Hatred in the Bloodline

Yesael City

Nearly ten thousand monsters had ringed Yesael City, locked in slaughter and fierce battle with the soldiers who guarded it. Light streamed down from the sea's surface into the depths, and corpse after corpse drifted up from the seafloor.

These sinful people had a powerful fighting strength, frenzied and thirsting for blood.

The soldiers on guard were trained, but their lives had been so settled and peaceful that they were no match for monsters come slaughtering out of the Demon Abyss in the deep sea.

Add the monsters' sheer weight of numbers, and the defenders of Yesael City were soon driven back step by step, fleeing from the open water into the city itself.

"Aaah!"

The lord of Yesael City rode their bizarre shrimp at the head of a company of men, fighting the monsters fiercely out on the open water, until at last they were surrounded on every side and struck down by a monster standing more than two meters tall.

Both they and the bizarre shrimp beneath them became food for the monsters.

The lord's own guardsmen shouted, urging their son to flee. "We can't hold it! Yesael City is finished!"

"Go now, tell the King!"

"The descendants of Ense, that defiler of God, they've come back again!"

Terrified out of his wits by the monsters swarming thick above and below the sea far off, the lord's son fled for his life into the distance, while his guardsmen held back the pursuit.

Once the guardsmen had been cut down to the last man, thousands upon thousands of monsters surged toward the city beneath the sea and broke their way inside.

Slaughter descended, and not a soul survived.

Yesael City.

It had fallen.

The monsters took this whole rich stretch of the seafloor, seizing the trilobite men's fishing grounds and everything else.

Beneath the light of the moon, a handful of trilobite men crawled up out of the depths of the sea, wounded over every inch of their bodies.

They scrambled up onto the shore and hurried into the God-Descended City.

Roused from sleep in the dead of night, Yesael walked into the lofty palace to receive the lord's son, himself one of Yesael's own descendants and a scion of the royal bloodline.

He knelt in the great hall, weeping, and the very first words out of his mouth were, "My King, Yesael City... it's gone."

Yesael came to his feet at once, and looked at him, his face grave.

"Gone?"

"What happened to Yesael City? Where is your father?"

Little by little the young man recounted the tragedy that had befallen Yesael City, his voice trembling as he spoke, as though he dared not recall that scene of utter horror.

"My father is dead. Those sinful people ate him alive."

"In the whole of Yesael City, I doubt there's a soul left alive."

"My King, those sinful people God cast out, they've crawled up out of the Demon Abyss beneath the sea again."

Yesael's pupils went wide.

So many years had passed. He had thought he would never again have anything to do with Ense or with Boon, and never imagined they would meet again like this.

The ministers of the Yinsai Kingdom at his side stepped forward at once. "My King, Yesael City must be taken back. It is the most important city we have beneath the sea."

"We still have other cities down in the deep sea, and no small number of towns and villages. Should these sinful people gain a foothold, every one of them stands in danger."

Yesael had no intention of abandoning Yesael City either. But these sinful people were nothing like the people of Yinsai.

The sinful people of the Abyss had been stripped of the higher intelligence God had granted them, and had degenerated into beings like a trilobite, like an ancestral fish, until by blood they scarcely belonged to the trilobite men at all any longer.

Even the Power of the King of Wisdom could do nothing to touch them.

Yesael thought it over for a moment, and settled upon his plan.

"Send several priests with Ruhe Beasts, and take back Yesael City!"

"Drive these sinful people out, and force them back down into the Abyss."

The reappearance of the sinful people had shaken Yesael, and yet to him it hardly counted as any great crisis.

It was only that the whole affair left him with a sense of ill omen.

Not long before, an accident had struck the temple being built for the divine, and even the statue he had carved for the divine with his own hands had come crashing down.

And now the sinful people the divine had once punished had appeared again within the domain of the Yinsai Kingdom, as though the divine were truly sending calamity down upon them.

Several Priests of God rode their bizarre shrimp out across the waves. The one at their head stood instead upon the very head of a Ruhe Beast.

