Joseph IV

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Joseph slumped onto his bed, unwinding after the tense morning he’d had.

He’d been standing on the walls the whole time Kaiden had been out there, squinting out at the small figures in the distance. He’d burned through every emotion he’d ever experienced during that time, from tense anticipation, to sheer terror when the new group of people arrived, to relief when Kaiden finally managed to get back to the walls, to pride when he realized they’d managed to capture a God-King after all.

He’d sent the survivors to go relax and unwind—only half had survived, holy shit that was worse than he’d expected—and put some people on restraining the captured Queen. He’d then brought Kaiden back to their home to explain what happened down there, like how they succeeded and more importantly, what went wrong.

And to think, the day had only just started. Pretty soon he’d need to go deal with the prisoner, and then who knows what else.

“So, after that, Domenic just goes off. Full on villainous monologue,” Kaiden waves his arms around, dramatically retelling his grand escape back to the village. “It was actually kind of funny. I mean, at the time, I was shitting myself. But looking back on it, it was pretty ridiculous.”

“Did he say anything important?” Joseph asked, bringing his hand to his chin in thought. “If it really was a villain’s monologue, then he’d have probably let loose some important information that could lead to his downfall.”

Kaiden blinked, before his eyes lit up. “That’s a good point!” he exclaimed. “Hold on, give me a moment to think. I wasn’t actually paying much attention at the time. Um…”

Joseph left him to that, turning to his own thoughts about what he’d learned about the recent battle.

It was bad. They’d won, sure, but it was more due to luck than any true skill on their part. They’d been played from the start—it was only due to Domenic’s own arrogance that Kaiden had managed to survive. If the other King had just brought his whole army over from the get-go, there was no way they would have won. Even then, the casualties they took were atrocious—five people out of their hundred or so fighters might not have sounded like a lot, but that was a good 5% of their population irrevocably gone.

Right now they’d be able to spin this as a victory, but a few more ‘victories’ like that and they’d be doomed.

“I think I’ve got it!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “When he was ranting, he said something about how our plan was ‘doomed from the start,’ or something like that. But the reason was that he said he didn’t bring his ‘one weakness’ with him!”

“His one weakness,” Joseph muttered. “Well, he obviously meant our orbs. But not bringing it with him… are you saying you think he left it back in his village?”

“I mean, it makes sense, right? Why bring the one thing that could kill you to the place people are trying to kill you at? Why not just leave it at home, where it’s safe?”

Joseph rolled the thought around in his head for a bit. “You aren’t wrong… but we don’t know if you’re right either. Just this morning we learned the issue with assuming things. Sure, it sounds logical, but is it? We can’t know for certain.”

Kaiden frowned, calming down a bit. “Well… yeah, I guess you’re right about that. But if we could… don’t you think it would be better to capture that over him personally? Like, if we had his soul, we could force him to do anything. And if that doesn’t work we could, uh… we could… fuck…”

“Kaiden?” Joseph asked, leaning forward in worry. “Kaiden, are you all right?”

“…I think…” he whispered, “I think I killed someone….”

“…ah.” And really, what could you say to that?

“I don’t… I stabbed him… and even if I didn’t, I gave the order, didn’t I?! And those people who died under my command! I killed them, I killed all those people!”

Joseph stared wide eyed at the kid as he broke down crying. On instinct he moved next to him, wrapping him in a hug. “It’s okay, kid, it’s okay,” he muttered to him. “It’s going to be fine.”

“But it’s not! They’re dead!”

“And it wasn’t your fault. Those people were trying to kill you first—if they didn’t want to die, they shouldn’t have attacked you in the first place. And those people didn’t die under your command—they died under mine. Remember that. I was responsible for them, not you. The only person you were responsible for was yourself.”

“I… I don’t…”

“Hey! Hey. Look at me,” he told the kid, tilting his head up to look him in the eyes. “Repeat after me. ‘The only person I was responsible for was myself.’”

“The… the only person I was responsible for was me.”

“Good. Now, I know it’s hard. This won’t be the end of it—these kinds of things never end so quickly. But I want you to come to me if you have any problems, alright? I’m here to talk to you if you need me, all right?”

“…right.”

“Good. Now, you’ve had a long day. You’re stressed, and you’re not thinking straight. I want you to lay down and try to get some sleep, all right? Just try and relax for the rest of today, we can finish talking about this later.” He told him calmly, slowly moved Kaiden down onto the bed, laying him down.

