I walked up to the altar wall and started turning the gargoyle-like decorations. In this puzzle, you had to turn gargoyles two, three, four and seven (counting from right to left) ninety degrees clockwise to open a secret passage.

The young priest Jeron seemed like he was ready to skip straight to insanity when he saw me turning the correct gargoyles.

“Who told you?! How long have you spied us?!” (Jeron)

“... Two, three. This is anime, Jeron. You need to watch from right to left.”

“Who are you?!” (Jeron)

“Me? Biggus Dickus.”

“I order you to answer me!” (Jeron)

“Is that really an appropriate tone for someone in your position? Dancer, Jeron is trying to interrupt me.”

“Shut up, baldy! I swear I'll shoot both your legs off, if you don't shut up immediately! We don't need all of you alive!” (Dancer)

After all required gargoyle decorations were turned sideways, a spiral stairway to the cellar opened on the left side of the aisle.

“Well, Jeron-chan is a bit of a hothead, but I'm sure he listens if you kick his groin.”

“Oh, good idea!” (Dancer)

“Bu-buu, Jeron Thai kick-u!”

On my way down to the cellar, I glanced at the idiotic idol these cultists worshiped: a three-meter wooden pillar with barbed wire coiled around it. They called it Father Tree.

When I watched the anime, I thought the barbed wire pillar was just a generic placeholder for a real world religious symbol in order to prevent triggering religious players, but the priests here really had the pillar. These self-flagellating wackos strapped themselves to the pillar with barbed wire and took turns worshiping themselves.

Most of the rituals practiced by the Green Mountain cultists seemed like extreme parodies of real world religious rituals, although in my eyes they were pretty much equally crazy. The religious cultists in real world were blind to the absurdities of their own faith as well – people called Aztecs cruel savages for sacrificing humans to their rain god, yet taught their own children to worship a brutally beaten dude nailed to primitive torture device. Apparently drinking the blood and eating the flesh of a human sacrifice was the most wholesome thing in the world in their eyes.

Apologize to Xipe Totec, compartmentalizationists, your rituals are just as gory and creepy.

I went down the spiral stairs, pulled up my scarf to hide my face, turned on my card light and opened the door locks with the priest's keys.

A horrible stench hit my nose when I pulled the cellar door. I backed to the stairs and kept my revolver ready just in case.

“Listen, everyone inside! You can come out, you are free! You are free to leave!”

In the game, the first mission after tutorials was to save a group of female slaves guarded by gangsters, but when you went in to save them, the gangsters were actually wooden dolls and the slaves attacked you. The NPC who gave you the mission was working with a fake slave girl gang. The first mission was actually still part of the tutorial: it taught players to not naively believe in characters words. It was a common trope in action RPGs. A seasoned gamer knew to expect betrayal.

A group of ghoulishly thin men and women wearing dirty rags slouched forward from the dark cellar, bringing the heavy rotten stench with them.

Some of the children probably can't walk... I can't...

Enemies dying gruesome deaths are fine, but I can't deal with this after all.

“You are free! Run to the forest as fast as possible! Were going to burn this temple soon! Go up the stairs and to the left!”

I turned away and climbed back up.

There are no social workers or psychologists in this world, and I can't turn into a one. This is why I couldn't become a medical doctor, mom.

I don't know how to heal the ones at the bottom. All I know is how to kill the ones at the top.

All the priests must die.

...Sometimes, for a few seconds, I can sympathize with Caliph Tze's desire to burn everything.

I'll surely get scolded by Crys, but there's no way I can go back to blindfold them or hold their hand to guide them outside. My stomach can't handle the crisp graphic horror of this human tragedy.

When I got back to the main hall, the priests were gone and Dancer was collecting food rations into a burlap sack.

“Speedrun, are you crying?” (Dancer)

“...I need some fresh air, this place stinks. Did Kimono take the priests out?”

“Yeah, I'm just looting. Do we need silver plates or candles?” (Dancer)

“I don't think so.”

“I'll take a few for myself, is that fine?”

“Sure, knock yourself out. Dancer, when they come up from there... imagine they are horses and let them go.”

---

As planned, the eight living cultists (the ninth one died of blood loss) were taken to the beach dunes on the east side of the temple.

While they were marching in line guided by Crys and Kimono, I took out a shovel from our coach and ran after them.

