They didn’t get the whole story until the following morning when the false Priest woke up.

Serenity didn’t know what Blaze did to him, or even if he did anything, but the man wanted to talk. His name was Ardeval and he’d been an acolyte, assigned to a Grand Project underground when a new Priest came in and took over.

Priest Alanaeon was, in his opinion, actually insane. She greenlit all sorts of projects that had been repeatedly rejected due to their expense or potential consequences, including the gun he’d tried to use and some project that required test subjects. They had a small number of criminals sent to them every month, but that wasn’t enough for Alanaeon; no, they had to go find their own.

So she sent impostors to take over several of the churches that hid some of the more secure access points to the underground after calling their Head Priests in for “consultations” one at a time. Ardeval knew that was when the illusion device was made; he suspected that the Head priests were also used as subjects, but he hadn’t really wanted to know. Accepting the post of “Head Priest” meant that he was no longer a candidate; he was happy enough about that.

She’d also sent people to handle “subject acquisition”; Ardeval wasn’t involved in that. His job was to make sure that her taking over the church wasn’t noticed, and he’d thought he was doing well. He’d only been there for about four months, but he’d managed to pass an inspection right after he started so he’d thought he was safe.

No wonder he’d been terrified enough to attack when they showed up in the guise of an Inspection team.

Ardeval was able to show them the route down from the church to the underground. It started in a storage room, where it had been hidden by the completely functional shelves; they rose into the ceiling and revealed a long staircase.

Ardeval was also able to tell Serenity that some people who were probably Earthlings had passed through. There were a number of people in novice uniforms that he’d been told were “Legion apprentices”. Ardeval had never talked to any of them, but it was the best guess Serenity had. After all, there were supposed to be a number of novices who were really Earthlings at the Steadfast Seventy-three church and they weren’t there.

The acolytes still wouldn’t talk. They maintained that they knew nothing about any of this. Ekari and Kerr were convinced they were lying, while Sillon was less certain; he thought there might be more to it. Blaze, Serenity, and Ita couldn’t decide.

It left Serenity with quite a dilemma. He’d planned to take on Alanaeon and the underground after dealing with Lykandeon partly because he didn’t want to warn Lykandeon and partly because he wasn’t actually certain where an entrance was. Sure, he had the memories from the vision, but when he tried to actually pin down a location they weren’t as helpful as he’d expected.

On top of that, Rourke had some known entrances, but they were all supposed to be guarded. This one, like the one in the vision, wasn’t.

If he left it for later, they’d have more time to prepare.

If he attacked now, they might be able to call Lykandeon for help.

In the end, it was the fact that the World Core lay in the middle of the installation that tipped Serenity’s decision paralysis in the direction of waiting. If someone threatened Gaia or got close to where she was housed and she called for help, he would be there if there was any possible way to manage it.

Lykandeon clearly didn’t care as much, but he was still the Planetary Sovereign and could communicate with Lyka; Serenity thought he could even command Lyka to an extent, though clearly not well enough to stop the dungeon breaks. That was enough to make heading in entirely too dangerous; it opened up the possibility of strong reinforcements while attacking a hard point.

Serenity needed to go for defeat in detail if he was going to win this. Taking on Lykandeon at all was a huge risk; only the fact that he’d found something he thought was an extreme weak point even made it possible. Attacking here would mean giving up that advantage. However much he wanted to rescue them now, he couldn’t.

At least he now had an access point. Hopefully it would stay unguarded.

As he headed out to let the others know his decision, Serenity smiled bitterly. Maybe that man who’d said they ate people in the church wasn’t entirely wrong. Kidnapping people to use as test subjects wasn’t really any better than eating them, was it?

Leaving them behind because he wasn’t sure he could get them out was a little better. Not much, but a little. He was going to come back as soon as he could.

No one other than Ita was happy about Serenity’s decision, and Ita was only happy with it because she’d be happy with any decision he made. Even so, no one actually objected. It wasn’t simply that they wanted to please Serenity, either; instead, he’d somehow managed to attract a group of people with experience beyond simply delving dungeons. Each of them had their own reason to agree with his decision.

Ekari and Kerr were young, but both were well trained. They didn’t have the experience Sillon or Blaze did, but they had better training than Sillon. In many ways, Ekari’s expertise with people and deception was similar to Blaze’s, but they were very different people and tended to choose extremely different approaches.

Kerr had the most personal reason, despite her youth. During the years leading up to her time as a Tutorial instructor, she’d tried all sorts of things to reach Tier Four. None of them had clicked, which was probably why she hadn’t managed the Tier increase, but she’d managed it after the Tutorial. She credited Serenity with the achievement, even if Serenity wasn’t certain why; it was her achievement, not his. In this case, she told him that she trusted him to do what was best for his people, even if she didn’t like it.

Serenity had the feeling that Blaze’s training might actually be better than anyone else in the group, including his own, but it was heavily focused on asymmetric warfare. Blaze had essentially no background in managing large groups or armies. Sillon was almost Blaze’s opposite; he had years spent serving in a fairly regular army, not even a mercenary company, even if he’d never been more than a small unit commander.

