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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Simzy
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The sight of the strong security guards collapsing one after another was too surreal.
It left a dreamlike impression, beyond surreal.
Amidst it all, Amon recalled the words the priest had spoken.
[Only one Divine Power Holder can exist in a single region.]
The reason was that Divine Power/Mystic Power were aggregations of faith.
When specific beliefs intensely gathered in one region, they became Mystic Power or Divine Power, and when those powers resided somewhere, a Divine Power Holder or an Entity was born.
In this case, Divine Power or Mystic Power didn’t reside somewhere once a certain amount was gathered, but rather, resided at regular intervals, ultimately limiting it to one per region.
Therefore, when one Divine Power Holder was born, drawing a circle at a certain distance around them meant that no other Divine Power Holder could be born within it.
This was a setting Amon was hearing for the first time.
At the same time, Amon was an exception to that setting.
Therefore, after initially hearing this setting, Amon didn’t believe it.
Even the priest who told him was confused.
But soon, Amon realized why this setting didn’t apply to him.
‘My power isn’t gathered from people’s faith.’
He didn’t know what the Goddess did, but Amon’s Divine Power was definitely given by her.
As his thoughts reached that point, he recalled a scene from Punk City 1.
It was roughly a quest to annihilate a Steampunk cult, and depending on the player’s choices, the player was sacrificed.
Then their Divine Power was extracted by a demonic symbol, resulting in a game over.
However, if the player received a blessing through a holy relic during the quest, they could survive even after having their Divine Power extracted.
The reason for this choice was that while it was easier to prevent the summoning of the demon in the first place, doing so meant missing out on the demon’s drop items.
So, those who needed the demon’s drop items would purposefully receive the blessing, allow their Divine Power to be extracted once, and then defeat the summoned demon.
According to that logic, Amon should have no problem even if his Divine Power was extracted.
His Divine Power was directly bestowed upon him by the Goddess, after all.
“As expected of Divine Power. The effect is killer, isn’t it?”
Amon muttered as he watched the employees collapse before his eyes.
However, there were survivors amidst the chaos.
The chairman and the doctor.
They were barely surviving this disaster.
Amon could guess the reason.
“Wow. Just how many implants did they cram in there?”
Before Amon’s eyes, the chairman’s consciousness flickered in and out.
His implants restarted his heart every time it stopped, and somehow supplied oxygen to his oxygen-deprived brain.
Repeating death and resurrection, the chairman clung to life.
But with each resurrection, the chairman’s face grew more haggard.
The doctor, closer to a machine than a human, like the chairman, was also barely maintaining life.
‘They don’t have much longer.’
Amon decided not to finish them off.
However, he still needed to witness their deaths, so he brought a chair over.
The doctor squeezed out a voice towards Amon, who was observing their demise.
“Why…!”
The single word he managed to force out.
Even with his flickering consciousness, the mad scientist wanted to understand this situation.
The answer to that question was in Amon’s head.
All attempts to create Mystic Power with human hands were destined to end like this.
If a saint could be so easily born by cramming a hundred people’s worth of Mystic Power into one shell, why wasn’t the Vatican doing this now?
The reason was simple.
They had already tried it.
On a much larger scale than the Higzen Distribution.
With thousands of sacrifices, not just a hundred, and a whole city as the summoning circle.
The result was a failure, and they erased it from history.
‘Strictly speaking, they succeeded in creating something…’
The problem was that what they created wasn’t a saint, the daughter of the Goddess, but the Antichrist.
Common sense dictated that humanity’s savior wouldn’t be born from the sacrifice of thousands.
What was born that way wasn’t a Divine Power generator like a saint, but a Divine Power exchanger, the Antichrist.
The Antichrist didn’t create apostles for free and produce Divine Power Holders like a saint, but was a demon of destruction that transformed ordinary people into Entities.
‘And that was the story of the first game.’
The Vatican summoned a demon, and the protagonist, a mercenary in the Steampunk era, had to clean up their mess, running around Europe and the Middle East.
That was the story of the first game.
Knowing that story, Amon already knew that this company’s Saint Project would fail.
‘Well, they can run the generator with Entities too, so in a way, the company’s long-cherished wish might have been fulfilled in a different direction.’
And this story was a dark chapter for the Vatican.
Perhaps only the Pope knew about it.
However, it probably wasn’t much of a concern for the Pope.
Whether the Higzen Group summoned a saint or the Antichrist,
The Vatican had to stop them either way.
Telling the priests that they needed to stop the Antichrist meant revealing the dark chapter of their history as well.
