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The new school year at the Church of the Goddess of Harvest was not quite peaceful.
First, the intelligence report that Malin had given to old Hoffman had been sorted out, and frankly, the senior members of various churches were all tingling with alarm—whether they truly hadn't noticed the matter, or their lack of awareness was due to interference from a higher-level entity was an extremely dangerous question.
At least Malin felt that the higher-ups preferred not to know about it; the situation had reached a perilously dangerous point. If the murderer accomplished this act of mimicking slaughter, who could say how dangerous and terrifying the ritual might be?
In Hoffman's words, half the population of Carterburg dying would have been a mercy from the gods. Had it happened in the Central Administrative Province, any city would be likely to produce a victim count over a hundred thousand.
