Paladin 4: Chapter 39 (Patreon)

Darren was unsure of how to approach these foreign gods, but in the end, he decided to simply knock on the door. It worked well enough with Laura, so he might as well try it again.

He rapped three times in quick succession. Unfortunately, by the time he finished his last knock, the door still hadn’t swung open. He stood there for nearly a minute, looking up and down the street, before finally deciding to knock on the door again.

He looked to the guards standing on either side of the door. They were probably meant to stop people like him from walking in, but thanks to his cloak, the two guards didn’t even notice him step right by them to knock on the door. He could deactivate his cloak to let them see him, but he suspected having to deal with guards would only slow them down. He needed to speak to this land’s gods directly if he wanted to buy the Spirit Origin Stone from them, not deal with mortal middlemen for hours on end.

So he ignored them and continued to knock. The door to the ziggurat still didn’t open, and Darren stood awkwardly on the front steps, unsure of what to do. He needed to get in, and he didn’t have time to wait politely on the doorstep.

The door was locked, but that hadn’t stopped Darren in years. No lock had stopped him since he got his Celestial Storm tendrils, and now he had evolved it into Divine Energy Projection he could make the key for any lock no matter where he was.

So he did the same for this lock, and soon the door swung wide, and he stepped into the ziggurat in the center of Marsa.

The ziggurat was supposed to be the center of the local priesthood, and Darren had expected something much like what he was familiar with in the various shrines and temples in the Sacred Seas.

When the doors opened, and he was greeted with incense, dim red lights, and a lot of naked women, he feared he’d stepped into a brothel instead of the temple. He opened the door again and peeked outside just to make sure he was inside the right building.

Shrugging, Darren approached one of the nearby naked women lounging around a pile of incense.

“Where are your gods?” Darren asked the naked woman.

The woman blinked up at him in surprise. “Huh? You’re not a priest. What are you doing in here?”

“Your gods,” Darren repeated. “Where are they?”

The woman’s face turned from surprise to confusion to anger. Her cheeks flushed red, and her lips turned to a frown. “I don’t know where you’re from, but here in Marsa, it’s considered rude to ask a woman if she’s a sinner!”

Now Darren was increasingly confused. It was a very simple question. Why was she getting so flustered?

He was trying to figure out how to rectify the situation when the naked woman turned her nose up at him and huffed.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re here for or what lands you hail from, but things here in Marsa are done differently.”

She stormed off before Darren could either apologize or ask any further questions. He shrugged. He was probably better starting fresh with someone new than antagonizing the oddly flustered naked woman any further.

But luck would have it, the next three people he encountered were also naked women. Some of them carried trays of wine, others biscuits, and still others a variety of goods. As he observed his surroundings, he came to realize that he had interrupted some sort of party.

He asked them the same question he asked the first woman and was greeted with shy, embarrassed blushes or bouts of sudden anger. One girl even started crying. That was when Darren realized he would probably need a different approach.

“D-do you think I’m going to the underworld because of this?” she sniffled and looked up at Darren with teary eyes.

Darren gave the crying young woman a pat on the head. “No. But even if you were, I already killed most of the demons in hell. It is a much nicer place now.”

That stopped her crying but left her very confused. Darren made his escape before she asked for further explanation and left her standing there with a puzzled expression on her face and a few fewer biscuits on her tray.

The priests here in Marsa were certainly freer with their desires than those in the Sacred Seas, that was certain. All those men of the cloth up north tended to be stuffy and reserved. He couldn’t imagine them throwing a party full of naked women right in the middle of the city. It wasn’t really Darren’s type of party, though the biscuits they served were still quite good.

Politely asking the nice ladies to see the nearest god wasn’t proving too effective, so Darren asked for the nearest priest instead. Surely they would know where the local gods were.

The naked women were happy to point him in the right direction for that request. They were using the entrance hall as a sort of lounge to relax their arms a bit after long hours of standing and serving drinks, which was why Darren hadn’t stumbled across any of the priests yet. All he had to do to run into them was continue up the main stairs and head to one of the higher floors.

