During a heresy interrogation, the heretic’s mouth stays shut, like a jar sealed with winter wax.

It’s mainly because the Inquisitors don’t want a public trial to become a stage where heresy blooms like weeds after rain. Most spectators lack the grindstone of philosophy to whet right from wrong. Even in open debate, victory can be smoke; a shameless tongue can sway hearts like wind bending grass.

Like debates in later ages: you can win or lose, yet the loser’s silver tongue still gathers followers like moths to a lantern.

So the Inquisitors simply don’t let heretics speak.

Convict. Explain. Then execute. Cold steps like a drumbeat in snow.

They become the “necessary evil,” sowing “fear of consequence” like frost over a field. This harsh, unilateral justice matches the Heretic Inquisition’s creed like blade to scabbard.

In the Silver Era, it still works. The Inquisitors swear a guard’s oath, steel their minds for justice, and keep this judgment burning like a lighthouse in fog.

But handed to later ages, “evil,” like “good,” sinks into human souls like ink into paper. The Heretic Inquisition twists into a shape that plunders women and wealth, death as currency, cruelty as habit—an ugly custom, nothing more.

Enough digression. Here and now, the Heretic Inquisition didn’t let me speak.

A gag ball—kidding. It’s a restraint mask, buckled under my jaw and across my face, my mouth clamped like a locked coffer.

Honestly, when controversial Heroes or philosophers are branded heretic, they usually get a special leave to speak. The Inquisition exists to strangle “evil” and shore up the mainstream, not to salt every field of thought.

If anything, they let true thinkers—those who worry the world like a pearl in the palm—speak before the crowd, then refute them. The thought stays recorded like a fossil leaf, and, being out of season, spreads only within a fence.

From my talks with Maki, he, too, wants every school to sprout, even what you could shelve under “crooked logic,” so long as it feeds the forest and not the fire.

I didn’t do anything world-ending, did I? So why am I the nail they hammer flat?

An Inquisitor silencing you means your sin stinks to high heaven.

I’ll say I didn’t spread heresy—fine, I did, but only a pinch, like salt on soup.

For now, I sit in the Heretic Inquisition’s great hall, the restraint mask locking my tongue. Boredom pools like stale water.

Idle hands itch; I might as well find a little fun.

They should’ve cuffed my hands, too, but under Stini’s murder-stare, the Inquisitors stopped at the mask. It breaks tradition, but when the Heretic Inquisition’s chair, Maki, says nothing, everyone treats it like dust on a rug.

I fish oil paints, charcoal, and other trinkets from the Shadow, and start painting on the mask, brush whispering like moth wings.

I meant to paint a ghoul mask, something fierce and handsome, but the Inquisitors on the bench and Stini, who’s defending me, glare like thunderheads. Two Inquisitors stride over and confiscate my tools, their hands quick as hawks.

No helping it. The wind blows stronger than the reed. I bow my head.

So I shrug, reach into the Shadow, and pull out paper to fold…

Maki seals the Shadow Realm with a Divine Art. The two Inquisitors march back up, take my paper, and Stini slips off her boot—iron-tipped and iron-heeled—and flings it at my head like a hammered comet.

My thought—yes, even a beauty’s shoe can have a battlefield smell.

Just kidding. The real thought is: the three-meter-tall paper phoenix I invented over years to make Ferrel laugh—no one’s seeing that today.

Self-amusement dried up, the well gets shallow.

So I breathe, and listen. Stini and the Inquisitors worked hard, scouring facts like miners with lamps. Effort deserves its wreath—in this place, that means I listen to their reasons and their rights; how they draw the line between is and ought. For the future they want, they’ll shout until their throats blood, sing until their ribs crack.

Even though the ending is already written like ink under the ash.

“Andor did nothing wrong. He gave our companion, Gloria Colonna, real life. That’s my judgment, Stini Saya, and my father’s, Hero Augustus Saya’s.”

On paper, they dug one charge out of me. The Heretic Inquisition hooked me with that single barb.

But what charge is it, truly?

Theft? Plunder?

Hard to call. I did it under a banner that screams “so my companion won’t die,” a flag big enough to shade a sin. Besides, what the Inquisition really wants is Raven, dragged bleeding from my shadow. Today’s punishment for me is a side dish; someone just can’t stand me sheltering Raven—evil—under my cloak.

Stini clamps onto that point and chews, repeating it like a mantra to thump the Inquisition’s injustice.

Her character is killer. She plays dumb and cute, but when the bell rings, her IQ, EQ, and combat power line up like stars. Is there a better heroine?

“But how do you know this isn’t Andor’s larger plot? He installed a component in Colonna’s strongest weapon. We still don’t understand—”

“Gloria’s not a weapon! She’s our friend. She’s a person. I demand an apology for that affront.”

Stini is terrifying.

Maybe it’s pure anger. I’m the Demon King; I always guess the worst. If she chose an anger everyone can share—righteous and obvious—to break the enemy’s rhythm, that’s mastery.

In the same situation, I can only do a little better. Only a little, little bit.

The Inquisitors confer, whispers like crows shifting on a branch. They confirm that after receiving the Soul Component, Gloria can’t be defined as an “object” by any measure of personhood.

So Stini’s anger has iron in it.

The speaker has to apologize, and that carefulness clings to the end of his sentence like dew.

