CHAPTER 57: EVIDENCE OF HERESY

  The crime scene stank of ozone and cooked meat. High Priest Daieth stepped carefully around an overturned stall, his crimson robes contrasting sharply with the grime. Patrol monks held the perimeter, their silence more oppressive than the ropes they’d used to seal the tunnels.

  He didn’t need to ask where it had happened. The narrative was written on the stone in a language of violence.

  He knelt first by the primary evidence: a dead man. One of the local enforcers, by the look of his cheap leathers. The body was contorted, one arm outstretched as if pointing the way the killer had fled. The story, however, was on the other arm. It was a ruin of charred flesh and self-devouring ink. The punitive Church glyphs tattooed there had not just failed; they had reversed, coiling inwards like snakes eating their own tails. The skin had split, weeping a fluid that glittered with malignant, hybrid energy.

  Daieth’s gloved fingers hovered over the wreckage. His own tattoos, perfectly ordered lines of sacred text, stirred in recognition of the blasphemy.

  “The heretic didn’t create this chaos,” he murmured to the monk shadowing him. “She mirrored his. And amplified it. A perfect, devastating reversal.” His lip curled. “An elegant solution for a brute. But see here?” He indicated the edges of the wound, where the flesh was cauterized in a pattern of interlacing blue and violet. “The energy signature is… fused. Western punishment energy captured by Eastern syntax and redirected. That’s an advanced technique. Unknown here.”

  He stood, his gaze sweeping the scene. His eyes picked out the other clues. Scuff marks where someone had fallen. Probably someone of slight build. Perhaps a child.

  “There was a child?” he asked.

  “A street rat, Your Eminence,” the monk confirmed. “Witnesses say the child fled with a kitten. The enforcer and his partner were chasing her for theft.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “And then the heretic intervened.” Daieth stepped to the wall, examining a tin can that lay there.

  The monk consulted his notes. “After she killed that man there and his partner fled, she inked the kitten and healed it.”

  "After killing a man... she pauses to tattoo a kitten instead of running?" Daieth shook his head.

  "Yes, Your Eminence," the monk said. "The witnesses were too afraid to stop her."

  “Further blasphemy.” Daieth closed his eyes, smelling the lingering metallic tang of spent energy. Beneath the stench of burnt flesh, he caught it. The unique, discordant resonance of Eastern and Western mixed together.

  He opened his eyes. “She ran away after healing the animal?”

  The monk read from the witness report. “No, Your Eminence. She just… walked away. Deeper into the Bazaar. The remaining enforcer ran from her.”

  Daieth nodded. Of course. No flashy escape. She had won. The fight was over. She had business elsewhere. That was more telling than any magical flight. It spoke of a predator who knew these tunnels like it was her territory and feared nothing.

  He turned his attention back to the corpse, his mind weaving the threads. The mirrored, hybrid backlash. The healing of a worthless creature. The calm departure.

  “Not just a murderer and heretic,” Daieth said, his voice cutting through the silence of the tunnel. "A walking heresy." The phrase stirred something.

  The Aira Thane case. Six years ago, a maid had fled the city after murdering her employer. He’d tracked her to the eastern ships and lost her. Could it be the same girl returned now with knowledge of Eastern techniques?

  He looked down the tunnel, towards the deeper dark where Quill and other brokers lurked. That was where she had been headed.

  “She is wounded,” Daieth realized aloud, the pieces clicking. “Such power always has a cost. The fusion is unstable. She is dying.” He smiled with cold certainty. “And if she went deeper into the Bazaar, past the stalls and toward the brokers... she is looking for a cure.”

  He turned to his subordinate. “Triple the watches on all ink dealers, especially the independent brokers. Audit their stock for anomalies. And send a detail to search the warrens for a girl, approximately ten years of age, in possession of a kitten. Bring the girl to me for questioning. Preserve the animal for examination.”

  The child was a thread. The kitten was a sentiment. And the heretic, for all her hardened skill, had just proven she was still vulnerable to both.

  “Every path to salvation in this city leads to me,” Daieth murmured, staring into the gloom where she had disappeared. “I will destroy this corruption.”

  ? Phoenix Flight [Lite LitRPG - Dungeon Diving - Slow Romance] ?

  by RainyLiquid

  Weak to Strong, gathering of powers, skills, and spells.