Chapter 322 – His will be done<h1></h1>


    … it stopped.


    It stopped. The force to eradicate not just a city but to make the entirety of smaller countriespletely uninhabitable, it just stopped. Energy condensed in its purest form, a small sun in the middle of the arena, now surrounded by a dome of silver energy. How would one just stop this?


    “There is no need to fear anything!” the deep voice boomed through the stadium with relentless conviction; “As long as I am here!” John turned to see the form of everyone’s saviour. He was tall, immensely so, muscle-bound arms reaching out of a white toga. His brown-haired head was crowned with an olive branch, and his middle-aged face burst with vitality and rage.


    His left hand glowed with the silver of the full moon while his right was engulfed in the golden zing of the sun. Sol and Luna also followed behind him, on their respective sides, all three of them working the magic that worked this miracle.


    “Ah, the great enver himself arrives,” Alexej mocked, the fact that he still was unmoved despite this attempt not having worked whatsoever made John’s hairs stand on end below his clothes.


    “You will be dealt with once this concludes,” Romulus dismissed it without a care.“Knights of Rome!” his voice once more echoed through the arena; “Do good by your oath, protect my people and protect me.”


    “Oh, the great emperor himself needs help, sh-“


    “Shut – Up.” Maximillian said, pressing his former friend’s air from his lungs by nailing him to the floor with his powers.


    “He has a point,” Romulus’ voice no longer echoed through the arena; “I may be able to contain it for now, but while I neutralize the bomb, I will be defenceless.” Just as the emperor said that, the gap in the sky spewed forth a swarm of dots that quickly closed in.


    It only took John a moment to realize what he was looking at. A small-scale invasion of elite forces, a hundred people, some flying, others simply diving down or getting carried. They wanted to push their momentum while they could.


    “So that was their n,” John mumbled. They wanted to distract Romulus with a hydrogen bomb and then kill him while he was busy containing the explosion. The fact that this was the n made John gulp.


    What kind of being must be distracted with the strongest weapon science produced to date just to be defenceless. “We begin with the neutralization now; the quicker we get this over with, the quicker we can get back to protecting our city!” Romulus instructed his two sworn goddesses.


    “”As youmand, Rom!”” both of them answered simultaneously and began to increase the amount of energy they expended.


    The barrier thickened as the explosion on the inside unfroze and yed out. They were causing a perfectly controlled detonation while also localizing the radiation.


    ‘And they tell me I will be on that level one day?’ John’s eyes went wide as the soldiers raining from the skynded all around.


    “I will take care of Alexej,” Maximillian told John. “Go make yourself useful… you are stronger than me!” The king muttered thest words reluctantly but he uttered them all the same.


    “Thank you. Everyone, let’s go!” the elementals and Momo followed after him as he went towards his first target.


    The prime objective was to get to Thana; she had walked at least fifty metres away and was now kneeling on the floor, still holding her head trying to shut out all noise from the outside. After he had her, he would help the knights.


    Of course, he wasn’t allowed to just get to her in the middle of an invasion. One of the enemy soldiersnded right in front of him, and he wasn’t the only one. Landing everywhere and wearing the same dark green, military uniform with the red star and stripes, they attacked whatever they saw first.


    The one in front of John was no exception and went right at him. The man, whose features couldn’t have been of lesser importance to John right now, was fast. Not as fast as Sylph, but that didn’t matter with how close he was. He whirled around a mace that he pulled out of nowhere, aiming right at John’s head.


    White hair and de cut through the air. Aclysia appeared in the gap between them, blocking the strike with her arm, covered in all the shards of Nathalia’s scales she had consumed. “I am sorry, I was in the kitchen,” Aclysia apologized as to why she didn’t use Defensive Teleportation sooner and then initiated her counterattack.


    Eclys cut a deep trench through the man’s torso, from shoulder to hip. John half expected blood to spew forth, but instead the wound simply vanished. It didn’t heal, there were no signs of regeneration. No, the wound was simply gone. ‘Just like my Gamer’s Body,’ John thought and was beyond confused.


    The arena filled with yet more fighters as the Knights of Rome, the elite order of the Sons of Rome, went in to serve and protect as had been asked of them. John barely got an idea through Jack’s eyes. There was so much going on, and what happened in the arena was one of his lesser concerns. He set the course of the mechanical sparrow over to the tform where Lydia, Rave and Nia should still have been.


    He was still facing the menace in front of him, however. The healed man immediately went back on the offensive, an attempt to Observe him failed. ‘Why does every fucking obstacle in my way have to wear protection against scrying magic?!’ he mentallyined.


    “GET OUT OF MY WAY!” he screamed and punched themunist soldier in the face with a straight left. The glove, made from the materials that had been created by the birth of a goddess and harder than most things in the known universe, crashed into his face, backed up with a proper boxing technique. “I need to get to Thana,” he growled as the man just shrugged off this hit again.


    It was time to get out the big guns. The shadows started burning with purple fire as the first fusion formed and Shadowme was burning again. “Let the world drown in our fury,” spoke the Gamer’s bloodhound and spread her fire to whatever enemy she could see.


