Chapter 262: The Errant’s Believers

The sword came to him and the assimilation hit differently from anything before it.

The hearthstone and the sword folded into his soul hierarchy simultaneously, two soul masses intertwined with each other, clicking into place at once. When it finished settling, Finn stood quietly in the dark chamber for a moment, understanding the full shape of what he now had.

The sword wasn’t a weapon with a fixed effect. It was a framework, a channel attuned entirely to his nature, capable of carrying whatever application of his Error powers he chose to run through it in any given moment.

He reached for it with his soul and it materialized in his grip.

The moment it fully formed in his hand, the chamber groaned. A low, resonant sound that came from the walls, the floor, and the very air itself. This was reality registering something it couldn’t cleanly process. The sword existed in his hand in a way that made the space around it uncertain. It left trails in the air when he moved it, pixelated distortions that hung for a moment before reality stitched itself back together as if it was healing a scar.

The green light along the body of the obsidian soul blade stuttered between solid and phase-through states in a slow, irregular pulse, the sword deciding with each moment whether it was a physical thing or not.

Finn raised it slowly and looked at it.

Real and unreal simultaneously. Corporeal and incorporeal in the same instant. He could feel through his soul connection exactly what it would mean for anyone else to try to touch it — to them it would be a flaw. An object that their hands couldn’t reconcile. That their soul strength couldn’t grip regardless of how much they had, because the problem wasn’t strength. The problem was that the sword was fundamentally an error in reality, and a hand reaching for an error finds nothing to hold.

Only the Errant could wield it. Only Finn.

He raised it straight up, point toward the ceiling, and held it there.

The groaning stopped. The glitch trails disappeared. The stuttering light steadied into a clean, firm pulse. With the sword held vertical and still, reality seemed to settle around it, like it had found the one orientation where the weapon simply belonged.

Finn held it in that place and looked at it for one more moment, before releasing his grip and dispersing it back into his soul.

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Meanwhile…

Far away in Hoshin Bay, things had changed.

The first clash had happened three weeks ago, and it had happened because the Temple of Shadows had miscalculated badly.

When the reports of the Errant believers first reached the Temple, the priests who reviewed them had made a straightforward assessment that it was simply a small cult operating in the Sprawl, with thirty people at most, and with no semblance of formal structure, nor any verified supernatural activity beyond some rumors from dock workers who drank too much.

The standard response was a squad of junior priests deployed quietly to disperse them, confiscate any religious materials, and make clear that unsanctioned worship in Hoshin Bay carried consequences.

The squad didn’t come back.

What came back instead were witnesses. Dock workers and night vendors who had been on the streets when the squad found Jon’s group, and who described in flat, shaken voices what they had seen. Priests of the Shadow Temple, trained and blessed and carrying the authority of the divine institution that had governed Hoshin Bay for generations, being taken apart methodically by a nineteen-year-old harbor worker.

Jon had taken all four of them down before the last one could send word back.

The Temple’s response was swift. The next thing they did was to send Named Priests. That was when the city immediately knew this wasn’t something simple.

Deploying Named Priests was not simply a show of seriousness, but it was also a statement. Whenever Named Priests were sent out, just like when Finn had been hunted down back in Hoshin Bay, everyone in the city understood the message and responded the way Hoshin Bay always responded to serious things: they locked themselves indoors and waited to see what would be left standing in the morning.

The night was long. People in their homes heard sounds they couldn’t identify. Sounds that went on through the late hours of the night and into the odd hours of the morning, before finally stopping.

By morning, a light drizzle had started, and when people finally opened their doors and looked out, the streets were filled with bone-white masks and the bodies of Named Priests littering the streets.

Jon sat at the center of it in the rain. Back against a wall, mask on his face, head tipped up toward the grey morning sky. His hair was flat against his head from the rain drizzling down. The blood on his hands and clothes was washing off in slow red rivulets, running along the stones toward the gutters. He didn’t move when people came out and saw him. He simply sat there and let them look, as if reveling in the moment of it. Letting them see the power he had gained from his God. The Errant.

That was the image that was burned in the minds of the citizens of Hoshin Bay that day. A young man sitting in the rain surrounded by the dead of the Shadow Temple, unhurried, uninjured, wearing a bone-white mask.

The Temple called him the Errant Adjudicator after that, though not to honor him. It was what their internal reports used to categorize him, and it leaked out into the city the way things always leaked out in Hoshin Bay, and then it became what people called him whether they believed in the Errant or not.

The believers had grown to nearly fifty now. And they weren’t hidden anymore, at least not fully. Too many mundane people had seen what they could do during the night of the Named Priests, had seen that the believers of this Errant God fought with something real behind them, something that translated into actual force rather than just conviction.

The Shadow Temple had always maintained its mystique by keeping its supernatural capabilities away from public view, keeping the mundane population uncertain about what was real and what wasn’t. The Errant believers had no such policy. They showed exactly what they were, openly too, and the effect on Hoshin Bay was measurable.

At this point, the Temple realized they weren’t dealing with believers of a small god, or some petty divine, but rather, these were believers of a God no less powerful than theirs. They needed to deal with them with the proper level of acknowledgment they deserved. So Paladins were sent this time, which was a different category of response entirely. Paladins operated in Hoshin Bay with the understanding that their deployment represented the Temple’s full institutional weight. They didn’t send Paladins for cults in the Sprawl, their existence wasn’t even known to the city. They were only sent when there were threats powerful enough to truly threaten their existence.

It was only when Paladins were deployed that Jon disappeared. Quietly, without announcement, the bone-white masks disappeared off the streets. The Errant believers became invisible again, or as close to invisible as fifty people could be in a city now actively looking for them.

But they were still there. And they were still growing. And everyone in Hoshin Bay who had seen the streets that rainy morning knew it…

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