John walked towards the Harbour with a determined gaze. People all around were interrupted in the festivities. Although some were alarmed by the explosion earlier, many more didn’t think too much of it. A distant thing, something they would surely be informed about when it hit the news cycle. Sabotage, a singular instance, nothing more.

Which forced the security people to run around. Shouting, forcing music to be disabled and lines standing to get something from gift shops to focus their attention on them. Orders were barked, confused men and women obeyed or bartered. When the Gamer passed such an event, he said a simple few words. Usually, the expression on his face was good enough to make people evacuate.

Although there were things only he could do, running straight to his target would have left a worried expression with the people he passed and accomplished nothing. ‘Better to walk with confidence and a stern expression to let people know I got this under control,’ he decided, walking while also navigating Sylph and Salamander to cover as much ground as possible.

Their presence would lend credibility to the security’s statements, wherever it was doubted. As they could fly and were overall quicker than John, they could fulfil that task and quickly get back to him before it mattered. Glancing over his shoulder, he looked to Beatrice.

“You know you could help them?” the question had to be formed verbally, as the passive maid had ignored the wordless mental appeal that Salamander and Sylph had started acting upon. Although Beatrice couldn’t fly, she was still more than fast enough to support this action. Same went for Siena, but the moonshade elemental was hiding in John’s shadow, as per usual. Also, the shadow spirit wasn’t exactly a reassuring sight or known for her easing diplomacy.

“I made my choice, Master,” Beatrice simply responded, an uncharacteristically firm look in her green eyes. Without further drilling into her reasons, John just nodded and they continued walking. He had other things to think about.

‘Let’s look at this properly. What are my victory conditions here?’ he asked himself. ‘I am being attacked here, so the proper question is what their victory conditions are. I already identified material damage or killing me as their primary and secondary goals. What I do against the second is clear, the first though…’

He would win if he beat them back before they dealt a wanted amount of damage, that much was obvious. The question was with what intent they were destroying things. Mere sabotage could be easily taken out as a possibility. Not only did the intercepted information he got go against that, it would also go against their current behaviour. The attacks were on-going, whereas sabotage would typically be more strike and retreat behaviour.

‘No, this is meant to be a prolonged engagement for maximum destruction. A showing of strength and intimidation.' The Lake Alliance must have figured out the obvious; they knew that a white peace meant Fusion overtook them in basically all aspects within a few years. To prevent that, they had to force John into a position where Fusion was weakened and he had to accept stifling terms to limit its growth. At the same time, they had to avoid whipping the people of Fusion into war-enthusiastic frenzy.

To that end, the Lake Alliance couldn’t have picked a better day to attack. The large stream of visitors from Fusion’s other territories meant that the Lake Alliance’s fighters could get into the Hudson Barrier, and gather in key locations, without any flags raised. On less stretched days, the local police would have found something off. The extra security he had put aside to oversee Marathyu didn’t help either.

At the same time, all target locations the Lake Alliance may have were notoriously low on people. As everyone working for Fusion was put on paid leave for these two days, the dockyard, the government buildings, the trade centres, they were all vacant. They could deal all the material damage without causing the oldest and most powerful wish among people that existed: revenge.

John closed in on the Harbour, grim determination on his face. ‘They need to grind me to dust in order to make me accept any sort of peace on terms favourable to them, even if they win today, I won’t back down.’ Another explosion in the distance was evidence that the Lake Alliance was perfectly willing to go for dust. That his enemies understood that they had to completely force John’s hand made the Gamer strangely calm.

It was much easier to deal with such straightforward warfare than the manipulation of the Horned Rat or the madness of the Lorylim. Not any less painful, though, as a skyscraper on the southern tip of Manhattan started burning. The fire spread with unnatural speed and intensity.

‘They still made two mistakes.’ John stopped next to Chemilia, who was overseeing the gathering of soldiers. Anyone not part of the evacuation protocol, or done with their assigned area, was hurrying to this location. Only a sorry force of twenty right now, but a start nonetheless. ‘Well, one mistake and one risk, to be fair, they had to take the latter. If I win today, I can run roughshod over them. What prestige they have left will be broken and their forces likely severely damaged. Today’s outcome will be critical for Fusion’s future performance in unifying the East Coast. ‘They’re wrong to think I am still the same power level as two weeks ago, though.’

“John.” Chemilia nodded in his direction. Corith was right behind her, Ted was missing though. “My husband has been around Manhattan at the start of this. He is currently observing the situation.”

