On the other end of the camera, Lydia was hiding her face between her hands, having just seen John’s eyes. Up and down motions, hiding her gaze, accompanied her shaking her head slightly; together, the motions painted a picture of shocked disbelief. “Thank you for telling me early,” she stated, “I wouldn’t have been able to rest this night had you told me once I was done with my duties.” Her hands opened to reveal glistening eyes, close to tears, but the stern woman was holding onto herself.

“You don’t seem surprised,” John noticed, to the sight of Lydia grabbing a handkerchief from somewhere offscreen and carefully drying the area around her eyes. They were now outside the hospital, sitting on the bench of a park that was still part of the larger barrier. It had an adequate amount of privacy.

“I am not,” the queen of steel answered. “Moronic as it is, the tradition to fight a tournament for leadership in case of a failed vote is still the most barbaric fragment our German or even European institutions have remaining within their constitutions, or whatever document acts as the replacement for such.”

With a heavy sigh, she dropped both of her hands. They hit her thighs with audible smacks. John could only see her upper body. The auburn-haired royal had placed her phone on the surface of a table; upon hearing that John would tell her a longer and more heavy-hearted tale, she had wanted to see his face.

“You are not operating in such a civilized world. Grabbing power through wars and continuous efforts on a continent so removed from regulations and a way to keep eyes on the monsters of the Abyss, particularly in these times, was always bound to get you in trouble one day,” she finished her thoughts, pressing her lips together until red was replaced with white as she gulped. “I just hoped nothing too bad would befall you.”

John’s heart felt like a stone upon seeing the queen in this misery. “Perhaps it would’ve been smarter of you if you had never allowed yourself to love me,” he said, his lips moving by themselves, formulating his doubts without thinking about it.

“… Aclysia, are you there?” Lydia asked over the phone after looking taken aback for a moment.

The weaponized maid leaned into the camera, “Yes, Lydia?” This was no time for the usual titles of respect, the white-haired woman knew that. In emotional gatherings like this, she kept to using names. “What is it that you want from me?”

“Can you slap your asshole of a master for me?” The queen’s tone was dripping with sudden anger. “Seriously lay into him, break his neck if you have to, Gamer’s Body should fix that.”

“I understand your anger, but this seems excessive,” Aclysia stated.

Rave chimed in before John could ask anything, “Don’tcha worry, I got this.” There was a sudden pain on his ear as she flicked his earlobe with all of her Strength. It hurt. It hurt a whole damn lot. Not enough to overcome John’s pain resistance, but he felt pretty abused nonetheless.

“What’s this about?!” he asked, somewhat angry. His own emotional state was anything but stabilized still. It had been less than two hours since he got the grave medical news and this was a steady up and down of emotions. Somewhere at the back of his mind, his Wisdom kept him from completely flipping his shit.

“’What’s this about’,” in a very untypical fashion, Lydia repeated after him in a dumb tone. “Do you not intend to overcome this obstacle as well, John Newman?! Are you going to stop and be less than the man I took you for?”

His prideful wrath stirred again; he clenched his phone so hard a crack spread through the glass. “No, of course no-“ he couldn’t even finish before she continued. The clean tear ran down Lydia’s face, but her dark blue eyes stared straight into his soul even from the small display.

“Then what foolishness takes hold of you that you dare say that I shouldn’t love you?” she lectured him. “When we…” she blushed, bit her lip for a second and looked down. Although she continued more quietly, John didn’t dare interrupt. Her tone stayed decisive. “When we sat together that one night and talked, when I told you I fell for you, I said I will allow myself this one weakness.” She took a deep breath, blinking away the resurfacing threat of tears. “That it may be, but don’t YOU, of all people, dare frame my love as a mistake.”

John let out a long, heavy sigh to relax the lump in his throat. Laid out like that, he quickly understood what he had said as a mistake. “I am sorry…”

“You better be,” the queen went back to drying her eyes, herself exhaling quite strongly, each breath quivering. “I can’t take another vacation so early, although I loathe to leave you alone with this, John. Know that I wish I could be there for you right now. Genuinely.”

“I wish you could be here as well… I could use your commanding presence to keep my mind off the bad things and on what I have to do.” Although he said that in a joking tone, it was true nonetheless. “But I know. I will manage. It’s my turn to come over to your place anyway.”

“Indeed,” Lydia blew her nose and sniffed. Still just a single tear, but her eyes were pretty red. “Negotiate what you have to; if all else fails, you are boarding the next plane to Germany. My offer to make you king is still on the table.”

