damn thing.   

Even if that developer showed up right now, I’d tell him to shove his exit survey and plug me straight back into the capsule. Because the Ultimate Answer doesn’t matter anymore. The damage is already done. People heard it. They understood it. It broke them. The problem isn’t knowledge. It’s the memory of it. What we need isn’t truth.  

It’s forgetting. We need them to forget. 

“What are you thinking so hard about, hyung?”  

“Are the books back on the shelves?” 

“Finished that ages ago.” 

“And you did it by hand? No telekinesis?” 

“Every single one.” 

Great. Now what the hell was I supposed to make him do?   

Pandomonium had been praying literally just to keep himself occupied, because sitting still apparently drove him up the wall. But he never actually listened to me. He’d flat-out ignored my order to shut up earlier, and I had no way to discipline him; even divine punishment cost Faith Points. 

‘Oh, great and wise Lord Fabio, bestow upon your humble servant the contents of your thoughts, for I am bored unto death. Amen.’ 

“Stop that shit!” 

“But don’t you get points when you grant my prayers? I’m helping, hyung!” 

“Urrgh…” 

It was like being held hostage by a professional complainer who’d weaponized religious devotion. He belonged to me—body, soul, and all—yet somehow I was the one being tortured by his nonstop whining. Something about this power dynamic felt fundamentally broken.   

Points… points… points… 

There had to be a way to farm them faster. If I could just stockpile enough, I could finally put a proper leash on this lunatic.  

It is possible to harvest Faith Points by consuming the holy relics of other gods.  

My gaze flicked to the Saint’s relic, lying forgotten on the floor, then snapped away like I’d brushed against an open flame. That was off-limits. If I consumed it, I’d lose any divinity not aligned with Order.  

The closer the relic’s essence was to your nature, the better the conversion rate…   

Records… could persuasion count as close enough?  

No. There was something even more compatible.  

I looked down at the purple poppy still resting in my hand. A holy relic of Distortion.  

Just looking at it made my mouth go dry. 

Monkey’s Paw Lore Time! 

T/N: Alright, fellow nerds, gather ’round! It’s time for another round of yappin’, spooky storytelling edition!  〈｀∀´〉Ψ 

Here’s the link to the original Monkey’s Paw short story, first published way back in 1907. The Monkey’s Paw But hey, if you’re too lazy to click (honestly same. I get it), here’s a quick re-telling so you can get the gist: 

Three wishes. That’s all it grants. But wishes are dangerous things. 

The rain was relentless the night it arrived, in the hands of a weary soaked soldier.  

A house sat hunched against the night, a small, stubborn island of lamplight in a sea of wet, grasping darkness. Inside, the fire in the hearth did not crackle with cheer, but seemed to hiss, its light casting shadows that writhed on the walls like things in pain. This was the home of the White family: a father, a mother, and a son, all bound together by a quiet, comfortable sort of melancholy. 

Their weary guest, Sergeant-Major Morris, was a man whose skin was stretched too tightly over his memories. He sat with them, but he was not truly there. His eyes were fixed on a point in the middle distance, a place where the rain-lashed English night gave way to sun-scorched, forgotten lands.   

“It has a spell on it,” he said, his voice a dry rasp, like dirt being shoveled onto a coffin. He turned the object over in his hands. It was not merely a monkey’s paw; it was a shriveled, blackened thing, a mummified knot of tiny, curled fingers. The nails were yellow and long. It looked like something that had died while begging. “An old fakir put a spell on it. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that to interfere with it only brought sorrow.” 

Herbert, the son, laughed, a sound too bright for the room. “Well, why don’t you have three wishes, then?”  

A shadow passed over Morris’s face, so profound it seemed to chill the air. “I have,” he whispered, and his gaze fell to the hissing fire. “I have.” 

He spoke of the first man’s last wish, which was for death. And with a sudden, violent revulsion, Morris threw the paw into the flames. Mr. White, with a cry that was half-jest, half-instinct, snatched it from the licking fire. The fur was singed, and it left a faint, cloying scent in the air—the smell of dust and spice and something else, something spoiled. 

“If you must keep it,” Morris said, his voice hollow as he prepared to leave, “don’t blame me for what comes. Wish for something sensible.” 

After he was gone, swallowed by the wet dark, an unnatural silence fell. The paw sat on the mantelpiece, a dark temptation. 

“Let’s try it,” Mr. White said, his cheerfulness a thin veneer over a sudden, prickling curiosity. “I don’t know what to wish for, that’s a fact. It seems to me I’ve got all I want.” 

