The Systemic Lands
Chapter 142: Day 327 (4) – Blood of the Innocents

The silence had stretched on for a while so Clarissa spoke again. “We pushed him back. You pushed him back. You can grind faster than he can gather power.” That was a good point, but peace was impossible.

“To delay the confrontation through diplomacy and attack him on our terms?” I asked. I didn’t like it. Asking for peace would be weakness and a step back. I had lost this battle, but I was personally winning. It was only a matter of time until he was dead.

“Yes,” Clarissa said.

“A cease fire can only be done if there is trust. I don’t trust the Ritualist and he doesn’t trust me. At the first moment of weakness the other side will attack. We forced him back and I doubt he can replenish his forces that quickly. If we press the attack, we could end him.”

“At what cost Michael? The city can’t survive another battle. If it is even twice as good as this most recent victory, the city will collapse.”

“The cost doesn’t matter. Either we win, or we lose and all of us die,” I said. I was not about to make peace. The only reason I let this conversation continue was that Clarissa seemed quite stressed. Sᴇaʀch* Thᴇ NʘvᴇlFirᴇ.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of nøvels early and in the highest quality.

“Michael, it isn’t that simple unless you choose it to be. You couldn’t kill him today, what makes you think you can kill him tomorrow?” I winced at that. She had a good point, but it didn’t matter.

“I can’t let him go! Not after what he did!” I shouted. Clarissa surprisingly kept her composure and kept looking right at me.

“You won’t consider the possibility?” I looked away at that. Dammit. I had enough self-awareness to know I should consider what she was saying, but my heart refused to listen. To compromise with that man, it would annoy me to no end. If this really was a cultivation world, I would develop a heart demon from even contemplating peace.

I would always be worried about a future attack. Still, calling a long-term truce was an option. If I made the offer and the Ritualist rejected it, I would feel like an idiot. But I would be saving the people of Purgatory. They could die, victory was far more important.

“Let me put it into perspective. We lost over half the RMPF and four fifths of the militia. Including Lady Shi,” Clarissa said. Not Lady Shi, I liked her. I sat there in silence a bit before speaking up, my heart heavy now.

“What? She was old? Why was she fighting?”

“Everyone was conscripted Michael. Every single person. She died defending the North gate.” Lady Shi, the woman who cut my hair. I liked her and she had been around almost as long as I had been. Dammit. Another thing the Ritualist had to pay for.

“If you are unable to kill the Ritualist, a truce of some kind must be brokered. It must Michael. Otherwise, people will scatter and hide. Any form of organization and government we have will collapse. There won’t be anyone left. You can threaten people, but right now that won’t work. It won’t work on me.”

I sat there in silence with Clarissa feeling depressed and defeated. I had fought so hard and overcome so many traps but still lost. The Ritualist could sacrifice everything under his command, and he could come back from that.

On the other hand, I depended on Purgatory being an actual city with an actual government to collect taxes and purchase the upgrades without my personal investment. Clarissa spoke up again. “We would need to increase the RMPF to at least 2,000 people to secure all the gates. We don’t have those numbers and with the base requirements increased, only about ten percent of the population for each arrival is qualified for a position. Also, the points needed to get them to a capable level.” That was 25 people every 10 days.

That meant it would take 800 arrivals, or 8,000 days. That was years. Instead of a housing crisis we were having a population shortage. It felt ironic in a sad sort of way.

“It can’t be that bad.” It was do or die. People would have to fight or die.

“Michael, we had to press everyone into the militia as a do or die plan. They won’t easily fight again. It is surprising they didn’t completely break this battle. Even if they did fight, many are broken from the mass casualties we have sustained. Five people committed suicide this evening alone and I suspect there will be more.”

“Hopeless, everyone is hopeless,” I muttered. People were giving into despair. Weaklings! Idiots! Cowards! One had to fight, never give up. Cling to life with every thread of hope. Now people were giving in to the despair that engulfed this place like a thick fog.

“That is why we need a long-term truce, Michael. To rebuild and gather up our defenses. We know his weakness now as well. Mental attacks. Something we can look for and focus on in the future. Also, more people can get the Radiant Beam skill to more easily clear out hordes of monsters. We need time and not to be under the threat of attack.”

