City of Sin (Yanyu Jiangnan)

Issa: Redemption

In Richard’s vision, the souls of the dead were like spots of starlight floating aimlessly in the sky. He suddenly formed a tetrahedron around himself on a whim, and these souls that were about to disintegrate suddenly sped up and started spiralling towards him. Human faces started being formed on the surfaces of the tetrahedron, and he felt a strange energy integrating into his existence with every soul that flew over. His own soul was strengthened over time, but every bit of power he absorbed also left him feeling a vast burden on his shoulders. The deceased still had their memories, emotions, and desires; although he wasn’t assailed by all of their dreams at once, it was like having a library full of tragedies in his mind.

The faces on the tetrahedron were a manifestation of the remnant conscients of the captured souls. As he browsed through their memories and emotions, he was flooded with the stories of people who would miss them, those that they could not bear to be parted from.

There was a famous quote by Emperor Charles who had accomplished many military feats and was greatly respected by the lords of Norland: “When we step on the earth of a foreign plane, we do not see lives, only numbers and resources.”

Charles was a prime example of Norland’s tendency to view other planes as resource banks and nothing else. He had gathered millions of warriors and rushed into the abyss, fighting the demons with a numerical advantage for the first time in human history. Most of those warriors were from secondary planes, and their lives had been used to pave the path to Daramore’s Castle. By the time he accomplished the greatest feat of Norland’s history and cut down the abyssal dragon’s head, the casualties were immeasurable.

Richard had always been the same, but he suddenly found himself thinking differently. He had already vaguely felt the thoughts of the dead while fighting the reapers in Faelor, but now he was thrust onto another path. This tetrahedron was a reflection of his soul; the faces appearing on its surface were other beings that now weighed on his mind. There was no clearer way to understand that one’s decision affected millions.

He looked around and didn’t know just what to feel, his body suddenly shaking as his elven truename completely shattered under the soul force pouring into him. Turning into tiny symbols that started spinning around his soul, it absorbed the incoming souls greedily. The spots of light from all over the battlefield were drawn in faster and faster, their minuscule individual power stacking up quickly and strengthening the symbols into bigger, more complicated words before those were simplified once more.

His new truename finally appeared, one made only of two syllables that represented the purest form of order. He knew instinctively that this name was also a path; if he walked to its end, he would become a master of order itself.

The new name was Issa, which meant redemption.

……

The massacre of the Sacred Tree Empire stunned all of Norland. Less than 20,000 of the 300,000 strong army managed to escape the battle, and more than half of the saints had been killed. Only a few tens of thousands had actually died in battle, while the rest were picked off during the following stampede. Only one of the seven dukes had even made it back, and that was through disguising himself as a common soldier. One more was dead, while the other five had been captured.

Recordings of the battle spread across the entire continent instantly, with every powerful lord researching it. Although the recordings were incomplete at best, the few moments that were captured were shocking enough. No one had a response to the nightmarish winter dragoons, night elves, and bladed hunters, all powerful troops comparable to rune knights that were in enormous numbers. While Richard’s massacre of the saints was one reason for the Empire’s defeat, this was just as much a factor if not more. The normal warriors quickly lost their morale in the face of these unkillable enemies.

Of course, one could consider this only obvious. How could a troop that went toe to toe with the reapers be deterred by the private armies of a few random nobles?

Alice was tasked with finishing off the remnants of the Sacred Tree Empire, given two legends and ten saints to accomplish her task. Richard quickly returned to Faelor to take care of the reapers once and for all.

He didn’t immediately return to battle, allowing Asa, Greyhawk, and Nasia take care of the reaper squads with the bladed hunters. Instead, he headed straight to the library of the primal celestials and dove into the last steps of his research. While victory was guaranteed at this point, his success in tracing back the design of the mothership would be what determined how much he earned back for this war.

Allocating a part of the work to the broodmother, he finally managed to build a model of the mothership after ten days, even answering all but one of his questions. Just where was the thought centre? He hadn’t seen anything resembling one in all of the battleships that he had destroyed, and the idea of a central control was confusing as well. His own connection to the broodmother couldn’t exceed 500 kilometres before it started to weaken, and he needed to use the cloned brain network to go beyond. He couldn’t think of a way to ignore the issue of distance entirely.

Unfortunately, the information he did have right now left him with no way to find out. He would just have to hope that it wouldn’t be important enough to stop him from disassembling the mothership and freezing it to get answers later.

When he finally left his lab, Greyhawk and the others had just returned from their latest mission, having ripped out all of the energy cores and turned the rest of the wreckage into a refined cube of metal that was a metre on each side. Taking care of the last bit of the process to retrieve the ember essence, he then explained the structure and possible functions of the mothership to everyone present.

Richard chose Greyhawk, Asa, Nasia, and Mountaisnea to be his protectors. The last one hadn’t been planned, but her power had increased greatly in recent times and she had managed to join his soul network. While he already had a guess about this and how the broodmother’s problem with the reaper commands had been eliminated, but he decided to put off questioning her for a while.

Just as he settled on the final time for the attack, however, another voice piped up in his mind, “I’m coming too!”

The voice was strange yet familiar, being pleasant with a hint of wildness. Richard felt a powerful aura suddenly burst up outside his door, the very fact that they had gotten so close concerning him for a moment. He still allowed them inside, confident that he could even defeat Asa with ease now that his analysis of the foundational laws of Faelor was complete, but as a fiery-haired young lady walked in he frowned with confusion.

“You’re…” he asked testingly.

The girl jumped towards him and put her hands behind her back, leaning dangerously close as she laughed, “Take a guess!”