Marcus had not spent many years studying. He had spent most of his life fighting his way through all kinds of dangerous places crawling with Monsters, so naturally, he could not have much in the way of aesthetic appreciation.
He only felt, by instinct, that the grand Church before him gave him an indescribably unique sense of beauty.
Unlike every Church he had ever seen before, a heaviness and decay that should never have appeared in a place of worship now filled every corner of his vision.
The dense fog remained. The towering spire, once a symbol of holiness and a bridge to the Divine Realm, had already snapped, leaving only jagged broken edges jutting abruptly toward the sky, without the slightest feeling of salvation.
The surface of the thick gray-black stone walls was covered in cracks. Withered, twisted black vines climbed the walls like snakes, probing along the grain deep into those fissures, like tentacles stretching up from below, trying to drag this Church into an abyss beneath the earth.
The few surviving stained-glass windows were now nothing but dim fragments whimpering in the wind, like the eye sockets of a skeleton.
The instant he approached through the shrouding fog and made out the Church clearly, Marcus shivered for some reason.
"Captain, we..."
At his ear came the Dwarf Stonebelly's tentative inquiry.
What he was feeling out was, of course, not whether they should retreat, but whether they should enter this Church.
The Dwarf, who had always been greedy and valued wealth as much as his own life, had already given up searching the many buildings along the road earlier under the pressure of the team's demands.
If this grand building at the end of the road still did not let him satisfy the greed in his heart a