I checked the shapes of the coastal dunes covered in marram grass and compared the skerries to the treeline further away. I was pretty certain we were in the right location.

I pointed the priests to the spot where they should start digging.

“Listen up, chain gang! The ones who work hard can keep their lives, but those who stop will get tortured and killed. Those who don't work don't eat or live! Now then, to keep up the morale, we'll use a counting rhyme to choose which one of you gets the honor of using this shovel! ...Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, shoot the Caliph in the toe, if you don't dig, we'll shoot you in the hip, then you will burn in the temple like a pig – congratulations, young man, you are the lucky winner! You can dig with a of shovel, the rest of you will dig with those planks.”

It was another good idea by Crys to let only the young priests live as diggers, because they'll likely have the best stamina and they are not as eager on becoming martyrs together. But it was my idea to hype them up with a carrot-and-stick tactic.

Crys and Kimono took turns guarding the diggers. Meanwhile, Dancer collected rest of the stuff from the temple and spread around some oil to make the place more flammable.

The priests digging sand and mud with planks of driftwood kept making hateful glances at me. Yes, let the aggro flow through you.

I couldn't see what was happening on the western side of the temple. I could only hope the slaves were heading in the forest like I told them.

“Crys, I'm sorry. I couldn't blindfold the slaves. They probably saw who we are.”

“I expected that.” (Crys)

“Huh?”

“It is fine. You are soft. The slaves here were kept weak and in darkness for a reason. Their eyes and limbs wither, their minds lose their edge. Even if they escape, they'll die in the wilderness. If they survive, they'll return to Pier City for a life of servitude and begging. Either they keep silent out of fear, or their words are not taken seriously. Either way, the risk of them bringing harm to us is small.” (Crys)

“I see, you knew it wouldn't work...”

As disheartening it was, I couldn't do much to help them after all.

I had acted like all those ignorant animal activists who open up the cages of imported fur trade animals and let them run free in the forests. It wrecks the local ecosystem and ends up causing more harm to animals.

Being a hero is not as easy as in comic books. I need to reflect on this.

If I truly want to save the world in a meaningful way, I need start thinking like a trained rescue worker in a hurricane disaster area, not like a naïve superhero who leaves an unconscious mugger in front of a police station with a sticky note on his chest.

Amateur good guys talk about tactics, professional good guys study logistics... or whatever that old saying was.

Just before sunset, our amateur digging squad finally found the entrance to the Strangers warehouse: a black, metallic octagon hatch with decorative abstract patterns like a Japanese manhole cover.

“Oh, you have done excellent work, little puppets! No, no, don't stop now, clean the area around the hatch too.”

After some more digging, Dancer descended into the hole and pried the hatch open with a crowbar. A diagonal slope with metallic steps came to view.

On the outside, the Strangers warehouse really looked like a submarine made of stone. The black hatch was the dorsal fin of the submarine.

“That's enough, move away from there. I'm going in.”

I went down first because I had the light card and knew what to look for.

The dynamite warehouse room was exactly the same as in the game – an Egyptian-style tomb with walls and pillars were made of metallic crystals. Instead of pharaoh's sarcophagus, there were three crates full of Strangers dynamite in the middle of the tomb.

“Speedy, did you find it?” (Dancer)

“Yes, it's here! Gimme a hand, I'll bring the first one out now!”

Dancer helped me to drag the first dynamite crate outside, then the second crate. For the third crate, Kimono came down instead of Dancer.

I heard the priests screaming in panic outside.

“Oh, right, Dancer wanted to do it.”

When we emerged out of the hole with the third crate, Dancer had already stabbed all the eight priests in the heart with a dagger. I guess Crys advised him to not waste bullets on them.

“Aww, did they all at least get a chance to use the shovel once?”

“Huh? Should I beat them with a shovel?” (Dancer)

“No, I was just joking.”

Kimono shook her head like I was acting like an imbecile again.

“Hey now, we all need to learn to share things equally, even if it's just shoveling sand.”

Yeah, that was the extent of my sympathy for these slave-trading torture cultists.

---

The Strangers dynamite was stored in three full crates. Each crate had 50 sticks of dynamite, so we had 150 sticks total. A fair bit more than Crys and Rain had in the anime.

One stick was around thirty centimeters long, weighted around half a kilo and was gray-white in color. Each crate also had several rolls of fuse cord.

Yep, this wasn't your grandfather's classic old timey dynamite. It was Strangers dynamite.

