Desperation

The reaction John got to his statement was not quite the one that he was expecting. After a beat of silence, Etriyya let out a harsh, almost shrill laugh, as much from shock as it was from humor.

"I forget you like to surprise, Newman... yes, I suppose you are technically correct. It is likely that one of the Six Deities, Himiko herself, would be able to stop this onslaught. She might even be powerful enough to do it on her own. That's almost assuredly why the Northern Ashes have cut her such a wide berth, why they have all but refused to even approach her territory."

"And that means that she's the key. She's the only thing on the continent they're afraid of." Etriyya scoffed at John's words.

"I fail to see how this information is particularly useful for us, however, given Himiko's absolutely amoral rule and willingness to sacrifice her own soldiers for the advancement of her organization. Even were she to slaughter her way across the Great Plains and offer to vassalize us, it would be – at most – two or three steps above the Northern Ashes themselves. Better than an outright evil organization... worse than Mercenary Lords. At least they tend to care for their own assets in more terms than absolute value. But all that is irrelevant. As I said, Himiko is known as a cold-blooded, cold-hearted pragmatist. She can't save us, and she wouldn't even if she were across the street, instead of across the country."

"...She can. And she will," John vowed, gritting his teeth. His eyes fell again to the dark sector of the west coast. "I'll convince her. She... I think she loves me."

"...What the actual fuck?" Etriyya mumbled. "Are you serious? John, you're insane. The first time you met, you were injured and she still shoved a shard inside your chest that damn near finished the job. The second time, she almost killed... John, she's supposed to be methodical, calculating. She'd be predictable if it weren't for the fact that she's so secretive you can never be certain what cards she has left to play. But you... you make her impulsive, make her act rashly. She travelled halfway around the country with an escort small enough to remain undetected – maybe even alone – all in the name of meeting up with you. Then she murdered Order guards, little enough of a threat as they were, to see you one more time before she left so she could attack your creations and drive you into a rage to ignite that Shard in your chest a little more."

John grimaced at that memory. Of how she'd assaulted him, impaled Seras... how powerless they'd both been against her. He was sure he wouldn't fare much better now, and what Etriyya said did make him pause. Himiko had been vested in ensuring the Shard's completion within him. He had no idea why, but she had a very heavily vested interest in seeing it complete. Seeing her husband Isamu gave him theories, but they were only just that. If he showed up now, what would happen? What 'cards' did she have in store for him?

No. It didn't matter. Not anymore, because... this was the only card John could play. The alternatives were all unthinkable.

"I know. It's foolish and reckless... which is why I'm going alone. I don't want anyone from the Order coming with me. I won't even have my family with me when I go to meet her."

"Father, I don't think-

"Master, perhaps-"

"Wait, hold the fuck up-"

"Quiet!" John said, loudly enough to be heard. He waited for the last murmurs from the women standing behind him to die down. "None of you were there when she attacked... but Etriyya is right. She's too powerful. If she wants to kill me, if she wants to capture me, she's going to do it, and none of us can stop her. The only thing your company would do is get us all killed or captured together."

"So you recognize how foolish this is, and yet you still suggest it as if it's no more than taking a stroll?" Etriyya scoffed, throwing her hands up into the air.

"John, you must understand, things are not so simple even if you knew that Himiko would aid you. In order to get to her, you'd have to travel over five hundred miles across hostile territory. The scatterings of guilds between here and the western section of the continent are bad enough for someone of your power, but to get to Himiko's territory, you'd either have to travel to the deep southwest or go straight through the territory belonging to all the alliances of the Great Plains."

"What, are they going to **** a random mage travelling through their territory? Who am I kidding, it's the Abyss, of course they would. Perhaps we can get through undetected."

"Unlikely. There are a few Fateweavers – current and former – still working for a number of the guilds. Given their lack of direct combat capabilities as a general rule, they're almost certainly working to secure the borders."

“And I suppose it’s not going to be as simple as getting on a plane either?” John asked.

