Frieren pointed her staff, and shimmering barriers wrapped each sleeping girl in translucent cocoons of protective magic.
One glance to Fern and Yusa Emi. Both understood instantly—eyelids fluttering shut, bodies going limp against their futons.
Nozomi caught the cue. His form dissolved into shadow, slipping through the floorboards toward the artifact's pulse.
The mist thickened. Seconds crawled.
"Matsushita, it's done!"
"Hehe, we're in luck tonight! All of them—top-shelf beauties!"
Crude laughter. The wet sound of lips being licked.
"That cold one with the black hair—she's mine. Don't even fucking think about it."
"Relax. I want the one with the fat tits. Look at those things through the blanket."
"Blonde goes to me. Love 'em when they're dazed like that."
The door groaned open.
Eleven men filed in—thick-necked, sweat-stained, reeking of sake and cigarette tar. The bald leader's grin stretched too wide, tongue dragging across chapped lips as he surveyed the lumps beneath quilts.
"Beauties... I'm here."
He lunged.
White light detonated.
Fern's staff cracked forward—the men launched backward like ragdolls, spines cracking against walls. Another flick severed their vocal cords mid-scream.
Yusa Emi rose, crimson hair bleeding silver from root to tip. Disgust tightened her jaw. The Holy Sword materialized in her grip, humming with righteous fury.
They dragged the paralyzed bodies to the back mountain.
Schlick. Schlick. Schlick.
The Valkyrie's blade sang through necks, through torsos, painting autumn leaves with arterial spray. She'd harvested hundreds like these—rapists, slavers, beasts wearing human skin. No hesitation. No mercy.
Fern's fire consumed the remains. Fat crackled. Bones collapsed into white powder.
"Let's go back to sleep." Frieren yawned, already turning away.
The other girls would never know.
Nozomi's phone buzzed. Handled.
He smiled. Miss Frieren was reliable.
The system's ping led him to a tunnel entrance hidden beneath loose flagstones. He descended into damp darkness, the air growing thick with incense and something else—musk, sweat, the cloying sweetness of arousal.
The passage opened into a torchlit square.
His breath caught.
A blood-red magic circle dominated the stone floor, carved lines forming a demon's splayed posture. But the circle wasn't what froze him.
Bodies writhed atop it.
Dozens of them—naked flesh glistening with oil and perspiration, tangled in configurations that defied dignity. Women with vacant, drugged eyes drooled onto the shoulders of bald men who rutted into them with grunting abandon. The slap of skin on skin echoed off cavern walls. Moans rose and fell in discordant waves—"Aaahn... hahh... nnngh..."—mechanical, hollow, stripped of genuine pleasure.
The stench hit him: sex and sandalwood incense and something coppery beneath it all.
A cult.
Hozuki Nozomi's eyes hardened to flint.
At the altar's apex stood a Cardinal draped in crimson robes, pointed hood casting his face in shadow. His skeletal fingers lifted a red curtain with theatrical reverence.
Behind it—
Hozuki Nozomi's recognition sparked.
Kiba Yuya's mother. That beautiful woman who'd delivered their meals with such warmth. Now she lay spread across obsidian stone, her voluptuous body bare and glistening, heavy breasts rising and falling with drugged breaths, thighs parted, eyes seeing nothing.
"Fellow believers!" The Cardinal's voice rang out, arms spread wide. "Revel in the flesh! Today, Saintess candidates grace our congregation!"
"Praise the Axis Church! Praise the Goddess!"
"LONG LIVE THE GODDESS!"
Fanaticism blazed in their eyes.
Axis Church?
Hozuki Nozomi's brow furrowed. Aqua's sect? That airheaded Water Goddess? Her followers had devolved into... this?
It made a twisted sense. The Axis Church rejected nothing, accepted everything. Criminals, deviants, the broken—all welcome under Aqua's banner. And gods absorbed their worshippers' nature over centuries...
No wonder her intelligence had cratered.
The Cardinal's palm descended onto Madam Kiba's soft belly, sliding upward to cup one full breast. His hood fell back, revealing a face twisted with mad ecstasy.
Nozomi's gaze swept the chamber. There—in a shadowed alcove—Kiba Yuya himself, that handsome young man now slicked with sweat, thrusting mechanically into a glassy-eyed woman's willing body. His hips snapped forward—plap plap plap—oblivious to everything but drugged sensation.
"RESPOND TO US, GODDESS!"
The chant swelled. Hundreds of voices.
The magic circle blazed crimson.
A ribbon emerged from thin air—red silk, shimmering with corrupted divinity. It dipped into the spring waters, and sacred light pulsed through the pool.
That's why the spring whitens skin.
[Ding. Detected lost divine artifact: Goddess's Hagoromo (Polluted). Retrieve?]
"Retrieve."
The ribbon vanished.
The Cardinal's rapture shattered into rage. "WHO?!"
Nozomi descended, landing soft as a whisper.
"Who the hell are you?!"
Believers scrambled upright, genitals swinging, faces contorted with fury.
Hozuki Nozomi's lips curved.
"Just a passing Divine Child."
The Cardinal's mouth opened—
"You're not worthy of conversation."
Light erupted from Hozuki Nozomi's palms, blinding and absolute.
"Holy Purification."
Screams tore through the chamber. Male flesh blistered, cracked, dissolved into motes of light. The Cardinal's robes collapsed empty. One by one, the corrupt believers evaporated—shrieking, clawing at nothing—until silence reclaimed the stone.
Only the victims remained. Kiba Yuya slumped unconscious beside his mother. A handful of women lay scattered, breathing shallow but alive.
Kind hearts. Deceived souls.
Hozuki Nozomi gestured, and spare robes drifted over their exposed bodies.
He didn't linger.
The Hagoromo would transform Sakurasou's hot spring into something genuinely miraculous. Mission accomplished.
…
In another dimension, a blue-haired goddess sneezed violently.
Something felt... off.
Aqua scratched her head, shrugged, and settled back into her chair to await the next unfortunate reincarnator.