This heretic cannot be burned, he must be hung up and whipped!

"Behold! The Supreme Lord has shown His mercy! This proves that the prophecy read by the Chapter Master is absolutely true!"

The soldiers looked at each other in bewilderment. The rage they had been simmering over Ogsger's absurd order was now shattered by the sudden "miracle." Several devout young soldiers had already fallen to their knees, their foreheads pressed to the earth, muttering prayers. However, many more veterans clenched their fists, their nails digging deep into their palms.

They have seen too many "miracles" -

Comrades rotting in the trenches, children devoured by the plague, commanders driven mad by prophecies...

All soldiers who had spent more than a month on the front lines understood that, apart from the weapons and equipment blessed by the church's fanatics, the Holy Cross had never truly protected them.

God's so-called blessings only come to a few lucky people.

"Implement the Chapter Master's orders immediately!"

Samuel turned and scanned the crowd, his fanatical eyes flashing through the lenses of his helmet.

"All patients should stop taking medication, and the injured should not clean their wounds! This is God's judgment on sin. Only by enduring suffering can the soul be cleansed!"

He suddenly drew the short spear from his waist and pointed the tip of the spear at the wounded soldiers who were trying to retreat: "Anyone who disobeys is a heretic!"

"Fuck you!"

A roar erupted. An old soldier stepped out from the crowd, his left arm wrapped in a blood-stained bandage. His right hand pointed at Samuel's face, his scarred face twisted in anger:

"I saved thirty-seven brothers in the trenches! And it was my troops who risked their lives to rescue you from the Plague Knights during the Battle of Black Mountain! Now you tell me that even bandaging your wounds is a sin?!"

"Have all your consciences been fed to hell?!"

"Ugh!"

Samuel's pupils suddenly constricted. The observers behind him pounced on Roy like hounds, thrusting out three short spears simultaneously. Roy stumbled back, but the other observers held him down by the shoulders. The spear points pierced his right leg, pinning him to the makeshift stake.

Blood flowed down the wooden pillar, and Roy's screams tore through the iron-gray sky:

"You blood-sucking parasites! God? God has never cared about people like us! It is us, millions and tens of millions of ordinary people, who formed the defense line. It was us who used our flesh, blood, and teeth to stop the heretics!

It’s us who survived the trenches! It’s us who were burned as firewood by you—”

"Shut up! Blasphemer!" Samuel stabbed Roy in the abdomen with a spear, and his screams stopped abruptly. Blood gushed from the veteran's throat, but he still stared at the observers, his red teeth gritting and chattering:

"I curse you...I curse you and that God...to rot together..."

The crowd was dead silent.

Tens of thousands of eyes stared at Roy's gradually stiffening body, his breathing heavy as thunder. Several new recruits began to sob, while more veterans silently removed their helmets. The cross branding on their foreheads flickered in the firelight, the "mark of loyalty" inscribed with a scorching iron upon enlistment.

At this moment, tens of thousands of cross scars seemed to have transformed into countless mocking eyes, watching all this.

Samuel gasped and pulled out his short spear, the blood from the spear tip dripping onto the bloody cross on his battle robe. He turned to face Chapter Master Ogsger and slammed the spear handle down:

"Execute the prophecy immediately! Otherwise, the next one to be judged will be——"

"Click!"

The sound of bolts being pulled was as clear as ice. The garrison troops raised their guns in unison, their black barrels gleaming with a cold metallic sheen in the bonfire's light. Ogsger stood behind the human wall, his fingertips stroking the gilded edge of the Pope's secret letter, a faint smile curling his lips.

"Are you...going to betray the Lord?!"

Samuel's roar suddenly sharpened, and the hand gripping his short spear trembled slightly. He knew the truth—since the Warp Storm had isolated the Kingdom of God, the observers had long been unable to hear any "holy words." Those crosses were merely decorations, and the plate armor that had relied on faith to withstand machine gun bullets had long since turned to ordinary iron.

"You don't dare do that,"

Neos stood on the platform, attracting everyone's attention, with a blue and white ball of light flashing in his hand.

"You would do anything for God's instructions. If the fact that you can't hear God's instructions were exposed, you would be considered disloyal to God. That's why you don't want to expose yourselves. Now, one after another, you stand up and reveal yourselves, even saying that the miracles before your eyes were performed by God!"

"Take a good look at whose power this is!"

Neos raised his right arm, and the blue-white ball of light in his hand burst into an even brighter light, resuscitating the dying veteran from the stake. Everyone watched as the spears were slowly pulled from the veteran's body, dripping with blood, and turned to powder in mid-air.

"You, Saints, must not overstep your bounds! The Supreme Lord is watching us! We can always hear His holy words!"

Another young observer stepped forward, pointing his spear at Neos. "You heretic disguised as a saint, listen to me! Your bullets cannot penetrate the Lord's protection! And your souls will be forever—"

"I'm listening—bang!"

