After all these years of violence and conflict, the rulers of the world had been limited to five different nations, four of them religious and us, the ones that appeared most like a cult of us all… Which is my personal opinion. According to the people I had gathered to help me govern they said that we were the least religious group of them all and we were only creating culture for our citizens.

I voiced my opinion less and less, at first because I trusted on the individuals that I had chosen; they were the best in their areas, after all, but soon there was a lack of new ideas, everyone praising what the others did with no critical thinking which was the basis of the science we so profoundly defended…

At least our society was getting smarter, and more people could do harder jobs, I told myself to see the positive side of things, even though we could have probably been better. Though when a citizen said something against the government and their actions, they were taken to the reformation centers I had talked about before.

Migration had once again been closed, but that wasn’t only us, no one wanted the possibility of letting more spies enter their countries and after so many years it was unlikely that someone wanted to change their beliefs when they were so inculcated into everyone.

And if there was a chance to lose citizens, no one in their right mind would let them exit and inform another country how they were doing, it could spell their doom if they managed to learn too much about themselves. But everyone had spies everywhere at the same time, though communication to their headquarters had turned harder with the ban on transport between countries.

For Petrió it wasn’t so hard, because one of their investigations had turned fructiferous and long-distance communication was made possible with magic. But the spies lived dangerous lives as any doubts of them being one meant being sent to a similar center as the ones Petrió had created within his country.

Even though there were five of us governments, the lands weren’t divided equally neither by size, number of cities or quality of the land. For example, we had less than 800 cities under us, but a lot of our land was farmable, which was good, but on the other hand we had few minerals which helped us create the stones to store mana.

But I knew that this fragile balance we had had for about two years wasn’t going to last, because I knew that the gods wanted to rule the whole continent due to them winning something after doing that. Perhaps our world would end if they did so, this might just be a game for them. But I wouldn’t let them defeat us mortals. Yes, they could die within this plane, but as soon as they did, they revived on their previous plane of existence and could keep observing the continent in which we lived on.

Whatever they had promised to each other must’ve been quite the big deal for them to enact such atrocities to each other, but maybe they had lived for so long that it was only this way how they could have fun, having exhausted the normal ways to do so.

Anyway, I know that my body won’t last very long, as my sister has already started to experience some of the illnesses that us Rakshnurians start to experience as we get older. I was still healthy, but I wouldn’t sit and wait for me to die, I wanted to finish having a positive impact on the world rather than a negative one and even though I have done wrong things I hope that with this biography of sorts, you understand that sometimes there is no right decision. I could have done some things differently, yes, but there would’ve been other consequences that might’ve been worse.

But what is done is done, so instead of mulling over my previous decisions I have decided to focus on the future and how I can hopefully improve it. I did start a separate investigation center that would hopefully not fall into the same positive feedback loops of the others where no science was made and instead everyone praised each other’s work, not worrying about the quality of the investigation, importance of the result and veracity of the facts.

I also tried to convince some cities that there was a better way to do things, but my party members made sure that as few people as possible managed to attend my rallies. I felt like I was fighting everyone, both from the other side but also from my side.

How could I improve the world when I didn’t manage to get to anyone? That question plagued me as I tried harder and harder to spread my improved ideals. And I just needed to get to people, I hoped that that would be enough to spark a curiosity, a doubt, anything in their minds and start a wider change in the world.

So as the leader of my country I commented to all other governments that I knew what they were doing, about their bet and about their goal on this continent, so I offered them to finish it all with one decisive battle, at the place where all our borders met, not because it was a coincidence, but because it was the scar of the continent I had created and no one wanted that territory, but they also wouldn’t let others take it.

It wasn’t sure that everyone would come, so in order to make such an event happen, I suggested that whoever didn’t attend would be taken out of the competition the gods were participating in. In order to gain their trust a bit, he let them communicate with each other through the letters that had magic imbued within them, the same that he had used to communicate with his spies or troops.

Of course, though, he wasn’t a fool, and the letters would explode if any sort of magic was inserted into them, which was a part of learning each other’s spells. This was written on the letter, so if one of them suffered from the explosion it wouldn’t be his responsibility.

He also offered them an alliance against any members that didn’t present themselves to the meeting, which he hoped would attract them more than stop them from coming. If his army was the only one that presented itself, it’d be quite shameful.

The date of the final battle was three months from then and even though he wanted to prepare his full army to go to the dead zone of the continent, he knew that he couldn’t leave his cities completely undefended. He was also contacted multiple times throughout these months, be it for questions of the rules of this event, about what others had told him and to confirm their presence in the event.

That day all five great armies were present, and one could see that everyone had improved the equipment of their soldiers since the last major war. Before we started fighting, I started communicating with all the five other leaders at the same time to agree on the final details and sign a soul-binding ruleset that we had to keep, otherwise we’d die. In my case it wasn’t so bad, because I was nearing my end, but the gods definitely didn’t want to lose that way so deep within the game.

But if I did commit a trap, I knew that all four of them would first gang up on my people before returning to their usual battle and finding out who won their little game. We still had a day before the event started and everyone was nervous. We were observing the others to see if we could counter their weapons or find out their strategies somehow, but it didn’t work.

As the sun began to set, I went into my tent and prepared the message I wanted to be my last. I was going to tell it just before the sun came out, as our battle would start when the light covered all of our camps, but the others had different plans.

Using trickery, they lit up the environment at midnight by creating enough fire and started a surprise attack at midnight. It took some resources from them, but they gained an advantage over everyone else which for them was worthwhile.

I was woken up by some soldiers that warned me it was dangerous before going outside and looking at the chaos that had ensued. Our troops had managed to cut losses as our encampment was defended fairly well, though the outer tents caught on fire quickly and some of our men died there.