“Ya know,” Rave greeted him in front of the entrance, “it’s kinda ironic that, after all we did the last few months, we are now just gonna waltz in there after all.”

“I didn’t even think of it that way,” John admitted and looked over the assembled forces. Aside from him and his girls, there were twenty other people around that were clad in different robes and sets of armour that had a uniform blue and black design to them. In the absence of any emblem, John had picked those colours as his as Thorne was decidedly red and Bearings gold. Another 30 of them were scattered throughout the barrier.

They were something like a proto-police force, an assembly of people John thought had good resumes and could be trusted with upholding the law. They were those that had acted with kindness in systems of cruelty, who had stood with John on point of principle when it seemed like he was losing or simply those who applied and had been confirmed by their peers. The whole structure was very much in the process of being built, just like courts, and currently overseen by Beatrice and Metra.

However, with a justice system, a military unit to enforce that justice and territory, Collide was basically a state now. All they needed was a flag and or symbol and a few other things. “Do you have a suggestion for what our anthem should be?” John asked. “Because I am leaning towards ‘America Fuck Yeah’ just for the lols.”

“Nicki Taylor - Worlds Collide,” Rave answered immediately and then sung her favourite part of the song. “We are the ones to ignite the darkened skies – The champions of a world that we defy – A solemn reign of the few who rise up high - And we all fight at the last light.”

“You should sing more often,” Nia stated from the sidelines.

“Why’s that?” the Lightbearer asked.

Seconds ticked by while Nia just stood there and looked back. The police force, not used to the blanks particular pattern of behaviour, looked confused as the silence carried on. What was just regular to John must have been a very awkward quiet to them. Being in the middle of a battlefield didn’t help. “You don’t slur when you sing, also it sounds good,” she finally formed an emotionless answer.

“Fair’nuff,” Rave laughed, biting her tongue in a teasing manner. “Anyway, whaddaya think?”

“The solemn reign part sounds a bit dictatorial to me… then again, in all due technicality this is a dictatorship, not like anybody elected me,” John thought out loud.

“Almost like you could just call yourself a king,” Metra suggested, balancing her body against Qiada.

“I already told you, I don’t want my position to be inherited,” John returned. “And I still don’t understand why you get so stuck up at that distinction.”

“Because a dictator is someone who pretends that he is given power by the republic, a king is someone who is honest and says he is in charge because he is a lion in a world of sheep,” the berserker babe declared. At this point, the police force was only getting more confused. They probably thought they were witnessing internal strife in the leadership when these were just conversations they had on the regular.

Now John could have either dropped the topic and made it seem like he was in charge or he continued on to normalize this. He chose the latter, there was no way he could hide from the world the fact that he was consistently bantering with everyone for long.

“You are just showing how antiquated your thinking is there, Metra,” he thus countered. “Two things can be true at once: I can be honest about the fact that I am head of state because of the power I wield and also erect a structure legitimized by large democratic functions. You already saw the draft for my government layout, would you say the words ‘Appointed by John Newman’ are particularly republican?”

“I am just saying ‘king’ Ne-“

“Just shut the fuck up Met,” Salamander interrupted. “You are so insistent on that word and nobody gets why.”

A pang of anger reached John along with some words. They were carried through the maze-like connection he had with the ancient weapon by sheer frustration. ‘Behold the wrath’s oath and be crowned king of Akkad.’

The words came along with a minor headache that quickly went away again. “The last line of a song?” he mumbled and looked at Metra, who glared daggers back. “Did you…are you bound in some sort of contract fiasco where one exact word difference is preventing you from accepting me?”

“He who will not wear the title of king and the weight of a crown can never rule the lands of Akkad,” Metra’s answer was more than the yes he needed, but it told him what he needed to know. “You disqualify yourself foolishly because you insist on being called a thing you are not. You could sire a dynasty, instead you want to sire a government.”

“I’d rather be Atatürk than the first Habsburg, that is correct,” John would have crossed his arms, but the flames of the fully charged Purgatory would have reached Undine then, and he didn’t want the ocean elemental to go through that. “Also, I could argue the opposite case – that an application system that disqualifies a worthy candidate on the basis of one word is supremely ignorant – as well.”

“Uhm, sir?” a particularly brave policemen asked and stepped forwards. “Shouldn’t we bring this to an end already?”

“You are promoted,” John told the guy immediately, pulling a stack of money out of his inventory and throwing it at the guy. Catching it but immensely confused, he looked first at the bundle of green and then up at the Gamer. “Look, I need people in leading positions and you actually dare to speak up to me, so you are now head of the New York Police.”

“Tha-thank you, sir,” the policeman looked at the money again, “I am afraid I will lose this money in the chaos though and you haven’t answered my question.”

