When Gilbert reached the town square, the goblins were already flooding into the town and causing havoc by stealing everything that hadn’t been nailed down. He found the three tribe chiefs and thanked them for the invaluable aid in organizing the distraction. As a repayment, he decided to not say anything about the looting and merely warned them against starting fires. The town was already almost empty, and Gilbert didn’t feel like trying to control the remaining horde while there were still more pressing matters to sort out. For those matters, he gathered three goblins that had stolen sufficiently dangerous tools for the purpose and approached the chapel door with one of the creatures in his hand.

The plan was to throw the goblin at whoever was the closest to the glass orb, hopefully incapacitating them. The other two would work as spare ammunition, if needed. Gilbert pressed his ear against the dark wooden door to listen if there was anything going on inside but couldn’t hear anything over the screeches of the goblin mob around him. “Okay, on three…” He whispered, as if his new comrades would understand a plan as complicated as that. “One… Two… Three!” Gilbert counted and kicked the door open with a yell that could just as well be called a roar.

Between Gilbert’s yell, Yulia’s scream of terror and the excited screeches of the goblins, the chapel suddenly became extremely noisy. The commotion woke up Emilia, who was sleeping away her headache on one of the pews. She joined in on the screaming just to let out some of the agony and slowly hoisted herself up to see what was going on.

“E… Emilia? And Yulia? What on earth are you two doing here?” Gilbert asked and lowered his goblin. “Where are the cultists?!”

“Can you not shout? The echo in here is killing me.” The priestess said and tried standing up, but got struck with a major case of vertigo and gave up on the idea. “I did some converting, they’re over there in the corner.” She groaned and laid back down.

Wondering what she meant, Gilbert went to take a look at the poor sods who had gone against Emilia. On the way he glimpsed at the lamb who had ‘tricked’ him earlier and was now hiding behind the altar, probably scared of his revenge – not that he was going to do anything. Gilbert wasn’t one for grudges and the conversation he had overheard by the dam made it clear exactly how involved Yulia actually was, or rather wasn’t.

In a dark corner of the chapel, three of the cultists were lying in the slime. Two of them, the younger man and woman, were clearly dead; done in by multiple hits with a blunt weapon of some kind, more than likely a certain relic that doubled as a mace and was in the possession of the party’s priestess. The old hag that seemed to be in charge of the cult lied next to them with all four of her limbs broken and blood pouring from her mouth and nose - surprisingly still alive and only unconscious. Gilbert almost felt sorry for her, but not enough to end her suffering quite yet.

“Emilia, are you literally unable to hold back the hitting and the punching?” He asked while trying to get the cultist to wake up by nudging her with his foot. “Does Sylvia now encourage beating up old people too? Should I be worried?”

The priestess groaned in agony again. “They severed my connection to My Lady and are lucky to face my wrath and not hers! Besides, I tried keeping them alive for questioning, but the girl was a mage or something and wouldn’t stop trying to cast crap, the guy was just allergic to maces or something -didn’t even hit him too hard...” She explained without getting up.

“Severed, huh?... Then it’s a miracle they’re still in one piece. We’ll figure out what to do about that once King returns with Anna. First we find the last cultist and break a glass orb, so try to hang in there. I’m not an expert, but all curses I’ve seen have been lifted eventually. After all, Valor has plenty of experts who can help.” Gilbert comforted her. He couldn’t imagine what Emilia was going through in her head, but the withdrawal symptoms were pretty apparent. While poking the cultist, he found himself theorizing about there being a slight blessing to one’s health when they were that close to a god, and the eventual crash back the regular mortal levels when they got separated. Suddenly his train of thought was interrupted by something falling into the water by the altar.

Yulia was on her knees behind the altar, trying to find whatever had fallen in by feeling the floor around herself. When she finally found what she was looking for, she glanced up at Gilbert and started to back off with a scared look in her eyes. Gilbert slowly approached her with his hand out, trying not to scare her, but it probably didn’t help that he was still covered in blood.

“Yulia, I’m not mad at you for tricking me, but you need to give the orb to me.” He explained calmly while cutting off Yulia’s escape route so she couldn’t run outside. “We don’t know what that thing does, so just hand it over before someone gets hurt.”

“Noooo! It’s magic, right? I’ll use it to bring everyone back! Then we can just live happily, like none of this ever happened!” The panicking lamb screamed and kept backing up until she hit a corner. Quickly running out of options, she pointed the orb towards Gilbert. “Don’t come closer or I’ll… I’ll use it on you!”

Gilbert sighed. “I’ve seen the people of this town and trust me, they’re gone. Whatever god has decided to toy with this town is sick down to the core, nothing good will come out from invoking their power.” He said and took a step closer.