“Get in line, Lylytina,” Rave protested, forcing the camera on her face. “He is marrying me, and it’s either me alone or me first! Point is, ya ain’t getting that ring before I am.”

Amusedly, Lydia blew air out of her nose. “Perhaps I will claim an heir first then, would you protest that as well?”

“Hold up you stuck up cunt,” Eliza threw herself into the picture. “That’s MINE, you fucking rigid piece of frozen shit!”

Lydia hesitated for a moment, looking over to the blood mage. Not her reaction, but the clearly longer hair was what made the queen hesitate. She knew what the connotations were. “You can insist, but the choice is not exclusively ours to make,” she chose not to comment, which was probably for the best.

“Fuck you,” Eliza growled, feeling her baby claim threatened. “I am the breeding sow here, do you hear me?! Violate that and I will make sure the fucking history books remember you as Lydia the meat rag!”

Lydia actually chuckled. “It is good to hear that you are all as dysfunctional as ever. I have less to worry about then.” She looked at a clock behind her. “I will have to leave you now. This next appointment is important and work will hopefully keep my mind occupied.”

“I won’t call you with bad news next time,” John promised, intent on keeping it.

“…I believe you,” the queen blinked and smiled widely, wider than he usually saw. It was a free and happy smile. The colour of her eyes lifted from the colour of steel to a happy summer sky like blue. “How odd. Take care, my beloved John.”

As her picture froze and then vanished, John felt the better parts of him in control again. Not in control of the situation, but in control of his decision making and emotions at least. ‘Live, learn, move on,’ he chanted in his head the motto that he had struggled to keep the past few hours. Just for himself, it was hard to pull back together. Lydia reminding him that his girls had fallen in love with someone that would get back up, however, was the motivation he needed.

Nothing was a better incentive for the Gamer than making his harem a bunch of happy girls.

Sadly, that enthusiasm was dampened, as he soon had to go to a meeting with a mysterious faction that suddenly decided to benefit him to get their hands on Eliza. Didn’t sound like a particularly great start. The better place would have been to go start some sort of training effort for his contact lens problem. He probably could get some of that done in the interim though.

“Okay, now I seriously need to eat something,” he announced, pocketing his phone in case somebody else called him. He wouldn’t know who; Scarlett was too effectively minded to want a conversation, especially since she and Magoi had to run everything right now. “If I am going to use these depressed brain cells for anything productive, I need calories!”

“Fucking yes! Food!” Eliza agreed. “I haven’t eaten in like 10 hours!”

“Wow, the sacrifices you make for me,” John smirked at her and they finally left the hospital area. Gnome went immaterial in response, reducing the group to John, Rave, Eliza, the maid duo and Metra.

At first, he wanted to go into some high-class restaurant with them all, but he quickly realized that he would look pretty stupid with the glasses on his head. Alternatively, he could have went for some junk food. Before he could make that call, he had an epiphany.

Although the south of the Little Maryland was in uprising, the north, or more specifically Washington, had fallen to the last leading figures the guild still had. Two generals that were, in turn, loyal to John. By all rights, this meant that this counted as conquered territory.

“Let’s go to the White House,” he told everyone.

“I thought we were trying not to suffer from anymore depression for the rest of the day?” Rave pointed out. It would be pretty counterproductive to go to the place of their defeat to that end.

John hummed in agreement as they took the sidewalk towards the capital’s centre. It wasn’t too far from where they were. “Thing is, I want to put down the teleporter,” he explained, “the long range one. No need to buy food if we can be back home in an instant and have Aclysia cook.”

“I do have some eggs that will go bad in a few days,” the weaponized maid approvingly remarked. “What hinders you from putting it down somewhere less… tainted, however?”

“I have no idea if there is an internal cooldown on the replacement, and given that I want to rebuild the White House and make it, at least, the heart of central government, I should have the teleporter there already,” John explained. After a few more steps he added, “And I need to see for myself.”

There were no further protests after that. Instead, Eliza started another topic. “Yo, I have a, probably retarded, question,” she turned to Rave. “Chemilia and Ted are going to be fucking cyborgs soon, right?”

“I guess?” Rave raised an eyebrow and slurred her counter-question, “Whaddaboutit?”

“Isn’t that mechanical fuckery going to interfere in their martial arts like a pogo stick up the ass?” the ever-bloomy language of the blood mage put into words something that John was also wondering about.

“Kinda?” the Lightbearer answered and scratched herself cattishly behind the ear. “It's kinda like wearing new shoes and all that jazz.”

