Inside the headquarters of the church of Embinyu, the Pope thought about his next actions carefully. The room he currently resided in was a simple but spacious one. It had glamor which matched his position but yet at the same time it did not contain more decorations than necessary. The Pope sat alone in this room, deep in thought.

Floating in the centre of this room was a certain glowing revolving crystal-like object. It was a Divine Gem. A magic gem infused with the powers of god to produce certain effects. In this case, this Divine Gem had ability of name concealment. Foreigners aside, those who came in contact with the Embinyu will eventually have their memories erased by the gem’s wondrous power. As long as the gem existed, the name of the Embinyu would be hidden from the general public, thus allowing the Order of Embinyu to flourish in secrecy.

However, this effect was not all powerful. Those who were wary, those who held power and those who searched specifically for them. This gem had no effect on those types of people.

Almost two months ago, the church had conducted a certain experiment. The result of the experiment had been a success. With the aid of their awakened Divine Saint Knight and by using another church’s Divine Saint Variant Candidate as a sacrifice, they had managed to incompletely revive one of their previous Divine Saints, Seraph.

There was an old saying that once a church had managed to awaken both their Divine Saint Variant, it would signify a new era. The reason for this was that simply having a Divine Saint Variant awakened caused a major boost in the effectiveness of the spells used by a religious order. Feeling the surge of power from Seraph’s revival, the church of Embinyu had been ecstatic.

However, the ritual had drained a lot out of the people participating and that was when disaster struck, an unknown “blonde devil” had interfered with the ritual. As a result, the Divine Saint Knight had been slain and they had lost contact with Seraph.

This information had been reported by the seers who had been monitoring the situation using long range scrying. The drop in the effectiveness of spells could also be used as evidence to verify that their Divine Saint Knight had fallen. However, the boost given by Seraph still remained which left room for some hope.

However, about a half a month ago, the Pope had felt the power boost given by Seraph fade and disappear as well. It was ridiculous. To have both Variants awakened only to have them slain shortly afterwards. Oh, what a farce of a new era!

Nevertheless, the church of Embinyu could not stop moving. They had to continue and act else their competitors get the better of them. The Pope’s forehead furrowed as he considered what would be best for their next actions.

The church had two options.

They could continue orthodox methods of trying to find their Divine Saint Variant Candidates or they could continue with their experiment and revive their previous experiments. The first method required years of training while the second allowed for an immediate access of a powerful tool. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which option was best for the church.

Regardless, both methods required a Divine Saint Variant Candidate. Finding one would not be an easy task. There was always the option of kidnapping the candidates from other churches but the risk would be high.

The church was to continue their search. That was the Pope’s decision. If they find someone else’s Variant then sacrifice them, if they find their own Variant, then good job. This killed two birds with one stone.

The attempts of the other church fractions interfering in this matter would be irritating. In fact, if the opposition plays their cards right, the Order of Embinyu may actually find itself in a very dire situation. However, that was the least of the Pope’s concerns.

Rather than interference from the other churches, the other humans, the Pope was worried about facing off against higher beings. There were three he had to watch out for. Three different entities which could single-handily destroy the entire order if rubbed the wrong way. The church simply didn’t have the manpower to stop them.

The first entities were gods.

The gods were mysterious beings which humanity knew little about. Even aided by the oracles of seers, the amount of information humans could obtain about the gods was small. Even the Pope suspected that much of the church’s information was either mistaken or incomplete.

According to what the church had managed to gather up over the ages, gods could be divided into two main categories. The major gods who resided in the immortal realms and the minor gods which resided here in the mortal realm.

From the aged and damaged records left from before the establishment of the Contract of Gods, it was said the unbounded powers of gods were immense. Whenever a god fought, everything in sight would disappear. There were very few methods of permanently killing a god as they had the ability to resurrect after their deaths. Sensing that their powers would very well destroy the entire world, the most powerful gods banded together and forged a spell across the very fabric of the land known as the Contract of Gods.

