Chapter 328 – Curse thy fate, love thy future

Chapter 328 – Curse thy fate, love thy future

“So?” John asked the blood mage, now patting the bench for Eliza to sit down next to him.

“The fuck do you mean ‘so’?” she mumbled; her voice was so tired from things John couldn’t hope to understand himself. Still, he had to try.

“I mean, ‘so, want to talk about the weather or something?’” John sarcastically remarked; “No, I want to know how you feel right now.”

“I don’t fucking know,” Eliza shouted at him, finally raising her eyes from her feet; “I guess I am happy that you are alive? No scratch that shit, I am ecstatic, I am so happy about it, it almost counteracts all the horror that goes on in my head right now. It’s quiet, I feel fucking perfect, but I know that somewhere in this head is... just this thing that wants to get out, and it’s not ANY thing. I have the literal end of humanity inside me, and it’s all quiet, which is somehow worse than anything I had to endure up to this point. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL?!”Fôll0w current novÊls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m)

“Confused would be the right response,” John answered, continuing to pat the bench beside him. Eliza refused to sit down. Sighing, he stood up and walked over to her instead. The other girls gave them some distance. “Look, this is all incredibly recent, and I can’t say I get what is going on myself. It seems to be a consistent theme in my life that I get dragged into stuff like this,” the Gamer said.

“Of course, you get dragged into this shit, you chose to hang out with people this screwed in their cum-oiled brain-windings,” Eliza threw at him. “Just fuck me, and I mean that you should just fuck off not that you should stick your cock into me. Ditch me, leave me here and never look back.”

“I can’t do that,” John stated clearly.

“JUST GO THE FUCK AWAY!” the blood mage screamed; “I don’t want your help; this Romulus asshole will look over me. He is going to be of more help than you’ve ever been with your friendly shit. I don’t need you anymore; I have my memories, I will survive!”

“You will survive, yes, but you will live in captivity,” John pointed out; “Just tell me the truth. We both know why you want me to leave.”

Tears welled up in Eliza’s eyes, “I just told you the fucking truth. I don’t need you anymore!”

“Eliza...”

“Don’t say my name like it means anything to you; you are just a fucking pervert and I happen to be cute.” She threw whatever she thought would get him to distance himself from her at him. Insults, accusations, they all were silenced when John reached into his inventory and pulled out the white scarf. He threw it around Eliza’s neck and pulled her close by the ends.

“Just say it,” he demanded when she dug her fingers into the white fabric of his shirt.

Tear-choked, she answered, “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

John gently kissed the roots of her hair, “Then let this be the last time you hurt me. You have your past back, right?”

“It’s a shitty past,” Eliza returned; “Full of abusive priests, cowardly parents and zealous idiots. Figures that my whole life sucked from the beginning.”

“But were the past weeks bad?” John asked.

“NO!” Eliza looked up to him with wide-eyes; “No, they were as awesome as rolling over a band of preachers with a steamroller and turning them into a bloody pulp on the floor!”

“And now you have your own name on top of that,” he told her; “Not some terrible abbreviation whispered to you by a fragmented goddess. YOUR name.”

Eliza was quiet now.

Continuing, John slowly rolled the scarf around her neck, “Look, I can’t say that everything will be fine. I don’t know. Maybe you are living on borrowed time now, maybe that thing in your head is bound to kill us all if we don’t kill it first, but I refuse to just leave it at that. If you can stay in control, that means that there is hope. So how about we just look at the positives here. You are alive, you are in control, we know what we are dealing with, and now you can enjoy life without the steady question of what is wrong with you.”

“Sol and Luna were right there,” Nathalia still didn’t really understand, as evident by her next question, “Do you expect gods to just meddle in your mortal affairs? I went in there to save John, Rat did what he did to get in good graces with Romulus again.”

“Sounds to me like you are an incredible selfish bunch,” the techno-lover continued.

“Selfish by your definition, yes,” Nathalia freely admitted, “but I don’t bother greatly with the opinion of lesser, mortal beings. Most gods would probably take the death of a few ten-thousand in return of being free to do whatever they want in Europe, which is impossible with Romulus around.”

“Yeah, that is super fucking selfish,” Eliza said in a happy voice as she sniffed, in a bit of a creepy obsessed fashion, at John’s shirt.

“How is your jaw by the way?” John had to ask out of curiosity.

“Melted back to my head,” the dragoness growled. “It’s still healing and hurts like hell.” Now that she mentioned it, John could see a bigger than usual gap in the scales framing her face that was lightly bleeding lava. It did look rather unpleasant.

“I could heal you,” John offered. His powers should have been bullshit enough for that.

Nathalia grunted in a mixture of dismissiveness and amusement, “You are beginning to have enough mana to restore my vitality, but it won’t be of much help.” To translate that into game terms: Undine’s heal value wasn’t really high enough to affect her HP total.

“Okay, back to the gods and your logic thing then,” John said; “What are you going to do now that there is war?”

“I don’t care about your war,” she instantly dismissed him; “As a matter of fact, I am going to just stay here with Tha-,” the dragoness stopped herself and rubbed the scales on the side of her face. It was fascinating to see so many people John thought untouchable acting so carefully. “-Eliza and leave you to do whatever you want to do.”

“What was that about wanting to save me?” John wondered.

“That was an emergency; if you participate in a war because of your own volition, I am not going to be your guardian deity,” Nathalia made clear; “If you die to your own mistakes, that just means you weren’t a worthy mate after all.”

Well, that was heartless. Gods seemed to have a non-involvement policy for anything that didn’t serve their own interests. “What if you were a patron god? How would you act in that case?”

With a flare of her wings drifting into John’s field of view, his well-read support spoke up. “Those who bind themselves to guilds only act on the core territory of that guild due to a treaty that ensures that guild will survive conflicts of interest,” Momo explained; “Abyssal History by Maria Theresia, chapter 3, paragraph 3.”

“Unless that interest is complete annihilation of that guild,” John guessed.

“Even then, the ones to slay that god shouldn’t be from our own kind,” Nathalia continued on; “We gods of destruction and those of death are too good at killing, so everyone else made a pact to unify against whoever goes out of their way to end a fellow god. Sending in a god to kill the enemy god means that you will face a coalition of everyone else.”

If there was a caste of people in your race that was way better at killing than the rest, it made sense for everyone else to make up a way to keep that caste in check. John completely understood that angle. If they didn’t do that, only the destructive gods would reign over anything. “I guess Romulus gets away with using Sol and Luna though,” John said.

“Yes. What are we going to do if he kills a god? Throw more at him to make him even stronger?” Nathalia shrugged; “If it hadn’t been for you, I would have worried about the genocide goddess only after she murdered Romulus.”

‘And in the process made it so nobody would ever have been able to stop her, good job,’ John thought to himself, not wanting to make Nathalia needlessly angry over something she clearly didn’t care about. It was good that gods were such a selfish bunch, for the most part. If they wanted, they could have meddled in all mortal affairs and next to no one would have been able to stand up to them. In this specific case, John felt kind of annoyed at their insistence of being uncaring onlookers though.

But the alternative was that all of the strong gods, however many there were, would appear in every conflict ever and just roll over all the humans in the field. So, this state of affairs wasn’t that bad.

They finally made it out of the building.