Neos skillfully took a gun from the guards who were carrying guns under the stage.

"Bang! Bang! Bang bang!!"

Gunshots rang out continuously, and the young observer's legs exploded with blood. He fell to his knees with a scream, staring in disbelief at the smoke rising from the muzzle of Neos' gun on the stage.

The whole place was silent, and everyone watched Neos empty his magazine bit by bit.

"It seems your 'blessing' isn't working," Neos' voice boomed from the high platform. A ball of blue-white light hovered at his fingertips, flooding the camp like a tide. Wherever it touched, the wounded's ulcers quickly receded, and the feverish body temperatures of those in high fevers plummeted. But this light was different from what the theologians of the chapter had witnessed—it was no longer as gentle as holy light, but instead had a mechanical, cold quality.

"This is not a miracle," Neos took a step forward, and the ball of light suddenly expanded, stretching his shadow into a giant curtain covering the entire venue.

"This is psychic energy, the power of humanity itself! And you—" he pointed at Samuel, "are nothing but parasites living on lies!"

The air froze for a moment.

Then, the roar erupted like a volcano.

"Don't kill them. I want them to completely give up. Tie up these charlatans for me!"

The soldiers descended upon the observers like a raging tide. Samuel tried to raise his short spear, but a one-eyed veteran punched him in the helmet. The cross on his chest fell to the ground, shattered by countless boots. An observer screamed and tried to flee, but was knocked to the ground by the butts of the garrison's rifles. The machine gunner on the top of the tent silently adjusted his aim, keeping his crosshairs locked on Samuel's twitching body.

"You...you traitors! Heretics!" Samuel's face was covered in blood, and he still screamed.

"The Lord will bring down divine punishment! Your families will be enslaved for eternity! Your souls will be condemned to eternal damnation in Hell—"

Neos raised his hand and clenched it. A blue-white light wrapped around Samuel's throat like a chain, hanging him in the air.

"Quiet."

He looked at the struggling Observer.

"You know better than anyone that the things in heaven are definitely not good. You traitors who betrayed humanity, you are only afraid of losing the right to suck blood."

The camp suddenly fell into an eerie silence. Several military chaplains and theologians wanted to stand up and argue loudly, but as soon as they made a move, they were tied up by the garrison troops who had been targeting them early on.

The soldiers gasped, their bayonets dripping with the observer's blood. They looked at Neos, the man who had once been called a "saint" but whose words and actions completely betrayed God.

"Line up! Everyone! Line up!"

Neos threw the tied-up observers down from the platform, and the bewildered soldiers lined up under the urging and whipping of their officers.

"Look at the bodies at your feet!" He grabbed his rifle and pounded it hard into the ground, the butt of the rifle clashing against the platform. "Hank Miller, nineteen years old, from a farm in Zurich. His greatest wish is to use his military pay to buy his family some plowing machines."

Many veterans of peasant origin raised their heads, their smoke-stained faces twitching.

"Thomas Wood, a top student in the theology department at the University of Paris, even shook hands with the old Pope and received his blessing." Neos' voice suddenly softened. "Yesterday at noon, his last words before he died were, 'Would my mother be proud of me?'"

Sobbing sounds spread in the corners. Many recruits who were drafted as students had red eyes, but more people tightly gripped their rifles and spears.

Neos pointed at the Second Company. This company had been the first to be exposed to the poison gas in that nameless town. They had suffered heavy casualties, and almost their entire organization had been destroyed.

"A week ago, there were more than 300 of you. Now there are only 42 of you. Tell me, when your comrades were blinded by poison gas, where was God? When your comrades were torn to pieces by artillery shells, which angel took away their souls?"

"But the pastor said..." The young recruit Charlie raised the trench manual in his hand and wanted to argue, but was interrupted by Neos' sharp eyes.

"Your pastor is lying there dying right now!"

Neos's hand was fixed on the dying old priest. In the previous large-scale treatment, he deliberately avoided these clergymen.

"The God he believes in has generously given us war, hunger, pestilence, death, machine guns firing at 400 rounds per minute, and trench clubs!"

The furious roar made everyone's heart dance wildly. At a certain moment, the priest Amos, who was closest to him, saw a ray of golden light flowing in Neos' eyes, which made the scorching sun pale in comparison.

A lieutenant in the fourth company suddenly ripped open his shirt, revealing a crisscross of scars on his chest: "Last week in Zagreb, Jason blocked shrapnel for me. Before he died, he stuffed this into me--" The metal identity card gleamed in Neos's psychic sun, and "For all the people I love" was engraved on the back.

Valentin held up a megaphone and shouted in the crowd, "We must fight for all that is good in the world! We don't want to die in confusion because of some bullshit prophecy. We can win the war with our own strength!"

"Yeah! Damn God! We have to rely on ourselves!!"