“Any organization worth their salt will have a full Abyssal staff monitoring any air travel in or out of the local airport. Even the Order stations a Knight at SPR International just to make sure that we are aware if anyone unexpected and dangerous arrives. There’s also the possibility that other organizations have informants there, and for abilities such as yours, I doubt any guild with the power to do so would be above downing a plane, no matter how much attention it would bring down on them. Even if you did make it to the West Coast unharmed, there’s no telling what kind of reaction you’d get out of the guards there… they’ll likely either kill you or throw you in a cell. Then again, those are probably your options with Himiko too, so perhaps that’s just speeding up the process.”

“Professional opinion, safer in the plane or out of it?” John asked, ignoring her defeatism.

“Equally suicidal,” Etriyya said immediately. When John didn’t avert his gaze, Etriyya sighed and shook her head. “Even though it’ll take you through more hostile territory, you’ll almost certainly be safer out of the plane. We have no idea where Himiko’s headquarters is; she’s done a very good job of keeping it hidden, and we suspect that she actually has several she can actively move between to make pinpointing her harder.

“You’ll have to travel around once you get there anyway; heading through an airport will just draw attention to your arrival, even assuming you make it there unmolested. Direct flights are also a no-go; Springfield is decently sized, but any flight you can get out of here is going to have at least one stop before getting out there, if not two, probably in major metropolitan areas. Half the country will know where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.”

John grimaced in annoyance. Could nothing ever be simple? He hadn’t expected things to be that easy, but the thought of people stationed at every major airport by potentially multiple hostile organizations was more than he had anticipated.

"Then I'll go southwest, like you said. It's... a bit of a detour, but it won't mean that much time."

"John, Etriyya is right to be concerned," Tricia pointed out. Despite her suit and the soft beeping of an increased injection rate, John could hear the worry and fear in her voice still seeping through. "The guilds you would face, no matter which path you take, are powerful. And in the time you've been gone, the information about you that the Albidians and Cabal retrieved have been disseminated. Some of it is missing – whatever they weren't willing to sell off, whatever they couldn't relay before their destruction. Some of it is twisted, lies sold for profit or misinterpreted data... but it's there. Your appearance, your abilities, the things you can do. Even the mages that might let a stranger pass by unmolested will be liable to accost you, if for no other reason than that your abilities would give them an edge if they can find a way to turn you to their cause."

"Tricia... he's not going to let that stop him."

Etriyya's words were almost whimsical. She had a soft grin on her face – a sarcastic, somewhat defeated one, but a smile all the same.

"Are you... are you in support of this plan?" Tricia asked.

"Not at all. He's an idiot, and he's going to get himself killed. But... at least he's taking a stand. I've seen that look in his eyes before; I didn't like the consequences then, and I doubt I will now, but he's not stopping without a fight. And I don't know about you, but I'm not prepared to start a brawl five-on-two to keep him here. Are you?" Etriyya asked, half-sarcastically.

"Can we not simply talk this out with words?" Tricia asked in exasperation.

"My Father has decided his path. Anyone who stands in his way will be met with the full **** of his flock," Sophia warned seriously.

"I forgot how refreshing her bluntness was," Etriyya noted, the corner of her mouth twitching up. "So, John... if you're going to do this-"

"I am," John emphasized.

"-you're going to need a guide. Someone who is familiar with the territory you're traversing, and ideally one you can trust. Otherwise, you may as well fall on your own blade now and save us the trouble of dealing with your enslaved, brainwashed, or corrupted body in a few years."

"A guide..." John mumbled, glancing over the map. It was true that whether by Barriers or through the mundane world, John's passage would likely be a difficult one. Hundreds of miles of potentially hostile mages, someone experienced at handling them... but someone loyal?

"I can't believe you two are discussing this as if it's sane..." Tricia said, sighing. "If you need me... I'll be planning for our move."

Tricia moved away from the table, in a way that made it perfectly clear how frustrated she was. Etriyya glanced her way for a moment, then turned back to John and continued.

