“There’s people coming from each hall,” Kyle said. “Just cast a detection spell, that’s what I’m getting. Looks like they’re split up and attempting a pincer.”

With the alignment I’d fallen into, the weird ability to sense the presence of other oaths even when they were obscured by walls was back. From what I could glean, he was right. There were one or two signatures coming from each of the six other halls. Apparently, some mechanism or another had alerted them to activity in the chapel.

Actually, that “mechanism” was probably the massive amounts of sound we’d made. It wasn’t like we’d been subtle or anything.

Nonlethal effects, nonlethal effects… was there still a point in trying to avoid killing our enemies when it wasted time and they were actively trying to kill me? With every passing engagement, I was losing reasons to hold myself back, but for some irrational reason that sounded very much like Jasmine’s voice to me, I did.

Fucking hell. I promised myself that I would at least stop using those limiters when we were up against the real threats. Against the Church’s Chosen, there was the argument that they were being manipulated in their actions—if not by magic, then through their upbringing. Once I’d thought of that, it had gotten significantly harder to justify killing them. After all, it wasn’t like they were the only ones who had been convinced into doing horrendous shit by the people who had brought them up. The only difference here was that they were being encouraged by the Church, not some jackass noble.

Ugh. I need to suffer through less thinking and work on the actual doing part. The Chosen were getting closer on our location.

“They’re going to come from the altar position first,” Kyle said.

“They’re—yeah,” I said, having realized it a moment after him. “Looks like the others are going to be a bit behind them. Let’s isolate our fights.”

“Isolate?”

Right, he hadn’t been trained in this. Scratch that, he was far too good of a fighter to have not been trained in some capacity, but he hadn’t been trained in the same way I had. “Isolate our fights. Turn it from us two against ten people once into multiple engagements, each comprising us two against one or two enemies.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Kyle said. “How do you plan on doing it?”

“Shields,” I replied, my mind switching gears. Fighting was a mindset that I had to ease myself into, but once the switch flipped, it flipped hard. I’d been born to this, after all. “We’re going to block off every pathway except for one by the altar.”

“Five shields,” the jester replied, already shifting the position of some of his spheres. “That’s going to be an awful lot of upkeep, I’m sure you’re aware.”

“You have more capacity in your oath than me, but I’m in alignment,” I said. “How many shields can you simultaneously cast? I can do two or three, depending.”

“I’ll do three, then,” Kyle said, sending his spheres out. A man of action.

His spheres made their way to the other side of the chapel, ballooning out into wide panes of force.

“Someone’s going to have to teach me how to do something better than the simple Ceretian shield,” I muttered, drawing out the frame for said spell. It wasn’t a bad spell per se, especially against the weaker oathholders that this smaller establishement possessed, but it was still pretty suboptimal to have. My spell list in general was pretty lacking for the amount of progression I’d had in my oath this past couple of months.

Frame, fuel, spark, and then my first shield was up. It was getting easier to create them with each cast, which I had to appreciate. If not quite perfection, practice makes competence. Jasper had always liked saying that.

My own shields popped into existence, covering the halls immediately left and right of the hall that we’d dragged the unconscious bodies of our first two foes in. They weren’t quite large enough to completely encompass the entrances, but they were enough that there wasn’t crawling room between their edges and the walls. They would be enough.

“Let’s hit the altar hall,” I said, striding towards it. The oathholders in there were almost upon us, rounding one final corner before they would be in direct view of the chapel. “Get close on the door, they’re almost here.”

Wordlessly, Kyle joined me. For someone with a full jester outfit, he could be surprisingly stealthy. His footfalls made not a single noise as he came to the door with me, the two of us each crouching down on either side of it.

For this fight, my weapon of choice was yet another dagger. For a nonlethal fight, it would have been ideal for me to use something like a baton, but I hadn’t brought any with me. Every time I went out, I was dressed to kill. Maybe that indicated something fundamentally wrong with my psyche, but I liked to think of it more as a standard precaution for the life I lived.

I had the classical fireball. That one laid stricter restrictions on the energy it drew from my oath, taking only the raw magical power and ignoring the special traits that my god gave it. It was characteristic of spells from the classical school, and while it was usually a detriment, it might actually serve to be useful in this one instance. While dangerous, fireballs were by no mean the instant-kill weapon that Inome’s magic was. Using my magic carried that serious “always-on” pitfall, meaning that I couldn’t access my unstructured magic or Ceretian offensive spells without risking killing someone. With a classical spell, though…

Oh, I also had Blind and Deafen. Those could come in handy.

The oathholders were coming closer. I could sense them round the corner.

I glanced at Kyle and nodded once, not entirely sure why I did so. He nodded back, his spheres frozen in the air. One of them was glowing an angry orange and almost quivered in the air.

Whoever this pair of Chosen were sworn to, they didn’t carry any sensory spells. At least, no sensory spells that detected the two of us hiding right next to the door. They sprinted out without a care in the world, their voices raised, and we punished them for it.

