Samantha

Biodata

Feature	Value
Name	Samantha (萨曼莎)
Alias(es)	Elder Samantha; Cult Leader; Order Leader; “old witch”
Species/Race	Human 170
Gender	Female
Age	Approximately three hundred years old 50
Affiliation	Echo of Truth Cult; head of the Truth Faction during her leadership 21 136
Occupation/Role	Former Cult Leader of the Echo of Truth Cult; elder; Cecilia’s teacher 50 169
Status	Deceased — her soul was devoured through Soul Feast, after which her body withered and dispersed in Zackeos’s domain. Cecilia’s later sightings of her are presented as hallucinations, not a confirmed resurrection 173 340 341
First Appearance	Chapter 37 37

Background / History

Samantha led the Echo of Truth Cult for decades and presided over the Truth Faction. Under her long tenure as acting leader, the cult had steadily expanded, and elders regarded her as a leader who had rarely made mistakes before her recent failures 136.

She took in Cecilia and trained her in magic for ten years. Her apparent care concealed a calculated purpose: Samantha intended to make Cecilia into a replacement vessel for her own aging soul. To accomplish this, she researched a forbidden black-magic ritual that could transfer her into a young body through a sacrifice witnessed by the ancient demon Zackeos 50 169.

Her divination foretold that the Chosen One would kill her. Terrified of death, Samantha became fixated on identifying and eliminating the Chosen One, assigning Ansu—unaware that he himself was the target—to investigate the matter through Freya 50 70.

Samantha’s position depended in part on Cecilia’s strength. Members of the Reformist Faction regarded Cecilia as the obstacle preventing them from taking control as Samantha approached the end of her life, and sought to eliminate the apprentice to weaken her teacher 21. Samantha nevertheless initially resisted treating the entire Reformist Faction as responsible for the conspiracy against her, favoring the surrender of the implicated members rather than an indiscriminate factional purge 49.

After the failed Royal Academy operation, she proposed convening a new Council of Elders and electing a leader to reunify the cult. By the meeting at Lawrence Manor, she held the position of rightful Order Leader and exercised authority over the organization’s broader strategy 49 69. Her power encompassed immense wealth, devoted followers, the Truth Faction’s magical research, and the Reformist Faction’s influence among national noble classes 105.

Original Game Storyline

In the original storyline recalled by Ansu, Samantha used the Demon Army treasure expedition to weaken Cecilia before attempting possession. Knowing that the ruins contained traps, undead, and formidable ancient monsters, she expected the expedition to exhaust her apprentice’s strength. Cecilia was severely wounded while protecting Samantha, who then arranged to trap her in the most dangerous underground depths 50.

The plan failed because Cecilia survived nearly a month of fighting and eventually emerged from the depths. Ansu also recalled that Cecilia obtained a lost inheritance of ancient magic in the ruins and used it to break Samantha’s soul ritual. These events belong to the original storyline rather than the final confrontation Ansu engineered in the current timeline 50 111.

Appearance

Samantha used magic to preserve a middle-aged appearance, but her failing lifespan eventually overwhelmed the disguise. By the time she confronted Ansu directly, she appeared as a visibly aged and deteriorating witch 104.

• Initially appeared to be a woman in her forties through sustaining magic 104.
• Her natural late-stage appearance included deep wrinkles, dense age spots, bloodshot eyes, and a frail, unsettling visage 104 136.
• Could disguise herself as a young, beautiful woman, though the illusion faltered whenever her unstable magic surged 167.
• After Ansu’s forest traps, she was left bloodied, ulcerated, and unable to maintain her youthful disguise 167.
• During the ensuing confrontation, she had a wound on her left shoulder deep enough to expose bone and leaned against a large rock while attempting to heal herself 169.

Personality

Samantha was a calculating conspirator who preferred manipulation, threats, and indirect control to open vulnerability. She exploited her authority within the cult, shifted blame onto subordinates, and cultivated Cecilia as both an asset and a future vessel 38 50.

Her principal motivation was self-preservation. Although she framed the Chosen One as a threat to the cult’s “great cause,” her divination-induced fear of death drove her increasingly desperate actions 70 105. As her body deteriorated and Ansu repeatedly deceived her, her caution gave way to paranoia, cruelty, and erratic rage 136 165.

She nevertheless retained enough cunning to recognize the strategic value of followers, offering Scholar promotion to the Council of Elders in exchange for continuing through Ansu’s traps. When the traps became lethal, she treated him as expendable 167.