“I apologize to Miss Gloria Colonna. I mean, we can’t judge whether Andor’s actions are entirely in good faith.”

“Then can you offer proof to the contrary?”

“Yes. This much we can. Andor refuses to explain what he’s done.”

That’s my soft belly. It concerns Raven. I can’t open my mouth.

The Heretic Inquisition’s backers are the Divine Beings. Sometimes, with their higher sight, they point out prey the Inquisitors should hunt. But the Inquisitors won’t lean on the Divine Beings to crush debate. It’s their knot: they know who to catch, but they must gather proof first, or no one else will accept it.

With Raven, under my quiet steering, the flaw blooms into a poison flower—they can’t find anything to convict her.

But the proof I hid—I know it. If I answer, they’ll catch me in a lie. If I don’t, I hang anyway.

Two tigers, one cliff. We both bleed.

“I believe Andor has his reasons to keep silent. And I’m not alone. Beatrice of the Nation of Azure Winds, the Purified Nation Helena, the Maid Alliance—they all support the great Hero Andor. We trust he hasn’t betrayed us.”

Stini declares it like a bell over water.

Then she names other banners with weight: the layered forest where her mother serves; the wide-wild nation that shields its frontier knights; and many, many more, flags snapping like river fish.

I didn’t expect her to rally so many. Peace talks draw leaders like birds to a lake, but getting them to perch on one branch takes power.

What shocks me more: a councilor of the Council of Sages, a Grand Sage—Ambroliel—steps in to back Stini. He’s in plain Divine Healer robes, walking the aisle openly, and no one says he shouldn’t be here.

Because he’s a Sage. He defines the world’s right and wrong like a mason sets a cornerstone. The title speaks for him.

I thought Sages watched the sky fall with clean hands, never touching smoke or cause and effect.

He catches my surprise, and adds one quiet line. “I trust Stini. I trust the ones she chooses.”

Right. They shared ground back in Kairi… though I didn’t expect Stini to move him.

Crowns, nations, guilds—official, grass-roots, authoritative, biased—stand with me. A Sage declares his trust. And Stini, half by plan, half by wound, paints Kairi’s misfortune under the Inquisition’s blade.

Looks settled. Solid as a nailed coffin—

—Not a chance.

From beginning to now, Maki has attended, yet said nothing.

When the gallery, under Stini’s lead, swells into a storm of shouts, when doubt pelts the Heretic Inquisition like hail, Maki raps the desk once and clears his throat.

Silence falls like snow. Power presses on the room like a hand on the sea. Voices die.

Maki finally speaks.

“We are right.”

—I know.

“We will always make the best decision.”

—I understand.

“Kairi, Nagash, Raven, Andor—past and future alike—will neither repent nor atone. We won’t change. As long as we grip justice, let our deeds be reviled. Your malice, we’ll swallow it all, not a drop left.”

—Yes. You’ve always been like this.

“But we will still kill who must be killed. We will still pursue what must be pursued. This is our so-called justice—becoming a necessary evil, cutting off love and beauty, standing on the far shore, and handing you your justice.”

—You never change.

“I will say: had we not wiped out Kairi’s village, how many cities would fall to the blood-hungry Demonfolk pouring out like wildfire.”

“I will say: had we not destroyed Nagash, the Truth Seekers Assembly would have led mankind to a cliff’s end like lemmings.”

Maki looks at me, long and deep, a word rising to his lips like a spark. He swallows it, shuts his eyes tight, then opens them hard, like a blade leaving its sheath.

“I will say how many die, how many live. I will say why justice and evil are bound like shackles and key. I will say what monsters we swallow without a word, and how dreadful they are.”

“Tomorrow, the Heretic Inquisition will still punish evil with evil, preach the terror of evil, and urge the world to step away from it, like sheep from a cliff.”

“And today—today only—I must say this. Do you still want to ask more?”

No one answers.

No one wants to hear.

The Heretic Inquisition carries the deepest darkness of mankind like Atlas with a midnight globe. If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you can’t understand their steel.

But that darkness is too heavy, a millstone around the neck. They won’t make others drown with them.

So they don’t explain, beyond teaching fear of evil. Silence doubles as a shield for ordinary folk.

People don’t understand. They call the Inquisition evil, villains, a habit to spit at.

Because the Inquisitors won’t speak. They take the darkness onto their backs, become the necessary evil, and—from the shadowed side—guard the world’s justice and beauty like a wall of thorns.

They’re heroes, too, not so different from Stini and Andor and the rest.

Maki knows everything. This vow is what he forged after seeing it all.

He steps to the center of the bench, brows knit, voice low, like thunder buried underground.

“…Final judgment: Andor Mephy, not guilty.”

Today, people are stunned, catching a faint glimpse of that heavy darkness from his back, like a low note in a church nave. Tomorrow, when the sun climbs the eaves again, they’ll forget. They will denounce and doubt as they did today.

Maki can only explain once.

He knows everything. This is the choice he made after weighing every feather and stone.

As for me, I don’t bother with so much rope.

I stand a moment. The two Inquisitors who took my toys come back up, unbuckle the restraint mask, and that’s that.

Speaking of which, they can keep the paper. But could they return my oil paints?

Those are expensive, you know. (Smile.)