The sparrow was everything but stealthy. For a start, Illusion Barriers usually didn’t have animals inhabiting them. Even if they would have, the inside of a house was no place for a bird. The little brown thing hopped over the floor in an attempt to not get seen.

“You probably found ONE of their bases… which is still pretty good,” Maximillian admitted and pat John on the back. “In Romulus’ name, what is the fabric of that suit? It’s better quality than mine!” That did make the king genuinely upset.

“Ah, you know, just forty times refined Spriggan-Spider silk, enchanted and then further upgraded by my abilities.” Before they left the current Illusion Barrier, John reached into his inventory. Right now, he only had two things with him, one was the Metracana (which he refused to leave in Rome) and a little casino token of green colour that he hadn’t used yet.

“What is that? It radiates magic energy like things several billion dollars in value,” Maximillian said with wide eyed.

“A standardized quest reward I get for every fight in the tournament I win. Thanks to Alexej…” At the mention of the name a moment of pain, as if he had gotten stung by an oversized hornet, flickered over the king’s face. “…breaking the rules by taking the phone call, that was technically the case,” John explained, just going on as before. The only way for Maximillian to come to terms with what happened was for him to accept reality. In time, the pain would dull.

The sparrow was hiding underneath a couch as heavy boots stepped by.

John flicked the upgrade token back into his inventory, using his thumb. He was going to use it soon enough. The people in the base he found still hadn’t noticed Jack, so at least there was that. But they were also talking about completely useless shit, so spying on them was pretty useless.

“And you just get that for free?” Maximillian asked; “Just for winning?”

“Yes, no, maybe,” John shrugged; “You will have to excuse me for not explaining further. As far as I am concerned, once this is all over, the tournament might continue. I am not going to disclose information to you that you don’t really need in this war.” In actually, this was just an extension of his general policy to keep things regarding his powers sealed whenever he didn’t find his opposite to be a potential ally. He just had a convenient excuse this time.

“Anyway, let’s get to that barrier I found.”

It was a twenty-minute walk on foot. John marvelled at the city as he travelled through. Graz wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination, and a lot of it was built in that old Renaissance style that was practically unfound in the USA. Mostly because the USA wasn’t around when that architecture was on its height.

Still, John allowed himself to appreciate the beauty that surrounded him only in hastened passing, the ever-present thought of Lydia being imprisoned somewhere causing his feet to remain quickly flying over the pavement.

Maximillian, similarly hurried but held back by his bad foot, guided them through narrow gaps between buildings. He had obviously spent quite a bit of time here. “What is the overarching strategy anyway?” John asked when the building came into view.

Jack was still cowering under the couch, not moving an inch.

“What do you mean?” the king asked.

“I mean, there has to be a reason why we start here,” John furthered. “Especially since we already know that it’s the whole clan that ran over to the enemy. They must have some sort of base of operations. Wouldn’t it be smarter to attack right there?”

Maximillian shook his head, “Generally yes, but you are a peasant, so there is no need for you to understand my plans. Just to follow.”

‘Is this how we are going to play this game?’ John thought and prepared to take the king down a couple of pegs. “Where is the base of the Zeritr family?”

“In the west of the province, wh-“

“-so, we don’t want to attack them with our backs turned to enemy reinforcements, so we are cleaning up the enemy concentrations in the surrounding area first. Got it,” John interrupted him. “I am not tactically inept; we can either play this game together or I will beat you at it.”

“We will see about that, buddy,” Maximillian returned.

“Someone just invaded our barrier!” he heard someone say the second they did exactly that. “Everyone, grab your weapons, put the emergency tablets into your mouth and…” A happy little bird fluttering out from underneath their couch made the leader stop talking immediately.

Jack sat down on the back of the dirty, brown thing, clearly having not been properly washed in years and cocked his head. “Why is there a bird here?” one of the men there asked. There were three of them in total. All of their attention lay with the bird.

“It doesn’t fucking matter why it is here! Kill it!” the leader bellowed.

Jack’s wings fluttered, and he flew circles through the air. Weapons and weak magic attacks all missed him as John burned mana to increase the little bird’s speed, nimbly weaving through the average sized room.

They were preoccupied with that long enough for Sylph to fly up the stairs. “Hi, how are you, I hear you are evil? John says you are evil! Sorry, you seem fun, especially you with the normal cut, you with the normal cut and you with the slightly more normal cut,” she blabbered and subjected each of them to a sudden gust of wind when addressing them.

The first two hit the goons, which were catapulted against the wall, but the third one, their leader, was thrown out of the window and fell two stories to the street below.

“Perfect,” Maximillian, inside the house, noticed the man landing in a shower of shards in the shadow of the building. Ready to turn around and take care of that man, he was stopped by John grabbing him by the arm.

