And without large wars happening, four more years passed. Throughout this time Petrió had solidified his power over the people he ruled over, while at the same time increasing a sentiment against religions, which he knew was necessary because when the god’s come back again, people would start having doubts about their beliefs unless they already had a negative disposition against them.

There were a few battles here and there, specifically against the ones that had laid their armies near his territory, and he had actually managed to win a few cities from them as well, which caused their direct violence to end, they didn’t want to fight a losing war, so they gave up on more territory and managed to stop Petrió from advancing further into their territory.

But, as soon as the year ended, the state of things would change. The preparation that every religion had been working hard on was finally going to give results. The gods would descend, though their power would only be a fraction of their true prowess. And according to the deal that these deities had done between them, their power would be correspondent to the number of cities they ruled over.

What they didn’t expect was the existence of someone else to have the power over a relatively large quantity of cities, the presence of Petrió. Their competition was supposed to be fair, so that is why they discussed for a long time how to deal with him.

They couldn’t just take him out of the competition, they had observed his efforts and challenges he had overcome, and they wouldn’t lend their powers to him because they’d be weakened by it, he wouldn’t be able to use them correctly and he might get too strong too quickly, so instead they’d never fight him or his armies directly unless their last city was attacked by him or his armies.

In the first hour of the next year, in the temples of forty-seven cities, beings out of the world were summoned. They were the gods of the people, and they were received differently depending on who they were. Some were instantly revered, while others were asked for knowledge and power. Some weren’t treated specially at all, just as a strong individual.

This was partly due to their original stay in the world and how they’d treated people then, but it was also caused because of the people they had chosen, some of them decided to turn the belief of the god that had blessed them into something different.

But in most places the gods were satisfied with their appearance, though not so much with their power. Almost each and everyone of them expected for their followers to have managed to secure more cities, while a few were happily surprised at their work. The followers of the war god, for example, had managed to get a hold of just under 500 cities, so he was able to use about a ten percent of his strength.

With all of them here, in this realm, they could no longer communicate with each other unless they used spells or were physically in front of each other, something unlikely due to what was about to happen. Total war. Alliances were allowed between them, and the fight was to see who would win the bet they’d made. Clearly, a lot of the relatively smaller religions joined hands against the war god’s empire, but others were left out, as was the case with Petrió, even though he shared borders with him.

But this wasn’t a worry for him, because it was within his plans to be alone. He had been this way before and he didn’t expect the behavior of his enemies to change too wildly when the gods came back. Because he wasn’t that powerful and he didn’t have any godly powers on his side, he wasn’t targeted at first, as everyone tried to get rid of the larger threats first.

Petrió was preparing one strong move with which he hoped to conquer one-hundred more cities and still be able to defend himself from plausible attacks. He didn’t know of the treaty that the deities had agreed upon, so he expected to meet some of them in his conquest.

Without their knowledge, Petrió had been building a large tunnel network that stretched far and wide and would utilize it to send specialized groups that would attack quickly and then “disappear” like magic. This was the first step of his plan and it worked really well, no one had found his tunnels before it was time to use them to fight.

Within a single day Petrió started a surprise attack to five different cities, his specially trained soldiers, that were also equipped with great tools and weapons to help the operation managed to find the leaders of the religions within each city and force a surrender, after which a hundred-man group entered these cities and quickly started reforming them.

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First of all, he was more violent with the reeducation, taking everything the last religion had built or created own and replacing it with his own program. At the same time everyone that was important for the religion that was in power was quickly taken out. He was lucky that all the cities he had attacked were part of a larger union of cities, because otherwise he would have had to fight against a god and if this had happened so early, most of his plan would have broken down.

But because everything was going well, he continued with it, now attacking six more cities the very next day. With these fast attacks he managed to conquer territory without the knowledge of his power getting out, at least not before he managed to restabilize his position.

The people within the temples couldn’t easily communicate with their gods anymore, because their contact was done through a connection within realms and now that they were on the same one it didn’t work anymore.

So, they had to send messengers to advise what was happening, yet they could fall victim to the enemies or other dangers, such as bandits or monsters roaming around. Most of the time they were caught by Petrió’s soldiers before they escaped, but a few were slippery enough that they managed to escape them.

But they still had to get to the main city of their god, which for most of them wasn’t that close. That was why most of them went through stops on other cities from their own god in order to warn them and send another messenger, full of energy, to keep sending the message.

This plan was sound, except that the city might be captured before they got there to rest and the progress that they’d made would be lost. This did happen to a few of them, showing that Petrió’s strategy was indeed working, but four different gods learned about what he was doing and raised their alarm… within their own reign, of course. Why would they give away free information to others when they could indirectly make them weaker by letting Petrió conquer them.

They expected to be able to defeat him if it came to a direct fight between them if they had their armies to support them, of course. The attacks that he was doing were unexpected and they were unprepared for them and that was the reason that they gave themselves as to why they’d lost these cities.

But just to make their territory a bit safer for them, they reinforced a few of their cities with soldiers from the front where the three large alliances were gathering. One of them was made from the followers of the god of war, the god of planning and the god of cunning. Around one in every four cities of the continent’s five thousand were under their rule.

The next largest alliance, but possibly the weakest from the large three was made up from fifteen different small cults that had altogether a bit over 600 cities. Lastly there was an alliance made up by five relatively large religions that had taken a hold of 500 cities.

The remaining towns were under the rule of religions that were either part of smaller alliances or were alone, like Petrió, but the others that were like him, without an alliance, were targeted because they usually were stronger than the average territory, having not only more cities than him, but also a god with a sizeable chunk of its original powers.

With the strategy Petrió had used he managed to get across the hundred-city barrier, which was when he passed the average cities per religion during this time. He still had yet to meet a deity, so some of his preparations were still unused. But he knew not to bite off more than he could chew so once he got to a hundred and twenty conquered cities, he stopped his soldiers from going further and focused on getting the power on the cities he had gotten.

These years hadn’t been wasted by the religions and they’d made sure that the citizens followed their beliefs, to different ranges of success. This meant that while some cities weren’t that hard to convince to accept the new rule and forget about the religion that had once loomed over them, in other towns citizens congregated in rallies against his government and trying to get their religion back.

It was there where I expressed my worst behavior, all in the name of control and progress against the religions I started to consider as evil. At first, I just imprisoned the leaders, but they continued to pop out of nowhere. I created reeducation camps where I showed them that they’d been brainwashed by them, but they continued to manifest against me.

We “played” this tug-of-war until I broke and ordered the creation of a “city” where everyone that supported the gods could go to, but they could never leave. It was going to be barricaded all around and guards would check that they wouldn’t leave. But too many people believed in the gods and what was built was quickly filled to the brim.

I didn’t want to spend so much building places that I didn’t support, so a selection system was installed. If you weren’t good enough to be there, you’d be gone. From the face of the earth that is. Going there already meant a resistance against the government, so they better be perfect and continue being so if they wanted to be there.