After taking another second to make sure he was fine, he stood up, making his way out of the room. “If you need anything, just call for someone. You are still their leader, after all—they won’t deny you anything. If you need me again, just tell them to come get me, and I’ll be here in a second.”

“…Hey, Joseph?”

The older man paused at the door, turning back to look at him. “Yeah kid?”

“…I don’t think I’m cut out to be a king.”

Joseph paused, before sighing lightly. Under his breath, too quiet for Kaiden to hear, he muttered, “Yeah, me neither.”

--

Joseph came up to the meeting house. They’d decided to convert the building into a temporary prison, since it was the only building nobody currently lived in. Before he went in, he squinted at the red sun looming above the doorframe.

For some reason, it felt different now. Maybe that was just the difference between a prison and a palace. Maybe he was just tired.

Entering the small building, Joseph took in their prisoner. An Asian women, with short black hair in a bob cut. She had an ageless look about her, making it difficult to tell how old she was—she could have been anywhere from twenty to forty.

They’d had to get creative when restraining her—when breaking your bones, or even cutting off limbs was only temporary, getting out of restraints became much easier. So they’d gone all out, creating an absolutely bizarre restraint (that probably violated at least three laws back home). They’d made a sort of table with a hole cut in the middle of it. They’d stuck her head through the hole, making her look like a decapitated head on top of a table, making her look like some sort of cartoon gag. Her arms were stretched to both sides, tied to the ‘legs’ of the table, and her legs were both tied together and to the floor, stopping them from moving at all.

It was uncomfortable enough to look at—he didn’t even want to think about how she was feeling right now.

She started as he came in, turning her head up to glare at him. “So, you’ve finally come,” she growled at him. “I was wondering what was taking so long. Tell me, what do you plan to do? Torture me? It’s not like you can kill me, after all. Well, whatever you do, I won’t talk!”

“You’re skipping a couple steps in there,” Joseph said dryly. “No. For now, I just want to chat.”

“Ha!” she scoffed. “Like I’d believe that. The only reason you haven’t killed me yet is because you can’t—so you’ve resorted to this instead.”

“…You’re pretty murder happy, aren’t you?” he asked dryly. “Well, you’re wrong about that, I’m just here to chat. Personally, I’d like to think we’re both reasonable human beings, though now I’m becoming less and less sure of that,” he shrugged, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of her. “Everyone’s got a reason for doing something, after all. So, what’s yours?”

“…Mine?”

“Yes, yours,” he replied patiently. “I want to know why you attacked us—why you attacked all those other people, as well. Why did you decide to attack people? Why did you decide to kill people?”

She narrowed his eyes at him. “I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

“Then we won’t get anywhere,” he shrugged. “I’m not your therapist—I’m your captor. But I don’t have to be. I don’t need to hurt you anymore—we could instead make a deal. But before we agree to anything, I want to know who I’m dealing with. I want to know if I could trust the person in front of me to follow through on their end, or if I would be stabbed in the back the second I release you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, glaring in a way that might have been terrifying if she wasn’t completely at his mercy. Finally, she huffed out a breath. “Fine,” she hissed. “I attacked you because it was logical.”

“Logical?”

“Yes. In this world, there are only two options—kill or be killed. We’re in a competition after all, and the losers die. I am not going to be one of those losers.”

“That sounds like something a psychopath would say.”

“But it’s not wrong, is it? After all, you’ve already been attacked by two other people—if it weren’t for these walls, you’d have been dead weeks ago.”

“And yet I do have these walls,” he raised an eyebrow at her. “And I managed to stall out two separate armies for weeks. And now I’ve captured the leader of one of those armies. And she’s still alive.”

“Considering where we are right now, I doubt that was by choice.”

“Considering you’re immortal, I doubt anything less would be able to hold you. Also, we don’t have a proper prison—we threw this together on the fly.”

“I could tell.”

“We’ve gotten off topic,” he waved his hand. “You say it was logical to attack me. But personally, I think it would have been more logical to talk first. After all, even if we have to kill each other, ten people can still survive in the end. There’s nothing wrong with gaining allies.”

If it was possible, the woman scowled even harder. “You think I didn’t try that? I owned a business back on Earth—I understand the power of connections more than anything! But she shunned me! She accepted my offer, and then stabbed me in the back! That’s when I realized—in this world, it’s kill or be killed! You have no allies, no friends, no lovers, nothing!”