As the two Chosen—both men, I noticed idly—made their way out of the hallway, Kyle’s spell slammed into them and detonated in a burst of orange dust, sending them tumbling towards me. The one who’d taken the hit directly seemed to be pretty out of it, but the other one tried to break his fall even as he nearly collided with me.

I stepped out of the way, allowing him to try to stop his fall on thin air. For good measure, I plunged my knife into his side as he fell, targeting a spot where his leather armor didn’t cover.

“That seems a little lethal,” Kyle said warily, looking at the man I’d just stabbed.

“Nonlethal stab,” I replied. “Dakheng is a big city. They’ll have Nacea oaths, will they not?”

“I suppose so,” the jester frowned. “Just don’t kill him too hard, yeah?”

Right, the clown had his own views on morality that… I wasn’t totally sure of. He’d captured a whole bunch of commoners at the royal ball yesterday, but he hadn’t exactly done it in a way that was super safe for them. Beyond that, there was no way any of those commoners had survived. At best, they would be awaiting life imprisonment. More realistically, he’d doomed them all to execution.

Well, at least he didn’t seem like the type to be a stickler for a strict moral code.

“He’ll be—“ I looked down at the dagger, then thought better of it. “Hey, dude with the knife stuck inside him. Just letting you know, taking that out is going to be very bad for your insides. I would highly recommend not moving.”

He didn’t. As much as these guys seemed to be pretty responsive to the idea of taking us down, they weren’t actually that devoted towards it in practice. A point for them not being under mental compulsion, perhaps.

I considered sticking around for a bit longer to try questioning this guy, but I was feeling impacts at my shield already. There were more people trying to break through, and given enough time alone, they would.

“There’s only one on the other side of that one,” I said, pointing towards my shield that I’d placed further away from the altar. “I’m going to open the one on the right. This one has two.”

“Sure thing,” Kyle said.

I turned my shield off and a pair of very surprised oathholders stumbled forth. Within moments, we were upon them. Just as before, the jester’s initial spell took one of them down. This time, though, I didn’t bother getting up close and personal with a knife. Instead, I took a frame—a far stricter one than I usually used—squeezed fuel into it, and sparked it.

The sphere of force and heat that constituted a classical fireball slammed into the second oathholder. With my oath alignment and recently increased class, they didn’t stand a chance. While I wasn’t familiar enough with the spell to make it properly lethal, it didn’t need to be. It knocked the other oathholder down all the same.

Afterwards, Kyle did the same opening-and-isolating thing with one of his shields, then another. Then it was his last one, and then the only person left standing was the one remaining Chosen behind my final shield.

I stopped supplying magic to my shield. This time, when it popped out of existence, the Chosen was ready for us, sprinting out and rapidly assessing the situation.

That was all that they did. After a glance around at the pile of unconscious bodies strewn across benches and floors, our final enemy put their hands up.

“I surrender,” he said, and the fight was over.

We’d won, and now we had someone with some actual power to question.

____________________

The jester really was versatile with what he could do. I had to wonder just how many oathholders he’d collected spells from, because it seemed like he had a trick for every situation under the sun. For our sole conscious prisoner, he had conjured up some kind of magical rope, similar to the kind I’d seen an Aedi oath use on one of the rising god’s cultists nearly a month ago. I doubted he’d taken it from that oathholder, but the premise was similar. Some kind of magically-reinforced strand bending to Kyle’s will, attaching our prisoner to a wall.

“Heretics,” the Chosen spat. Well, tried to spit. My temper was running a little short, and I may or may not have disintegrated whatever came out of his mouth with a burst of unstructured magic.

“Look,” I said, gracefully avoiding the whole “murder dangerous opponents” part of my usual doctrine. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

“We’re not your enemies,” Kyle said. I could tell he wasn’t putting his whole heart into it, but it was a blatant enough lie that I had to give him credit for at least trying. “We’re just trying to resolve a complicated situation.”

“You’re not examiners,” the Chosen man said, narrowing his eyes. “Neither of you bears the Church crest.”

“Who claims that examiners need the crest?” I asked. The hook I was trying to bait him on was pretty much pure bullshit, but lying had always been one of my specialties. With my mind as coldly focused as it was right now, it came to me like swimming to a fish. “Other examiners?”

“Church doctrine.”

“Doctrine? Doctrine?” I spouted, doing my best to sound like I was genuinely appalled by what he was saying. “Chosen—“

“Darryl.”

“Chosen Darryl,” I said, putting too much emphasis on every word just like an overly self-important official might, “We live in a time where a noble used a heretical application of their oath to communicate like a fucking god. Doctrine went out the window when reason did.”

“There is still no reason to—“

“There is,” I said, not sure where he’d been going nor where I was.

