As the Darksol Empire’s forces descended upon the city of Moscow, the atmosphere in said city went from bad to worse. While certainly not a hub of religious devotion, Rusk was still a nation bound to the will of the Luminas Church. With the war dragging on and turning so heavily against the Confederacy, was it any wonder that people turned to God, or rather, the Goddess in this time of strife and woe? Even before the Greater Darksol Empire, a collection of nations that existed in a similar fashion to the greater USSR but with far less communism surrounded the city. There were already doomsayers and radical priests, both legitimate and illegitimate, preaching about the ‘end of days’ and all other manner of doom and gloom.

People needed to make sacrifices, both material and spiritual, to appease the Goddess Lumina and end this time of destruction and darkness, or so the doomsayers claimed. All were to give up their possessions, burn them in great bonfires and fast like never before. Mansions that could have sheltered hundreds were set alight even as the cold of night claimed its terrible toll on the unsheltered masses, but this was Lumina’s way of showing displeasure, nothing more. More shows of devotion needed to be made; more offerings and more sacrifices to the One God had to be given if there was to ever be a chance of Lumina’s holy and heavenly forces coming to save their sinful selves.

Needless to say, this was a futile effort. Their fictitious Goddess did not exist in the way that they thought it did. There was no ‘Creator God’ aside from Kain himself, or at least one half of the greater whole that he was. While not happy about it, Kain had begun to flex that Divine Authority and had been mucking about with the faith-based magic of the Church. He did not like partially taking on the role of that false goddess in any way, shape or form, but sometimes a man had to put on a kind of drag to make his enemies fall to ruin, just ask Cl**d Str*fe from FFVII.

But that was beside the point.

What mattered was that there was an ever more paranoid and ever more fanatical mob of rowdy serfs in a city that could neither feed nor shelter them. What that meant was that the entire city was a ticking time bomb that could, at any moment, result in the entirety of the populace within going on a religious warpath. Kain, while a villain to the core, did not want to have to kill off everyone in Rusk. No, despite what some may think, ruling a nation devoid of people is not a welcoming prospect to a man with World Domination on the mind. Sure, he could import people from other areas he controlled, but who the fuck would want to live in this dump of a place?

Rusk was cold all year round and was either a muddy mess or a frozen and snow-strewn hellscape depending on the season. Why would he want to torture his own people by having them live in such conditions, even with central air on his side and armies of undead to laboring to make things more livable? No, he would much rather keep alive those who had, by some miracle, become accustomed and partially immune to this place and its freakish conditions and have them live here. He could spare armies of skeletons and zombies to build infrastructure, homes and more, but despite being a tyrant he would not subject his own people to these god-awful conditions. He may be evil, but he wasn’t that evil.

So, he was left with a conundrum. He could invade and set of the metaphorical bomb that way, hopefully acting fast enough to cut the head off the snake before it bit both him and itself. He could try and wait it out, but that too would set off the bomb and may result in an even bloodier battle for both his enemies and his own side. What to do, what to do?

He had promised his children that they would get a chance to shine, but he did not want them to have to face fanatics who would likely ignore pain and misery to charge headlong into death. Facing that kind of unbreakable enemy was not something a child should have to do. He was pondering this problem when Raziel and Elizabeth, his twin children, came to him.

Their plot was risky, but if it worked then it could avoid the pointless eradication of potentially usable people.

…

“Do you think we can take the devils at their word?”

“They could have easily descended upon us a thousand times by now, each of those times we would be powerless to stop their genocide of us.”

“But why would the ruler of the dead and the damned desire peace? Surely, he would rather rule over our undead bodies than our living ones? It makes no sense why the devil would offer us such conditions. The devil is diametrically opposed to the Goddess, so why would he allow us to keep our faith if we surrender unconditionally?”

“And his offer of one final battle, the dead of which would be revived to their peak of life as if nothing had happened, seems like a devil’s deal for sure. He can only turn the dead into undead, why claim to be able resurrect them to life once again? Only the Goddess can do such a feat…”

The words of the people huddled in Moscow had once been full of blind devotion to their sad deity, but after a week and a half of messages being shouted into the city and food and clothes being air-dropped in as well, the edifice of faith had begun to show cracks. Humans are fickle creatures, capable of turning on each other and their institutions in times of strife and immediately turning their backs on whatever group that they were a part of when food was offered when they were starving and clothes were offered when they were naked. Add in that the brave few who had taken these ‘demonic gifts’ early were not twisted and misshapen as the doomsayers claimed they would be, and people began to slowly deradicalize of their own volition.

A few days later, and the words spoken over the loudspeakers began to ring even more true. The chilly summer air began to warm up, something that was considered impossible for the people of the People’s Union of Rusk. Summer temperatures soared to a record high, from the seasonal average of 41 degrees Fahrenheit merely a day ago to an unheard-of temperature of 71 degrees Fahrenheit! People had to ditch their normally heavy clothes and pick up the far less heavy clothing air-dropped by the devil’s creatures in order not to die of heatstroke, something that no one had ever expected would even be a concern.

A few days after that and the temperature had still not gone down, and what was more, the eternally cloudy skies parted and people were nearly blinded by their first sighting of the sun in their whole life. There was fear at first, but scripture had talked about the sun, and people quickly adjusted to the never-before-seen bright ball in the sky that rained down its warming glow. With each surprise, the people’s radical influencers lost more and more power. Finally, almost five weeks into the deradicalization process, the ‘leaders’ of the city came to bargain.

They wanted to surrender, and Kain was more than willing to accept that offer, but he wanted to show them that rising up would not only be an exercise in futility but that doing so even after his death would be a waste as well (not that he intended to die anytime soon). He had to give his children a chance to shine, and the ‘demonstration’ of their power would serve all the purposes he needed it to.