Chapter 353 – End of Moscow


    “Members of the Blood of the Proletariat, peasants, serfs, soldiers and schrs,” Romulus’ voice boomed over the river Moskva and over to the city of a very simr name. “This is the empire’s ultimatum. Everyone who surrenders within the next hour, by leaving arms behind and meeting us outside the city, will be left unharmed. Everyone except your leaders, who will have to answer for their attack on Rome and their unjust invasion of neighbouringnds.”


    John, standing not far behind Romulus, took a look at the city they were threatening right now. It was a strangely beautiful construction of onion-topped towers at the heart of a desert of steel and cement. Of course, the towers, relics from a past under another regime, were covered inmunist iconography. The contrast between the old and the new was staggering, a forceful restructuring of the social order that swept through all other aspects of life.


    ‘Although the paint underneath that new red coat must have been drenched in blood as well,’ John thought. People didn’t start attempting to overthrow the government if they were even remotely happy; poverty bred crime and revolution.


    “I am pretty fucking sure I shouldn’t be here,” Eliza told John. “What if she wakes up because of the pig-ughter that is about to happen here?”


    “Pretty sure that’s part of the idea,” he answered, “to see what else triggers her to take over.”


    “Yes,” Romulus turned around to address them, “this is the one time I am close enough to stop you should you run amok during a battle for a city. It is an unpleasant test but one that needs to be done anyway.”


    “Well, if the asshole-inmand says so,” Eliza scratched the side of her head, “do what you fucking want as long as it helps me, I guess.”


    Rodam couldn’t help but giggle a bit at the choice of words the blood mage employed. Their amusement was cut short, however, by an announcementing from the city.


    “Imperial scum, you will never receive a single surrender. We will fight to thest man and take as many of you dogs with us as is possible,” an unknown voice, presumably the leader of the Blood of the Proletariat, answered them.


    John would have loved to see that person, the son of Trotsky if information was to be trusted, for some reason. It was the same kind of weird interest that he had in maybe listening to a live speech of Hitler or ask Stalin how he could justify running a system that so clearly didn’t work. Lesser versions of that would have been to ask why the founding fathers kept very around, but that wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the manmade starvation of millions of Ukrainians or the terror of the concentration camps.


    It seemed, however, that he would never get the chance to. “If that is how it shall be,” Romulus didn’t actually seem unhappy about the situation. “Sol, bring me Krieg’s gift,” he ordered.


    “You want to use that here?” The sr goddess usually wasn’t one to question her summoner’s orders, so this sort of hesitation made John wonder just what he was about to witness. Romulus nodded, and Sol, with the certainty of a person who obeyed orders without question, reached into her private sub-space and pulled out a spear.


    The marks of hammers could be seen all along its ck metal shaft, making the whole thing uneven and chaotic to look at. It had no decorations whatsoever, ending in four des that grew out of the shaft in an L-shape, all pressed next to each other and an unpolished crimson red crystal.


    It radiated an aura of danger, the strange silence that hung around objects whose single purpose is so terrible that it best be acknowledged but unused. Romulus gripped the weapon and suddenly the four des spread out to even angles with the sound of locking machinery.


    Raising the weapon over his shoulder, Romulus took a throwing stance. The des began to rotate. Slow at first but elerating over the course of a minute until the individual des were no longer visible and it was just a cage of whirling metal around the crystal.


    That crimson object at the core liquified and became fluctuating fire. Tongues of the crimson onught at the core of the spinning containment would asionally leak out. Each time John needed to shield his face from the ensuing heat, he could feel the ground underneath his feet unfreeze.


    Romulus drew his arm back a bit more, took a deep breathe, and then John was hit by a shockwave as the emperor tore through the sound barrier as if it was a piece of wet paper. The spear was struggling against some sort of giant barrier for a few seconds, then it broke through, and John was hit by a second, much stronger shockwave caused by the giant fireball that ripped apart the onion-tower heart of the city.


    John looked at the damage once he got a steady footing again and then up to the mushroom cloud of fire, dust and dirt. ‘That’s it?’ John thought as the head of the cloud rose higher and higher into the sky. ‘No final battle at the gate, no bringing out of awesome weaponry, no anything? If this was a videogame, this is where they would pull the final twist and present the end boss with his 17 phases that rose from some sort of underground facility.


    But nothing of the sort happened. Romulus had blown up, with just one attack, the most secure ce they could have hoped to have and with that had eliminated most of what had remained of the enemy core forces.


    “This war is over,” Romulus announced, not even 24 hours after he had taken to the field.