The crowd began to shout, and the platform began to shake under the waves of sound. It was not artillery fire but the roar that resonated in the chests of tens of thousands of soldiers.

Neos felt an unprecedented power boiling in his blood. He raised his hand and pressed it lightly, and the noise stopped instantly.

"I know many of you are still panicking and worried, because without the power of God, we mortals cannot resist the corrosion of hell."

The ball of light condensed at his fingertips slowly rose.

"But now, everything is different! Let me tell you, throughout our long history, there have been many people like me with special abilities, but they have all disappeared from history textbooks! This is simply because certain groups, certain beasts that feed on human souls, want to force us to obey them!

Because it knows that as long as it cuts off all our choices, we will have no choice but to choose it! But now it’s different! ”

"This is the power of all of us!" "Bang!"

The cold sun was shaking above everyone's heads. The moment the blue and white light rain fell, the coughing in the tent suddenly stopped, green grass grew on the bare ground, and the rust on the soldiers' weapons faded.

But Neos deliberately missed the observers—the crosses engraved on the observers' helmets were gradually rusting in the blue-white rain of light.

"This power comes from your desire for life!" His voice echoed in the camp.

“When a mother prays all night for her feverish child, when a farmer digs wells during a drought, that is our miracle!”

A soldier suddenly raised his bayonet: "I believe in the captain's smile when he blocked the bullet for me!"

"I believe in the scarf my wife knitted for me!" a communications soldier choked.

"I believe... I believe in the heart that is still beating at this moment!" A non-commissioned officer pressed the soldier's badge of his fallen brother against his chest, and the brass number plate glowed faintly.

Neos opened his arms, and the camp of tens of thousands of people was enveloped in a blue-white rain of light. Before anyone noticed, Neos quietly healed the priests as well.

The soldiers' spiritual support cannot be completely destroyed at once. Before their new spiritual support is born, these priests still have to fulfill their duties as "psychologists".

Of course, the observers who were still groaning in the audience would definitely not seek treatment.

"Now! Listen to the Chapter Master's orders!"

Neos retracted the large blue and white ball of light in the sky, and in the eyes of everyone, the light shrank to his fingertips.

That light wasn't holy, and even seemed to chill the soul, but it was more reassuring than any cross. More and more healthy soldiers shouldered their weapons and joined the line, all gazing at the platform.

Ogsger walked slowly up to the platform, the axe blade lightly scratching the corner of Samuel's robe.

"Order—effective immediately, all observers will be detained for being 'incited by heresy.' Food rations will be increased by 30%." He paused, his eyes sweeping across the crowd.

"As for Budapest—we are not going to Jerusalem to be pawns of those deceitful bastards of the Strategic Prophecy Committee."

He raised his battle axe, pointing the tip of the blade toward the overcast sky in the east:

"Let's go to Budapest! Under the leadership of Master Neos, we'll drive all the heretics back to hell! Then we'll go into the city and kill those bastards who fattened themselves with 'prophecy'!"

The cheers were like a landslide and a tsunami.

Amidst the deafening roar, Neos quietly withdrew his psychic energy. He watched the blue-white halo gradually fade from the crowd, and the smile on his face gradually calmed.

The play was beautifully staged—using "miracles" to destroy theocracy, using fanaticism to counteract fanaticism. When he caught a glimpse of the bewildered and puzzled eyes of the detained theologians and priests, he felt a little depressed.

"Not enough..." he muttered to himself, his clenched knuckles turning pale.

"To make these people truly stand up, simply breaking the cross is far from enough. But only if we survive first can we be qualified to talk about what comes next."

"Fellow countrymen! Let's move forward!!"

On the distant horizon, the sun pierced through the dark clouds that were smoked to an iron gray, and shone on the path of the regiment's advance.

PS: 240 votes, next update 4.5k...

In Flame: 1914: Chapter 31 Unless God Himself Wears a Steel Helmet

January 4, 1915, Matthias Cathedral, Budapest

"The heretic landship has stopped."

"why?"

"..."

"Why waste precious landships when the heretics can wipe us out with germs and poison gas?"

Bishop Marburg didn't put down his telescope, continuing to watch the Hell Legion's encirclement outside the city. The adjutant reporting behind him guessed:

"Perhaps... the heretics want us to surrender. They don't want to sacrifice us to the Lord of Hell with bullets and bayonets, but rather want us to surrender, torture us bit by bit, and refine our souls?"

Bishop Marburg lowered his telescope and forced a cold smile across his wrinkled and weathered face.

"There are over 437,000 Crusaders in this city. Even if we evacuated them before the siege was completely closed, there are still over a million civilians in this city. Such a large-scale sacrifice... I'm afraid Hell could open another portal."

"Open another portal..."

Fear gradually appeared on the adjutant's face, and he once again recalled the precious photos taken by the Paladin who had gone to Jerusalem on a reconnaissance mission.