Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

Chapter 307: Chapter 11: The Beast Hunting Team

At the Mitchell’s dining table, a heated debate was unfolding.

More accurately, it wasn’t so much a debate as it was a one-sided rout.

The old mendicant friar Reed was entirely triumphant, while Father Anthony was inching ever closer to dying of rage.

The priest of Wolf Town Church, with a red face and hurried voice, exclaimed, “…The essence of the Catholic Church is personal worship. The Lord truly incarnated as a person, and not in the image of a pharaoh, a king, or an emperor, but as a humble Galilean farmer. This concept is unprecedented, and it’s precisely this that draws more and more people to convert and accept the Gospel.”@@novelbin@@

However, Friar Reed scoffed in response, “And why don’t you tell your followers that the Son of God is just a lowly farmer from Galilee? See if they are moved or if you end up stoned to death? What’s so special about God becoming human? Travel thousands of miles from here to the east, and you’ll find religions where humans can become gods!”

“But doesn’t our success in supplanting the ancient pagan religions exactly demonstrate the divine mandate of the Catholic Church?”

“The rise of the Catholic Church only shows one thing, that those in high places know how to get things done. With the Empire’s support, the Western Church went from a church of the poor and the oppressed to a church of the powerful. What I really want to ask you is, in the lands of the Saracens, another heretical religion holds equal status to Catholicism, where the Eastern Church can only be second-class citizens. Do you also acknowledge their divine mandate?”

Father Anthony’s breath hitched, nearly passing out from indignation.

The old mendicant friar leisurely sipped his wine, with a smile on his face that made Father Anthony suddenly want to punch him square in the nose.

The pair were speaking in Old Tongue, also mixing in many ancient terms.

Apart from the two in dispute, only Father Caman and Winters in the Mitchell household understood their words.

Pierre, the son of the Mitchell family, had gone to find the young groom Anglu, leaving only Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell and their unmarried younger daughter, Scarlett, at the dining table.

Gerard’s young daughter was thoroughly preoccupied with the lieutenant; she kept sneaking glances at Lieutenant Montaigne. Gerard himself didn’t understand why the two priests were arguing, even though he didn’t grasp what they were arguing about.

However, the Mitchell family should be glad they couldn’t understand the “abominable and shocking” remarks of the clergy, which would be deemed heretical in the eyes of ordinary believers; this way, they could continue to respect the two priests.

Of the two people who could understand, Father Caman showed no expression, while Winters was distracted.

They had found nothing in their hunt for the beast; the blood trail and scent vanished at a small stream. The creature had traversed some distance in water, erasing its tracks with the flow.

Winters, leading men, searched kilometers up and down the stream, but the best hunting dogs from Dusa Village couldn’t sniff out where the creature had emerged from the water.

This vast primeval forest absorbed the search party of over a hundred people like a drop of water in the desert. The search area was extremely limited, like searching for a needle in the ocean.

As the sun began to set, making it harder for humans to operate at night while the wild beasts thrived, Winters reluctantly ordered the militia to withdraw from the woods.

What angered Winters even more than the failed hunt was the indifference of the two Protestant villages toward the beast plague.

Before leading the Dusack into the woods, Winters had sent riders to all four of the other villages to summon their militias. The militias from villages east and west of the river quickly arrived under their leaders’ guidance and joined the hunt.

However, the villages of Nanxin and Beixin didn’t send anyone from start to finish.

When Winters questioned the village leaders, both came up with the same excuses, using “We thought the Dusack were pulling our leg” and “Our participation wouldn’t have made any difference” to shirk responsibility.

More hateful than an enemy’s attack was betrayal.

If the two Protestant village heads were not civilians, the furious Lieutenant Montaigne might have executed those two wastrels on the spot.

If an outsider felt such indignation, imagine what the Dusack must have felt.

The old village chief of Dusa, Sergei, almost drew his sword to kill the two Protestant village leaders; he was so enraged that he was held back and, beating his chest, swore oaths that even if all the heretics died out, he would never extend any help to them again.

In the small village of Wolf Town, the mood was as tangled and indecipherable as a ball of yarn.

Winters had no intention of meddling in these affairs; he merely hoped that the villages would unite to resolve the wolf plague swiftly. He knew that sooner or later, he would return to Vineta and did not wish to leave a mess behind.

But now, the beast was yet to be seen, and the villages were on the verge of fighting each other instead.

Lieutenant Montaigne even began to miss the harsh battles in Tanilia, where at least enemies were enemies and friends were friends, without any of these annoyances causing fresh disdain.

Winters really had no appetite; he thanked Mrs. Mitchell for her hospitality and left the dining table.

Shortly after, Father Caman too got up to leave. After exiting the dining room, he went straight to the back of the house.

There, Lieutenant Montaigne was pacing thoughtfully.

Startled by Caman’s footsteps, Winters casually asked, “Your Brother Reed sure is bold with his words; he isn’t afraid of being sentenced to the stake. Is that why you placed him with me?”

“Brother Reed is only intentionally provoking Father Anthony; he was merely teasing him,” Father Caman replied with a measured tone, nonchalantly sitting on a barrel: “Theologic debates often sound blasphemous to the ears of the faithful, which is quite normal. The Catholic Church does not have a tradition of burning its clergy. Moreover, Brother Reed has a special status which allows him to speak freely.”

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