But the dangers of the south didn’t take the shape that he thought they would. Instead of being attacked by an army, he received a letter informing him of a quiet peculiar information. His enemies claimed of having his sister in his possession, something which sounded as a joke at first, because he had never had a sister, but slowly his memories came back, and he asked to be alone to think.
His advisors weren’t foolish and realized that he did indeed have a sister but somehow had forgotten about it, somehow. After Petrió had completely recovered his memories, he had decided that a response was necessary. Even though his sister had been barely useful to him, it’d be bad publicity if he weren’t to save his sister from the enemy and if he did manage to get her, it could turn around and people would probably be praising him.
But before he even tried to get her back, he needed to confirm this information, because if he saved someone, he’d not only look like a fool but also have wasted important resources which could’ve been used on other fronts where they would’ve been more useful.
After receiving a detailed image of his sister, he could guarantee that these people had at least met her before and in detail even. She had changed throughout the years, but he could identify her relatively easily. For his sister he was asked to give up his country and the two of them would be given a mansion within a city so that they could leave a peaceful life, but he didn’t want that, partly because he wanted to save his sister and not necessarily live with her, but also because he liked his current life, ruling cities and worrying about the different policies he had to take in order to push forward against stronger enemies.
This tactics game was interesting to him, and he would rather have a tough and interesting life ahead of him than a slow, boring and easy one. But he couldn’t let this information go out yet, because he knew that his opponents were stronger than him and if he put up any resistance against their “offer”, he didn’t know how they’d react. At the same time, they could be tricking him and after he gave them his territory give him nothing, his sister’s corpse, a different person or anything else other than what they’d promised, because Petrió didn’t have the strength to fight back against them.
He was going to set a trap, trying to get as many of his enemies defeated in a single attack while his army prepared to rush them with a new armor which weighed little, but it still protected them from most attacks. They knew that they had a weakness against some magic attacks, but they weren’t common spells, so they hoped that it’d make some time for them to get enough territory to force a short armistice where they could prepare the next phase of their attack, because they had multiple weapons and armors ready to use but preparing the soldiers to use them took time.
What they wouldn’t change was the war diet, which was based on highly efficient pill-like foods that filled their stomach for hours without the need to defecate as they were efficiently created so that the body would use every part of the food.
The trap was him agreeing to their contract, though it was going to be signed on the border of the two countries. While Petrió had already planted many traps, so had his enemies and neither of them knew of the other actions, though they had suspicions. Once the leaders of both lands had checked the table, food and chairs, for their safety, they sat down and started negotiating the details.
Petrió wanted to make this as believable as possible, after all, and his enemies would have been more suspicious if he had accepted their deal which was terrible for him. After a few hours had passed, the document was passable and the sun was already starting to get near the horizon when the traps of Petrió’s army went off, though his enemies’ traps went off just seconds later.
They had both planned their traps to go off in relation to the sun and Petrió’s ones were just coincidentally further from the sunset. Once both sides realized what had happened, the leaders started fighting amongst themselves, mostly with magic, because any weapons they had carried were thrown into a dimensional portal built by one member of each country so that they couldn’t be accessed later.
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Petrió had planned better than his enemies, though, and the army that had come with him had actually left already and left a 2D illusion behind that was easier to make and cheaper to maintain. His enemies, on the other hand, hadn’t really moved their army and so they’d suffered damage, but even with this great win by Petrió, he was still on the losing side.
Once Petrió and the rest of his allies left the meeting through a teleportation spell, he could finally calm again and start overseeing the army advancements through enemy lands. But there wasn’t fast communication yet, so the map in front of him could only be updated at the speed of their fastest horses, which meant that the orders that they sent were given with many conditions so that depending on the situation, they would act differently.
His army went through the different phases he had planned, but their progress was slower than what he expected, their difference in numbers was just that large. He was conquering with limited casualties, but even so it was like fighting a wall of flesh, their enemies just sent more and more people to fight them. At times full towns fought against them, leaving them empty after conquering, and Petrió stupefied with their behavior. What could make the average man give away his life? Even children and the elderly were behaving the same way.
During his campaign the number of religions remaining on the world had fallen to ten and it was time for the gods to meet again, as they had agreed. During this meeting many changes to the “rules” were made, which helped turn the tides of his fight.
The largest change that helped this was that now gods could participate on all parts of the campaign against him, which made his armies suffer great losses, as battalions were completely massacred, and the information didn’t get out. Only when they realized that something was wrong were they armed with the weapons against the gods, and they managed to hurt the enemy deity and survive to live the tale.
If I hadn’t unleashed those catastrophic weapons, the world would be a very different place. But my people were dying, and we were out of resources to use, this being one of the last plans which we hoped to keep until the final battle, alas it wasn’t possible, and we were forced to make a hard decision. Perhaps we could defeat the enemies with time or the help of another religion, but we didn’t want to go for chances, we wanted to be sure that we would survive.
The meteor shower hit all over their territory, destroying the terrain and cities, bringing the power of the god down and killing off thousands of its soldiers. But it came at a cost. Not only were everyone’s eyes looking at us, in order to either defeat us or get this spell from our hands, but there was a scar in the continent.
The “scar” was a charred area where nothing could grow for the next few decades, the ground was barren, except for a few ruins that managed to survive and a few differences in height that “decorated” the terrain. What’s worse was that we didn’t even manage to defeat the god with this, because some of its cities were out of the zone of impact.
My sister had managed to survive this attack not because I had planned to do so, but rather because my enemies never planned to give her back to me, so she wasn’t near the area of the deal, she was as far from me as they could get her. They tried to use her as a method to stop me and my armies, but I told them that I had made my intentions with them and my sister clear with my previous attacks and they understood that I didn’t really care that much for my kin, which worked as I expected. I was a bit afraid that they might kill her because she was of no interest of them anymore, but my advisors guaranteed me that they’d keep her just in case anyway.
Within my own lands I was still focused on improving our efficiency on all aspects and the cities for the religious people were decided to be too costly but instead of completely destroying them, they were changed into reformation centers, where after a certain amount of time the people were forced to leave, either alive and to live within their country or by dying and leaving the world forever.
The propaganda was had fully spread amongst the people and sadly, we were behaving almost like a religion. But it was the easiest way to quickly organize so many people, after all. I just hope that after all this is over we can regress on our cult-like behavior and base our culture on science and not a person.