Chapter 142: Day 327 (4) – Blood of the Innocents

Chapter 142: Day 327 (4) – Blood of the Innocents

The silence had stretched on for a while so Clarissa spoke again. “We pushed him back. You pushed him back. You can grind faster than he can gather power.” That was a good point, but peace was impossible.

“To delay the confrontation through diplomacy and attack him on our terms?” I asked. I didn’t like it. Asking for peace would be weakness and a step back. I had lost this battle, but I was personally winning. It was only a matter of time until he was dead.

“Yes,” Clarissa said.

“A cease fire can only be done if there is trust. I don’t trust the Ritualist and he doesn’t trust me. At the first moment of weakness the other side will attack. We forced him back and I doubt he can replenish his forces that quickly. If we press the attack, we could end him.”

“At what cost Michael? The city can’t survive another battle. If it is even twice as good as this most recent victory, the city will collapse.”

“The cost doesn’t matter. Either we win, or we lose and all of us die,” I said. I was not about to make peace. The only reason I let this conversation continue was that Clarissa seemed quite stressed.

“Michael, it isn’t that simple unless you choose it to be. You couldn’t kill him today, what makes you think you can kill him tomorrow?” I winced at that. She had a good point, but it didn’t matter.

“I can’t let him go! Not after what he did!” I shouted. Clarissa surprisingly kept her composure and kept looking right at me.

“You won’t consider the possibility?” I looked away at that. Dammit. I had enough self-awareness to know I should consider what she was saying, but my heart refused to listen. To compromise with that man, it would annoy me to no end. If this really was a cultivation world, I would develop a heart demon from even contemplating peace.

I would always be worried about a future attack. Still, calling a long-term truce was an option. If I made the offer and the Ritualist rejected it, I would feel like an idiot. But I would be saving the people of Purgatory. They could die, victory was far more important.

“Let me put it into perspective. We lost over half the RMPF and four fifths of the militia. Including Lady Shi,” Clarissa said. Not Lady Shi, I liked her. I sat there in silence a bit before speaking up, my heart heavy now.

“What? She was old? Why was she fighting?”

“Everyone was conscripted Michael. Every single person. She died defending the North gate.” Lady Shi, the woman who cut my hair. I liked her and she had been around almost as long as I had been. Dammit. Another thing the Ritualist had to pay for.The initial posting of this chapter occurred via N0v3l.B11n.

“If you are unable to kill the Ritualist, a truce of some kind must be brokered. It must Michael. Otherwise, people will scatter and hide. Any form of organization and government we have will collapse. There won’t be anyone left. You can threaten people, but right now that won’t work. It won’t work on me.”

I could win, against impossible odds. But it wasn’t enough. I could kill hundreds of monsters, but it wasn’t enough. I could race back to Purgatory and fight through trap after trap, but it wasn’t enough. I could win battles, but the war was lost.

Dammit! It hurt to admit it. I prided myself on my thinking and strategy, but the Ritualist had bested me by the very nature of his abilities. His attack had applied enough pressure to push things to this point. Clarissa would not have come here to tell me this and risk my ire if the situation wasn’t dire.

The corpses in the street. The swaths of people killed. While human lives were cheap in this place, but in a large enough amount they could crush anyone or anything. A weight that couldn’t be shaken off. The losses Purgatory had just experienced were horrendous. Any other leader would have been replaced or assassinated.

We didn’t have a housing crisis. We had a morale crisis. A leadership crisis. “Fine,” I said quietly. Almost like I didn’t want to hear my own words. “I will...I will attempt a truce between Purgatory and the Ritualist, if I am unable to kill him.” That was hard to say and even harder to admit. It meant complete failure. It meant that I was a failure if it came to that.

“As long you understand. I am not telling you to do it. Just that if the war continues and there is another attack or battle like the last one, there won’t be a government left.”

“I get it. I need to rest.” Clarissa got up from the chair and then paused.

“I thought you would also like to know. The baby survived,” Clarissa said. At least that was one piece of good news. “The mother named the child Michael after you.” I closed my eyes. It was a popular enough name. I would take the compliment for what it was.

Clarissa left my room and closed the door behind her.

All of the suffering I had endured. Peace. I couldn’t imagine the Ritualist accepting such an offer, but Clarissa was right. I didn’t want to end up as Hannibal, winning every battle but losing the war. I didn’t want to be the Japanese samurai stuck in the past, unable to move forward.

How? The monsters I could understand. Even using a mimic to create a decoy to try and lure me into a trap. Fine. I could accept all of that. But, all of it together? How was that even possible for one person?

Just whip out a new power. Just like that. It was complete nonsense. An entire new ability I had to think about the limitations of. The fact he used the decoys as a last resort, meant that there were clearly limitations. He also only decoyed himself, not other people. A possible limitation, but one I wasn’t going to count on. We would need to implement master stranger protocols at all the gates to check for imposters.

He would have to be summoning more right now. An attack on Heaven needed to happen as soon as possible, so I could finally see him defeated. The area people could go in the Systemic Lands was only so big, with only five discovered cities so far.

While I hadn’t checked the edges of all the level 2 areas, there weren’t that many options for the Ritualist on where the Ritualist could hide and rebuild his army of monsters. If he needed people, that meant he needed a city with arrivals.

My head hurt. I would worry about everything tomorrow.