“Sorry you had to witness that,” John apologized to the prisoner; “Let’s see here… what is your name…” He tried to use Observe but was promptly blocked. Sighing, he looked over the items on his body instead. Under other circumstances, he would have used Reveal now, but he had no idea what else the day could bring, so he took the time to dismantle the protection naturally. He eventually found the answer in a hammer and sickle emblem on his collar.

“Standardized protection charms,” he noted after turning it in his hands for a bit before crushing it in his left. “Clever.”

‘Just out of interest, you think you can grow him a new hand or just reattach the old ones?’ John wondered towards Undine. The situation was already in place, might as well use it to answer some questions he had.

‘I would only be able to attach the old ones, John,’ the water spirit answered. Well, that was good enough.

“Take it as a sign of good faith,” the Gamer explained as Undine fixed the guy up. As the Observe sheet warned, the second he had his hands back, he threw a fireball at John. Quite a significant one for him, judging by the earlier attacks he had used and the bravado that went with it.

“Burn, Gamer!” he screamed on the top of his lung as he jumped up, a constant stream of fire robbing his sight of what was going on.

‘Why do I get this sort of shit when I try to be reasonable?’ John wondered, the attack dissipated on his Mana Protection, taking about 300 mana of his bar. It wasn’t even a threat, he would need less than a minute to regain that much.

John’s gauntleted arm darted out of the flame and clenched down with his heavily boosted strength. First, he cut through the uniform with his claws, then skin, finally he crushed the bone and the spell ended. “So here is a tip for you: just because you are a mage doesn’t mean you should forego Endurance entirely. This is reality, man, no damn system is stopping you.”

It was just a bit of bad smack-talk; John knew that training physical attributes along with magical ones basically meant that the normal person would just be mediocre at both. Jack of all trades, master of none, that kind of situation. Being tough in the Abyss required a bit more than just running a few laps. Unless you had a broken ability and could become tanky by smashing a button in your interface.

“Anyway,” John moved on before the guy could point that out, he wasn’t here to debate, “let’s talk about you giving me a map of all the bases in the area.”

“I will never do that,” Vladimir growled and spat in his face. The mixture of blood and saliva hit John’s face and ran down his cheek.

He wasn’t particularly bothered and just wiped it off with his free hand. “You will tell me whatever I want if I leave you with her,” he nodded towards Siena, “for 10 minutes.”

“Didn’t you just give her a lecture about how she shouldn’t torture things?” the guy mocked.

“No, I just gave her a lecture about how she shouldn’t needlessly torture things and/or make my life hell by interpreting my orders in the worst possible way. I have seen too much to still think that torture never has a place,” John told him; “Sometimes, you need to do things you despise in order to reach the outcome you yearn for. Wouldn’t you know that, mister revolutionary?”

“Those who stand against the world revolution don’t need to live,” Vladimir spat in his face a second time; “You are all dogs who have engraved the suppressing systems into your heart.”

John wiped the saliva off his face a second time. “Fine, have it your way… Siena, you up for using your talents in a constructive way?”

“Anything that takes my brain off brooding,” Siena smirked, the trail of her tear still clearly visible; “What a bad day this is going to be for you, I am in a particularly stabby mood.”

John didn’t exactly feel great using Siena in this way directly after giving her a talk about how that was bad behaviour, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The only alternative was to do it himself, and the list of his own vices, a domination fetish, a weakness for pretty girls, a barely checked sense of pride, a slow decline into wondering how he would even survive without Aclysia around and other stuff, did not encompass an interest of inflicting unnecessary pain. What he would do for efficiency's sake was one thing, and he would torture himself if he had to, but he preferred not to get his hands into this kind of dirt.

If god existed, the Judaeo-Christian one, and was just watching over this show like a silent observer, John would take the responsibility of all of it when judged by him. He was very well aware that the difference between doing it himself and making someone else do it was negligible. Depending on the case, the latter could be much worse even.

Well, at the end, he had gotten what he wanted in the form of the login data for the server network inside this building. Momo was already getting on making a copy of all of it, both in her memory and on hardware, to be put into her inventory.

John walked over to the cowering shell of a man. Thirty minutes, that’s how long he had lasted. Now he had no teeth. Otherwise he was largely untouched. What Siena had done, John had forced himself to watch to face the consequences of his actions, had been more methodical than simple-minded beating.

As always with her methods, the less said about them, the better.

But what reduced the man to his current state wasn’t actually the fact that he had been tortured, but that he had successfully been tortured. Now that he had given in, he knew that he had betrayed what he had fought for his whole life. Too bad for him that he was on the side that John couldn’t let win.

“Will you let yourself be taken prisoner?” John asked. He hadn’t asked this of everyone. This was war, and there was no simple way to ensure these people actually wandered into some sort of confinement. Just taking an oath that they would stop fighting wouldn’t work; the few people that would keep that oath were too honest souls to be part of this particular war.

He had no time to walk every guy down to whatever base they had, but just for this one he would make an exception. A mild repentance for what he did to him, the right to keep living another day.

“I will not be shamed any further,” the scraggly bearded mage whispered.

