The game difficulty
has gone crazy.
After Glen returned to his room.
Willoden, the head of the Veronia family, remained alone in his office, wearing a grim expression.
“…….”
A silence that matched his gaunt appearance.
Breaking that silence, Nicola, the commander of the Black Armor Knights, spoke up.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine……. No. I’m not fine.”
Without even the strength to put on a mask of pretense, Willoden was mentally exhausted.
That was how draining his conversation with Glen Wordsworth had been.
“Sir Nicola.”
“Yes. I’m listening.”
“Do you understand what just happened, at least logically?”
“……”
Nicola fell silent.
Even by his own judgment, the conversation between Willoden and Glen earlier was something that made no sense by common standards.
“……There are too many unanswered questions.”
“Exactly. Questions.”
Willoden interlaced his fingers.
The first question.
How on earth did Glen Wordsworth find the Black Cult hidden in the underground waterways?
Of course, the Black Cult parish in Veronia was far too poorly hidden to truly escape the eyes of the Holy Papal State.
If Willoden had not worked tirelessly behind the scenes, it would have been discovered by inquisitors long ago.
‘But even taking that into account, Glen Wordsworth’s movements were strange.’
The moment he arrived in the city and made Willoden’s acquaintance, he hurriedly left the estate and found the Black Cult parish.
As if his target from the very beginning had been the Black Cult parish hidden in Veronia’s underground waterways.
‘I went to such lengths to avoid suspicion from neighboring territories…….’
Willoden let out a low groan.
It seemed information had leaked from the inside without his knowledge.
Otherwise, it made no sense that Glen Wordsworth knew the Black Cult’s location.
‘But how do you explain linking the Black Cult with the battle priests?’
Wraiths born from the atrocities of the Black Cult.
The fact that those wraiths were used to train battle priests was a secret known only to Willoden and a handful of high-ranking nobles within Veronia.
Naturally so—normally, the moment a wraith was confirmed to exist, a seven-star priest would be summoned immediately to annihilate it, as it was nothing more than a ticking time bomb.
The method of exorcising wraiths through the obsolete ritual of exorcism and strengthening a priest’s holy power was something Willoden himself had discovered.
‘But judging from that earlier conversation, Glen Wordsworth seemed to know this.’
Willoden’s complexion darkened.
Of course, exorcism was not a ritual known only to Willoden, nor was he the first to use it to strengthen holy power by purging wraiths.
But the point was that Glen Wordsworth had gathered that chain of knowledge and connected the Black Cult with Veronia’s battle priests.
As if he had seen straight through a secret Willoden had hidden for decades.
‘Just how did he know?’
With how accurately Glen pierced the truth and stabbed straight at the core, even the sly and seasoned Willoden failed to respond properly.
In the end, he tried to silence Glen Wordsworth by killing him as a last resort.
But that boy was under the protection of the Inquisition.
A situation where he could not even lay a hand on someone who knew secrets that could threaten not only his honor, but his life.
—I lost.
As he himself admitted, Willoden had suffered a complete defeat at the hands of Glen Wordsworth.
A grand lord who had worn the mask of a coward for decades and skillfully gathered profit, defeated by a brat not even twenty years old.
“Huuu…….”
A deep sigh filled with worry.
Willoden’s upper body slowly collapsed onto his desk.
Of course, regardless of everything, if Glen Wordsworth failed to solve the problem of the cursed mist, he could not hand over the battle priests.
He had lost, but there were still things he could not give away.
However.
‘There’s no way he’ll stop there.’
Now that his weakness had been seized, Veronia would slowly have things taken from it by Wordsworth.
And above all, in the near future, Glen Wordsworth would likely remove the cursed mist openly and demand the battle priests.
The sense of unease would not leave his mind.
North of the city of Veronia.
If you ride on horseback for two full days, you will arrive at a small city at the northernmost edge of the Holy Papal State—Lucillirion.
It was originally known as a city of beautiful scenery where snow never melted all year round, but that was no longer the case.
“What is that wall?”
Seeing the jade-colored wall at the edge of her vision, Romina gaped in astonishment.
Beside her, Glen replied with an indifferent expression.
“The cursed mist.”
Because of the jade-colored mist descending from the unexplored lands to the north, Lucillirion fell in an instant from a beautiful city of snow to a cursed land.
Of course, thanks to the tireless efforts of Veronia’s famous battle priests, that cursed mist had been stopped at a certain distance from the city.
The dense jade-colored curtain was a sight born from mist that could not descend further south, piling up again and again.
If that were to reach Veronia, it would be nothing short of a catastrophe.
‘Thousands of people would rot away and disappear along with the territory.’
Suddenly, it became easier to understand why Willoden Veronia had gone as far as using the Black Cult to train battle priests.
‘If it weren’t for sacrificing the people of the territory, I would have done the same.’
Even Glen, who used everything he could, was reluctant to cross the line of abandoning basic humanity.
In any case, the suffering of the entire territory caused by that jade-colored mist would soon come to an end.
Now that he was here, the mist would soon be completely cleared away, and the shackles binding Veronia’s battle priests would be released.
The goal was simple.
Go into the unexplored land shrouded in cursed mist and eliminate the source of the mist.
Clop, clop—
They rode their horses into the city plaza, but there were hardly any townspeople to be seen.
Naturally so—who would remain when a mist that devoured flesh and souls lay right at their doorstep?
