Candle

On a certain floor of a certain building for a certain office. There sat a man among piles of papers, who was focused on reading newspaper reports, police reports, incidents in the past decades and many investigative papers. He got it from the archive of the judiciary department, from the police specifically, to look for information about the guy he met the night before.

"Eryl mentioned they're a group of terrorists so they must have been a record about them. Even tho they're new in the southern hemisphere, this is just a subjective view since they've been here for a decade already."

He got absolutely nothing from reading these papers for two whole hours.

"Some random cases about a serial murder spanning towns that continued for years, a psychotic guy with his psychotic modus operandi who haven't been caught yet, the recent tripophobia-enducing cases a few years ago... Shit. nothing really supernatural-y here. Goddamit what exactly am I looking for?"

Data about a secret organization. Will it be called a secret if there was available information on them? I dunno what Ayre is thinking but seems impossible to me. However, he remembered something that Eryl also mentioned.

"Extremists... Extremists in the sense of what? Oh wait that was dumb. If they're indeed extremists, then I am wasting my time idling here in these small cases..."

He continued his search until twilight but to no avail. He wasn't able to even scratch the surface of information regarding the organization he's looking for. He called it quits when Dan knocked on his door in the evening.

...

After dinner and cleaning his body, he sat on his bed while opening a certain black box. He studied the items inside it. The letter was still the same. He kept it for evidence. However, the same wasn't true for the candle. He kept it because he was curious what that candle exactly was.

He was readying to place the letter back to the back when it grazed his skin, making his blood flow out.

"A paper cut? Tch."

Drip, drip.

It was nothing worth noting until a drop of that blood touched the candle's flames.

The blood reacted violently with the flame! Like cesium put into a bucket of water and imagine it was a kilogram of the pure element with its physical form flattened, the blood was so reactive that Ayre, during that split second, thought it was going to burn his whole room down!

However, instead of cesium hydroxide, hydrogen and a loud explosion, what was produced was a haze of blue light. The contrast between the light produced and the still-burning, little candle flame continued until the blood completely evaporated.

A few seconds after the evaporation, Ayre was still dumbfounded at what happened.

"This is the first time am seeing it but...this must be ambience..."

The blue haze was still not disappearing in fact, it was getting more solid and blue with little bits of sparkles evenly distributed across the haze even though the blood already evalorated due to heat.

Ayre tried touching the haze. Moving his hand, he found out that it behaves like smoke or sublimated gases. It can also be affected physically.

'Hm? Is this how ambience works? If that guy from last night indeed used ambience, did he somehow made that by physically manipulating it? Then how..?'

...

In a certain room of Crotton Cathedral.

"Cardinal Eryl. I detected ambience activity though I am not sure where it came from since it faded just after."

"An attack last night, you haven't detected shit. Min, now you're telling me you detected something?"

Eryl sounded a bit annoyed. He just, after all, revealed some confidential information to a civilian, however, Min was also confused that he didn't detect anything the night before so he did not retort.

"I don't know exactly how this works. I suspect it is because last night, the guy's source of ambience was synonymous, if not the same, to my source. Since I am used to mine and how I feel when I handle it, i must have missed it."

Eryl's closed eyes suddenly opened a bit. It's supposed to be a frown. Let's consider it that.

"Min. Remember. These guys aren't from our faith. The Lady Above would not give power to blasphemers! Even if she did, she would withdraw it the moment they turn the other way." Eryl replied disbelievingly.

Indeed. Ambience cannot be produced from oneself. Humans cannot get it from the environment nor cultivate nor learn how to produce it, all by themselves. Instead, from what the church authorities know, ambience can only be given to them by the Twelve Gods! Directly from the Gods! These people who were given these abilities, of course, can only wield abilities based on which god the ambience they are using came from. Of course there are some exception to this according to the church peeps.

With that being said, if two people have the same source of ambience, generally, they would not be able to differentiate who's ambience is which since they came from the same source. That's why Eryl quickly denied Min's hypothesis. He did not want to acknowledge the possibility that these people were indeed from his very own church.

Of course Ayre at this point, was currently clueless about any of this information.

"That certainly is unquestionable but my senses won't lie to me. Are there any church related to us? A church that has resemblance to ours by any chance?"

Eryl thought for a while before decisively answering.

"Hmm... Actually, there is...."

...

Ayre stared at the ambience produced from his own blood. He continued playing with it as if he was a kid who got his very first toy.

Whoosh! Shashasha I dunno...

Sound was produced as Ayre was manipulating it. He changed its direction and speed while experimenting and concluded that ambience was like his own arms' extension. Though he also found out that it has a certain radius in which he can freely control it. It faded away as soon as it was controlled to go beyond that radius of five meters.

Of course Ayre wasn't a genius. In fact, he consider himself dumb. That's a trade secret between us. He did not immediately learn how to properly use it since he was just playing with it, nothing more nothing less. His pale face, as pale as a corpse in fact, is just one of the many proof supporting this. He was currently anemic from losing too much blood! No, anemic is an understatement. He looks like a patient who's about to have a hypovolemic shock from losing too much blood!

Yup, he called it quits the moment he felt he might collapse.

"Gotta ask that Min tomorrow. Hopefully they won't mind me barging in their church two days in a row."

Plop.

Ayre straight up fell asleep on his bed the moment the two made contact with each other.