The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

"Woman, man, what's the difference? We've eaten them all!" the Snow Werewolf howled.

Evan's face went dark instantly, and he roared with fury, "Whoever you are — if you've laid so much as a hair on Tina, you're already dead."

Above his head, a pitch-black eye appeared — his newly perfected Death God's Eye. The werewolf who had spoken had only just let out his howl, hadn't even lunged forward yet, when the Death God's Eye had already appeared. He looked up, and his gaze was instantly caught by it. His towering, powerful frame shriveled at once, though his face still carried a smile even as he withered away before their eyes — he himself entirely unaware of what was happening to him.

The other two Snow Werewolves, seeing this, went pale and dared not look at the eye hovering in the air. Howling, they charged at Evan instead, hoping to draw his attention and break his concentration.

The withering, dying werewolf suddenly burst into motion, twisting around and clawing savagely at the werewolf charging toward Evan.

That werewolf hadn't expected his own comrade to turn on him. Caught off guard, he lashed out with a claw of his own; the two shadowy figures grappled for an instant, then broke apart with a crack. The withered werewolf, already ruined, let out a sickening crunch of bone and a scream of agony, both arms snapped. Only then did he come fully to his senses, crying out in a trembling voice, "Demon!"

The Death God's Eye had already vanished from above Evan's head, but a thread of vital essence flowed back through his whole body along with its return. Evan hadn't expected the Death God's Eye he'd developed to carry the ability to steal an enemy's vital essence. He examined the sensation — the amount was tiny, but utterly pure, as if every impurity in the blood-energy had been stripped away, nearly ninety-nine percent of it lost in the process, but what remained was extraordinarily refined, and it meshed perfectly with his own constitution.

This was, by any standard, a technique straight out of the demonic cultivation arts. Evan couldn't help but think of the legends from Earth. A pity the quantity was so small — entering his body, it seemed to light up only a few hundred cells, he thought, a touch regretful.

The trembling werewolf screamed the word "demon" at him. Evan pointed a hand at him coldly — a natural reflex now, an alchemical technique. The snow around them roared into flame, pale blue fire instantly engulfing the werewolf. The snow was decomposing naturally into hydrogen and oxygen and igniting in turn; not only was the snow burning, the water within his own body began to boil as well, forming vast numbers of bubbles within his blood vessels and cells, all a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. His body swelled visibly outward. His scream cut off halfway through — the instant the hydrogen and oxygen fully formed, he was already dead.

His corpse burst apart violently, the massive explosion shredding the clothing of the other two werewolves into ribbons, spattering their white fur with blotches of blood, singeing their coats in the blast until they looked like a pair of beggars. Both threw up their arms to shield their faces, the muscles beneath bulging, but neither was injured.

The instant the blast went off, Evan casually swept a hand, and the snow before him shot upright like a curtain. Amid the roar of the explosion, the wall of snow rippled violently but held, unbroken. When it settled back down, a great crater was left in the ground, black-red earth mixed with blood spread in a scattered circle across the snow. Only the two beggar-like werewolves remained across from him, still in their transformed state.

"I'll ask once more — did you see a woman knight pass through here, along with a large party of knights?" Evan said coldly, an edge of bloodlust in his bearing.

The sight of blood didn't frighten the two werewolves — if anything, it only sharpened their bloodlust. "You're as good as dead, same as those knights. I'll hunt down every last one of you and those knights and chew you up, bones and all."

"You won't get the chance." Hearing this, Evan felt somewhat reassured — it seemed they'd already taken losses at the knights' hands. He had no wish to kill needlessly, but the circumstances left no room for mercy; if he didn't kill them, they'd kill him, and he'd already killed one of their number besides. He wouldn't let the other two go — leaving roots behind only invited trouble later.

Two gray beams shot suddenly from his eyes — his Eyes of Death. At the same instant, Ronaldo moved, drawing the greatsword from his back, feet dancing in quick, short steps, the blade in his hand blazing with white light. With a great shout, a streak of white light cut straight across, aimed at the waist of the other werewolf.

The moment Evan's death rays struck, the werewolf sensed trouble. A pale blue glow rose from his body, forming a wolf-shaped phantom outside himself; the phantom threw back its head and howled, pale blue light gathering toward it from the air, as though summoning some innate power. But the death rays arrived first, and he froze in place. Evan's sword-cane rang out, flashing silver, and in a single stride Evan was already beside him, his rapier driving into the werewolf's belly. The sword's energy erupted, and in an instant every organ inside him was shattered to pulp. No vitality, no regenerative power, however great, could help him now. He let out an agonized scream, a flicker of blue light rising over his body as if trying to mend itself, but it was only a flicker — he collapsed lifeless to the ground.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from NovelFire. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Evan sheathed his blade. By then, Ronaldo had already exchanged three or four blows with the other werewolf; with a single spinning cut, the werewolf's head flew from his shoulders, blood spraying out. The headless body took two more steps forward before crashing down.

