That achievement came just in time for the knight to drive his tiny boat out of the Guild Hall barrier. ‘Well, that certainly happened,’ John thought and then turned from the water to the field of death behind him. The average fools had never stood a chance.

Sure, they could have overwhelmed the trio of girls with sheer numbers. As a matter of fact, Rave and Nia had sustained more than a few bruises and cuts from when they had simply reached the maximum of how many people they could track at once and someone had gotten an opportunistic attack in. Thankfully, the Baelementium reinforced body suit was great at protection while Nia’s magic detection senses generally spared her from being hit with anything too dangerous.

However, between Metra eventually appearing behind the enemy forces and John joining back into the fray, providing the much needed AoE abilities through Sinflut and Arcane Echo, they were destroyed. The fight had been over 6:1, yet it had been pretty clear who the victor would be from the moment John defeated Egan.

The sad thing, really, was that none of them had given up, being drugged out of their minds. John didn’t relish this victory, he had just caused a bunch of death. Like always, he was aware that it was needed and he wouldn’t lose sleep over it, but that didn’t mean he just shrugged it off.

The fishmen thankfully had surrendered, which was something John would need to deal with later, but for everyone else they could only cull them down. Now they began the very unthankful, not to mention disgusting, work of piling the bodies only for Salamander to set them on fire.

“I don’t understand you people,” John said in a hollow tone. “Why sell your life for something you don’t believe in only to gain yourself an unmarked grave?” He turned to Zimmothy. Sparing him the usual mercy of healing his arm, simply because John was of the mind that he didn’t deserve it whatsoever, the spearman was leaning against a tree nearby.

“Because of the rush and money,” Zimmothy answered. “Don’t tell me you never fight just because you like to.”

“Not with other people’s lives and futures on the line,” John shook his head; he would get no satisfying answer out of the man. Instead, The Gamer walked over and grabbed him by the collar with his left, dragging him behind himself.

“What the…” Zimmothy was obviously confused as to why John was this much stronger now, an answer lying in the fully stacked Purgatory. He attempted to get on his feet, an endeavour that looked at best like him doing a crabwalk as John simply kept on dragging him on to the teleporter.

Rave and Aclysia were right behind him and stepped into the pavilion with him once they got there. They teleported over to the Enclave.

Whether or not the coalition’s people inhabiting John’s former first acquired territory expected the Bearings invasion to succeed, they sure as hell didn’t think that the Gamer would just appear in their midst unharmed. An alarm sounded, robots raised their arms with some sort of weaponry attached to them while people grabbed their weapons.

A certain ginger was stepping his way up to the teleporter, an arrogant grin on his face. “Look what the cat dragged i-“ he was interrupted by John tossing Zimmothy across the five metre distance and at the man, ripping him straight off his feet.

“Shut up,” the Gamer declared as he walked down the steps. “I just had to pile the corpses of YOUR allies on a funeral pyre, I have more bodies swimming in my waters than I dare to count. My mood is incredibly sour right now and you going ‘look what the cat dragged in’ in response to your enemy coming in unharmed with one of your allies isn’t helping.”

“Get him!” the ginger didn’t seem particularly open to moral lectures, but John only wanted to vent anyway. At least the wave of robots that descended on him were soulless automatons; he had taken enough lives for a day. To make this as short a conflict as possible, John raised Purgatory and unleashed the spell within.

A sword several metres long appeared and John whirled it around. The blade was black and brown, from the two elements infused into it. With Mana Blade above level 33, it allowed for two properties to be added to it and so John had added earth (giving the attack a slow effect) to the normal shadow infusion (increasing the damage but decreasing the duration).

Not that he needed a slowing effect as he turned all of those robots into scrap metal. Everyone’s jaw unhinged as they fell to the ground, John casually nudging one metal torso that would have fell on him to the side.

John looked around, clenching and relaxing his clawed hand intimidatingly. It had the intended effect, nobody dared to attack him, a few even took a step backwards out of fear.

“Y’all really need to learn to not piss off the wrong people,” Rave was way more relaxed about all of this, having less remorse over killing people in the first place. Unlike John, she had been dealing with deaths her whole life. “Or at least how not to be any more annoying than you need to be.”

“I really recommend listening to that last part,” Aclysia added. “Master seems about ready to forget himself.”

“I am,” John kept his commentary short, then he exhaled as much tension as possible. “Okay, people, here is the drill. This whole me losing thing? It was all a lie. Believe me or not, I don’t care. Thorne, Bearings, whatever guild of degenerate slave holders, thugs, loan sharks or other predatory practice you are part of. This is my ultimatum: Stand out of my way and live an honest life or stand against me and I don’t guarantee your life won’t be claimed in the next engagement.” He turned back around, “From here on out, I retaliate. I will be back in two hours and I expect all of you to be gone from my land by then. Tell your leaders I accept surrenders whenever.”

______________________________________________________________

“Urgh… ahhh… shit… SHUT UP… Let me… NO, FUCK OFF!” that was the exchange that John encountered when he entered the small bedroom in the yacht to look after Eliza. A television in the background was displaying an episode of Dr. House at max volume. A distraction for Eliza to try to ignore the carnage that was going on outside, Aclysia turned the TV off as John walked over to the blood mage holding her head and ramming it against the wall in a desperate fight to stay in control.

Gently reaching out for her, Eliza noticed all of them only when John’s hand touched her head. “It’s done,” he promised her and received a blow to the stomach as his reward. This time he wasn’t blown back, instead the goddess of genocide buried her hand in his guts so deep the fingers closed around his spine.