    While it was John’s goal to get to Thana, he couldn’t just ignore the situation at hand. All would be lost if Romulus died and that nuke went off anyway. ‘Just what kind of desperate must these people be to run such a suicide mission?’ John thought. ‘Or are they just that possessed?’


    In the light of an ongoing atomic fission, he and his elementals battered the soldier in attacks. The attacks he returned would have been dangerous if he had been fighting just two or three of his group, but they were abined force with months of team fighting experience.


    There wasn’t any need for John to order them anymore, at least not in an on-going fight like this one. Everyone knew where to be, when to get out of the way so someone else could get an attack in. Shadowme stopped her area efforts and threw a storm of dark mes at the enemy that was only reinforced by Sylph adding her wind to the mix.


    The outgoing inferno turned the floor to ss with such intense, lightless heat that it should have turned the soldier to nothing but a charred corpse. Instead he jumped out once morepletely unharmed.


    Same couldn’t be said for his uniform, especially the top part which had been covered in cuts from the start of their fight. Now it was basically just charred tatters and gave free view to the man’s chest. Therey the answer to his apparent invincibility.


    It wasn’t Gamer’s Body at all, just something that made it so they could fight more effectively. ‘Just what kind of preparation went into this behind the scenes?’ John had to ask himself. They either had the Supreme Fateweaver himself on their side or managed to get someone of equal power, they got a goddamn hydrogen bomb, they had an ancient crusader artefact.


    What was next? Actually, John didn’t want to find out.


    ‘I can’t wait until they all keel over at once, I need to get to Thana now,’ he decided. He didn’t even have an idea how high the bundled lifeforce of 100 abyssal elites was, but he could imagine that it wasn’t something that would just be done with in a moment.


    “We got this,” Momo told him even as Shadowme parted into Siena and Smander again, “Just go get her! She will be great help in cleaning up this mess!”


    “Go!” Undine urged him as well, flowing off his arm.


    “Thank you!” John said and made a break for it.


    As he bridged thest few metres, he checked on the tform through Jack. It was empty; in all likelihood they were somewhere in the chaotic battlefield below as well. A battlefield that, as John noted, didn’t look all that well for them at the moment.


    The Blood’s soldiers being able to disregard any injury made it so that they got an edge whenever theynded a hit. Morale also must have been a factor; not everyone had a skill that allowed them to just check why their enemies simply weren’t dying.


    He finally reached Thana and kneeled down by her side. He tried to reach out to her, but she was thrashing, mumbling something too quiet for him to hear. Hitting her head on the floor and seemingly trying desperately to look away from the still unfolding nuclear hellfire behind the silver screen.


    “Talk to me,” he finally managed to get a hold on her by the arms. He turned her so she had to look at him. The dots in her eyes were like a broken clock, ticking in illogical distances or backwards at times. Her eyes were wide in shock, barely seeing him. They were only filled with terror.


    “Jo-h…n,” her lips barely formed before her whole body was gripped by a shudder and she went back to chanting what he didn’t understand earlier. “No, stay inside, stay inside, stay inside,” she said over and over again.


    “What is it? What do you need? Please, talk to me,” John pleaded and shook her, “Stay with me, Thana!” The quivering stopped. She looked back at him. Her violet eyes reflected his relief. She raised her left arm, John saw four numbers appear slowly, as if they had to fight against somest resistance. 0-0-0-1. It was the first set of many, carved into skin by bursting blood vessels. They disappeared as quickly as they came, reced by new ones.


    The dots stopped moving and then stretched into seven thin lines, crossing the golden ring. A smile appeared on Thana’s face, onepletely devoid of all of her usual insanity. The voice that spoke eventually clearly was Thana’s, yet that tone… it wasn’t hers whatsoever.


    It was uncaring, rough, primal beyond sanity or insanity. John doubted that these concepts even meant anything to someone who sounded like this, like a hungry wolf that managed to form words.


    “I am here, this body is mine, I am here, this body is mine, I am here, this body is mine. I am here, speak my name, I am here, speak my name. The humans all need annihtion, the humans all need annihtion. I am here, the human anathema, I am here. Finally. I can end this farce myself.”


    Before he could ask anything, a strike to his shoulder flung him to the air faster than he realized, and then he had already crashed against the wall with all of his mana instantly annihted and health reduced by a third. ‘It hurts,’ John thought, his right shoulder clearly broken several times, making his whole arm useless. He waited for it to fade as all physical agony did when it was healed away. It didn’t. It continued to pulsate in pain, no matter how long he waited.


    A window appeared before him that had him look up and at the unknown girl inhabiting Thana’s body. Observe revealed a terrible truth to him: that the name Thana, which the faces had whispered to her, had never been meant for the girl he knew.


    Everyone else was still busy fighting; none of them noticed the imminent doom that had just awoken in their midst. Not yet. In mere moments they would learn.


    And the clock strikes midnight.