Since the outcome of antagonizing the Higzen Group was the same, they probably just told the priests to stop the birth of the artificial saint.
Amon was confident he could explain all these settings to the doctor.
‘But I have no obligation to explain all this.’
But there was no reason to.
‘Who knows if he’ll suddenly resurrect later.’
He was someone who had already transferred his consciousness into a machine once.
It wouldn’t be strange to be extra cautious.
Amon remained silent.
The doctor, with unanswered questions in his heart, finally stopped breathing.
Amon then turned his gaze to the chairman.
The chairman, using more expensive equipment, clung to life longer than the doctor.
But it didn’t seem like it would last much longer.
The chairman and Amon made eye contact.
The chairman didn’t seem particularly curious.
He was simply filled with grief.
“Not being able to… kill you… is… my greatest regret…”
The chairman skillfully strung together words amidst his fading consciousness.
But did he know?
That he had repeated that sentence six times already.
Still, it was admirable that he still maintained his consciousness.
‘With this level of mental fortitude, it’s no wonder he’s the chairman of a megacorp.’
However, regardless of Amon’s admiration, there was a fact that needed correcting.
“You won’t die.”
The chairman’s eyes widened at Amon’s words.
Seeing was believing, so Amon pointed to one of the security guards who had begun to transform.
“Death is not an escape, Chairman.”
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Divine punishment always fell upon humans who violated the taboos set by the Goddess.
Humans who ignored the Goddess’s words and fell into corruption were cleansed by a flood.
The Tower of Babel, which challenged the Goddess’s authority, crumbled.
Sodom and Gomorrah, cities that mocked the Goddess’s angels, burned brightly under sulfurous fire.
Then what punishment would befall those who attempted to drag Divine Power into the realm of humans?
They were deprived of rest.
Sleep, peace, death.
Deprived of all forms of rest.
There were various expressions to describe such beings.
The Goddess’s abandoned children, beasts walking the abyss, beggars of the ashes.
While the expressions varied across eras, a modern term would be familiar.
Monsters.
The theme of a dungeon varied depending on the type of experiment that failed.
If genetic experiments failed, monsters or zombies roamed, and if artificial intelligence experiments failed, robots roamed.
Among them, when Mystic Power experiments failed, the method of birth was different from other dungeons.
At the site of a failed Mystic Power experiment, the moment a dungeon boss was born, the surrounding beings were twisted.
The space where it was born transformed into a dungeon, and those deprived of rest had their souls bound to the dungeon.
And they became monsters, wandering the dungeon.
Even if explorers entered this dungeon and killed them, they resurrected in the form of respawns, clinging to fragments of their human memories, obsessed with their last moments, wandering the dungeon as monsters.
This was the divine punishment that befell them.
Amon nodded as he watched the surrounding beings transform.
‘Ignorance is not a sin.’
They probably didn’t think they would become monsters.
In the first place, Mystic Power experiments rarely failed, and the origins of monsters in Mystic Dungeons were unknown.
‘If they had known, they wouldn’t have conducted such experiments within the company headquarters.’
However.
‘Blasphemy is a sin.’
Not believing in God, and daring to challenge God’s authority.
This deserved divine punishment.
Therefore, Amon felt no pity.
Not for the employees transforming into low-level monsters,
Not for the security guards transforming into elite monsters,
Not for the doctor transforming into some strange mimic-like creature.
Amon believed this was the divine punishment they deserved.
‘Those who didn’t participate in this project won’t be punished.’
Roughly, the innocent would survive.
That was the logic.
It seemed like a dangerous thought, but at least in this situation, it was the right one.
Presumably, even the most oblivious employees would leave the company building on their own in this situation, so he wasn’t worried about innocent victims.
Incidentally, the chairman became a mid-boss, muttering “I have to sell…” in his final moments.
Judging by his last words, he probably became a gimmick-type boss.
While they transformed into monsters, the company building also began to change.
It was probably taking the form of a dungeon.
To welcome challengers, and to protect the boss.
The building slowly restructured itself.
The laboratory where Amon was had become the dungeon boss room,
and the security guards and the chairman near Amon were relocated to other locations.
‘Oh. Good.’
It was a happy mistake.
He was planning to run for the exit after turning them into monsters, but thankfully, the monsters were moved on their own.
‘Wait. Is this good?’
Thinking about it, it wasn’t good.
The place he was in was the dungeon boss room, wasn’t it?
This was the most dangerous place.
Amon immediately ran for the exit.
But he couldn’t help but stop at the voice he heard from behind.
