SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 52: Conspiracy

The church was empty at this hour except for the three of them.

Kenji sat in the front pew with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded together and his eyes on the altar ahead. The candles along the walls were low. Most of them had been burning since morning and were halfway down now, the wax pooling at the base of each iron holder. The light they gave was warm but thin.

Marcus was two pews back. He had his arms crossed and his legs stretched out in front of him and his head tilted back slightly. Not sleeping. Just waiting. Marcus was good at waiting. He had a patience to him that never looked like patience from the outside.

Aria sat apart from both of them. Off to the right, near the side window. The glass there was old and colored and the light coming through it at this hour put faint blues and golds across her hands where they rested in her lap. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Just sitting with whatever was in her head.

None of them were talking.

They had been summoned and they had come and now they were waiting and the waiting had gone on long enough that the silence between them had moved past awkward.

Then the door at the far end of the chamber opened.

Not the main doors. The smaller one set into the wall behind the altar. The one that nobody used except the senior clergy. It opened without sound and Archbishop Dominus came through it.

He walked slowly. He was dressed in his full vestments which meant this was not informal. The deep red. The gold at the collar. The ring catching the candlelight as he moved. He came around the side of the altar and down the two steps and walked up the center aisle toward them without hurrying.

Aria straightened. Marcus uncrossed his arms and sat forward. Kenji lifted his head and watched him come.

Dominus reached the front of the nave and stood before them. He looked at each of them once. Then he reached into his vestments and produced a folded document and held it at his side without opening it yet.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

His voice carried in the church. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"I will not spend time on introduction or context. You are all aware that the hero Hiroshi was dispatched on a retrieval mission to the eastern district several days ago. To investigate a missing merchant caravan."

He paused.

"What followed was not expected."

He unfolded the document and held it open but didn’t read from it directly. He already knew what it said.

"This report was compiled from two independent sources. A guild operative and a senior watch captain. Neither aware of the other. Both describing the same sequence of events." He looked at them over the paper. "Hiroshi was observed moving through the lower tunnels beneath the eastern district in the company of goblins. Not in conflict with them. Moving alongside them. Cooperating with them."

Marcus said nothing but his eyebrows frown slightly.

"The operative who went in to confirm the report did not return. The watch captain sent four men in after that. Two did not come back. The third and fourth returned and gave their accounts. The third refused to speak further on the matter afterward. The fourth is currently under observation by the church physicians."

Aria’s eyes moved to Dominus. "What did the fourth describe."

"Enough," Dominus said simply. "Enough that our physicians recognized it immediately and enough that I recognized it when they brought me the account this morning."

He folded the document and held it in both hands.

"What they described is consistent with demonic corruption. The behavior. The effect on those who encountered him. The atmosphere of the tunnels in the area he had passed through." He let that sit for a moment. "We have seen corruption before. Not frequently. But the church has documented it thoroughly enough that there is no ambiguity in the pattern."

Kenji spoke for the first time. "How advanced."

Dominus looked at him. "Advanced enough that early intervention is no longer a relevant conversation."

Kenji absorbed that and said nothing more.

"A corrupted hero," Dominus continued, turning slightly so he was addressing all three of them equally, "is not a problem that can be contained or quarantined or treated. You understand this better than anyone. The gift that was given to each of you does not weaken under corruption. It does not disappear. It turns. Everything that made Hiroshi capable and effective as a hero becomes something else entirely under demonic influence. And there is no wall built high enough. No cell strong enough. No chain made from any material that would hold a hero with capability for long enough to matter."

The candles along the wall flickered once as something shifted in the air outside. Then steadied.

"The kingdom cannot absorb a corrupted hero moving freely within it. The damage that could be done in days is not something we recover from easily. Possibly not something we recover from at all depending on how the corruption develops and what it directs him toward."

He looked at them.

"I am not asking you to bring him in. I am not asking you to attempt to reason with him or to look for remnants of who he was before. I am asking you to find him and I am asking you to end this before it becomes something the kingdom cannot survive."

The word he didn’t say sat in the room anyway.

Marcus nodded slowly. One single nod. He was already somewhere else in his head, already working through what this meant practically and what it required.

Aria had her hands pressed together now. She looked at Dominus with an expression that was controlled but not entirely. "And if there is doubt. If we find him and there is doubt."

"There will not be doubt," Dominus said. "Not at this stage. You will know."

"But if there is."

Dominus held her gaze. "Then you come back to me and we speak again. But Aria." He said her name quietly and with weight. "There will not be doubt."

She looked at him for another moment then looked down at her hands.

Dominus turned to Kenji last.

Kenji was already looking at him. Had been looking at him through most of it. His expression gave nothing away the way it never did. But his eyes were doing something that the rest of his face wasn’t.

"I want to be the one," Kenji said.

Dominus studied him for a moment.

"Yes," he said. "I thought you would."

He didn’t say yes or no to it directly. He simply held Kenji’s gaze for a long moment and then gave a single small nod.

Kenji stood up.

Marcus stood a beat after him. He pulled out a folded map already, from inside his jacket, and was looking at the eastern district markings before he had fully risen from the pew.

Aria stood last. She looked at the altar once. At the candles. At the colored light still coming through the old glass window beside where she had been sitting.

Then she turned away from it.

Dominus watched the three of them move toward the main doors. His hands were folded in front of him and his face was composed and still.

"May Soleth be with you," he said.

The doors opened. Cold air moved through the church briefly and the candle flames bent all in the same direction at once.

Then the doors closed and Dominus was alone.

He stood in the quiet for a long time without moving. Then he walked back to the altar slowly and lowered himself to his knees on the stone floor and pressed his hands together and closed his eyes.

He prayed for the soul of a young man he had just sent three people to kill.