When I finally stepped back to the comfortable messiness of my room, my hands weren't trembling anymore, not that it surprised me. My decision meant that I had embraced my role in this mysterious new conflict.

And there was no room for nerves in a conflict.

I turned on the more complicated part of my dilemma. After all, deciding to take an active role in a mysterious conflict was just a direction, and not a plan. I needed a proper strategy for the upcoming strategy.

Unfortunately, real-life conflicts were not like chess, all required information sprawled in front of the player, waiting for the decisions that were only limited by their ingenuity and intelligence. In real life, sides were not equal, neither in power nor in conflict.

Though in my case, said inequality was rather extreme.

So, rather than going to bed, I turned on my computer and started browsing on the news — though not before creating a couple of Virtual Networks that doesn't keep any log, just to be on the safe side.

The fire that I had likely risked my life visiting was a good point to start my search, and almost immediately, I had found a news article on the website of Brightwood Times, the local news agency.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much much.

Today marks another mysterious act by the mysterious cult of Brightwood.

Early evening today, the firemen responded to a routine fire call in the rural area. A routine call, after all, with the collapse of corn prices, more and more of those houses are abandoned, creating a permanent fire risk that the mayor still fails to react.

Unfortunately, soon, they realized it wasn't just an ordinary fire they were dealing with, when their best efforts failed to do anything, and they soon called for help, and even then, the fire continued to burn down more and more…

Until the fire mysteriously vanished.

The medics expected the worst with the number of cars that were outside, but fortunately, there was no sight of any burned bodies in the building.

But that only deepens the mystery.

The experts suggest that the cult had used a petroleum-based chemical accelerator to start the fire. But the experts have denied specifying the type of accelerator to maintain the secrecy of the investigation.

Until now, police managed to identify twenty-three missing people linked to the fire based on the abandoned cars and communications with the family. Unfortunately, police have yet to find any link between those twenty-three people in terms of work, school, or social circle, which continued to leave us in the mystery about the identity of the cult leader.

Regardless of the method and the identity, however, one thing is clear. This mysterious cult had used a deadly fire as some kind of tribute to whatever crazy thing they believed before moving the next step of their nefarious plan.

And I'm afraid it's not just singing a few songs.

I call on the mayor and the police to put the proper focus on that menace before we end up in another famous cult doomsday where hundreds of members are poisoned for whatever crazy tenet they follow.

The missing people …

I skimmed the rest of the article, including the identities and detailed description of the missing people, with several calls to action, begging to the public to come forward with any information they had.

Unfortunately, neither this article, nor the other snippets I was able to find were particularly useful, though at least, it gave me some knowledge baseline.

Some parts of the article were reliable, though its usefulness was rather questionable.

Apparently, the building was abandoned, and was being used as the meeting spot for a new, secretive cult. I would have liked to say I was shocked about the cult aspect, but considering it was the first thing I had come up with to follow my guide's request if that was required, it brought something more similar to chilling realization.

It would have been me that disappeared in a tragic fire if I had followed her harebrained ideas.

The part about no deaths would have been suspicious, but since I had seen the medical teams completely idle during the fire, it was rather clear that they didn't see any sign of life in the building.

However, I doubted it was just as simple as the cult walking away in their own will after the fire started. With the magical nature of the fire, some kind of abduction was the likelier option — and that was if this mysterious Darkness didn't just kill them with a method that left no body.

I ignored the parts about the chemical accelerator, aware that it was the experts reaching for a convincing explanation. Understandable, considering blaming an invisible angel would hardly help their career, especially in a cult-related case — even if that was completely true.

The number of missing people, along with their significantly varied jobs and social classes, was rather interesting, but in that aspect, I was rather limited by the news. And I could hardly go and talk to their families without raising any suspicion about myself — my presence near fire had been dangerous enough.

Unfortunately, the rest of the assumptions and information about the cult was completely useless, because I had no idea whether the journalist actually had any reliable information about the cult and was following it, or just filling the rest based on the attitude of the other cults.

"It's research time," I murmured as I stood up, but this time, to make myself a large cup of coffee. A sleepless night awaited me, and I wanted to be prepared.

I started simple, searching other news about this mysterious Brightwood cult fire, and their other activities.

It turned out to be less than useful, because, in a small city, a mysterious fire and the disappearance of a significant group of people was exactly the kind of news that created a cloud of spectacle, the sheer gossip value killing any chance of me getting useful information.

There were already dozens of articles popping on the web, not to mention thousands of social media posts, covering everything from religious rants to detailed opinion pieces about the ineffectiveness of the mayor's fire policy.

The hundreds of attention seekers claiming to be friends with the missing people, each claiming that particular missing person was the cult leader for various reasons — from occasional mysterious actions to having three dogs that barked too much during the day.

That much inaccurate information was worse than no information.

The theories about the mysterious cult were even more outlandish. Some claimed that it was a witch coven that was going on hundreds of years, some claimed all participants already committed suicide, some claimed they were Satanists, and there were even a couple of them swearing that they had seen aliens picking them up.

The worst part was that I couldn't even use common sense to disqualify any of the standard bullshit of the conspiracy theorist, not when I had an incorporeal angel goading me to build a cult of my own.

Who could say this mysterious Darkness wasn't Lucifer reaching from below, or aliens coming from the sky.

Helpless, I expanded my search terms, hunting for other mentions of cults, in particular about possible mysterious disappearances, across America and the rest of the world.

It went just as horribly as I could have hoped. There were thousands of cults all around the world, from crazy people thinking of themselves as the reincarnation of Elvis, to weird sex rings disguised as ancient cults, and a cursory web search hardly helped me to limit the results.

It was impossible to find anything useful by searching directly. I needed a different approach.

Luckily, my major as a computer engineering student gave me some options.

A quick search later, I had found an open-source code for a rudimentary web crawler to catch and analyze news and social media post. I downloaded it. Of course, there were several tools that worked like that I could purchase, but that would leave a money trail, and until I could understand what I was facing, I prefer to be as untraceable as possible.

Also, the tool itself wasn't too complicated, so modifying it for my needs before adding several keywords such as cults, mysterious fires, and disappearance wouldn't take more than a few hours.

So, I started typing.

Interestingly it took only minutes to finish the program. I wasn't a particularly gifted coder, or interested in programming. Just like my chess career, I had picked my major due to easy employment opportunities rather than skill or passion, therefore, even by studying hard, I was a mediocre student at best.

And Sunset College was hardly an Ivy League institution in terms of competition, which worked excellently to pin my abilities — or lack of it.

I was able to code, but usually, my programs were riddled with logic errors and bugs, requiring a significant cycle of development to make them work compared to my classmates. It was why I had assumed it would take a few hours at best.

However, this time, I managed to run the program after a few quick fixes, while catching and fixing an impressive number of bugs in the process that the original author had left.

A part of it was no doubt my focus. After all, it was nothing like a deadly threat to make people focus. Still, at this point, I was familiar with the sudden improvement in my abilities based on my Traits, though the exact source was harder to pin down.

My best guess was Pattern recognition, especially when it came to catching bugs, probably with some assistance from my newest one, Calculation — and maybe some smattering of assistance from Tactics and Strategy in terms of understanding the general structure, but that part was doubtful.

Regardless of the exact nature of my Traits, however, the program was ready in under half an hour, and after one last click, started working…