In the Name of God

Yesael stared at the fallen statue, shaking from head to foot.

He stood at the foot of the stone steps, his fists clenched tight.

"How dare you."

The first words came out barely audible. What followed was a furious roar.

"How dare you defile God!"

The fleeing craftsmen and all who had built the temple were rounded up and dragged back, forced to their knees before the lake to await their grim fate.

All struggle and resistance were futile before Yesael, who bore the Crown of Wisdom.

The foreman of the craftsmen, the very one who had killed the royal with their own hands, looked up at that tall crowned figure and said, with a bitter, broken smile,

"It was your own desires you were feeding, plain and clear, and you did it all in the name of God."

"God is God. You are you."

"King Yesael, it was not we who destroyed the statue of God Yinsai. That was the wrath of God against the King."

They spread both arms wide and turned them up toward the sky.

"My King, do you see it now?"

"God will not have your faith. Raise your temple higher and higher. Lay down the most precious offerings you can find. None of it will turn aside God's rejection of you."

The foreman seemed already to know their own fate and end, and still they cried out their grief and fury at that royal bloodline standing so high above.

"Perhaps we truly are born with sin in us. Desire. Slaughter. Tyranny. That is the original sin, and that is why God drove us out of the paradise He promised."

"Otherwise, why is it that the moment we step out from under God's feet, we fight, and slaughter, and deceive? We walk the road of original sin and never once stop."

"King Redlichia alone was God's true firstborn son. He alone was the true King of Wisdom."

The foreman's words struck Yesael straight through the heart.

Rage and fear held the King. He turned, and fixed them with a look of fury at its very limit.

"Defiler of God."

"I will not kill you."

"God was merciful, and King Redlichia was merciful, and so today I too shall be merciful and let you go."

"But you, and every descendant that comes after you, shall become slaves. Slaves forever."

Kneeling below him, the foreman felt their mind slipping little by little into chaos.

Yesael's words fell like the law of heaven itself, and his Power of the King of Wisdom was a punishment from on high that no being of wisdom could resist.

With all the strength left in their body, they shouted,

"It is you who defile the divine being!"

"It is you, King Yesael."

"You are not fit to wear the Crown of Wisdom. You are not fit to hold King Redlichia's..."

The words broke off before they could finish, cut short all at once.

For the first time, Yesael unleashed the Power of the King of Wisdom across a great multitude. He reached out his hand toward the thousands of trilobite men kneeling before him, and light and shadow came pouring from between his fingers. In an instant the eyes of every one of them turned hollow and empty.

Their very sense of self was twisted at its root, their memories rewritten entire, and one by one they became slaves who could do nothing but obey.

At that same moment, a mark of royal punishment for sin appeared on the bone helmet at each of their brows.

This was the brand of a slave.

The brand would pass down through their bloodline, and generation after generation their descendants would never escape the fate of slavery.

By their own strength they could never erase what the Power of the King of Wisdom had branded upon them.

When Redlichia had first unleashed the Power of the King of Wisdom across a great multitude, it had been in the hope that those who came after might inherit the covenant and the oath he himself had sworn to God.

Yesael, though, had done it only to punish the people who had defied him.

Behind him a noble of the Yinsai Kingdom came forward, fearful and uneasy, and knelt before Yesael to ask, "My King, this... is work on the Sky Temple to go on?"

The fusion monster, once out of control, had destroyed whole sections of the structure. The sacred stone they had spent years searching out lay in ruins, and so did the statue the King himself had carved. On top of that, so many seasoned craftsmen had had their memories and their very will twisted into a slave's.

Finishing on schedule was impossible now, and even four more years might not be enough. Some of the rare treasures, once gone, were not the sort one could simply go down to the seabed and find again.

They were the stores the Yinsai Kingdom had gathered over decades. Once gone, they were gone for good.

Yesael did not so much as glance at them. "Of course it shall be built!"

"And built better than before. Built to perfection."

"This time, not a single mistake shall be permitted."

The noble's body shook all over, and they asked in a quavering voice, "My King, dare I ask when it must be completed?"

The King, who before had been impatience itself, was suddenly no longer so overbearing.

"It shall be completed within ten years."

He paused a moment. "Apart from these slaves, and the craftsmen already conscripted and on their way here, take no more for the time being."

With that, he mounted his fusion monster and turned and walked away, hundreds of guards following close behind him.

Once his fury had spent itself, an intense cold came seeping through Yesael's whole body.

The foreman's words had lodged in his heart like a driven nail. Could all of this truly be God's own wrath?

In his heart he asked himself, asked that heart within him that had always held such devout faith in the divine being.

"God, have I truly done wrong?"

"It is not possible."

"I have faith in God! I make offerings to God!"

"What wrong have I done?"

Yesael stood lost. He did not know whether what he had done was right, or wrong.

He could not understand it. Could it truly be wrong to have faith in the divine being?

Could it truly be wrong to punish those who defiled God?

He was not like his father, who could always be there at God's own feet, receiving God's guidance at every moment.

He had his father Redlichia's strength, and none of his father Redlichia's divine favor.

The Distant Sea

Out of some deep-sea trench came a great host of terrible beings, cutting across the surface of the water and pressing into these seas that belonged to the trilobite men, falling upon the scattered ancestral fish like starving wolves.

They wore insect-like shells, and their long, narrow lower halves were sheathed entirely in a soft carapace, shaped just like a shrimp's tail.

Their upper bodies resembled a trilobite man's own, except that where a trilobite man wore a carapace of bone, theirs was some manner of soft-shelled armor.

Their two arms had lost their nimble hands altogether and become a pair of massive spikes.

Out on the surface of the sea, the people of the Yinsai Kingdom tending the fish herds caught sight of them at last, and stared at the monsters that came rushing out, thick as a shoal.

"Th-th-that..."

A voice broke out shrill with panic. "What in the world is that?"

An old man recognized them at once. "It's the sinful people!"

"The sinful people, the ones the divine punished, they've come surging out of the Demon Abyss!"

They had not fled far before the monsters overtook them.

Those shrimp-tailed lower halves were better suited to darting and gliding through the water.

Arms like spikes ran straight through their chests and killed them on the spot in an instant.

These monsters, ravenous beyond all restraint, devoured the trilobite men where they fell.

The scene was bloody and terrible.

These monsters were none other than the descendants of Ense and Boon of old. Gone was the higher intelligence that belonged to the trilobite men, and nothing was left them but a beast's coordination and instinct. They had no language, and could not speak.

But let the antennae upon their heads so much as touch, and their minds could speak to one another. Thousands upon thousands of the sinful people gathered together, forming something like a single, terrible army of monsters.

At the very first the sinful people had numbered close to a hundred. But over the decades that followed they bred like mad within the Demon Abyss, until their numbers had swollen to nearly ten thousand.

Now the Demon Abyss itself could no longer sustain them, and so they had swarmed forth, surging toward this place.