“You won’t because I am standing here to prevent any chaos,” John answered, eyeing his mana bar. It was stuck at 500, all of his mana regeneration was being guzzled by ongoing preparations. “You just stay right here and take any stragglers into custody – and no moving out of formation, are we clear?” Normally he would encourage independent thinking in his personnel, but he really couldn’t afford anyone moving from here and blocking the planned evacuation route for the enemy.

‘This will be enough,’ Undine finally gave him the signal that things could get moving again. The red scars that ran over the blue, latex-like material of the glove were glowing from the inside from the vast amount of mana inside.

“Okay then, Rave, Aclysia, I want you to follow me after the initial confrontation. Metra, you keep the eastern part under watch, Beatrice, you keep coordinating the police efforts, Nia, you just do as you do,” he could have given her an order but that was historically useless. “Well then, I’ll go ahead.”

He walked up to the metal that had descended upon the main entrance to seal off access. ‘Gnome, would you?’ he nicely asked his earth elemental.

‘I will try my best!’ she promised and materialized between him and the gate. After taking a deep breath and making a self-reassuring fist-pump, she kneeled down. Her fingers dug between concrete and metal. A creaking sound echoed in her skull, as she clutched her teeth and slowly rose. The metal bulged and folded where she gripped it. Then a sudden CRACK, something broke and Gnome almost fell backwards as the metal became loose.

“I did it!” she declared, happily jumping on the spot. Understandably, seeing a cute Asian girl in a yellow and black, stylistically oriental summer dress smilingly bounce with a large chunk of metal lifted above her head caused some unhinged jaws. The eyes of everyone were fixated a bit lower though, at the place her short skirt no longer hid whenever the pull of gravity forced her downwards. “Yay,” she exclaimed with closed eyes, “yay,” she opened them and saw everyone staring, “yay…?” she followed their eyes to her bare crotch. “Noooooo!”

The chunk of metal was suddenly brought down right behind John, blocking everyone’s view with an iron curtain. Gnome went down to her knees, the sound of deep shame leaving her lips, “Uwuwuwuwu…” as John pat her head.

“There, there,” he said.

“How you forget to create panties to wear all the time is a fucking mystery,” Salamander rubbed her temples with the clawed tips of her gauntleted hands. “Admit it already, you love to be seen, you pervert.”

“No!” Gnome denied the allegation, glancing at John for a moment and quietly adding, “…Not by everyone…”

“Aren’t you just adorable,” John kneeled down to cuddle Gnome for a second. “We will have some nice cuddling time when we are back home,” he promised. “For now,” he got back up and walked up to the glass doors, “domination time.”

He pushed open the door and was greeted by an array of spells and bullets all heading for him. To not have expected a trap there would have been naïve. Any enemy with basic tactical understanding would concentrate their last stand somewhere where they had the advantage of a chokepoint.

Undine changed from the glove into her true form, stretching herself into a protective semi-circle as the attacks kept raining down on them. The mana John had poured into her became a continuous source of self-healing. John gave her more, all of his regeneration, withholding only those 500 points for the few attacks that did come through and needed to be blocked by Mana Protection instead.

The barrage calmed, then flared up again for a moment as people gathered their last reserves and threw everything at John and Undine. If he hadn’t propped her up for exactly this scenario, they would have succeeded in breaking through the layer. If they would have succeeded in then also beating John was a whole different question, but without taking the time to prepare, this whole situation would have been a lot messier.

Finally, the attacks ebbed away save for some isolated instances, as people reloaded or gathered new mana. ‘Remember: don’t kill anybody,’ John instructed. That was when Undine unleashed the flood. Her golden eyes switched into red as she transformed from a protective shell into a torrenting wave. A riptide that broke into a barricade made from human’s holding up large shields and scattered it. ‘UNDINE!’ he screamed mentally.

The madness that threatened to grip the water elemental whenever she unleashed was as strong as ever. It sung to her. Urged her to fill the lungs of these fools with water and burst them inside out in a gruesome way. Tentacles of water forced themselves down the throats of unsuspecting soldiers to enact exactly that.

The promise of gratification that would come from killing these people rung with her sane self’s promise to John to control herself. In the end, Undine didn’t manage to regain control over herself, but she did manage to focus her insanity’s attention towards attacking more people not yet drenched in the saltwater scourge she represented. Violence stilled the thirst for murder.

The orderly firing line that had greeted John was completely torn now. Small teams of 2 to 4 people formed, only to be quickly assaulted by Sylph as she darted around the place. The tempest elemental kept any form of organization impossible, Salamander picked up the stronger people in the crowd, the kind that could survive a couple of blasts from her unnatural flames. Rave and Aclysia then stormed into the room, tilting the balance all the way into his favour, and the slow Gnome crashed into the people trying to reform the shield line.

By the end, what looked like an orderly foyer initially had turned into a place of scorched and soaked ground, destroyed pieces of art, dislocated lamps and smashed furniture.

