Chapter 497 — The Aftermath Subsides
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
"Hey, why aren't you saying anything?" Seeing Gao Cen's Shi Che keep silent, Amber of course started babbling again. "No way—don't tell me you actually took it to heart... it's just that you snuck into the city..."
Gao Yang hastily shook his head, flinging out of his mind the whole picture of "a goose babbling away in front of me." He glanced at Amber: "This was an operation of great risk, prone to any number of variables—civilians storming the cathedral of superhumans, even with White Knights and a great many volunteer mercenaries as the vanguard, could too easily spiral out of control. Especially with the suspicious points you mentioned about Fallen Baelang... it was necessary for me to come in person and hold the line against accidents."
Hearing Gaosong's words, Amber was briefly taken aback. Her pointed ears twitched slightly, and a strange smile surfaced on her face: "Really, now..."
"Really what?"
"Nothing," Amber shook her head. "That Fallen Baelang did show something bizarre. Frankly, it was a bit dangerous at the time, but luckily it was only a false alarm—Big Guy, where's that crystal?"
Wright had been standing quietly to one side all this while without a word. Now that Amber called on him, he paid no mind to the nickname she had given him; he stepped forward and took from the container at his side that pale-gold crystal, still giving off a faint glow, as though forged of light itself: "My lord, this is it."
Gao Yang took the crystal with some surprise: "This is... what?"
Amber spread her hands: "Believe it or not, these are the remains of Fallen Baelang... the rest of his body was burned away by the holy light. This is all that's left."
Gao Yang was astonished—how was it that this otherworldly bishop of holy light, after being burned, had left behind a relic like a monk's sarira? Was Fallen Baelang some eminent monk...
But he did not voice his thought. Instead he regarded Amber with a strange expression: "What exactly happened?"
Amber cleared her throat and launched into a vivid account of what she and Wright had experienced: "It was like this. Down below, we found..."
Gao Yang's brows drew slightly together as he listened closely to every detail Amber described. Stripping away the part where this disgrace to elvenkind blew his own horn, he slowly reconstructed in his mind the entire course of the operation that had killed Fallen Baelang.
And then he could not help but feel a touch of emotion at the death of the interim Bishop of Luan.
It seemed Fallen Baelang really had prepared an ambush in the prayer chamber. Somehow he had obtained a bizarre power, and had laid a deadly trap in that room—but he had clearly failed to guess the White Knights' operating procedure: the White Knights skipped straight past the step of "enter the sealed chamber, disarm the mechanisms, engage the enemy" and chose instead to blast the whole chamber before going in. So the ambushing Fallen Baelang, before he could even act, was half blown to death...
Then this half-dead fellow pretended to be striving to resurrect himself in hopes of setting up another ambush, and miscalculated once again—Amber's faith was uncommonly strong, Wright could break the mind-brand himself, and the other White Knights had all received the new church's teachings, men of terrifying resistance to the God of Holy Light. Fallen Baelang's final ripple bought him nothing but emptiness, and then he was thoroughly beaten to death.
Honestly, it was a rather pitiful death. Better to have died in the great cathedral, face to face with the common folk pelting him with stones—at least then he might have made the papers; struck the right pose, and he might even have made the textbooks...
Put that way, it felt even more pitiful.
When Amber finished and Wright had added a few details from the side, Gao Yang gazed at the crystal in his hand and sank into thought.