"Will you tell me yourself, or should I find out?"
Faced with Sagres's calm question, the Chief Priest suppressed the fear in his heart and roared, forcing himself to sound brave.
"You... do you know who I am? I am a Chief Priest of the Church! If you dare touch a single hair on my head, the Knights of Holy Fire and the Inquisition will never let you go! You will burn forever in the Holy Fire, and your soul will fall into the bottomless abyss!"
He tried to frighten Sagres with the authority of the Church and the threat of cruel punishment, but his voice trembled uncontrollably from fear and from being tightly restrained.
Sagres listened to the uninspired threat without expression and finally gave a faint nod, as though confirming some trivial matter.
"Understood."
His tone remained flat.
"Then I'll have to do it myself."
As soon as the words left his mouth, he raised his hand and pointed his wand directly at the Chief Priest's forehead.
The Chief Priest's eyes widened in terror.
He tried to turn his head away, but his entire body was tightly wrapped in the carpet, leaving him unable to move even an inch.
He could only watch as the wand drew closer and closer to the space between his brows, like the cold touch of death.
"No... you can't..." he whispered hoarsely, to no avail.
The next moment, the tip of the wand touched his forehead.
Sagres's magic entered his mind like a cold scalpel, forcibly prying apart the Chief Priest's mental defences and probing into every corner of his memories.
The Chief Priest's body suddenly went rigid.
Then he began trembling violently and uncontrollably. His eyes rolled upwards, exposing the whites, while strange gurgling sounds came from his throat.
Veins bulged across his forehead, and cold sweat instantly soaked through his velvet nightgown.
Complex and chaotic fragments of memory surged into Sagres's mind like water from a burst dam.
He saw the village square, where the Chief Priest stood above everyone else and watched indifferently as the villagers accused one another.
He saw Will being burned into charcoal by the Holy Fire, along with the barely concealed satisfaction at the corner of the Chief Priest's mouth.
He saw the man's critical gaze as he selected gold and silver valuables, and the greed hidden beneath the pretext of "purification".
He saw the sordid power struggles within the Church, and how witch hunts were used to eliminate rivals and accumulate wealth.
He saw scattered and one-sided intelligence about the School of Withering, much of it exaggerated through fear, though mixed among it were several suspected locations where the organisation had been active.
Deeper still lay the Chief Priest's darker past: using his clerical status to satisfy personal desires in his youth, eliminating opponents through cruel means, his hunger for a higher position within the Church, and a series of unsavoury methods he had prepared to achieve it.
All of these memories were laid bare before Sagres, like pages in a book filled with hypocrisy and greed.
He quickly filtered out the useful information, paying no attention to the sordid personal details.
A moment later, Sagres withdrew his wand.
The Chief Priest seemed to have lost all strength and spirit.
His head dropped sharply, and his body went limp within the carpet's grip, leaving only faint, unconscious twitching as drool ran uncontrollably from the corner of his mouth.
The light had completely vanished from his eyes, leaving them hollow and vacant. It was obvious that his mind had suffered irreversible damage during the brutal intrusion.
Sagres frowned slightly, not out of sympathy, but to assess the value of the information he had obtained.
"Just like that book. Ninety percent of it is rubbish."
Sagres sounded slightly helpless.
"Not much of value... but Noctis's activities around Durmstrang seem to be larger than I expected. Even the Church has started paying attention. And there are several suspected strongholds of the School of Withering..."
He glanced at the Chief Priest, who had been reduced to a vacant shell, and wasted no more time.
With a wave of his hand, he released the carpet.
The limp body slid to the floor like a discarded rag.
Outside the tent, the camp remained noisy.
The knights were still drinking and carousing, completely unaware that their leader had met a fate worse than death.
Sagres lifted the tent flap and stepped out of the luxurious, soundproofed cage.
The noise of the camp and the heat from the bonfires immediately washed over him, forming a stark contrast with the silence inside the tent.
The moment he appeared, several nearby knights who had been drinking or cleaning their weapons, along with two clerics speaking quietly to one another, noticed him.
The sight of an unfamiliar black-robed figure emerging from the Chief Priest's tent was far too conspicuous.
"Stop! Who are you?!"
One quick-reacting knight suddenly stood, shouting sharply as his hand instinctively reached for the longsword at his waist.
The others immediately became alert as well.
They rose to their feet, hands gripping their sword hilts, and began closing in around Sagres with hostile expressions.
Sagres ignored their reactions. He simply raised the wand in his hand and gave it a casual wave.
The knights, whose longswords were either halfway drawn or already out of their scabbards, were horrified to discover that the weapons in their hands seemed to come alive instantly.
The cold metal twisted and extended like living snakes, no longer rigid weapons but flexible steel cables that wrapped themselves around their owners.
The hilts suddenly lengthened and coiled around the wrists gripping them, while the blades twisted around arms, ankles, and even necks.
The knights struggled in panic, only to find that the restraints formed from their own weapons were astonishingly strong.
Their powerful bodies were helpless against the animated steel.
In the blink of an eye, the knights crashed heavily to the ground like fish thrown onto dry land, writhing and struggling in vain, able only to let out muffled cries.
The clerics were even more terrified.
Just as they were about to chant their spells, the ornate robes they wore suddenly tightened around them.
The garments that symbolised their status became as tough as leather, binding their bodies and restricting their movements.
Even more unnerving was the fact that several crude "hands and feet" made of cloth suddenly sprouted from the hems and sleeves of their robes.
These fabric limbs braced themselves against the ground, awkwardly lifting the screaming clerics as though they were pieces of cargo and carrying them directly towards Sagres.
The accompanying servants and peasants had already scattered and fled the moment Sagres subdued the knights.
By now, not even their shadows could be seen.
The entire camp fell eerily silent.
The prisoners bound in iron chains stared at the scene in stunned disbelief, momentarily forgetting how to react.
Sagres paid no attention to the knights writhing on the ground.
His gaze settled on the two clerics brought before him.
Without saying a word, he raised his wand and pointed it at their foreheads one after another, just as he had done to the Chief Priest.
The brutal mental intrusion began again.
The two men's bodies trembled violently as their eyes rapidly lost focus.
Sagres quickly skimmed through their memories.
Most concerned daily prayers, mission procedures, fear and flattery towards their superiors, and a few rudimentary applications of magic.
As for the School of Withering and any higher-level secrets, they knew very little, even less than the Chief Priest.
A moment later, Sagres withdrew his wand.
The two clerics collapsed as though their bones had been removed, and the fabric limbs casually lowered them to the ground.
Their eyes were vacant, drool running uncontrollably from their mouths as they followed in the Chief Priest's footsteps.
"As expected, they're all insignificant small fry," Sagres muttered to himself.
From their memories, aside from confirming a few scattered details from the Chief Priest's information, he also discovered a common and tragic truth.
A considerable number of these clerics had not joined the Church willingly.
Many of them had been reported or abandoned by terrified families as children because of uncontrollable "bursts of magic".
They had then been taken in by the Church, brainwashed, and trained until they ultimately became tools used to eliminate "heretics" and preserve the Church's rule.
The magic within them was innate, yet they had been taught to use it to persecute others who shared the same origins.
In Sagres's view, the amount of magic within them was almost identical.
The only real difference lay in how much magical knowledge the Church had chosen to teach them.
Since there was no more valuable information to extract, Sagres stopped wasting time on them.
With a casual gesture, the two clerics' bodies twitched slightly as the magic within them was completely drained, becoming nourishment for Sagres's efforts to create new magic.
After finishing, Sagres swept his gaze across the camp.
At last, his eyes settled on the bewildered prisoners who had witnessed everything.
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