The ziggurat was a tall structure. From the outside, it looked like a series of balls on a chain stacked on top of one another. A tall winding staircase ran through the center of the tower from the bottom all the way to the top. Darren sensed auras akin to holy adepts on the floors above. There were stronger versions of the same aura higher up, some of which diverged, though not in the directions he was used to. People at the third order in Marsa must have had a different path from the cleric, priestess, and paladin paths he was used to.

He revealed his wings to fly straight to the top. Darren reasoned that whoever was in charge would have a fairly powerful aura. They would know where the gods were.

The stairways were just barely wide enough for him to fly past, and they grew narrower the closer they got to the top. It took a bit of bobbing and weaving as he neared the tallest chamber, but when the stairs ended, the tower widened to reveal a single wide, circular room.

All around him were dozens of the highest-ranking priests in Marsa. They lay about in fine silken robes, being waited on by dozens of naked women just like that downstairs. The priests here were being tended to like pampered lordlings as the naked women massaged their shoulders, kept them cool with paper fans, and fed them plump fruits from their hands. It was the picture of decadence.

Several priests jumped to their feet at Darren’s arrival. More would have, but the bountiful piles of female flesh heaped in their laps prevented them from doing so.

“Who are you? How’d you get up here?” Demanded a priest in brilliant gold-trimmed robes. He seemed like he was in charge. Good.

“I am Darren,” Darren replied.

“How dare you disturb this holy ritual!” The man growled.

Darren looked around. This didn’t look like any sort of ritual he’d ever seen. There wasn’t a single candle, line drawn in salt and blood, or human sacrifice anywhere to be seen.

“Ritual?” Darren asked curiously.

“Yes!” The man in the gold-trimmed robes nodded a little too vigorously. “All these fine young women from the city of Marsa are afflicted with a terrible curse! Only through serving the priesthood can their souls be cleansed!”

“Naked?” Darren asked skeptically.

The man’s cheek’s flushed. “W-well... we... uh... can’t have clothes blocking our ability to see into their souls. Otherwise, how would we possibly know if they have become pure of heart yet?”

Darren was skeptical. He’d always been able to see through clothes when looking at Divine Aura. After all, to do so, he had to peer straight through the skin. Why would peering through clothes be so much different?

He was curious, but he had more important questions to ask.

“Where are your gods?” Darren asked.

The man’s red face grew even more flustered, but Darren had been expecting this after his first few unfortunate encounters with the women downstairs.

“I want to meet them,” Darren clarified, just as the gold-trimmed priest was about to respond.

“Meet our gods?” The priest sneered. “What kind of question is that? If you’re asking to die, we can certainly oblige you. It’s what you deserve for interrupting such an important time to all these beautiful women here.”

He raised his hand, and a sphere of fire appeared in his palm. The sphere grew larger and larger until it was the size of the man’s head. He unleashed, and Darren did nothing to stop the incoming projectile.

It splashed against Darren’s chest and accomplished absolutely nothing. His clothes were unruffled, and his hair was unsinged. It didn’t even force him to blink.

“What? Are you wearing some sort of shielding talisman?” The man snorted. “If you thought that would be enough to let you walk straight to the top of the ziggurat, you were wrong!”

He charged another fireball, and this time the few priests who’d bothered to stop what they were doing and climb to their feet joined him. Some threw lighting, some threw beams of light, and others materialized fist-sized balls of dirt. Out of everything, the dirt did the most damage, since it stuck to his shirt when it struck.

Darren glared at the stain. Cassandra had given him this shirt.

He turned his gaze to the gold-trimmed man and all the other standing priests. Then he activated Fists of Peace. Each of the glowing fists grew until they were as large as a person, and he scattered them among the crowd. Their strength was less concentrated this way, but for a few third-order priests, he didn’t need to do anything particularly fancy.

He forced every standing priest to their knees, including the one dressed in gold.

“Brothers! Stand and fight! This intruder is attacking me!”

Darren looked over the crowd with a fierce glare. “Stay where you are.”

The priests looked between their leader, Darren, and the beautiful naked women that surrounded them. Following their leader’s orders was the last thing on their mind. Not a single one of them rose to their feet.

“Now tell me how to contact your gods,” Darren asked the priest in gold trim.