Her suspicion of others also made her vulnerable to elaborate deception. Ansu persuaded her that Freya’s innocence was a calculated facade by appealing to Samantha’s belief that powerful Church figures must be conspirators like herself. She regarded Bishop Paul’s reputation for compassion as evidence of especially effective manipulation, making Ansu’s fabricated account more convincing to her 104.

Samantha used promises of advancement alongside threats to secure obedience. She offered Ansu the prospect of becoming the youngest elder in the cult’s history if he completed the Chosen One investigation, just as she later promised Scholar an elder’s seat 70 167. As her authority collapsed, she increasingly insisted that subordinates were sabotaging her rather than recognizing their unwillingness to follow her orders 156 157.

Power Progression

Stage	Power / Development	Details
Established veteran mage	Long-lived magical practitioner	At approximately three hundred years old, Samantha possessed divination magic and had researched forbidden methods of extending her lifespan 50.
Cult sacrifice at the Royal Academy	Large-scale sacrificial ritual	Ordered a blood sacrifice to borrow the fallen god Ersos’s power against the Church’s Divine Descent; the ritual failed, and she escaped through a prepared teleportation circle 38 40.
Declining lifespan	Appearance-maintenance magic falters	The magic preserving her middle-aged appearance could no longer conceal her advanced age and physical deterioration 104.
Return from the royal capital	Partial recovery before the final hunt	Elder Matthew assessed that she had recovered most of her strength after escaping the royal capital’s encirclement, despite her worsening judgment 167.
Forest confrontation	Multi-school combat and restorative magic	Survived the final trap, attempted to heal her injuries, and combined evocation, necromancy, and conjuration into a corrosive storm during Ansu’s simulation of the confrontation 167 169.
Final ritual	Soul Feast	Invoked her possession ritual in response to Ansu’s casting, but targeted a disguised soulless puppet. The invalid sacrifice exposed her to the contract’s punishment, and Zackeos devoured her soul 172 173.

Abilities & Skills

Multi-School Magic

Samantha was a high-level mage proficient in evocation, necromancy, and conjuration. Her specialty was combining multiple schools into complex, difficult-to-counter attacks 169.

• Created a corrosive black storm that obscured detection and distorted perception. 169
• Used blended magic to pressure Cecilia’s defenses before initiating Soul Feast. 169
• Her magical mastery was considered formidable even by elders who had lost faith in her judgment. 167
• Within the storm, her presence appeared dispersed and difficult to locate, and the surrounding darkness contracted against Cecilia’s protective barrier. 169
• Used restorative magic to slowly heal her severe injuries after surviving the forest traps. 169

Although Cecilia continued to fear her teacher’s abilities, Ansu stated that Cecilia had already surpassed Samantha during their ten years together. He attributed Cecilia’s anxiety to her ingrained reverence for Samantha as the person who introduced her to magic 169.

Divination

Samantha used divination to investigate the Chosen One and received the prophecy that the Chosen One would eventually kill her 50 70.

• Used blood and divination crystals to seek Ansu after infiltrating Benalu City. 165
• Her fear and unstable mental state made her increasingly distrustful of her own divinations. 165
• Her obsession with the prophecy directly led her to assign Ansu the Chosen One investigation. 50 70
• A later divination warned that the Chosen One was drawing closer to her while Ansu was physically approaching her at the Lawrence Manor meeting. 69
• Had previously relied on divination to identify advantageous timing for her schemes. 165
• Repeated divinations in Benalu City consistently predicted her defeat, prompting her to declare that the God of Magic was deceiving her and then dismiss the results as unreliable. 165

Curses and Poison

Samantha employed insidious black-magic methods to coerce Ansu into obeying her orders 104.

• Poisoned Ansu in his simulation of the meeting, causing blackened veins, spreading corruption, and severe pain. 103 104
• Threatened to withhold the antidote unless he located the Chosen One within one week; failure would result in his internal organs rotting and rupturing. 103
• In the actual meeting, began casting a corrupting curse after teleporting Ansu away, but he interrupted her with his fabricated intelligence before she completed the threatened ultimatum. 104
• Relied on Ansu’s separation from Cecilia to pressure him without interference. 104

Concealment and Perception

• Sustained a magically preserved appearance and later disguised herself as a young woman while traveling with a merchant caravan. 104 167
• Used secret sensing magic from a hiding place in Benalu City’s Black Port District to hear surrounding whispers and insults about herself. 165
• Detected dangerous magical presences in the forest and used Scholar to advance ahead of her through suspected traps. 167
• Her deteriorating condition and the speed of Ansu’s attack prevented her from recognizing that the apparent Cecilia beside him was a magically disguised puppet. Ansu judged that her former, more composed self would not have made that mistake. 173

Soul Feast

Soul Feast was Samantha’s ultimate ritual: a sacrificial black-magic contract overseen by the ancient demon Zackeos. She intended to sacrifice Cecilia’s soul and take possession of her body 50 169.

