Kyrellia was not a good place to be right now. Not only was the nation effectively divided into three separate mini nations due to the civil war that had been raging for far, far too long, but the invading Non-Humans and Metal Demons made the situation even more precarious. While the Kyrellian Civil War had effectively been halted when the Crusade was declared, the tensions between the three factions made it not only unlikely but practically impossible for the three sides to the succession crisis to truly put aside their ambitions and differences.

Even as the invaders marched into city after city, each side was more than content to let the other two mini nations fall if it meant they were victorious in the civil war. The leaders of each individual side had long since abandoned any pretenses of compassion and mercy for their rivals, and as Arkhan had suspected the masses were the ones who got the short straw.

The battles during the civil war before the invaders arrived were extremely bloody and costly, but never did the cost of an engagement include the lives of Knights or any other member of the ruling class. The civil war had been fought not with tactics, but by simply throwing bodies at the other force until it either surrendered or retreated. However, this way of war left the Kyrellian manpower reserves heavily depleted and caused a growing sentiment of hatred and distrust towards the ruling elites among the common folk. Although it felt like ages ago, back then there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the nobles and clergy cared for them.

Nowadays there was no such sentiment. Those who remained still went to church and still payed lip service to the ruling class and the church, but slowly over the course of the war the rhetoric of the Church had become less and less accepted. Now, with the supposedly inferior Non-Humans and their Metal Demons thoroughly trouncing any force sent against it the dogma that was spoken by the men of the cloth was even less respected than before.

Despite not being the westernmost nation, it wasn’t too far east either, and thus the control the church had on the masses was stronger than in Grellekia but weaker than in their ‘big brother’ to the east. There were still a good number of devout followers of Lugus in Kyrellia, but their numbers were no longer what they used to be. Where once about 9/10ths of the masses had almost total faith in the church, now only about one in seven had the same devotion, and most of them were people who had nothing else to lose and thus supported the Lugusian faith because they had nothing else to hold on to and give their miserable lives purpose.

It was widely accepted that the Metal Demons were just that, Demons and that the Armageddon War that would see the holy and heavenly armies of Lugus’ angels descend from heaven and destroy the wicked. However, as more and more time passed, and the Armies of Heaven still did not appear, people began to worry if their god had abandoned them.

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It was at that time, when the three factions in Kyrellia had been all but kicked out of their own homeland that a new, heretical faith began to spread like a virulent disease through the occupied towns. It was one that basically denounced almost everything that the Lugusia Faith stood for. It claimed that the Kyrellian Prince who died a horrific death so many years ago had knowingly attacked and razed the town where the Almighty God Arkhan had come into existence.

It claimed that Arkhan, in his divine rage at seeing his home destroyed created the Metal Demons (which the new faith referred to as Deus’ Machina) and unleashed them upon the infidels who tried to destroy the True God of Humanity. The new faith proclaimed Lugus as a mere pretender to the Throne of Heaven, and that Arkhan the Almighty had, in his infinite wisdom, conquered and brought order to the chaotic land to the west between the Human Lands and the Non-Human Lands. He had also seen the Non-Humans as the equals to humanity that they were and allied himself with their gods and brought untold prosperity to all he touched.

As the 3rd month of the war moved past and the whole of Kyrellia was occupied, the two conflicting religions butted heads more and more frequently until finally the dam burst. The Second Kyrellian Civil war was started and ended on the same week as the followers of Arkhanism and the Deus’ Machina of their god crushed the zealot army of Lugusians in a single decisive engagement.

While the Lugusians had hurled themselves in a fanatical fury at the ‘Heretics’ they were simply too few and too poorly armed and armored, resulting in the Lugusian Church now becoming the second largest faith in Kyrellia, followed by the faiths of the Non-Humans by only a few scant followers. While this was a boost to the Lugusian Morale in a twisted way, the Non-Human faiths quickly overtook the Lugusian Faith in numbers in a matter of days after the quick end of the Second Civil War as all of the slaves were freed and began to once again practice their faith and believe in their Gods.

…

The whole of the western Human Lands had been taken, and the promise that Arkhan had made to his first few MSGs had been somewhat fulfilled. He had triumphantly returned to and conquered the nation that started him down the path he was on, and now he and his MSGs had dealt a major blow to the church’s control of Kyrellia. He was honestly surprised how easy it was to get the Kyrellian people on his side. Never would he have expected that the act of supplanting the main faith in a nation with another would be so simple.

While he DID have to now deal with even more people who blindly worshipped the very ground he walked on, he did find a bit of schadenfreude at the suffering of those who had wronged him so long ago. Now that he was back in Kyrellia he prepared to visit the ruins of his home village to pay respects to his deceased family and the place that had begun his rise to power. He now realized that, had he never lost everything that night he would have likely never reached the heights he had reached now. It made him wonder if the absurdly high Luck stat he possessed had in any way contributed to that tragedy, as that loss had been what had started him down the path to greatness in the first place.