451 Ceremony begins

This by itself was quite an achievement for the undeveloped society of those people, making me wonder where did they obtain the materials to build it in the first place. With how realistically small… No, I couldn't think that way. Just considering three meters of growth in the radius for the entire world per person, with three thousand people inhabiting it, it would turn from about three square kilometres of space to an astonishing ten of them! And that number came when I only considered the linear growth for this place, that I could already tell by the time dilution, was most likely to change!

But I wasn't given enough time to adore the majestic building in front of me, as the group of guards quickly pulled me inside the building, leading me through a set of triangular corridors, aimed to funnel all the visiting guests into three main, inner entrances to the proper part of the sanctuary.

By the time I finally stepped inside the place, I already made sure to do some tweaks to my look with my hiding ability, just in order to prevent anyone from recognising me, if I were to chance upon someone that already interacted with me.

Yet, as soon as I saw the interior of the sanctuary, I realised how mistaken I was thinking that its exterior was grand.

Consisting of a main, empty square in the middle, decorated with a huge altar only, one might compare it to modern stadiums, with how the tribunes for the guests were stacked on a light slope, allowing everyone to observe the events in the middle. With the entire guest area separated into four distinctive locations, once again kept triangular, with the pointy end aimed at the altar and with the corners filled with raised, triangular platforms, almost entirely covered in delicate carvings of events that I couldn't even recognise.

If this place was a sanctuary made to celebrate my person and my deeds, how come I couldn't even tell what those sculptures were supposed to mean? Unless this wasn't my sanctuary at all, made for someone I didn't even know about!

My train of thoughts got soon stopped, when the group of guards brough me to the altar, using the fact that the entire area was empty for now. Scanning the surroundings with my energy vision, I could that behind the walls of one of the raised platforms, quite a sizeable crowd was amassed, with a strange energy signature flowing through the floor, strangely resembling the runes I saw back in those folks ancient ruins.

Clack.

With most of the guards moving to the giant doors located at the bottom of every raised platform, their leader even dared to enter the one where I found something happening already, as if not worried about interrupting the rites happening there. Before long, the small holes between the carvings light up with a bright light, before it all returned to how it looked before, with the same massive doors that the officer entered, now opening in order to let the massive crowd of people pour out and take their seats all around.

Considering my intention to learn as much as I could before judging the leaders of this strange cult and punishing them for doing strange stuff behind my back, I acted as if I was completely devoid of power the very moment I felt a weak, sucking force from the chains on my wrists. After calculating the average strength of people inside my dimension, and making sure to add just a tiny bit of power just to make sure, it became obvious that with the current suction force, not only all my power would be drained up in a matter of seconds, but also the natural regeneration of the body wouldn't be able to keep up with it, putting me close to a comatic state.

Keeping up the illusion of my body hanging down powerlessly from the chains, I moved my head up, watching the proceedings of the ceremony. To my surprise, as soon as the crowd cleaned out from the gate, filling up barely a fifth of the free seats in the sanctuary, a familiar face showed up, with her entire body dressed up in expensive robes, oozing luxury and high status. 

With a thin, black cloth only pretending to cover her charms, she cleverly always positioned herself in a way to make the spectators unable to see her from the front, either by showing them her back covered by a thick, royal coat kept in the red and purple colours as if in opposition to otherwise black tone of the rest of her clothes, or by moving suddenly to make the coat cover her front if she wanted to face the crowd.

But the real surprise only came after she and her entire entourage with the guards' officer included in it fully stepped inside the main square. Because right after them, three figures in chains entered the area.

Accompanied by the huge wave of whistles and insults falling down from the audience, the beaten-up faces of Jessie, Barkal and someone else I couldn't recognise showed up! With the thick chains made out of some strange material tightly banning them from all sorts of movement outside of slowly trodding forward, I could already feel a familiar warmth of rage brewing in my insides, yet consider what they had to go through to appear in such a state, waiting just a few moments later wouldn't change anything for them.

With my disguise still perfect, not even when a group of uniformly dressed people appearing to be secondary priests of this place chained all three of them to the other sides of the altar did either this damned princess nor her slaves and my retainers managed to recognise me!

"Silence!"

As soon as a plainly dressed, old man passed a strangely familiar staff to the hand of the unnamed princess, now posing as the highest priestess of this place, did anyone from the leading group utter a single word.

With the crowd instantly silencing down, the princess that once asked me to fuck her in public in order to reaffirm her status, knocked at the floor with her staff three times, before raising her hands high into the air, not caring about revealing most of the glory of her body barely hidden behind the thin, black cloth to the crowd.

"All praise our saviour, the last hero!"