A Glimpse of the Truth

Nora silently lowered her head.

It seemed the enemy was even trickier than she had imagined.

Nora tightened her grip on the Flail. She had expected to find a gathering of cultists, perhaps with one or two sea monsters to deal with. She had never imagined that this place would be crawling with monsters.

Nora squeezed her eyes shut in despair. Could she really accomplish what she had set out to do? She was a Burier and had brought all her equipment, but there were so many monsters...

And Theus had actually let them out. The madman—didn't he know these monsters had no reason?

What am I thinking? Cultists are mad by nature. Nora clenched her teeth and tried to brace herself against the mountainside. She thought she understood what Theus meant. The monster before her was just testing her. Only after she defeated it would she be allowed to negotiate with him.

Damn cult leader!

Nora held up her Tower Shield. She waited a long time, but the enemy still didn't attack. Carefully, she shifted the shield aside a little and watched the other side from the corner of her eye.

She was wearing the White Crow's heaviest armor, and she had even brought the shield meant for charging into battle. She was confident she could withstand any attack head-on—not that even a monster that huge would change that.

If there was only one...

No problem. She'd win.

Nora tried to encourage herself.

Then the Six-Armed Monster spoke from above. "Hello. My name is Ash."

It was talking?

H-how was that possible? Had it retained its reason?

Impossible. It was a monster from the sea.

Nora tightened her grip on the shield, but the attack she expected never came.

She began to hesitate. After a long while, she shifted the shield aside a little.

As she moved the Tower Shield, she saw Ash's confused face. When Nora remained still, Ash decided to bend down and speak with her.

Ash opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, she looked at the smoke beside her in surprise. She sniffed, then took a deep breath of it.

"That smells wonderful, like seaweed among coral reefs... Um, what do you need to know? About the Pollution? Or about what's beneath the Abyssal Trench?"

Nora froze. Only then did she realize that her censer was still burning.

She looked at the censer, then at Ash.

"You haven't been Polluted!?"

Ash looked at her strangely and nodded. "That's right. Monica is the only one of us who has been Polluted."

She had been bent over for a while and was getting tired, so she straightened up again. Her towering figure blocked the setting sun over the distant sea.

Nora stared blankly up as Ash slowly stood, and then...

Clack!

The back of her helmet struck her armor again.

Annoyed, Nora took off her helmet. She looked at the towering Ash with doubt. Reason told her that the Purification Censer couldn't be wrong, and Ash didn't seem to have lost her mind, but Nora simply couldn't understand it.

Nora bit her lip and couldn't help asking, "How have you avoided being Polluted?"

Ash looked at Nora in confusion, then stepped aside and pointed to Monica. "She's the only one who was affected. The rest of us are fine. She's the only one who needs your treatment."

Nora glanced at Ash. She couldn't see any madness or savagery in her eyes. If anything, they seemed... bewildered.

"That's impossible."

Nora took a deep breath of the censer's purifying smoke. Mm, it smelled like sweet oranges.

When she looked up again, everything was still the same.

Could this all be real?

This monster from the sea hadn't gone mad? It was even... friendly?

No, no. Something had to be wrong.

Nora suddenly felt uneasy. She cautiously turned around, keeping a wary eye on Ash as she slowly backed toward the sea.

The Flail swung, and smoke billowed out. When it touched the seawater, the smoke seeped down in tiny wisps, like instant coffee poured into a cup of water.

The Banshees exchanged glances. They looked hesitant, but none of them moved away.

The smoke drifted into the sea and gradually spread around the Banshees.

"Mm, it smells a little like sweet shrimp."

"No, only pearls inside giant clams smell like this!"

"It obviously smells like sunshine on coral!"

The Banshees began quietly arguing. They couldn't agree on what the smell was like, but they all thought it smelled wonderful.

Theus stood to one side, watching with a strange look on his face.

How strange. Can you smell things underwater? He wondered absently. Nora was acting oddly, but he didn't stop her. He knew this was how she dealt with Pollution.

The first time he had met Nora, she had used the censer to send information into his mind, including something similar...

Wait, was that a censer for preaching?

Theus gave Nora's Flail a strange look.

You wave a Flail and beat the doctrine into people's heads, and that's called preaching?

Well, it certainly worked. Theus already knew quite a bit about the Silent Temple.

It would be nice if the process were a little gentler...

As he watched the Banshees quietly discuss the smoke, Theus's eyes suddenly lit up.

He noticed that the Pollution on Monica was gradually slowing down.

The black substance, which had been wriggling constantly like leeches, seemed to have been dropped into icy water. Its movements gradually slowed.

A hint of pain also appeared on Monica's face.

It worked!

As expected of a Burier from the Silent Temple. She really could deal with Pollution!

"Look!"

"Monica seems to be feeling better!"

"Look at the Pollution on her!"

"The Pollution—it's receding!"

"It really worked! The treatment methods from the land are so strange!"

The Banshees began looking at the Flail and Tower Shield in Nora's hands with awe. They looked strange, but they really seemed to be working.

Nora blushed a little. She felt as if all her wariness had been a joke. Now that she had calmed down, she looked over Ash and the Banshees in the sea. Her eyes paused on their scales before she finally looked at Theus. "Are they from the sea? Have they always lived underwater?"

"Yes," Theus replied. He also sensed that something was wrong. "Pollution appeared in the sea recently. It drives living things mad, so I came to..."

"You said Pollution appeared in the sea?"

"Yes. Look at Monica. That's..."

"I know." Nora interrupted Theus again. Her expression was extremely complicated, as if she had seen something unbelievable.

She seemed to want to say something, but it was so absurd that she struggled to get the words out. Theus and the Banshees beside her could even sense her conflicted feelings.

"I know Monica has been Polluted, and I know there's Pollution in the sea."

Theus and Ash exchanged confused looks, but Nora's next words left them frozen in place.

"But this Pollution has been going on for over a thousand years."