“I’m an idiot!” Marie muttered. “Do you remember the circumstances in which we met those refugees all those years ago? Those with a third eye?”

“Uh, we saw them escaping from their ancestral enemies while passing through the Worldshaper’s territory. Why?” Aziz asked.

“Dolt. They were indeed escaping from their ancestral enemies, but if I’m not wrong” —she lowered her voice to a whisper— “they were escaping from their enemies in the Wildlands!”

Aziz’s mind turned white for a moment, as he fought to digest the meaning behind those words. “You’re saying that…those refugees were from the Wildlands? Like…they’re demons?”

“Exactly,” Marie whispered. “And I’m willing to bet that there’s a subtle difference between those refugees and the demons that they faced. Remember a term that Demigod Eliza and the others kept using?”

“‘Primal demons’? I was indeed wondering about that,” said Aziz. “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

“What are you ‘oh’-ing about?” Rene, who had been staring at Degurechaff, joined the conversation. “Did you make some new discovery?”

“You could say that,” Aziz replied. “Can you keep a sec— of course you can.”

“Naturally Rene’s able to,” Marie replied, rolling her eyes. Pulling her close, the marshal began to expound upon her theory. “Remember how Demigod Eliza keeps using ‘primal demons’ over and over, along with the other Paragons?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about those normal demons?” Marie paused for a moment. “Those that, err, don’t like to fight?”

“That’s an acceptable hypothesis, but what does it have to do with the three ‘ohs’ Aziz said?” Rene asked.

“It’s simple, really. Remember when we first went to the Worldshaper’s Divine Kingdom? When we left, we…”

And with that, Marie launched into an explanation of the events that transpired after the Southern Continent came to a preliminary arrangement with the God of Fire, and how they met a particularly special type of beastfolk that called themselves Ars. While the marshal continued to explain her conjectures, Aziz looked around the place, and noted that no one seemed to be particularly interested in eating.

To be fair, he wasn’t either, but this was probably proof that those who attended the ceremony today were probably decent people. Or people who knew how to read the atmosphere. Both sets weren’t mutually exclusive, but Aziz naturally found himself hoping that the people who knew how to read the atmosphere were also decent ones.

The world really needed more of such people.

He turned back to the two women, who were ending their philosophical and political discussion with some choice words.

“So?” Aziz asked. “What have you decided on?”

“To wait,” she replied. “I do not believe that Ark City will hide the issue of demons — well, good demons — in the Five Lands. It will create a problem if the other nations find out that Ark City hid something as important as this from them.”

“What about the Ars Tribe?” Aziz pressed on. “They’ve been here for years, and since I don’t know anything about them after we escorted them out, nothing important or big has happened to them so far.”

“We’ll say nothing either,” Marie replied. “Again, everything is just a conjecture of mine. It’s possible that the woman you pointed out earlier is just someone who just left the tribe before it was destroyed to join Ark City. After all, Ark City used to be the deepest city in the unexplored lands of World’s End back then.”

“If you say so, then.” Aziz glanced at the third eye on the young woman’s forehead, and then turned away. The primal demons were enemies, true, but he wasn’t going to do anything without the explicit direction of the State Council. Politics was a mess nowadays, and no one wanted to be the fellow who started a diplomatic rift or worse.

He was about to leave with the others when an odd feeling gripped his heart. For a moment, all colour fled from the world. The sky turned a pitch black a moment later, with the ground a blinding white.

Aziz snapped out of the abrupt change a moment later, but it wasn’t any trick of his mind — he wasn’t alone in feeling such a…wrong sensation. The colonel couldn’t think of anything to liken what he just experienced to, and from Marie’s pale face, he knew that neither could she. Something that shouldn’t happen had occurred, and he could tell that the source of such an incongruity came from somewhere beyond World’s End.

In the Wildlands.

The uniform clung to his drenched back, but Aziz had little attention to pay to peripheral sensations like sweat. The incongruity had passed, and with it, the colonel could feel that something…wrong had encroached upon the world. It was as if the warm sunlight now brought with it a chilling cold, or someone had rearranged the organs in his body.

It was…just utterly wrong.

“Something happened, right?” Rene asked. “If the humans and beastfolk can feel it this vividly, it must mean that something fundamental about the Human God’s authority has been twisted. I cannot feel it the way you two do, but this much is obvious.”

The awful feeling continued to persist for a few more moments, before ebbing away. A horrible sense of loss assailed his senses, like the time when the Lifespring passed away, but the feelings back then were incomparable to the hollowness in his chest.

His hands met that of Marie’s, and the two squeezed the other’s hands tightly, but even physical contact like this couldn’t alleviate the sense of loss he felt.

“It’s all an illusion,” Rene’s gentle words danced in his ear. “Relax. Let it go. It’ll be alright, I promise. Whatever happens to the Human God cannot affect you, no matter what.”

His heart pounding madly in his ears, Aziz straightened his back slowly, with Marie lending him a hand. The emotions that were rampaging earlier were beginning to calm down now, but all he could think of was what that horrible feeling entailed. As he turned his gaze to the horizon beyond World’s End, the Ars Tribe woman he noticed earlier came into view once more.

Tears were running down her face.