Agony.
That is the only thing I could remember as I jerked awake.
My vision did not exist. A blindfold?
Panic.
Panic flooded my mind as I tried to move my arms. Yet they did not respond.
What is going on? Why is my body not responding?
"Hm? Oh, you have awakened. A shame, I did not want you to feel this pain. But, then again, given what you did to those poor girls, I think this is justified."
I felt a chill in my heart as soon as I heard that smooth, magnetic voice.
I knew that voice.
I heard it just before-
Before I was knocked out by an Angel.
'No. No! NO!!'
I started thrashing again, trying to escape from my captor, but the bindings would not budge!
"You are that eager to escape? Unfortunately, you won't be going anywhere until I am done examining your internals. Quite the interesting biology you got there."
Once again, I felt unspeakable agony as something sharp sliced upon some part of my body. I don't know where, my mind is all muddled, and everything hurts.
The pain is too much! I can't endure it!!
I felt my teeth bleed as they bit into whatever restraint this Angel placed within my mouth, and miraculously, I managed to bite through it.
"P-Please, let me go! I don't want to die-"
My words stopped as a scream tore through the air.
Was that my voice? Was I the one screaming? I don't know. The pain is too much! I can't think straight!
I don't know how long the scream resounded in my ears before it was abruptly silenced by agonizing pain coming from my mouth.
Even through my delirious mind, I could instinctively identify the Holy Energy that burned my mouth shut.
This Angel, he forcefully sealed my mouth shut by burning it close.
"Hoh? Interesting. So my theory was right. Your body's true nature is closely related to the evil alignment, and holy damage is significantly amplified against your kind."
I did not want to stay awake for this sick and twisted torture that this Angel was committing on me. I want to go unconscious! I want to die already!
Wait a minute! I know what to do!
I forcefully mobilized the Demonic Energy within me and forced it into the Pawn piece within my heart.
If I detonate the Evil Piece, I can die in the explosion! I will be free-
"[Ultimate Disturb]"
Once again, agony dominated my mind as those words rang out across the tapestry of reality.
I felt my magical resistance and physicality in general, be enhanced far beyond what I could have ever dreamed of, but I could no longer mobilize my Demonic Energy.
"Good. Looks like it worked exactly how I wanted it. I can't have you dying so easily, and neither can I have you attempting suicide like that. So, I made your body stronger so that it can withstand some more experimentation. The downside of this spell is that your ability to mobilize your mana or whatever equivalent you have is now rendered impossible."
Suddenly, despite not having my eyes covered, I could tell that I was being stared at by a burning gaze.
I felt my body shiver in terror as the Angel's calm words rang out in my ears.
"Do you wish for mercy? Weakling? Do you wish for this suffering to end?"
I could not have nodded faster at those words, but my only response was another bout of agony as I felt one of my ribs being forcefully ripped out of my body.
"Unfortunately, I have no mercy to spare for a monster like you."
I felt another rib pulled out of my body.
"Do you remember the screams? Beast? The screams for mercy that your victims called for?"
My right arm's skin was torn away, after which he pulled out the tendons beneath. And yet, I felt a spell take hold of my mind and make me remember exactly what he was speaking about.
"Do you remember how that girl begged you to let her go? How she pleaded to leave her be as you ravaged her before eating her alive?"
Ten days ago. I came across a college student walking home by herself late at night. No other human in sight, and neither that bitch of the Belial seems to be around.
Enchanting black eyes and silky black hair that fell to her well-proportioned back.
A perfect prey to satiate my hunger.
So, I did what i wanted and took her to my nest.
I enjoyed her tender body for a day before I ate her up to fill my belly.
Once again, pain shot through my body as he pulled apart my leg, slowly and carefully extracting my leg bone.
"Do you remember the little boy? The one whose parents are still searching for even now?"
A ten-year-old boy.
I remember him.
It was when I first fled to this town after leaving the underworld behind nearly four months ago.
After I killed my master, my Demonic Energy was going out of control, and my body had just started to deform. So, I was desperate and starving for unpolluted life energy.
That was when I found the boy playing all alone in the park without supervision.
I ate that brat whole and was astonished to find that his lifeforce satiated my hunger for nearly four months, allowing me to sleep without hunger for all that time.
My burnt shut lips tore open as I screamed myself hoarse, as the Angel dug into my back and slowly started to pull on my vertebrae.
Finally, the blindfold fell from my eyes as my body thrashed under the agony.
But I soon came to regret it.
The visage I beheld was beautiful.
Long blond hair tied back into a tail. Beautiful blue eyes that felt like they would pull me in. A charming face that would make anyone swoon, regardless of gender. A divine radiance that would make most humans kneel almost on instinct.
Yet, such a beauty could not hide the burning rage I beheld in his eyes.