    There were a lot of things that could have been said about this war, and John tried to unravel what they must have been thinking in starting it as he sifted through the ruins of the now captured city. Predictably, everyone had given up once their leaders had been blown up, and the normal people inside the city actually seemed kind of happy to see the upying forces. For them it must have been a long nightmare finallying to an end.


    Why would the Blood attack? It wasn’t like they were threatened by the empire; as a matter of fact, it was their attack that finally snapped Romulus out of istion. Was it truly just the hatred of the powerful that motivated them? John didn’t want to believe humans could whip themselves in such a frenzy, but then again he himself had indiscriminately killed a bunch of people in battle while reducing them to only their uniforms.


    If they had the conviction that it was the true and absolute moral obligation to spread the Marxist utopia to every corner of the world and that Romulus was the head of the old-world order that needed to die, then their actions were in line with their ideology. Many of them even seemed to think that losing this war was just a dy in the grand scheme of things.


    In that kind of bubble, attacking made absolute sense. Too bad that their bubble waspletely fucked and wrong. ‘All these supremacist ideologies are weird; how can people be doubtless?’ John wondered; ‘Thinking that you found the one answer that works for everything is so incredible arrogant.’


    “I feel like somebody is prating my stomach by fucking a hole in my side and the end of their cock is curving out through my belly-button,” Eliza said, holding her mouth as if she was about to puke while massaging her left temple with her right-hand, which looked a bit stupid; “And Thana is trying to kick out my eyeballs or something. Fuck, everything hurts. FUCK.”


    Romulus was staying nearby, lifting a piece of debris, half of one of the onion-ceilings to be exact, like it was made out of Styrofoam. Always keeping an eye on Eliza.


    Which turned out to be more than just a wise policy when she growled like a hungry wolf and her eyes switched from the seven dots to the seven lines. The goddess of genocide, with hair that rapidly grew down to her lower back, must have learnt her lesson by now and, not afflicted by the debuff on her Intellect, actually tried to run, rather than fight with Romulus around.


    Of course the emperor didn’t let that happen and moved to intercept her. When she tried to run around him she got caught by the wrist. Like a dog on a leash, Thana struggled and screamed as she tried to get away. She probably would have ripped her own arms off if John didn’te over and said the name of the girl that he wanted to have inside that body. “Eliza, get your shit together.”


    Her eyes reverted back to normal, and Romulus let go. “Really? You call ousting that cannibalistic abomination-needs-to-get-fucked-thing from being in control ‘getting my shit together’? Are you a dumbass or are you are an insensitive cocksucker?”


    “Just desensitized at this point,” John shrugged and patted her on the head. That made her do a weirdly pleased squeaking sound.


    “Fascinating,” Romulusmented, “it took her a lot longer to regain control in the instances before this.”


    “It’s because I am madly in love with this motherfucker,” Eliza said and jumped on his back. “Carry me!”


    “Not the time,” John said, tapping on the sickly pale arms that were wrapped around his neck. “But I actually wonder why you had such an easy timeing back. Can you exin what you experience if it takes over?”


    “She,” Eliza corrected; “We keep flip-flopping between it and she, and I am bothered by that shit, so let’s just call her by what she is, which is female and not some weird, asexual shit… even if she looked like an insectoid monstrosity instead of using my cute hide.” With a nod, John signalled that was okay for him; he didn’t have strong feelings one way or another. “Anyway, imagine you are standing on ake as clear as something that is a metaphor for really fucking crystal clear water. There is a shitload of people standing on your side of the surface and the other side, and they are looking at what is up for them. You are the only one that moves or does anything, and you need concentrate a whole fucking lot to do that because something wants to assimte you into this whole hive of murdered, human salt pirs. If you want to get back, you need to find a way to that weird golden sphere that is flying far above and below you, and shit isplicated. That’s about how it feels like when she is in control,” the blood mage exined. “Normally I need to run my thoughts against hers until I get control of that fucking world, and then I can fly however the fuck I want. When you say my name, it’s like a rope strung from all that love and candy shit appears, and I can just easily use that to escape, because Thana gets the fuck away from feelings of that nature.”


    “Huh,” John grunted in fascination and patted her head some more. “Well, if you ever lose, I am going to be very sad.”


    “I am not going to lose, are you fucking kidding me?” Elizaughed at him, “How am I ever going to eat more of Aclysia’s cooking again if I get dissolved into that freak-cab? Thana can eat her own ass, and I get some pudding… and you can have sex with other girls in front of me ande into a bowl that you make me eat at the end.”


