Paladin 4: Chapter 28 (Patreon)

Assigning quests to the Protectors was similar to assigning quests to his followers back home, so Darren quickly got the hang of what he needed to do. He copied the quest his sigil gave him and sent it to his Protector’s badge.

“I got the quest! I’m taking it!” said the Protector, ready to wrestle Asuriel over who got to cling to Darren’s arm. She was a lithe cleric-type seraph, slightly taller than Asuriel and with metallic blue hair like the water of the deepest parts of the Sacred Seas.

A message opened up before Darren’s eyes.

Natashiel has accepted your quest to investigate unusual behavior from the ophanim.

“Hey!” Asuriel glared. A moment later, she accepted the quest as well.

Asuriel has accepted your quest.

Still groaning from the earlier sparring, Kilean spoke up. “We’ll accept the quest as well. Looks like a tough one. I guess me and the boys will be out-of-town all week working on it. Too bad, I guess we’ll miss tomorrow’s sparring session...”

Despite his words, he had a smile, like a rat who’d finally found freedom from the cat that had been toying with them.

Kilean has accepted your quest.

Five more messages flashed before Darren’s eyes, and he dismissed all of them.

“Alright, we’re off to do some questing! Bye!” Kilean and his companions limped toward the door as quickly as they could.

“Darren, why do we need all these people?” Asuriel pouted. “We already had a lead, just the two of us.”

“Oh, really?” Natashiel slid between Darren and Asuriel. “Then why don’t we go follow up on it? Just the three of us?”

“I think you’re better off completing the quest yourself...” Asuriel replied with her arms crossed. But Natashiel was already moving her hands.

“Too late! I joined your party, and we’re all in on this quest together. Let’s go!”

Darren shrugged and gave Asuriel a comforting pat on the shoulder, pulling her close.

“It will be better to have more eyes on this,” Darren explained.

Asuriel only pouted for a moment before returning to her usual jubilant self.

“Alright then, Natashiel. But you’re following our lead. After all, the two of us are fifth order officers, and you’re a fourth order recruit.” Asuriel poked the slightly taller seraph in the stomach.

Natashiel smiled, crossing her arms beneath her prodigious breasts. They loomed over Asuriel’s more petite form. “Oh, I’ll certainly be listening to sir Darren here...”

Darren realized he was probably going to play peacemaker, so he grabbed Asuriel and placed her on his shoulder as they headed out the door. Asuriel stuck her tongue out at Natashiel from above as they the Protector’s headquarters.

***

Darren, Asuriel, and Natashiel quickly returned to the node office they’d accidentally set off the alarms. The same seraph was still standing behind the desk she was at last time. She wore the same plain smile on her face and looked for all the world that she hadn’t moved in the slightest in all that time.

“Authorized people only beyond this point,” she said in the same monotone voice she’d used the last time they were here.

“We’re Protectors here completing a quest,” Asuriel explained. This time she had a badge to point to.

The monotone seraph leaned forward and inspected the badge. She froze for a moment, then stepped aside.

“You may proceed.”

Darren and Asuriel shot each other a glance, looking all around them for blaring alarms as they stepped past the invisible threshold that had stopped them last time.

“It’s been a while since I was in one of these,” Natashiel smiled fondly. “Before I was a Protector, I did maintenance for the ophanim nodes. It was a pleasant job, but a lot of the seraphim here are one step away from being ophanim themselves. They’re so monotone and boring. They have no goals or aspirations beyond just getting through another day of work. I needed a little more excitement in my life.”

“Good,” Darren replied. “Then where do we go?”

Bringing Natashiel along with them was a bit of a lucky break because Darren and Asuriel had no idea where to find these ophanim. It turned out that much like the sparring arena, these ophanim were inside a pocket dimension.

Accessing it was easy enough. There was a door nearby, and opening it led into a space of pure white light. At first, they thought nothing was in there, but then Natashiel craned her neck upward.

They followed her gaze and saw the ophanim hovering above them.

It was hazy and blurry, like it was only half present. But the longer they stared at it, the better the image of the creature above them resolved itself. An infant was in the middle, curled in on itself like an unborn fetus. Its eyes were shut tight, and it rotated around itself in the air, drifting sideways and upside down.

