PROLOGUE

A Church Too Dark
Bread_and_Wine.

Terra of the Left.

He was in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. It was an oval-shaped park about 240 meters wide with a public fountain a short distance away from its center. Terra sat on the edge of that flowing creation, quietly looking up at the stars overhead.

With few man-made lights in the square, his face wasn’t visible. Only the gentle darkness enveloped his silhouette, operating as a kind of veil.

There came a small splash.

It wasn’t from the fountain.

In Terra’s right hand was a bottle filled with cheap red wine. He didn’t have a drinking glass to accompany it; each time he brought the bottle to his lips, the alcohol contained within made a splashing ripple.

Nonetheless, there was no air of inebriation to him.

If it had been daytime and his face visible, all who saw him would think to themselves, What awful wine that man drinks. He wore the expression of someone working overtime.

“Are you drinking again, Terra?”

He heard a low, masculine voice. He turned his head back to look that way, remaining seated on the fountain’s edge. It was another member of God’s Right Seat—Acqua of the Back. The man wore mainly blue clothing, which resembled a golfing outfit.

Next to him was an old man wrapped in magnificent ceremonial robes.

The Roman Orthodox pope.

He was supposedly the most powerful person in the Vatican, but the two God’s Right Seat members obscured the man’s presence to a mysterious degree.

Terra wiped the red liquid dripping from the corner of his lips with an arm and said, “I am technically replenishing myself, you know. With the blood of God.”

“Bread and wine,” said Acqua. “Just like Mass.”

“My Raphael, the healing of God, signifies earth. The land’s fruits and blessings are the quickest way to replenish my strength.”

He thought he’d answered seriously, but Acqua and the pope both sighed. Each let their eyes drop to Terra’s feet.

Around them were several empty bottles.

After seeing the label on one, Acqua shook his head. “Cheap wine,” he said. “You can’t find wine this cheap even in stores trying to rip off tourists. You could have gotten a slightly better brand if you’d said you were with God’s Right Seat.”

“Please stop it,” said Terra good-naturedly. “I don’t understand the intricacies of wine. It’s only a tool for a ritual, after all. If I asked for more, I’d be insulting real alcoholics.”

After hearing the pair’s exchange, the pope interjected, “…As a mentor to the faithful, though, I would prefer that you abstain from gaudier drink.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t expect you to be criticizing me.” Terra laughed in a low voice. “Wine is only necessary for this ritual. But you, Acqua, don’t need any such thing—yet you seem to know quite a bit about tastes and brands.”

The pope glared at Acqua, who winced slightly. Unlike the other members, he didn’t make light of the pope, for some reason. “A carryover from my days as a mercenary,” the man explained. “One of the battlefield’s necessities.”

“Ha-ha, well, you are a hoodlum, Acqua,” laughed Terra. “A bad boy, unlike the rest of us pious believers.”

The pope grimaced at this casual recommendation of himself. Being lumped together with the man was, perhaps, not something he appreciated.

As if to offset this, the pope took a moment to view the square that could hold three hundred thousand people. “Still…,” he said in the quiet of the night. “Two of God’s Right Seat and even the pope of Roman Orthodoxy outdoors without actual protection…Should we not hold these meetings inside? If security saw us now, they might start foaming at the mouth.”

“I think it’s fine, don’t you? The Croce di Pietro is still in effect,” said Terra, taking a sip of wine and looking up at the night sky. “And just look at how disgusting the sky here is. There are so many barriers colliding and competing that it looks like the aurora up there. It would be hard to magically snipe someone through all that.”

All spells, not just barriers, could be countered and reverse engineered if you solved their formulas. The library of grimoires that Puritanism was so proud about, the Index of Forbidden Books, was the culmination of that idea.

However, the layered barriers protecting the entire nation were intertwined by the Crossist “meanings” held by over 90 percent of the Vatican’s buildings, forming a complex web. Analysis with the Index of Forbidden Books wasn’t an option—even the nation’s highest authority, the pope, could no longer grasp the entirety of it.

One could spend a long time breaking an intricate cipher, but if the password’s pattern changed every second, any old solutions would lose meaning. Not only did the keyhole change shape; the number of keyholes changed, too, making it impossible to create a duplicate key.

Despite the Roman Orthodox Church—the pope first and foremost—no longer having anyone who could enact clear controls over the barriers layered around the Vatican, the shield still brushed off every analysis spell that came knocking.

“In any case,” began Terra.

He put the now-empty wine bottle on the fountain’s edge. That was the last of the cheap booze he’d brought into the sanctuary.

With slow motions, he rose to his feet, straightened his back a little, and said, “Now that I’m done replenishing the blood of God, I suppose I should be on my way.”

Acqua’s eyebrows moved slightly. “You’re using it, then?”

Terra’s lips opened thinly, and he laughed. He could tell from Acqua’s tone of voice that feelings of bitterness swirled inside the man. “You disapprove of using civilians, Acqua?”

“…Bloody battles are better left to the soldiers who thrive on it.”

“Ha-ha,” laughed Terra pleasantly. “A real noble viewpoint. Unfortunately…” He paused. “The Church’s greatest weapon is its numbers. The figure two billion is a big strong point. Begrudging the fact is less natural. Academy City only has 2.3 million in all. Different literally by orders of magnitude.”

“War decided by the quantity of people and goods?” said Acqua. “Barbaric. I feel as though I’m peering into a war of ancient times.”

“The simplest solutions truly haven’t changed at all since back then,” countered Terra, looking up at the sky through the canopy of barriers. Despite having practically drowned himself in wine, his gait didn’t waver in the slightest. “We of God’s Right Seat may be imperfect, but we lead the people with the mystery of those imperfections.”

He spread his hands to the side, stood on one foot, then swiveled around to Acqua.

“Why not let the scared lambs seek guidance where they will? By my shepherd’s hands…just like the children who vanished after the piper.”