“I see,” John extended his right hand, four splinters appeared behind his back and hovered over, merging into one; “Are you sure?”

“You will have to live with the guilt of delaying the perfect and inevitable state of humanity laid out by Karl Marx,” Vladimir stared at him with the last bit of will he had left. The eyes of a man who died for what he believed in.

John couldn’t respect the belief, but the conviction itself was to be honoured. “Maybe,” he stated as the purple shard flew forwards and ripped a diamond shaped hole into the man’s skull; “But I have to say I doubt it looking at history,” he added after the corpse had sunk to the side.

“There we go,” John said after he handed over the data to Maximillian, who then quickly used it to coordinate his subordinates; “See? My plan worked perfectly.” It was incredibly easy, really, leave the one semi-important guy go and use John’s ability to have his elementals persist half a country away from him to have Siena stalk him. Then, once they had found the location of the just-important guy, raid the location and find all of the places where the non-important people were hiding.

There were about 100 more of these location, with 1 to 3 people each, spread throughout the whole city and the surrounding countryside. Now that they had information on everyone and everything about these barriers, it was rather easy to formulate a response.

In other words, John had just decided the fate of a whole province in the span of eight hours. He felt like he was a high level character in a low-level PvP arena. Because he was so over levelled for this content, he didn’t even get EXP or anything else out of it. As a matter of fact, he felt kind of disappointed all around. After the speech Romulus had started the war with, he had gotten kind of hyped, despite knowing better. As it turned out, there was no honour in killing, it was rather boring all around, and whatever glory awaited him at the end of it didn’t make it less of a waste of time.

Welp, there was that claim scratched. Might as well accept, even though he didn’t quite feel right about getting a quest about an actual war instead of murdering ultimately lifeless monsters inside his barriers.

But he was going to kill more people either way. That was just the nature of being inside a world where might made right. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t able to just enforce change. Even if he would have been, they were on the defence here. All things considered, killing people that tried to kill you and wouldn’t stop trying was an act of self-defence.

“Yes, it did,” Maximillian admitted with an annoyed click of his tongue. It was at that moment that John realized that the two of them would have a constant pride battle going on. Maybe they weren’t so different after all. “I guess it’s about time I show you the last bit of how the war works.”

“…You still hid something from me?” John said with a raised eyebrow. “Really? Buddy, I am the strongest tool in your arsenal right now. You don’t keep secrets from the guy with the nuclear codes.”

“Perhaps, but this involves a bit of trust on my part, so I wanted to see how you fared first. Before you give me yet another lecture, let me show you,” Maximillian explained and pulled his smartphone out of a private pocket space. “Every guild has some sort of system set up that allows easy communication. Many rely on telepaths, but those are hard to come by, so we go with the wonders of the modern age instead.”

What popped up on his screen was an app that, without being sarcastic in any way, looked like a google maps based mobile game. Symbols popped up everywhere as they were speaking. Most of them were house icons in different colours and sizes. The more aggressive the colour, the higher the danger of going there, John assumed.

“The data I just sent over to my information ministry is now being spread by the hired technomancer team. Basically, this app will show every base of which we know the location, but the much more important feature is this,” Maximillian pointed at a different icon, one of crossed swords. There was a timer underneath that ticked up, showing how long that icon had been there. “That means someone engaged or had the time to react before being engaged. These are what we need to look out for now. The enemy will have a system like this as well, and without a doubt they have noted the lack of updates from HQ already, so they are going to go into retreat.”

“Which means that there will hundreds of them on the streets and we need to help out with the battles and see which ones escalate to step in,” John, who felt his former gang warfare impression mix with Pokémon Go of all things.

If there was a battle amongst a crowded route, that meant that more enemies would be there, causing more of their side to come in to counteract, causing more of the enemies to pour in to save their comrades, causing yet more of their allies to go there.

John could already see the pareto principle in effect here. 20% of the battles would see 80% of the fighters. “I guess we got our way cut-out for us then… and you didn’t want to trust me with that info because this thing needs to be secured by connecting it with my aura, right?”

Maximillian nodded, “Take it personally, I don’t want you to meddle with my state founded projects. The state being me. Basically, buddy, I don’t want you in my business.” He let out an annoying grumble, “But, alas, Gamer, you are very much correct when you say you are the strongest weapon I have with me as of this moment, so I will use you to the best of my ability.” Now he grinned. “I will whip you like you are my personal bodyguard, only here to do what I need you for.”

“How gracious. Once this whole thing is over, I am going to punch you in your smug face,” John drily stated and gave Maximillian his own phone, “Now unlock this thing so we can get going; your bravados are making me sick.”

Maximillian did as he asked, and when John received his phone back, he wondered something. “Shouldn’t you have given this to Jane before we split?” The king gave such a charming smile that John felt the urge to use his promise pre-emptively. “You already gave Nariko access because you want to fuck her, didn’t you?”

“What can I say, I like ripe women,” Maximillian shrugged it off; “Let’s clean up the rest here; if we break resistance around this area, we can quickly take care of the other parts of the province and surround the enemy base. They would store information regarding her in a more important facility.”

On that they saw eye to eye.