• Required a sacrificial target and invoked Zackeos as the “Master of the Scales” and “Warden of Contracts.” 169
• Was intended to grant Samantha Cecilia’s young body and extend her life. 50 170
• Samantha’s version was less complete than Ansu’s original Ancient Enus-language version, allowing him to trigger arbitration against her ritual. 168 170
• Required the intended sacrifice to be within a certain distance of the caster. 172
• Her final attempt targeted a disguised puppet person with no soul, invalidating her sacrifice and invoking the ritual’s punishment against her. 173

Ansu tested the competing rituals in a simulation before the final battle. Although the initial counter-ritual caused Samantha’s soul to be devoured, the unresolved Samantha–Cecilia contract left Ansu and Cecilia trapped in Zackeos’s domain until Samantha’s remaining body died naturally. His subsequent use of a soulless substitute avoided that outcome in the actual confrontation 170 172 173.

Equipment / Magical Items

• Homeward Compass — An ancient rune-covered disc that could instantly teleport its holder to its designated starting point. Samantha used it to abduct Ansu to the Northern Borderlands 104 148. Ansu later possessed the item and used it to leave a teleportation coordinate near a cave entrance 274.
• Divination crystals — Used alongside blood magic to locate Ansu in Benalu City 165.
• Prepared teleportation circles — Samantha escaped the failed cult ritual through a pre-arranged teleportation circle, having diverted power for her own escape 40.
• Magical communication devices — Received Scholar’s urgent call when Cecilia attacked him and used magical projections to issue orders to elders while trapped under Church surveillance in the royal capital 105 136.

Relationships

• Cecilia — Her apprentice of ten years and intended vessel. Samantha trained Cecilia’s exceptional magical talent while secretly planning to sacrifice her soul and seize her body; Cecilia ultimately rejected her as a teacher and joined Ansu against her 50 169. Samantha noticed Cecilia’s growing attachment to Ansu and attempted to invoke their shared mission to restrain her independence 39 49. Long after Samantha’s death, Cecilia hallucinated her return and feared that her former teacher was seeking revenge 340 341.
• Ansu / Hermit — A cult executor whom Samantha ordered to locate the Chosen One. Ansu repeatedly deceived her, exposed her intentions to Cecilia, and engineered her defeat through Soul Feast 50 104 173. Earlier, she recognized his intelligence and promoted him to Chief Deacon of the Benalu district after Cecilia opposed assigning him to Samantha’s own service 49. By her final days, Samantha identified him as the Chosen One and demanded that the Council of Elders act against him 165.
• Scholar — Her Chief Inquisitor and trusted subordinate. Samantha used his modified, magic-resistant body to trigger Ansu’s forest traps, promising him elder status before he was annihilated by the final trap 106 167.
• Elder John and Elder Lyles — Elders ordered to hunt and kill Ansu, while capturing or crippling Cecilia for Samantha 136.
• Elder Matthew — A Truth Faction elder who became disillusioned with Samantha’s instability and surrendered to Ansu and Cecilia 168.
• Elder Simon — Samantha trusted his information about the Chosen One’s presence at the Royal Academy, despite his role in the betrayal that brought the Church’s forces against her. He was subsequently executed among the cult’s traitors 38 49.
• Zackeos — The ancient demon invoked through Soul Feast. Zackeos arbitrated the competing rituals and devoured Samantha’s soul according to the contract’s rules 170 173.
• Freya — Samantha ordered Ansu to maintain contact with the Saintess in hopes of learning information about the Chosen One 50. Ansu later used false claims about Freya’s role in the Church’s plans to lure Samantha toward the royal capital; Freya then passed information about Samantha’s arrival to Siens 104 108.
• Bishop Paul — One of the few Church opponents Samantha considered frightening. She interpreted his compassionate reputation as the product of exceptional scheming rather than sincerity 104.

Story Role / Major Arcs

Hunt for the Chosen One

Samantha pressured Cecilia and Ansu to locate the Chosen One at the Royal Academy, blaming Cecilia when the investigation failed to produce results 38. After divination foretold her death at the Chosen One’s hands, she made the search the cult’s highest priority and threatened Ansu with removal from the Order if he failed 70.

