Chapter 1195 – Liberation Campaign Finale – Consolidating the Gains<h1></h1>


    ‘Weirdly enough, I like that she’s damaged,’ John thought as he walked through the desert. ‘She felt suspiciously unblemished for someone who went through this.’ He stopped atop a dune and looked down at a sandstone valley. ‘Or maybe my taste in women has been thoroughly warped to be attracted to crazies.’


    Tattered cloth from tents and gs fluttered in the gust that rolled over the dunes. Sand sprayed onto the ruins of what must have been a campsite not too long ago, but now consisted only of wrecked items and half-buried bodies. What John saw was only the surface of it and he did not feel the need to dig up the shrivelled husks that had once been people. A quarter of his mind distracted himself with the conversation he had a world over with this new and fascinating woman.


    “All I’m saying is that I have no understanding of fashion whatsoever. I just saw that ‘maid outfit’ and it clicked. d you like how I look in it.” He heard all of that through Jack and answered suavely that her fashion sense could not have been that rotten if she picked up on the superiority of the ck and white uniform. Their back and forth continued from there.


    Five percent of his mind observed what was going on with the volunteer force. There wasn’t much to follow over there. Nothing unusual had happened and Ted was coordinating the efforts properly. The Creator Puppet was primarily a permanent lookout and asional lifter of heavy stuff.


    The remaining seventy percent of his mind were dedicated to keeping up with what his harem he could be in contact with. Interesting as ire was, attracted as he was to her, his love for his current women was undiminished. Even between them, the optimistic vampire was the talk of the town. A pleasurable distraction from the misery that was so omnipresent everyone was dull to it by now.


    ‘Seriously though, my perverted Master, why are you chasing after a woman during a mission to save a woman that you can then salivate after?’ Momo wanted to know.


    ‘Well, you know how it is, fate takes strange turns,’ John responded to her. ‘Plus, I’m not chasing her right now. That was a genuine offer to give her a road into the future.’


    ‘Uhm, stupid question… but what would she do if she stayed here?’ Gnome asked. ‘I didn’t follow that bit.’


    ‘If I read her correctly, after she burned this whole empire to the ground, she would kill herself,’ John presented what he had gleaned of her motivation. ‘She’s basically living out the mantra of ‘if everything is doomed, why worry about it?’ at the moment.’


    Smander hummed into the mental connection. ‘How immoral would it be if I bet she crashed into being an entirely different personality after she gets the fuck out of here?’


    ‘Very immoral,’ Momo responded.


    ‘C-can we not bet on the emotional wellbeing of people?’ the season elemental added.@@novelbin@@


    ‘What are we wagering?’ Siena asked.


    ‘Typical shit, loser has to do one thing the winner demands.’


    ‘Then I will wager that she will retain her outwardly cheerful attitude.’


    ‘Girls! Could you not?’ Gnome tried to reign in the rebellious elements with a rare surge of assertiveness. ‘She deserves… she deserves cuddles! Growing up in this ce must be near Eliana levels of suffering and you are over here betting on how she would react being in a safe environment the first time in her life! That’s so m-mean!’


    ‘You do have a point,’ Smander responded. ‘But first off, we are not doing it to her face, and second off, we are fucking bored.''


    John tuned out of that particr moral debate, as he had no horse to back there. Certainly, Smander’s bet wasn’t in good taste, but there was no harm, so no foul. Plus, it truly was dull.


    Just a couple of dunes over, the Gamer spotted the flickering of a me in the darkness. At the northernmost area of the continent, the night was the shortest. Yet, the desert was cold. On Earth, deserts often dipped to below freezing temperatures by night. Everyone always remembered the Sahara for its sweltering heat, yet the intense swing of temperatures, especially ind, was just as dangerous and fascinating. Fundamentally, the only real mark of a desert was how dry it was.


    It did not get quite that cold in the Iron Domain’s Archduchy Delikt. The night was around zero to five degrees Celsius, the day rose all the way to thirty. A stark difference, certainly, but in the livable range. Fires were pleasant. Burning wood was a luxury. A luxury acquired by oupeting the other tribes in the fight for the scraps the fortress of the local Ironborn provided. There was a lot ofpetition over deliberately little resources. The desert province was the most popted in the Kingdom of War, entirely by decree of the Ironborn. It had to be a misery to try and earn ess to the savannah and the forest. Of course, it had to be.