A new record of pain, as far as John was concerned, as she kept her arm there and the hole wide open. The fear of death cascaded down his body. He realized he had gotten careless, with all the times Eliza had gotten back in control, he had gotten careless. The last time should have been a lesson, but he had wrongly assumed that to be the most control Thana would ever be able to gain again.

“The shiver in your spine,” Thana growled as she shattered the bone inside her palm. “That is where I live!” She obviously intended to rip her arm upwards and tear apart John’s entire body in a shower of torn meat, but it was the willpower of Eliza that prevented it from happening long enough for Aclysia to step in. A desperate but effective measure, Aclysia cut the arm off with Eclys and then quickly pulled John away.

An angered roar, filled the small room, rupturing John’s eardrums. Thana’s lips formed more words, curses and useless bartering with Eliza as she tried to move their shared body to end the Gamer’s existence once and for all. John, currently paralyzed from the legs down, had no choice but to watch.

In the end, history repeated itself and Thana suddenly, with a less panicked expression, fled from her control over the body.

With the goddess of genocide once more dormant, Gamer’s Body kicked in again. His ears informed him that they returned to function with a pop inside them, while his spine was only recovered when he removed the arm from his stomach.

In what was more than a bit morbid, John offered Eliza her hand back. The blood mage broke out in shrill laughter and tears simultaneously. “ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!” she asked. “You and your bastard’s ass, NEVER get close to me when I have an episode like that again! Every time this body hurts you, I want to jump off the tallest cliff I can find and hope it miraculously kills me.”

He knew that his view on the matter, that he’d rather suffer even the worst pain than see her struggle for her own body for longer than she needed to, wouldn’t lead them anywhere. Not only did she already know, it was just the most depressing version of ‘No, YOU put down the phone first,’ that existed.

“…So you don’t want that hand back?” John asked instead, in a poor attempt at humour. What she had bled onto her seat across from the TV flowed upwards and back into her body.

“No, I don’t,” Eliza said as a new one started growing. Bones and veins, then sinews and muscles, skin and then finally the red fingernails of crystallized blood, the whole process didn’t even take five seconds.

Now John was standing there with a hand. The whole situation had deflated as rapidly as it had come. With no idea what else to do with it, he threw it in the trash can. “Please check later if the slimes eat that,” he told Aclysia.

“Most certainly, if you promise you will not engage so quickly in attempts to calm down Eliza in the future,” Aclysia’s exterior was calm, but underneath she was boiling in a mixture of rage, worry and unsure blame. “I can only watch you get dismembered so often.”

Both Eliza and the weaponized maid were uniform in that wish and, with how dangerous these last two times had been, John would have been a fool to go against that. “I will be more careful,” he promised. “Anyway, it seems like she figured out how to force her way into control, but whenever she does it, the wall breaks down a bit.”

“No idea why she isn’t just getting this shit over with then,” Eliza growled. “If she just went all out in one go, who fucking knows how much of ME will still be in there.”

“Yeah… she is probably asking herself the same question,” John stated.

____________________________________________________________________

With Eliza pacified, they went to the conference room. John used Create to fix his shirt on the way. Luckily the enchantments then took care of the bloodstains, leaving him ultimately looking as impeccable as ever.

Still though, what Thana had done and said to him gripped him for a little longer. ‘I should see some sort of soul doctor to make sure she didn’t infect my spirit or something,’ he thought, wondering about what she meant with the whole ‘living in your spine’ thing. His elementals weren’t reporting a new roommate, but it was better to be extra careful.

He sat down in the deep sea blue seat at the usual position, between the two doors, connecting the room with the outside and in front of the large screen connected with the laptop he had in front of him. In a routinized move, he pulled his phone out and slid it to the empty seat to his left. Rave was sitting to his right, Aclysia standing behind him.

Across from him sat Magoi, not because they were on particularly bad terms but because, as the High Fateweaver had explained at one point, he felt that this was the second most important looking chair in the room. His son was sitting at his own side. The remaining chairs were mostly empty, a slouching Beatrice picking a random one to oversee the operation with careless eyes. At one of the side tables, Nia sat and played with Stirwin, Copernicus lying nearby and sleeping.

“So, we have officially entered phase 3,” Scarlett opened the conference without any words of greeting. “Nice show at the Enclave, John, very convincing.”

“It wasn’t a show,” he clarified in a dry tone.

“Right…” Scarlett’s hesitant voice revealed that she was very aware she just stepped onto a sore spot. Making the correct call, she moved on. She knew perfectly well that she couldn’t properly empathize with that. “Anyway, the initiation was a bit sooner than I hoped, I wanted the coalition to stir a couple of months and really get at each other’s throat, but that’s not key to what I want out of this, so I don’t give a fuck about losing that bit to Bearings. You still got the map?”

John looked over. The original purpose of the paper had been to mark scouting data, now it was covered in pins and strings of different colour, a layout of who should attack where and how big a garrison they should leave in which barrier. It was Scarlett’s original design, a visual step by step for how phase 3 was supposed to play out.

Having spent several hours trying to pry that plan apart with a figurative crowbar, John had only made small adjustments they agreed would lead to better believability for the eventual result of the outcome of the battle at where all strings met at the end: the Thorne HQ.

“Yes, we will begin operations in two days,” John said. “I have some other administrative work to get through first.”

“The IOUs?” Scarlett asked.

“Yeah, once the people start leaving the Guild Hall, it will be hard to correctly track who was actually here and who is lying to land an easier job in my new government. Best do it now. I also need to give the Fateweavers their ships back,” he nodded towards Magoi, who made a wide gesture at his son, delegating the work down the line.

“Alright, just don’t wait too long or they might actually manage to drag Sigmund or another monster into this,” the bloodstained technocrat reminded him.

“I am aware,” John assured her, “but I am not the one who is in the most dangerous position in the plan.”