“If you could finish paying for the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?” said Herbert. “Wish for two hundred pounds. That’ll just do it.”  

His father, feeling foolish, held the brittle object in his hand. It felt strangely dense, a focus of unseen weight. He closed his eyes. “I wish for two hundred pounds.”  

A shudder went through him, convulsive and vile. He swore the paw had twisted in his grasp, a dead thing’s final, ghastly twitch. He dropped it with a clatter. In the silence that followed, the wind outside gave a long, low moan, like a soul in misery. 

The next day, the sun rose on a world washed clean, but the feeling of wrongness lingered like a stain. The paw sat on the sideboard, inert and ugly. By afternoon, as the shadows began to lengthen again, a stranger appeared at their gate. He was dressed too neatly, his movements stiff and formal, as if he were a marionette performing a practiced, sorrowful dance. 

He was from Maw and Meggins, the company where Herbert worked. 

There had been an accident, he said. Herbert had been caught in the machinery. There was no pain, he assured them, his face a mask of practiced sympathy. The company, while accepting no liability, wished to express its condolences with a sum of money. 

The sum was two hundred pounds. 

The stranger left. The light faded. The house became a tomb, haunted not by a ghost, but by the crushing weight of an absence. Days bled into a week. Mr. and Mrs. White were two silent specters in their own home, moving through rooms thick with unspoken horror. 

Grief hollowed them. But grief is hunger, and hunger whispers. 

It was a night, a week later, that the second wish was born. Mrs. White, her face pale in the moonlight, her eyes lit with a terrifying, feverish fire, seized her husband’s arm. 

“The paw,” she rasped, her voice hoarse and unfamiliar. “We’ve only used one wish.”  

“What are you thinking?” he whispered, a cold dread snaking around his heart.  

“I want my boy back,” she cried, her grief finally souring into something monstrous. “Wish him back!” 

“No,” Mr. White begged, recoiling. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Think of what he looked like. He was mangled, caught in the… I couldn’t even identify him.” 

“Bring him back!” she shrieked, her voice an unholy thing. “I don’t care what he looks like! He is my son!” 

Her madness was more terrifying than the paw itself. He saw the abyss in her eyes and knew he had lost her, too. Trembling, his mind screaming, he stumbled into the dark parlor, fumbled for the paw, and whispered the second wish. 

“I wish my son alive again.” 

The paw did not twitch this time. It felt cold, inert, satisfied. A crushing silence descended, heavier than before. He could hear his wife’s ragged breathing from the top of the stairs, her ears straining for the sound of a footstep on the path.  

They waited. The clock ticked, each second a hammer blow against the stillness. An hour passed. Nothing. A profound, empty relief began to bloom in Mr. White’s chest, until a sound came from the darkness outside.  

It was not a knock. It was a single, hollow rap on the front door. Soft, yet it echoed in the bones. 

Mrs. White gave a cry of triumph. “It’s him! It’s Herbert!” 

The rap came again. Deliberate. Patient. Sepulchral. It was the sound of something that had all the time in the world. 

“For God’s sake, don’t let it in,” Mr. White pleaded, grabbing his wife as she scrambled down the stairs. The thing at the door was not his son. His son was in a cemetery two miles away. Whatever had traveled that distance, whatever had been reassembled by a profane wish, was not something a mother should see. 

She fought him, her strength terrifying. “I’m coming, Herbert, I’m coming!” she cried, fumbling with the chain and the bolt on the front door. 

Knock. 

A third knock came, louder now, insistent, shaking the very frame of the house. Mr. White, in a final, desperate surge of terror, knew what he had to do. He dropped to his hands and knees, scrabbling madly on the parlor floor in the dark. His hands swept over carpet, wood, searching for that cursed thing. 

He heard his wife draw back the bolt. He heard the chain begin to rattle.  

His fingers closed around the dry, hairy thing. He scrambled to his feet, holding it aloft, and as his wife’s triumphant cry mingled with the scraping of the final lock, he screamed out his third and final wish. 

“I wish him dead. Again…” 

The knocking stopped. 

Instantly. The silence that fell was not empty; it was a vacuum, a void that sucked all sound and hope from the world. He heard his wife give a long, wailing cry of disappointment and loss as she wrenched the door open. 

A cold gust of wind swept through the house, extinguishing the last candle. 

She stood on the threshold, looking out into the night. The road was empty. The lamppost across the street cast a pale, lonely light on the wet, silent pavement, revealing nothing but the darkness that had been there all along.