“[Apostle of the Goddess.]”
An indifferent, beautiful voice resonated in the room.
It resonated not through someone’s throat, but as if spoken directly into his mind.
The boss was already looking at Amon with crimson eyes.
At first glance, she was a beautiful woman.
But Amon could never like her.
No, it was awkward to even call her “her” in the first place.
That being was closer to being genderless.
The dungeon boss opened its mouth.
“Bow down and worship me. I will give you all of this.”
The boss manipulated the space with a blank expression.
A view of the entire city unfolded below.
The boss, who created this spectacle, said,
“Revere and serve me, kissing my feet. Then I will give you all the ends of the earth, or else I will destroy you.”
Amon’s expression crumpled.
This was why he couldn’t like the boss.
Although the boss quoted scripture upon its birth, it wasn’t because the boss was divine.
Contrary to popular belief, angels, demons, saints, and the Antichrist were all the same in that just looking at them could drive one mad and kill them.
Only those who were already mad or had strong faith could withstand it (both having similar meanings).
Since Amon couldn’t bring himself to recite verses praising a demon, he just quoted scripture, but the boss was by no means a divine being.
‘A worm daring to impersonate the Goddess’s authority…’
If she were a shell of a wronged victim, or a pure and innocent new life, he might have considered some compromise.
Even if she were a vengeful spirit seeking revenge on those who experimented on her, he would have tried to somehow rehabilitate her.
But what was here was a demon.
A demon that sacrificed 100 Divine Power Holders and insulted the Goddess.
Not innocent, not harmless. Just evil itself.
It was fortunate that, unlike the erased history, the number of sacrifices was small, so it wasn’t a final boss on the level of the Antichrist, but a demon was still a demon.
The fact that it recognized Amon as an apostle upon birth and immediately tried to test him confirmed that its nature was evil.
Amon refused the demon’s offer.
Instead of answering, Amon raised his middle finger.
“Why would I?”
Serving such a creature would surely lead to ruin.
In the first place, the command to bow down and worship was just a fancy way of saying, serve me as your god and become an Entity or monster.
That being called it a “blessing,” but to Amon, it was a curse.
Amon, being extremely wise, had no reason to accept the demon’s offer.
He decided not to exchange any more words.
He immediately turned and headed towards the exit of the boss room.
No matter how great the demon was, it was fundamentally a boss.
Once he left the boss room, it couldn’t do anything.
As if reading Amon’s intentions, the boss continuously tried to hold him back.
“Why do you fear me? You cannot leave this place until I permit it.”
Giving another middle finger to the boss who persistently pleaded behind him,
Amon ran for the exit.
Finally, he managed to place his foot on the threshold of the exit.
That was when it happened.
The words that he could never ignore echoed from behind him.
“Is it because even the Goddess is an outdated coward that her apostles only run away?”
Amon’s feet stopped dead.
Seeing this, the boss showed emotion for the first time.
The corners of the boss’s mouth lifted slightly.
‘In the end, your faith will be your downfall.’
The boss had no intention of letting Amon live anyway.
What she wanted was Amon’s beating heart.
The overflowing wellspring of Mystic Power within it.
She had no intention of making him her apostle.
She had to kill Amon to obtain it.
To achieve this, she couldn’t let Amon go.
As she predicted, insulting the Goddess prevented Amon from leaving the boss room.
He even seemed to be preparing for battle, gathering his weapons.
‘How foolish.’
He looked like a moth drawn to a flame.
The boss gazed at Amon with amusement.
She could attack now, but she wanted to test her power since she had just been born.
Arrogance.
Some might call it that, but the boss called it confidence.
Finally, Amon, finished with his preparations, turned towards the boss.
Holding his swords in both hands, Amon, who had been facing away from the boss, said,
“You come at me with sword and sorcery, but I come at you in the name of the Mother of All, the name of the Goddess whom you insult-”
The boss looked into Amon’s eyes as he muttered.
The more enraged he became, the more he lost his reason, the easier it would be for the boss to seize the wellspring of Mystic Power.
But the moment she looked into Amon’s eyes,
The boss was terrified.
‘What… what is this…’
Madness.
Beyond those dark eyes lay only madness.
Eyes gleaming with madness stared at the boss.
Amon crossed the swords in his hands.
Gnashing his teeth, lips smeared with what looked like a torn lipstick mark moved behind the cross.
“This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I will strike you and take your head from you. And I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”
Deus Vult (God wills it).
Amon muttered softly,
and the boss stumbled backward.
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