The Demon Lord's Bride (BL)

After ending the projection call with Ignis, I spent the rest of the morning with Shwa, squeezing his cheeks while checking the communication orb every now and then in case Natha made contact.

Actually, it was more like waiting and wishing for his call together with his son.

Haa...I was holding on to his words, but it was hard to keep calm when anything could happen before the auction. At this point, the auction was not important anymore, but the invitation to the Grand Church.

The priest who conveyed the invitation did not mention the reason why they wanted to invite the Hero--just that the church’s executive wanted to meet him. In a nice, ideal, unsuspecting world, it wouldn’t be weird for a religious leader to desire a meeting with someone chosen by their Goddess.

But, well...this world--and especially that church--was nowhere near ideal.

Since we already decided that Jin should make a request to see the relic no matter what, a conflict was most likely to arise. After all, we had no intention to play nice with the church the moment we saw the last relic. We already knew the church would never auction it for real, so the only thing we could do was snatch the relic the first chance we got.

Of course, the best-case scenario would be the church willingly letting the Hero have the relic, but...why the need to bait with a grand auction in that case? They could just send a priest from the local church in that last auction when they heard the rumor about Jin looking for a relic.

Hell--they could send the aristocrat in Dailamy to talk to Jin instead of sending mercenaries to steal it.

So, no--peaceful cooperation did not seem to be an option here.

Also...honestly? I didn’t want that.

As much as I wanted my friends to stay safe, there was no way I would want a peaceful conclusion with an organization that killed our parents, orchestrated an attack and annihilation of the Druid royal family, was massively racist, and let innocent people die for the greed of their so-called ’devotees’.