After calming down, the elites of the Sun Shadow church unleashed divine techniques one after another. Facing these divine techniques that carried the aura of extreme heat, even though the group of Awakened Wicked Souls had been obscured thanks to Sarmyte's ability, they still found it difficult to deal with it.
Fortunately, they weren't the main forces.
"Everyone, let us use the divine technique [Sunlight] together on these sinners to cleanse their crimes"
A Cardinal among the group spoke up.
The priests of the Sun Shadow church were capable of jointly casting a divine technique mainly because of how they performed divine techniques, which was creating a brand of Eternal Heat within their souls through faith, causing their souls to continuously approach his existence.
For that reason, the soul structures of the Sun Shadow church's knights and priests were similar in certain parts, which they would be able to take advantage of to perform a joint divine technique.
Some particularly powerful divine techniques couldn't be cast by a single person at all, requiring the joint effort of a few, or even a few dozen priests to perform.
The Cardinal's suggestion was completely reasonable, so 7-8 priests around him joined hands together. Their body contact allowed their souls to reach closer to God, their unwavering faith led them even closer than they normally did, and the damage caused by it was even more serious than normal.
The heads of the priests who joined hands all exploded at once, splattering red and white matter all over the place, even their souls had been destroyed within this sudden explosion. At the same time, the Cardinal who made the suggestion to perform a joint divine technique was also bleeding, but now, his face carried the insanity of wanting to destroy everything.
"Cardinal Ryan, what are you doing?" someone asked in disbelief.
Ryan was an old member of the Sun Shadow church. Many of the church's current priests were taught by him from the beginning, his faith in God had always been firm, so they had no idea why he suddenly betrayed the Church. His faith in God should have protected his soul and made sure that he wouldn't fall under any type of charm.
"I knew it, the so-called Eternal Heat doesn't care about us at all! He is merely a fake God!" Ryan's body couldn't help but tremble continuously, it was unknown whether this was a side effect of his earlier attack, or simply due to his hysteria.
"During the long years, I've accumulated too many questions, but no matter how much I pray, God has never granted me an answer. Eventually, I realized that they were nothing but an especially powerful Evil God, our so-called faith divine techniques were nothing but a variation of the axle rituals" Ryan hysterically explained everything. He now appeared like a crazed idol fan whose delusions had been completely shattered.
All the Churches were the same, always overestimating the importance of their faith. In reality, for Pathway Entities like Eternal Heat, the sheer difference between them and humans made it so that no matter how high or low they assumed their faith to be, it was still an insurmountable distance.
For the majority of believers, this didn't matter at all, but Ryan seemed to have been aided by somebody that made his discerning eyes raise a bit higher than the rest, but not too high. This caused his firm beliefs to be shaken, the fact was that Eternal Heat truly didn't care too much about the faith of humans, so Ryan simply went insane.
Hearing Ryan's words, the Pope's expression became grim. While he understood that there would always be worms and termites in the Church, he didn't think that even someone at the top brass like a Cardinal could also be a termite.
"Your Holiness, I believe…" a knight in red armor standing near the Pope seemed to want to say something.
But before he finished his words, he abruptly aimed his sword towards the Pope and burnt away his entire life force for the sake of one strike. An attack done through burning away one's entire life force wasn't something that could be driven by the grudge of one or two green hats, this was the grudge of dying his entire head in the color green.
"The Church of Dawn sends their regards!" this knight's aura of extreme heat became even more extreme, displaying the solidity of his faith. He was still a devout believer of Eternal Heat, but he also believed that the Sun Shadow church were blasphemers.
When Negary first arrived in this world, he once convinced a knight of the Church called Raymond about this fact, who then aided Negary greatly during his raid on the Lohr church's mountain cathedral. This traitorous knight was not killed during the follow-up pursuit from the Church and instead founded the new Church of Dawn, continuing to worship Eternal Heat.
Thanks to his original background as a knight of the Sun Shadow church, he was easily able to plant members of the new church inside the Sun Shadow church, who went on to even become Divine Guards. It was next to impossible to discern people of a different church with the exact same faith like this, and there were two more knights here who were also members of the Church of Dawn.
The Pope wasn't the most powerful individual in the Church, but having become the Pope, his faith was the most unwavering, and for members of the Church, faith was power.
A shield of divine power manifested from the Pope to stop the knight's attack, but even bigger chaos swiftly ensued as the Cardinal of Lohr and his subordinates suddenly retreated from the battle. For the sake of reformation, this Cardinal had let Negary develop and grow, so after Negary fully matured, this matter had always been his personal nightmare.
Even worse, he discovered later on that the Church and the Impure Hermit Order had actually secretly cooperated with one another, causing him to feel even more doubts about pushing the reformation of the Church.
Not too long ago, someone had also informed him of the details of this ambush, so he had chosen to retreat from this struggle. The Church was no longer the Church that he knew, or rather, he had never actually known the true face of the Church in the first place.
Some other members of the Church had also been informed that the contents of the so-called Decanter of God's Offering were made entirely from the souls of their fellow believers; that the souls of their family members, comrades, and friends that they had fought alongside with, would all return to the Decanter of God's Offering after their death, and not to the divine kingdom of Gods; furthermore, those souls would go on to be treated as fertilizer for the so-called Source Energy fruit. Knowing these truths, their faiths practically fell apart.
In an instant, the overall strength of the Sun Shadow church decreased by a mile. The Pope's expression was filled with sorrow, knowing that there were actually so many traitors in the church caused the Pope's heart to twitch in pain with every beat.
Fortunately, there are still devout supporters of the church.
The Pope took a step back. To his delight, Kunier had raised his sword in front of him to protect his life, while Green and Chromie who respectively led the Guardians and Saint Hunters were also continuing to fight against the Awakened Wicked Souls.
If the entirety of the church's upper brass aside from himself were actually spies and traitors, the Pope might have thought that he was going crazy and his faith would have definitely collapsed. If that was the truth, then what Sun Shadow church would this be? The name might as well be changed to 'Traitor's Church'.
Other people also joined the battle after the initial ambush of the Awakened Wicked Souls. While they had all made sure to conceal themselves, it wasn't difficult to see that they were members of the other Churches.
The Decanter of God's Offering was currently in the Pope's hand, so the target of everyone here was naturally the Pope. He was originally a priest, so while his body was decently strong thanks to years of being nurtured by divine techniques, it was still far from being comparable to a knight.
In this chaotic battlefield, the only source of extreme heat the Pope could feel was from Kunier in front of him. As he was a Divine Guard, the shining extreme heat exuding from his body proved that his faith was unwavering, so the Pope handed the Decanter of God's Offering to Kunier, telling him to take it away while he focused himself on performing divine techniques.
As soon as the Decanter of God's Offering reached his hand, the perfect knight of the Church, Kunier, turned his sword around and stabbed the Pope. The extreme heat exuding from the sword slowly faded away, together with the Pope's heart.
TN: If you haven't noticed, the title is referring to Gin from Detective Conan.
