Bernadette was genuinely startled. She'd just had a face-to-face encounter with what appeared to be an agent of the Demoness Sect, and now here they were, seeking an alliance?
Vincent felt his instincts blaring. This feels arranged. His paranoia spiked sharply.
"Cooperate on what?"
Mr. Z's face lit with excitement. "Holding a ritual in Backlund — bringing our Lord's descent to fruition, letting His radiance once again fall upon this land of despair, granting redemption to all sinners!"
"..."
Aurora Order through and through. Three sentences and they were already talking about divine descent.
Vincent set the internal commentary aside and ran through what he remembered of the original plot. As he recalled, it was the Loen royal family and MI9 who had brokered the arrangement between the Demoness Sect and the Aurora Order — the Demoness Sect would manufacture the Great Smog while the Aurora Order served as a distraction to draw the Churches' attention.
In the original, they'd intended to work with Mr. A. With Mr. A dead, they'd reached Mr. Z through the Demoness Sect. The broad trajectory hadn't changed even with his interference.
Though — given the tip-off letters he'd sent to the Churches, would George III still proceed exactly as written?
Bernadette asked evenly, "Mr. Z — regarding this proposed cooperation: have you consulted the Lord? Has He sent down any divine revelation?"
Mr. Z answered with immediate fervent certainty. "The entire meaning of the Aurora Order's existence is to proclaim the Lord's glory and bring about His return to this land. That has been the sole purpose of every member across centuries."
Bernadette paid no attention to the speech. "So have you consulted the Lord, specifically?"
"..."
Mr. Z's expression froze. He looked at Bernadette the way one looks at a person who simply refuses to listen. I've explained everything clearly. Do you think the Lord is everyone's personal secretary, descending a divine revelation for every small decision? Who do you think you are?
Bernadette read every syllable of that expression and almost laughed — being silently called an idiot by someone whose own mind was clearly not functioning correctly.
She looked down at the cross on her wrist. Unfortunately, no reaction. Presumably it had exhausted itself dealing with whatever the Demoness had attempted through Trissy.
In that case...
"I'll leave that matter with you for now. Keep me informed of any developments as soon as they arise."
Mr. Z's smile returned. "Of course."
He hesitated, then: "And the god-child in Tingen..."
"You fled from an Angel," Bernadette said mildly, "and now you're worrying about the god-child."
"..."
The muscles in Mr. Z's face twitched. He didn't argue the point. The Aurora Order were fanatics, yes — but not fools. A Sequence 5 Beyonder did not throw himself at an Angel without very good reason.
"Oh — one more thing," Bernadette said. "The day you first came to find me — the pub. Was that your doing?"
Mr. Z looked noticeably surprised. He shook his head. "No. I only detected the smell of blood from a distance — enough to estimate dozens of deaths. I assumed someone was conducting a sacrificial ritual and went to look."
So the Zemangg Gang really hadn't been killed by Mr. Z.
"What happened, Mr. A?"
"Did you see who was responsible?"
"A group of people in masks. They were just leaving as I arrived."
MI9.
Though he'd long suspected as much, this was the first real confirmation.
There was no denying it — the Aurora Order, the Demoness Sect, these terrifying organisations caused enormous suffering every year. But compared to George III... they might actually come up short.
Bernadette didn't pursue the topic. She snapped her fingers and summoned the invisible servant. "I'll be moving on from this address. For future contact, use my messenger."
The standard summoning chant for Bernadette's invisible servant ran: "The invisible creature that wanders the higher planes; the benevolent spirit friendly to humanity; the messenger that belongs solely to Bernadette Gustav..."
But the version she gave Mr. Z — and the one she'd previously given to Xio and the others — replaced the final line with: "the messenger that belongs solely to Natasha." This didn't affect the messenger's function, because what the messenger locked onto wasn't a name but the person the name referred to.
It was the same principle as Klein's messenger, contracted under the name "Gehrman Sparrow."
"Understood."
Mr. Z pressed his hand to his chest, bowed once more, then his silhouette stretched and dissolved into the shadows, gone.
"You seem unusually invested in the god-child in Tingen," Bernadette said.
"Not especially. We're wearing the True Creator's cross — if there's any chance of reducing the damage His followers cause, it would sit better with me when the time eventually comes to act in His name." He paused. "And partly because it would help you complete the ritual at the same time."
"Should we go to Tingen ourselves?"
"You're serious? There's an Angel watching the place!"
Setting aside the Angel, Vincent had a firm personal policy against getting too directly entangled in Tingen's affairs. Not if he could avoid it.
Bernadette thought. "We'll revisit it. Besides — Mr. Fool's blessed follower is in Tingen. If something truly goes wrong, Mr. Fool might intervene."
Mr. Fool will indeed intervene. And he'll nearly die in the process.
She gave a soft, quiet laugh. "Heh. I wonder what sort of chaos the Aurora Order and the Demoness Sect are going to unleash in Backlund together. This city truly never runs short of suffering. A city of endless hope and despair..."
Vincent offered a carefully measured piece of what he knew. "Based on what we've pieced together, the Demoness Sect is very likely already in an arrangement with the Loen royal family. Now they're approaching the Aurora Order as well. I have good reason to suspect George III's hand is behind this."
"Connected to his ascension again?"
Bernadette looked through the window at the street below. "I wonder what the Churches will do with our tip-off."
Over the following two days, Backlund took on a noticeably tighter atmosphere — especially in the Docklands and the East Borough, where Church members could be seen moving at all hours. Acting on instructions from above, they investigated every disappearance recorded over the past three years. As the reports came back to each of the three major churches, the upper echelons convened a closed meeting.
None of this was anything Vincent and Bernadette were directly privy to. All they could verify was that the Churches had genuinely responded.
Vincent found himself curious: in the original, the Great Smog had been George III's cover for concealing the evidence of his human trafficking. Now that the trafficking was exposed, would the Smog still happen?
If not — then hadn't Bernadette already, in effect, averted a disaster involving high-level powers? Except the advancement ritual remained incomplete.
In the meantime, Bernadette continued her work at sea. By current estimates, catching one Pirate Admiral was all that stood between her and full digestion of the potion — but that wasn't guaranteed. They couldn't sit and wait for Qilangos to appear.
Danitz, for his part, had transitioned gradually from nervous anxiety to something closer to genuine enjoyment. He'd started to feel as though the list in his hands was a death warrant — whoever's name he pointed to, that person died.
Deeply, profoundly satisfying.
The pity was that his intelligence only stretched so far. Tracking every pirate across the boundless open ocean wasn't possible, and after a dozen or more strikes, the "death list" had exhausted itself into a perfectly useless piece of paper.
Bernadette released him.
"Wait — what?"
Danitz's first reaction was blank confusion. "That's it?"
I'm not done enjoying this yet!
To be continued…
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