No matter the reason, they all recognized the need to retreat while the going was good and not push so far ahead that they would be surrounded, even if that was more metaphor than physical reality.

What they weren’t all immediately agreed on was what to do with the fake priest, the real priest, and the acolytes. Serenity wasn’t sure what to choose; he simply knew he didn’t want to leave anyone behind him who might warn the people underground. That meant that the fake priest and all four acolytes had to either die or be captured and guarded, because Serenity wasn’t willing to trust either their word or a spell or oath to hold them.

The real priest was a problem in a completely different way. Vinal seemed to be falling apart after finding out that her mentor didn’t actually exist, that Ardeval was completely faking it when he guided her in the disguise of Priest Kiilitha.

They went round and round about what to do until Ekari finally made a suggestion that was obvious in hindsight. “We should take Vinal to my mother. She’ll definitely respect a High Priestess and mother will help her recover. And if we’re doing that, we can just take the others to Rourke. We are here as Priest-Inspectors. In fact … Serenity, why don’t you send a message to Rourke and ask him for a couple Inspectorate guards?”

Serenity felt silly for not realizing he could ask for help transporting the prisoners. He was slowly getting used to having a trusted group around him, but he hadn’t expanded that to Rourke yet.

Three days later, the Steadfast Seventy-three church was securely locked, Vinal was following High Priestess Karin around like a lost puppy, Rourke had the fake priest and five questionable acolytes, and the group was on their way to the church in Immutable Fifteen. It was the only remaining church that was supposed to still have novices that probably came from Earth.

Serenity had tracked the number rescued and knew that they’d rescued over eighty percent of the Earthlings that were transferred from Zon to Lyka, according to Djen’s records. Rourke was fairly confident that many of the missing were dead, killed the same way as the execution Helen saw. The remainder seemed to have been given “to the Legions”, which Rourke was surprisingly uninformative about.

In fact, all Rourke would say was that the Inspectorate and the Legions had an ongoing feud. He wasn’t about to let them have control of the Inspectorate, which they claimed was their right since the Inspectorate was armed and expected to fight on occasion. At the same time, Rourke maintained that the mandate of the Inspectorate was to be able to inspect anyone, anywhere, anytime - and the Legions wouldn’t permit that. It made getting information out of the Legions difficult.

High Priestess Karin theoretically had more control over the Legions, but in practice there was little she could do if they didn’t obey her. She was working on a plan with Ekari to deal with that, but they hadn’t yet reached a workable solution that could be used if Lykandeon were still a threat. Serenity had the feeling that the Legions would be another problem to deal with after Lykandeon wasn’t a problem anymore.

Immutable Fifteen’s church, however, was a problem that they could deal with immediately. Like steadfast Seventeen and Steadfast Seventy-three, Immutable Fifteen was completely out of contact with the higher authorities in the Eternal Church. They could do whatever they wanted.

Going in as Priest-Inspectors still seemed like a good plan. It had worked both times previously to at least get them in the door; hopefully it would work again. If things went really well, they might not have to empty out the church, but Serenity wasn’t exactly confident in that outcome. It’d happened both times so far, after all.

Immutable Fifteen was a zone of destruction, far worse than Steadfast Seventeen. Few buildings were more than rubble and the place stank of the dead. It would have made an excellent hunting ground for a necromancer or Death mage; Serenity could deal the Death-attuned mana being pulled towards him as they traveled. In a way, that was convenient; there was almost certainly some form of pestilence brewing in all that death, and Death-attuned mana would discourage it.

Blaze would still need to check them all when they left. Serenity expected that he’d insist on checking Serenity as well, even though he wasn’t vulnerable to nearly any plague.

Strangely, there were no signs of the monsters that had to have caused the devastation. Or perhaps that wasn’t so strange after all; it wasn’t like there was anything to hold the monsters in the area with everything destroyed. The only ones that were likely to stay were scavengers that had already freed themselves from their dungeon’s instructions, and scavengers had plenty to eat in the area without trying to hunt a well-armed group.

The buildings near the Immutable Fifteen church were, if anything, in even worse shape than those they’d passed earlier, but the church itself was mostly intact. It was scorched and chipped, but the walls and roof still stood.

The smell had also decreased, as had the level of Death mana. Fewer people had died in the area. When Serenity put that together with the fact that the church’s building was still standing, it gave him hope.

Once they were ready, Ekari knocked on the church’s door. For a long moment, nothing happened. She was just about to knock again when the door opened and revealed a woman with an obvious injury on her arm. It was bandaged, but the bandage clearly hadn’t been changed recently because it showed the brown of old blood at the surface where it’d clearly seeped through the gauze at some point.

She looked at them, started to say something, then froze as her eyes passed over the group. She turned to someone they couldn’t see and yelled, “David! There are six people here, they’re all healthy, and they’re wearing uniforms!”

Serenity blinked. Uniforms? He guessed that the black overcoats could be seen as a uniform.

It was only a moment later when he caught the even more important fact that the language the woman used was English.