“So?” John asked the blood mage, now patting the bench for Eliza to sit down next to him.

“The fuck do you mean ‘so’?” she mumbled; her voice was so tired from things John couldn’t hope to understand himself. Still, he had to try.

“I mean, ‘so, want to talk about the weather or something?’” John sarcastically remarked; “No, I want to know how you feel right now.”

“I don’t fucking know,” Eliza shouted at him, finally raising her eyes from her feet; “I guess I am happy that you are alive? No scratch that shit, I am ecstatic, I am so happy about it, it almost counteracts all the horror that goes on in my head right now. It’s quiet, I feel fucking perfect, but I know that somewhere in this head is… just this thing that wants to get out, and it’s not ANY thing. I have the literal end of humanity inside me, and it’s all quiet, which is somehow worse than anything I had to endure up to this point. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL?!”

“Confused would be the right response,” John answered, continuing to pat the bench beside him. Eliza refused to sit down. Sighing, he stood up and walked over to her instead. The other girls gave them some distance. “Look, this is all incredibly recent, and I can’t say I get what is going on myself. It seems to be a consistent theme in my life that I get dragged into stuff like this,” the Gamer said.

“Of course, you get dragged into this shit, you chose to hang out with people this screwed in their cum-oiled brain-windings,” Eliza threw at him. “Just fuck me, and I mean that you should just fuck off not that you should stick your cock into me. Ditch me, leave me here and never look back.”

“I can’t do that,” John stated clearly.

“JUST GO THE FUCK AWAY!” the blood mage screamed; “I don’t want your help; this Romulus asshole will look over me. He is going to be of more help than you’ve ever been with your friendly shit. I don’t need you anymore; I have my memories, I will survive!”

“You will survive, yes, but you will live in captivity,” John pointed out; “Just tell me the truth. We both know why you want me to leave.”

Tears welled up in Eliza’s eyes, “I just told you the fucking truth. I don’t need you anymore!”

“Eliza…”

“Don’t say my name like it means anything to you; you are just a fucking pervert and I happen to be cute.” She threw whatever she thought would get him to distance himself from her at him. Insults, accusations, they all were silenced when John reached into his inventory and pulled out the white scarf. He threw it around Eliza’s neck and pulled her close by the ends.

“Just say it,” he demanded when she dug her fingers into the white fabric of his shirt.

Tear-choked, she answered, “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

John gently kissed the roots of her hair, “Then let this be the last time you hurt me. You have your past back, right?”

“It’s a shitty past,” Eliza returned; “Full of abusive priests, cowardly parents and zealous idiots. Figures that my whole life sucked from the beginning.”

“But were the past weeks bad?” John asked.

“NO!” Eliza looked up to him with wide-eyes; “No, they were as awesome as rolling over a band of preachers with a steamroller and turning them into a bloody pulp on the floor!”

“And now you have your own name on top of that,” he told her; “Not some terrible abbreviation whispered to you by a fragmented goddess. YOUR name.”

Eliza was quiet now.

Continuing, John slowly rolled the scarf around her neck, “Look, I can’t say that everything will be fine. I don’t know. Maybe you are living on borrowed time now, maybe that thing in your head is bound to kill us all if we don’t kill it first, but I refuse to just leave it at that. If you can stay in control, that means that there is hope. So how about we just look at the positives here. You are alive, you are in control, we know what we are dealing with, and now you can enjoy life without the steady question of what is wrong with you.”

“So, you are asking me to just carry on like it’s a regular ass day with this THING in my head?” Eliza was dumbfounded; “That’s your great advice here? How will that stop me from hurting you again?”

In response, he shrugged, “What other choice do you have? Wallowing in despair won’t make her disappear. You can only try to live with it as best you can, and, if you let me, I will gladly assist you in managing it. If you could stay in control for the past hours, then it stands to reason that you can always stay in control.”

He let go of the scarf now resting firmly around Eliza’s neck, exactly where it belonged. “You could only hurt me if you decided to leave me. I knew you were a broken angel from the start, I knew that I was in for some pain and that getting with crazy was bound to get me in trouble. Just promise me that this is the last time I need to tell you to work on your problems, because we know that I am right, and I am getting sick of you causing problems.”

He flicked her forehead.

“The fuck, dude?” Eliza complained; “One moment you are all romantic and make me feel like someone is burning bibles in my stomach, then you end it on THAT?”

“Hey, just because I love you doesn’t mean I can’t tell you to fix yourself,” John defended himself, “and I’ve just had these talks with you one too many times to be serious about all of them.”

Eliza burst out laughing. A new name, a new terrible certainty and no more scratching in her head or faces hovering all around but still the same shrill, insane laughter. Strangely calming, in this situation. “You know what, you are right, you cum-spray can,” she said and jumped at him. It was an unexpected motion that brought John out of balance as the snickering host of the walking apocalypse grappled onto him. One, two steps he took backwards in an attempt to regain his footing, then the third caused him to slip and land with his back in the shallow mud of the lake’s rim.

Before he could complain, Eliza kissed him deeply. As she was holding onto him, John just laid there with his limbs sprawled out and let the moment pass. Once she pulled back, he raised his head so that his ears were no longer underwater.

“Was that really necessary?” he asked with a grin on his face.

“You are spot-fucking-on,” Eliza ignored his question; “So what if the end of humanity lives inside me? Only thing I can do is learn to live with Thana-“ she took a pained breath, raising one hand to support her dazed head. With worry John looked at the scene continuing, “-there she is, alive and kicking. She isn’t going away and you won’t listen to sense and go somewhere far away from me, you loveable clit-sucker. Fuck all of this confusion and self-doubt and shit. I will just become so fucking stable that I don’t have to worry about any of this shit ever again, and then I am going to have your kid and that’s that.”