John walked through that chaotic roomscape with one arm on fire and the other in his pocket. “So, here we are again,” he stopped in front of a certain ginger. He had short hair and wore a futuristic set of armour, none of which had helped him against a combination of the unleashed Undine and a combined firestorm heading his way. Now he was missing his eyebrows and he held his ribs as if they were shattered under the armour, probably thanks to a run in with Rave. “Damien, right?”

This guy was level 89, he wasn’t a joke, he just wasn’t a challenge to John, his little army of familiars, or the group of elites that had gathered around him.

The man looked up with a mixture of fear and loathing. “What is it to you?” he growled. “What do you care about the name of one person whose life you are destroying with your actions? You just run around, act like morality is the be-all and end-all of life and denying the rest of us an existence based purely on competition.”

“It’s the pure part where you lose me,” John admitted. “You can’t live your life purely by anything. You can’t just eat bread, you can’t just do the same thing every day, you can’t just base every decision on money and much less can you force everyone to act like you.”

“You mean like you are doing?”

“I am forcing upon society the ability to give everyone the room to live their lives as they want to,” John shook his head. “Fundamentally different from forcing one way on everyone because you think that’s the best way.”

Damien continued to stare at him. Obviously, there was no convincing him.

“Well, I hope you will find your place in my new order,” John pat the guy on the shoulder with one hand while fishing a key card off his belt with the other. Damien tried to jump at him once he realized what the Gamer had done, but a sword came down between him and his target.

“Hands off my master,” Aclysia warned, the silver-white of Eclys continuing to reflect sharply the flickering of broken lights. “I will make sure everyone who gives up keeps their word,” she told John as he headed to the elevator. “I trust that nothing will happen to you.”

That was a silent acknowledging of the fact that she too believed that Scarlett would not betray them at this point. John nodded thankfully, somebody strong had to stay down here lest the defeated forces tried some shenanigans like taking the police force hostage. On the face of it, John’s troops were of abysmal quality, having no training and only second-rate equipment that John had hastily cobbled together with his okay crafting ability Create.

Turned out that, if normal people wore armour that was too strong for them, their bodies couldn’t compensate. John had to wonder whether that also applied to him and it was thanks to the fact that Gaia was regulating his rewards that he hadn’t encountered that yet or if it wasn’t a mechanic at all. He largely suspected the former with a sprinkle of ‘if it never comes up, I don’t have to design it’ laziness from miss supreme deity herself.

‘Wonder how the Armour of Brandenburg’s Miracle got around that,’ John remembered back to the fight he had with Lydia’s dad. ‘Ah, that’s possibly part of why it’s destroying itself with each usage? Man, enchanting is complicated business.’

He swiped the key card and the elevator came rumbling down the shaft.

_________________________________________________________________________

John looked at the list of sins on his phone. It was long, neatly organized, well sourced and vile. Absolutely vile.

The room wasn’t particularly large or impressive. The walls were of a nice reddish wood, the floor a simple grey carpet, the table a massive round thing, same wood as the walls. Computers and screens were mounted wherever convenient and multiple exits would have allowed for quick evacuation.

If it weren’t for the fact that every single one of the directors were bound to their comfortable leather seats by robotic drones. One could say many things about anarcho-capitalism, but it seemed that it was the brightest that rose to the top of such a society after all. The brightest and the most amoral.

Being cold, calculating people, the directorial board of Thorne was not in panic about their current situation, they were simply staring at John and Rave, waiting for them to say something. “You know, once I am done cleaning up this city,” the Gamer did them the favour, “I am going to take a very, very long bath and watch an episode of My Little Pony just to counteract all this filth you are subjecting me to with something that is so disgustingly innocent and sweet that I want to kill myself.”

“And he is probably going to have somebody ride his dick while he is at it,” Rave joked. While her boyfriend was not actually in a jesting mood, her fun-loving nature did drag him out of the grimdark-setting his brain was currently in. A little bit, at least.

“I am not perverse enough to have sex with My Little Pony in the background,” John stated and handed Rave the phone with the crimes these people had committed. Whatever funny answer she had was actually silenced as Rave put on a serious face and glared at one person in particular with immense disgust.

“Okay, so what are we doing with these shitheads?” she spat out.

“Miss Scarlett Thorne recommended we kill them all. If anybody ever would be able to find out that we worked with her to fool everyone in the whole city into making this takeover as clean as possible, it would be them,” John drily said those words.

Rave crossed her arms, gave him a crooked smile and theatrically shook her head. “Oh no, you just told them all the truth, guess we have to murder them now.”

“Yes, however… ah, I can’t keep this play up,” John turned to the directors. “Jesus, hell, people, have you ever stopped to consider that you are dealing with OTHER PEOPLE?”

