John makes his own justice.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: 4-9-2018: This is ultimately the path this branch will take under my writing. My apologies to those for whom some of this will be a repeat/redo for parts of it. If you came here via link chapter, then know that the branch you (very briefly) went down is effectively retconned. Sorry. If it's any consolation: I'm set on this one.]

Does this change anything?

John looked Juniluny over: her scowl still managed to appear smug even as she faced ****, perhaps only because she got one over on him. They had killed Talon, and brutally so, despite John making the mage harmless. But Talon, no matter what he suffered, was still a slaver... and had tried, without hesitation, to capture or kill John. Was it really injustice to see him die?

If that's what the Order fights... maybe he’s lucky to be dead.

John flinched at his own thoughts. Had he always been this callous? He had never enjoyed power before or known so much about the secret societies—the sort that had been the accepted truths of the desperately bored and paranoid—that occupied his world. All his childish fantasies, of hurting Frank or going after criminals like a merciless vigilante, had been nothing more... But I could really become that, now: doling out punishment as I see fit. But what’s fitting for this one? Maybe the Order would have it right, here...

“Well, tall one? Are you going to be happy with that... seeing my head roll once they’re done **** me for my secrets?”

John took another step back from the halfling. She tried to keep looking smug... and was a natural at it, too. But John saw it there in her trembling eyes, in how her hands gripped her new belt, in how her shoulders drooped: she was barely hanging on. She was terrified of the Order... or else, she was terrified of him. She must've imagined the worst going on in his mind... and on his current line of thinking, she would be right to be afraid.

“After everything you’ve done... tell me why you don’t deserve to go straight to the Order.”

Juniluny took a futile step back, crashing abruptly against the desk. “W-Well, you... didn’t kill Talon, and you obviously didn’t want-”

“That’s not my question.” John pressed himself into the wide seat, straightening his posture as he met her fearful gaze. “I won’t pretend that being trapped here, as my minion, wouldn’t be a kind of punishment for someone who used to freely walk the Earth... but you’ve wounded Kim... perhaps forever. You tried to do the same to Moira... Hell, you already did that and probably worse to the humans I found in your Maze. Nevermind the illusion monsters: you’ve hurt real people, not just-”

“Don’t minimize your guilt with that idiotic theory!” Juniluny spat, surprising John. “Earth Centrists are the worst: they just jest, justifying genocide with juvenile jargon, pretending the Abyss is some fever dream or a two-edged gift from Gaia-”

“Earth Centrist?”

“Don’t pretend now! The ones prowling this place are real enough, but you... you think they’re illusions, then?”

John eyed the halfling... and all the nuances of a human that kept making him forget the pointed ears, the reason for her stature, or anything else that made Juniluny a fiction. It happened occasionally, even with the elves: John would forget that they were illusions, that their alleged homes in the Abyss were never real, or were elaborate, false constructs like the creatures that suggested they were anything else. He had accepted this about them: every person who seemed to know more about them than he did stated as much. Tricia had scoffed at the idea that they were real; Moira considered the barriers their homes, and the collapse of those barriers their destruction. Whenever one died, their body vanished after some period of time, if not instantaneously. It had all added up pretty well: an illusion barrier was like a dream, and the monsters therein the avatars of one's inner-thoughts. They seemed real for the fleeting time they existed: they had lives, ideas, desires, and goals. They had meaning. When the dreamer awoke, he did not commit genocide upon the world he lost.

The dream was never real in the first place.

But dispelling the notion proved harder with Juniluny. For brief seconds, he'd feel the full guilt of a man who enslaved a real person. She had been earthbound, however one did that. She had lived as a human, among humans, even as she did inhuman things. The Earth was a real past, present, and future for her before John came into her life... and while she deserved **** or worse, John had not seen himself as her executioner until now. Juniluny was not like Tita or Fairy; enslaving Juniluny required a very different question of John. Branding monsters from illusion barriers meant they wouldn't vanish with the dream; his mark made them more real than they ever could've been.

Branding Juniluny made her less.

But what she suggested now went against all notions the magic world seemed to give him... and while he sometimes felt guilt for enslaving this woman or that creature, it was as a human being for something empathic. It would be another matter entirely if they the illusion barriers were somehow not their end... and if he had truly robbed some dozens of sapients of their freedom.

John rejected the notion; until he had proof, he could only have what he knew from experience and what the rest of the world believed. Moreover, if becoming "earthbound" was like branding, then Juniluny was simply made real and let loose... and even now believes the dream she escaped. "Have you... ever been back to your home?"

The Cabalist smirked at that. "I suppose I haven't. Oh, think it all some lie I've come packed with, do you, boy? Unbelievable... no, I suppose it's absolutely believable... ignorant peasants. If you had half the inquisitive mind I enjoy, you’d study such manifestations and interrogate the subjects therein instead of blindly accepting so theological a theory.” The halfling crossed her arms. “Or maybe you just deny the truth in front of you as more trickery.”

“Wouldn’t that make you worse?” Juniluny grimaced as John spoke. “Suppose I believed you: that illusion barrier monsters are all... real... doesn’t that mean every elf and orc and sad beast you kept is a real victim, and every **** you engineered worthy of punishment?”