In the game, the dynamite was triggered either by a fuse or just by shooting it with a firearm. Carrying it in a backpack while jumping from roof to roof didn't set it off, so it was stable enough. Strangers dynamite also didn't go bad or sweat nitroglycerine like real world dynamite – these crates had been under the sand for a century, after all.

“Let's test it out then.” (Crys)

“I was about to suggest the same thing.”

There were two sets of fuse cord coiled around a wooden wheel. The thinner cord was fast fuse that burned about one centimeter in a second, the thicker cord was slow fuse that burned one centimeter in three seconds.

I set up one stick of dynamite on the wrack zone of the shoreline. I cut about a meter-length piece of the slow cord.

“Yosh, let's take cover behind the sandbank. Crys, could you throw a small fire bomb and light the end of the cord, please? Everyone should cover their ears, these things like to go boom louder than gunshots.”

Crys threw a small fire bomb and we waited.

I was extra cautious: one meter of slow cord was 300 seconds.

We probably looked like a bunch of monkeys crouching with hands over our ears.

“Speedy, nothing is happening.” (Dancer)

“Wait for it. I put a bit too much time on it, It'll go off soon.”

Mu-Ur Quincunx speedrunning was all about minor optimizations at higher levels. This kind of time loss would have been unacceptable in a real run, but we we're not in a big hurry here.

Finally, after five minutes –

BOOM

– the dynamite went off and the ground rumbled. Sand, pebbles and seawater rained down on us. I climbed at the top of the sandbank with a victorious smile.

“Tamaya!”

“What?” (Kimono)

“It's something to shout when fireworks go off.”

There was a small crater on the beach. The murky seawater rushing in the crater had already turned it into a pond.

“Impressive. Is it possible to make more of this dynamite?” (Crys)

“I don't know, I'm not a chemist. Probably not, unless we find some genius alchemist or something.”

“That is regrettable.” (Crys)

“Hey, we have three crates of it. One stick is enough to do this, six-pack is enough to bring down a mansion.”

One of the strange features of Strangers dynamite in the game was that two sticks together actually had the power of four sticks and three sticks together had the power of six sticks, and so on. If the same principle of doubled blast bonus for each added stick in a bundle applied here, and there was no upper limit, we could use a full crate to easily blow up the top of the Rukhkh Mountain completely, if it comes to that.

And if the dynamite doesn't do the job, Dancer will.

“Kimono, load the coach. I will light up the temple.” (Crys)

In the anime, Crys and Rain used a Strangers mining vehicle (a six-wheel truck that fans nicknamed Game Goat) to transport the dynamite out of here. We had to use a space-limited horse coach, so Kimono ripped the backseats out to get the dynamite crates in. All the junk we didn't need was thrown out.

“Kimono, wait a moment, I have an idea for these.”

I grabbed the cloak and hat I took from Merster Bison.

I ran back to the beach dunes and placed the cloak and hat under Jeron's corpse.

“Hehehe...”

It was a bit childish plan, and probably wouldn't work, but the idea of Green Mountain Cult and Dark Murderers blaming each other for all these attacks was entertaining. I wasn't as good at these false flag operations as Crys, but I tried.

Crys checked that the flames were spreading evenly in the burning temple before we left.

Kimono drove the coach as always, while us three gentlemen sat inside. I tried to keep the dynamite crates from moving too much with my feet.

Dancer suddenly lowered his head respectfully to Crys and me.

“My friends, allow me to formally thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity to travel with you and become part of your gang. I am constantly overwhelmed by the exquisite joy I feel when I'm being accepted as a member of your group. Before this, I was just a starving stray dog circling the alleys, but now I'm a proud gun dog with a standing in a clade. Crystal Pencil, Speedrun, and Dragon Kimono as well, if you hear me – I truly thank you from the bottom of my heart.” (Dancer)

“It is fine. I allow it.” (Crys)

“Eh, what's with that solemn cadence, Dancer? Don't start frolicking in jubilation now, you silly vertebrate.”

“Yes, I promise not to dance on my own, my friend.” (Dancer)

“...Well, thank you for becoming a follower and supporting the team. Let's keep hitting those funding goals together or whatever... Uh, I don't know how to answer when someone speaks so earnestly. The ship to Mu leaves early in the morning, right? We should collect some zees before that...”

The Beach Temple burned in the night like a colossal candle when we left the area.