Rise of the OtherGod Apostle: Not a Cult Leader, but a Serf?!
#193
#193
So they’re all just running on instinct now?
How many people received Colomba’s healing blessing?
And what happens when the maggots start feeding on people who can’t move? Can’t resist? Can’t even open their mouths to scream?
Oh, this is bad. This is so much worse than I thought.
Leave them like that long enough and there’s nothing to come back to. Bones, if you’re lucky. Maybe not even that.
If my plan didn’t go the way I thought it would…
“… You said they consume and imitate things, right? So what happens when there’s nothing left but insects? Do they just… stay like that?”
“When no organic targets remain to consume or replicate, the swarm advances to its next developmental stage.”
“Which is…?”
“They merge into a single mass, form cocoons, and undergo metamorphosis. Once the process completes, they disperse to locate new prey. Lady Ledeia’s original contract kept that instinct suppressed. Now, it’s fully unrestrained again.”
“…Shit.”
So the maggots really were fly larvae. Because why wouldn’t they be.
Suddenly, Ledeia’s desperation to hold onto Order makes complete sense.
Picture it. Waking up one day and realizing your real body was already gone, devoured down to nothing. That everything you thought was you was just a swarm of insects holding a shape. A truth like that doesn’t just break you. It makes you want to stop existing.
But that’s only half of it. At some point, She must have realized that without a steady stream of new recruits joining the collective — fresh bodies for the swarm to feed on — her own form would eventually destabilize. Break apart. Until all that was left was a swarm with nowhere to hide.
Yeah… this mess is all Order’s fault.
Order got it completely backwards. Instead of trying to make Ledeia forget what she really was, Order should have been the one reminding her. Year after year. Every single time, without exception.
That’s all it would have taken. Ledeia would’ve been loyal until the stars burned out. Grateful, devoted, no questions asked.
And we sure as hell wouldn’t be knee-deep in this mess.
“Alright, once that thing finishes forming, what’s the first thing it does?”
“…It’ll probably try to finish eating Fabio. Its base instincts will demand it.”
“Nope! Done. I’m done. Hyung, I’m getting the oil. We’re burning this whole place down.”
“No. We can’t do that.”
Those tens of thousands of “replica phones” were the backbone of my entire plan.
Like it or not, they counted as my Servants right now. And if I could just figure out how to control them…
Something cool and smooth slid across my skin.
Oh, that’s right. I still have this little guy.
The purple snake peeked out from my sleeve, tilting its head with what almost looked like curiosity.
I held it out toward the monstrosity taking form in front of us. The thing that had once been, or was on its way to becoming, Colomba.
“Hey… think you can freeze that for me?”
The snake flicked its tongue once. Every maggot in the room stopped dead. All of them at once. It was like watching the most gross game of freeze tag in history.
[You sense that any physical contact will cause them to move again. At the same time, you feel a powerful urge to pet the smart, adorable little snake!]
[SYSTEM: Due to the effect of ‘Heaven Above, Earth Below, I Alone Reign Supreme,’ ‘Distortion’ is displayed as text.]
“Good snake.”
I gave the snake a head pats, and it flicked its tongue, looking pleased.
One of these days, I really need to give this little guy an actual name.
“We’re heading to the Council chamber.”
“Why? Is there something there we need?”
“House Lizard’s bomb.”
The entire reason House Lizard called that Council meeting was to plant a “bomb” across the Dark Realm.
Except the bomb wasn’t explosives. It was Oblivion’s name.
You see, the instant someone becomes aware of Oblivion’s real name, it opens a door in their mind. Not a metaphorical one. A genuine entry point that Oblivion can wrench open and invade through.
House Lizard’s genius was in the disguise. He encoded the name as an acrostic — hidden vertically through lines of official Council documents. Routine paperwork. The kind of thing every delegate would read without thinking twice. The moment those pages made the rounds, Oblivion would have thousands of mental doorways to blow through simultaneously.
The part I still don’t get is how House Lizard managed this without getting invaded himself.
Discovering Oblivion’s true name is one thing. Walking away from that discovery with your memory intact? That’s something else entirely.
But maybe you can write a name in pieces without ever thinking the whole thing at once?
House Lizard could’ve committed a method to memory. Not the name itself, but a sequence. Something clinical and abstract enough to keep his mind from brushing against the real thing.
Consider what happens if House Lizard found a document containing the true name in full. Reading it once would be all it takes. Because the second someone consciously processes it — actually understands what they’re looking at — Oblivion is already inside. It rips through your memories, erases every thread that led you to the name, then vanishes.
You’re left with nothing. No memory of the name. No memory of the search. No memory that there was ever anything to forget.
So if House Lizard did find it, he needed a way to break the name into harmless pieces before his own mind could assemble them. Like handling a poison one diluted drop at a time. Never enough to kill you, but enough to work with.
Whatever method he devised, it went beyond cleverness. It demanded precision. Patience. Absolute nerve.
And a willingness to play against Oblivion knowing the stakes were total, and that losing meant you’d never even know you’d played.
First, you’d have to open the document just a crack. A sliver. Only enough to glimpse the very last letter. Cut it out with care, eyes locked on that single letter and nothing else.
That letter goes onto red paper.
Then someone else steps in. Someone who hasn’t seen the original document. They take what’s left, copy the now-visible text onto green paper. And when they’re done, they fold it tight and seal it shut. No one reads it. Not on purpose. Not by accident. Not at all.