“You don’t believe in me. You don’t believe I can kill the Ritualist.” That hurt more than anything. The doubt in me. I was doubting myself.

“Do you? Can you honestly tell me, that you can succeed in killing him?” I couldn’t answer that. Clarissa knew that after all my failures. To say that I could, would be an obvious lie.

I let out a long sigh. “Brave of you to confront me about this.”

“I don’t shy away from hard truths and hopefully you don’t as well. The truth is, you can’t kill him, he can’t kill you, but the city can’t survive any more battles between the two of you.”

How ironic. If the conflict continued, then the city I was fighting to protect would collapse anyways. I thought of Hannibal. Not the serial killer flesh cooking Hannibal, but the General of Carthage Hannibal thousands of years ago. The man won every single battle against Rome except for his last battle.

A military genius. He even won the Battle of Cannae by enveloping a larger force with a smaller one. The first and only time in all of history such an event occurred. But he lost since everywhere else Carthage was losing to Rome and he had to retreat to the capital.

Rome refused to give up, even with horrendous losses. They lost fleet after fleet to storms, but just built more and threw more men at Carthage. That was why all of Western civilization came from Rome and not Carthage. They were too stubborn to call it quits.

But being stubborn didn’t always work. A total war like this, between me and the Ritualist, just devastated everything. The Japanese samurai came to mind. Resisting against guns, even though they should have tried to compromise and change.

I could win, against impossible odds. But it wasn’t enough. I could kill hundreds of monsters, but it wasn’t enough. I could race back to Purgatory and fight through trap after trap, but it wasn’t enough. I could win battles, but the war was lost.

Dammit! It hurt to admit it. I prided myself on my thinking and strategy, but the Ritualist had bested me by the very nature of his abilities. His attack had applied enough pressure to push things to this point. Clarissa would not have come here to tell me this and risk my ire if the situation wasn’t dire.

The corpses in the street. The swaths of people killed. While human lives were cheap in this place, but in a large enough amount they could crush anyone or anything. A weight that couldn’t be shaken off. The losses Purgatory had just experienced were horrendous. Any other leader would have been replaced or assassinated.

We didn’t have a housing crisis. We had a morale crisis. A leadership crisis. “Fine,” I said quietly. Almost like I didn’t want to hear my own words. “I will…I will attempt a truce between Purgatory and the Ritualist, if I am unable to kill him.” That was hard to say and even harder to admit. It meant complete failure. It meant that I was a failure if it came to that.

“As long you understand. I am not telling you to do it. Just that if the war continues and there is another attack or battle like the last one, there won’t be a government left.”

“I get it. I need to rest.” Clarissa got up from the chair and then paused.

“I thought you would also like to know. The baby survived,” Clarissa said. At least that was one piece of good news. “The mother named the child Michael after you.” I closed my eyes. It was a popular enough name. I would take the compliment for what it was.

Clarissa left my room and closed the door behind her.

All of the suffering I had endured. Peace. I couldn’t imagine the Ritualist accepting such an offer, but Clarissa was right. I didn’t want to end up as Hannibal, winning every battle but losing the war. I didn’t want to be the Japanese samurai stuck in the past, unable to move forward.

How? The monsters I could understand. Even using a mimic to create a decoy to try and lure me into a trap. Fine. I could accept all of that. But, all of it together? How was that even possible for one person?

Just whip out a new power. Just like that. It was complete nonsense. An entire new ability I had to think about the limitations of. The fact he used the decoys as a last resort, meant that there were clearly limitations. He also only decoyed himself, not other people. A possible limitation, but one I wasn’t going to count on. We would need to implement master stranger protocols at all the gates to check for imposters.

He would have to be summoning more right now. An attack on Heaven needed to happen as soon as possible, so I could finally see him defeated. The area people could go in the Systemic Lands was only so big, with only five discovered cities so far.

While I hadn’t checked the edges of all the level 2 areas, there weren’t that many options for the Ritualist on where the Ritualist could hide and rebuild his army of monsters. If he needed people, that meant he needed a city with arrivals.

My head hurt. I would worry about everything tomorrow.

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