Andover Temple Pursuit of Steve-An Action in The Legend of William Oh | Readify Wiki: A Better Way to Explore Books

The Temple of Andover pursuit of Steve Holland is a reversal in which a failed religious service becomes a debt-driven hunt through the temple itself. What begins with William Oh seeking a replacement Healer turns into an attempt to recover Steve’s corpse, then into a hostage negotiation governed by magic. The pursuit matters because it converts Andover’s promise of restoration into an economy of sacrifice, corpse fines, and enforceable agreements, while showing William Oh answering institutional exploitation with improvisational violence.

Causes and Background

The immediate cause is the Temple of Andover’s disastrous provision of Steve Holland as a Healer. After the party pays fifteen hundred gold for the service, Steve dies outside Skyhold when he falls and breaks his neck on the first rise. William Oh initially reacts as a dissatisfied customer: he returns to the temple demanding a better Healer and insists that the first one was defective. The priest refuses the logic of an ordinary refund. Instead, the temple treats the corpse as an asset that must be returned, and explains that the fifteen-hundred-gold payment was already a substantial discount from Steve’s actual retail value of fifteen thousand gold, calculated from his level of thirty-five.

The financial threat changes the meaning of Steve’s death. William Oh and Loth are no longer dealing only with a failed resurrection or an unusable Party member; they are facing the Temple of Andover’s demand for a Corpse Fine if Steve’s body is not recovered. William Oh recognizes that the amount could have purchased equipment capable of saving their lives, and his anger turns toward the institution that sold them a priest and then charged them for the consequences of the priest’s death. The temple’s sacred language therefore operates alongside a precise commercial ledger: restoration requires a sacrifice, the priest has a retail value, and death creates an outstanding liability.

The pursuit also begins under the pressure of uncertainty. William Oh suspects that Steve may not have been a genuine Healer and wonders whether the temple had supplied an ordinary debtor instead of a formal Debtor. Loth does not confirm the suspicion, but the possibility deepens the party’s distrust. William Oh then considers where a desperate young man with a sudden debt would least expect to be found. He uses the Goat Mask taken from No-face’s loot, whose encoded speech can be understood only by other Mask wearers, and frames the question through the practical logic of benefit: if Steve remains uncaught, who profits?

Entry into the Temple

A garish gilded sign announces Rent-a-Miracle above the Temple of Andover, making the institution’s commercial character visible before William Oh and Loth cross its dim interior. Their movement from the public-facing temple into its restricted spaces is abrupt. William Oh sweeps through the door, kicks open the panel separating their side of the building from Retribution, and strikes the journeyman priest with the back of his tomahawk before the non-combat Class can raise an alarm.

The assault takes William Oh and Loth through a hall of cages, where the inhabitants watch them pass, and finally into a small room. There, the ancient master of the temple is eating lunch with Steve Holland. The two are laughing at the naivete of a certain Party, which reveals that Steve’s apparent death was not the end of his participation in the affair: he has been alive, sheltered within the temple, while William Oh’s Party believes it has suffered a fatal and expensive failure. Steve’s amusement collapses when a one-armed, goat-faced William Oh enters carrying a tomahawk and identifies him as the corpse the temple had demanded.

Steve immediately flees through the back door, sending his chair flying and dropping a pastry from his hand. William Oh pursues him by activating Gravity Charge, with one of sixteen charges remaining. Rather than run along the floor in the ordinary way, he relaxes his body and falls toward Steve, treating his prey as the new down. Even after Steve turns a corner, William Oh’s altered sense of gravity continues to pull him toward the fleeing priest. He lands on a doorframe, climbs through the sideways opening, and drops after Steve through a corridor that seems to descend into the earth according to his inner ear.

The Capture and Fight

William Oh catches Steve from behind with a headbutt, sending the priest sprawling with William Oh on top of him. The capture is temporary. Steve backhands William Oh hard enough to send him skittering across a wall, then regains his feet and runs. William Oh keeps the momentum of the pursuit, jumping over a display and bouncing from a soot-covered ceiling to aim at Steve’s back.

Steve turns and raises a divine shield glittering in the colors of Andover. The shield briefly places the temple’s authority between the two men, but William Oh attacks it as a physical obstacle. His Phantom Hand cracks the defense, and the Tomahawk of the Serpent drives into one of those cracks, shattering the shield and putting the blade beneath Steve’s chin. William Oh grapples the priest and says that he does not want to kill him, while admitting that he does want to kill him and will do so if Steve forces the issue. The threat changes the chase from recovery to negotiation, but only after violence has established which side controls the immediate terms.

