The Game Difficulty
Is Crazy
Chapter
The day after Glen visited.
Priest Jonas was running frantically through the corridors of the monastery.
His face was clearly full of panic.
“P-P-Priest Jonas? Your knees aren’t even good—where are you running so fast?!”
But Jonas did not even acknowledge the nun.
The old priest’s dash, which had started early in the morning, only stopped when he reached the abbot’s office.
Bang—!
“B-Bishop Romano!”
Romano, the abbot, who had been reading the scriptures with a magnifying glass, lifted his head.
“Brother Jonas. What is the matter so early in the morning? And what is with all that sweat?”
“Huff… huff… haa… I-I ran… from the underground crypt…”
“The underground crypt? At your age, something serious must have happened for you to run all the way here from there.”
Romano tilted his head.
Jonas finally caught his breath.
“Brother Jonas. What about the underground crypt? Did something happen to the wraith we had sealed there?”
Concern deepened on Romano’s face.
He wondered if the wraith imprisoned in the underground crypt had gone on a rampage.
However, the words that came out of Jonas’s mouth were utterly absurd.
“N-No, that’s not it!”
“Then what is the problem—”
“The wraith has disappeared!”
Abbot Romano also lowered his magnifying glass with a shocked expression.
“…What? What did you just say?”
“Just as you heard. Early this morning, while I was cleaning the prayer rooms, I felt something strange coming from the direction of the underground crypt. So I went to check, and…”
“You’re saying the wraith we had sealed there has vanished?”
“Yes.”
Romano looked at Jonas with a disbelieving gaze.
For a moment, he even wondered if the old priest was playing a prank, but Jonas was not that kind of person.
“How could this have happened?”
“Could it be that it failed to withstand the holy power filling the monastery and naturally dissipated?”
Romano shook his head.
“I have never heard of a wraith naturally disappearing.”
“Then are you saying someone personally destroyed the wraith in the underground crypt?”
“That would be the most reasonable conclusion.”
Even so, Romano was not confident.
Only high-ranking priests could destroy a wraith.
‘There is no priest with that level of holy power in the Wordsworth territory.’
Even he himself, the highest-ranking priest in the territory, was not even a 6-star priest.
If there had been a 7-star priest to begin with, the wraith would have been destroyed immediately instead of being sealed.
“Ah, Bishop Romano. Come to think of it, there was something unusual.”
“Something unusual?”
“Yes. There were scratch marks all over the floor and walls of the underground chamber.”
“Scratch… marks?”
Romano’s eyes widened.
“Then that means there were traces of a fight, Brother Jonas?”
“It… seems so.”
Battle marks left where the wraith disappeared.
‘In other words, someone fought the wraith. Could it be…?’
Among the priests of the Papal State, there was only one way to directly battle a wraith.
‘Was an exorcism performed?’
Bishop Romano frowned.
“So, judging from the circumstances, someone performed an exorcism on the wraith in the underground crypt last night, and in the end succeeded in eliminating it?”
Perhaps finding it ridiculous himself, Romano let out a hollow laugh.
An exorcism was a truly reckless method that risked the life of the priest performing it.
From drawing ritual patterns on the floor, to reciting passages from the scriptures, to maintaining ironclad mental focus while chanting incantations—
A single mistake could lead to a fatal accident. It was a ritual so difficult that even high-ranking priests struggled to succeed.
Not only that.
If one simply waited, a high-ranking priest dispatched from the capital would eventually come and eliminate the wraith anyway, so why would anyone go through such needless hardship?
‘Who in their right mind would do something like that?’
Yet someone had gone down into the underground crypt last night and done that insane thing.
And somehow, they had succeeded.
For now, that was the most plausible hypothesis.
“Could it have been done by the trainee priests?”
“That’s impossible.”
Romano shook his head.
Exorcism was a ritual abandoned long ago for the safety of priests.
Aside from himself and the old priest Jonas, no one in this monastery would even know the method.
Jonas let out a low groan.
“Hmmm… Then that means…”
“Yes. It must have been the work of one of the visitors from outside the monastery.”
“But who would know the details of the exorcism ritual…”
“That is something we must find out now.”
Romano closed the scriptures.
“Priest Jonas. Could you bring me the monastery’s visitor log?”
“Yes? Ah, understood.”
Jonas made the sign of the cross and immediately left the abbot’s office.
Left alone, Romano muttered to himself.
“Just whose doing could this be?”
A shadow fell over Romano’s face.
Of course, from the abbot’s perspective, there was nothing to lose—someone had taken care of a troublesome wraith that was not easily dealt with.
However, in order to report properly to the high-ranking priest who would soon be dispatched from the capital, it was necessary to uncover the truth of the incident.
‘Someone who knows about exorcism and successfully carried it out would not be an ordinary priest.’
Imagining the image of such a venerable priest, Romano made the sign of the cross.
At the same time.
Glen skipped the morning training and sat in the middle of his room, regulating his breathing.
Dark circles hung heavily under his eyes.
Since he had returned late at dawn after defeating the wraith, both sleep and stamina were lacking—an entirely natural state.
Even so, he did not feel particularly exhausted.
‘I’m about to weave the second holy ring I’ve been waiting for. Who has time to be tired?’
Of course, despite saying that, Glen fully intended to throw himself onto the bed the moment the work of weaving the second holy ring was finished.
“Inhale… exhale.”
He slowly released the breath he had taken in.
Then he gently closed his eyes.
Soon, the noises from the room, the hallway beyond the door, and outside the window faded away, and silence settled in.
Glen focused his mind.
The holy power filling the left side of his heart began to shine and gather into a single point.
The second holy ring was beginning to form.
