Bella wasn't sure if this counted as shooting herself in the foot. She didn't particularly care about expending a bit of psionic energy, though.
"Fine, I'll handle it myself!"
Psionic-driven lightning erupted in a cone toward the chair. The veiled figure was pierced through multiple times, the stone chair itself shattered, and the last wisp of life energy vanished in an instant.
Bella used her staff to flip the black veil aside. Beneath the fabric lay an old woman who had been dead for years.
Shriveled skin. Every tooth gone. Her eye sockets were two dark voids.
The old woman looked like a dried-out mummy—impossible to say how long she'd been dead.
"Cheap parlor tricks!"
Bella called out to Castiel, and the two continued deeper inside.
The nave, two side chapels, the nuns' dormitory, a prayer room, a kitchen—the monastery wasn't large, and its layout was straightforward.
Bella swept the first floor, then went up to the second. Finding no sign of the enemy, she returned to the ground level.
"There." Castiel pushed open a door in a concealed alcove, revealing a straight, narrow path beyond.
A brick walkway barely a meter wide, its flanks bristling with wooden crosses packed so densely they formed walls.
A tidal wave of malice surged out the instant the door opened. Bella stood at the threshold, cautious.
This evil felt tangible, almost physical. The only thing she could compare it to was the yellow-eyed demon who'd strung Barbara up from the ceiling not long ago.
She'd been in terrible shape back then and had chosen to retreat. Today, she had no intention of taking point either.
She turned to the angel. "Look, buddy—by human standards, this is where you step up and show some gentlemanly spirit. As a man, you should go in first and take a look."
She said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
The angel didn't follow her logic. "Man? Woman? I should go in first at a time like this? Shouldn't we go in together?"
Bella shook her head so fast it blurred. "Going in together means we both get taken down together. Under the current circumstances, I believe you leading the way is the better option."
"Very well."
The angel didn't know what fear was. He strode in without a second thought.
Malice saturated the corridor. The temperature plummeted. The deeper they went, the heavier the ground-hugging white mist became, thick enough to seem solid.
Bella ran her hand along the wall. Ordinary-looking brickwork was steeped in a coppery stench of blood, impossible to dispel. They reached a wooden door where someone had gouged words into the bolt with a blade: GOD ENDS HERE.
"This is blasphemy!" For once, a flicker of displeasure crossed the angel's face. He pulled the door open and went in first, Bella five meters behind.
Even in the pitch-dark room, Bella didn't activate the Light spell on her staff. She was focusing on suppressing her own presence.
No time to set the battlefield—she'd let the angel test the enemy's mettle, then decide which spells to use.
Castiel had no concept of subtlety. The surrounding darkness made him deeply uncomfortable, and he released his own radiance. Light bloomed outward from him—one meter, two meters, three. Aside from his own shadow, darkness had been banished from nearly half the room.
"Watch out! Behind you!" Bella shouted.
A split second later, a tall, horrifying figure erupted from the angel's shadow.
Nearly six feet three, draped in a traditional nun's black habit and coif, the dark shape extended two skeletal hands and clamped them around Castiel's throat.
By the light radiating from the angel's body, Bella could make out the nun's attire—normal enough. The face was not. Iron-grey skin stretched taut over the skull. Murky yellow eyes gleamed with malevolence. The jaw gaped open to reveal blood-red gums lined with fangs like rows of blades.
This was a malevolent spirit dressed as a nun.
Bella still didn't intervene. She wanted to see what the angel could do.
He'd gone on about holy magic, banishment, holy weapons—a whole arsenal of solutions. Time to put them to use.
Not only did she refuse to help, she cheered from the sidelines. "Come on, Castiel! Use your holy magic to destroy this demon! You can alter other people's fates, right? Use that! Send this thing back where it came from!"
Castiel pressed his right palm against the ghost nun's face. Bella watched closely. Nothing happened.
"No good. I can't interfere with her fate."
"Then try something else!"
"She can't be banished!"
"How about one of your angelic spells?"
With bony fingers crushing his windpipe, Castiel's face was flushed crimson. He began reciting scripture. "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name..."
Before he could finish, the ghost nun opened her maw and continued for him. "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven? HAHAHAHA—!"
Her voice seemed layered with dozens of different tones, a cacophony, but one thing was clear: she wasn't afraid of holy magic in the slightest.
An evil spirit that had memorized the Bible?
Watching Castiel exhaust his options, Bella could practically see a cascade of IMMUNE notifications popping up above the ghost nun's head. She had no choice but to step in.
She tapped the ghost nun on the shoulder. The contact was ice-cold, like touching iron.
"I think it's time you let go." Third-circle spell—Mind Schism, driven straight into the ghost nun's psyche.
Both third-circle Mind Schism and fifth-circle Suppress Mind Schism had been developed while treating 006. Patients with fractured psyches were common enough, but a patient whose psyche had been fractured by a god's memories was exceedingly rare. 006 had provided an enormous amount of data and real-world insight for developing both spells.
Tearing apart was easy; putting things back together was hard. That's why Mind Schism was third circle while Suppress Mind Schism was fifth.
Bella didn't bother figuring out what the ghost nun actually was. She forced a schism in the entity's psyche.
Her right hand scooped through empty air, and a large mass of milky-white psychic substance was ripped out of the ghost nun's mind.
"That easy? No resistance at all?"
Vast quantities of foreign memory fragments had been stripped away. Bella was baffled—was this thing's psychic resistance in the negatives?
The next instant, the ghost nun's malice spiked violently. The fingers around Castiel's throat had sunk deep into his neck.
"Wrong! You got it—wrong!" The angel could barely force the words out.
I used the wrong spell? Countless thoughts collided inside Bella's head.
Could it be that the ghost nun had been in a state of memory chaos—the more chaotic, the weaker she was? Mind Schism had excised the harmful memories, and the spell had actually helped her?
Bella immediately reversed the Mind Schism. She shoved the extracted memory fragments back in, then switched to the fifth-circle spell she'd developed specifically for treating psychosis—Suppress Mind Schism.