The scavengers had already arrived.
They moved through the cavernous breeding ground clad in heavy quarantine suits, the glass lenses of their gas masks fogging with each slow, laboring breath. Beneath those masks came the dull rhythm of strained inhalation—human lungs struggling against poisoned air. They worked quickly, almost frantically. Because they lacked any form of specialized resistance, they were forced to rotate every few minutes. Sometimes an alarm would shriek through the chamber, and another team would rush forward to carry away a worker who had collapsed unconscious.
A thin mist drifted through the air.
It was atomized neutralizing fluid. It could not truly oppose the strange corrosion that haunted this place, but at least it gave people a fragile illusion of safety.
Against the erosion, ordinary humans were helpless.
And yet, even so, humanity still held a faint advantage in its war against the demons.
From time to time shrill screams echoed through the chamber.
Some of the eggs had not fully hatched. The scavengers smashed open the hardened shells with brutal efficiency and dragged out the creatures wrapped in viscous mucus. They resembled malformed fetuses—twisted bodies curled in upon themselves. Their grotesque forms bore traces of human features, as though they were half-finished evolutions abandoned midway through creation.
A thermite rifle ignited with a sharp flash.
Soldiers stood guard nearby, watching those things with tense vigilance while the scavengers shoved the creatures one by one into iron cages. The Ever-Motion Pump had never encountered demons born from such eggs before. They needed specimens.
So it always went.
Those above merely moved their lips, and those below ran themselves ragged.
The scholars in white coats dissected demons in pristine laboratories under perfect security, while these unfortunate souls had to sink into the depths of corruption to capture the monsters for them.
"Was there a fire here?"
Lloyd caught a faint scent of ash lingering in the air.
"There was a strange plant," Arthur replied. "It looked like a demon, but its form resembled a kind of herb. We found it when we captured the underground palace earlier. Didn't expect it to appear here too."
"Stomach-chew grass."
From Arthur's description alone, Lloyd could already picture it.
"Archpriest Lawrence certainly has… unusual cultivation techniques."
Fortunately it had been discovered early. If that plant had spread, it would have been far more troublesome than ordinary demons.
"Mr. Holmes," Arthur said after a moment, glancing at Lloyd. "What we truly don't understand… is this."
He pointed deeper into the facility.
"According to the Geiger counter readings, this is the pollution source of the entire breeding ground—the place where the erosion is strongest."
Arthur stared at the shattered eggs before them.
At the center of their arrangement stood something like an altar: a furnace.
Ash blanketed the ground beneath it. The crucible had long since cooled, yet faint traces of metal remained within.
"This is…"
Lloyd could feel the erosion pouring out from the furnace.
It was overwhelming—like the center of a vast whirlpool, dragging everything toward it, pulling the souls of those nearby into some immeasurable darkness.
"I don't know what it is," Arthur said quietly. "But the metal residue inside the furnace appears to be holy silver… Archpriest Lawrence may have used it to forge it. But holy silver is supposed to destroy demons. Why would it carry such intense erosion?"
That was the contradiction Arthur could not comprehend.
Holy silver and demons were, by their nature, utterly incompatible.
And yet here they were together—sacred metal carrying immense corruption.
Lloyd said nothing.
Instead, he stepped forward against the invisible pressure.
The furnace was far too dangerous to approach, so the scavengers had already erected a yellow warning line to keep others away.
Arthur did not understand why Lloyd would approach it.
But Lloyd did.
Inside his own body was a plug forged of holy silver—the Silver Seal that bound his secret blood. It was the final safeguard that kept the power within him locked away.
As he drew closer, the hallucinations intensified.
The pressure became unbearable. It was difficult to imagine what kind of demon had once stood here—something even witch-hunters would struggle to resist.
The world itself seemed to warp and crack apart. Strange music echoed through the distortion, dreamlike and disorienting.
Then suddenly—
All sound vanished.
The world snapped back into its familiar form.
And Watson stood on the far side of the furnace.
"This thing is dangerous," she murmured, leaning over the edge of the crucible to peer inside. At the bottom, the holy silver had solidified into a faintly glowing mass.
Lloyd felt something strange.
The pressure had suddenly disappeared.
Or perhaps it had risen beyond the level he could even perceive.
"So Archpriest Lawrence truly possessed the skill to forge holy silver…"
Lloyd steadied himself beside the furnace and stared at the congealed metal within.
"No."
Watson immediately shook her head.
"That's not it, Lloyd. Use that clever brain of yours."
She walked over and gently placed a hand against his chest.
"Connect all the pieces of the story. You don't really think holy silver is that easy to forge, do you?"
Lloyd stared into her illusory eyes.
For a fleeting moment, his mind drifted.
