While he was looking for Earthlings, he hadn’t expected to find them in charge. They ought to be lower Tier than whoever was in charge of the church, and with as much destruction as he’d seen, Serenity had expected the church to have barely been kept safe by the power of its Priest. Either he was missing something or something strange was going on here.

Not that that was new.

Serenity walked up behind Ekari; while she’d started learning English, she wasn’t anywhere near fluent yet. Katya had learned the language faster than anyone else had yet and, from what Rissa said, even Katya was still clearly a foreign speaker.

Serenity saw that he wasn’t the only one moving to back up his party; a couple of people had pretty clearly “casually” drifted into view on the other side of the door as well.

“Stay calm. They don’t know we’ve taken over the prison. Maybe we can fool them long enough to capture them too.” A man wearing a red shirt and blue jeans offered. He adjusted his belt; it didn’t escape Serenity’s notice that he was armed with a sword that had probably come from the church’s armory; it looked very much like the standard Eternal Church sword.

Serenity set a hand on Ekari’s shoulder to let her know he’d handle this and grinned. He wanted to shake his head at the situation, but restrained himself; he didn’t know how they’d take the gesture. The Inspectorate uniforms had worked to get them past the door the previous two times, even if it’d been in a somewhat hostile manner. This time, they hadn’t even managed that, and the hostility was worse. It was supremely ironic that the one time it might actually be a true negative was with people who didn’t even know what it meant.

Serenity tried to suppress his smile to something friendly-looking. “We’re actually here to get you out, if you want to leave. I’d prefer not to fight; why don’t we sit down and talk about this instead?”

The woman at the door jumped back at his voice, like she hadn’t noticed he was there, even though he hadn’t tried to hide as he walked up to the door.

The man who suggested capturing them was less surprised, but didn’t seem to realize that Serenity had spoken English immediately, since he replied in horribly accented Aeon. “Get us out? What-”

The other man set a hand on the first man’s shoulder. He seemed comfortable in the robe he was wearing, rather than Western-styled clothing, but that didn’t change the words that came out of his mouth. “You speak English?” The words were in English.

“I do.” Serenity nodded as he spoke. “We all speak a little, but of the six of us here, I’m the best English speaker.” It was his native language, but Serenity hadn’t yet decided if he wanted to reveal who he was if they didn’t recognize him on their own. “We can send you back to Earth if that’s what you want. Either way, I don’t recommend staying here.”

“Who are you and what’s with the uniforms?” The speaker didn’t seem inclined to back down but he also didn’t seem to be headed towards violence immediately.

Serenity blessed modern society for a moment. Even people who were prone to violence usually had to work up to it unless they’d been through enough violence that it was a first resort, and Earth tended to be safe enough that there were fewer people with that experience. It gave him a little more room to convince them he was here to help.

This wasn’t the first time he’d had to convince Earthlings who’d taken over a church that he was there to rescue them. It wasn’t even the tenth. It might have been the hundredth; he’d lost count. Aide would know, but Serenity didn’t care enough to ask.

“Call me Thomas. This is Ekari; the others are Blaze, Sillon, Ita, and Kerr.” He pointed at each as he named them. “The uniforms are from the Inspectorate; if you think of them as being somewhere between Internal Affairs and the Inquisition, you probably have a good idea. Inspectors are not people that Church officials want to tick off. What’s your name?”

The man seemed to relax a little, but he was still tense and wary. “Where did you get them?”

Serenity wasn’t quite sure how to answer that; the fact that they’d gotten them from the head of the Inspectorate didn’t seem like the right answer, somehow. Fortunately, Ekari was more on the ball than he was. “Given. Secret, undermine.”

It was too bad her English was so poor. Still, she’d said enough for Serenity to get the gist of her suggestion.

“There’s a group of people who are working against the Church; well, several groups really. Lots of political stuff. Anyway, one of them gave us the uniforms to help us get into the last few churches, the ones that were still supposed to be controlled by priests. I assume you took control in the chaos?” Serenity waved a hand vaguely at the destruction around them.

The robed man relaxed a little more. “Yeah. What are you going to do about it?”

Serenity shrugged. “Depends. Are they still alive?”

“We’re not monsters,” the woman broke in. “He gave us weapons so we wouldn’t be helpless against the real monsters, we couldn’t exactly kill him after that.”

“He’s also the man who kept us locked up until then,” the man in blue jeans objected. “Everyone who kept us here should die.”

