Kain opened his eyes as the near void that his mind/ soul had been trapped in for more than a few years faded away as if it were never there. He felt… weak. He felt frail, as though he had woken up from a multi-year-long coma. Although, that was an accurate analogy, as he had been sitting on a very comfy chair for more than two years now, completely asleep and with minimal ability to interact with the world around him. At the very least, he was glad that his body needed no food, drink, or air, like usual, as it would have likely been a pain in the ass for anyone to bring food and drink up here and then get his slumbering body to eat/ drink it.

As much as he wanted to move from his current position, he found his body to be mostly unwilling to comply. Thankfully, the more he strained against his dulled frame, the more control over his own body he managed to regain. Unfortunately, the gains were still minimal. It would likely take another few weeks of struggle at minimum for him to even muster up the control needed to safely walk down the flight of stairs that led from his current seat to the floor of the throne room, and that was a rough estimate at best.

So, Kain Anathemas Nekronus von Darksol, the Abominable King feared and respected in nearly equal measure, had no choice but to wear down the atrophy that had taken his body from him, bit by bit. But that would take a while, but it wasn’t like there was a war that desperately needed his input going on, right?

…

Alexis paused mid-blow, leaving her rapier partially lodged in a rather unfortunate Sultanate soldier. She had stopped her action the very moment that the ripple that came from her beloved had washed over her, and now she was wondering if she should simply go back home to see if Kain could use any help. However, she wasn’t the type to leave a job unfinished, so as the poor soldier desperately grasped at the monster whose blade had very nearly severed his spinal cord from the front, Alexis contemplated her next move.

It was obvious that there were only two paths forward. Either she could keep the pressure on the flimsy garrisons that were already besieged by the many fractured nation-states that had arisen from the Sultanate’s new way of doing things, ultimately taking all of it for Darksol, or she could let the rebels do their thing and take the land for themselves. To be brutally honest, she was leaning towards the latter option, if for no other reason than it would cut down on the number of people standing in Darksol’s way when the Empire eventually came to claim the lands.

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Letting the loyalists and the rebels bleed themselves dry would make a later invasion all the easier, and while letting entire regions devolve into bloody messes was not always a good thing, it tended to be better than fighting two enemies at once. This was especially true when said enemies might end up putting aside their differences and fight a common foe, which in this case would be Darksol.

With those thoughts in mind, Alexis decided to finish dealing with the current laundry list of foes on this current battlefield and made up her mind to make a strategic withdrawal from what Modern Earth would call Tunisia. It would certainly boost morale for both of her foes, but that would only serve to make them fight each other even harder and that much more ferociously.

…

Piotr sat on a chair made of blue ice, his gaze fixed on the tall wall of fog that separated Darksol’s territorial bounds from those of the Sultanate. He had not been told to move further south, nor did he want to. It was not in his nature to desire action or movement, as his state of undeath did not fully remove the malaise that accosted him at every hour of the day. He still wept for his lost homeland, for his lost family, for everything that Kain and Lord Wolfenstein had told him that his homeland, the Soviet Union, had done.

However, due to being a certain type of undead, he could not actually cry. Instead, these tears were internal, and what made them worse was that he was gradually losing his ability to care about the very things he was morose over. His growing apathy was driving him to deeper feelings of loss, but apathy was also consuming those too, so Piotr was gradually losing his reasons for being so gloomy and ultimately this gloominess would just become a standard part of his personality without cause or reason.

So, there he sat, watching for any idiots that would try and cross the border when he felt the presence of two… vampires? No, they were not vampires, but they also weren’t not vampires. And they were not Dhampir, either, because those do not exist on Mortis. These were… something else. It finally dawned o him that these were the twins that Kain and Alexis had sired. He had never seen them in person, mostly due to his former inability to control his hellishly cold aura (a trick he learned very recently), and now they were coming here, but for what reason?

They were also traveling rather slowly, far slower than he would have expected them to be capable of moving as people with their pedigree. It soon became clear as to why they were going so slowly, as the nearly clear sky betrayed the sight of over fifty airships of the partially magic variety flying across the sky, laden with troops and supplies so that a new front could be opened.

Piotr, in his typical fashion, was barely amused by this whole sight, and dispassionately waved at the fleet of heavily armed, metal-covered, supersized war-blimps as they floated gently through the air and made their way through the fog wall. Piotr then got back to doing what he always did whenever his mind wasn’t preoccupied with battle or diplomacy and continued to brood like a certain flying nocturnal mammal-themed superhero.