“Has she talked yet?” the Cardinal asked, causing Mehily to shake her head wordlessly. All Remezan could do was sigh and scratch his bald head. “This is just one giant disaster,” he mumbled, not for the first time in the week, “The monster-tainted Rogue flees the night we captured her, killing several people on her way out. Then the monster we aimed to catch somehow comes back to life a week later, eats another one of the guards, flees for everyone to see and the Hunter able to track that thing has already left. All the while, an angel refuses to speak to the priesthood. We learned nothing, lost control over one beast and may have created a second one.”

It had been a silent agreement that both Mehily and Remezan had come to independently that this slime, Apexus, had not been the mere creature they had thought him to be. Once was a fluke, twice a coincidence, but three times was a pattern. Once the slime had spared Mehily, at the time she thought it was to ridicule her. The angel, still locked in her room, had made it very clear that the slime had never been a bad being and looking at the track record objectively, there was no denying her side of the story. Lastly, the report of one very distraught guardsman had painted a picture about an incredibly regretful creature, no matter how nightmarish it had looked.

Thus, the two of them had arrived at the conclusion that their way to approach this had been twisted. The same could not be said for Evmeria and Bertholdt. While the Warrior simply remained stubborn in his path, not asking a whole lot of (in his opinion) unnecessary questions, Evmeria was fully aware of all of those doubts, but had only expressed faith in Jersoja. Something that Mehily had been struggling with recently. Was it her god’s commands that were simply flawed or had she been misinterpreting them from the start?

The second seemed much more likely. Jersoja’s teachings taught that the monster was impure. Associating with them was simply unclean and generally bound to bring more trouble than they were worth. In an ordered creation, this made absolute sense. The monsters living on leaves were created as living tests, the Parasytes were dangers older even than the Omniverse and the demons in the Roots were tainted beyond repair. All of them were clearly evil or at least adversarial, there was no doubt there. Which, in turn, meant that this ‘Apexus’ creature was not part of the current order of creation. That was even more terrifying than her or her god having made a mistake.

“If only we could call upon another Inquisition,” Remezan leaned back in his tall chair. If Inquisitions were an easy thing to form, the Church would have used them all the time. It was a tool that was severely limited in numerous ways. The first and obvious one, an Inquisitor was needed. While numerous Inquisitors could join the same Inquisition, there was at least one needed to start the entire thing. Second, the whole thing needed to be of interest to the divine. An Inquisition was, in all technicality, the request for continued divine guidance towards a particular individual.

If there was no interest in providing that guidance, none would be given. With how non-interventionists the gods normally conducted themselves, their help was reserved for the cases of extreme oddity, danger or as a rare reward for the truly faithful. Then there was a number of other limitations that didn’t apply to this case: Range, the need for a clear and accurate description of the target and a proper temple to do the ritualistic prayers at.

The last thing, one very rarely important, was that an Inquisition could not be called on the same target twice within ten years. There was no gaming it either, by targeting a usual ally of theirs, for example. Such attempts would just incur scorn from the divine messengers. The rules were the rules and the enforcers strict.

In other words, now that they had caught and lost Apexus, they had even less ways to find him than before. “One would think finding some sort of giant blue blob with a skeleton would be easy,” Remezan complained, also, not for the first time, “but nobody has seen it… him. We still don’t even know if he has any connections to…” The Cardinal stopped himself, before he could accidentally provide the secret he had kept from Mehily for so long. The Priest herself knew it was probably for the best if there were things she didn’t know yet. Great minds had broken, that much the United Gospel taught.

“Perhaps…” Mehily carefully intervened in the Cardinal’s thinking session. Since he kept inviting her to his office, a room entirely defined by the outlines of luxurious furniture that Remezan had removed upon taking over from his predecessor, she had taken the opinion that he must have wanted some second opinions. Why his holiness would choose her for that was beyond her. “Perhaps we should tell the angel about this?”

Aclysia was still in the dark, both about Reysha’s breakout and the slimes revival. “No, not yet,” Remezan shook his head. “Telling her would only awaken a wish to leave. She isn’t cooperating right now, but at least she is staying. If the slime is genuinely not a monster and as much in love with her as she is with him, he will come to save her eventually. We will try to capture him then.”

“He also doesn’t seem to be too stupid,” Mehily added to the theory. “It will be necessary to reveal a weakness or a chance for him to talk to us on safe terms.”

“Yes… I have been thinking about how we could make that happen… sadly, we do not have a way to communicate with this ‘Apexus’,” the Cardinal sighed again. Something that only grew more frequent as time passed. “I would send some scouts that simply shout the message into the woods or something, but the public will see any negotiations and respond with outrage.”

The guards were generally held in high regard on Ctania. As such, the death of not one but several of them in a couple of days had the people at the cusp of rage. If the Church was to step into that situation saying that they wanted to have a calm talk with one of the two culprits, particularly the one that had been so high profile these last months, there would be an outcry for slimeshed. That the leader of the local Trader’s Guild outpost took personal (and now public) interest in re-obtaining the core only worsened the situation. Where outrage didn’t talk, money surely would.

“I will invest more thought into this after the Day of the First Ascensions,” Remezan summarized his thoughts. He needed to gather energy first, make sure things were secure even for the little break he took. Afterwards, there might be some room to take minor risks.

Mehily simply nodded. That made sense. It was one of the three days in the year on which the Cardinal left the building. The Day of the Original God, dedicated to the Progenitor Deity, the Day of the First Ascension, in honour of Trember, the second god and godhood in general, and the Day of the Thirty Third Ascension, to honour the creator of this very leaf. Each time, he was only out for about half an hour, travelling to the festival site, delivering a public prayer, and returning to the church.

“Once that ordeal is over, I will have the energy to think about these things in all their complexity with the appropriate amount of energy,” Remezan put the temporary final note on this topic.