Renato rushed into the courtyard, following the pull he felt within.
The instant he pushed open the gate, he seemed to pass through an invisible membrane. Then a strange change took place.
His heart began to beat joyfully. The wound on his forehead closed before his eyes, and a faint itch tingled through his fractured left hand. The broken bones swiftly joined, and the bruising faded.
Every injury Renato had suffered in battle healed. But rather than delighting him, this set alarm bells ringing in his mind.
The sight in the courtyard was even more nauseating.
A group of more "finely equipped" cultists knelt before a mountain of flesh. Renato had no idea how to describe the thing. It looked as though many people had been forcibly melded together.
Some of the people fused into it still retained a measure of consciousness. Several arms waved feebly in the air, while a few mouths gaped open in what appeared to be terrible agony.
He even recognized a few faces. Uta's vicious face, the face of "Fang," was embedded in the side of the flesh mountain, his eyes still moving. Only half of "Gold Tooth" Solas's head protruded, and he had lost consciousness entirely.
Renato even spotted Detective Aldo. In the end, the detective had not escaped either.
What the hell were they doing?
He was utterly baffled. In his original body's memories, the ritual to summon Dakoul had not been like this.
The believers were supposed to sacrifice their souls, open a gate to the Astral Plane, and draw His "true form" through...
After all, it was fundamentally a summoning ritual, not this revolting fusion of flesh.
As Renato pondered this, the cultists who had paid him no attention suddenly turned their heads in unison. Dozens of human-skin hoods faced him,