“Just leave him right there,” John instructed, leaving a gap in the Illusion Barrier that would allow that man to escape whenever he regained something like consciousness. “We are going to take care of the rest of the building.”

Maximillian tried to free himself from John’s grasp, succeeding only to be stopped by Aclysia when he tried to get outside anyway. “Who do you think you are to command a KING?” he pressed out, glaring at the Gamer.

“I have no king,” John told him; “I am the Gamer, I am stronger than you, I am smarter than you, and I have a plan that is better than yours. You are not dealing with one of your subjects here, buddy. Either you include me in your strategies or I will exclude you from mine, and at the end of the day you might be A king here, but I am the player in control.” Maximillian pressed his lips together until all blood was pushed from them during that speech. “Now come with me up the stairs, there are two others we can interrogate.” He was rather urgent in that; if the leader there would get any inkling of what John was planning, then that would have been a problem.

For a moment, it looked like Maximillian would actually turn on John there and use his powers to get his way. Preparing for that case, he kept Salamander close and incorporeal just as Undine materialized as a glove on his hand.

“Have it your way then, Gamer,” Maximillian finally caved as he realized he was surrounded by John’s familiars. If they fought, nobody would have had a fun time and the only winner would have been the Blood of the Proletariat. They finally headed further up the stairs.

An extrusion of slime formed in John’s palm, eventually reaching the size of a baseball. It dripped to the floor and then took the shape of a tiny, highly adorable, Undine, who went the opposite way. This was one of the many new tricks John and Undine had figured out since she had learned to split herself. Of course, there were limitations to this.

“What is she doing?” Maximillian asked, looking after the little thing puddling down the stairs.

“Healing the guy, seems like he got knocked out by the impact,” John explained. That would cause the clone to disappear, without a connection to the main body they were unable to create new slime, so changing their composition to the lightly green version that had healing properties chipped away at their mass. Still, John couldn’t exactly have him lying there.

“Why? How would you know? Explain yourself, now!” the king demanded.

With an annoyed grunt, John decided to comply. “The plan is quite simple…”

“I somehow made it out of there,” the man who had been overseer of the base that was just raided in a lightning fashion, Detlef, confusedly asked himself as he informed his own boss, a lean man with a scrawny, brown beard and wearing that standardized green uniform John had come to despise. All he remembered was trying to catch a sparrow, followed by a chatting voice, and then he was already out the window. Next he knew, he woke up with miraculously minor injuries in front of the house.

Whoever attacked the base must have been a complete idiot to just leave him. He had contacted his superiors via mobile phone and had been ordered to return to headquarters. They had to find out who was even attacking them.

Their information network in this area had only been getting started to get a proper set-up, and then Nariko Hollmey, whose appearance he only knew from TV, had destroyed even these little things.

That, and more, John learned by listening in as he walked up to their base. It was quite well-hidden, he had to admit; they had put an Illusion Barrier at the edge of a wheat field and then built a multi-story building inside. The standard, grey communist things.

At this point, the day had advanced quite a bit. Walking through a city of this size actually took a lot of time, more than the skirmishes (which they had continued as they had waited for Detlef to go to the headquarters) in fact. This whole thing really was more akin to street gangs bashing each other up than proper war.

Although John wasn’t stupid enough to presume that it would stay this way. This was the base of abyssal warfare; there were more things that could happen in the background, and an eventual battle where everyone threw in all of their remaining forces was inevitable. This was just the calm before the storm.

But he could steal energy from this storm.

“I just lost control of the barrier,” the scrawny looking boss grumbled, his voice breaking for a second as the implications of that became clear to him, with a clear Russian accent; “…How did they…” his eyes fell on Detlef; “You were being tra-“

The gig was up, and Siena burst out of the shadows in a mass of knives and delightful moans. She rammed her knifed hand straight into the boss’ mouth and ripped out the tooth containing the capsule of suicide powder. “Can’t have you die,” the shadow spirit, surrounded by half a dozen stunned people, mostly men, announced, “my ‘master’ still wants to play with you.”

‘I thoroughly dislike her usage of that word,’ Aclysia mentally informed John like she was handing a complaint to a store manager.

The Russian spewed blood; Siena’s claws had completely torn apart his tongue. That wasn’t stopping him from throwing a bunch of fire spells out though. Just like Sylph had done earlier, Siena weaved through the attacks with relative ease. Her body more a mass of darkness with feminine curves than her normal, purple skinned form, the unleashed nightmare elemental went straight at everyone else.

“I am under orders to not make you suffer needlessly, what a shame, I normally so enjoy playing rough with so many men at once,” she giggled while tearing the throat out of one man, one of her bladed tentacles ripping through the chest of another one. In a manner of less than a minute, the whole room was decimated. The noise attracted other people in the moderately populated base of operations, but John’s group was already on that.

