Solace sat frozen in the pew, his mind struggling to process the sheer scale of the revelation—a dead god. A rotting, planet-spanning serpent coiled beneath the Royal Palace of Hera. But as the initial shock began to recede, the fragmented pieces of his knowledge snapped together violently.
The Royal Palace of Hera wasn't just a political stronghold. It was the exact location of the fourth seal of Netharis.
His theory was right. The System, the novel's plot, the hidden history of the empire—everything was tethered to those seals. If the gods themselves were buried beneath them, the stakes were infinitely higher than a simple political rebellion.
He slowly turned his head to look at Nicole. Her profile was bathed in the dim, fractured light of the Cathedral, her expression a mask of weary endurance.
"If the board is already set," Solace asked, his voice low, trying not to disrupt the murmuring prayers of the devotees around them, "has something changed from the previous time? Or are we just walking the same path?"
Nicole didn't answer immediately. She watched a young woman two rows ahead trace the circular symbol of the Loom over her heart.
"Everything," she finally breathed, the word carrying a profound exhaustion. "Everything is fracturing, Solace. The timeline is bleeding into something unrecognizable."
She turned to face him, her silver eyes piercing the gloom. "Firstly, the incident on Ishtara... that was never supposed to happen. It was a localized skirmish in my first life, not the slaughter it became now. Furthermore, there is a new, massive complication brewing in the Itou Sea that I have no precedent for."
She paused, and for the first time, Solace saw genuine hesitation cross her features.
"But more perplexing is the girl named Love," she continued, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper, "I survived an entire lifetime of war, Solace, and I never encountered her once. I am not even sure there was someone with that level of power hiding in the shadows. To have a variable of that magnitude suddenly appear..."
Solace felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He was right. Love was an anomaly even to Nicole. It only acted as a catalyst to further confirm his suspicion.
"And the Church?" Solace pressed, needing to map out the immediate threats. "Are there anomalies within the Sanguivar clan? Within the Church of the Loom itself?"
Nicole offered a grim, slow nod. "Worse than before. There are way too many kidnappings, quiet abductions in the lower districts. They aren't just torturing heretics; they seem to be experimenting on them."
She leaned closer, the scent of her floral perfume mixing with the sharp tang of burning incense. "And the most off-putting part... they are following a strange, unseen entity. They refer to him only as 'The King.' I don't know his full name, nor his origin, but the highest echelons of the Church bow to his will. And his sole, obsessive goal is to break the seals."
Solace stared at the giant, spinning Loom at the altar. In the novel, it was never explicitly stated why the Church was so desperate to break the seals, or who was truly pulling the Pope's strings. But hearing Nicole say it out loud, the terrifying logic settled into place. What would a human religious institution have to gain by freeing Netharis and ending the world? Nothing. Unless... they weren't in control at all. There had to be a god, or an entity on that level, holding the leash. 'He let the silence stretch, giving himself a moment to breathe.
Then, a simpler, far more human question surfaced in his mind.
Solace looked at the Principal. She was a Layer 5 powerhouse, a regressor playing a cosmic game of chess. Just minutes ago, she had coldly informed him that his potential was permanently capped at Layer 3—that he was useless in the grand scheme of gods and monsters.
"Then why?" Solace asked, his voice breaking the quiet stillness between them. "Why do you care about me?"
Nicole blinked, clearly caught off guard by the shift in topic.
"Despite all your talk about how I'm not worth allying with," Solace continued softly, "you brought me here. You're warning me. You're sharing the most classified, dangerous information in the world with a student who can't even break past the middle layers. You promised to protect my family. Why?"
Nicole looked away, her gaze dropping to her hands, which were resting neatly in her lap. For a long, fragile moment, the haughty, untouchable Principal vanished.
"In my previous life," she began, her voice entirely stripped of its usual armor, "I was... closed off. I trusted no one. I treated every person as a resource or a threat. And it was a very cold, very lonely way to watch the world die. Francis killed Hilda; her blood had been compromised, and she exploded in front of me."
She turned her head slightly, refusing to meet his eyes, but he could see the tension in her jaw.