    “I find this disgraceful!” Sol interrupted their talk at that point; “You dare talk of such shameful things in front of your emperor?”


    “Don’t knock it, sister,” Luna also appeared and bowed down to John with a mean smile; “You act all offended, but when we three tried a roley in that direction, you were the one begging for a refill.”


    “Luna, check your tongue!” the ted blonde demanded; “We are talking to peasants here.”


    “I must agree withdy Sol,” Lydia intervened, “this whole talk is highly unorthodox by now.”


    The moon goddess rolled her eyes, tapped on Romulus shoulder and whispered something into his ear that made him blush after he had bowed down to hear it. Now seeing someone who just destroyed one of the most secure buildings in existence in a single strike blush? That was terrifying and made John’s respect for Luna rise to unknown levels.


    Respect, not desire, he wouldn’t even dream of trying to cuck Romulus. Seemed like the quickest way to get cleansed from the face of the, save teleporting into a POTUS press conference and enchanting the hot female secretary he was sure would be there to have sex with him right in front of the cameras.


    Okay, MAYBE he actually desired to do that and Luna, but he wasn’t stupid enough to try.


    Now why were they even searching the crater of the former headquarters? Two things: John still had a chance to find the Amber Room for another 25 score, but much more important was the person Romulus was searching for.


    Eventually, they heard someone sing, and Romulus immediately went after the voice. They found their target sitting on the barren ground and looking at the sky. John wouldn’t have been sure if it was a he or she if he didn’t know who she was, as the person looked highly androgynous and wore nothing but a piece of drapery that she had slung around her naked body.


    “There you are, Romulus,” the voice was clearly female and spoke with a tone as precise as the ticking of clockwork. She had long ck hair and was wearing a piece of cloth that hid her eyes. “I was wondering when you woulde to end me.”


    “Whether or not I end you depends on your answer to my question, Justitia,” Romulus answered. Indeed, this was the goddess of justice herself, patron goddess of the Blood of the Proletariat and a goddess of knowledge. She wasn’t a fighter, even John could have beat her, most likely. “Did you tell them it was eptable to attack my city?”


    “I told them it was unjust, but they have never listened to me when it was to their disadvantage, just as you never have,” Justitia told him. “I admit to my faults, when I aided them in overthrowing the old tyrant, who aimed to emte you of all people, I did so thinking they would turn out to be better. At the start they were, but as time went on they eventually became worse than the thing they destroyed. Every other guild in this area was eradicated, and I was left with no choice but to stay or die. I left your court to find the reforms to individual justice that you were too conservative to touch and found a ce of endless reforms where everybody was guilty of something.”


    Maximillian joined them on a flying piece of debris, just in time to hear the emperor’s answers. The princess, whose main goal had always been to reform Germany out of the stagnant state that it had been for too long, listened closely. As did the king, whose main goal had always been to honour traditions and work within the system.


    “I admit to my faults as well, Justitia,” he spoke; “I have neglected my people for over a millenia now, thought that my governance worked well enough because it was stable. I cannot say that I think I have acted wrongly. I was relying on Frederik to show me where the futurey, just like I relied on Sargon of Akkad before to show me how to build a state. Despite all my power and wisdom, I am still just a man from a tribe. I do not like to change systems that run, I honour what came before. I should have allowed Frederik to step back when he wanted to, should have listened to the naysayers in my court more closely instead of just leaving my people to figure things out by themselves while never giving them the political incentive to change. I maintained tradition at the cost of progress.”


    Lydia stood straight by the end of that speech, as did Maximillian. They both seemed to feel reinforced in their views. Lydia, because she knew that her want for change was now recognized by the emperor himself, and Maximillian, who knew that his want for tradition to stay was an issue at the heart of Romulus as well.


    “It seems both of the current candidates may be able to reinvigorate this slowly crumbling empire I built,” Romulus said, looking at both of them for a moment. “Either through rapid reforms or slow modernization.”


    “…It is good to hear you have snapped out of your depression then,” Justitia said. “What is your n with me then?”


    “You may have be the patron goddess of a guild that attacked me with values that turned out to be wrong, but I know that you aren’t evil, and neither do I condemn the average person that followed the oppressors in order to be freed,” Romulus said. “I want you to sit at the peace conference and sort out the mess the Blood’s disappearance from the world stage will undoubtedly cause. In justice’s name, I implore you.”


    “In justice’s name, I ept,” Justitia said and rose from the ashen ground.