Chapter 88

“Wait, we’re going into the King’s palace?” Chris asked, with unconscious Olivia in his hands.

“Of course! Start using the one head you have!” Ember scolded Chris. “I understand you might have been too preoccupied with using Beatrice’s gifts on Samantha, but from this point on you have to pay attention if you don’t want to have the one head you still have left separated from your overtrained shoulders!”

“Several of the White Masks were from the palace!” Chris exclaimed. “I do not expect these tiny little masks that blonde sex addict gave us to be of any use.”

“They will work just fine,” Ember said. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t serious about going to see that decrepit drug addict! We’re going to the High Priest. And he couldn’t care less about what mask you wore, wear or will wear.”

“Your robes before,” Chris continued, “You’re one of the High Priests priestesses!”

“How observant.”

“But then ... Beatrice,” Chris stuttered as he looked at the succubus’s back, her tail, her little bat-like wings on her back as if witnessing them for the first time.

“Oh, I’ll leave the explanation to the High Priest! He’ll love to tell you that over and over and over. Why spoil his fun?” Ember chuckled. “Rather, why not tell us a little more about those White Masks?”

“They changed often. Most of them used voice-change magic. The whole point was that nobody would know exactly who they were. Though some were more conspicuous than others.”

“Felicia,” Beatrice, Carl, Liam, and Jeremy said in unison.

“But just by their body shape alone, we counted at least ... Was it fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” Carl said. “Not that it matters much. Some were glorified bodyguards for the real important people.”

“One name we did find out thanks to Carl,” Chris said. “Samira, the third princess.”

“Another one,” Beatrice felt like she had her fill of princesses just with Bloody Mary alone.

“And what a piece of work,” Carl added.

“Compared to that blood-thirsty psycho, Mary?” Beatrice asked.

“Samira is nastier in more subtle ways,” Carl said.

“And sometimes not so subtle,” Chris said with a pained voice.

“So that’s two princesses already,” Beatrice counted. “Then was the whole royal family involved in that Forge deal?”

“Maybe?” Chris could only guess. “Maybe most of them knew but just didn’t care?”

“Samira isn’t someone I would recommend messing with,” Ember said. “We’ll have a talk with Felicia instead. None of you knew that she could summon demons?”

“WHAT!?” All four eunuchs exclaimed and stared at Ember with their jaws dropped.

“Figured as much,” Ember concluded and walked forward, ignoring them. “It does seem almost unbelievable. Though she had a few niche uses for the Guild, what you told me about the demons just doesn’t make sense.”

“No doubt that she was the one that made them appear,” Beatrice said. “Whether she could control them or not...”

“And whether the other involved parties even knew of this,” Ember wondered. “Hard to imagine that Belmot would. And if his Purple Capes did not know, then Felicia is in for a time of her life at their hands, hehe. Oh, we’re pretty much here!”

Beatrice remembered that one of Lucarad’s places of operation was some deep underground chamber, so it made sense they’d reach it faster than the actual palace. But as Ember took a turn into a narrower tunnel, Beatrice hoped that the tittle of a High Priest would offer Lucarad with something more spacious than a couple of dreary stone chambers.

After a couple more turns and a flight of stairs, Beatrice got a feeling that Ember was literally taking them to that very chamber. The oval chamber with a stone altar in the middle where Beatrice first appeared in this world. Her first worshippers. Her first orgy. Her first cum rain.

When Beatrice saw a single wooden door just ahead of Ember, there was no longer any doubt.

“We’re baaack~! And we brought company!” Ember cheerfully exclaimed as she pushed forward the squeaky door and triumphantly walked through. “I’m sure you’ll find a place in your hearts for a new potential fucktoy—”

Ember froze in place, and a second later Beatrice saw why. Just a glimpse of dark red was enough. The succubus quickly rushed through the opening and stood beside Ember to get a better view.

A dozen mutilated bodies sprayed across the stone floor in a pool of blood. And high upon the oval wall another body hung lifelessly with his arms straight above his head, nailed through the palms of his hands. He wore gold and purple robes, stained in rivers if half-dried blood. And between the shoulders, where the man’s head was supposed to be, a misshapen skull was pushed into the bloody neck stump of the corpse.

“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.

Beatrice half-opened her eyes and watched through the gap in her forearms in front of her face how the fiery death ball flew through the implausibly long “living-quarters”, setting on fire and smashing aside any object that was unfortunate enough to be in its path as it rapidly approached the one responsible for the latest massacre.

“Huh?” the young pink-haired hamaxe wielder turned her head to see why the entire ‘living quarters’ suddenly flashed white for a split second and saw a giant ball of molten rock and fire hurling in her direction.

“WUAAAAAHH!!” the girl unleashed a warrior’s battle cry and turned to meet the approaching doom head-on with her giant hammer axe, swinging it around her in an arc as she turned to gain more momentum for her weapon. The bloody white hammer axe formed a tail of its own behind it as it flew through the air: a black mist that grew thicker before the girl disappeared from Beatrice’s view, obstructed by the bright fire.

An explosion akin to a bolt of thunder cracked through the air and Ember’s Doomsday rock sharply changed direction and flew straight for one of the gothic arc windows, crashing through it and leaving a giant hole wider than the window itself as it flew out of the palace, accompanied by the glass and stone it broke in its path.

The original target of the fire magic stood where she was before, breathing heavily as drops of sweat rapidly formed on her face. She was hunched forward, grasping tightly the long handle of her giant hammer that now rested on the cracked marble floor and a barely noticeable lingering layer of black dissipated completely before the last stone fell to the floor from the new hole in the wall.

“Who the hell are you?” the first known survivor of Ember’s lethal spell asked the uninvited guests in between her heavy breaths.

“The one you’re looking for,” a soft voice answered the girl’s question. “That is, one of them is the so-called Beatrice, The Hero That Was Promised, foretold by The Scrolls—”

“Unholy Roasting,” Ember said and unleashed several dark flame bolts straight at the hammer girl while the beastkin still talked, but again the girl proved to have enough awareness and an astonishing strength to dodge the all three bolts of fire by jumping together with her massive hammer.