Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 395

Chapter 395 – Purged

The Divine Trials were a massive success, in my not so humble opinion. Within a week, the ‘problem children’ in Patriarch, Prophet, and Saint Pete’s religions were either gearing up and traveling to Jerusalem to try and ‘reclaim the holy land from the invader’. However, the three Divine Messengers were not so lenient as to make the call to arms simple, not when this was designed to be a way to purge them from the ranks without damaging their faiths.

One fun bit of a Divine Trial is that the one calling it could invoke conditions upon the one taking the trial. There was a balancing act, there, especially when dealing with mass trials, like they were now. Make the conditions too narrow, and you’re just wasting energy. Make them too wide, and you may get unintended consequences. Try to get clever with them, and you’re guaranteed unintended consequences.

It was the same as with Dungeon Laws. For instance, when Iahab Allah sent his terrorists through my portals to attack, I created a dungeon law disallowing fire and explosions. That had worked to prevent the terrorists from causing trouble, even when Iahab’s tanks entered the fray, since it killed their guns and the tanks’ engines. However, it also killed gas motors throughout Swamptown, and made cooking with anything but an electric stove or microwave impossible.

That law had been too heavy-handed. However, if I’d tried to restrict it more when I made it, disallowing gunfire and suicide vests, then grenades would have still worked, and the tanks would still have been able to move. More importantly, if the System decided that there was a difference between firearms and cannons, then the tanks could still have done a lot of damage, as would anyone with a rocket launcher.

Now, if I’d tried to be clever about things, restricting the Dungeon Law to just Iahab’s monsters and the terrorists? That would have relied on the System’s interpretation of things, which could be incredibly literal at times. After all, as far as the System was concerned, my posting a quest on Atara instead of reaching out to one of my followers directly meant that I was not involved with the whole ‘bringing a dragon to Earth’ thing, and, therefore, not a part of the Divine Trial, so the System wouldn’t impact my faith with how things worked out. As much as I enjoyed using those loopholes, I didn’t much fancy being on the other side of them.

The three divine messengers had worked together to shape the three rules for the Divine Trial. First, everyone who received the call needed to pick up arms and join the fight. Simply sending support through prayer, or even supplying material goods, was not enough. It did not matter whether someone was a Fighter, a Wizard, a Crafter, or a Merchant, all had to pick up a weapon, and put their life on the line, or be stricken from the faith.

Second, they could not enlist the aid of those who did not receive the trial. No hiring mercenaries, or getting government forces to fight alongside them, unless those forces also were part of the trial. The three messengers were very clear about not wanting people to be able to hide behind others, or use wealth or influence to force others to join the fight.

The third, and final, rule was that they had to go to Jerusalem by the swiftest means available, and, once there, begin their attack within twenty-four hours. There would be no delaying as the ‘faithful’ dived dungeons and desperately tried to get stronger. No, they were being thrown into it as soon as possible, and, once they began the attack, there could be no surrender, and no retreat. They either succeeded, and proved their faith, or died. Any who retreated would be stricken from the faith.

The three rules did a good job of walking the line between being so vaguely worded that they relied on System interpretation, which could lead to things either being applied too broadly or too loosely, depending on how the System ruled, and so specifically phrased that they inevitably left loopholes and exceptions in the wording. The three messengers had given those of us on GodNet a look at the rules before they sent out the trials, and, aside from a couple tweaks to the wording from a couple of the Gods of Law from different pantheons, they were widely approved of by the deities of Earth. The mortals receiving the Divine Trials were less enthusiastic, however. Almost as if they hated the idea of risking their own lives instead of sending others off to fight and die in their name.

However, they didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. Even if they wanted to hide, and pretend they didn’t hear the call, that wasn’t an option if they wanted to keep their position in whatever community they had. The System did not make Divine Trials private, after all, since a large point of them was to bring focus to those who were being challenged by their god. If they could just keep quiet and ignore the call without anyone knowing, then it would reduce the power of the Trials.

Worse, for those who tried to avoid their fate, any of the faithful who met them after they failed their Trial would be informed by the System that they were an Apostate and had been cast out of the faith. Which was a problem for them, since doing anything more than ensuring that the Apostates had the bare necessities for survival would put a curse upon the faithful. They could leave food and water out for them, like a dog, but giving them space in their home? Not allowed. Basically, they’d be shunned socially, unless they went to a community that wasn’t part of the religion that they had failed to uphold. For some, death was probably preferable.

