Chapter 338 – Logistics

Chapter 338 – Logistics

“Blanka Zeritr, you are a traitor to the crown of Vienna,” John heard Maximillian begin the process of judging the leader of the clan behind him. “Your actions have led to...” The door to the abyssal tent, that was more like a transportable throne room, fell closed.

John had no intention of staying and listening to it. This wasn’t his state of affairs, and he had no reason to make it his. Having no emotional connection to her or her clan whatsoever and knowing that her execution was a foregone conclusion, he simply walked away and over to his group.

Blanka had refused to talk but the same could not have been said about the High Fateweaver they had caught. Evidently not quite as firm a believer, the man had spilled the beans on everything they wanted to know. The worst kind of coward, the one who was only interested to be on the winning side.

On the plus side, John now knew where Lydia was supposed to be, the city of Warsaw. Being the real world Polish capital, a state that seemingly didn’t hold a lot of sway in the Abyss, it was right inside the enemy territory and not exactly close.

But not so far that it was unreachable either. “We need allies in this,” John said. Their group was strong but not strong enough that John felt comfortable that they would manage to get in and out unscathed. They would need a strike-force, big enough to be secure but also small enough to be mobile.

John’s phone started ringing at that moment. He didn’t know the number on the display and was tempted to just click it away with the idea that it could be spam. Still, in the Abyss, one better kept in mind that everything could happen. “Hello, John Newman here,” he introduced himself.

“You have located Lydia,” the voice on the other side, deep, majestic and decidedly calm, belonged to the supreme commander of their forces. Romulus was the last person John could picture holding a phone, especially if he was currently in the form of a giant, but that was beside the point.

“Yes,” he answered. “I am going to save her.”

“You are going to try,” Romulus corrected him. “The smart move would be for you to wait for me to heal. It won’t be longer than three days from now. Once my recuperation is complete, this war is finished.”

All of that was true, the emperor would simply crush anything under his feet. However, three days were a long time when times were turbulent, just like 1 degree could make the difference between water and ice. “I can’t wait that long,” John clearly stated.

“I know,” Romulus agreed with him, and the image of the cold emperor at the heart of a stagnating empire finally fell apart completely. “I said it was the smart move, but neither my honour nor my conscious allow me to leave her with these fiends. Sleep, move to the city of Prague. I have made arrangements for suitable reinforcements. You are moving out tomorrow at noon.”

John checked his clock, he had to lower the phone for a moment to do so, It was 9 PM of Thursday the 11th of January 2018. Romulus wanted them to execute a deep-strike in 13 hours. On the scale of warfare, that was about as fast as it got. He raised his phone again.

“I understand, give me a location and I will be there.”

“You will not be part of that attack!” Nariko told her daughter as they broke camp. Following the phone call, John had waited for Maximillian to finish his business so he could come with. The king wanted to be part of this, as predicted. Now only Rave’s mother was holding them back, having heard of this only now. “It is foolish and has nothing to do with you.”

“She is my friend, so it’s very much my business,” the pink-haired half-asian answered. “Or I am making it my business! Dunno, don’t care, gonna do it cause I wanna.”

“You are not going to go!” Nariko kept her position. “Jane, you are jumping head first into danger, I cannot allow you to do that.”

“Allow? Mother, ya aren’t going to ‘allow’ me anything. I am going to do my own stuff, and ya got no control over it,” Rave riposted. “Ya picked a very bad time to start trying to be a good mom that worries for her kids.”

“I was always worried, worried that you won’t have a home,” Nariko mumbled, dialling down on her volume when she realized they were making a scene that attracted a lot of attention. “I protected a place you can come back to; if you now lose your life and can’t got there, it’d break my heart. You WILL stay safe, Jane!”

The sight made his eyes go wide. He stood at the feet of a spire and not just some spire, an absolute beauty of one. It grew upwards in seven, walled off levels. Each of them was filled with buildings that were true marvels of architecture from all kinds of time periods. It seemed like every person was living inside their own, wonderfully designed church, including clock towers and everything.

The predominant colour of everything was gold, the colour of eternally burning fires reflecting light stones. Ornaments were set into everything with arching bridges spanning over the streets and stairs. John couldn’t help but feel awe at the beauty of this city but also how easy it had to be to get lost within those beautiful pathways.

His eyes wandered up and found the second uppermost district blackened and painted red, a disturbing, forced depiction of new ideas on top of a pile of past glory.

“They call Prague the heart of the empire, for it is the city that Romulus himself designed and which has stood perfectly for a thousand years... until the Blood did their thing and assaulted the top two rings, those filled with the ‘filthy royalists’,” Maximillian explained. “Normally, I would invite you into my castle,” he gestured at the ruined structure at the very top of this spire, laying half in ruin, many of its own towers having fallen, now that John looked more closely he could see small trenches were the falling debris had cut into lower laying districts, “but you can see the problem with that.”

John often forgot that Maximillian wasn’t just a pretty strong mage in his own right, even if he held no candle to what the Gamer could achieve, but that his title of ‘king’ actually encompassed more than a bit of land. “How many people live here?” John had to ask.

“About 110’000, it’s the fifteenth biggest abyssal city in Europe,” Maximillian answered. “Although the count of the losses will make clear whether or not that can still be considered true or not.”

John hadn’t seen this part of the war yet, and it made it feel infinitely more real. Tracking gang members on the streets and countryside was one thing, invading a base with about a hundred people inside another.

But seeing this kind of destruction made John see that it didn’t take more than a hundred people to eradicate a whole slew of average people in the Abyss. Hell, if he wanted to, he could collapse the wall of the uppermost district and set forth a landslide. On his own, he was capable of killing thousands if given the right opportunity.

Combat focused people in the Abyss were walking warheads of different magnitudes, and he was slowly evolving into the nuclear kind. ‘Now I hope I never have to fight in a city,’ John thought; the amount of accidental destruction he could cause just by going all out was staggering.

Maximillian crossed his arms and let all of that sink into the Gamer. “Every day you will learn a bit more about the burden of your powers, buddy,” he said and began marching towards the city. “It’s all fine and dandy if us powerful people have clashes in a colosseum, but when it’s all out war, well, the difference is rather apparent.”

John nodded to himself and followed the king, who had a valuable thing to say for once. “Imagine if Romulus and Thana had clashed on top of this city,” he mumbled.

“There wouldn’t be a city anymore,” Rave whispered; even she hadn’t known this part of the abyss. Wars happened so seldomly, especially on the scale of thousands of fighters clashing in a society that didn’t produce a whole lot of them in the first place, that she could have only ever heard of it in passing.

“No, there wouldn’t,” Nariko told them, gave them a much saying glance. “Now imagine what would have happened if the Blood only wanted to destroy, not conquer, without any meaningful opposition.” Before either John or Rave could answer that, the auctioneer continued in her path. “I will see you at the meeting point tomorrow.” With that, she turned into lightning and crackled over the field, into the city.

“We should go find a bed somewhere as well,” John, still not completely done digesting the whole scope of destruction this war must have caused where there were concentrations of abyssal populations, said.

“Follow me, I know a place, and we get to stay for free, since I own it,” Maximillian announced.

That didn’t sound too bad and, ho boy, was it not too bad. The place they eventually landed in had large rooms with spacious bathrooms, who had the usual range of applications John loved to misuse for sexual purposes.

The best thing about them, however, was the beds. They looked more like marshmallows than the usual blocks of foam he rested on. Being at least three metres in diameter, they were just white, puffy... maybe cotton; from the feeling John had from throwing himself on there, he only knew that he was laying on top of something magical.

He barely had pulled the blanket over his naked form when he fell asleep.