    All of the different ways to extract robotic monsters from the corpses of thousands were so cruel it bordered onedy. Worse, it was so deeply carved into every aspect of the world that it became a mundane experience.


    ‘You still stand by what you said to her?’ Metra asked.


    ‘Hm?’ the Gamer hummed in response, distracted by his own thoughts. ‘Are you referring to what I said to ire? About no one owning the world?’


    ‘Yeah, sounded like something only a king that’s not trying hard enough would say.’ Behind that teasingment was both critique and interest.


    John went ahead and exined, not like he had anything else to do. In the distance, the fortress at the heart of the Archduchy rose from the desert sands. asionally, the magic of his haremettes caused an explosion of light. They had already broken through the defences and were now cleaning out the rest.


    ‘To start with, what does it mean to own something?’ the Gamer asked. ‘As far as I am concerned, ownership of something entitles you to all of what something is and produces. To that extent, you can own a house or a factory. You can even own a plot ofnd. The dirt, the nts, the fruits, you can call all of that yours. All of those tangible assets, you can own. Everything spiritual beyond that cannot be property. The inspiring sight of a sunrise over a hill is not yours because you own the hill. It cannot be. Any attempt to enforce something like that would inevitably fail.’


    ‘You sure about that?’ Metra asked, sarcastically. ‘I served a king once who would have the eyes gouged out of all who would gaze at his mistress.’


    ‘That makes him a tyrant, doesn’t mean he truly owned the sight,’ the Gamer told her. ‘You can use whatever means you desire, magic, terror, violence, ultimately you can not withhold people from interacting with the world in their individual ways. You may think you can, you may be under the illusion that you have control, but deep down every tyrant ever knew that they were one free mind away from losing their veneer of ownership. That’s why they all turned into such paranoid bastards. Desperately, they clutched onto something that couldn’t be held in the first ce. You can try to make your arguments about individual cases, but just witness me do this.’


    The Gamer raised his head and looked at the stars above him. It was a sorry sky, filled with few speckling dots. A full moon shone intensely down on the desert, tinging the dunes silver. That sight, the product of his senses beholding the world, belonged entirely to him.


    ‘A millennium of oppression and Arkeidos’ only option to prevent someone from doing this would be to kill everyone else. If you have to go that far, do you really own something?’


    ‘How’s that any different from your house though?’ Metra asked. ‘If I have the will to squat inside someone’s property, I can do so and you can do fuck all about it without threatening me.’


    ‘Fair point. What you prove there is that even owning a house is dubious,’ John responded to her. ‘Let’s look at this from the lens of raw power then: it is unfeasible to take hold of a concept asrge as the sky. You can make it so difficult, so punishing, to break into a house that it might as well be impossible.’


    ‘That’s exactly what I meant when I said you sound like a king that’s not trying hard enough,’ Metra retorted. ‘Just because it’s unfeasible doesn’t mean it’s impossible. You think any of these semi-braindead people we’re saving on this world look up like you do and think that shit isn’t owned by Arkeidos?’


    ‘I’m with Metra on that one,’ Smander chimed in. ‘You can own anything with enough power.’


    John sighed and shook his head. ‘I’ll concede that these people probably could be convinced that the sky is owned by Arkeidos. But!’ he emphasized that word before Metra could rub her rhetorical victory in his face, ‘but, you still do not understand. This grasp, based entirely on power, will never beplete and will neverst. You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. When something forcefully upheld breaks down, it does so catastrophically.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Ownership has the backing of power, but it’s also a societal, moral agreement. In order to own something, everyone else has to agree, on some level, that it is yours and there is no way to do that with the sky.’


    ‘…This is getting way too fucking abstract for me,’ Metra confessed, sounding unconvinced.


