“Blanka Zeritr, you are a traitor to the crown of Vienna,” John heard Maximillian begin the process of judging the leader of the clan behind him. “Your actions have led to…” The door to the abyssal tent, that was more like a transportable throne room, fell closed.

John had no intention of staying and listening to it. This wasn’t his state of affairs, and he had no reason to make it his. Having no emotional connection to her or her clan whatsoever and knowing that her execution was a foregone conclusion, he simply walked away and over to his group.

Blanka had refused to talk but the same could not have been said about the High Fateweaver they had caught. Evidently not quite as firm a believer, the man had spilled the beans on everything they wanted to know. The worst kind of coward, the one who was only interested to be on the winning side.

On the plus side, John now knew where Lydia was supposed to be, the city of Warsaw. Being the real world Polish capital, a state that seemingly didn’t hold a lot of sway in the Abyss, it was right inside the enemy territory and not exactly close.

But not so far that it was unreachable either. “We need allies in this,” John said. Their group was strong but not strong enough that John felt comfortable that they would manage to get in and out unscathed. They would need a strike-force, big enough to be secure but also small enough to be mobile.

John’s phone started ringing at that moment. He didn’t know the number on the display and was tempted to just click it away with the idea that it could be spam. Still, in the Abyss, one better kept in mind that everything could happen. “Hello, John Newman here,” he introduced himself.

“You have located Lydia,” the voice on the other side, deep, majestic and decidedly calm, belonged to the supreme commander of their forces. Romulus was the last person John could picture holding a phone, especially if he was currently in the form of a giant, but that was beside the point.

“Yes,” he answered. “I am going to save her.”

“You are going to try,” Romulus corrected him. “The smart move would be for you to wait for me to heal. It won’t be longer than three days from now. Once my recuperation is complete, this war is finished.”

All of that was true, the emperor would simply crush anything under his feet. However, three days were a long time when times were turbulent, just like 1 degree could make the difference between water and ice. “I can’t wait that long,” John clearly stated.

“I know,” Romulus agreed with him, and the image of the cold emperor at the heart of a stagnating empire finally fell apart completely. “I said it was the smart move, but neither my honour nor my conscious allow me to leave her with these fiends. Sleep, move to the city of Prague. I have made arrangements for suitable reinforcements. You are moving out tomorrow at noon.”

John checked his clock, he had to lower the phone for a moment to do so, It was 9 PM of Thursday the 11th of January 2018. Romulus wanted them to execute a deep-strike in 13 hours. On the scale of warfare, that was about as fast as it got. He raised his phone again.

“I understand, give me a location and I will be there.”

“You will not be part of that attack!” Nariko told her daughter as they broke camp. Following the phone call, John had waited for Maximillian to finish his business so he could come with. The king wanted to be part of this, as predicted. Now only Rave’s mother was holding them back, having heard of this only now. “It is foolish and has nothing to do with you.”

“She is my friend, so it’s very much my business,” the pink-haired half-asian answered. “Or I am making it my business! Dunno, don’t care, gonna do it cause I wanna.”

“You are not going to go!” Nariko kept her position. “Jane, you are jumping head first into danger, I cannot allow you to do that.”

“Allow? Mother, ya aren’t going to ‘allow’ me anything. I am going to do my own stuff, and ya got no control over it,” Rave riposted. “Ya picked a very bad time to start trying to be a good mom that worries for her kids.”

“I was always worried, worried that you won’t have a home,” Nariko mumbled, dialling down on her volume when she realized they were making a scene that attracted a lot of attention. “I protected a place you can come back to; if you now lose your life and can’t got there, it’d break my heart. You WILL stay safe, Jane!”

“Or what?” John intervened. He had made it his policy to not get involved with Rave’s family problems for as long as he wasn’t asked to, but this final, commanding note had him slightly seething. “She already said she wanted to come with me, Nariko, and she isn’t your little girl. I’ve had it.”

“This doesn’t involve you!” Nariko decided. In response, Rave glared at her mother, the pink hue in her eyes glinting dangerously. Grabbing her boyfriend’s whole body by hugging him tightly, she stuck out her tongue at her blue-haired mother.

“This involves him more than it does ya, Mom,” the lightbearer told her, “Ya just decided to watch over me yesterday. Here is a truth for ya: I will be in danger even after you are gone again. I like the thrill, and ya were out of my life for too long to have any right to tell me what to do.”

“I just want you to be secure, why is that so hard for you to understand?” Nariko groaned in frustration.

“Because I don’t want to be coddled and held secure. If this is what ya think of as family, ya can go away again, I was perfectly happy without ya around,” Rave said and hugged John even tighter. “I gave you a chance to come back into my life and ya try to control me when I thought we could just get along enough to see each other on the holidays without having arguments like this every time.”

Nariko took a deep breath. “Maybe I am being unreasonable b-“

“Not maybe,” John got right in there again. “You are being the archetypical evil mother right now, somehow both causing abandonment issues and overprotecting your kid. Congratulations.” He had really had it with this.

“Stay out of this, John Newman, before I smite you were you stand,” Nariko crossed her arms with an angry expression.

“You threaten Master at your own risk,” Aclysia warned, gripping Eclys out of thin air, and John realized that he had caused the situation to escalate just that slightest bit further than he had wanted and now it was threatening to roll down the slope with no way of stopping it.

Momo to the rescue. “Relax, people, this whole situation is highly unnecessary,” the support said, slowly flying by between them, shutting down her e-reader for a moment by slapping the lid closed. “And can be resolved rather easily. Rave, you won’t give in, right?”

