After seeing off the Female Pope and the others, Pan Long returned to town for a night's sleep. The next morning, he ate his fill, then went to the church for more than a dozen bottles of concentrated holy water.
"Are you going to lift someone's curse?" asked Cadra, the homely nun who managed this potent holy water and knew him fairly well.
Pan Long smiled. "You could say that. I want to see whether concentrated holy water can cleanse certain evil souls."
"That won't be easy." Crusader Eric, who was helping nearby, shook his head. "Purifying them with fire would be quicker."
A young member of the Shield of the Heavenly Father agreed. "Eric's right. We're only mortals; purifying evil is the Heavenly Father's work. Better to send them straight to meet him. Why not buy a couple of packs of 'Gummy'? It's much easier to use."
Pan Long laughed. "Gummy" was actually a highly malleable explosive. It could easily be molded into all sorts of shapes, and it tasted sweet, hence the name.
His grasp of scientific history was shaky, so he did not know whether anything like it had existed in the history of another world. But the young man had a point: besides pouring holy water down those evil creatures' throats, he could stuff Gummy into their mouths and detonate it.
Its effectiveness was dependable: administer the remedy and the life was gone, with no cheating young or old.
It might not purify an evil soul, but it could at least purify an evil body. That counted as conservative treatment.
It was like dealing with a highly contagious, dangerous epidemic. A cure would be best, of course. Failing that, the sick should at least be isolated while a solution was sought.
That much was common sense