“Good… well, not good, but the right reaction to have,” John answered. There were a total of six fighters in the Lake Alliance that John had deemed as threatening to him. What was threatening to John could squash Chemilia and Ted in under a minute. That was the reality of Abyssal warfare and its thorough inequality between participants. His phone buzzed; he quickly pulled it out to find a message from Scarlett. “Intel says we’re dealing with something between 100 and 300 enemies,” he summarized the little report he got from her.

Not the most accurate estimate but, for a lot of moving targets, way more precise than most other leaders could hope to have in under fifteen minutes after an enemy engagement started. Two of the enemy forces were quite close together, assaulting the dockyard and the Fusion Trade Tower, both west of Liberty Island and having been part of the same barrier pre the establishment of the Hudson.

Contrary to the first wave of intel he got, the largest force was actually east, on Governors Island. This was where John’s project of a supermassive Abyssal battleship was currently growing. The raw amount of material that was stored there already made it a juicy target. The labour that had gone into the only partly done hull segments was also nothing short of insane.

All of that aside, Governors Island was, as the name made quite obvious, an island. As such, it was harder to run a counterattack on that location. The only land connection went through a tunnel that went underwater. Given the enemies clear access to explosives, that would be a foolish route to take. An attack per boat was the only possible one.

Honestly, John wouldn’t have minded losing the progress on the battleship. They had disassembled the entire thing before, they could start over again. All of the materials there were another matter though. It was the biggest stockpile of shipbuilding materials they had. Depending on the amount of damage that would be dealt to the ships being built currently, those things would be needed to quickly make up for their losses on the proper navy project.

The good thing was that metal was relatively hard to ruin, so the destruction of those stocks would take a while. Regardless, John had to get there. “What’s the plan?” Chemilia asked. With those new options in mind, John had to alter his current idea a little bit.

“The main problem is that we don’t know where the enemy elites are,” he stated. “Under other circumstances, I would stay here personally to wait until we got word of were any one of them appears and reinforce that position myself, but we don’t have that luxury right now. Instead, we’re going to do things in reverse. Chemilia, I want you to remain on standby here until we can be certain where there ISN’T one of the six high-level enemies. Your job is to take care of all the average soldiers and limit the widespread damage they do. If you can, go to Manhattan first, take care of the situation there, then the dockyards. Any problems with that strategy?”

“Shouldn’t we focus on the dockyards first?” Chemilia asked, since she was given permission to do so. It was admirable that she put strategic importance over the position of her husband. Likely, this was more due to trust in Ted than loyalty to Fusion.

“They’re going to keep damage on the docks on a minimum, the NTC naval engineers are staying there. They won’t risk angering a foreign power like that, if they have any idea what they’re doing. Anything else of value is going to be destroyed before we get there.” John explained, and the general nodded.

“Then, what are you going to do?” Chemilia asked.

“Engage the enemy on two fronts,” John responded, as he marched towards the jet skis. If the enemies were looking for an opportunity to collapse on his position, then there were three ways to deal with that. Either he could try to make it a trap, something he wasn’t quite confident enough in doing with how little he knew of the enemy and their abilities, or he could hide, or, enabled by what only he could do, he could divide and conquer.

The Mandala Sphere warped into the double of John. With Jack, the Gamer could appear at two different places and thus make any plans of the enemy to collapse on him a near impossibility. Only if they had aura sight capabilities high enough to see which of the two was the real one could they hope to spot the difference. A risk, for sure, but one small enough John was willing to gamble on.

Jack would take the two maids to Marathyu, while John proper would go with the elementals to Governors Island. The reason for this split was quite easy – the elementals could only follow his real body in incorporeal form. Without that detail, John would have needed to grab a proper boat to fit all of them on, and those were much better utilized for troop transport.

Of course, the enemies could also realize that the real body was the only one that could take the elementals with it in that way. On this point, John was willing to bet entirely on the enemy having no idea what was even happening. Nothing like the Arcane Double existed in normal spell craft. Just like Combination, it was categorized as a Game Breaking spell. Another reason for the split was that Jack was the weaker combatant but also needed less protection, meaning the Artificial Spirits could concentrate on supporting each other in battle.

That there were suddenly two John Newmans caused some confusion even amongst the gathered men, including the general and Corith, neither of which had been informed of this ability yet. John got on one of the two jet skis and already drove off, while Jack turned to smile at them. If it weren’t for the fact that they had just seen the transformation, nobody around would have been able to tell this was not the Gamer.

“Never forget, men and women of Fusion…,” he stated in a pompous tone. Despite the situation, John tried his best to keep his sense of humour. “…even in the darkest hour, when there is despair and everything seems hopeless, that there’s one thing that is undoubtedly true.” Jack swung himself on the other high speed boat. The two maids got on behind him, through some reshaping of their bodies they could take the space normally reserved for just one person.