"Is this… a gift from the devil?"
"I was once human, Lloyd," Watson replied softly. "We used to be such good friends. Does helping a friend really require a reason?"
"No."
Lloyd's gray-blue eyes reflected her figure.
"You're dead, Watson. What stands here now is only the skin of a demon."
His rationality was frighteningly absolute.
"And how do you decide the form of life?" Watson asked with a gentle smile, her voice trailing with a dark echo. "My body died—but my mind remains. Is that death? My flesh burned away, yet I still live in your memory… in your mind. Perhaps I'm nothing more than a hallucination born from your imagination."
She tilted her head slightly.
"Or perhaps I'm just one fragment of a split personality."
"Lloyd, you can't understand the form of my existence. If you could, you wouldn't be so lost… and those ancient fossils in the Gospel Church wouldn't be so mad."
Watson turned to look down into the furnace.
Her voice grew colder.
"I was the Church's mistake, Lloyd. You opened Pandora's box. You called me the Holy Grail… but in truth, I was only a false grail."
Something inside Lloyd stirred.
His gaze turned dangerous.
"...It's that thing."
"Yes."
Watson smiled approvingly.
"You guessed right."
"Being a detective hasn't been wasted on you. You're smarter than you used to be."
"In the end, a Messiah-class containment object refers to demons with extreme corrosive power—creatures that are nearly impossible to kill. Long ago the Gospel Church called them calamities."
"But later," she continued softly, "the Church discovered a way to kill calamities, didn't they?"
"Just like a frontal lobotomy."
"Cut off all possibility of transmission. Seal them away forever."
She looked at him.
"This is the last calamity. The final demon. The only true Grail."
"Mr. Lloyd Holmes."
"I'm merely a counterfeit."
"And they… are about to crawl out from their forgotten graves."
Her voice echoed like a distant song.
Then everything vanished.
The shattered visions dissolved, and the world reassembled itself.
Lloyd found himself standing behind Arthur's wheelchair.
The yellow warning tape separated him from the furnace.
Cold sweat dripped from the tip of his nose.
He slowly released the wheelchair handle and clenched his fist.
Everything just now had been an illusion.
From the moment he saw the furnace, he had fallen into Watson's hallucination. Her words echoed in his ears like a curse, gnawing at his mind.
"You look unwell, Mr. Holmes," Arthur said with concern. Even witch-hunters felt uneasy in the face of such corruption.
"I think… I understand the reason now."
Lloyd spoke slowly, exhaustion in his voice.
Watson had said his guess was correct.
If he followed that logic, everything made sense.
But the conclusion was chilling.
"I believe this holy silver wasn't forged by Archpriest Lawrence. I should have realized it sooner. When he came here, he carried with him the holy silver accumulated by the Gospel Church over centuries. Even using it to disguise this place wouldn't require much."
Lloyd looked up at the enormous breeding ground.
Lawrence had placed holy silver at key points throughout the terrain, forming something like a protective barrier—locking the effects of erosion inside and minimizing contamination outside, all to evade the Purification Agency's search.
"What do you mean?" Arthur asked uneasily.
"Arthur… do you remember the Sacred Coffin?"
"That thing was a Messiah-class containment object. Within the Church, only demons with overwhelming contamination were given that classification. They were almost impossible to kill—but they could be contained."
"For over a hundred years, the Church captured many such horrors and sealed them away one by one."
"You mean…"
A cold dread crept over Arthur. It felt as though some immense secret lay only a step away.
"The Sacred Coffin," Lloyd said quietly, "was forged entirely from holy silver. Inside it was sealed the last demon—the only Messiah-class containment object the Church never truly solved."
"Our internal codename for it was the Holy Grail."
"It was the thing that caused the Night of Holy Descent."
Lloyd stepped closer to the furnace and stared into its dark depths—the same depths he had seen in the hallucination.
Within the black and silver void lay something like the deepest pit imaginable.
In that abyss countless hands stretched outward—trying to escape, trying to drag others down with them.
He could almost picture the scene.
Flames roared within the furnace, melting the Sacred Coffin piece by piece. The holy inscriptions and relief carvings collapsed under unbearable heat. Pale silver slowly withered away, until at last the unspeakable body inside was revealed.
Twisting.
Struggling.
Embracing the long-forgotten world.
"Archpriest Lawrence melted the Sacred Coffin…"
Lloyd's voice sounded distant.
In the imagined flames a shriveled hand rose slowly from the molten silver, gripping the furnace wall as it dragged itself out—stretching its body freely within the fire.
"So what exactly are you trying to do… Archpriest Lawrence?"
Once a witch-hunter.
And now—
the man who had unleashed the most abhorrent demon of all.