The holy energy around him was thin, like wisps of smoke that would coil around a person who had just come out of a hot bath. But this did not fool me one bit.
Because I could feel the colossal weight of his holy energy tightly restrained within his body. It was a testament to his skill and ability that only those tiny strands of energy were leaking from him despite his apocalyptic rage.
A beautiful, melodious voice escaped from his mouth. A voice that could enchant any god or devil and make them do anything he wanted.
Yet, all I felt was terror as that beautiful voice slithered into my ears like a poisonous snake, proclaiming my doom.
"Such an evil being like you has no right to beg for mercy. Mercer the Stray Devil. With your own memories that I have seen as the proof, I hereby proclaim you guilty."
"Your punishment is death."
"[Holy Fire]"
If what I experienced before was agony, then this was so beyond it that I had no words to describe it.
Beautiful white flames danced in the air in such a way that they would mesmerize anyone who beheld them. Yet I felt soul-chilling pain as these holy flames burned me on a conceptual level.
I wanted to scream, curse, beg for mercy, and many more things. Yet, I was denied that as the flames quickly consumed me.
And then, I knew no more.
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(Aetherion POV)
I felt pure disgust as I watched the Stray Devil burn in my Holy Fire spell, his disgusting form reduced to atoms by the pure energy of the spell.
A week. That was all it took for this damned world to show its ugliness to me.
Things were going so well.
I had gone to the Yakuza, convinced them to make me an identity to blend in. Got some money by using the Create Greater Item spell (In hindsight, maybe that is what I should have done from the very beginning instead of stealing from others), and even got myself a rather quaint apartment at the edges of the Town.
However, just as I was getting ready to hunker down and test out my abilities, I was overwhelmed with disgust as a rather weak energy signature washed over me.
It was as if I had smelled something particularly foul, making me gag in reflex while my instincts practically demanded that I annihilate this offensive thing before it spread its filth in the area I lived.
So, it is exactly what I did.
I flew into the air using my hiding spell and came to the source of the smell in a small warehouse nearby.
What I saw inside made my blood boil.
A grotesquely deformed humanoid creature was feasting on the corpse of an elderly man. Given his clothing and the discarded bag nearby, he must have been an employee of the firm that is right across my apartment complex.
The curious thing was that this creature reeked of the same kind of demonic energy as that of the Belial girl that I was observing when I first came to this world.
The only difference was that this creature's energy felt much more corrupt, darker, and evil compared to that of the girl.
I wanted to smite that creature then and there. But given the lack of information that I had on this world, I wanted to know more about this thing before making a decision.
So, in a foolish move that I am still regretting, I activated the spell Retracognition after knocking him out and restraining him.
In the game, this spell allows the user to sneak a peek into their opponent's character setting, their karmic value, their spell repertoire, items, and many other such things. The only downside was that this spell cannot be used on players and monsters that are equal to or above the caster's level.
However, in this world, the spell worked differently.
I saw everything that this creature ever saw. All his knowledge and memories became mine.
And all I felt was absolute disgust, enough to make me consider scrubbing my own soul if that was even possible.
Somehow, I felt tainted by just looking at his memories.
I saw how this monster relished in killing and violating innocent people to satiate his endless hunger, I saw how he felt glee in lording his power over the common people that unwittingly walked into his path.
I saw the monster for what it was.
And I decided to punish it for its actions.
I could have simply ended its life then and there, or maybe even tortured it some more, now that I knew what exactly it was, what its status was in the pecking order of this world, and how exactly I should harm it to prolong its pain.
Yet, I wanted it to experience pain. The same pain that his victims felt. So, I decided to kill two birds with one stone.
So, this creature suffered agony, the payment for his sins, as I used a level 50 Blessed Knife to cut him open and see how his body functioned. A win-win scenario.
And yet, even as his body was reduced to dust, I felt no satisfaction.
Just because he died in agony does not mean that the poor girl he killed would come back home to her devastated parents. Just because he died does not mean that the old woman who was waiting for her husband would find solace. Just because he died does not mean that the innocent child who died at his hands would come back to life.
If their corpses were intact, I could try to use Resurrection magic to see if I could bring them back. But unfortunately, this monster had long since devoured them whole. Even the old man that he was in the process of eating when I stumbled upon him, only had his bottom half and clothes left behind.
I felt it was too cruel to leave parts of his body behind for wild creatures to eat or for the police to find and tell the devastating news to the old woman. So I destroyed his remains and only kept his ID so that I could track down his address later on.
With a sigh, I cast a Tier-1 [Clean] spell to get rid of all the blood and gore, then put away the body parts I harvested from the creature before I left the warehouse and slowly walked towards the cemetery near the edge of the town, right by the pristine Church.
As a player with my Alchemist, Herbalist, and various other crafting classes maxed out, I could always see harvestable resources marked for me within my view as highlighted objects.