Her arrival at the academy was itself part of a conspiracy to expose her to the Church of Holy Light. When Bishop Terry’s Inquisition attacked, she ordered a blood sacrifice to borrow the fallen god Ersos’s power against the Church’s Divine Descent. The ritual failed, and she escaped through a prepared teleportation circle while the remaining cultists were consumed by holy light 37 38 40.

At the subsequent cult assembly, she supported organizational reunification and elevated Ansu to Chief Deacon under the codename Hermit. She then used his connection to Freya as a route for further investigation 49 50.

Ultimatum and Deception

In Ansu’s simulation, Samantha poisoned him, teleported him to a remote stronghold, and gave him one week to find the Chosen One 103 104. In the actual meeting, Ansu interrupted her curse and exploited her paranoia by falsely claiming the Chosen One was protected in the royal capital, prompting her to prepare to leave and creating an opportunity for him and Cecilia to undermine her position 104 105.

Samantha initially insisted that Ansu accompany her to the capital, both because he supplied the information and because she remained suspicious of him. Cecilia attacked Scholar and refused to surrender Ansu, forcing Samantha to compromise: he would remain with Cecilia but provide a detailed intelligence report for the capital operation 105 106.

Loss of Control Over the Cult

After realizing Ansu had deceived her, Samantha mobilized a major cult force to kill him and reclaim Cecilia 115 136. Her increasingly hysterical orders, inability to mobilize the full Council of Elders, and public exposure through rumors steadily eroded her authority 144 156 165.

The initial pursuit involved eleven Truth Faction elders, six Reformist Faction elders, and nearly every executor from the eastern provinces. While under Church surveillance in the capital, Samantha threatened the pursuing elders with death if they failed to bring her Ansu’s head 115 136.

After escaping the capital’s blockade, she sought contact with Elder John’s missing force and tried to return to Benalu City to reassert control. Ansu had David, Henry, and Ryan spread partly fabricated rumors that Samantha had assassinated the pope and escaped the Church’s strongest efforts to suppress her. These stories turned her planned secret return into a source of public panic 144 149 153 165.

Ansu’s appointment as an elder overseeing intelligence created competing centers of authority. Executors selectively ignored Samantha’s increasingly frantic demands while continuing to supply Ansu with information about her movements 156. Once back in Benalu City, she repeatedly divined defeat, rejected the results, and announced that Ansu must be the Chosen One. Her attempt to rally the elders at Seaside Manor ended in a fierce argument, after which she resolved to pursue him herself 165 167.

Final Hunt and Death

Samantha personally pursued Ansu and Cecilia to Maple Grove Town, using Scholar to clear the magical traps laid for her. Scholar’s death and Samantha’s injuries left her desperate but still determined to claim Cecilia’s body 167.

Ansu first simulated the confrontation, in which Samantha initiated Soul Feast against Cecilia and he countered with a more original ritual. The resulting arbitration consumed Samantha’s soul but exposed an unresolved-contract danger that required a different strategy for the actual battle 169 170.

In the final confrontation, Ansu opened with Soul Feast, prompting Samantha to cast her own ritual against the apparent Cecilia beside him. In reality, her target was the head maid of Lawrence Manor, a disguised, non-sapient puppet person rather than Cecilia, invalidating her own contract. Zackeos consumed her soul, and her body subsequently decayed into dust 172 173.

Before dying, Samantha tried to undermine Ansu’s relationship with Cecilia by insisting that a Chosen One and an enemy of the Holy Light could never coexist. Ansu answered that Cecilia already knew his identity and had not reacted as Samantha expected. Her final expression was one of shock and incomprehension 173.

Aftermath and Later Hallucinations

Ansu returned from Zackeos’s domain and confirmed Samantha’s death to Cecilia. Cecilia was relieved that the confrontation had ended more simply than she anticipated and hoped that her new life with Ansu could now begin 174.

The two subsequently controlled the Echo of Truth Cult, using its resources for new magical research. Cecilia was later explicitly identified as Cult Leader, with Ansu serving as Chief Elder 198 324.

Samantha’s influence nevertheless persisted in Cecilia’s fears. In a later episode, Cecilia reported seeing Samantha and became convinced that her former teacher had returned to kill her. Ansu attempted to calm her, but she remained agitated; these sightings are presented as hallucinations rather than evidence that Samantha survived or returned 340 341.

Notable Quotes

“If we can't kill the Chosen One, then the Chosen One will surely kill me in the future!” 70

“Find him! You must find Hermit, and then kill him!! Bring me his head!” 136

“I don't want to die... I don't want to die! As long as you let me live, I can give anything!” 173

“Darkness and light... can never unite.” 173

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