“N-o-p-e, nope,” the pink-haired girl spelled out.

“There you have it, Nariko. I get that your intentions aren’t bad, but you literally have no right nor way to enforce what you want here,” Momo logically constructed it as best she could. “You are businesswomen, right? You should know when a transaction is doomed to fail from the outset.”

The older, blue-haired woman finally sighed in defeat and annoyance. “I will be watching over you, whether you like it or not, for as long as I got time!” she then declared.

“Too bad she never had time the last twenty years,” Rave mumbled when her mother angrily stomped away on bright-yellow shoes that did absolutely not fit to her suit. The abyssal auctioneer was going to brood on her own for a bit, while still following them.

“Let’s just get to Prague,” John decided.

They took a train back to Vienna, sleeping a bit on the trip, then caught a lucky plane over to Prague. The whole journey took them about four hours, leaving them with another eight hours before they needed to gather where Romulus had told them to.

Which meant that John would be happy to take a nap. “Let’s switch over to MY Prague,” Maximilian declared, and John looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Prague has a rather expansive abyssal city underneath my rulership… or at least it would be if they hadn't gone independent about a hundred years back. I still own a lot of real estate around here and have a honorary seat on the city council, no matter how much the current elector hates that. Just go over to the barrier and you will see.” The king promised and was gone a moment later.

With nothing else to do, John did. The local barrier would get in the way of his original plan, to copy some nice hotel and fall into the bed, anyway.

The sight made his eyes go wide. He stood at the feet of a spire and not just some spire, an absolute beauty of one. It grew upwards in seven, walled off levels. Each of them was filled with buildings that were true marvels of architecture from all kinds of time periods. It seemed like every person was living inside their own, wonderfully designed church, including clock towers and everything.

The predominant colour of everything was gold, the colour of eternally burning fires reflecting light stones. Ornaments were set into everything with arching bridges spanning over the streets and stairs. John couldn’t help but feel awe at the beauty of this city but also how easy it had to be to get lost within those beautiful pathways.

His eyes wandered up and found the second uppermost district blackened and painted red, a disturbing, forced depiction of new ideas on top of a pile of past glory.

“They call Prague the heart of the empire, for it is the city that Romulus himself designed and which has stood perfectly for a thousand years… until the Blood did their thing and assaulted the top two rings, those filled with the ‘filthy royalists’,” Maximillian explained. “Normally, I would invite you into my castle,” he gestured at the ruined structure at the very top of this spire, laying half in ruin, many of its own towers having fallen, now that John looked more closely he could see small trenches were the falling debris had cut into lower laying districts, “but you can see the problem with that.”

John often forgot that Maximillian wasn’t just a pretty strong mage in his own right, even if he held no candle to what the Gamer could achieve, but that his title of ‘king’ actually encompassed more than a bit of land. “How many people live here?” John had to ask.

“About 110’000, it’s the fifteenth biggest abyssal city in Europe,” Maximillian answered. “Although the count of the losses will make clear whether or not that can still be considered true or not.”

John hadn’t seen this part of the war yet, and it made it feel infinitely more real. Tracking gang members on the streets and countryside was one thing, invading a base with about a hundred people inside another.

But seeing this kind of destruction made John see that it didn’t take more than a hundred people to eradicate a whole slew of average people in the Abyss. Hell, if he wanted to, he could collapse the wall of the uppermost district and set forth a landslide. On his own, he was capable of killing thousands if given the right opportunity.

Combat focused people in the Abyss were walking warheads of different magnitudes, and he was slowly evolving into the nuclear kind. ‘Now I hope I never have to fight in a city,’ John thought; the amount of accidental destruction he could cause just by going all out was staggering.

Maximillian crossed his arms and let all of that sink into the Gamer. “Every day you will learn a bit more about the burden of your powers, buddy,” he said and began marching towards the city. “It’s all fine and dandy if us powerful people have clashes in a colosseum, but when it’s all out war, well, the difference is rather apparent.”

John nodded to himself and followed the king, who had a valuable thing to say for once. “Imagine if Romulus and Thana had clashed on top of this city,” he mumbled.

“There wouldn’t be a city anymore,” Rave whispered; even she hadn’t known this part of the abyss. Wars happened so seldomly, especially on the scale of thousands of fighters clashing in a society that didn’t produce a whole lot of them in the first place, that she could have only ever heard of it in passing.

“No, there wouldn’t,” Nariko told them, gave them a much saying glance. “Now imagine what would have happened if the Blood only wanted to destroy, not conquer, without any meaningful opposition.” Before either John or Rave could answer that, the auctioneer continued in her path. “I will see you at the meeting point tomorrow.” With that, she turned into lightning and crackled over the field, into the city.

“We should go find a bed somewhere as well,” John, still not completely done digesting the whole scope of destruction this war must have caused where there were concentrations of abyssal populations, said.

“Follow me, I know a place, and we get to stay for free, since I own it,” Maximillian announced.

That didn’t sound too bad and, ho boy, was it not too bad. The place they eventually landed in had large rooms with spacious bathrooms, who had the usual range of applications John loved to misuse for sexual purposes.

The best thing about them, however, was the beds. They looked more like marshmallows than the usual blocks of foam he rested on. Being at least three metres in diameter, they were just white, puffy… maybe cotton; from the feeling John had from throwing himself on there, he only knew that he was laying on top of something magical.

He barely had pulled the blanket over his naked form when he fell asleep.