Spreading through the building, if the lead man wasn’t a threat, then nobody there should have been, they began to wipe the building from the bottom up.

Meanwhile, Siena was still dodging the attack spells. “I love playing with fire as well, but only if it has tits,” the shadow spirit mocked.

‘STOP HIM!’ John, now close enough to feel that fire with Wisdom of the Inferno, mentally screamed at her.

‘Why, he is no threat whatsoever, it’s actually kind of cute. Look at him struggle,’ Siena returned.

‘He is not aiming for you!’

That made Siena hesitate for a second, and she looked behind her to see the room set aflame. ‘He is burning information? Your point?’ she wondered. The communist looked like he was convinced that he had won, showing a crimson smile.

‘We want that information,’ John returned to her.

‘We already have it… but fine, have it your way,’ Siena gave a lustful sounding giggle and then cut off the man’s hands at the wrists as if it was nothing. ‘There, no more fireballs, although you should hurry and get Undine here if you still want to save things.’

‘I swear to god, Siena, you are making my life needlessly complicated!’ John growled and sprinted up the stairs. ‘Can you learn to restrict people without harming them already?’

‘What would I gain from that?’ Siena shrugged his opinion off. For the moment, John suppressed their mental connection in anger.

“Us two getting along nicely without all this bickering all the time,” he announced his arrival in the smoke-filling room. Undine immediately went to work, putting out the fires and healing the bleeding man who actually seemed intent to die as fast as possible, as John went over to Siena.

The sound of him slapping her across the face echoed through the room. It was delivered with considerable strength, heavily boosted by Purgatory, throwing Siena’s face to the side. She slowly turned back, her sulphuric yellow eyes opened wide in shocked disbelief.

“I thought we made some good progress in the last two weeks, but here you are falling right back into the same habits that make everyone hate you,” he spewed out. “You disappoint me.”

He opened his mental connection to Siena again, having done what he thought he needed to do and say. Much to his surprise, he found that she was affected by that. A lot. Her slender fingers, the claws retracted, touched her hurting cheek. She looked like she was about to cry.

Now that did make John feel slightly bad, but he knew that he had to stand his ground here. “I…” the nightmare elemental began. “This is just who I am, John; I am not going to change fundamentally. I am sorry if that doesn’t work for you.” That mixture of sarcasm and honesty that filled her voice made him just the slightest bit really fucking mad. Still, cooler heads had to prevail.

His answer came in the shape of quiet whispers. “You, Undine and Eliza, I feel like I had the same talks with you at least three times over the past weeks. Eliza finally got her act together and decided to save herself yesterday. Undine is doing her best to get over her communication problems. YOU, on the other hand, drop back into your overly sadistic habits once and already make excuses. I am not asking you to become perfect, I have never asked that of anyone, but I need you to stop using my orders to do the most pain-inducing shit you can come up with and to stop doing everything to make me angry. You are like poison to my soul.”

Siena just kept her hand on her cheek without answer.

“Next time you blatantly over-do it, that’s it. I will annul our contract, and you can go back into your cage. Then I won’t have to be angry over you all the time, which will do wonders for my mental health,” John stated. It was mostly true; he knew that he would lie sleepless some days, wondering if he could have fixed her if he had just tried a different way.

“You would give me up?” the shadow spirit’s voice was now devoid of all sarcasm, just pure shock.

“I would have left you behind ages ago if I didn’t feel obligated to try and fix you,” John put every bit of earnisty his voice and spirit could muster behind those words. “The way you are right now, I can’t love you.”

That line hurt her more than anything he said before. “…You can be properly despicable,” Siena cried, a single tear running over her face as her immaterial heart shrunk together; “You tear apart my way of life and now you want me to change for your sake.”

“No, I am asking you to change for your sake,” John answered. “Because I can go and try to get a different shadow elemental just like that.” he snapped his fingers to underline the point. “I don’t need to go through all of this. But if you want to transform that unhealthy love that you have for me into something that works and into something that I return, you will have to work on yourself. I know you aren’t evil, just twisted, and I have seen that you can be better. If you can focus your bad habits to shine at the appropriate times, then we are all fine.” He gently pushed her hand aside and framed her face with his own. “Do it for you, and we can just lie under a starlit sky and look at each other wordlessly, just lost in each other’s eyes. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Yes… yes it would…” Siena was confused over the fact that she agreed to that. “I will try, happy with that?” Had she ever even felt love that wasn’t charged with violent obsession?

John didn’t know, but he meant what he said earlier. The next time she went too far, she would be gone. “All I can ask for, as long as you actually do try. NOW!” His eyes fell on the handless boss of this base.

It was time to continue what they came here for.