Paragorn’s Infinity Trial – Part 5
In the weeks since the people started to leave the city of Albion, the upper class people in control of the church started to notice that church attendance and church donations had dropped sharply and this sent them into panic mode. To mitigate this, they sent out their most feared Inquisitor, Mozgus, to investigate why the people were suddenly leaving the city of Albion in droves and mitigate it. And Mozgus, being the excessive religious zealous monster that he is, took this assignment as if the fate the world depended on it and he was the only that could save it.
Out there on the outskirts of the city of Albion, a group of refugee families were preparing to leave the city together and venture out west and settle there. As they were travelling, they ran into a group of knights that were travelling towards Albion. Not looking for any trouble, the refugees made space for the knights to let them pass by, only for those knights to suddenly surround them and hold them at spear point. This was occurring all around the outskirts of Albion, the knights under the command of the Holy See were detaining the departing refugees. To make matters worse for this specific group of refugee families, they encountered the most feared of the Holy See's inquisition, Mozgus. Upon seeing the feared inquisitors, the refugee families all knelt down and begged him to let them go and stating their innocence of any heresy.
At this, a visage of such seething rage appears on Mozgus' face that it should be physically impossible for a human to achieve, and he roars at the refugees.
"YOU BLASPEHMOUS SINNERS! YOU DARE SPOUT YOUR HERESY IN FRONT OF A MAN OF GOD!"
With a single gesture, he called forth his personal retinue of torturers, who were a group of six misshapen men that Mozgus had taken in and trained to be his personal torturers. By then, his face had returned to the visage of calmness he had before the refugees spoke up.
"By my authority, I shall pass judgement upon all sinners. And for the grave sin of apostasy, you are all condemned to death by the wheel."
Upon hearing this, the refugees broke out into crying and prostrated themselves before Mozgus, begging for forgiveness, the children clinging to their parents crying and screaming in fear. When one of Mozgus' torturers grabs a child and rips it away from its parents, they try desperately to stay together only for the knights to restrain the parents and force them to watch on helplessly as their child is taken from them.
It was at that moment that suddenly the world came to a stop. The refugees that were being restrained and forced to watch this barbaric execution of a child suddenly manages to free themselves from the grips of the knights restraining them. And the little child that freed itself from the grip of Mozgus' executioner ran back into the arms of his parents who tearfully embraced him. But once the shock of it all passes, the refugees look around and start to notice that the knights and Mozgus and his torturers were very much aware of what was happening, judging from their eyes that followed them. Eyes that were filled with infinite malice and hate and it was all pointed at them. If before, they were seen as apostate, now they were also seen as witches and that in Mozgus' eyes called for a worse punishment.
Pretty soon, the refugees were talking amongst themselves and they basically all had the same question: 'What is going on?'
"I did this." All the refugees heard as they looked skyward.
The answer to their question came in the form of Paragorn in his resplendent golden armor descending down from the skies and landing in front of them. In their eyes, it was like a god had descended from the heavens to answer their prayers and they all knelt in front of him. The children were gazing at him with wide open eyes and excitement in their voices as they pulled at their parents and told them to look at who just came, with the parents trying to shush the children and have them kneel in front of Paragorn in an attempt to not insult him. But Paragorn waved their concerns away and bade them to rise. Soon enough they asked him whether he was a god.
In response, Paragorn simply smiled at them and waved his arm towards the western horizon. "I am but a man. A very powerful man, but a man I still am. I have helped you simply because I wanted to help you. So now you can all continue on your journey."
When Paragorn said his peace, the refugees looked at him skeptically, nor believing him for a second, for this kind of power is not something a man can do regardless of how powerful they were. But what else kept them there was the fear of the knights chasing them down once this was over and Paragorn knew this.
"Continue on your journey, you have nothing to fear from the church." Said Paragorn waving his hand in front of them and implanting this suggestion in their minds.
And like that, the refugees take off under the supervision of Paragorn. And this happened all around Albion. The Holy See church had recalled all their knights and had them surround the entire city and apprehend all the refugees that were leaving the city and force them back into the city and put the fear of the church into them. But this was what Paragorn was waiting for, to round up the entire church and all their forces in one fell swoop. Using the Space Stone's enhanced power, he was able to use its power of Omnipresence to be present around the entire city at the same time. After ensuring that the entire city of Albion was empty of the refugees and now only inhabited by the Church people, Paragorn went to work. He activated the barrier he had set up days ago that surrounded the entire city of Albion and entrapped everyone that was still inside. And after that, he appeared in front of everyone and grabbed them by the head and made them kneel in front of him.
But from their point of view, the entire world had suddenly gone dark and all of a sudden a golden god appeared in front of them. With this act, Paragorn would judge them. He would read their minds and look through their histories to draw his judgement. For those who were utterly fanatical to the church and committed horrible, absolutely unforgivable deeds in the name of their 'god' and were utterly unrepentant, Paragorn would punish them by sending them out into the depths of space. He would curse them with total immortal and send them out to float in the infinite expanse of the cosmos, never more coming into contact with any matter of any kind, doomed to watch the universe pass them by but unable to evermore interact with it and only every finding an end to their suffering at the heat death of the universe.