“Well, that person sounds like a bitch,” Joseph hummed, drumming his fingers on his knee, deciding not to touch that topic with a ten-foot pole. “But considering you’re here now, I’m going to assume she’s long dead.”

“She is.”

The two of them fell into silence for a minute. Joseph trying to figure out what to say next, Meixiu lost in the past.

“…Nothing I can say will gain your trust,” Joseph told her calmly. “And after that, nothing you say can gain my trust. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work together.”

“Do you even listen?” she scowled. “I will not fall for some pretty words again.”

“These aren’t pretty words,” he told her bluntly. “These are facts. I want your army gone. You want to survive. I want to survive. I’m pretty sure neither of us want to deal with Domenic, at least not in the long run. So, what would you be willing to do to be free?”

“Nothing,” she scowled at him. “Nothing, because soon enough, my army will break through your walls, and I will kill you.”

“Bold words from the woman who looks like a Halloween decoration.”

“It is the truth!”

“I’ve spent the last two weeks fending off one army—it’s not going to be that much more difficult to fend off another, especially when they just lost their leader.”

“I have generals that would take control. Then they’ll destroy you utterly.”

“I see, I see,” Joseph nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a good point. But I have a question for you—will they take control of the army in your name, or in their names?”

Meixiu went silent.

“I mean, generals taking control of their armies from their leaders is pretty common throughout history. Especially when those armies are made up of people that have only been ruled for a month. How long do you think it’ll take? What if I told them you were dead? I somehow doubt they wanted to be the ones attacking us, especially when they’ve been doing nothing but starving outside some walls all this time. Perhaps I could bargain with them? Get them to go away, in exchange for peace? How many of them do you think would accept?”

“They would not,” she hissed at him, eyes blazing.

“How certain are you of that?”

With clenched teeth, she ground out, “They. Would. Not.”

Joseph smiled, finally glad they were getting somewhere. “See, this is why diplomacy is important—you have no allies to bail you out, and no army to save you.”

“Neither do you!”

“And yet I’m not the one in chains,” he countered. “My deal is actually fairly simple. You see, there’s an army sitting outside our gates; not the one you brought, the other one. And I’d like to get rid of it. So, here’s my deal. You surrender control of your army to me, and in exchange you get to live.”

“You’d make me your slave!?”

“Why does your mind always go to the worst places!?” he exclaimed incredulously. “No, you idiot, I’m going to make you my vassal. You pay me tax, you give me your army, and you get to live and even stay as a ruler of your people. Like any other vassal in history.”

“How could I trust you?” she asked him incredulously. “You’ll just throw me away once I’m no longer useful, or once a better ally comes around! Nothing you say is the truth!”

“I accepted an ally I barely knew into my home, taking on the burden of fighting their war for them, and proceeded to do everything in my power to keep them alive, despite all logical reasoning saying I should have left them out to dry a long time ago. If you become my ally, I will fight with you to the bitter end. This, I swear upon my life.”

The Queen was silent, staring down at him. Before finally—“I need some time to think.”

“I don’t know how much time I could give you.”

“Then you won’t get an answer. I need time to think.”

Joseph gave her a good, long look, before sighing. “All right,” he got up, shaking out the numbness in his legs. “I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll talk more then.”

She stayed silent, simply staring at him.

And with that, he left the ‘prison,’ leaving the Queen alone once more.

--

Later that afternoon, Joseph climbed up onto the walls, gathering more reports from his sentries. He got up next to one of the guards, a young man named Jabari, with a short afro and the beginnings of a goatee.

“How’s it been up here? Has anyone tried attacking recently?” he asked, scanning their surroundings.

The sentry grunted. “They’ve tried to attack a couple of times, but we’ve managed to repel them. They charge, and then we kill a couple of them and they back off. Rinse and repeat. They’re more aggressive today than before, but it’s not a huge deal. They’re still too wary of getting close.”

Joseph hummed, staring down at the destroyed farms below. Any infrastructure had long since been ravaged, and any remaining yields stolen by the attackers. A couple bodies were scattered across, their blood soaking into the fields.

Joseph blinked in surprise, as suddenly a man broke away from Meixiu’s main camp, making his way closer.