William Oh demands Steve’s stash. Steve first claims that he cannot reveal it because William Oh will kill him and take it anyway; his fear becomes so theatrical and physical that he begins blubbering, with snot dripping from his nose. The display briefly catches William Oh off guard. Steve uses that opening to elbow him in the ribs, sending him through a nearby wall, and dives through the hole. The escape fails after another short, violent chase, when Loth binds Steve in silk ropes.

Bound but not passive, Steve fires Abilities in a desperate attempt to save himself. William Oh disrupts every one of them, turning the priest’s magical resistance into another demonstration of the pursuer’s control. Steve’s tone then shifts from fear and despair to righteous fury. He invokes the curse of Andover, predicts fire and brimstone, claims that milk will sour and food will spoil around William Oh, and threatens him with powerful friends. William Oh answers by raising the tomahawk toward Steve’s neck. Faced with imminent death, Steve abandons the threats and offers to disclose the location of his stash if William Oh provides a guarantee that he will not kill him.

The Contract and Its Immediate Consequences

William Oh finds the guarantee in the form of a magical agreement. The relevant Ability seals an agreement by making two individuals share smoke from a pipe; anyone who willingly violates the spirit of the agreement suffers triple the passive debuff for one month. Steve reads the terms while complaining about the pipe and its painful handling. The proposed Contract requires him to tell the truth to William Oh’s Party, refrain from attacking or abandoning them, avoid misleading them into danger, reject half-truths and misrepresented facts, support them to the best of his ability, and guide them to his most valuable hidden assets.

The Party’s obligation is equally specific. William Oh’s Party agrees not to kill Steve and to use his assets expressly toward paying his Corpse Fine. It will attempt to raise the money within thirty days and may kill Steve only if it becomes blatantly unlikely that the required capital can be obtained. The agreement thus transforms Steve from a hidden temple beneficiary and fleeing target into a temporary resource whose survival depends on the value of his concealed property.

William Oh and Steve both agree to the terms, and the two streams of smoke mingle before returning to them, sealing the Contract. It is the twelfth Contract associated with William Oh’s arrangements, and the System records six Contracts as active. William Oh emphasizes the lethal consequence of breach by telling Steve that breaking the Contract will literally make him keel over and die. Steve’s sour response does not undo the agreement; it confirms the new balance of power. The pursuit ends not with Steve’s death, but with his capture, compelled cooperation, and continued life made conditional by the same economic obligation that began the chase.

The Temple’s Commercial Theology

The pursuit exposes the Temple of Andover as an institution where sacred power and commercial accounting are inseparable. Its gilded Rent-a-Miracle sign presents divine assistance as a service available for purchase, while the priest’s question about whether the Party accepts a fifteen-hundred-gold sacrifice for restoring William Oh’s limb places bodily recovery inside a formal economy of ritual exchange. The same logic governs Steve Holland’s supposed death: the temple does not treat a dead Healer merely as a lost person, but as an item whose return has financial conditions. When the journeyman priest explains that fifteen hundred gold was already a discount from Steve’s fifteen-thousand-gold retail value, based on his level of thirty-five, the temple’s categories of blessing, purchase, debt, and corpse become interchangeable. The divine institution therefore creates the crisis twice—first by supplying a disastrously unreliable Healer, and then by converting the consequences into a liability William Oh’s Party must somehow pay.

Aftermath and Institutional Exposure

The pursuit’s financial consequences remain active after Steve Holland is secured. Loth later slides fourteen thousand nine hundred fifteen thousand-gold coins across the Temple of Andover’s counter to pay the Corpse Fine, while a bruised priest bows and thanks the Party for its business. His swollen face still bears the mark of William Oh’s earlier attack, yet the exchange proceeds with the practiced politeness of commerce. Loth’s bitter objection is that Steve is standing alive and well directly behind him: the payment is therefore not compensation for an irretrievably lost man, but the price demanded by an institution whose accounting system has already classified him as a recoverable liability. The scene completes the pursuit’s central reversal. Steve’s death was first treated as a disaster, then exposed as a deception, and finally converted into a legally enforceable debt that William Oh’s Party must pay even after recovering the supposedly dead Healer.