Chapter 106: Chapter 106: Floor 14: The Saintess And The Succubus Cross

Finn followed the missing men back to their homes while James held the shrine.

The houses told the same story, but the wives did not.

Finn found work tools abandoned mid-task: a plane left in a half-finished cut, boots by the door with the laces still tied, and a meal gone cold and furred over on the table.

None of it looked like a man who had packed, planned, and chosen to leave. It looked like someone had stood up in the middle of his life and walked out.

The strongest clue waited in the home of the most recent man to vanish.

His wife let Finn in because she was too tired to refuse. When he asked whether her husband had received anything from the Saintess, she went quiet before pulling a folded strip of cloth from the pocket of a coat hanging by the door.

The cloth had once been red, but now it had darkened almost to black. Stitched into it, small and neat, was the curved cross from the shrine.

"She gave it to him after a private blessing," the wife said. "He kept it on him after that. And then he changed. He wasn’t the same in the days before he went."

Finn looked at the back door on his way out, where fresh scratch marks scored the wood near the latch. They ran inward, not outward.

A man had grabbed the frame from inside the house and tried not to leave, but he had lost.

The three temporary teammates were restless by the time the group regrouped because the floor had given them a place to search, not an enemy to fight.

"We should open the shrine and search it," the mace user said. "Tear it apart if we have to. The answer is in there."

"And turn the whole village against us with no proof?" the water mage said. "She’s their saint. We break into her shrine, and we become the monsters. That hidden failure condition is probably waiting for exactly that."

"The System gave us an investigation, not a subjugation," the ranger said. "That means there’s a trigger. If we move wrong, we set it off."

Finn let them finish before speaking. "We’re not making enemies of the people before we understand what’s happening to them. That’s how investigations get people killed."

James agreed, but he did not soften the rest. "The shrine is the center of this. Everything we found leads back there. We don’t tear it open yet, but we don’t ignore it either."

The three of them settled, though the unease stayed on them. They were competent enough to understand the risk, but not patient enough to like it.

James and Finn put it together in an empty side room of the inn.

Finn went first. "Missing men were all healthy and working-age. Sick old men and boys got left alone. Every house I got into, the man had a private blessing from her before he vanished, and three different wives used the same line without thinking about it. Peace before service. Word for word." He set the folded cloth on the table between them. "Most recent one had this on him. Her cross. And there were scratch marks on the inside of his back door, pointing in. He didn’t walk out easy. Something pulled him."

James turned the cloth over once and laid out his side. "The statue’s the Floor 5 shape, finished and refined. The cross over the door has the same design, and there are threads running out of it into the walls and floor, the kind of thing I only saw once before, at the corruption source. The shrine runs warmer near men than near women. And she answered nothing I asked. Her prayers aren’t about protecting anyone. They’re about giving yourself up."

Finn was quiet for a moment. "So they’re not wandering off and dying."

"No. The shrine’s choosing them. She marks them with a private blessing, and then they go." James looked at the cloth between them. "Either she’s the one taking them, or she’s preparing them for something underneath all this."

They did not have enough to stand up in the square and call her what she was, not in front of a village that would close ranks around her the instant they tried. So they made the only call the evidence allowed. They would watch the shrine after dark.

That night, the Saintess gathered the village’s remaining men in the shrine square for a public blessing.

It was the strongest thing James had seen on the floor. Dark red candles burned in a ring around the open ground, and the Succubus Cross hung lit above them, and the women and children stood at the edges holding a mix of fear and hope on their faces. The remaining men stood in the center, and they were not all the same. Some looked ashamed to be there. Some looked exhausted past caring. A few looked strangely eager, leaning toward the front of the gathering as if they had been waiting all day for this.

The Saintess moved among them in her ceremonial white, and she touched them as she went, a hand to a forehead, a palm to a shoulder, fingers spread against a chest over the heart. She spoke softly the whole time, about devotion and longing and the reward that waited for those who gave themselves fully, and the village heard comfort in it.

James heard a hand closing around something it had decided to keep.

He watched closely enough to catch what the villagers missed. As her hand left each man, a faint mark surfaced on the skin near the heart or the side of the neck, there for a breath and then gone, the curved shape of the cross pressed into flesh and fading like heat off stone. No one else seemed to see it. He saw enough of it to know it was not a blessing.

Beside him, Finn kept his voice under the candles. "Look at them after she touches them. The shoulders drop. They go calm." He was right. Each man went still and easy after her hand left him, too calm, the calm of someone who had stopped struggling against something.

Then the mace user made a sound low in his throat and took a step toward the square.

He was staring at the Saintess with his mouth slightly open and his weight already shifting forward, and James caught his arm and pulled him back hard before the second step landed. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

The Saintess turned her head.

The blessing ended and the crowd began to break apart, and James and Finn stayed back at the edge of the light where they would not look like a threat.

It did not matter. The Saintess turned toward their position in the dark anyway, unhurried, as if she had known the whole time exactly where the two strangers were standing, and she smiled at them across the emptying square.

Her voice came low, not loud enough for the villagers drifting back to their homes, but clear enough to reach the two of them.

"Strangers should take care," she said, "when they come to a village on a holy night."

Then she turned and climbed the shrine steps, and the doors closed behind her.

James let out a slow breath. The warning had been plain under the softness, and he had heard it, and Finn’s expression said he had heard it the same way.

The mace user stood beside them, shaken, rubbing his face like a man waking up. "I don’t—I don’t know what that was," he said. "I just wanted to get closer. I wasn’t thinking. It was like the thought wasn’t mine."

"It wasn’t," James said. "Don’t go near her alone. Don’t go near her at all, if you can help it."

The man nodded, pale, and did not argue.

Late that night, James was keeping watch from the inn window when the movement started.

A door opened across the lane, and a man stepped out of one of the houses, slow and quiet, barefoot in the mud and dressed in loose sleeping clothes. His face was slack, his eyes open and fixed on nothing ahead.

He did not shiver as he walked through the cold, steady and unhurried, toward the pale stone of the shrine above the rooftops.

James was already moving. He woke Finn with a hand on his shoulder and a finger to his lips, then the two of them slipped out after the man without waking the house or stirring the village.

They kept their distance along the path. The man never looked back or slowed. He reached the shrine doors, lifted one hand, and pressed his palm against the Succubus Cross set into the wood.

The doors opened inward, but no one stood behind them.

Before James and Finn could close the gap, a voice came from the dark interior, soft and pleased and fully awake.

It spoke the man’s name like it had been waiting for him all night.

James tightened his grip on his sword.