The important part wasn’t to come up with a coherent argument. Darryl knew more about the Church than me. He had to, given the fact that he was most likely pretty utterly indoctrinated at this point. Any story I spun would fall apart under sustained investigation.

No, the point was to not allow that sustained investigation in the first place. Destablize, distract, and redirect. Darryl had just watched his entire team—possibly including many of his friends—fall apart around him, and that had to have left him feeling nervous to some extent. If I could play off that, widen existing cracks, then he wouldn’t even try to question my authority.

“We must be adaptable,” Kyle said, picking up the slack. “They prepare to attack us at any moment. Do you truly believe that this location could stand up to sustained assault?”

“But—“

“But nothing,” I interjected. “We used exclusively nonlethal tactics. None of the devoted Chosen in this branch of the Church will face their deaths by our hands, which you can easily note by simply looking down. Can you imagine what would happen if we were truly attackers, nobles dedicated to wiping you out?”

There was some truth to my words. This branch of the Church might’ve been a weaker one, but the strategy they’d employed had been laughably bad. Not a single oathholder had been able to offer more than token resistance.

Had they just withdrawn all their personnel to more important locations? This was definitely one of the more minor branches. I’d initially decided on going here because there was a possibility that the Church had sought to stealthily place their hostages in smaller branches, but with the shoddiness of this defense, I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case.

“We wouldn’t normally be this weak,” Darryl replied defensively. “There was—“

I have you. He wasn’t questioning my identity anymore. That was progress.

“Was what?” I asked, interrupting his statement once again. Have to keep him off balance.

“Did your alarms fail to wake you up?” Kyle asked dryly, compounding my efforts. “At least to my eyes, you appeared pretty damn asleep.”

“Hold on, you’re literally a clown, how did—“

“Answer the fucking question,” I growled. The fact that Kyle still somehow had time to do up his entire jester setup was hurting us a little here, but even that question could be avoided if we piled on enough pressure. “The clothing that an examiner wears is far less important than your utter failure to respond to one.”

We were selling the impression fairly decently at this point, I had to say. It wasn’t like we had done any research into it. I hadn’t done any, at least—I had nothing to say for Kyle. For all I knew, he studied on the daily to figure out how to impersonate every person he met. I wouldn’t put it past a Shanzhai oath like him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he said, clearly panicking. “I—the leader was supposed to be here.”

“The leader?” And now we were making real progress.

“He supported us all,” Darryl said, stumbling over his own words. “Made us more than the sum of our parts.”

“And without him, you failed?” Kyle asked, tightening the ropes.

“Yes,” Darryl said. “He was supposed to be here. The leader was always here.”

“Where did he go?” I asked. “It explains your failure if you were relying on a single person. I must have words with him. If it turns out that he was the one who set up this arrangement, consequences will have to be meted out.”

“Don’t hurt the leader,” the bound Chosen begged, a sudden desperation entering his voice. “Anyone but him.”

“I never said anything about hurting,” I said, a little annoyed. Yes, getting on tangents was good, but this one wasn’t quite productive to the information gathering we were supposed to be doing. “I simply mean redistribution of resources. He will be made to understand his failure and reinstated.”

“Oh,” Darryl said. It was almost pathetic, the way he visibly sagged in relief at that. “Well, in that case…”

“Where is he?” I repeated.

“The northern branch,” Darryl said. “The major one. Said there was a meeting of some kind, had to handle some part of the ongoing conflict?”

“Did he say anything about captives?” I pressed.

“No,” Darryl said, turning his head towards me. Some of the suspicion from earlier had come back. “Why does that matter?”

“We’re searching for a specific captive,” I said honestly. “An unprecedented one with an ability that we’ve never seen before.”

Kyle glanced at me, raising an eyebrow where our captive couldn’t see, then turned back, schooling his face again. “As the lady said.”

“That doesn’t—“

“We’ve gotten enough,” I said. “Put him out.”

Kyle acquiesced, casting yet another one of his spells. This one flashed brown and then gray before lightly floating over to our captive and dissipating into the air. I had no idea what it did, but Darryl’s limp body hit the ground a moment later, the ropes dematerialized, so it clearly did what it needed to.

“The northern branch,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Transit still went as smoothly as it did before. We still had Kyle’s map, which he had stored up his sleeve and totally undamaged because of some sleight-of-hand bullshit or another, and that was enough to guide our way. Nobody hostile was in the streets, but there was still some level of tension in the skies. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not, but the air felt clammy and dense, as if some act of the gods had just taken place around these parts.

Given the abilities the Church had access to, it may very well have.

“This is going to be a lot more dangerous than our first go,” I warned the jester. “Are you still willing to come?”

“Sure.” His reply was as flippant as could be. “Not like I have anything better to do.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “This is a stupid fucking idea.”

“It’s fine,” Kyle said, flashing me a mischievous smile. “It might be a stupidly dangerous quest, but what else can us adventurers do?”

And with that, we were on our way to the Church’s northern headquarters.