Which is why roughly seven hundred million people, give or take a couple million, had set out on the single largest mass-migration in human history. Naturally, the Israelis were the first there, and quickly learned that while their fighters and tanks and bombs were very effective against unarmed Palestinians or the pre-System militaries of the region, they were all but fodder to the dragon. Even their nuclear arsenal was ineffective.

That was something to see, honestly. The wards around the mountain the dragon set up shop in rebuffed the blasts of the weapons themselves, as expected of a shield put up by a Tier 4 spellcaster with the Spellmight title. The boundary of the shield was easy to see, since on one side of the invisible line there were plants, and signs of life, and the air was generally tolerable, whilst on the other was an irradiated landscape, wiped clean of all signs of human habitation.

As might be expected, irradiating the landscape made the task of getting to the mountain to try and attack the dragon far more difficult for the ‘crusaders’. The only two buildings still standing in all of Jerusalem were the System Shop, and the local Adventurers Guild. The System Shop was protected by the System, naturally, so it would take more than nukes to damage it. As for the Guild, it only stood because the building was treated as the ‘outer grounds’ of my Dungeon Annex, like how Swamptown was part of my territory but not truly part of the dungeon. So, everyone inside the Guild building survived the city getting nuked, but there weren’t many of them, since most of the locals had either gotten the Trial, or were caught up in the crossfire during the dragon’s rampages as he responded to the Trialee’s attacks. Either way, there were very few ‘bystanders’ still in the city when the bombs fell.

One month after the Trials were announced, the last taker fell, succumbing to radiation before he even got to the dragon’s doorstep. Seven hundred million or so dead, and another hundred million who had been publicly stricken from their faiths and labeled as Apostates by the System itself. Of those Apostates, I expected that most would leave Earth in the coming months, though whether it was to go to another planet or whatever afterlife awaited them, I had no idea. Either way, they were no longer a problem for the three faiths that had wanted to clean house.

With their faiths cleansed of the worst corruption, Saint Pete and his fellows had a much easier time working on the rest to try and organize the rest. Roughly one-fifth of the post-Initialization population of those faiths had been purged, and that kind of loss, especially when so many of those called out for the Trial were the wealthy and influential members of the faith, and their families? That kind of thing had ripple effects that went beyond mortal comprehension.

It was too soon for any of the mortals to sense it, yet, but all the Gods, Demigods, Divine Messengers, and so on could feel it. That tide of death and faith crystalized the break between the God of the Jews, the God of the Bible, and the God of Islam. The three nascent deities were not fully conscious, yet, but they were getting there. And without the taint of the recently dead, the faiths were coalescing faster than before. Soon, all three ‘brothers’ would wake up.

And it was clear that they would be brothers. Not quite as bad as triplets, but more along the lines of three brothers born in the space of three years. Close enough that they all had some similarities, but they would still be their own beings. Which, honestly, was better than any of us could have hoped from that whole mess.

Of course, one couldn’t ignore the fact that there was now a Tier 4 dragon with very defined ‘appetites’ in a world with mostly Tier 1 and 2 adventurers. That wasn’t something that could be allowed to linger for too long. It was simply bad practice to not clean up after oneself.

I had nominally been put in charge of the cleanup operation. Not because I shouldered any blame or responsibility for what happened, but because I was one of the deities that could best handle the Divine Beast known as the Monkey King, or the Great Sage Equaling Heaven. While I would not call the relationship between myself and Sun Wukong ‘friendly’, there was at least respect there, on both sides. I’d treated him fairly, and with respect, the times we’d met, and he returned that in kind, especially since I never tried to presume I had any authority over him in the slightest.

The hardest part had not been in getting the Monkey King to deliver divine judgement against the dragon, but rather in getting him to wait to take the dragon on. If Sun Wukong had gotten his way, the day the dragon made himself known, he would have descended upon him to challenge the dragon to a battle. Win or lose, that would have caused nothing but problems for the Divine Trials. And that wasn’t acceptable, at all.

Fortunately, the Monkey King reacted positively to my suggestion that allowing those undergoing the Divine Trials to waste themselves against the dragon would enhance his own reputation when he stepped in after and did what they could not. Seeing a dragon fall was impressive, yes. However, seeing that same dragon fall, after they had swept aside millions of people trying to take his head? That was on a whole different level.

Plus, with the area emptied out, there would be none who could try and interfere with his battle, and no worries about collateral damage. The idea of being able to take on a worthy foe, without any need to hold back? Well, the Great Sage was practically bouncing by the time I contacted him to let him have his fun. I, on the other hand, had gotten several other deities together for a watch party, because this was going to be one hell of a show.