Juniluny had no answer to that but a scoff and a deflection. “You won’t turn me to the Order... not when you know what they’ll do; what they did to Talon.”

“Talon was a human,” John quickly spat, “and you’re just trying to get off without a punishment.”

“I’ve been enslaved, my life’s work has been confiscated, I’ve lost my free will, and perhaps worst of all: you’ve killed all my slaves!”

“You put some kind of suicide effect on them!”

“Sure, to go off if I died! Since I’m well enough to walk among the living, there’s obviously something else about your damn brand that triggered it... meaning you’re the one that killed th...” It finally snapped into place. Her assumption, her anger over a lost servant, her curiosity as to how her genuine Hellbat could be defused and have the thwarting party live... how the Hellbat could be slain without exploding. Juniluny felt it the moment Tara died...

... as Juniluny’s slaves had felt the **** of their master.

“You... branded Tara.”

John barely gave her words time to stop ringing in the air before he commanded, “You’re not to harm or endanger her in any way.”

“Tara breathes,” she slowly whispered, “and you seem to have wanted Talon to do the same... even if only as an Order chew toy, for all you apparently appraised of all their appalling amorality... but her... you marked her... to keep for yourself.”

“I marked her to save her from blowing up!”

Juniluny’s smile grew slow and hideous. “But she and her precious flames aren’t here, now are they? More’s to the point... did you ever give her up to the Order? I thought I would’ve heard from-”

“I didn’t,” John replied.

“Oh... Well, does the Order know she, too, worked for the Cabal?” Her meaning grew slowly in John's mind until his expression became stone. “Oh my... they don’t, do they? But they will once they have me... I won’t tell them, of course, Master, but the Order leaves little choice: they’ll peel it from my mind, no matter how far you have me bury it, and then, my sweet talling... then you’ll have to send yet another to the pits of the Order.”

Tara came to his mind: her snarky attitude, her lustful heat, her eyes that burned even when her flames were doused... her freedom, which he promised, and his orders that would help ensure she would try and live a good life from now on. He thought to visit her on his Sunday off but didn’t want to remind her of what he did, no matter how cruel or merciless she might've been before. In his mind, his brand had helped reform the unreformable... and had simultaneously inflicted such a cruelty that his only recourse was to leave her be.

Am I ready, now, to order her to walk into the Brighton mansion, just to... John thought of Talon, and of how much harder it would be to keep Tara alive and in captivity... Tara, a living bomb of hellfire. The Order might not even wait until the night before executing her... and once they got Juniluny to talk, they wouldn’t be able to ignore even a **** to the Cabal roaming Springfield. If the Order wasn't careful, then Springfield would go up in flames... and even if they were, it would mean Tara's ****.

On his orders.

Damn it...

“Are you ready to kill two women, John? Because if you’re not... I have a suggestion.” Juniluny’s hands let go of her belt. They were rattling like leaves on the hood of a car engine turning, but she still managed to find the first latches of her armor on her shoulder.

John sighed his frustration out slowly.

“I may be at cock-height, boy, but I can still tell your eyes seldom leave my fresh-baked loaves.” John was fairly certain she meant her tits... mostly because, somewhat to his shame, not even these dire times could keep his gaze from wandering. The task was harder still when she undid the latches on her left shoulder and waist to unfurl, with surprising ease, the blue leather armor that wrapped around her body. Only a thin layer of white cotton, the guard between her pale flesh and the harsh interior of the armor, clung to her body now. She was sweating... perhaps from the armor or the stress, but it couldn't have been from the slightly cool temperature of the Temple. It clung to her slightly chubby, absurdly hourglass form in all the right ways for John's pants to grow tight, but he was already shaking his head. She sighed, "I could be useful to you."

"That's..." John struggled to order her to stop... and, slowly, began to contemplate what he really wanted from her.

She peeled away the layer of cloth, letting her heavy breasts tremble as she rocked to and fro. "Think about it, Master: you just tell the Order you killed me, and I'd stay here. I could pleasure you... tutor you... guide you on all the things you obviously don't know, and skip the nasty parts you don't want to know. Tara continues to live however she's living out there in the ugly world. Maybe I even join her in some... semblance of freedom."

"You know I can't do that."

Juniluny stepped forward, her eyes glimmering as she spoke. "Fine, keep me here... do me silly... pork me pregnant with precious portions of poor you and poor me... if you think you can. I'll do it all... I'll do anything..." She had reached him, and still his orders couldn't find his lips. She caressed his crotch; the outline of his turgid rod was easy to find, and her fingers continued to shake as she tried to keep her bravery up. "... and I'll do it all willingly... if you just let me..." Live. She didn't say it, but there was no ambiguity left: she was begging for her life, and her willing body was all she had to offer.

John might’ve felt pity for her... except the last hour remained too fresh in his mind. Fine. “Your punishment, then.”

Her eyes remained opened too wide as she listened; she followed his fingers as he pulled up his outfit interface.

“You’re going to live in this Temple forever...” He pressed the icon of his naked avatar, and his meat sprung back into view. Despite the fact that her plan seemed to be working, Juniluny had her doubts as she looked at his weapon. “... as my informant, as my teacher... and as my ****.”

“T-Then... I won’t be turned over?”

John smiled.