“…You bubblegum flavoured cunt, you suck cock better than you explain things,” Eliza grumbled and looked over to Metra instead. The First of Wrath hadn’t been particularly talkative in the past few hours, but addressed like this she reacted.

“You know you can use martial arts through clothes, right?” Metra began her explanation, everyone nodded. “It takes a tremendous amount of practice, but eventually, you get used to working your martial art through a layer of cloth. The same logic can be extended to swords, clubs or any other weapon you can think of. Usually takes years to get used to just one weapon though, which is why you see most martial artists that actually get used to a weapon use that weapon for a while. I guess you can extend that same logic to biomechanical limbs.” She shrugged at that point. “They didn’t have them when I last got around to the topic. People just attached blades to their stumps. That worked like a fucking charm.”

“There’s some martial arts that actually only work with weapons, but that’s like school specific stuff,” Rave added as the White House lawn came into view.

“Next fucking questions,” Eliza continued on, her insane grin having something of a predator thinking about her next meal. “What about using some shit that’s part of you as a sword?”

“Uhm… I honestly have no idea,” Rave answered. Metra also shook her head.

“I guess it would make it easier,” the blonde berserker stated, “but I haven’t heard of someone doing that yet. Few people have the regenerative capabilities to even think about that, even fewer could manipulate their bodies in such ways that a useful weapon could be made from their bones. It probably happened somewhere before, but it didn’t cross my path.”

“Al-fucking-right,” Eliza nodded, and they entered the White House barrier.

The devastation in front of them was… cold. That was the word John had for it. He remembered the action, the massive sword caving metre long trenches into the ground, the fire, the shattering earth, the blast that had ended it all. Before him simply lay a carved-out corpse of a building along with a lawn whose flat surface had been broken into several pieces of different levels of elevation. None of it moved, only some relief workers ran about the place, gathering what value could be saved and checking if they couldn’t still find some limbs. It was a pretty macabre line of work, but less than twenty-four hours after the fact, there still was a chance, however slim, for reattachment.

Given the size of some of those ravines and how they had shifted throughout the battle, John didn’t hold out much hope. What hadn’t been found yet probably lay squished between layers of dirt. Still, it was a valiant effort and John wasn’t about to negatively judge someone for trying their best to make it so their comrade still had a hand.

Nobody bothered the Gamer as he walked around, wordless. He had imagined feeling worse returning here, like it would have some sway over his soul. Sure, the air was a bit heavier, sure, he felt his damaged pride again, and sure, he looked at the cone of desolation with a gulp, but all of that was actually less than what he had imagined he would feel like.

The White House was completely done. There was very little to be saved. The once proud building had its most prominent part first horizontally slashed and then Sigmund’s final attack burn through it. The destructive cone split at one point. John saw a piece of wall, roughly his own size and height, at the head of that fork in the ashen ground. In front of that lay a black cloth over a small but broad body.

The Gamer had no intention of lifting it and looking at the charred corpse of the man below. He just bowed down in front of it. “They will remember you,” he whispered, “as a man who made mistakes but more so as someone who ultimately did what he thought best for his people.” As much as John disagreed with the action Abraham had taken even before his arrival, there was respect for the fallen, particularly those sacrificing themselves to mend their mistakes, that had to be given.

John eventually raised his head again, adjusted his glasses, his field of view sliding down his nose was extremely unpleasant, and placed the teleporter at a somewhat unharmed part of the building. Meaning, in this case, that the walls still stood, windows having shattered or molten from the extreme heat that came with Ifrit’s fire. Not only had Sigmund’s attack directly destroyed much of the main building, including the Oval Office, but the resulting fire had eaten every single bit of furniture inside. A charred façade was all that still stood anywhere.

The destruction of a national monument, be it only its Abyssal copy, made John only angrier. They were symbols of a nation, often bigger than a single lifetime in purpose. The only thing still shining in that mess was the deformed Mandala Sphere, too broken to be repaired even with Create. John took it with him to at least re-use the materials. “I seriously need to get even stronger to make Sigmund pay,” he growled when he found himself back at Liberty Island.

Eliza grabbed him by the arm and forced him to look at her that way. “You will focus on getting your fucking sense of balance back, you worry inducing retard,” she let him know. She had that look again and a tone that made John almost break out in a cold sweat. It reminded him of the time he had seen the strongest man in the world get his heart ripped out. “That German named dumbfuck is already as dead as a screaming pig in the slaughterhouse.”