That floating infant was the center point for hundreds of rings. These rings drifted around the ophanim, slowly orbiting in gentle loops. There was a pattern to the movements, but with so many rings moving, even Darren’s enhanced mind couldn’t track their path.

The thing before him was even more remarkable when he looked at it with Divine Aura. It was made from human souls, and yet it didn’t resemble a human at all. The seraphim were made of many human souls joined together and speaking in harmony with one voice. But this thing was more like looking upon the discordant voices of a busy city marketplace. There were a thousand voices, all shouting for attention, and the flow of Divine Aura through the air around it was deafening to his trained senses. Though the patterns were simple, there were simply so many of them he couldn’t hope to track them all, let alone how they interacted with one another.

Each of the rims was covered in rows upon rows of crystalline eyes. Flickering like shadows within those eyes, Darren could barely make out human figures. So those had to be the individual souls that made up the ophanim.

“What odd things the ophanim are...” Natashiel sighed. “Thinking, but without mortal care or concerns. Silent, and yet with a thousand voices within them. It’s said that this is the fate of every seraph, eventually. When the dominant will within us can no longer contain all the discordant voices of all the souls that make us up, our minds fade away and leave behind a million voices.”

Darren thought of his mother. Her soul was joined to one of these things. She’d done it to herself in order to keep helping him even after he died.

“Can it ever be undone?” Darren asked. “Can a soul be taken from an ophanim?”

Natashiel shook her head. “One joined. The connections are too great to separate from the outside. Occasionally, an ophanim can become a seraph once again, but they are never the same. Instead, they are born anew with a new mind, body, and personality. I have never heard of the original will manifesting again.”

Darren was silent a moment, eyes studying the whirring, churning mass of Divine Aura. He was looking for something wrong with it. Anything, really. But he didn’t know enough of these things to know when something was wrong or when they were being influenced from afar.

“Hmm... how unfortunate...” Natashiel looked over the ophanim.

“What?” Asuriel demanded. “Don’t leave us in suspense. What do you see?”

“Oh... nothing. It just looks like this ophanim has grown by quite a bit lately. There must have been a tragedy in the human world for so many souls to ascend at once.”

Darren was pretty sure he knew exactly where the tragedy had happened. Odds were, most of the souls Natashiel was looking at came from Whiteguard.

“See the hazy rim right there?” Natashiel pointed toward one of the spinning eye-covered rims. It’s exceptionally blurry, but most of the ophanim is unfocused because it’s integrating the new souls. Normally, this kind of thing can be done quite fast, but when there are enough souls, especially if those souls belong to sigil wielders with a great deal of Divine Aura, they can destabilize and take control of the entire ophanim. We don’t see anything, but there’s probably a struggle for control within that ophanim right now! Fascinating stuff."

Darren’s eyes focused on the mess of Divine Aura. He wasn’t sure how Natashiel could determine anything about such a chaotic mess. Still, if she said something was happening, he believed her.

Originally, he’d believed that Kalaziel was planning to swallow down all the souls from Whiteguard himself and use them to fuel a breakthrough to the seventh order. But if those souls were here instead, then something was happening that he hadn’t quite made sense of.

Quest Completed: Investigate the odd behavior of the ophanim!

New Quest available: Find proof of where these souls came from and how they’re influencing the ophanim!

Darren sucked in a sharp breath. His mother must have thought this was what he needed to see. She would be in a position to know since she was in an ophanim herself. But what exactly did she want him to figure out?

He updated his quest for the Protectors with the new information. It was sent out to Natashiel, Asuriel, and all the others who’d taken it.

“We need to investigate further,” Darren ordered. “We shall check the other ophanim.”

Natashiel jumped to it, and they went through the ophanim’s pocket dimensions one at a time to figure out if they were all experiencing the same effect.

Some seemed normal and healthy to Natashiel and Darren. Others were hazy and battling off the same infiltration of the first. How many of the healthy ones had been taken over completely?

“Well, that is odd. I guess we know why the ophanim have been putting out so much stuff saying Kalaziel is a hero. Prime Saint Horon will want to know about this,” Natashiel said.