“I will not be lectured by a boy!” a half-elf looking adonis grumbled and had a Shardbound penetrating his head a moment later. Silence, then screams of bloody murder as the men and women who had the arrogance to think they were untouchable even as they lost a war realized that they were not getting out of this despite their status. What greater shield was there than being important, after all?

“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO YOU JUST MURDERED?!” one of them shouted.

“Helirius Sunturner, Thorne’s director of marketing,” John told them, “Greatest crimes: slave-trafficking, extraction, assassination of his own father and keeping a slave continuously in his basement and repeatedly raping her.” The Gamer was all game for consensual sexual slavery, anything else could go burn in a fire.

Rave was strutting over to the guy who had shouted, looking at John’s phone as she didn’t have his memory for names and data. “Let’s see, ya have a shaved head, a scrawny embarrassing beard, bad skin condition… there is your photo. Umutu Warski, director of research and development. Wow, ya actually cut the dicks off people because ya thought eunuchs would make better warriors. When the practice was caught, ya pinned it on three of your subordinates. Ya also put aside company funds, even more dismembering of people, ya got a sick fetish, don’tcha?”

“Men without desire make better followers,” the bald man explained himself in panic, not seeing what the cat-eared Rave was up to behind his chair. A sudden shock hit him, his mouth opened wide and light cascaded out together with his death scream.

Rave pulled her black-gloved hand back from the back rest of the chair. She had used the Depth Delay to cause the ki of her punch to travel through the chair and into the chest of the man, where it had then ripped apart his heart and lungs in a combination of raw martial arts and Copernicus’ light blessing.

Eight more directors sat around the table. These people would face at least five death sentences each in John’s courts by the number of their crimes. It was because these were people with connections that could bail them out if John didn’t watch over their cells continuously himself that it was necessary to kill them right here.

John felt more like a vigilante killing them one by one than he was comfortable, but the thought of giving them even the sliver of a chance to escape was even worse. Least he could do was kill them quickly though. There was only one person who both he and Rave were actually tempted to leave to Siena. Not that they could, the shadow elemental was somewhere else entirely right now.

“Child rapist and murderer,” Rave didn’t even give him the honour of naming him or the time to respond before breaking his neck. In death that man had a sadistic smile on his face. “How the fuck did Scarlett work with these… things?” Rave was still disgusted enough to use another curse.

“She didn’t,” John told her, “the overturn ratio in Thorne’s board of directors is immense, she was just stuck between the decision of letting them be or continuously replacing them, harming the administrative body of Thorne. Basically, she tolerated them, which is bad enough but at least not AS bad.”

When faced with morals or her own goals, Scarlett would give her own goals the priority, John understood that much about her. She still cleaned out the elements whenever she thought she could do it. As the saying went, however, power corrupted, and given enough time the replacements would pile on their own sins.

“But that’s an overly grim look at the situation anyway. These people here were the central committee; Scarlett assured me that she concentrated the worst of the worst here so she can have a better eye on them. The external branches, where 90% of the on-the-ground decisions are made, are apparently headed by okay people.” One of those examples would have been the lady that had led the shop in the Ikea. An utterly milquetoast shop owner.

“Ya know, I ain’t exactly a moral gal myself,” Rave said as they headed back to the elevator. “I always did what I wanted, but when I look at that,” she pointed over her shoulder, “I am suddenly way more appreciative of what you are doing, John. Cleaning this thing up is mostly unpleasant or boring work, I don’t have a lot of interesting fights, but it feels good to know that we are going to create a world that’s better tomorrow.”

John nodded to himself. It was good to hear his girlfriend’s voice form the things he already knew but needed to be reaffirmed every so often to stay aware of why he was doing these things. He gave her a warm smile. “Thanks to sticking by me even when it bores you,” he told her.

“Hey, ya never know, maybe we end up in another tournament, that was fun,” Rave joked back as they stepped out of one of the many exits and arrived at a balcony. “Are we just going to leave them like that?” she asked, pointing at where they came from.

“Yes,” John told her. “They will be put on the same pyre as everyone else of their side that died today. I won’t give them the satisfaction of a special grave.” He looked down in the streets, where a ginger called Damien had somehow managed to overwhelm Aclysia and was now leading a procession to the edge of the barrier. Aclysia and the police force were harassing them, but the hurt weaponized maid was slow and no one else dared to fight the ginger due to the power difference.

At least that was the official story as to how a train of people managed to reach the edge of the barrier and use physical force to break out. A train of people that also contained a suit wearing androgynous girl with red hair and red eyes.

John saw her with his improved eyesight; a moment later Rave handed him his phone. “Ya got a message,” she said, in her usual good mood again. As always, she recuperated from these things quicker than he did.

Taking the phone slowly, he looked at the display: the message was exactly what he thought it would be.