After the God-Devouring Serpent's rampage, there was a mess to clean up. For instance, the flames on its body could spread elsewhere and catch on people or animals. Animals were simple enough: their vitality was burned away outright, and they died. Corpses without vitality would no longer be tormented by black flame, only burned to ash by ghostflame.
People were different. Their vitality varied, and once set alight, they would run around, expanding the destruction and greatly increasing the reach of these two supernatural flames, ghostflame and black flame. Thus, Crepus and his squad needed to promptly eliminate anyone who had caught fire.
During the pre-battle briefing, Crepus explained the characteristics of the two flames to his squad. "This icy-blue flame is called ghostflame. It isn't especially dangerous. Although it's fire, it's cold. Once the target dies, their corpse will burn to ash, and then the flame will go out on its own. This black fire is called black flame. According to the reports from Windmill Village, it burns the vitality of living things. That means we only need to kill those who have caught fire to stop these two flames from spreading any further. Our main task this time is to confine the flames' effects to the volcano, preferably to the God-Devouring Serpent itself, and nip any secondary disasters in the bud. Understood?"
"Understood!"
The Two Fingers' Confessors set out, hunting down people who had caught fire around the volcano. In a sense, they were giving those people a quick end, sparing them the pain of burning any longer.
That was one part of cleaning up the mess. Other parts involved such underhanded tactics as shaping public opinion and doing everything possible to heap blame on Rykard. The Two Fingers were no pushovers. Rykard would pay for his earlier