The instant Ron touched the statue, he sensed that something had changed.
As they drew divine power into their bodies, another force pulled them back against the statue.
If you had a cup of steaming hot water and didn't know whether its sides would burn you, wouldn't you test it carefully?
First with a fingertip, then a finger, then your palm.
In this, Ron was nothing like Imu, who had impatiently picked up the cup and gulped it down.
That was why Ron noticed the change at once, while Imu realized it only when he could no longer pull free.
Seeing Ron move, the statue's newly awakened eyes blazed with divine light.
"Bastard!"
Ron had stolen so much of his power. All he wanted was to reclaim the divine essence inside Imu, yet Ron would not even allow that. The nerve of him!
But when the statue noticed the devastation around him, he frowned.
"She actually failed?"
"She had my power, yet she couldn't even deal with the weakest evil god she lured here. Utterly useless!"
His strange muttering made Ron glance at the plant's remains on the ground with sympathy. From those words, it was easy to infer a cruel truth.
No wonder the statue possessed such strange power.
This had been a trap he had laid!
He had deliberately drawn in Imu, an evil god bent on seizing this world, then sent him to the temple for the statue to absorb...
After all, this was someone who, with only part of the power she had been given, could suppress Imu at his peak eight hundred years ago!
Imu's invasion eight to nine hundred years ago had not been an accident. Someone had engineered it.
That had been the plan, at least.
But plans depended on people. As Ron