{Chapter: 62: Carla Vs Church! The Edge of Faith and Flame}
Faced with the swift and brutal annihilation of all his loyal followers, Carla didn't even flinch. There wasn't a hint of pity in his crimson eyes, nor any inclination to stop the massacre.
To Carla, sentiment was a luxury. Since the situation was already spiraling beyond recovery, there was no point in interfering. He would simply extract as much benefit from the carnage as possible. A demon's way of thinking was cold, strategic, and always self-serving.
"What is lost can be recycled," Carla muttered under his breath, his voice a low growl that hummed with unearthly resonance.
With a powerful swipe of his hand through the smoky, blood-soaked air, Carla seized the swirling remnants of the recently slain. Pale blue soul flames danced between his fingers as he collected not just the souls of his followers, but also those of the soldiers they had managed to take down with them.
Though the quantity was modest, the quality was high—the souls of knight-level warriors, hardened in battle, brimming with vitality and force. Their spiritual essence pulsed with residual strength, and Carla wasted no time.
With one guttural breath, he devoured them whole.
Their screams echoed faintly in the air, barely audible above the clang of steel and the shouted prayers of the priests. The moment the souls entered her being, Carla activated a racial trait innate to his demonic bloodline—Soul Conversion.
The energy from the consumed spirits surged through his body, targeting the chains of suppression that the world had placed upon her.
Hw could feel it working. The bindings of divine law cracked slightly. His strength, once sealed and suffocated, returned in a trickle—but it was a trickle of pure power.
It was enough.
In that moment, as the blood of her enemies pooled around his hooves and the last cries of the dying faded, Carla made a rough mental calculation of the enemies remaining. Dozens of soldiers encircled him, many bearing arms blessed by the church. Behind them, priests in flowing robes chanted incessantly, their divine mantras prickling against his mind like needles.
Then came the arrows.
One whistled through the air directly toward his skull. Carla didn't blink.
Hw reached up with supernatural speed, caught the arrow mid-flight, and instantly plunged it into the throat of a soldier who had dared to approach too close. The movement was fluid, executed with such speed and precision that it bypassed conscious thought. It was instinct.
Carla had fought for centuries. Wars, massacres, divine purges—none had dulled his combat reflexes. If anything, they had sharpened them into something terrifying.
"Fools," he muttered.
If not for the sacred items these pests were carrying—the blessed blades, the holy water, the scripture-charged talismans—he would have already slaughtered them all. But the divine poison in their weapons burned against his skin like fire. Even glancing blows left marks that sizzled and smoked.
The holy water in particular was infuriating. Useless against mortals, it was a toxin to his kind. Just a few drops could scald through his fur and burn his flesh beneath.
And those damn priests—every syllable they uttered felt like an ice pick driving into his skull.
"Poisonous insects," he growled, swiping at another group of attackers.
A soldier lunged with a gleaming sword coated in sacred oil. Carla twisted his torso, let the blade graze his side—where his flesh hissed in pain—and countered with a savage elbow to the man's face. His helmet cracked; he dropped without a scream.
His magic flared. It rippled off her like heatwaves, his skin crawling with raw, untamed energy.
Unable to bear the irritation any longer, Carla conjured a defensive enchantment. Wind surged around his body, forming a translucent barrier. Dust and blood were blown outward as his new armor took shape—a shell of compressed air, dense and invisible, strong enough to deflect steel and disrupt enchantments.
Then his claws grew.
From each fingertip extended a meter-long blade of condensed air, crackling with barely-contained violence. He stepped forward with deadly grace.
One swing was all it took.
Steel armor cracked like brittle ice. Three soldiers were torn open from neck to thigh, their innards flung like wet confetti across the stone floor. They died gurgling, wide-eyed, torn apart by invisible sabers they couldn't even block.
The survivors paused, trembling.
That moment of hesitation was all Carla needed.
He grinned.
Across the room, Safi, the commanding officer of the church's elite forces, clenched his jaw. He watched the battle unfold with increasing anxiety.
"We're forcing him to take damage with volume, not with skill," Safi muttered. "If this wasn't a confined space, if he had room to maneuver... we'd be slaughtered."
Carla wasn't merely surviving. He was adapting. His power, though still chained, was reawakening. And Safi knew something the others didn't:
If they didn't kill him soon, he would reach a point of no return.
Judging from the current state of the battlefield, it was painfully clear to everyone that while they might be able to eventually wear down and defeat the demon through sheer attrition, the cost in blood and bodies would be unimaginable. Victory, if it came at all, would be the kind that left behind only the ashes of triumph.
Safi stood quietly, eyes narrowing as he surveyed the devastation. The holy warriors had launched volley after volley of attacks, holy water and blessed blades slashing at Carla's hide, and yet the demon still raged, still tore through ranks with claws like wind-carved scythes. They had inflicted wounds, yes, but every blow seemed to invigorate him. Every life lost seemed to feed some hidden furnace within the monster.
The ancient tomes of the Church had warned them of this—clear warnings scrawled in blood and ink across yellowed parchment, warnings that had been passed down through generations of saints and scholars. For demons, death was not a setback. It was sustenance.
"The more they kill, the stronger they become," Safi muttered under his breath, his voice trembling with a mix of awe and horror. "What an evil race..."
His hands clenched into fists, one of them clutching a polished silver badge engraved with the sigil of the Holy Sun. He turned to the leader of the chanting choir nearby—a cadre of clerics in white robes, whose lips moved in perfect harmony as they intoned hymns that shimmered with divine resonance.