But here, I did not see things like that. Instead, I could instinctively tell what things I could use for my crafts and what I could not.
And the body parts that I pulled from the Stray Devil were definitely good materials for Alchemy, even if they are not that high quality.
Soon, I arrived at the graveyard by the church, which was unguarded, showing that people were not really afraid of graverobbers.
Making sure that nobody was around, I used Create Greater Item to make three nameless gravestones and placed them in the ground.
The damned Stray Devil did not even know their names, so I had nothing that I could carve on these headstones. So, I had no choice but to leave them be.
Once again, I spread my senses across the area, making sure that nobody was nearby, before I let go of my disguise.
My wings unfurled as my Halo erupted with pure light above my head, illuminating my surroundings.
Remembering what I once saw in the videos of old, I took a knee and clasped my hands together in a praying motion.
"I do not know how to pray properly or how to say final rites for those who have departed. But if there is a God in this world, I want you to listen to my words. I ask that you guide these unfortunate souls to the afterlife unbothered. I ask you to tell them that I have avenged their unjust deaths. I ask that you prove yourself better than whatever god existed in my world who could not care less about us, and protect these poor people who died so horrifically."
Once again, I reigned in my wings and Halo, returning to my human visage, and bowed down to the three headstones.
"I hope you find peace in whatever afterlife you end up in. As for your families, I will try to find out who they are and try to guide them indirectly to your graves. At the very least, they need to know that you are all in the afterlife."
I know that I would be killing their families emotionally by taking away their last hopes that their children and the old woman's husband would come back safe, but I cannot have these unfortunate people live with false hope for their entire lives.
As someone who once lived with such false hopes, I know how painful it is if such a hope is not nipped in the bud.
"Truly, such a strange world I have found myself in."
I cast my invisibility spell and used Fly to take off, heading straight home.
The knowledge I gained from the Stray Devil is too vast for me to take at face value. I will need some time to contemplate and understand what I received.
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As the otherworldly Angel left the cemetery, he was unaware that wisps of pure holy energy gently curled down from the heavens and tenderly stretched into the ground, exactly where he had placed the graves of the three victims.
The tendrils of holy energy originating from the very system of Heaven, a hidden part of the System that nobody alive knew about, slowly and carefully held onto the three human souls and gently pulled them into the sky, straight into heaven.
Once upon a time, it was said that the Heavenly Father would welcome any lost lamb through the pearly gates of Heaven. That anyone deemed free of sin, those who were deemed innocent, and those who once lost their path only to find it again, would be welcomed into his embrace.
In those days, when the Lord walked among his people, it was common to see the System of Heaven guide the lost souls of people who had died unjustly to the gates of Heaven, welcoming all who chose to follow his teachings.
Yet, after certain events, such was no longer the case.
It had become sadly common for many a soul to simply slip through the net as it were. For those who died unjustly to be left on the mortal plain, doomed to roam around as restless ghosts or wraiths, slaves to accomplished mages or exorcised as evil spirits.
Mortals who were born with weapons and tools that He had created to protect them were either killed before they could bloom or were tempted away from their race by darker beings that lurk in the shadows, all because his children no longer performed their duty as the guardians of the world.
Mortals looked up at the heavens for salvation, a salvation that would never come, for the denizens of the seven heavens had shut themselves away from their charges. With no other choice, the mortal then looks to their fellow men and women of the cloth, only to find darkness lurking within their white robes.
All the while, the Heavenly System, the very thing that the Lord created to prevent all these tragedies, tried and failed to react in time, trying to follow its original programming, yet failing to do so, all because its true wielder, the one who would supply it with his potent Light, was no longer there and in his place was someone who was simply not strong enough to bear such a burden.
But now, after nearly a thousand years since it was last seen, the heavenly system acted on its own once more, piggybacking on the absurdly potent Holy Energy it had felt in this area. Its programming running at full power for the first time in a millennium, as its power was felt across the seven heavens, jolting awake all of the Seraphim who were 'busy' with their own things.
For the first time in a thousand years, the daily prayers and heartfelt pleas of those who follow Heaven's teachings were rewarded.
Lost souls that wander the world were snatched up by the System, guiding them to their destination as it was meant to be.
For a few precious moments, the entire world came alive as the Heavenly System reigned supreme across the territory of what is known as the Abrahamic Faction, spooking many a God and Pantheons that were eying these territories with ill intent.
Unfortunately, just as quickly as it came alive, the System soon reverted back to what it was before, as the small fragments of pure Holy Energy it gathered were spent.
What did all of this mean for the world moving forward? Nobody knew. But one thing was for certain.
Things were finally starting to change, and the future that was once fixed had now become muddled.
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Author Notes: Read 5 chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/Ruijard1