“Group fights, aw yeah, those always get me hyped up,” Jeff shouted.

  “Everything always gets you hyped up.” Dra shook his head, and that was about all that John could stomach of these two right now.

  The mood on their team’s ptform was bad, to say the least. The recent happening hung in the air like a poisonous fog, infecting whatever words were spoken and killing conversations before they could become more than awkward small talk. John fully embraced the development. He would get this fight over with as soon as possible, and then they would fix this whole mess.

  He gnced over to Thana, who stuck to Lydia in their current divide, the two of them sitting on another table while Rave sat with him; Nia and Momo refused to be caught up in this. “So, it is a 2vs2, let’s go ahead folks, pick your fighters in the next 5 minutes!”

  “Your decision remains the same?” John asked over the two tables.

  “Yes,” Lydia’s tone was indomitable, she had made up her mind and was now going to stay the course. Understanding of her reasons remained, just as his wish this wasn’t what they would have to do.

  The time ran out, and he and Thana rode the ptform down to the arena. “Are you that angry?” Thana mumbled into the quiet, undoing her scarf and handing it to John.

  Sighing, he answered and took it, safely storing it in his inventory until after the fight, “I am not angry, I am concerned, Thana.” The blood mage shook her head in what John first thought to be an understanding nod but turned out to be more of a near-colpse as she took a reflexive step forwards to keep her bance.

  John was close, ready to catch her. When she stood steadily again, he couldn’t help but burst out, “See? Something is clearly not working with you right now!” Thana stayed silent to that.

  Only when the ptform dissipated underneath them did she mumble, “I have to be useful, I can’t be the insane fucking girl that is just dead-weight.”

  “You will never be deadweight!” John growled as they strode towards the centre of the arena, “I won’t let y-“

  “Hello,” Alexej interrupted with a happy wave, “how are you.”

  “About ready to rip your spine out,” John growled. His anger found a way more fitting target. Thana’s recent instability had started with this maniputive fucker’s meddling.

  “Wow, hostile,” the informant ughed at which point all of John’s elementals materialized.

  “We are going to end this quickly, okay?” he said to everyone.

  “Let’s fucking murder that brown-robed brown-noser,” Thana growled in agreement as the biome wheel nded on the standard arena.

  “I will turn his skin into a nice and crispy yer,” Samander hissed.

  “Well, I like quick, so making this quick works for me, way more important stuff to do,” Sylph hyper-actively nodded.

  Gnome did her usual fist-pumping, “We can do this, w-we can!”

  “For everyone’s security,” Undine said and changed into her glove form.

  “Those two are fine to cut?” Siena asked.

  “You can torture Alexej a bit if you get your cws on him,” John allowed.

  “Let’s just do this so I can find some books on psychotherapy,” Momo hovered off the ground.

  “Ah, such hope, but I am sorry, this victory will be mine!” Maximillian said, and then the fight began.

  The opening moves were the same as the st group fight. Thana made a break to reach the duo, activating Bloodburn immediately, but then was hit by the reinforced gravity magic, smming her to the ground.

  However, this time they had to deal with John and almost all of his familiars, who all advanced to immediately take advantage of the situation. “Quite sorry,” with these words the bck hole that was Maximillian’s elemental appeared.

  A sudden pull ripped all four of the openly manifested elementals from their course towards Alexej and Hawpler. Only Siena, dwelling in John’s shadow, was secure from this thing. ‘That cannot be sustainable for long,’ John thought as all of them fought against the gravity well that was cwing at them. He threw three quarters of a wave of Shardbound at the elemental, directing the st one towards Maximillian.

  As he had anticipated, all of them were uselessly sucked into the bck hole. John had no idea how it worked in detail, but it seemed to be the case that Hawpler was something like a selective bck hole. Whatever he chose to exert a gravitational pull on, no matter what it actually was or what rules of physics he had to break in the process, once unleashed, that was what he did.

  “Soulburn.” While John was still running forwards, undecided whether he was going to attack Hawpler, to free his elementals, or just continue in his efforts to free Thana, the blood mage pulled her own ace. The red fmes of Bloodburn got repced by the six pilrs of blue fire.

  Under the shocked eyes of Maximillian and with a scream of anger, quickly swinging to maniacal ughter, Thana fought herself to her feet. “I hope you are ready for a fucking rodeo! You looked down on me for too long,” the bundle of insanity howled and threw herself at the gravity king with reckless abandon.

  Her movements were way slower than they should have been, but she was still faster than Maximillian, who had the honour of getting punched in the stomach by a fist engulfed in blue fmes that had withstood the weight of a mountain sized dragon.

  To John’s surprise, not only did Maximillian not get instantly thrown to the Fateweavers by this, merely being catapulted backwards and rolling over the floor like a skipping stone over the pond, but he also kept his attack in pce. Every step Thana took dug deeply into the sandy earth, caving under her inhuman weight.

  The six pilrs disappeared as whatever emotion she had been burning ran out. “Soulburn,” she growled once more and fought her continued advance towards Maximillian. “What kind of monster did Lydia find?” the king couldn’t help but ask out loud.

  “The kind that will murder you. The humans all need annihition.”

  Thana stopped dead in her tracks, “Did I just fucking say something?!” She shook her head as if she was standing in the middle of a swarm of bees.

  “Keep your head in the game!” John shouted and jumped at Alexej. This needed to be over as quickly as possible, something was seriously wrong, and it wasn’t getting better.