"Take this," Safi said, handing the badge over. "Continue the hymns. Do not falter, no matter what happens. Let their voices reach the heavens."
The leader bowed deeply and held the badge reverently before returning to his post, raising his voice in a sacred verse. The glow around the clerics intensified, forming halos of radiant light that pulsed with each syllable they spoke. The very air around them shimmered, as if afraid to stand too close to such purity.
Safi, meanwhile, turned his attention inward. From within the folds of his robes, he retrieved a small, unassuming vial. Its surface was covered in runes that pulsed with a dull red light, ancient and alien. He held it gently, his fingers trembling. His expression grew even more solemn—as if he were holding not just an object, but the weight of hundreds of years of faith.
{Saintess Maya's Ashes}
It was a relic of incredible rarity. The result of sacred rituals carried out over generations. When the most devout saints of the Church passed on, their remains were cremated in the highest sanctums. Their ashes were preserved, prayed over, and infused with blessings for decades. Only once the residue of countless prayers and tears had fused into sacred essence could such a relic be created.
This tiny bottle could spell death for creatures born of shadow and sin.
Safi's hand moved with practiced grace. He drew a ceremonial dagger, its edge sharp enough to part a prayer. He sliced a shallow wound into his palm, letting blood drip into the vial.
The ashes within the bottle stirred. A golden light began to pulse faintly from its mouth. As he murmured an ancient incantation—a mantra known only to bishops and the highest echelons of the faith—the vial responded. The light grew stronger, tendrils of holy fire dancing around it like ribbons.
Golden trails spilled onto the floor and slowly crept outward. The ground began to hum with a strange resonance, and a warmth began to build, not from heat, but from the divine power radiating outwards.
Carla, still reveling in the destruction he wrought, suddenly felt the hair on his neck stand on end. Something was wrong.
His instincts—razor-sharp after surviving a millennium of slaughter—screamed at him. His head snapped around, and his eyes locked onto the bottle in Safi's hands.
"You wretch," Carla snarled, his voice distorted by fury. "You dare!"
Without hesitation, the demon conjured a translucent orb, condensed from raw wind and condensed hatred. With a roar, he hurled it straight at Safi, its force compressing the air like a thunderclap.
A squad of priests rushed to intercept the incoming death, robes fluttering like wings. But devotion alone was no shield.
The orb ripped through them like a scythe through grain. Blood spiraled in the air, painting the altar in arcs of crimson. Their bodies were torn apart, their sacrifice lasting only seconds.
"BANG!"
The blast struck a golden barrier that shimmered into existence a heartbeat before it hit Safi. It held—barely. The shockwave from the impact surged outward, uprooting earth, shattering weapons, and hurling armored soldiers like dolls in a tempest.
The wailing wind was deafening. Bones snapped. Helmets caved in. Flesh split. Soldiers who had been standing shoulder to shoulder were now scattered like leaves, many never rising again.
When the dust cleared, only Safi remained standing—his figure surrounded by a slowly fading aura of divine light. The rest were gone, their bodies reduced to silent reminders of their devotion.
Blood dripped from Safi's ears. His knees threatened to buckle. But his eyes were clear.
He whispered the final words of the sacred mantra.
The vial shattered in his hand.
Not with an explosion, but with grace.
Golden dust rose from the shards, flowing upward like smoke. It whispered through the air like wind-borne prayers, weaving and dancing until it coalesced into a stream of light. That light, gentle and unwavering, flowed toward Carla.
He knew in his mind that it was impossible to dodge this kind of attack, and if he resisted it, at least half of his life would be lost.
The demon's face twisted in horror.
He could feel it. This wasn't merely a weapon. It was judgement.
Death.
"Damn you all!" he roared.
Realizing there was no escape, Carla roared and poured every ounce of his essence into one final, desperate counterattack. He formed a spear of raw magic, a weapon wrapped in cyclones and arcs of crimson energy, and hurled it directly into the approaching light.
There was no sound when the two forces met.
No explosion. No clash.
The holy ashes simply passed through.
The spear, magnificent and violent, dissolved like fog in sunlight. The power of [Saintess Maya's Ashes] penetrated into the spear transformed by Carla's own magic, as cleanly as a hot knife cutting butter.
Although Carla's power is essentially far superior to the extraordinary power in this world, he has been weakened in many ways. When facing the holy relics that the church spent a huge price and decades to create, he is inevitably at a disadvantage.
Holy and evil—two forces that could not coexist. Like day and night, light and shadow, they were bound to repel one another, locked in a never-ending struggle to erase the other.
One purifies. The other corrupts.
One heals. The other rots.
Yet neither is inherently stronger or weaker. They are equal in their extremity, their balance only disrupted when fate tips the scale.
When holy power surges and finds darkness, it does not simply harm—it sears, it annihilates.
When evil seeps into sanctity, it festers, taints, and corrupts what was once pure.
So, when Carla found himself on the wrong end of [Saintess Maya's Ashes], a weapon crafted from the sacred remains of a martyr revered by the Radiant Church, he understood, too late, that this battle had already been lost before it began.
His face, once full of fighting spirit and confidence, twisted into shock and dread.
The moment his spear—formed entirely of demonic mana—made contact with the ashes, a sharp jolt surged through it. The weapon, unable to resist, became the conduit, channeling the holy essence directly into his body. He barely had time to react.
The consequence was immediate and catastrophic.
The arm that gripped the spear was the first to feel it. Her fur blackened and peeled away like wet parchment under flame. Skin bubbled, then melted. Muscle turned to slush. Sinew snapped like violin strings. Bone cracked and buckled under a force that didn't strike—it unmade.