That had the sounds of a long standing argument. It was one Serenity had heard before; some of the churches they’d handled earlier hadn’t been inhabited only by Earthlings after the priests left. The abductees had made the entire range of decisions about what to do with the people left behind long before they were rescued. Some worked with them, some captured them, and some killed them. Some did worse things; Serenity hoped he never found out who that was.

It was clear that the people here had gone with the “capture” option, but it was odd that they only held one person. “What about the others? There should have been more than one person here other than you.”

The woman shrugged. “There were, before the attacks. They were gone before the old man let us into the armory for weapons. He said they’d left to help the people nearby but I think they just ran. He didn’t seem happy with them.”

It was true that there were far fewer dead near the church. That might mean the acolytes had helped, but it might also simply mean that the monsters had concentrated on the church, which gave the local residents more time to get out.

What he knew before coming here was that no one from the church had ever responded to the recall notice. That meant the acolytes either hadn’t gotten out or they hadn’t gone to their assigned destination. Serenity didn’t know which and definitely didn’t care.

The level of destruction was higher in Immutable Fifteen than Serenity had seen anywhere else. He hadn’t really questioned it, since it was typical of a monster wave, but it wasn’t typical of what he’d seen on Lyka. The destruction should have been either concentrated on Eternal Church people and property or spread around after the monsters lost their initial compulsions.

The only times he’d seen widespread devastation like this on Lyka, the monsters were still around, attacking indiscriminately. That wasn’t the case here; they hadn’t seen any on the trip from the portal. There was definitely something different about this Sector.

On the other hand, was there any reason to investigate it? Serenity couldn’t think of one.

“Do you think you can set it up so that the priest can get loose a couple hours after we leave? That would let us get you out of here safely.” It would also give a nice buffer time for the residue of Ita’s portal to dissipate and become less obvious even if the Priest got out of his confinement a little early. Serenity wasn’t about to leave anyone tied up in an area that might have monsters; it would be better to just kill them. At the same time, he didn’t want to reveal too much if he could avoid it. Making it look like the Earthlings ran on their own would be perfect.

They all stopped to think about that. The man in the robe was the first to reply, and it wasn’t hopeful. “He’s really strong. I don’t think there’s anything we can set up where we can predict how long it’ll take him to get out. We’ve got people watching him now to make sure he’s not escaping; if we don’t watch him, he could get loose without us knowing.”

Serenity nodded. That wasn’t entirely a surprise; higher-Tier people were generally confined using Skills or locations specifically designed for it. A Tier Four or so physical specialist could certainly have defended the building and would be very hard for Tier One people to contain. It was probably a good thing he wasn’t a mage; a high Tier magic user could be impossible to contain without the right countermeasures if he had the right Skills.

Serenity fell into that category.

So what was he going to do now? Short of getting everyone out and then releasing the Priest themselves, there weren’t many good options, and there were some significant downsides to that. Serenity didn’t want it to become known that there was a group of Priest-Inspectors helping Earthlings.

What if he combined the two options? A group of Priest-Inspectors that arrived hours after the Earthlings fled on their own shouldn’t be suspected. “I think I have an idea. Can you gather everyone up without letting the Priest know? It’s fine if he knows you’re all planning to leave, but he can’t know that anyone’s helping you…”

Nothing was ever as easy as the initial plan. Even so, a few hours later, Serenity had managed to convince the Earthlings to step through Ita’s portal - mostly by going through it himself first. He’d then had to let someone else step through, see what was there, then step back.

Serenity was grateful that the Portal Node could display the destination of a portal if someone checked it. He wasn’t certain he’d have been able to get most of them on their way to Earth otherwise. As it was, it worked.

It wasn’t the worst one group of abductees, but it was well up there. They simply never trusted him. Admittedly, he never revealed who he was, but he didn’t think that would have mattered; it didn’t for most of the untrusting groups before and in some cases it even made things worse.

When they finally had everyone out of the church building, Ita headed away from the church and found a relatively sheltered open area. The rest of the group met her there and Serenity set up his tent. They needed to wait long enough that “no, we didn’t see anyone on our way from the portal” would be believable, which meant that they had to wait for several hours.

It was only a few hours before dark, so they’d decided that overnight should be long enough; they’d arrange to arrive at the church a couple hours later in the day than they had originally. That would simulate a midmorning portal into Immutable Fifteen.

The priest was still locked in the emptied armory when they arrived at the church. They took some time to “explore” the “strangely empty church”, but were careful not to be quiet. He heard them moving around and talking; after he beat on the walls for a bit, they “found the key” and rescued him.

He was grateful enough that he didn’t even seem to notice that they were Inspectors and regaled them with the story of everything that had happened since the first dungeon break on the trip back to the portal out of Immutable Fifteen.