  Alexej was an informant, and there was a reason the guy had never fought. Like Herman before him, he wasn’t going to be all that great at fighting. ‘Sorry, girls,’ John apologized to the elementals he left behind.

  With a series of simple punches, John assaulted the informant who, despite the strained look on his face, managed to dodge backwards. While he wasn’t able to nd a single hit, the Gamer wasn’t worried. He was delivering Alexej straight to the arms of certain defeat.

  Which the informant himself only realized when it was too te and he was about to collide backwards with Thana. “Normally I’d introduce you to my fucking foot, but you two have met before,” the blood mage ughed and spin-kicked the maniputor straight towards his master.“…What the fuck, I don’t feel lighter,” Thana growled, almost budging in as yet another emotion ran dry. “Soulburn,” a third time she used the one-word chant to keep on her feet.

  “You okay, Alex?” Maximillian asked, keeping his eyes on the two of them; “This might look pretty grave right now but we will prev-“

  The sound of a cell phone rang from Alexej’s robes. “Excuse me, I will have to take that,” the sv sat up, coughing up blood as he did.

  “Oh, hey, what is the contestant Alexej doing there?” Jeff commented what everyone was thinking.

  “Taking phone calls in the middle of the game is against the rules, as far as I know,” Dra said and took out an overly thick book. “A moment of pause please.”

  A victorious grin appeared on Alexej’s face as he listened to whatever the person calling him had to say. “Alex?!” Maximillian was obviously angry at this development.

  “I am sorry Max,” the maniputor put away his phone with a shrug. “This was always the only way this could end.”

  A sudden burst of speed brought the support right next to the confused gravity mage. A knife glinted in the sunlight, then disappeared into the flesh of Maximillian’s soft side.

  “What the hell?” John asked and suddenly all hell broke loose as the audience started screaming in confusion, panic quickly spreading as the sound of arm bells rang all over the city of Rome.

  “For the revolution!” Alexej shouted and pulled the knife back, before aiming for Maximillian’s throat.

  Instead, his own hand suddenly was subject to an attack. A bde of dark purple, connected to the betrayer’s shadow, penetrated through the unprotected arm and ripped it aside. “Nothing worse than a traitor,” Siena hissed as more tendrils of bded darkness wrapped around Alexej and forced him aside.

  John finally caught up to the whole scene and started healing Maximillian as all elementals, from Hawpler to Gnome, helped restrict the monk-robe wearing Alexej. Even now, Observe did nothing and John didn’t feel like it would be smart to use mana on Reveal at the current time. Even now, Alexej wore his victorious smile. Exactly now, the king looked back with the eyes of a man who experienced the ultimate wrong.

  “Why?” Maximillian finally managed to ask a single word.

  “For the revolution, I wasn’t subtle about it,” Alexej dismissively said.

  ‘What revolution?’ John asked himself and had already figured it out by the time Alexej went on.

  “The Blood of the Proletariat will deliver this world into the utopia it was meant to be.”

  “Why?!” the king continued on; “You had a good life under me, I don’t understand.”

  “UNDER YOU, YES!” Alexej ughed in his face. “Born into serfdom, what an honour indeed! To be a sve to one as self-centred as you.”

  “Why would you try to stab him?” The world around John seemed to crumble. He turned to look for Thana, who was simply confusedly looking around. At the very least, she seemed fine for the moment. “Fateweaving is still in effect, he would just have been teleported away,” John id down.

  “Oh, you should look up and think again if it is,” Alexej giggled. Hesitatingly, John and everyone else did. The reason for the arm bells became apparent immediately. The sky had been cut apart. It was as if a thin knife had been applied to a canvas. The gap in the outer wall of the Protected Space of Rome was pitch bck in the cloudy sky.

  “It would have been nice to take you out personally, but I will take the second-best thing and die with you all,” Alexej announced as something fell out of the gap. It was an object with an unmistakable form, normally meant to be dropped out of a pne and not a dimensional gap. A round, bck painted head followed by an elongated, thick metal shell and a cylindrical end.

  ‘Of all the things that could kill me in this fantasy world,’ John couldn’t help but feel like fate, even though it didn’t exist, didn’t like him. ‘It’s going to be a fucking atomic bomb.’

  John couldn’t help but spend his st moments in awe and sorting out the confusion. How was it possible in the first pce that this bomb got teleported in? The Supreme Fateweaver must have been on the Blood’s side, that was the only conclusion that could be made. Why the bomb? To wipe everyone out effectively. Why wait until now? There must have been something they had needed to get. Was it the bomb itself?

  Questions with which a mind certain of its own death sought to distract itself from the inevitable. Everything seemed to move slowly, as if the world swam in honey. Obviously, it couldn’t have been that sugar-coated; this was the world that had forged the weapon that was about to end him after all.

  The bomb closed in on the floor, and John’s eyes fell on Thana. The blood mage was still out of it. Apparently, she hadn’t even noticed what was about to happen. Gssy eyes stared inwards. She was stumbling around. Her hands clutched her head, blocking the screams all around from reaching her ears.

  Would she be able to survive the explosion? John didn’t find the idea completely ridiculous, but would she be able to survive the aftermath as well? There would be no one left in this world that she knew. He sincerely hoped that she would find someone who would take care of her.

  ‘I will never kiss Jane again,’ John realized as the bomb hit the ground.

  Nuclear hellfire spewed forth, and then…