"It would help if they could handle themselves in a fight. There's a mercenary outfit about two hours west of here in Ashlan that has taken over a lot of business from the local area. I can send a message to them; they might be making preparations for the Northern Ashes too, but if they're not, I can at least see if they have someone who can keep you alive long enough to reach the West Coast. They're as honorable as mercs get, but I'd still watch your back when you sleep."

"No, I think I have a better idea," John whispered.

"Oh? Did you have someone in mind, perhaps your tracker that assisted you against the Albidians? Her sensory abilities would come in handy with avoiding unwanted company," Etriyya noted.

"I might ask her... but I'm not sure yet," John admitted. "I don't know how far she has travelled, or what kind of knowledge she has of the lands. Besides, I'm trying not to put anyone in harm's way... not anyone I care about, at least."

"Then... who?" Etriyya asked. "I didn't know you had many other contacts outside the Order, but we did lose contact a bit... even before you left..."

With that unpleasant memory hanging in the air, John set his jaw. He felt the embers burning inside his chest heat, the fire within slowly rising. Were he not fully in control of his Shard, it would surely have activated at the thought of what he was about to do.

"Take me to your dungeons. I need to speak with one of your prisoners."

---

"...You aren't going to tell me what you're planning, are you?"

"Would you prefer if I did?" John asked as they stood at the end of a long hallway of cells.

"No... the less I know, the better. I have a feeling whatever you're planning violates our oath – so I'm going to disable these alarms, and then wait for you here."

"That works for me," John said quietly. "Lerianna, Shishun... you two wait out here with Etriyya; no need for an entire crowd to go in at once. Besides, I'll be doing most of the talking."

"I hope you don't regret this, Newman," Etriyya grumbled, but she fiddled with the panel all the same. The mechanical door to the cells slid open. "I can only guarantee you about twenty minutes before the guards rotate and come to check in on this sector. Third cell down on the right-hand side, her passcode is 056189."

"This shouldn't even take five," John said. He locked eyes with Vallya and Sophia, giving a firm nod as they strode into the prison cells and shut the smaller privacy door behind them.

The cells were less like proper prison cells and more like capsules, large tombs of metal in the shape of tall cylinders. Computer screens beside each of the containment devices controlled them, while several more near the doors were no doubt in charge of monitoring the overall room or triggering emergency alarms.

"What do you want us to do, Father? Shall we pull her free of the cell and restrain her?"

"No, no need for that," John said. He realized then that he'd been clenching his jaw without meaning to. "This needs to be fast and clean. I just want her to understand what's happening."

"We'll be right behind you. I'll do my best to look intimidating like a proper guardian should," Vallya swore, nodding firmly.

"I appreciate you all going along with this, I know it was rather sudden... before we do this, I want you both to know how grateful I am to have met you, and the rest of my new family."

"I think you mean 'made', not 'met'," Vallya said with a cheeky grin. John allowed a soft smile to touch his face, before steeling himself again and striding into the room proper.

John stepped up to the computer and glanced over the relatively simplistic interface; most of the buttons were labeled quite clearly with what they did, though the 'Purge' option did give him some pause. The ‘Interrogate’ option seemed the most likely to yield the results John wanted, so he pressed that one first.

The pod slowly ground into action, the top and bottom halves partially separating. A surprisingly quiet mechanical whirring filled the air as most of the front of the pod retracted into the upper portion, either into a compartment above the tube itself or otherwise deformed by a magical enchantment. Within the pod was revealed a sight that would have horrified John... if it wasn't so grimly satisfying to see.

Lady Arista was restrained within the confines of the tight "cell", half-hanging and half-resting against the wall of the capsule. Her hands were encompassed entirely up to the wrist, fully immersed in the solid metal of the upper section as if it had been poured directly around them, with her arms held at full length and stretched high above her head. Her legs were enveloped even further, all the way up to her upper-thighs, stopping only a few inches short of her waistline.

