“Heave!” There is a loud grunting, Canta feels himself rise up into the air. “Heave!” repeats the gruff voice, sounding a little troubled. He lurches higher up, the rope tied around his waist pulling him out of the well little by little.

“Give me that!” snaps an annoyed voice. Alleluia. Canta raises his head, looking up at the light above him. He barely has a chance to breathe, before the air is squeezed out of him as the rope, fastened around his waist, presses itself down tightly against his gut as he suddenly flies towards the surface.

Cold hands clutch his wheezing body as he comes to a sudden stop. “Are you alright?” asks Alleluia’s voice, sounding worried.

Canta slowly opens his eyes, covering his face with a free hand. It’s so bright out here. The sun must have come out from behind the clouds while he was down there. He looks at her worried face, happy that someone would make such an expression for him, but also a little embarrassed. “I’m fine, thanks,” he says, his gaze following her arm that is held out to the side. She holds the man in the metal armor tightly by the trim of his armor, just below his neck.

“Uh…” starts Canta, wanting to ask.

“Ah! No! Don’t get jealous, honeybun!” says Alleluia, letting the man go. “I just had to convince them to let us borrow their rope.” Canta isn’t. She shoots an angry glare back to the group of priests and soldiers holding the back end of the rope. They all flinch back, taking a step towards the one behind them who apparently has a broken shoulder, by the looks of it. Probably more of her ‘convincing’.

Canta looks at the man in charge, as Alleluia lifts him out of the well that is still lined with wet, dead, gray skin. All of the poison water seems to have dissipated, leaving only a gruesome carnage to coat the stones below. She sets him down and Canta can’t help but notice the soft squishing of some red meat beneath his right foot.

~*+- PROFILE -+*~ HP: ----- "Canta" SOUL: 20/20↑ LEVEL: 3 ↑

EXP: 0/36

CLASS: [Sin-Eater]

STATUS

HUNGER: You are stuffed full

THIRST: You are a little thirsty

SUB-CLASS: None

RACE: ???

OBOLS: 0

STR: 08 ↑ WIS: 12 LUK: 07 DEX: 11 INT: 12 LOV: 05 ↑↑

Looking down in disgust, he stares at the piece of liver stuck to his bare sole. “Ugh… go away, Nina,” he mutters.

“Who’s Nina?!” snaps Alleluia in a sharp tone. He looks up at her unblinking glass eyes. Noticing, but not too worried about the excited muttering coming from around them. Something about a blessing or some other weird, priesty stuff. This brewing storm was more important to avoid, before she killed him and everyone else here. He points to the monstrous corpse hanging out sideways from the well that is still falling apart, piece by piece.

“That’s Nina. Are you jealous of some swampy, liver-eating, well-monster?”

“No!” replies Alleluia quickly, yet still continuing to glare at him.

“Uh… okay?” replies Canta, shrugging. He has the feeling that this will come to haunt him later somehow.

The crowd of priests begins to chant excitedly. He ignores them though, seeing that she isn’t done with him just yet. “And what do you think you’re doing, just running off like that?!” she asks in a scolding tone, leaning down towards him with her hands on her hips.

“I was hungry,” he explains, raising an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t get it, you don’t have a stomach.”

Alleluia gasps, pulling back and covering her mouth. “You jerk! I was worried about you!”

“Huh?” Canta stares at her incredulously. “You don’t have to be. I can take care of myself.”

She frowns. “You were getting eaten!”

“I was the one doing the eating!”

The shouts from all around them grow louder.

“It didn’t look like that when I saved you,” she argues, crossing her arms and lifting her nose into the air as he glares down at him.

“I could have saved myself,” replies Canta, his eyes twitching as he crosses his arms too, mimicking her posture. Though in his mind, the action is done simply out of the principle of the matter. “After all -”

The crowd grows louder and louder. Their jubilant chants and cries bounding as they begin to circle around them. “Shut up!” yells Canta, pointing to the people, not even able to hear his own thoughts anymore as he listens to their words. They’ve all gotten very close. Uncomfortably close.

“Sin-Eater! Sin-Eater! Sin-Eater!” they chant over and over, the priests with the most fervor, together with the white and gold embroidered soldiers behind them.

“Huh?” mutters Canta, his finger drooping.

“Make us clean!”

“We will be pure again!”

“Purge! Purge!”

Canta has no idea what’s happening, but this feels like it’s a good thing. “See?!” he holds his hand out to Alleluia in a displaying gesture. “They know how to appreciate me!”

The last thing he sees before he flies back into the well are her two cold, light-less eyes that carefully watch him, as he falls back into the hole and breaks his bones again.

“Heave!”

“Heave!”

Canta puts on his meanest glare as they pull him out of the well a second time. This time, Alleluia doesn’t help, letting them do all the work. His eyes go straight to her, as he leaves the well. She just keeps her arms crossed and looks away in a huff, making a point out of it herself now. The soldiers all cheer as he rises up out of the darkness, which he appreciates a lot, but doesn’t quite understand. He does feel like he deserves it though.