While still a long way off they caught sight of the monsters running rampant through the sea, and a look of contempt came into the eyes of the royal priest who led them.

"Wretched, ugly things. They ought to stay quietly down in the Abyss."

The colossal beast, dozens of meters long, came down upon Yesael City, and terrible tentacles spread hundreds of meters out through the seawater, tentacle after tentacle strangling the monsters, tearing them, running them through.

Within the ocean there was no one at all who could stand against them.

The Ruhe Beast was a mythical being, a dependent of Shelly, the servant of God.

The instant the fusion monster appeared, those who had seized Yesael City fled in terror in every direction, not daring even to look back.

But it did not all end there.

They scattered into the sea, and from then on fled at the very sight of a fusion monster, only to turn and plunder and strike at every village, and even city, that had none standing guard. One or two might hold a single city, but they could never guard so vast a stretch of sea, still less hunt every last one of the monsters down.

What is more, the monsters bred at a ferocious pace, all the more so once they had set foot in the fishing grounds of the Yinsai Kingdom and found food of their own at last.

The more of them were killed, the more there were, while the trilobite men wore themselves ragged simply staying alive.

Across this stretch of sea, the people under Yesael's rule and the descendants of Ense found themselves locked in a confrontation neither had ever expected, one that felt almost like fate itself.

Hatred still spread through their blood, and the killing never let up.

The Royal Palace, God's Cup Flower Garden

By now the indoor garden had become a sea of golden blossoms, planted full of Sun Cups that the High Priest, Schlode, tended with painstaking care.

Schlode waved his hand, and the water in the basin cradled in his arms scattered out across the soil.

This was a power that belonged to a senior priest.

Examining the Sun Cups, Schlode was pricked, quite by accident, by one of their roots.

Hiss!

He let out a cry of pain.

Then he realized that the roots of the Sun Cup were boring into his carapace and into his flesh, as though they meant to work down into that flesh and grow there as one with him.

"Huh?"

A sudden thought struck Schlode. Perhaps the Sun Cup's true use was not merely to breathe in its pollen, but to fuse it with oneself, and so master the power of this creation of God entirely.

Schlode had long since noticed that the Sun Cup was some manner of being, half plant and half animal, and seeing it bore its way into his own flesh only confirmed what he had already suspected.

"A creation of God."

"I knew it couldn't be that simple."

Overcome with excitement, Schlode threw himself at once into studying it further.

He felt that he had not merely become the first senior priest. Perhaps he might yet open up a path for wielding the power of God.

Again and again he tried, using his wisdom ability without pause to reach out and commune with the Sun Cup.

Remarkably, Schlode really did plant the Sun Cup into his own body, until it became a part of him.

BOOM!

The great stone doors swung open, and Schlode strode out from the God's Cup Flower Garden.

His appearance had changed entirely.

Root after root threaded through the cracks in Schlode's carapace and into his body, driving deep into his flesh, reaching into his very organs, until it had fused with him completely.

All of this lay hidden within his body, unseen. On the outside...

At his shoulder, the blossom of a Sun Cup swayed in the wind.

Bizarre, and yet possessed of a curious beauty all the same.

"Divine technique!"

"Realm of Illusion."

Schlode waved his hand, and the Sun Cup jutting from his shoulder came into full flower, scattering golden motes of light across dozens of meters all around.

Anyone who caught the scent of the blossoms fell into the illusion Schlode had woven. His influence reached directly for dozens of meters around him, and not even a priest of God could escape the phantasm he conjured.

This was a strength that could rival even the Ruhe Beast, strength born of another path.

Schlode was wildly excited. He felt he had found the right path.

"So powerful!"

"This power is beyond all measure."

"This, at last, is the true power God has granted us."

But the priest beside him watched Schlode with worry in their eyes. This bizarre form of his looked anything but normal.

"High Priest Schlode, is this truly all right? They are not dead things. They are alive."

"The divine gave us this power, and perhaps this is not how it was meant to be used."

Hearing himself doubted, Schlode at once shot the priest a look of open displeasure.

"Do you presume to guess at God's own will? It is I who received God's revelation, not you."