For those who had committed heinous deeds, but were not loyal to the church or repentant, they were sentenced to suffer the same accursed existence that the others who were just as heinous as them but fanatically loyal to the church. But then there were those who are repentant of the deeds they had committed. For those, Paragorn would give them a second chance at life and to be a better person. For their punishment though, they would be sentenced to petrification for a hundred years and all the while being conscious of the world around them. After their punishment was over, their petrification would come to an end and they could rejoin the world once more and make a better live for themselves.
Out of all of them, one person was set aside, inquisitor Mozgus. For him, Paragorn had an entirely different punishment in mind for him. First off, he showed Mozgus the real power of a god and told him that though he was not his god, but that he would punish him regardless for all the evil he has done. And as true fanatic, Mozgus proclaimed the evil he committed as necessary to enforce the strict laws of god. And in answer Paragorn laughs at him and tells him that everything he ever believed in was naught but a lie. His shows him the Apostles and the God Hand and tells him that his whole religion was nothing but a tool used by literal devils to control mankind to their grand malign design and that he was a fool for believing in this lie so whole heartedly. As expected, Mozgus, in his fanatical zealotry, cursed out Paragorn for daring to question god and to spout these heresies and screaming at him that he is to die by burning at the stake for his heresies.
Paragorn just looked at him, face impassive, waiting for Mozgus to finish his tirade before he at last placed his left hand that had the Infinity Gauntlet on Mozgus' head. With a pulse of power from the Reality Stone, he mutated Mozgus so horribly bad that he could no longer even be recognized as human. His right arm had shrunken down and deformed that it resembled a bird's featherless wing, his left arm was so grossly enlarged with elephantiasis that it dragged down his upper body to left and gave him permanent scoliosis. His right leg was made stiff with Fibro dysplasia, which caused all his connective tissues in it to be replaced with bone, resulting in him losing the ability to move his right leg. As for his head, he enlarged his lower jaw so much that he could no longer close his mouth and he perpetually drooled. His right eye that he covered up with scar tissue constantly itched and ached, but he was unable to relieve the itch and pain and got gradually worse over time. And lastly, he covered his body in open sores that never healed and constantly oozed out a disgusting and putrid pus. And this whole time, Mozgus agonizingly felt the change that Paragorn brought on to him as his bones cracked and his muscles tore and reknit themselves to turn into this monstrosity.
"There, all done." Said Paragorn when he let go of Mozgus. As a last icing on the cake, Paragorn created a mirror in front of Mozgus to show him what he had become. And suffice to say, he was horrified by what he had become.
"Your punishment is special. After this day is over, your barbaric cult and the memory of it will be wiped from existence and you will be its last practitioner left. You will see humanity ascend to the stars and create a civilization the likes of which you cannot begin to imagine and you know that your backwards cult was not and never will be a part of its ascension. You will be there to see it all, but you will never be accepted by them."
"You will be reviled, hated and shunned by humanity. And yet, you will be forced to see it happen before your eyes, but you will never a part of it. You will understand any language that will develop in the future, but you will never be able to speak nor communicate with humanity ever again and they will never again believe in a god. And you will never be able to harm them ever again, regardless if it is self-defense or not and yet never die and always regenerate back to this grotesque monstrosity until the very last human in this universe has died."
When that over, Paragorn opened a portal behind Mozgus and pushed him in. This portal would send him 3000 years into the future where everything and everyone he had ever known were long gone. What made this curse worse was that he was overcome with a desperate desire to connect to humanity, but every human that saw him was overcome with a seething hatred and viciously attack him and he could not fight back till he was dead, only for him to regenerate from. The horribly mutated Mozgus would wander the Earth and hundreds of other planets for many thousands of years, desperate to connect to humanity, but never be a part of it.
Back in the present, with the City of Albion now empty of refugees that would start the enlightenment of humanity and the Holy See erased from existence, Paragorn still would do one last thing before he left this universe forever. His plans for humanity in this universe to become ascendant would never come to fruition so long as the demonic denizens of the Astral World would temper with humanities' destiny for their own malevolent desires. So to combat this, Paragorn used the empowered Reality Stone to forever more separate the Physical World from the Astral World. From now on, all of the souls of the deceased would flow from the Physical World to the Astral World, but never the other way around. From now on there would be no more temporal conjunctions that would result in the birth of an Apostles and the all remaining Apostles in this world would die immediately because the Physical World rejected them. No longer would the God Hand have any more influence in this world, be it subtle or overt, and thus their steering of humanity's destiny had come to an end.
When that was all over and humanity's future was assured, that was when Paragorn at last told his system to get him out of this universe and back to the Dragon Ball universe.