This spell limited the amount of Divinity a god could use in the mortal realm and forced gods with power into the immortal realms. Of course, there were Gods who rebelled against this and descended into the mortal realm as Heretic Gods.

The immortal realms were believed to be a collection of dimensional space which gods can rule over as their own territory. Although it existed from the start under the ownership of various beings, it was now most famously known as the realm of Gods. It is a known fact that the mortal and immortal realms are inseparably linked. If one realm is destroyed, then the other will fall as well.

Apart from that, not much else was known about the immortal realms other than the fact that the power of gods skyrockets there to the extent that even gods cannot kill each other easily. The immortal realms was built on the mortal realm as a foundation and thought to be made up of a collection of pure divine energy. While it is difficult for gods who generate divinity to damage this realm, it has been theorised that Divine Saint Variants who absorb divine power would have the ability to collapse the immortal realm completely. Nevertheless, to the church’s knowledge, no living Divine Saint Variant had ever made it to the Immortal Realms so this was all just speculation.

Due to the establishment of the Contract of Gods, the amount of power which gods could bring out in the mortal realm was severely limited. Nevertheless, that fact doesn’t make it any less difficult to slay a minor god.

To take down a minor god, the church needed to mobilise at battalion of at least 10 Saint-level followers with the resolve to face heavily casualties. Even then, there was a slim chance that the god would resurrect itself sometime later to take revenge. Thus conflict with gods was undesirable.

Saint-level followers referred the Saints, Saint Knights and Seers within a religion order. In other words, it referred to the ones who had reached the final class advancements which could be obtained within the religion order. Including the Pope, the people who had reached this stage of power within church of Embinyu only numbered eight.

The current actions of the church was to try and resurrect a Divine Saint Variant, a godslayer. Gods have always had an unnatural sense of danger and resurrecting the dead in itself was against the will of most gods. If they find out about the churches actions, then resistance should be expected.

The second entities were hostile Divine Saint Variants.

The Divine Saint Variants were the most closely guarded secret of all religious orders. Originally, it was a system created by gods after the Contact of Gods to give humans the power to defend themselves against Heretic gods in their absence. Due to the fact that the Contract of Gods had only just been established and thus was prone to bugs, at that time, the contract had no effect in limiting the power of Heretic Gods at all.

Thus humans needed a way to defend themselves. The Divine Saint Variants represented this. Possessing ever-evolving defences, blessed with god armour and able to use the Divine Power which exclusively belonged to the gods, the Divine Saint Variants gained the alternate name as the Proxies of God.

However, each church could only have two Divine Saint Variants at any one time. A Divine Saint and a Divine Saint Knight. Disregarding the difficulty of training someone to slay gods, the main issue regarding the Variants was finding them.

It was like finding a specific speck of sand in a world of nothing but desert. Amongst every living person in the mortal realm, there were only two people who had the necessary factors to become a Variant for the church. Even if the church found people who satisfied the requirement, it didn’t mean that they could awaken them as those people would be Variant Candidates of other religious orders.

However, there were three certain characteristic traits which allowed a Variant Candidate to be identified even without awakening them. First of all, they were usually natural-born geniuses. Be it magic or the sword, they were people who simply excelled and performed above all others. Secondly, they were extremely difficult to kill and were able to survive in the harshest of environments. And lastly, they had the ability to learn the “adaptive defences” which no-one else could emulate.

Although the likelihood of encountering one was low, the Pope couldn’t discard the possibility that one of the other churches would send a Divine Saint Variant to investigate the Embinyu’s movements. If that happened, everything would be over.

There was no point opposing a Divine Saint Variant. Against a minor god there was some hope but against a godslayer designed to kill heretic gods, there was none. This feeling of certainty came from the Pope’s long years of experience.

