Afterwards I had to leave for Germany. Lydia wanted me to help her in the tournament for German succession. As my powers were largely deactivated thanks to an ongoing patch, however, I was unimportant to her for months. It wasn’t until they returned, just shortly before things were about to happen, that she took interest in me.

Jane, healed, safe and toughened up, landed on the same day as the princess begun to actually talk to me a lot about what was happening. At the time I was also living with Herman, the Apothecary, who I had met randomly in Germany. Well, it wasn’t random at all, but I will get to that in a minute.

Lydia explained the process of the tournament to us. How, if there was a tie in the election, which there was, she had to start announcing four fighters over the next days. First, she announced me. At that time, I was somewhat well-known amongst the Abyssal elite only, due to SecretBlonde’s long-time spying on me, which had stopped shortly before the Thana incident. It was also the first time I met Romulus, who I thought a fleshmade god at the time, but I learned over the coming weeks that he was just as big of a flawed creature as the rest of us.

Speaking about flawed creatures, during the announcements Nathalia also came to visit me again. I skipped the second time, as it wasn’t that important, but that made this the third time I saw her. I guess it’s true what they say about ‘third time’s a charm’ as we actually fell in love with each other.

_____________________________________________________________________

“Ha…haha…ahahaha…AHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAA,” Tilgun smashed his hand on the surface of the water as his bellowing laughter travelled over the still ocean and after the distancing boat. Like a drunk man who had heard a delicious jest, he repeated the motion over and over, causing giant fountains and waves in the process. John and Rave held onto the edge of their safety boat as it swayed dangerously.

Eventually Tilgun calmed and with a gesture of his hand the surface smoothened again. “A truly marvellous joke,” he admitted, acting as if he was wiping away a little tear under his eye. “I believed your story up until there, as unlikely as it sounded, but there is no way that…” Tilgun reared his head as if he had just smelled something weird. John also perked up to see what had the higher dragon perturbed.

Slowly a giant fortune cookie hovered down from the sky. Now this was the first time John had seen Gaia do something that stupid and blindingly obvious.

Tilgun grabbed it, ripped it open, devoured the edible parts, the hunger he was suppressing right now shining through, and then looked at the piece of paper inside. For John, it was really more of a banner. “It’s true?” the Maw of Souls said in the confused tone of reading out loud something that was dissonant to one’s own belief. Then he broke out laughing again.

“I don’t know how to feel about that,” Rave said as they saw the serpentine sea predator roll over the surface of the ocean. “I am confused as to what we are watching… also did I hear it right that you referred to him as Nathalia’s younger brother?”

“Yup,” John did not know what else to answer.

“So I am looking at the younger sibling of that overly slutty lizard literally rofling?”

“Yup.”

“Wow…”

“Yup. Wow…”

Eventually Tilgun calmed down and the Gamer continued with his story.

__________________________________________________________________________

It was when the third fighter was being announced that it came to me, through a random piece of information, that Herman was SecretBlonde after all, and I went to confront him. I found him at the end motions of a ritual, sacrificing over a hundred regular people and using their blood to revive Thana. He originally wanted to use her to find immortality, but as that was no longer in the cards, he at least wanted to leave behind a perfect human. Can’t say I exactly subscribe to that logic, but it did seem like he was ideologically possessed of that notion that it was something that needed to happen.

Gaia eradicated his existence. He wasn’t just killed, he was simply discontinued.

However, he did leave behind Thana, and we took her in. Unstable as she was, as crazy as she still is and despite all she put us through, we did decide that we had to at least try to be good to her. Lydia agreed and added her as the final fighter. That created a final line-up of Lydia, me, Jane, a girl named Nia who had lost her arrival date, and Thana.

A lot of things happened over the course of the tournament. Summarized by person rather than chronologically: Jane had to fight her mother, who was on the enemy team, and face some things she rather didn’t in the form of Nariko being very bad at the being a parent thing. I learned Lydia’s story and we also fell in love, which is a wonderful theme in my life. Thana got a bit more stable, although she is still crazy, and we also get very close in those months. Momo told me she didn’t want to stop at being my Artificial Spirit and that she was striving for independence. The Horned Rat, someone who I am just going to assume you know already and who I met through another random encounter in a dungeon, opened to me what the Metracana was. Undine forced herself to reach Tier 4 from Tier 2, coming in contact with the Lorylim in the process, from which we managed to ultimately save her, although she will forever bear the scars of that mistake.

We had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s, all the while the tournament was going on. For the most part, our teams were neck in neck in points, but it did look like we would ultimately win. It was at the end of the second of the three rounds that shit hit the fan again.

The Blood of the Proletariat, having gotten the Supreme Fateweaver on their side and guided by the closest aide of the enemy candidate, Maximillian, who the aide betrayed, attempted to nuke the city of Rome and, most decisively, Romulus. The emperor managed to suppress the explosion but was incapacitated while neutralizing it. An enemy elite force invaded, armed with a Prussian artefact which Lydia’s father had gotten them. The princess herself got kidnapped.