"Strange, these Snow Werewolves. What secret is buried in all this?" Ronaldo murmured to himself.

"No telling whether the Snow Werewolves even knew any secret. A pity we didn't leave one alive to ask." Evan glanced at the werewolf's corpse, drew out his wand, then thought better of it and put it away again.

"What, has the werewolf's soul already dissipated?" Ronaldo asked.

"No. I just don't feel like bothering with it. Never mind — let their souls be. I have a feeling that meddling too much with other people's souls might not end well," Evan said mildly.

"The person you're looking for — it's Tina?"

"How did you know?"

"I ran into a woman knight a little over two months ago, who also went by the name Tina. And your pet flower fairy has crossed paths with us before. Besides, Teresa, the one I went to see — she knows Tina too, obviously. What I don't know is what she is to you."

"What she is to me — you could say I'm the one who brought her out of her hometown, with my own hands. I was the one who first taught her swordsmanship," Evan said, still not revealing the true nature of his relationship with Tina.

"I see. How did you know Tina was in danger? I had no idea myself."

"Her adoptive father told me. He and I are friends, and he's also close with our headmaster," Evan said.

"So she really came here. It seems the Curia got word of something — perhaps this is all about the Saint's Skull after all."

"She belongs to the Tulip Guard, and the Tulip Guard is a New Church organization. Would they even have any interest in the Saint's Skull?" Evan asked as he walked.

"Of course they would. Both the New Church and the Old Church are interested in it. The Saint's Skull is what remains of the body of Saint Simon. Among the Twelve Saints, he was the founder of the esoteric Dominion Society. The Dominion Society holds that the divine is the embodiment of light, and that our practice exists to merge with the Holy Light — divinity and self as one, ultimately returning to the divine. His teachings were pushed to the margins in his time, but his profound cultivation and lofty character still earned him a place among the Twelve Saints. The Saint's Skull carries no trace of death's taint — quite the opposite, it's suffused with holy light. If someone is ill and the Saint's Skull is kept near them, they'll be healed. It's said that if a necromancer could ever master the Saint's Skull, he would be transformed by light itself, shedding his nature as a necromancer to become a cleric of the Holy Light," Ronaldo said.

"So that's what it is. No wonder the New Church is so interested. I suspect what the New Church is really after isn't the Saint's Skull's actual power, but its symbolic value. If the New Church secured the Saint's Skull, they'd have a holy relic of their own. No wonder they came here, and no wonder outsiders have no idea what they're actually after," Evan said.

"The Saint's Skull is a relic of the Dominion Society — not the New Church's, and not the Old Church's either," Ronaldo said. "As the last surviving paladin of the Dominion Society, I intend to see it returned to where it belongs."

"You're a paladin of the Dominion Society? Wasn't the Dominion Society declared heretical by the Creationist Church?"

"They're the heretics. They carried out religious persecution. The Dominion Society understood the true knowledge of the divine — we were the genuine voice of god in this world. But the Pope grew jealous of us, Gregory VII most of all. Under his rule, he ruthlessly purged all who dissented — not just the Dominion Society, but many other reclusive sects besides, all fell within the scope of his purges," Ronaldo said, his voice bitter.

"I see. So the Dominion Society's teaching holds that everyone carries both divinity and a demonic nature within them — that even liches, vampires, and werewolves are no exception, and that if they convert and repent sincerely, they too can ascend to heaven. Is that right?" Evan asked, recalling some of what he'd heard about the Dominion Society.

"That's exactly right. All cultivation exists so that one may merge with the divine. Every being yearns for the light; anyone who devoutly believes in the divine will find eternal life within the Holy Light, no matter what sins they carry. That is why the Dominion Society alone carries the true will of the divine. The Maker brought the world into being, and every living thing is his child — he is a loving father, and everything in the universe falls within his dominion. The other gods are nothing more than his emanations, avatars taken on to aid living beings. When the Maker saw spiritual beings fall into the mortal world, it grieved him deeply, and so, to save his children, he poured forth his radiance." A saintly light rose over Ronaldo's face as he spoke, as if a layer of holy radiance had settled over his bald head.

"If that's so, then how did life come to fall in the first place?" Evan asked. He didn't believe in a creator god who had brought the universe into being, though he did believe the world held a great many gods — beings who were simply mortal creatures who had, in the end, ascended to godhood.

"Because when the Maker made life, he granted it free will. Because of that free will, living beings gained the right to choose for themselves, and so some fell. But the Maker never abandoned them, just as a father never stops caring for his child," Ronaldo said.

Religion, as ever, had its own complete and self-consistent logic — no wonder it could so easily beguile the human heart; no wonder so many wise men had devoted themselves to it, building magnificent structures of religion and philosophy in the process. That Ronaldo spoke this way was hardly surprising — he'd been steeped in these teachings since childhood, and the logic of it all did hold together, which was precisely why it had shaped him into the man he was.

Evan only smiled at this. He had no interest in arguing points of belief, so long as no one else's beliefs came to interfere with him.