It was decided that Kain would remain behind and that Alexis and Alistaira would conquer the Kingdom of Anglond together. In all honesty, this was probably for the best. With the fact that both of them were highly specialized, they would have to work together to achieve a total victory. Kain, on the other hand, had a very versatile army composition, capable of adapting on the fly to a variety of situations. He considered this little turn of events a good chance for the two girls to bond in battle over the broken bodies of their beleaguered and battered foes.
While there was a bit of one-sided animosity from Alexis towards Alistaira due to her ‘trying to leech off Darksol's innate greatness’, this little trip of conquest would give the two the opportunity to work together or force them to potentially fail separately. Both of them wanted to outdo the other, but for entirely separate reasons. Alexis wanted to prove how powerful and superior she was in comparison to Alistaira, which would in turn (at least in her own eyes) make her certain to keep Kain's affection and not have ‘that little mortal skank’ take her place at his side.
Alistaira, on the other hand, just wanted to show how far she had come compared to how she was when she first met Kain in the flesh. To her, this was a chance to prove she was the greatest living necromancer the world had ever seen, outside of Kain himself, of course. She had no interest in becoming a Lich until she had mastered the art of various Magics as far as possible while alive. Becoming a member of the undead was, in her eyes, an option that should be taken only when it was absolutely needed.
As Kain saw the two would-be conquerors off, with both of them still bickering as they marched off through the Gallows Woods, he set about the process of sending his personal armies to the border between the former lands of the short-lived Kingdom of Francus and the Teutonia Knightly Junta. Kain still had no idea if or when the Teutonian forces would make a move, or even if they had the slightest intention to do so. Still, there needed to be a breakwater in place in the event of a flood of the living trying to rain on his parade.
He would be damned if he were forced to cut the ‘female bonding session’ short due to an inopportune assault. He would be very, very careful and make sure that no one disturbed those two. If they failed to dominate Anglond separately, they would surely realize that they had to work together. They could easily replace their soldiers, but both of them suffering defeat after humiliating defeat might be enough to force them to bury the hatchet and come together.
While he didn’t want them to fail, Kain knew it might be the only way to get them to make up. Whether or not the Anglish could bring anything to the table that could pose a threat to them was something Kain was ignorant of, and thus could only speculate on.
“If one of those damnable Heroes did somehow survive up until this day, then those two would certainly be in for a lesson from the school of hard knocks…”
…
Kain had no idea that there was indeed one of those shitty little interlopers still alive in this world. One of the founders of the Adventurer Guild and the oldest human alive aside from himself, Piotr Grigori Ivanov was stuck in stasis and waiting for his chance to fight once again. Denied the ability to pass on due to the fear that something out in the world might be too great a threat for normal forces to deal with, he had remained in a state of perpetual stagnation, unable to age and unable to die. His was an existence that he despised with every fiber of his being, he considered himself an idiot for permitting this torture to befall him when he had foolishly assumed there was even the slightest chance that ‘The Great Enemy’ would return.
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He now spent the rest of eternity waiting for the day that he would be released so that he could finally face a foe that could give him an honorable death. As he hung in mid-air, suspended within a pillar of light, the moment he had waited centuries for had finally come. The Guild Masters from each of the member-nations of the Luminas Confederacy assembled before the enchanted obelisk that would release him from his imprisonment. They all placed a special magical key within the stone monument at the same time and then all turned the keys at once. The pillar of light vanished, and Piotr fell to the ground and, after collecting himself, approached the Guild Masters.
“What is the foe I must kill?” Piotr asked in a thick Russian accent, the magic of this world allowing him to not only understand the English-speaking natives but also have them understand him… Barely…
“The undead are amassing and have already conquered the whole of Southern Albion. They behave in a way more like our own soldiers and less like the mindless undead they should be. They move in disciplined formations and use both tactics and strategy, things that not even the Abominable King could make happen!”
“Then they are not as mindless as they appear, da? Or at least they have a powerful being controlling them…”
The Guild Masters nodded in confirmation and handed Piotr his weapons and armor which had been kept in stasis as well. Lifting the massive two-handed great sword with only one hand, he gave a few practice swings to get back the feeling of using his beloved Frostfang. As the men walked out of the stasis chamber, Piotr had a good feeling inside of him.
“This foe…” He thought to himself, “This foe will be the one to send me home. At long last, I have found a place where I can die, and return to the Motherland once again. Wait for me, my Katia, my little Dimitri. Papa will be home soon enough…”
The force of nature known to the world as ‘The Frozen Juggernaut’ had been unsealed and was being sent directly to the land now known as Anglond. As he stepped foot on the wooden boat that would transport him to the closest port in Anglond, the air around him became noticeably cooler and those within a few meters of him could see their breath. As the boat finally made its way out to sea, the temperature slowly began to drop even further. The uncontrollable cold that encircled the person also known by his other title, 'The Living Ice Age' needed to be warded off, but even the enchanted clothing provided by the Adventurer’s Guild was not enough to fully push back the ever-deepening and encroaching chill.
Thus, the crew aboard the ship pushed themselves harder than they had ever gone in their lives in a desperate attempt to avoid death by hypothermia. Their suffering did not bother Piotr in the slightest. Even if they died, he had a way to get to where he needed to go and these people were ultimately part of the very system that tore him away from his loving family in the first place. He would get to the field of battle, slay his foe and die a glorious death, only to be whisked away back home like the other Heroes who died before him.
He would go back to the glorious land of his birth and tell his children a tale that was on par with the biographies of the greatest men of history; like Lenin, Stalin and Marx. He would get back home to his glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to his waiting family even if he had to fight the entirety of this twisted, oppressive, monarchist, and capitalist world in the process.