Just as Kain had finished dealing with the last of the four outlying Berlin Defense Forts felt a surge of mana coming from the nation of Ititlis. Old Kain knew all too well what this meant, and it definitely threw a spanner in the works. The Luminas Church had begun the process of summoning a new group of Heroes into the world, and they had begun this process several weeks before they were believed to be able to do this.

“Lord Wolfenstein….”

“Yes?”

Lord Wolfenstein had appeared behind Kain on the back of the Zombie Dragon.

“You said they would need months, not merely a few weeks. Are you playing both sides?”

LW sipped a martini and shook his head to signify that he was not a double agent.

“Then why are they being summoned and why was your intel so grossly incorrect?”

“I cannot claim to know everything, my good man. It was your actions that convinced the clergy to begin ahead of schedule, after all. Or are you going to say that turning a patch of earth into a nuke was not something they should have been concerned over? My intel was spot-on, but you just so happened to take the timetable for granted and altered the flow of events. If you had merely let your armies deal with the problem rather than directly interfering, then it may very well have taken them months to set things in order. Of course, the future is fluid, so my intel may or may not always be one hundred percent accurate all the time, just one hundred percent accurate most of the time.”

Kain sighed and accepted this. He admitted he was a bit to quick to let loose his own power, but in all fairness, he had not personally fought in a large battle in quite a while. He was way too quick to show off what he could do, but what was the fun of having this much power if he never got to use it?

“You know, sometimes not showing your hand gets you more gains than if you let everyone see your royal straight flush.”

With those words of wisdom, Lord Wolfenstein vanished, leaving Kain to try and deal with what was going on. Several of his armies had succeeded in their objectives, but some of them were still slugging it out with the walls and defenses of the festungs. The prototype Bombards were certainly useful to the armies that they were given to, and they had more than proved their usefulness against the walls of the fortress cities. Kain could not wait until he reached the next Tier of undead. Having undead cannons and mortars would be a massive boon to his military.

For now, however, he needed to focus on the present. If he managed to crush the capital city of the Knightly Junta before the Heroes were summoned, he would have one less potential problem to deal with. Kain relayed the situation to the forces under his and Erwin Krueger’s command and advised them to pick up the pace. Any army that had finished its job would be sent to support one that had not. Hopefully this would be enough to deal with the Knightly Junta and allow Krueger to establish a Darksol-friendly Teutonia.

The new nation would need a large amount of support to help it rebuild and recover from the war, but the Darksol Empire had resources in abundance and manpower to spare. Kain could afford to have his undead work as laborers to help speed recovery, just so long as they were the Tier 1 undead and not the more powerful Tier 2 undead. In fact, this gave him the perfect reason to keep the lesser undead around. After all, why should he waste able hands?

…

Kain’s five armies met up with the ones under the command of the Arch Necromancer Alistaira Crowley and the Leader of the Greater Teutonian Union State, Erwin Krueger. Together, they led fifteen groups of twenty-five formations, which was more than enough to deal with the final fortress that lay in front of them. What made matters even worse for the Teutonians of the Knightly Junta was the arrival of the five armies led by Alexis herself. Unlike in the Anglish Campaign, Alexis was not leading a force made up of undead beasts, but instead a force comprised solely of vampires from the Five Great Houses.

The only reason that the vampires didn’t die due to the sunlight was the massive spell that Alexis and Kain had unleashed which turned the sky above them into a roiling mass of black clouds that made the sun that could be barely seen behind them appear blood red. The day had been banished (albeit temporarily) and now was the time for the scions of the twilight to run wild. With twenty armies and one hundred formations arrayed against them, all led by the best and most powerful commanders Darksol had to offer, the fate of the Knightly Junta was set in stone.

As the artillery from the attackers fell onto Berlin, mages unleashed spells both at the walls and over them. The barrage of stone and metal balls, casks filled with fluids and magical projectiles hammered the walls for a good two days straight and only ceased when enough damage had been done. The undead forces of Darksol moved towards the city, followed shortly thereafter by the living humans that made up the bulk of Erwin Krueger’s military. Kain and Alexis had agreed to a small request made by Erwin Krueger regarding how to handle the capital city of Berlin.

Krueger and his men/ women would be the first to enter the city, which would give the Greater Teutonian Union State a propaganda victory and would make it appear that Darksol had merely given support to the fledgling nation. The reason the undead were advancing ahead of the living was due to the second request made by Krueger. The undead were unbothered by arrow fire and the like, so they would advance just up to the beginnings of the breaches and then stop and absorb some of the fire. As soon as the rain of arrows ceased, they would part and Krueger and his troops would rush through and secure a beachhead.

This was the plan, and it was executed flawlessly. Sure, the vampires were not exactly thrilled that they had to let these mortals claim the glory of setting foot inside the city first, but it was all under the orders of the Primogenitor, so they let it slide. Alexis had argued for her kin to be the second force to enter the city, following after Krueger and his troops. This was accepted and it was then decided that Alistaira would go in third, followed by Kain going in fourth.

As the living and the undead fought side by side to take the last bastion of the Knightly Junta, they were shocked to discover a separate force that rose up from within the city once they had entered it. The channels and waterways that divided the capitol of Berlin into pieces soon began to be filled with blood and gore as the forces of Atlanti’lyeh emerged from the murky depths. Soon enough the fighting inside Berlin had devolved into a slaughter from which there was no escape for the supporters of the Knightly Junta. There were only two ways out of the massacre, death or surrender, and those in the capital would never give up until they were dead.

None of the four surface-dwelling commanders had been aware that Zalga had already had her soldiers occupy the waterways in the city, thus making her armies the true first ones in. Zalga had planned to take the city before anyone else could, but never got around to doing it despite having her troops infiltrate the city over a week in advance. There were several reasons for why this was, but the biggest one was that she had a bigger problem to deal with than the city itself.

She had kept quiet about it, but there was a force on the Atlantic Ocean that was giving her trouble and diverting her attention. This force would prove to be a headache for Darksol in time, but for now it was solely the problem of Zalga and her nation, one she intended to keep hidden from the rest of Darksol for now. From across the ocean, a new threat was drawing near.