After passing through the administrator's residence, the crowd conducting the Blessing Pilgrimage around the Spring Elf headed toward the river in the mountains.
As they walked, however, Lumian grew increasingly uneasy, a hint of nervousness rising within him.
He remembered the locations of the nonlethal traps he had dug... and now the entire procession was approaching one set of them!
On the one hand, Lumian hoped his traps would work, but on the other, he didn't want any villagers to get hurt, especially his friends.
Just as this thought crossed Lumian's mind, Raymond, who was walking beside Ava, suddenly stumbled. As though he had tripped over something, he pitched forward and landed face-first on the ground.
Lumian instinctively turned toward Raymond to check whether he had fallen into a trap. Once he confirmed that Raymond hadn't, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Raymond, however, looked distinctly unhappy. Making a fool of himself in front of Ava, the girl he loved, naturally left the young man ashamed and angry. But just as he pressed his palms against the ground to push himself up, he noticed that the earth beneath them was unusually soft.
He hurriedly scraped at the ground before him, his expression abruptly darkening. "There's a trap here!"
His expression darkened because the trap lay directly ahead of Ava-and directly ahead of him!
If he hadn't tripped, both of them would have fallen into it!
As Raymond spoke, Ava's already inexplicably pale face grew paler still. The trace of displeasure she had felt at Raymond making a fool of himself during the Blessing Procession instantly vanished, replaced by gratitude.
Such a coincidence?
Raymond could spot the trap I set?... No, he might simply have fallen... but that makes it even more of a coincidence!
So much of a coincidence that it seems deliberate!
Suddenly finding this far too coincidental, Lumian took two steps forward and uncovered the trap in front of Raymond, secretly erasing some of the fresh digging marks he had failed to deal with. After making a show of examining it for a while, he stood and loudly announced to the surrounding crowd:
"It's a trap a hunter set and didn't properly clear away!"
A chorus of coarse curses immediately rose around him.
The next stretch of the journey was considerably less lively than before, but once the riverside ritual ended, the atmosphere of the Blessing Procession still reached its peak.
Then came the final stage: entering the church.
Amid the villagers' singing, the chorus inside the church gradually drew to a close. Yet the Father of the Parish still hadn't appeared. Lumian casually surveyed his surroundings, muttering inwardly:
Godfather said the Father of the Parish would appear in the church, but now there's only the person announcing the end left. Does he not know it's the Governor who announces the end of Lent?
Just as doubts began to rise in Lumian's mind and the young people around him gradually left, clear footsteps sounded at the entrance.
Hearing those footsteps, Lumian abruptly turned his gaze toward the entrance and saw a familiar figure standing there:
The Father of the Parish, Guillaume Bénet, wearing the white-and-gold robes of the clergy, his hair black and his bearing imposing!
Beside him followed a shepherd who had taken special care with his appearance-Pierre Berry, the shepherd who had returned "specifically" to attend Lent.
With an imposing expression, the Father of the Parish said in a deep voice:
"Send the Spring Elf away."
He's here-the man presiding over this ritual, Guillaume, the Father of the Parish and a suspected mid-sequence Beyonder!
The moment he saw Guillaume Bénet, Lumian's gaze froze. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at his sister Aurore and saw her signal to him.
Lumian's pupils contracted slightly. Every muscle in his body tensed in an instant, ready to leap out and stop the final step of the ritual.
Upon hearing Guillaume's voice, the shepherd Pierre Berry bent down with a smile and picked up the axe from the ground.
"Send the Spring Elf away!"
The moment he noticed Pierre Berry's movement, Lumian, already prepared, stepped forward and drove a punch toward the shepherd's chin!
But Pierre Berry caught sight of Lumian's sudden attack out of the corner of his eye. His body twisted, dodging the blow with a bizarre movement beyond the capabilities of an ordinary person, and he brought the axe down hard.
Ava, who was merely an ordinary person, turned deathly pale. When had she ever witnessed anything like this?
As she saw the sharp axe cleaving straight toward her neck, her mind went blank. Unable to react at all, she simply stood there, not daring to move a muscle.
Whoosh!
The axe descended swiftly toward Ava's head, only to be blocked by a black scythe veined with golden cracks.
This time, Pierre Berry's pupils trembled violently, though his expression hadn't changed at all during Lumian's earlier attack. He watched gray mist emerge from Ava's chest and abdomen. It peeled back to either side like curling flesh, and drops of blood pattered onto the floor.
A figure without a trace of blood on him emerged from Ava's body, twisting like a snake. The crimson glow of flesh magic flowed along the scythe and into his body, fully restoring the flesh of his legs and feet that had yet to finish forming.
"All that time I spent studying this weapon wasn't wasted," Nimrod said with a smile. He took a monocle from inside his clothes and fitted it over his eye.
His right eye.
The surrounding gray mist seemed to surge toward him from every direction, even blurring the scenery for a moment. Nimrod felt as though countless gazes were flowing toward him along with it, but the next instant, he gently swept his palm across his face.
The gray fog within the Fool's seal flowed onto Nimrod as though it had found a new master, obscuring his face until only its outline remained visible. The gray mist over his face looked somewhat pale, like a pure white mask, yet also seemed to shimmer with brilliant starlight.
[Heh, posing as a believer in God Almighty... that reminds me of what I did back then. We really are alike.]
Hearing the laughter by his ear, Nimrod chuckled as well and extended a finger.
Up, down, left, right.
He traced an inverted cross before his chest.
The next instant, the shrouding gray mist became like a glittering starry sky, and countless points of light abruptly burst throughout the church!
Before you continue