    John couldn’t me her, neither for the tone nor the statement. Property and fairness were conceptsden with subjective projections. ‘Let’s just say that it is useful to consider that some things cannot be irondws,’ he told her. ‘And that there is beauty to find that no one can deny you. No matter how horrible the world is, there is always a way for you to find something good. Even if that doesn’t appear to be true, it’s best to assume it is, because what are you going to do otherwise?’ The Gamer walked around a lone woman lying in the sand, raw Mettle dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. She was alone, sedated, and entirely at the whims of the environment and people around her.


    ‘That works for me,’ Metra budged on that point. It wasn’t the first time they had a conversation like this and it wouldn’t be thest. There were some fundamental worldview differences between the two of them that could not be equalized. Creating bridges between them was interesting and productive, however. She benefited from the reminder that higher ideals enabled progress and he benefited from the reminder that base violence was necessary for authority.


    A bnce of views was always appropriate.


    He turned his mental attention to Jack and ire again. Aclysia had returned and the three of them were talking about the leisurely topic of food. The vampiric Ironborn had a lot of interest in it because she didn’t understand it. The only tastes she knew were that of Mettle, blood, and iron. The concept of ‘sweet’ was alien to her.


    With the minor depression that revtion caused, John stepped into thest fortress of the north. The current Adventure Questpleted that instant. All three provinces of the Kingdom of War had fallen to him in the span of six days, counting from his initial assault on the Cardinal Bastion. In total, it had been eighteen days since he first set foot into the Iron Domain.


    ‘Seems like we are getting closer,’ John thought. In terms ofbat, fulfilling this Quest would mean he was done with this world. Standard quest design would usually send him to the three other Kingdoms first, but games had the advantage that enemies stayed put and could be designed to be a gradual increase in difficulty. Neither was true for the Iron Domain. It was all about Arkeidos.


    John made his way inside the fortress and ran into an Ironborn. Of the two, the monstrous humanoid was more surprised. With superior speed, the Gamer secured a grip on the Duke’s skull and severed it from the body with a quick Arcana Ray. Tossing aside metal, John charged up the Arc Lance destined to pierce the now headlessly stumbling Ironborn’s heart.


    The person who had driven the Ironborn right into John’s hands appeared around the corridor. Dismissing his spell, John just watched as his girlfriend stormed towards the target. The horrible screeching of violently reshaping and scratching metal dominated the corridor. A re of heat warmed John’s chest before the hard light ws that had emerged from the Duke’s chest cooled down and then were dismissed entirely.


    Rave pulled her arm back. Like a kid probing a domino, she gave the upright corpse a little tap and then watched as it fell over. Rattling, the metal remains came to a rest on the floor, allowing the feline Lightbearer to take half a step forward. “Missed you, tiger,” she greeted her boyfriend, wrapping her arms around his neck.


    “I missed you too,” he responded and smiled at her adorable face. They hadn’t seen each other in five days. Although she was covered in dirt and dust from the travels, her hair looked as perfectly messy as ever. Not even the neon pink colour waspromised, harmonizing nicely with her self-cleaning bodysuit. Her eyes changed from copper to blue, as Copernicus separated from her and, without any word, tapped to somewhere else in the fortress.


    Gently, he took hold of her chin. His heart beat faster when she closed her eyes and tilted her head in invitation. Dirty as her pink lips may have been, John still bowed forwards and kissed them without hesitation. The minty taste typical to her was greatly diminished. It had been a, thoroughly deliberate, manifestation of her daily routines – almost all of which were upended by their current task.


    Invigorated by true love, the Gamer felt his soul rise from the muck of the past week. The misery of the world. The thoughts of punishment running through his head. The terrible tales ire reported with the tone of amon urrence. All of those burdens he carried with him, made easy to lift by the spirit she supported. Her hand found the cor of his shirt and held on demandingly. Their lips stayed in contact. Their breathing synchronized. Discordant and ever pondering thoughts were quiet.


    He was where he was supposed to be.


    When it felt right, when both of them quietly agreed, they pulled back. He rested his forehead on hers. She whispered, “Let’s go take a bath. I need someone to wash my back.”


    “We can do that,” he agreed.


    They could discuss what to do next infort.