By the time he reached this point, the church knights stationed around him had grown sparse.
Even the church could hardly bear the expense of solid iron armor. There were at most three hundred church knights in Holy Lord Cathedral.
Half of those three hundred had been stationed along the main road at the start to show off. The rest were scattered across the other roads, with at most one knight per intersection.
That meant Norton had to travel this long, narrow road on his own before he could meet up with the others at the next intersection and finally enter the sanctuary.
Looking at the emaciated paupers lining both sides of the road, some so thin he could hardly tell men from women, and feeling their desperately yearning gazes, Norton felt immense pressure.
How could he describe the miserable state of these medieval people?
Starving? Dressed in rags?
Even those words painted too pretty a picture of their condition.
Their bodies were as thin as stalks of hemp, like skeletons wrapped in a layer of skin. Their cheeks were so gaunt they had hardly any flesh, and their eyes bulged from their extreme thinness. They looked rather unnerving, like big-headed ghosts.
Why couldn't they be described as dressed in rags? Because they wore hardly anything at all. The better-off ones had a pair of underpants to cover their privates, while the worse-off had no clothes at all. The women wrapped themselves in bark or leaves, leaving their shriveled breasts exposed, while the men had half their buttocks hanging out.
Father Mia had taught him about the people's living conditions.
To eradicate vampires completely, the church had decided to starve all the paupers until they were thin and anemic, with too little blood. That way, the vampires wouldn't be able to get enough food and would starve to death, achieving the goal of wiping them out.
It was a remarkably idiotic line of reasoning, just what one would expect from people who had each spent over twenty years in isolation.
As someone who had lived in the real world, had parents, and received a good education, Norton looked at them with pity, just as any normal person would.
But pity was useless. Under these circumstances, Norton had no power whatsoever to bring about any kind of rescue or salvation. He could barely look after himself.
Unless someone overthrew this feudal papal state...
Ah!
Something suddenly stirred in Norton's mind, and an idea popped into his head.
Wait! Could I become this country's savior, the leader of the red forces, a commander revered by all, and the leader in the people's hearts?
Clearly, there was no chance of that. Norton didn't think he could lead an ignorant age into modernity with his little bit of knowledge. The idea was as laughable as traveling back to ancient times and thinking he could free the slaves, naive and ill-timed.
Besides, Norton was a good-for-nothing, a good-for-nothing the church had kept penned up for twenty years. What fucking brains did he have?
Norton sank into thought. It was a mental illness brought on by more than twenty years of isolation, making it easy for him to lose himself in his own world of thought.
His movements, however, didn't stop. Like a machine, he continued walking passively along the petal-strewn road, scattering black bread crumbs around him.
It could be considered his signature skill. Even while reciting the Bible, he could lose himself in a world of fantasy.
"Oh God, grant me some food!"
"I beg for God's divine light!"
As he walked, the paupers on both sides of the street cried out to God and fought for the bread, following in Norton's footsteps with the frenzy of madmen.
Until the crumbs in his basket were completely gone.
"Hmm?" After reaching into the basket once more and finding nothing to grab, Norton finally came back to his senses from his fantasy, in which he had already gotten as far as building a new world.
He looked at the basket in a daze and saw that it was empty, and that the street had come to an end.
"It's all gone already?"
Norton drew his gaze away from the basket, reproaching himself a little.
He felt that his problem had grown quite serious. He was always losing himself in his fantasies at any moment, and it was giving him signs of schizophrenia.
Norton kept reproaching himself for his abnormal behavior, without noticing that he seemed about to lose himself in thought again.
Until a voice pulled his thoughts back to reality.
"M-Missionary, sir, p-please give me some bread. My son is starving to death!"
Norton came back to his senses in a daze and slowly raised his lowered hood a little, allowing him to see what was in front of him.
The bread was gone, and the paupers in the street had long since stopped following Norton. Only one woman was kneeling by the roadside.
A woman, so thin she was all skin and bones and wasn't even wearing a shirt, knelt on the street beside him, gazing longingly at Norton on the petals in the middle of the road.
She was so thin that even her breasts had become layers of withered skin hanging from her chest. Her face was covered in mud and wounds; she seemed to have been hurt while fighting for bread.
She held a child in her arms who looked like a monkey. The child was even more skeletal, and if his body hadn't been rising and falling slightly, Norton would have thought he was already dead.
Looking at the bloodshot, yearning eyes in the woman's skull-like face, at her skeletal body and the child in her arms who couldn't even lift his head, Norton trembled slightly and tried to grab something from his basket, but couldn't find a single crumb.
He had given away the last of his black bread crumbs moments ago. How could he possibly produce any now?
Norton's body trembled slightly. He said nothing and paused briefly, then took a step with a tremble.
No one was allowed to stop during the Mass or interact with the people around them, because this was a time to bathe in God's holy divine light, which could not be tainted by the filth of the lower classes.
If he stopped, the church knights' blades would be waiting for him.
If the people trampled the flower path, they too would face God's punishment.
Norton's heart bled with regret. Why had he sunk into thought just now? Why hadn't he paid attention to how many black bread crumbs were left? Why couldn't he have saved a little?
Even if he had saved just a little, he could have reached out and tossed the woman a handful when she knelt and begged him.
As Norton slowly stepped forward, the last trace of hope in the kneeling woman's eyes slowly faded.
The child in her arms seemed to convulse from hunger, and this undoubtedly struck directly at the last of her reason and sensibilities.
She could no longer concern herself with the rules of the Mass. She crawled onto the flower path on her knees and reached out to grab Norton's robe.
The mud on the woman's legs stained the petals of the flower path and likewise defiled God's holiness.
"Missionary, sir! Missionary, sir! Please..."
"Swish!"
A flash of a blade swept down across the woman's neck.
"Gurgle..." Her bleeding head rolled onto the petals in the center of the street, splashing a streak of scarlet across the multicolored flowers.
Norton's raised foot paused slightly, then came down trembling. He avoided the head that had rolled in front of him and continued forward in silence.
The church knight stood quietly behind the woman's headless corpse, holding his greatsword. His gaze swept like a blade over Norton's retreating back, but he said nothing.
The woman's head alone was left lying on the flower path she had never been allowed to set foot on in life. Her eyelids trembled slightly, and her eyes lost all color.
"Swish!"
Another flash of a blade came down, and a small head rolled to a stop beside the woman's. Norton's cowardly retreating figure was reflected in its half-open eyes.
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(A lot of you have asked where the population came from. Holy Lord City is where a god died, and it is the church's holy city. Its religious atmosphere is fanatical to the point of obsession; things are somewhat less extreme in other regions. There will be more details later in the story.)