The woman's once confident features were reduced to a numbed, dull stare that was only slightly alerted by the motion around her. Her pink hair stood in near-shambles, ragged and clearly unwashed for potentially the entire year John had been gone. Her eyes were bloodshot, strained, and only hesitantly glanced up as her prison cell opened... and yet, all the same, the softest of smirks crossed her face when her eyes met John's.

"Newman... by god, I was starting to think the Albidians actually offed you," the woman croaked, her voice hoarse and strained. "Nobody would tell me what happened after the Albidians got into your world, not in any certain terms. Glad to see you're still alive, though... too many newcomers to the Abyss slaughtered before they get a chance to put their feet under them. How long have I been here? You look the same, but that doesn't mean much in the Abyss; the way you're looking at me is a lot different than the last time we met."

"You talk a lot. And you seem awfully casual to see me opening your cell for a bitch who betrayed me the last time we interacted," John spat, not addressing Arista's actual questions.

"I'm not going to be ashamed of what I did. I drew my line in the sand a long time ago, and I wasn't going to cross it."

"Yeah, I heard about that... Moira told me all about your line in the sand. Once the Albidians were out of the way she put an entire taskforce on what she called 'post-conflict evaluation'. Awfully fancy words for figuring out who fucked up, where, and why. But they uncovered enough. I heard all about your background."

"Not that hard to find. I didn't exactly go around shouting it from the rooftops... but it was public enough that it wasn't hard to find," Arista said, offering a gesture as close to a shrug as she could with her body restrained in the spread eagle pose. "You spend long enough fighting on the front lines as a **** and, eventually, you earn a name for yourself."

"Must have been pretty traumatic..." John said, crossing his arms slowly. "Bound by magic, **** to fight against your will, putting your life on the line for the people who kidnapped you and slaughtered your family."

There was a slight gleam in Arista's eyes, a dangerous one, but she kept her composure when she responded.

"Traumatic? You have no idea what I went through, and don't you pretend to, John Newman. I wasn't **** to fight against my will. I was **** to live against my will. When you're under that kind of enchantment, your every move is ****. Even the meals, even the sleep, the things you want to do – it's your body moving without any control, it's the ultimate disconnect. If you wake up in the middle of the night and have to take a piss, and they didn't tell you it was okay, you sit there and you piss yourself, because you don't have a goddamn choice."

Arista sighed, narrowing her eyes at a memory, though her gaze never left John's face.

"You aren't even really alive... you're watching someone else live your life through your own eyes. **** would have been a release, it would have been returning control in the next world when I had none left in this one. Imprisonment, ****, exection... I'd bear a thousand years of this before I would ever subject myself to another month of that hell. It wasn't a pleasant choice, but it was never a hard one to make."

"Is that why you aren't scared? Why you're acting so brave and confident even now, locked deep within the confines of the Order's dungeons? You know that they have their own moral guidelines, what they will and won't do to you in their custody. You feel safe here, is that it?"

"Safe? Never, not in this Abyss," Arista said with a dry laugh. "Safety is the feeling fools get just before the knife slides in."

"That's good," John noted, pulling his right arm behind his back. He accessed his inventory, felt the weight of his tool form within his palm. "Then this won't be much of a shock to you. You made a very, very big mistake in your calculations."

Arista's face hardened, and John saw an awareness in her eyes – the honed insight of a survivor and warrior with decades of experience. "Care to enlighten me?"

"Oh, I'll enlighten you... we'll have plenty of time to teach you the error of your ways," John whispered. His right hand clenched around the collar in his right hand as he brought it in front of him, almost caressing the vile object as he showed it to Arista for the first time. It was the **** collar that had once bound Willow Bianchi, until John had fried it off of her neck accidentally. He'd repaired it mostly out of curiosity and a benchmark for the kind of objects he could improve his Crafting skill to work with... but now it had found a use at last.

"...You're not serious," Arista said, glaring down at the collar. Her gaze never left it even as she continued to speak, honed on the offensive item as if it were calling out to her very soul. "Moira would never allow this to happen. No matter what I did – even if I were to break free of this cell at this moment and slaughter my way through the Manor, she would put me to **** before allowing this."