"You were different, Solace. In that life, despite everything, you stayed close to me. You offered comfort in times when I thought I had nothing left but the sword in my hand. You were the only one who didn't look at me like a weapon." She paused, taking a slow breath.
Finally, she turned to look at him. To his absolute shock, a smile touched her lips. It wasn't a smirk, nor a calculated expression of authority. It was a genuine, impossibly fond smile.
"But mostly," she whispered, "I brought you here because it was you. Because Solace Wright was too kind for his own good." The smile faded slightly, replaced by a melancholic observation. "Though... looking at you now, in this life... that doesn't seem to be the case anymore."
Solace stopped breathing for a second. The words hit him harder than the revelation of the dead god. He was simply too kind. He looked down at his hands. It wasn't him she was remembering. It was the original Solace, the soul that had inhabited this body before the transmigration. The original Solace had been kind. The current Solace was paranoid.
He swallowed the guilt that flared in his throat. He pondered her words, looking at the woman beside him. Nicole Richards was nearly ninety years old, though her Thread of Time kept her trapped in the pristine, unaging body of her prime. In her youth, she could have wiped out entire platoons single-handedly. The centuries had undoubtedly dulled her raw edge, but she was still a terrifying force. She harbored a deep, personal vendetta against Pope Francis—a grudge Solace didn't fully understand yet.
But despite her arrogant, uncaring facade, Solace realized she wasn't a bad person. She was just a soldier who had lived too long. His respect for her and the terrible burden she carried grew exponentially. Capped potential or not, he had gained a truly powerful ally.
Solace opened his mouth, prepared to finally ask the most pressing question: Why had she specifically chosen the Cathedral of the Shattered Sun for this meeting?
Before the first syllable could leave his lips, the ambient temperature in the Cathedral plummeted.
It wasn't a natural chill. It was a sudden, suffocating pressure that settled directly over his chest, heavy as a slab of iron. The rhythmic clack-whir of the giant Loom at the altar seemed to distort, the sound warping into a sickening, discordant drone.
Then came the whisper.
It didn't enter through his ears. It slithered directly into his mind—a coercive, terrifyingly sweet murmur that felt like a physical violation. It was an eerie, manipulative sound, slowly corroding his thoughts, making his own memories feel distant and unimportant.
Solace gasped, his hands flying to his temples as he struggled against the strange phenomenon. It felt as though someone were pouring warm, black ink over his consciousness.
Around them, the Cathedral fell deathly silent.
The hundreds of devotees who had been kneeling or murmuring prayers suddenly stopped. In perfect, horrifying unison, they all stood up. Their eyes were glazed, empty of humanity, entirely possessed by the coercive aura. Without a single word, the mass of civilians turned and began walking out of the Cathedral in a synchronized, mechanical march.
Through the blur of his corroding mind, Solace forced his eyes open.
From the deliberate shadows near the grand pillars, a silhouette stepped forward. As the figure moved into the dim light of the stained glass, the oppressive aura seemed to pulse with every step he took.
He was a man dressed in the immaculate, heavy robes. He was incredibly charming, with sharp, aristocratic features, but he wore a fundamentally unsettling smile—a smile that promised absolution through agonizing ruin.
It was Cardinal Martin.
Solace grit his teeth, trying to summon his Threads to fight off the mental invasion, but his concentration was fracturing.
Beside him, Nicole didn't look surprised. In fact, she was practically beaming.
She remained seated, her legs crossed, watching the Cardinal approach with the serene satisfaction of a spider who had just felt a twitch on its web.
"Finally," she whispered, the word carrying a lethal, icy joy.
In the next fraction of a second, the world inverted.
Nicole unleashed her aura. She didn't stand, she didn't shout. She exerted the sheer, oppressive, world-ending pressure of a Layer 5 directly against the Cardinal's domain. The clash of their invisible powers shattered the coercive whispers in Solace's mind like a hammer through glass.
Freed from the mental stranglehold, Solace collapsed forward, falling to his hands and knees on the hard wooden floor between the pews, coughing violently as he gasped for clean air.
Through his tearing eyes, from his position on the floor, he finally looked up at the charming, smiling man who had come to hunt them in the house of his own god.