From Satan with Love (bxb)

Chapter 1 The Exorcist

"Come on, Leon, it's not that hard. Just go meet him, smile charmingly and say something nice, and if you really don't want to take him on the show, we can certainly find a way to talk him out. He is just a fanboy who wants to meet his idol, and he happens to be the son of our biggest sponsor!" Chloe pressed her hands together and implored with her battering long eyelashes.

She knew her audience well. The stubborn exorcist could never say no to a pair of pleading puppy eyes.

Leon pinched his nose bridge as if he was having a headache: "We've talked about this many times. The whole point of this show is to warn people how dangerous it is to tamper with dark magic or supernatural forces, and now you want me to take a random rich boy on a job? You know how dangerous things can get! We had an agreement from the beginning that only professionals are allowed on set!"

Even though it still sounded peevish, Leon's tune had already softened significantly compared to moments ago. Chloe knew she was getting there.

"I know, Father Solari," said the young producer, "but our staff still needs to eat, and if we want to survive the brutal competition on Webflix, we have to secure our sponsors. Otherwise, we can't keep saving lives and spreading God's love anymore!"

"Stop patronizing me. I'm not even a diocesan priest. Spreading God's love is not really my expertise." Leon retorted peevishly. Such blunt words could have incurred criticism from his colleagues, but Leon never really had the patience for trivial matters like his ecclesiastical reputation.

Chloe tilted her head and shifted her tone subtly, changing from pleading to negotiation, "How about this, you do this one thing for me, and I promise no more fan related appointments for a month!"

"Two months!"

"Six weeks!"

"Deal." Leon decided to take whatever he could get as he also knew how difficult it would be for Chloe to reject a request from their biggest sponsor, Randall Lockwood, the billionaire and CEO of Lockwood Enterprise and a major board member of several mainstream media and streaming platforms, including Webflix. The success of the show was largely attributed to his support. Otherwise, they would have burned out their budget before they finished their first episode.

Leon was only ordained officially as a priest two years ago when he reached age 24 (which was already a notable exception as the canonical age to ordain a priest was 25), but he had been working in the field of exorcism for almost a decade. At first, he was an apprentice of a revered exorcist, Father De Rossi, who was his mentor and guardian after his mother passed away and his father disappeared. Leon showed an exceptional aptitude for identifying demonic activities and a strong intuition that allowed him to ask all the right questions, and Father De Rossi didn't want such rare talent to go to waste during the ongoing unheralded war between the Catholic Church and diabolical powers.

According to the statistics collected by a less known exorcist society in the Vatican, The Diablus Eradicatio Bureau, the number of confirmed demonic possession incidents around the world had drastically increased during the past decade and kept rising with each passing year, which only began to incur concern and disturbance in the Holy See in recent three years.

The newly elected Pope Sixtus VI had an exorcist background and didn't dismiss the Bureau's warning as quickly as his predecessor. Upon closer investigation, the alarming rising number and the scale of the mass possession cases were no longer something that could be ignored.

The Holy See then relocated vast resources into the Diablus Eradicatio Bureau, recruited pious priests from worldwide to join the exorcist force, and collaborated with psychologists and mental health institutions to tease apart mental health cases from demonic ones. However, not long after the "Holy War'' against Satan started, the exorcists soon found the biggest obstacle they had to face was the bias and stigma attached to exorcism. Even within the Catholic Church, a significant number of priests didn't believe exorcisms or demon possessions were real and cast glances askance at the exorcists.