“Hey,” he said, getting Jabari’s attention. “Down there, someone’s approaching. Do you think they’ve sent someone to talk?”

The soldier squinted down the walls, before leaning back with a grunt. “No, that’s just the corpse-guy. They send him out after they retreat to bring back their fallen. He hasn’t been doing anything else, so we’ve been letting him do it.”

“Hm,” Joseph hummed, squinting down at corpse-guy. “…Look, I appreciate the sentiment and all, but I feel that’s something you should have told me about earlier.”

The younger man turned to his king, narrowing his eyes at him. “So, you’re saying we should just leave their corpses to rot? They deserve their funeral rights as much as any of us!”

“That’s not what I meant,” Joseph shook his head, backpedaling. “If he’s just bringing the bodies back home, then that’s fine. I mean that I want you to tell me about that beforehand—I shouldn’t be learning about something like this after it’s already been happening for a while. How many people actually know he’s doing this?”

“…Just me and Maat, I think.”

“Just you two?” Joseph asked, raising an eyebrow. “If you two are the only ones who know, that means he’s been doing this at the same time every day. Meaning he’s probably consciously trying to make sure as few people see him acting as possible.”

The other man now began to look uncomfortable, causing the King to sigh.

“Look,” he said, grabbing the man’s shoulder. “I trust your judgement—that’s why I put you up here in the first place, you know. But the King cannot trust anyone’s judgement, not even his own. That’s why I ask all of you to report everything you see to me, if not one of our other leaders. That way we always have multiple perspectives on things—if I had seen that man, I probably would have shot him. Kaiden might have thought he was here to bargain, and invite him to the village. And you just let him go about his business. And maybe that’s the right answer, and will make those people over there like us more, making them more willing to deal with us. Or maybe he’s planning something, and you’re giving him the time he needs to pull it off. That’s why we need more than one person to look at these things—it allows us to think about it from multiple angles, and figure out a solution to all our problems. Do you understand me?”

“…Aye,” the soldier grumbled. “Aye, I understand, no need to lecture me. Gods, I feel like I’m a brat again when you do that.”

“Ah, sorry,” Joseph chuckled, awkwardly, rubbing his forehead. “It’s just I force of habit, I suppose—I had kids of my own, before, and now when I see anyone so much younger than me, I tend to treat them the same way.”

Moise turned to look at him in shock. “You have children!?”

“Had,” he winced, feelings he’d been repressing suddenly rearing back with a vengeance. “I have no way to talk to them anymore. I don’t—I’d divorced their mother a couple years ago, and she got custody, so they’re used to not seeing me much anymore—and they’ve got a new father now, and he seems to love them as much as I did, but—I mean, Matt’s birthday was coming up, and I was gonna get him that new Pokémon game he wanted—and Abby’s just lost another tooth, and it made her smile… and Skyler’s, he asked me for—for advice on asking out that girl he likes—and… and it…”

He choked, unable to say anymore. He felt tears bursting from his eyes, as a dam he’d been desperately trying not to acknowledge existed burst open. He sobbed, hugging himself as he bent over, barely able to stay standing. He couldn’t say anything, couldn’t stop, couldn’t do anything but sob uncontrollably.

The two of them stood there for a while, a King crying over what had been lost, and a soldier who was so out of his depth.

“Pharaoh, I…” Jabari trailed off, making to reach for him.

“Nope, I’m good!” Joseph yelped, forcing a grin onto his face. With the tear tracks and red eyes, it didn’t look the slightest bit real. He choked out one more sob before forcing all those emotions back into the depths of his mind. “Just a bit of a cry—everyone needs one now and again!” he tried to force out a chuckle, but it came out more as a wheeze.

“I… uh…”

“Hey, look, don’t worry about it. It’s fine, everything’s fine, okay?” It was impossible to tell who Joseph was trying to soothe with those words.

“…If you say so, Pharaoh.” The younger man muttered, unsure what else to say.

“And, uh, hey, please don’t tell anyone what just happened. The King’s got to be the strong, composed leader in the middle of a crisis. The last thing anyone needs is to know their leader broke down crying, all right? There’s some extra rations in it for you if you do!”

“…As you say, Pharaoh.”

“Good—no. Thank you. And, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to see me like this.”

He closed his eyes, forcing his body back under control. He let out a sigh. ‘Nobody should have.’

9,953 God-Kings Remaining