"What happened?" Carl rushed into the large oval blood-smeared orgy room.
"W-whoa," was all Liam could manage when he saw the bloody scene.
"Those robes," Chris uttered, looking at the hanging corpse opposite the door through which they all entered. "I-Isn't that the High Priest himself?"
Has to be! Beatrice thought. The High Priest was the only one among his insane cult that wore purple, and she also recognized the misshapen skull that she once saw in Lucarad's possession, now taking the place of the Priest's head. That meant that Lucarad's head had to be somewhere among the countless mutilated body parts. Beatrice preferred not to shift through the corpses just to confirm the identity of the man they came seeking help from, but they also had to know for sure.
Luckily for Beatrice, Ember was quick to the task and already stood over the decapitated head of her former boss. Lying in a pool of blood, cross-eyed, jaw dropped open, tongue hanging out. There could be no doubt—The High Priest, Lucarad, was dead.
Beatrice looked at Olivia in Chris' arms. How was she supposed to help her now? Asking Lucarad for help was far from a perfect solution. Barely acceptable in fact. But now, Beatrice was robbed of even this option.
Then they all heard a high-pitched scream. Turning toward the source of the desperate cry, Beatrice saw an open hidden door in the wall of the chamber with a welcoming light shining from wherever it led to. Turned out that there was another way out of the cult's private sex-orgy-summoning-altar-room.
"The living quarters!" Ember exclaimed and ran straight toward the open hidden passage, lighting up fires in both her hands.
Someone strong enough to wipe out Lucarad and his congregation. Beatrice had no way of knowing how strong Lucarad might have been. Her only reference was Ember's strength, but Ember herself was just a mercenary, higher to boost the cult's combat potential, at least according to the fire mage. Ember had once claimed that she too did not know Lucarad's exact strength, only that he "was not weak by any means".
How many levels could I get from killing someone strong enough to do all this? Beatrice wondered and followed Ember across the pool of sticky red, her four loyal eunuchs close behind.
Beyond the hidden door was a short hall with a few steps leading up to a grand hall. Brightly lit not only by torches but also actual windows! A row of twenty gothic arch windows, over thirty feet tall, all on one side of the so-called "living quarters" that rivaled the king's throne room. Apparently, this was the only outer wall in this hall. And it was not facing the burning part of the city, judging by the clearer sky with natural clouds, colored fiery orange by the setting sun.
Not that anyone in Beatrice's party was too preoccupied with the view outside. For it was the view inside that held their attention. A continuation of what they saw in the sex chamber. More blood. More entrails were sprayed across the floor and several tables. And unlike the chamber, a few people here were still alive.
And none drew more attention to themselves than a screaming girl in a white and red skintight attire with a stupidly large hammer axe in her hands that looked twice as heavy as the petite girl herself. The weapon might have been pure-white once upon a time, but now it was drenched red, with a partial intestine stuck to one side of the round hammer portion of the hammer axe.
With her back toward Beatrice's party, the pink-haired girl had all her attention on a few survivors of the massacre. Two survivors, a man and a woman in blue robes were before the girl, on the floor in a pool of blood, with several mutilated bodies all around them.
Three more, all women, were further away, each had their left hand nailed to a wall through the palm. Beatrice vaguely recognized the three nailed women. Though she no longer recalled their names, Beatrice was all but certain that those were the first three that she had sex with on the day she was summoned to this world.
"Who else might know where this so-called 'Beatrice' might be!?" the hamaxe-wielding pink-haired girl demanded to know from one of the blue-robed figures before her.
"For the last time, WE DON'T KNOW!" the woman with emerald-colored hair and topaz-colored eyes screamed back at the pink-haired girl in frustration. "You killed the one man that might have known!"
SHPLUART!
"Don't tell me what to do!" the pink-haired girl told the splattered pile of gory mess that was a living being just a second before and threw her freshly bloodied hammer over her shoulder, sending a sticky arc of red flying over the horrified screaming man still left before her.
Ember raised her right arm, straight extended, palm of her hand facing forward, and simply said, "Doomsday!"
At the last possible moment, Beatrice closed her eyes and put her arms in front of her face to protect herself from the bright flash that was the harbinger of scorching heat and molten rock.
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