With the girls present, it didn’t take very long to repair most of the damage caused by the assassin’s attack. The paladins who were injured were healed and the paladins who died were resurrected. Mary also made a full recovery, while Anne remained nearby watching her silently. Since Mary had sacrificed herself to protect those children, Anne’s insolent behavior hadn’t seemingly disappeared. What Mary said wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t take a mother to protect children.

It didn’t seem that strange to me. Anyone would have stood in front of those children and protected them. Mary just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I never imagined that such a simple thing would seemingly throw Anne into a crisis of faith. It’d be too easy to think this would solve all of their issues, but it did seem to be a step in the right direction. At least, I was fulfilling my promise to Mary. That was the other reason I had put them in the same church, as a means to carry through with Mary’s dream.

As for the assassins, neither side took ownership. A brief investigation that included Celeste’s ability to tell lies through the vibrations in people’s voices, and Miki’s ability to discern the truth through their souls, verified that no one was lying. Even Mary wasn’t so powerful as to deceive both of them. When we tried to find out who owned the crates that had the explosive in them, both sides had thought it was the other side. It seemed like they had been slipped into their respective inventory without them realizing it. In the end, there was nothing I could do to reveal the truth.

Once, Elaya had suggested that I could make the entire city the 1st level of the dungeon. I had originally rejected the idea, feeling like such a move was too invasive. However, it worked well enough for the Champion’s Gauntlet, so why couldn’t we do something similar? If I worked with Eliza to make the entire city a miasma-free level of her dungeon, then that would lead to many benefits.

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I’d truly gain a home-field advantage. No one who wished us harm would ever be able to enter the city without us immediately detecting them. We could summon monsters anywhere in the city to maintain order. Of course, those monsters would take the form of soldiers or at most bandits, so their appearance wouldn’t be so upsetting.

I’d be able to teleport anywhere in the city instantly. The situation that arose earlier where Carmine and I were surrounded wouldn’t have happened. We could build or reshape buildings with the snap of a finger, and we could infuse the walls with miasma, making them extremely durable. Even if a building was damaged, the dungeon could heal that damage in hours. The damage from those explosives would have healed themselves already without Terra needing to do any earth manipulation.

Furthermore, something from my jobs told me that the citizens who had the karmic infection would actually end up having more buffs and benefit greatly from continued exposure to the dungeon, even if the miasma was nearly non-existent. Regretfully, Eliza didn’t have the kind of mana for such an upgrade, so this was something that would need to wait for a later date. I still had plans though. With the fae causing issues from overseas, and Twilight coming from below… we needed to get stronger. That, I was certain of.