“Never!” The priest glared at him spitefully. “Are you some sort of foreign god who thinks he can seize control of our city? Ha, don’t make me laugh. His divinity, Lord Sobek will crush you like a frog between his mighty pointed teeth!”

Darren frowned. This was going to be a lot harder than he thought. Perhaps he would even need to test how well his ability to manipulate Divine Aura within a living being would work on a human. But first, he would need to clear out the room.

“All of you women, come to me,” Darren waved them in his direction. “I can purify you instantly.”

The women, skeptical at first, perked up at the news. “Wait, you mean I don’t have to spend months serving the priests to save my soul from eternal torment in the underworld?”

Darren nodded.

Several of them rushed to Darren’s side.

“Wait! Wait!” The gold-trimmed priest said, voice hurried and full of panic. “I’ll talk! I’ll take you to Lord Sobek!”

Darren didn’t feel his purification ability doing anything to these women, but he cast it on the entire room just to be safe. A few items on display around the chamber shifted and changed as he wiped out whatever equivalent there was of Demonic Aura here, but otherwise, they mostly stayed the same.

The man in the gold-trimmed robes was practically in tears as the women joyfully redressed and fled down the stairs to tell their companions the good news. Soon everyone in the entire ziggurat was talking about the foreign god who visited.

Darren wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about that. After all, he wasn't a visiting god. He was only at the fifth order. He didn’t want to lie straight out of the gates. When he was little, he remembered his mother telling him first impressions were important, and from his experiences since he emerged on the surface, he was pretty sure that was true.

But at the same time, explaining that he wasn’t a god, just a mortal man who happened to be about as powerful as one, would probably take longer than just letting the locals think whatever conclusion they’d already come to.

For the sake of speed, he decided to just roll with this and correct their misunderstanding later if he needed to. But he still hoped that he’d be on his way with a lighter Inventory but a Spirit Origin Stone to show for it before the day was up.

When all the naked women in the tower were blessed, purified, dressed, and happily returning home, the sobbing high priest of the ziggurat tried to attack Darren once more, this time with the help of more of his companions. But it was an utterly futile attempt.

“Take me to this Sobek,” Darren insisted.

“...Alright.” The gold trimmed priest pouted.

“Just do me one favor,” the gold-trimmed priest asked as he guided Darren to a circle of stones. “Do not attempt to steal Lord Sobek’s beauties. The last time we felt his rage, we had to spend years rebuilding half the city.”

Darren made a non-committal noise of agreement. He had to purify any more women that he suspected of being cursed. It didn’t cost him anything, so to withhold his aid when it was so cheap to give would be wrong. But he didn’t say that to the priest guiding him, since he was finally being helpful.

They came across a circular platform. Markings adorned the ring of stones, each of them depicting a strange symbol Darren didn’t recognize. He was no scholar, but there were plenty of books in his mother’s bag of holding after she passed. Trapped in the Seven Hells, there was little else to do besides rereading his skill books and what she’d left to him, so he gained a considerable amount of expertise in certain narrow subjects. He’d lacked the context for most of what he read, since besides the ones intended for him, most of his mother’s library pertained to advanced subjects and had few hints to the prerequisite knowledge needed to truly understand them. But he had an excellent memory, so if any of these symbols had been in those books he would have remembered.

“Oh, great Sobek!” the gold-trimmed priest knelt, beckoning Darren to stand in the center of the ring of stones with him. “We beseech entrance to your mighty palace so that we might grace your glorious presence.”

He groveled before the circle of stones on his knees, all the while brushing his hand against them one at a time. He was inserting a bit of that strange combined Divine and Demonic Aura the people of Marsa used, and one by one, the circle of stones lit up.

When the last stone lit, the air above the circle rumbled, and five metallic rings formed in the air above the circle like they had fallen from a great height straight through the tower ceiling.

The world surrounding Darren and the gold-trimmed priest faded away, and they emerged in this Lord Sobek’s Divine Realm.

<Note>

Yes, the priests of Marsa live in a tower that looks like anal beads. And yes, they are fully aware of what their tower looks like. Being a priest in Marsa is a good gig if you can get it.

Also, any resemblance to goa’uld teleportation rings is purely coincidental.