The courtroom was filled to near bursting by all necessary parties. In one corner sat the defendants, the elites and higher ups of the former Teutonian Knightly Junta, and in the other sat the prosecution. Every document that could be obtained and ever bit of recorded audio and video was collected and reviewed by the lawyers on both sides. Despite Erwin Krueger intending this to be a kangaroo court on the scale of the Nazi trail of the Valkyrie Conspiracy members, Darksol had, at the very least, given the defendants a competent legal team.

As much as this was a show trail, there had to be some fairness, otherwise Darksol would be just as twisted as the Knightly Junta had been. Sure, there was a snowball’s chance in hell that the majority of the defendants would walk away unscathed, but Kain had narrowed their selection of lawyers down to a handful, and those handful were damn good at their job. They knew they were fighting a battle against a near vertical slope, but lawyers have been able to get their clients out of worse situations both on Mortis and on Earth. A lawyer may sometimes be seen as borderline unethical or even corrupt, but their job is to use the law and as many interpretations of it and loopholes in it as they can to get their client out of trouble.

Lawyers are not intrinsically crooked, evil and deceitful, they just have a job to do and a good lawyer will use every legal and technically legal means to secure a courtroom victory for their client. Is the client truly guilty or innocent? Such things don’t matter, all that matters are that they do their best to win, regardless of who wronged who and how massive the wrongdoing was/ is.

So, with all that being said, it definitely came as a shock to Erwin Krueger when it was revealed that the group defending the defeated Knightly Junta was made up of some of the best lawyers in the whole of the nation. Now, while the odds were heavily against them, the defendants at least had some of the best of the best trying to keep them all from a terrible fate. Kain was willing to stack the deck heavily against the defeated Knightly Junta, but he was unwilling to have Darksol’s courts be tarnished by the same filth that covered the courts in some of the nations on Earth and Mortis.

Kain knew he was being a hypocrite, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to keep face while also giving his allies a chance to show the validity of their case. If the defendants could convince the jury that they were ‘innocent’ then it would certainly speak volumes about his own people and the power of a good legal team.

…

As you can guess, the worst part about defending raging racists and pseudo-Nazis was that they would occasionally (and by that, I mean quite often) speak up in the middle of court and when it was not their turn to do so. Of course, the mad ramblings and train of thought rants that some of the high command of the former Knightly Junta vomited out certainly did not help their case. This was especially the case when their rants and ravings made them openly confess to their own misdeeds and their intent to commit them again if possible, much to the dismay of the public defenders.

The work of everyone involved in the trials was not made easier by this, as even the prosecution had to ignore the overt confessions of guilt made by the defendants in most of their courtroom outbursts due to the fact that they were speaking out of order and thus preventing their confessions from being valid in the court. Instead, they had to use written confessions, recordings from interrogations and lots and lots of letters, memos, recorded speeches and other documents. The only slightly beneficial part about these rants was when the defendants were being cross-examined, but even that was a double edged sword.

…

This was not what Erwin Krueger had expected, and certainly not what he wanted. He had wanted this event to be more like a true show trial rather than a standard and valid one. He was quite irked at this turn of events, but Kain had made it so and challenging him was tantamount to suicide.

Yes, a guilty verdict was all but assured, but he had wanted the proceedings to be as one-sided as possible. Having some of the best public defenders in the whole of the Empire supporting the enemy in their moment of defeat seemed to him to be pure lunacy. The fact that this whole trial had gone on for a week instead of ending in a single decisive day was, in his eyes, quite the annoyance. There were Heroes that were being summoned at this very moment! The procedure to bring superhumans into the world was already underway, and they were dilly-dallying with making a ‘fair’ trial?! Utter foolishness!

His only solace came when the courts handed down their final verdict not even eight days after the trial began. Of the whole lot of them found guilty, more than thirty of them were sentenced to life behind bars, ten of them were given the death penalty and the rest were given lengthy prison sentences without parole. Not the result he had wanted, but it was at least something.

Only a few hours after the verdict came down, the magic that filled the world shuddered and shook as new arrivals made landfall on Mortis.

…

Deep within the holiest of holies for the Luminas Church, a group of clergymen focused the massive power that swirled around them into a single formation that was etched into the ground. Crystal pylons the jutted like obelisks at regular positions around the formation. The diamond-like gems mounted on the top of the ivory-white stone posts glowed with incredible light, illuminating the room in a brilliant silvery radiance as the etched formation on the floor shone with a dazzling blue luminosity.

As the ritual reached its climax, the formation on the floor seemed to shoot up like an intricately detailed wall of azure light and dyed the room in a sapphire glow. When the circular room was once again visible due to the light having faded, several humans lay in a heap in the center of the massive formation. The clergy were both overjoyed and taken aback. They were thrilled that they now had Heroes to fight for their behalf, but they were mortified that there were so few. Compared to the last (and first) summoning, the amount that they had obtained this time was almost humorously miniscule.

What made things even more annoying was that every single one of the New Heroes was between 14 to 18 years old. They had wanted adults, and preferably adults who knew how to fight. Raising a bunch of teenagers was not their ideal situation. The New Heroes would have to be schooled in the workings of the world, combat and have their previous religious affiliations or lack thereof wiped from them (if possible).

The tl;dr was that they wanted suitable pawns of a suitable number rather than what they got.

Still, they were the Heroes sent by the Goddess Lumina, so they had to treat hem with all due reverence and respect. The best they could hope for was that they would be easily re-educated and would actually manage to win the war for them. To paraphrase a line from a movie about a ‘mercenary with a mouth’; They did not want superheroes, they wanted super slaves.

Having arrived naked into Mortis, ‘handsome’ men and ‘beautiful’ women carried the unconscious summoned Heroes into a room where they were dressed and put in beds. When they awoke, they would be properly educated and, if necessary, re-educated. A mix of charm spells, charisma and demagoguery could work wonders and the Church had existed for the centuries needed to perfect this craft.

As the Heroes slumbered and the two remaining nations of the Luminas Confederacy mobilized, Darksol and its subject nations geared up for a final, decisive conflict. The war to take and convert Teutonia was over, and now the War for Europa was getting started.