All eyes were on the two forces that opposed each other. On one side were the proxies for the surrendered city of Moscow, on the other were two children barely below the age of six. The proxy army was comprised of exact doubles of the people from the city, all of the Flesh Golems lovingly handcrafted by Zero Noir. They were armed with pitchforks, spears and other such mass-production weapons and covered in a mix of padded cloth and studded leather armor, a feature that the citizens of the surrendered city thought to be a ludicrous expense.

A flare was shot into the sky to announce the beginning of the proxy battle, a skirmish designed to display to the Muscovites the sheer difference between their own capabilities and those of Darksol’s masters. Elizabeth was the first of the twins to move, aiming her bow to the sky and notching a single arrow withdrawn from the now ‘empty’ quiver. With a fluid motion fit more for an artist than a warrior, she let the single arrow fly. The shaft arced up high into the air, at which point something miraculous occurred. The arrow split into two equally sized ones, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then more and more and more until the single feathered messenger had turned into a cloud of death that blotted out the sun.

As the rain of death began to descend, the flesh golems continued to run headlong towards the twins, heedless to the hail about to fall upon them. These flesh golems were made to be exactly like a normal human and have exactly the same weaknesses and durability as one, and as the tempest of arrows fell upon the mass of meaty constructs, even their ‘expensive’ armor could not save them. The storm of arrows fell as a mighty tidal wave upon a child’s sandcastle, utterly obliterating the golems and drowning them under a deluge of shafts.

But the arrows did not claim the ‘lives’ of all the golems. Some were ‘lucky’ enough to emerge with only a few shafts in various places and some fewer still were very lucky and were completely unharmed. They charged forwards towards the twins, either riding the high of adrenaline from the pain or simply running forward as they were made to do. It was when they were but a few dozen meters away that Raziel stepped forth.

He held his oversized scroll in his hands and with a wave of it a force of spectral warriors armed with equally as ephemeral spears appeared from nothing in front of the child and charged forth to meet the oncoming mob. The ghostly spearmen crashed into the flesh golems and as if they were real and physical people that just so happened to have the same power as a certain Mutant, and they plowed through the mob like they were barely there at all.

With another wave of the oversized scroll, a dozen or so spectral Spartan look-alikes appeared and began to advance behind their large circular shields while thrusting their own spears with ever step. Another wave of the scroll saw a small formation of ghostly archers appear and unleash several volleys of arrows into the flesh golems, after which both children advanced at a rapid speed and with their weapons drawn began to carve the remaining flesh golems apart.

It was barely even half an hour after the flare had been fired that the proxy battle came to an end with an overwhelmingly clear victor. Kain’s children had not a scratch on them and the flesh golems, on the other hand, were completely defeated down to the last ‘man’. As the Muscovites took stock of the sight they had seen, they realized just how fortunate they had been that cooler, saner and more survival-oriented heads had prevailed. They would not have stood a ghost of a chance against these two, and heaven forbid they send in the rest of the military! That was to say nothing of the power that their far older parent likely had at his back, and if they had called the Crimson Empress in as well….

“We will never rise against you, so please, we beg of you, do not bring ruin to our land. We will turn our backs on the Goddess, so please do not let your wrath fall upon us.”

A single man offered up his plea to Kain, but Kain had already made a deal with them, and he intended to keep it.

“I offered you generous terms for surrender, and you accepted them. I would be unnecessarily cruel to alter the terms of our deal here and now, therefore our deal still stands. I expect that there will be conflict over the altered dogma, but that is fine. I also expect that there will be conflict over the undead that will arrive here and begin their work, but in time you will see the merits of how we do things. Of course, we would be fools to assume that Rusk can be tamed in the same way as other places. You have your own unique culture that must be added to the melting pot, and I have faith that, in time, all will see that what we bring is not oblivion and darkness but prosperity and progress.”

Kain turned to the man who had begged him for mercy.

“Make no mistake, friend; you and yours will be long remembered not as villains who sold out your own but as heroes who took a gamble and came out on top. Soon enough you will all have full bellies, clothes on your backs and rooves over your heads, not to mention a safety net in times of struggle and a government that does not force you to suffer. I may be Abominable, I may be Evil, but those who have called me so were the ones who kept you chained and afraid. I will not claim I am moral, but neither will I claim that I do not care about those within my nation and its sphere. Future historians will laud you as visionaries and men of great character for the choice you have made, and future generations will sing your praises as they live in a life of luxury unlike anything you have seen before.”

With Kain’s words still being only halfway believed, the Abominable King summoned his dragon and mounted it with his twin children. As the massive beast flew off into the sky and headed west, the citizens of the fallen city could never know that their choice to surrender to Darksol would be remembered centuries later as the moment when Rusk started to transition from the hopeless backwater it used to be to the massive industrial and economic powerhouse it was to be in the future.

They could never guess that their names would be enshrined with those of the greatest minds in all fields in a place in the city where their people would remember them with dignity and pride as those who saw the future and made a sacrifice so that their children and children’s children could prosper like never before. As of that day, the People’s Union of Rusk was dead, and what rose from its ashes was the nigh-unstoppable juggernaut of industry and military might that would be later called the Ruskian Unified State.