I was in the middle of the arena when it all went down, together with Thana, who was separated from me and had collapsed due to some unknown reason. I had to fight to get to her, and when I did, I called out her name and then a thing inside her awoke and tossed me aside.

It turned out that Thana wasn’t the name of the girl I knew, but the name of the monster inside her. A human goddess, the goddess of genocide, who then began slaughtering the Blood of the Proletariat’s forces. She would have killed anyone who was close, so it was to our luck that they had disabled their emotions while everyone with half a brain fled.

Not so Maximillian, who had every bone in his body broken, or the aide who was consumed from blood to bone and soul, leaving only a disgusting, dry heap of unidentifiable flesh behind. Then Thana turned to Romulus and ripped out his heart while he was still busy dismantling the nuclear explosion.

She would have forced him to stop, exposing the whole city to the hydrogen bomb, if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of the Horned Rat and Nathalia. While their reasons weren’t heroic and they ultimately proved to not be an obstacle whatsoever to the goddess of genocide, even after getting their full power back from Romulus, they did buy enough time for the emperor to finish the procedure.

Afterwards the two giants squared off. Physically speaking, Thana was as strong, or maybe even stronger, as Romulus. Her attacks were pure instinctual slashing and ripping, however. She did manage to injure the emperor, but ultimately Romulus won by using honed technique and skills.

Before he could strike her down, I intervened. I managed to figure out the girl’s true name, Eliza, and as I said it, Thana lost control. She was about to kill me, having already eviscerated my stomach, when Eliza returned. I fell into a coma and woke up again the same day in the hospital.

With Lydia kidnapped and her grandfather, Frederik the Great, killed during the invasion, as well as the damage to the city of Rome itself, Romulus had ample reason to take vengeance on the Blood.

Together with Maximillian, who wasn’t just the enemy in the tournament but also Lydia’s ex, we fought in what would be later called the Five Day War. The first two days were rather uneventful, but we did find out Lydia’s whereabouts. A strike force was formed on the third day to get her out as soon as possible. We managed to find and secure her, killing the Supreme Fateweaver and Lydia’s father in the process. Then we were trapped. The Blood had planned to lure us into a barrier and then pin us there while they threw wave after wave of enemies at us. Were it not for the demise of Gehnigm, earlier mentioned Supreme Fateweaver, we would have most decisively perished there.

However, with Magoi, the very same High Fateweaver that had helped me before with Eliza, at our side, they could only trickle in in manageable amounts. We held on for almost a day before we were relieved by Romulus and his forces.

The emperor had been in need of healing following the events in the arena, no wonder with a missing heart, and thus the whole war had just been about securing our position until he was fully operational again. The battle of Warsaw destroyed most of the enemy forces, including a giant godkiller construct. On the fifth day we moved to Moscow, where Romulus used a terrible spear to level the enemies’ main base. The war was won.

And that was just about three weeks ago, since then nothing all that interesting has happened. We parted with Lydia, got on this cruise and that’s that.

___________________________________________________________________________

“Wow, wow,” Tilgun applauded with all his hands, a weird 1-2-1-2 rhythm. “You glossed over a lot of stuff there, I can tell.”

“It’s not like it was a linear story,” John made a grimace, “It’s hard to tell you all the things in a way that makes sense because so much of it was going on kind of next to each other.”

“Okay, a detail question then, where is my sister now?” Tilgun leaned in. “Her smell on you is faint at best.”

“Yeah, about that…” John just gave him the gist of what had happened on that evening.

“I see, I see…” Tilgun hummed. “So I am going to be an uncle soon, now that is a nice thought.”

“Not within the next few years,” the Gamer reminded him.

“Yes, very soon, I am aware.” Of course that was a highly insignificant timeframe to a being this old. “I am highly offended that she didn’t ask me to be the messenger on the matter. Someone has to tell her of your current exploits after all… I think I know exactly who she asked.” He did sound rather annoyed and sucked in air through his almost sealed lips, making a mice-like squeaking sound. “With my curiosity sated, another question: Do I assume correctly that this ship is equipped with a mobile barrier?”

John had a bad feeling about this, “Yes.”

“Splendid, I am tired of jumping into the magical stream that connects all barriers and pray Gaia presents me with some exit that has water and food. Moving on land is so tedious,” Tilgun rolled his neck. “It has been a while since I have been to a coastal city. We shall see what it brings me.”

“Ya don’t plan to eat the local population, do ya?” Rave chimed in. “Cause that’s totally a thing that I can see ya doing, being Nathie’s brother and all.”

“Only if they refuse to venerate me and give me offerings to feast on instead,” Tilgun simply answered. That wasn’t calming in the least, but what could they do?

They had picked up yet another travel companion.