At that point, House Lizard has both halves. He knows that the green paper’s content plus the red paper’s single letter equals Oblivion’s true name. But what matters is that he still doesn’t know the name itself.
As long as those notes stay sealed and unprocessed, there’s no doorway for Oblivion to invade through.
It’s like keeping fuel and flame in different rooms. Perfectly safe until someone brings them together.
House Lizard’s entire method was engineered around that gap.
And the Council documents follow the same principle. Oblivion’s name is buried acrostic style through the text, but the threat remains inert as long as nobody figures out how to extract it. Skim through them casually and all you see is boring Council meeting notes.
I doubt the actual method was anything as crude as reading the first letter of each line, though. Something that transparent would’ve been risky.
None of the players would want Oblivion crashing the Council meeting mid-session.
No, the genius of the plan is in the sequencing. The documents go out first. Quietly. Distributed to every bishop, every priest, every administrative office across the Dark Realm. And only after they’ve reached every last corner does someone publicly announce the extraction method far and wide, all at once.
That’s when Oblivion is in real trouble.
Just knowing how to decode the name doesn’t make you a target. Until you put it together, there’s no mental door for Oblivion to sense, no connection to follow. Which means Oblivion is cornered. It can burn through as many points as it wants. It still can’t erase its own name from the world.
Why? Because anyone who learns the method can just grab one of those Council documents and piece the name back together from nothing. Again and again and again.
And with Records already gone…
There’s no way to remotely rewrite or erase every copy that’s been sent out. That option died with Records.
If the Church of Order’s leadership wants to clean this up, they’ve got two choices. Both of them bad.
Option one: follow proper channels. Months of bureaucracy. Approvals, committees, the full procedural crawl. Option two: throw protocol out the window, abuse their authority, and start seizing documents by force. But behaving like tyrants instead of servants of Order will diminish their divine authority.
The more I think about it, the more astounding House Lizard’s plan becomes.
It’s efficient. It’s ruthless. And the precision behind it is borderline terrifying.
Good thing he wasn’t going for total victory.
Because if House Lizard ever played to win…
Yeah, no. I don’t want to picture that. Not even a little.
Anyway.
When Oblivion took over Athanas’s body, it let an interesting detail slip:
‘Descent is expensive.’
So who gets stuck with paying the bill?
Roklem. Who else.
Turns out, there are actually two forms of Oblivion.
The first is the enigmatic one. An entity so vast, so overwhelming, that its true name is unknown even to Roklem. The second is the version that shows up far more frequently— the one the Apostles call upon freely, invoking it as easily as breathing.
To keep things simple, let’s call the first “Greater Oblivion” and the everyday version “Lesser Oblivion.”
The one House Lizard discovered? The one that took control of Athanas?
That was Lesser Oblivion.
And Lesser Oblivion is broke! It doesn’t have any priests performing rites, no worshipers offering prayers. Not a single source of faith points to its name.
And there’s no chance Order is going to go around asking other subordinate gods to chip in for Oblivion’s expenses.
Which means every single descent comes straight out of Roklem’s pocket.
“…The logic bomb? You mean that document with the three clauses?”
“Yeah. I need the method for extracting Oblivion’s name.”
“Oh, that? I’ve got it right here. One sec.”
Pandomonium dove into his messy inventory, digging around for what felt like way too long, and finally produced a tightly rolled scroll.
“Here you go!”
“…Thanks.”
It was smeared with dark, crusted blood.
I decided not to ask where that came from.
That inventory, though. It genuinely needs professional help.
“Alright, so what’s the plan?”
“I’m going to bankrupt Roklem.”
Pandomonium stared. “You’re going to— what? How?”
I figured I should take a second to explain.
“First, we split this scroll into three parts.”
The plan is straightforward. I take the first letter. Callister gets the second. Pandomonium takes the rest. The tricky part is the cutting. We can’t let the whole thing unroll and accidentally expose the final letters. One careless moment and we’re done.
Once it’s divided, we each head to a separate room. Somewhere in this lab there should be rooms with the Blessing of Soundproofing. Shouldn’t be hard to find. Then we each input our letter into a Holy Flesh Container unit.
The order of the letters might come out wrong at first, like 312 instead of 123. Doesn’t matter. We just keep cycling through the combinations until the right name pops out.
Ideally, we’d set the Containers to loop endlessly, but one full pass is all we need to spring the trap.
And since those units now have my mental defense trait…
Oblivion is going to come knocking, and my trait is going to slam the door in its face. It’ll try again, get the same result. After a few failed attempts, it’ll flag an ‘anomaly’ and try to descend into the nearby units to figure out what’s wrong.
And if we keep that ‘anomaly’ check going over and over?
Congratulations! We’ve just created a feedback loop from hell. And every single one of those failed ‘error’ checks costs Roklem points.
Sure, Order could probably patch the exploit, but in the middle of this chaos? I wouldn’t bet on it.
So you got enough points to spam Divine Punishment, Roklem?
Fine. I’ll bleed you so dry you’ll be begging for those cancellation refunds.
I’m going to turn Order’s own system into a money pit that drains every last point. He’ll have to lift the Punishments on Pandomonium, not because he wants to, but because he’ll be too broke to afford the upkeep.
When I finished, Pandomonium was just staring at me, his mouth slightly agape.
“Wow,” he breathed.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just… this is exactly how I figured it would go.”
“…Which was?”
“That hyung would find a way to fix everything.”
“……”
Okay. We’re done. Moving on.