Climbing out of the well, he unties the rope from around himself, peeling it out of his red skin that the coarse thing had dug itself inside of.

New hands grab him and for a fearful moment, he thinks they’re going to toss him into the well a third time. Canta yelps as he is hoisted into the air. But his voice and body both become relieved as they start carrying and tossing him above the crowd. As he flies through the air, the object of clear adoration and celebration, he looks over to Alleluia’s grim expression, her eyes never leaving him, never blinking as he rises into the air.

He is going to regret this later too. He can feel it.

Eventually, the celebration ends however, as the collection of the many dead surrounding them begins. He and Alleluia take no part in that, however, being guided into a house by a group of very shaky and nervous priests who all seemed to want to talk to him. Yet somehow, none of them ever seemed to manage to find the courage.

Canta, at first happy about this warm welcome, now slowly starts to become suspicious. They were being too polite. Too nice. Too eager about his presence. Too…

- reverent.

The priests, the soldiers, the man in the armor, the people in the town, now that the celebration has fallen quiet and the fervent blood has left all of their veins, they tread very, very softly in his presence. As if walking through a temple.

This has never happened to him before, not in this life and he is sure that it also didn’t happen in his old one and now that it does, he can’t help but feel like they’re walking into a trap.

Especially because he suggested to Alleluia that the two of them leave. But not only did she not want to go, saying she had never seen a place like this before, let alone actual people, but also the soldiers seemed worried about this too. So maybe it didn’t feel so much like a trap, as it does like they’re prisoners, one of them, willingly so, apparently.

“Save one backwater town and this is what you get,” mutters Canta as they close the door to the room behind them. He can hear the lock turning. He looks over to Alleluia. “We’re probably going to get murdered, you know?”

She shrugs indignantly, apparently still mad at him for whatever reason, as she turns around to look out of the upstairs window, down at the destroyed town below.

The awkward silence between the two of them is quickly broken however, by the sound of a mechanism being wound taut, the chain of her body winding back up. She turns her head around to look at Canta, as he finishes turning the crank on her back. “Thanks,” she mutters awkwardly, turning back to the window.

“Yeah,” says Canta dryly, looking around the simple room. It looks like an old attic or something that nobody has used in a long time. One door. One upstairs window. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t trust people. People are what got me killed in my last life,” he explains, walking to the door and peering through the keyhole. He can see some very stiff looking guards standing on the other side. He’s pretty confident that Alleluia could break this door down and take both of them out. But she doesn’t seem to have the same sense of dreadful urgency that he feels.

Maybe he’s just paranoid though. But that’s understandable in his eyes, considering his first death. Well, the first death that he remembers.

He turns around looking at her. She has turned her head from the window to look his way. “I don’t trust priests,” explains Canta. “I don’t trust soldiers. I don’t trust that guy with the cape,” he rolls his eyes. “Who even wears a cape? I’m making a new rule,” he says. “Never trust someone wearing a cape.”

Alleluia blinks. “What?”

“Never mind. Look, this doesn’t feel right to me. People don’t just celebrate other people like that.”

Alleluia tilts her head. “You killed the monster,” she says. “Nina,” she adds on dryly.

“Will you get over it, you baby!” snaps Canta. “I don’t remember the surface that well, okay? But I remember that this isn’t normal.”

“They were rather surprised by me,” says Alleluia. “They were very rude until I managed to…” she explains, her hand running to the exposed mechanisms on the base of her neck. “- convince them,” she finishes. “Maybe we’re not normal?”

“We’re not,” says Canta as plainly as he can, thinking about how they had chanted his class-name. Maybe priests like him because of that? It makes sense to him, in the inner workings of his mind. Holy people dislike sins. He gets rid of sins. Ergo, holy people like him. Two drops of goo make a slime.

Sure, one or two of them spared an odd glance at Alleluia, but somehow, he seemed to be the bigger oddity. He isn’t sure how he feels about that. Then again, they all seem to be terrified of her, which is something that he can sympathize with. Alleluia looks his way for a moment. “Honey, I’m sorry that I -”

The door clicks as the lock turns again.

Canta and Alleluia look up as the man in the armor, a light bruise around his neck, steps inside together with some priest from the line-up. Canta can see his shaking legs, as evidenced by the tiny bit of fabric moving just where his knees are.

“Sin-Eater,” says the gruff man, awe in his voice. “Thank you for your help,” he says. “We’re hono -”

“Yeah, Great, great,” interrupts Canta, waving him off. “Can we go now?”

The man and the priest look at each other. The priest turns around out the door. “Bring it in!”

The two of them step to the side as another man walks in behind them, carrying a large tray covered in food. Canta eyes it, watching as the man nervously walks past him, setting it onto the table. He bows, before quickly shuffling backwards out of the room. Canta looks back at the platter. It’s full of food. Real food. Cuts of meat. Bread. Cheeses.

He smacks his dry mouth. He can still taste a little Nina, but -

His stomach growls.

- he could go for a little snack…

“Typical,” says a sharp, criticizing voice from the window. “Well?”

Canta looks at her, then at the food, then at the two people by the door.

“Well… I guess we can hang around for a little while…”