Grim Reaper in the Apocalypse: Reaping Immortals

"Your daughter?"

Neumann smiled and scratched his head. "Yeah. The reason why I became a Savior in the first place was so that I would have the authority to support her from the sidelines. If I was an ordinary citizen, I wouldn't have been able to stay here."

Atlan remembered Neumann mentioning that he had a daughter, but he'd never met her before.

"Oh, Ninth is in charge of this mission?" Lizzie said. "Then, I'm sure this mission would be finished in just under a minute"

"Ninth?"

Neumann nodded. "Yes, that's her nickname. She doesn't like it when people call her Neumann, so she adopted her nickname. I'm Neumann the Eighth, and she's Neumann the Ninth, hence Ninth."

Lizzie looked like she knew Ninth, making Atlan the only person in their group to not know about her.

I wonder what she's like.

Atlan assumed that being assigned to a Critical Point was only reserved for those who proved themselves as capable Saviors. The fact that she was assigned to a mission in the Church meant that she was a person who was well-trusted by the HeadQuarters.

He looked up beyond the steel walls and saw the climbing black spires of the gothic church.

No matter how much he looked–even with his Thermal Vision–he couldn't see any evidence of a Symptom rampaging through the Church. It wasn't terribly hot like the Masamune district. The walls weren't melting like hot wax. There were no tremors in the ground. There was nothing.

"Why can't I see any sort of Symptom in the Church?"

Even the blockades on the four major roads showed no signs of any destructive manifestations in the City. It was as if there weren't any Canzers rampaging through the Remedium at all.

It made him wonder how they knew there was a symptom in the first place. If there was no evidence of any destruction, then how did they know there was a Canzer there?

Neumann arrived just a little bit sooner than them, so he also saw no evidence of a Symptom.

"I don't know, but this isn't the first time that I saw a mission with no discernible Symptoms."

Lizzie supplemented that with her experience. "There are some symptoms that are really subtle. Sometimes, a crack in the ground or a slight breeze in the air is considered to be a Symptom.

We Vanguards don't have the theoretical knowledge or foundation to discern what a Symptom looks like. For us, things might look normal, but for Operators, it could look like a red herring that immediately lets them know that there's a Symptom." Explore more at empire

He knew nothing about 'Quills' and how they operated, but it wasn't hard to guess that there were probably a lot of alarms and security measures installed in the Church that let them know immediately that it was plagued by Canzers. It's a Critical Point, after all.

Maybe there are Operators permanently stationed in the church. Maybe they're using some sort of technology to monitor the area too.

He looked to the side and saw the group of civilians surrounded by soldiers. If he wanted to know what kind of Symptom occurred, then he'd have to question the people who were inside the Church when it happened.

He slowly approached them, and a few civilians recognized the black battle suit he wore.

"Are you the Star Porter?"

"The one all over the news?"

Atlan used his reputation to his advantage. "Yes. Can you tell me what happened at the church?"

The civilians all looked at the soldiers who were yawning and looking outwards. They told them that they weren't allowed to talk to others about what they saw, but the Star Porter was different. They thought he was sent by the HeadQuarters.

"We were in the middle of a mass. Most of us were sitting on our pews listening to the Reverend talk about the generosity and magnanimity of the Genesis God, when all of a sudden, we heard a popping sound."

"It's not just a popping sound, it sounded like fireworks! It's like a small explosion."

"Yeah. That's what I heard too."

Atlan let them relay their story without interrupting them.

"I was offering my thanks when I suddenly saw the candles flickering!"

"And they were getting hot! They burned through the wax within minutes."

"If I could recall, the whole room started getting hotter too. I was sweating through my shirt."

Their explanations of the Symptoms they saw sounded oddly familiar to Atlan.

He didn't know why, but it sounded a bit similar to his experience in the Masamune district. The main event that happened in both scenarios was a sudden onset of a heat wave.

The difference between the two was the increase in temperature. The one in the Masamune district was enough to give everyone who stayed for a minute inside the affected area, third-degree burns all over their bodies. The church symptom didn't look that intense, given that the survivors looked fine.

"That's everything you saw? It didn't get unbearably hot?"

The survivors all looked at each other and shook their heads. "No, we're fine. The Reverend escorted us out the moment he sensed something wrong. That's it."

"We don't even know why we're still detained here. We didn't lose any SoulTime from that, but the soldiers insisted that we stay here so that we can be compensated with a few years of Lifespan after everything is settled."

The survivors all had the same sentiment. They wanted to go home, but the soldiers didn't want them to go out.

Atlan thought for a second as he tried to assess what he heard from them.

Are there a lot of Canzers that cause heat wave-like Symptoms?

When he looked at the church with his Thermal Vision, he didn't see any sign of a temperature increase. It was actually a little bit colder compared to the other buildings.

Did they already kill the Canzer?

"Did you find out anything from the survivors?" asked Lizzie.

But just as he was about to answer, Pterina suddenly walked up to them.

"I can tell you what Canzer they're fighting."