Triggered by Yulia’s shaky hands, the orb suddenly began to shine with a bright green hue and started to burn her skin. The lamb screamed as it melted through her hand and fell into the water. As it hit the bottom, the green glow was released into the water as a shockwave of magical energy that spread along the surface at a rapid pace. Gilbert was quick to act and crushed the orb with his mace, but when it had no noticeable effect, he figured it was probably time to bail. After grabbing the still screaming lamb on to one of his shoulders, he sprinted to Emilia, who had gotten up to see what the commotion was about and grabbed her too. As they escaped, Gilbert heard the old crone cackle hysterically for one last time.

The goblins had stopped whatever they were doing to watch the wave of energy travel past them but forgot about is almost as quickly as it had appeared. A few tried catching up to it but were too confused about how it disappeared whenever it hit the walls of the nearby buildings, when in reality the wave simply passed through them and continued spreading on the other side, quickly covering the entire flooded area.

When Gilbert had reached the other side of the town square, and nothing bad had happened, he figured it was okay to stop and see what the burst of energy was about. He placed Yulia on some crates that had been piled next to a small storage building and told Emilia to see what she could do about the injured hand.

The priestess searched her pockets, took out a few rolls of bandage they had liberated from Anton’s camp and started wrapping the first one over Yulia’s mouth to shut her up. The lamb’s hand looked like she had tried to catch a white-hot cannonball that had then burned its way through the flesh and bone, but the weird thing about it was the way the wounds had been closed already. They hadn’t been cauterized shut, but more like melted – something Emilia hadn’t seen before. “At least it’s not bleeding… But in my current, shitty state, I can’t do much about it.” She explained, dug out a small green vial from a pouch on her belt and pulled the cork out with her teeth. “I have no idea if you’re hurting or not, but this oil should make it numb for the rest of the day.” The priestess carefully poured the oil on Yulia’s hand and wrapped it in cloth to make sure she didn’t wipe her face with it.

“Well the goblins aren’t melting, so that’s good.” Gilbert pointed out and turned back to the girls to see if he could help.

Emilia just stared at him, trying to figure out what he was talking about. “The goblins aren’t... what? Why are there so many damn goblins in here anyway? And what happened to you? That’s not your blood, is it?”

“Nay, it’s not mine. We fought meat.” Gilbert explained while helping Emilia get up on the crates.

The priestess grinned wearily. “Meat, huh?... Did you beat it?”

They sat down to keep an eye on the chapel and exchange information about the town while waiting for King and Anastacia to arrive. Gilbert told Emilia about the slime, its effects on flesh and about the new god that was supposedly helping them. In turn Emilia explained what had happened with the cultist and about her state.

An hour passed quickly by trying to get Yulia to calm down. Emilia offered to knock her out, so they could avoid having to deal with it until King and Anastacia returned, but Gilbert didn’t approve the idea. They also sent out a few goblins to gather some food and drink from the tavern, which turned out surprisingly well as they returned with a few bottles of juice, a piece of dried ham and a bundle of carrots – among some inedible items, like bones and candles.

“Should we just check out the chapel? I don’t think anything has happened.” Gilbert suggested. Having finally eaten something, he was eager to get back into action.

The girls were less enthusiastic about it: Emilia was lying down in the crates, trying her best to not throw up while Yulia had suffered a complete breakdown and didn’t react to anything happening around her.

“No? Well you hold the fort here and I’ll take a peek.” He shrugged and wandered off towards the chapel.

One of the goblins messing around in the area was the greyish tribe’s leader. It calmly walked around and gave orders to the smaller ones whenever it ran into them. While definitely not smart compared to other sentient races, it was clearly far calmer and collected than your average goblin – whether this was caused by the goddess or simply by happenstance, it gave a massive advantage to the tribe in terms of survival.

It spotted Emilia and ran over to chat. “You Emula?” It asked and pulled on the priestess’ sleeve.

“What the… I’m Emilia if that’s what you meant.” She said and slowly got up. “What do you want?”

“Tribute for god!” The critter screeched and put out its hand.

“Oh right, the goblin god… Look, I work for Sylvia, so me paying tribute to some other god would be pretty weird.” Emilia tried explaining, but the vacant stare of the goblin made it clear that nothing was getting through. They kept staring at each other until the priestess caved in. “Fine! I can always apologize to My Lady later on. What does this god want?”

“No gold! No treasure! Only things no want!” The goblin listed, excited that it was able to get another gift for their god.

Emilia went through her pockets and only found things she would have liked to keep, even the vial of oil she had just used was made of high quality glass that didn’t dissolve into the contents, so she would like to reuse it later. While emptying the pouches on her belt, she pricked her finger on something and took it out. “This is a disgrace… A priestess giving something to some god that deals with goblins.” She sighed and handed over a shard of metal that had fallen off from her armor while she and King were trying to repair it. There was nothing special about the material, so patching it with any piece of steel would work just fine – though she still wanted to strangle the goblin when it just threw the shard away.

Before she could act on it, they were interrupted by Gilbert, who ran towards them as fast as he could. “GET UP, WE’RE LEAVING!” He shouted and pointed at the gate out of town.

“What? Why?” Emilia asked and carefully dropped down from the crates. It didn’t take long for her to get an answer as the black steeple of the chapel began to crumble to the ground.