"I'm not Moira, and she doesn't even know that I'm here," John said, enjoying the fear slowly breaking across the normally stoic mercenary lord's face. "Nor will she know that you're gone... not until it's far too late. And you're in no position to resist."

"I'll find a way out of this," Arista swore, her eyes still not leaving the collar in his hand. "I swear on my life, on my soul, on my very existence. I will free myself of this, and-"

"You will be silent!"

John thrust his hand forward and slammed the collar into Arista's throat. The magical steel was little more than a slight half-circle on contact, but as soon as the device was planted against her windpipe, it went into action. Liquid metal flowed across her skin and solidified around her neck in a little over a second, and the moment that it finished, the collar lit up with a bright crimson light. Arista's eyes widened and her pupils dilated, her breath suddenly coming in ragged gasps as her vision fell in and out of focus.

John grabbed the now-limp woman by her jawline, forcing her head up and meeting her unfocused eyes with full intensity.

"You claim that you haven't been getting much information out of the Order, so allow me to enlighten you as quickly as possible," John snarled, eyes flashing with light while the shard in his chest seared with intensity.

"Your betrayal, your actions to save your own skin, cost me the love of my life. Your cooperation with those bastards took the thing I cared about most in this world from me. Between your righteous self-assuredness and your welcoming of ****, neither execution nor a Lifetime of Penance would be punishment enough for you. So I'm going to do what you did to me. I'm going to take from you what you cherish most in this world. In my case, it was Seras... for you, it's your freedom. I have to live the rest of my life without her. You'll live the rest of your life without free will... until such a time as I decide you've served enough of a sentence and end your life myself. That is the only fitting punishment for what you have done. That is the only way you can feel the same pain as that which you have inflicted on others. That is the justice I deliver to you.”

Despite Arista's dilated and dead eyes, John thought that he could see a flicker of something deep within them. Anger? Sadness? John didn't know. He wasn't even sure that he cared.

"So... here's your first order. I'm sending you to my world. You are to tell anyone that approaches you that I sent you, and that you are there only by my grace. You are to follow any orders that they give you that are not fatal, and make sure they know I've instructed you to do so."

Arista said nothing, could say nothing... but John felt the anger and hatred inside of her. Felt it as surely as he felt the satisfaction of finally delivering the last of his justice against those who had taken Seras from him.

"Now, begone."

John tapped his hand against Arista's chest and used Summoner's Warp to vanish her away, back into his own world. The capsule beeped a few times at the sudden disappearance of its captive, but no alarm bells sounded. John tapped the ’Release’ and Close’ buttons, just in case the device needed to re-verify an empty cell. The metallic capsule slid closed again and the incessant beeping halted after only a few more seconds.

"Vallya, I'm going to send you back. I would be almost disappointed if the others trusted Arista enough not to attack her, despite my instructions," John admitted. "Make sure they know what happened here. I don't want Arista to die... not yet. Not until we've made our journey in full."

"Of course. I'll make sure she is very well... 'taken care of' until you arrive," Vallya promised, a single fang gleaming as she smiled at John. John nodded at her and cast Summoner's Warp again to send the playful Kitsune back to his new world. The silence hung in the air after her disappearance. John stood there for a moment, basking in the emptiness until Sophia's hand gently rested on his shoulder.

"We should go if you wish to meet Etriyya's deadline, Father," Sophia said gently.

"I... I know," John said, sighing. He gently wrapped his fingers around Sophia's for a moment, sharing a long glance with the harpy. "That's the last one. We... we got all of them now. Every last one of them is dead or being punished. Do you think we did right by her?"

"I think we brought justice to her as best as anyone could ask. No trace of those who have wronged her lasts upon this realm, save what we allow by the grace of our mercy to serve us," Sophia swore, gently extending her wings and wrapping them around John's chest. "Had it been my fate to fall in her stead, I would be in awe of your efforts to honor my passing."

"I guess that's all we can ask," John said, sighing.