In the past, a certain Divine Saint Variant named “Xef” had gone rampart and became a threat which would destroy the world. The army of Saint-level followers mobilised against “Xef” was annihilated in an instant. In the end it had required several Divine Saint Variants from various fractions teaming up to seal “Xef” away.

Remembering the incident, the Pope thought it was best not to gain the attention of such people.

The last entities which the Pope was worried about were beings ranked 6 and above.

From the vague oracles received by their seers, the church of Embinyu had managed to deduce the following information.

Firstly, all beings in the mortal and immortal realms could be ranked into 7 tiers. The lower the number of the tier, the stronger the being.

In the mortal realm, there were only 6th and 7th tiers. It seemed that anything stronger than that would be forced into the immortal realms by the Contract of Gods but there were exceptions. The 6th tier contained beings such as Minor Gods, ultimate class humans, high ranking spirits and full grown dragons while the 7th tier contained everything weaker than that.

The immortal realm contained tiers 5 to 2. The 2nd tier seemed to be comprised of all chieftain gods and other ruling existences. 5th tier was the level of strength that major Heretic Gods descended at now that the Contract of Gods had been fixed to limit their abilities. Not much else could be further obtained by the church through the use of seer oracles. It seemed that only someone who resided in the immortal realms would know the complete truth.

Only, one scrap of information would be gained about the 1st tier: Never oppose the first tier. To put simply, the first tier were literally invincible and unstoppable. They cannot lose no matter what. At most, the result would be a draw if one decided to fight the 1st tier.

Considering the fact that minor gods who were on the scale of natural disasters was only 6th tier in this ranking, the Pope shuddered to think of what entities ranker higher could do. Either way it was best to stay out of their way.

The Pope came to a decision. He remembered than a few years ago, someone matching the characteristics of a Variant Candidate had been spotted in a certain location. In the church’s current circumstances, that was a good a lead as any.

However, that didn’t do anything about the other churches being mindful about the Embinyu’s actions. Thus, the Pope decided to take a risk.

The church of Embinyu was currently in possession of 48 False-Divine Weapons.

Research on fake divinity had been going on for centuries, however, it was only recently that there had been a breakthrough in this technology. Ironically, it had not been a religious order which had come forth with revolutionary ideas needed for this controversial new technology, rather, it had been the players who had come up with the basis of the system.

A few years ago, a group of magic researcher players teamed up and developed a revolutionary system they called the False-Magus system. The False-Magus system used an alchemic core and allowed the access and mastering of multiple systems of magic both inside and outside the caster’s specialisation range. Stealing this technology, the church had used centuries worth of research to modify and adapt the False-Magus system around an Origin core which they had obtained from a slain god.

The result of this were the so called False-Divine Weapons. In this world there exist items known as godslaying weapons. When used, these weapons take over the user’s body and cause them to go berserk while in turn giving them the power to fight against gods no matter who they may be. Because mortals were not meant to possess Divinity, these False-Divine weapons had a similar effect as the godslaying weapons.

Including the first prototype which had been created and lost by the order of Beelzebub, there were 49 of such weapons in existence. In order to distract the attention of those who could hinder the Embinyu, the Pope made his decision.

The False-Divine Weapons would be scattered around key locations and given to monsters to distract their enemies. Additionally, some of the techniques and demonic spirits of the church will be “abandoned” so that only people with malicious intentions could find them and put them to use later on. Meanwhile, the church would track down the Variant Candidates was quickly as possible and revive their fallen Variants.

The Pope looked at the revolving gem as he reconsidered his decision.

“No, This is it. I will not change my decision.”

The Pope stood up and exited the room to give his orders to the subordinates waiting outside.

***

On a side note, the name concealing divine gem will later be destroyed when the church of Embinyu incurs the wrath of a certain peacekeeping masked eccentric but that’s another story.

As to why this American Campione was playing a game… well… people buy strange things when their drunk…

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Happy New Year! (Well, actually its a bit early but yeah....)

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