“Still a weird goal, but fine by me,” John laughed; “Just don’t switch all the way into the careless mindset.”

“If I get careless, I get shanked out of fear by all of dumbass humanity,” Eliza made him understand that she was completely aware.

“Yes… can we get out of the water now?”

The blood mage got off him, and they walked back to the bench.

“And once more I am reduced to a drier,” Salamander grumbled, radiating heat as they made their way home, to the mansion Staufen; “I am a spark of war, not some random fucking hairdryer.”

“Actually, I was wondering about something,” John said, with the heavy things done for the day. “The whole thing was broadcasted live, right?”

It was a wonderful showcase of the fact that the news were somewhat corrupt wherever one went. Apparently, Jeff had not only been the caster but also the one with the exclusive broadcasting rights. So, when the whole thing had started to unravel at hypersonic speeds, he just kept the camera running. Probably made more money on that day than the rest of the tournament combined.

“Yes, the whole fucking world will be afraid of me forever now,” Eliza gnarled. “Carry me!”

While not really sure what that had to do with anything, John thought that she could use some more support. She seemed to have gotten over the worst of it now, but a little more wouldn’t hurt. Also, he would take most excuses to feel one of his girls up, so he picked her up princess style, and they continued their way through the massive building.

“Anyway, my question is why you and Richard were the only real responders there,” John continued on, looking at Nathalia.

“Who else did you expect to go there?” It was blatantly written on the dragoness face that she found the question pretty stupid.

“Ya know,” Rave chimed in, “ANY god that is allied to Romulus?”

“Sol and Luna were right there,” Nathalia still didn’t really understand, as evident by her next question, “Do you expect gods to just meddle in your mortal affairs? I went in there to save John, Rat did what he did to get in good graces with Romulus again.”

“Sounds to me like you are an incredible selfish bunch,” the techno-lover continued.

“Selfish by your definition, yes,” Nathalia freely admitted, “but I don’t bother greatly with the opinion of lesser, mortal beings. Most gods would probably take the death of a few ten-thousand in return of being free to do whatever they want in Europe, which is impossible with Romulus around.”

“Yeah, that is super fucking selfish,” Eliza said in a happy voice as she sniffed, in a bit of a creepy obsessed fashion, at John’s shirt.

“How is your jaw by the way?” John had to ask out of curiosity.

“Melted back to my head,” the dragoness growled. “It’s still healing and hurts like hell.” Now that she mentioned it, John could see a bigger than usual gap in the scales framing her face that was lightly bleeding lava. It did look rather unpleasant.

“I could heal you,” John offered. His powers should have been bullshit enough for that.

Nathalia grunted in a mixture of dismissiveness and amusement, “You are beginning to have enough mana to restore my vitality, but it won’t be of much help.” To translate that into game terms: Undine’s heal value wasn’t really high enough to affect her HP total.

“Okay, back to the gods and your logic thing then,” John said; “What are you going to do now that there is war?”

“I don’t care about your war,” she instantly dismissed him; “As a matter of fact, I am going to just stay here with Tha-,” the dragoness stopped herself and rubbed the scales on the side of her face. It was fascinating to see so many people John thought untouchable acting so carefully. “-Eliza and leave you to do whatever you want to do.”

“What was that about wanting to save me?” John wondered.

“That was an emergency; if you participate in a war because of your own volition, I am not going to be your guardian deity,” Nathalia made clear; “If you die to your own mistakes, that just means you weren’t a worthy mate after all.”

Well, that was heartless. Gods seemed to have a non-involvement policy for anything that didn’t serve their own interests. “What if you were a patron god? How would you act in that case?”

With a flare of her wings drifting into John’s field of view, his well-read support spoke up. “Those who bind themselves to guilds only act on the core territory of that guild due to a treaty that ensures that guild will survive conflicts of interest,” Momo explained; “Abyssal History by Maria Theresia, chapter 3, paragraph 3.”

“Unless that interest is complete annihilation of that guild,” John guessed.

“Even then, the ones to slay that god shouldn’t be from our own kind,” Nathalia continued on; “We gods of destruction and those of death are too good at killing, so everyone else made a pact to unify against whoever goes out of their way to end a fellow god. Sending in a god to kill the enemy god means that you will face a coalition of everyone else.”

If there was a caste of people in your race that was way better at killing than the rest, it made sense for everyone else to make up a way to keep that caste in check. John completely understood that angle. If they didn’t do that, only the destructive gods would reign over anything. “I guess Romulus gets away with using Sol and Luna though,” John said.

“Yes. What are we going to do if he kills a god? Throw more at him to make him even stronger?” Nathalia shrugged; “If it hadn’t been for you, I would have worried about the genocide goddess only after she murdered Romulus.”

‘And in the process made it so nobody would ever have been able to stop her, good job,’ John thought to himself, not wanting to make Nathalia needlessly angry over something she clearly didn’t care about. It was good that gods were such a selfish bunch, for the most part. If they wanted, they could have meddled in all mortal affairs and next to no one would have been able to stand up to them. In this specific case, John felt kind of annoyed at their insistence of being uncaring onlookers though.

But the alternative was that all of the strong gods, however many there were, would appear in every conflict ever and just roll over all the humans in the field. So, this state of affairs wasn’t that bad.

They finally made it out of the building.