“Horon?” Darren remembered that name. Asuriel had mentioned him once when they first met, and he was trying to figure out the politics of the heavens. He was a Prime Saint, just like Ashe and Kalaziel, and according to rumors, he wasn’t too fond of Kalaziel.

“The Prime Saint of Honor, and funnily enough, he never got along with Kalaziel, the Prime Saint of Valor,” Natashiel explained. “I think the fact that their domains are so close is what always leads them to conflict. I’m sure he’ll be interested in anything to do with his rival.”

Darren nodded thoughtfully. This Horon could be a key ally if Darren could get him on his side. “How do we contact Prime Saint Horon?”

Asuriel smiled, clearly thinking the same thing Darren was. “Just keep doing what we’re doing. Horon was the first Protector, and he established the entire order. We’ll show our quest results to Captain Gaviel, and he’ll show it to the other captains. Sooner or later, it will reach Prime Saint Horon’s desk.”

They dove back into their work with renewed resolve and a new plan. Natashiel was the one who figured out the new souls were almost all coming from Whiteguard.

“How strange. There are so many souls from Whiteguard. Is there a war on? I’ve seen nothing on the network. In fact, I don’t think anything has been mentioned about Whiteguard at all...”

Quest Completed: Find proof of where these souls came from and how they’re influencing the ophanim!

Darren ran his fingers across his chin, feigning deep thought. “Perhaps I should make another quest then. One to check in on Whiteguard.”

“Yes!” Asuriel feigned approval. “I think that is a very smart and clever idea, Darren. It is so very weird that there’s not much information on them. If only someone had extensive photographic and video recordings of what’s been happening over the last few days. There’s a start absence on the ophanim network...”

Darren wrote down the new quest and added it to his Protector’s badge.

New Quest Available: Provide an accurate and verifiable account of what has transpired in Whiteguard.

He and Asuriel would take that quest and turn in the information that Asuriel had already gathered. Perhaps Ashe could turn over her recordings to Kilean and his companions to ensure all the sources didn’t come straight from him.

“We’ve found what we were looking for. Let’s go,” Darren replied. The ophanim were a bit eerie, and staying with them too long made him think of his mother’s predicate. He didn’t want to stay here any longer than he had to.

“Yes, this is very troubling...” Natashiel muttered. “I think we should report our findings to the captain. Something bigger than us is afoot.”

“I hate to agree, but I think that’s a good idea,” Asuriel said.

***

Back at the Protector’s headquarters, Captain Gaviel reviewed the information Natashiel provided with a furrowed brow.

“Is this all true?” Captain Gaviel looked up from his interface and stared at the three of them intently.

“I swear by my analysis of the ophanim,” Natashiel replied. “And we weren’t the only ones on this quest. Speak to Kilean and his team. I’m sure they’ve found something troubling as well.”

Captain Gaviel stood. “I’m going to look into this myself, but I fear a heinous crime has been committed right under our noses in this city. Someone is corrupting the ophanim.”

“Not just someone.” Darren left the unspoken name hang in the air.

“I’ve never seen something like this,” Gaviel said. “The question is, where did so many souls come from?”

Darren and Asuriel glanced at one another. A moment later, Gaviel was looking at images of Whiteguard viewed through Asuriel’s eyes.

The captain went pale at the sight of all the dead bodies. “By the heaven above the heavens... where did you get this footage?”

“Whiteguard,” Asuriel replied.

Captain Gaviel sat back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “I’m compiling several quests. If all this is true, it has dire implications on the entirety of the heavens...”

“Not just the heavens,” Darren replied.

Captain Gaviel nodded grimly. “Continue completing quests as you have been. I’ll cover up the results of your recent investigation. If what I fear is happening is truly happening, we shouldn’t play our hand too soon.”

“What will you do?”

“The other captains will send quests of their own, and we’ll see if this is just something isolated to Calabor, or if the issue with the ophanim spreads to the other cities as well.”

“And if it has?” Darren prodded.

Gaviel leaned back in his chair. “If it has, then you may very well have stumbled upon the conspiracy of the ages. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to promote you to high officer for something like this.”