“Ok, so I guess I just have to absorb all the Darkness from these containers? Shouldn’t be too hard, I did absorb the Bloodwell after all.” James said.

“Yeah but this is basically raw dark energy. It’s very hard to use, much less directly absorb into yourself.” Lunaris replied. “It can corrupt your mind, and it causes extreme pain! …which isn’t a problem for you, I suppose.” Lunaris smiled. James’s reckless stunts had come with great rewards, but also great pain. The fact that he didn’t feel pain anymore was even more of a relief for Lunaris and Helios than for James himself.

“As an additional challenge, we need to bring this energy back to Hedonia.” Helios added. “So you can’t just absorb it the way you usually do, which transforms it and adds it into your own mana pool. You have to actually keep it as raw energy so we can actually use the full amount, we need as much of it as we can get.”

James nodded as he stared at the giant containers full of energy. But now that he was actually looking at all this energy, it felt like a waste to simply take it and dump it elsewhere.

“How much of the total energy do you think is lost when you absorb it and take it for yourself?” James asked.

“Well, it’s a hard thing to estimate, but if I were to just throw a number out there, I’d say around 5% remains and is added to your total energy and power.” Lunaris said as she looked at him curiously. “But why do you ask? You know we need it for Hedonia, it would be a huge waste to absorb it.”

“What if I did absorb it though?” James asked with a devilish smile. “All it means is that we’d need to hit more Stygian cities to get more energy. And what if I just keep absorbing it? If we just hit 40 cities instead of 2, then we’ll still have all the energy we need, but instead of it being energy we’ll get to use only once, it can permanently become part of my power!”

Even though Helios and Lunaris were used to his craziness, and they hardly ever got surprised by it anymore, they were now both staring at him with their mouths open.

It took minutes for them to process what they had heard. “40 cities? Are you all right, did you hit your head or something?” Lunaris actually put her hand on his head and began pouring some healing into it. She was genuinely concerned.

Helios, who was usually more willing to support James’s reckless ideas, was flabbergasted as well. “Brother, forty cities is a crazy number! Just weeks ago we had so much trouble dealing with Garantep and his city, and now you want to take on forty of them? That’s as crazy as saying we should go fight the sun or something. You’re not making any sense!”

“Yeah, Garantep was tough. But look how much easier it was this time. And now I leveled up even more, so it’ll keep getting easier! We just have to make sure we target the weakest cities from Garantep’s memories. And then I can just gobble up their energy reserves just like that. Getting even more powerful with each city we destroy.”

“But you’re forgetting that we can’t just use our own energy to power up huge projects like the one Hedonia is undertaking right now.” Lunaris added. “Otherwise we could just gather every mage at Hedonia and pour as much into it as we can. The energy needs to be pure and homogenous, so if we were to use a mix of your energy and some other, instead of the raw one stored here, then we’d also need to purify that mix, which would take a lot more time.”

“Doesn’t sound like a problem to me. So what you’re saying is that the energy would need to be all from one person?” James asked with the same devilish smile. “Obviously, that won’t be a problem once I absorb the energy from 40 Stygian cities. I’ll just fuel it up all by myself, no need to mix it with anything.”

“That … is true, theoretically.” Lunaris sighed. She thought her days of sighing and nagging were over, but she didn’t expect James’s insanity to go up even more than her tolerance to it. “I guess I didn’t realize it because of just how insane a proposition it is, but I suppose it could work. Theoretically, of course. I mean, the logic is sound on paper, it would of course be a great thing to not only destroy 40 cities worth agents, to not only steal their energy, but to also actually use it to make yourself stronger. But I can’t believe you’re not hearing how insane that is. I don’t understand how you could even think of it, it’s nonsensical.” Lunaris shook her head and sighed again.

“Hey, minutes ago I didn’t think that I could just kill the leader of this city in one hit. And yet I did. It seems that beating Garantep, leveling up and gaining my powers back from the curse made me a lot more powerful than I realized. So I say let’s snowball this advantage of ours, let’s pillage and kill every city we can get to!”

“But brother, doing this to one city is already a huge event. Their weakest cities don’t have great protection for now, except for the residents themselves. But doing this to dozens of cities will definitely attract the wrath of the kind of enemies we can’t possibly deal with.”

“All I’m hearing is that it’s a win-win. We get to become much more powerful, and if a big shot agent does come to deal with whoever is responsible for destroying their weakest cities, then at least he’s not fighting in the war.” James answered.

“Yeah, he wouldn’t be fighting in the war cause he’d be there killing us.” Lunairs replied. “How is that a good plan?”

“Then we just have to destroy 40 cities before anybody really powerful shows up. Well, it doesn’t even have to be 40, cause it’s not like I don’t have a lot of mana already. But it’s such a nice, even number.” James answered with a grin. “Also, it’s not like they’ll send the biggest kahuna right away. I’m sure they’ll send a big bad agent after us, but by the time they arrive, I’ll already be way stronger than I already am. All I have to do is absorb the energy, and my power will grow exponentially. I’ll kill whoever is sent after us, and by the time they send another, even stronger person, we’ll be long gone! Easy-peasy. The real crime would be not doing this. How could we let all this energy go to waste, to be used in their war, when I could take it all for myself?”

They stared at him with their mouths open again.

“What do you mean before anybody finds out?! You’re saying that as if destroying a city takes as long as taking a trip to the store. And even taking 40 trips to the store before anybody finding out is already an impossible task! This whole plan is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, it’s like you’ve forgotten all the lessons you’ve learned over the past year!” Lunaris tried to reason with the madman. She had been trying so hard to be a more easy-going person, but James had once again turned her into a worried, nagging mess.

However, the more insane James was being, the more Helios was getting into it. His fists were clenched, and his eyes had turned into fire.

“Ok, brother. I’m in!”

Lunaris sighed again, but she knew she couldn’t argue with the hotheads. After all, all their risky and insane gambits had paid off so far. “All right, all right. I’ll agree to it. Without me, you’d just end up losing your limbs within a few minutes. But I still think it’s your craziest idea yet, and that’s saying something.”