Kain stared daggers at the massive tree. Though his kids were safe, the fact remained that this big thing of wood had attempted to abduct them. And, while he was certainly going to have some choice words for his wife and their kids, he was currently in the place where he was at and was therefore in a position to assert his will over the oversized shrub.

“I will give you my ultimatum, you leafy bastard,” Kain growled, his eyes still focused like a scalpel towards what he assumed was the core of the giant plant. “You and yours can stay here in this continent, but you will leave the rest of the world alone. I will get to you and this place eventually, but you will patiently wait your turn and prepare for my return. Keep this continent to yourself, but don’t even consider going beyond it.”

The tree scoffed at him using telepathy, but Kain didn’t much care. He had been here long enough, and he had other things to do with his time. As he turned to leave, he looked back and gave a few more words of both threat and promise.

“You will not come after me and mine ever again. If you do, know that you are putting everything that you care for under the threat of death, or worse. Do. Not. Cross. Me. Again.”

Kain flew off back towards Necrograd, ignoring the destruction that he had unleashed upon the ground below when he had first come here. Thankfully for the jungle and for the creatures that called it home, the damaged sections were already healing, and they were healing at a blinding speed. This was the only thing that gave Kain a reason to pause. If this place repaired the damage that fast, a normal invasion would be out of the question.

Perhaps, when his people were ready, he could come back here and wage war anew. Although, with the rate at which everything here reset itself, he would need to find some permanent way to hold the land that was to be occupied. A simple application of Scorched Earth would not be enough, and so something else, something more… twisted would need to be done.

He hadn’t tested to see if using his own power on one specific portion would do anything, but he was in no mood to stick around and find out. He needed to get back home and give Lexi and the twins a scolding of a lifetime, and every second that he wasn’t there was a second that they would have to come up with a more potent excuse for their actions.

He pushed his power into letting himself move faster and shot off like a hypersonic missile towards his home. He just knew that things would not go as he wanted, but then again, when had they ever? His people wanted a decent peace, and he was also in that same camp, despite what LW wanted from him. He needed a break, and by Jove, he would get one no matter what.

Besides, his family needed some time to just do family things, which irritated him slightly when he realized that the first thing that they would do as a Peacetime Family would be what could possibly become a somewhat minor and temporary family feud.

…

Kain had reached about the halfway point between Arcfira and Europa before he was accosted by a telepathic message from the tree. The tree had, seemingly, somehow forgotten the threat that Kain had posed to it and was now ranting over the magically generated telepathic comms that Kain had no right to deny it and the elves control over the rest of the world, among other such nonsense.

Kain didn’t have the patience to deal with this bullshit right now and merely stopped his flight, charged up a sphere made of Death, Disease, and Blacklight Magic, and then shot it out beyond the horizon towards the general direction of the obnoxious asshole of a plant. He waited as the sentient bush ranted for a bit longer before beginning to scream in panic as the orb plummeted towards the surface. Kain could feel the eruption of power as the sphere detonated on impact, spreading not a pure destructive force but a pure corruptive force over a wide area.

However, Kain did not feel the energy expand in the way that it should. Instead, the magic power was seemingly sucked up and absorbed by something faster than it could spread out and taint the surrounding landscape. However, the annoying plant had stopped communicating with him after cutting the channel. Obviously Kain’s ‘fuck you, now shut up’ had done something, but what that something was eluded him.

Either way, the oversized shrub was silent, and Kain resumed his flight back towards Necrograd. He had wasted enough time with that dumbass piece of wood, and he really couldn’t give a fuck what transpired in that place unless it resulted in war. Still, he remained insistent that Darksol and its puppet states would avoid war, at least for a few years. There was still the matter of integrating the former nation that was the Arbiana Sultanate, now known as the Arbianan Federal Protectorate.

Plus, if his knowledge from his life on Earth held any weight regarding how this world’s version of the Middle East was made, then he now had access to a whole fuckton of the sweet, sweet, black gold. He was thankful that magic existed, as it would mean that Darksol would not be dependent on fossil fuels, but a bit of oil would add to the rapidly expanding economy of his Empire.

The only real problems were how to get to it, how to harvest it, how to refine it, and how to put it to work. But he did have the world’s smartest/ most inventive people at his disposal, and he was sure that even if Wakanda couldn’t think of things to do with it, Alistaira, Alec, and Zero Noir certainly could. Plus, if he knew Alec Nefarius half as well as he thought he did, he knew that millennium-old vampire nerd would be one of the first to try and do all manner of weird and random things with what he would call a ‘new alchemical reagent’.

Maybe the four of them would invent something that Earth never was able to make when he was there. Maybe they would accidentally set all of the deposits on fire and render them useless. Maybe they would turn the oil into a living blob of flammable goo that would willfully seek out people and try and snuggle with them.

The sky was the limit, except when it wasn’t, and the four geniuses would have no small amount of fun trying to figure things out. Meanwhile, Kain would be busy lecturing his family, not that he expected that to go well. He wasn’t sure how they would respond, but at least he was fairly sure that they knew he was pissed about the whole situation. Maybe that fact would help prevent things from getting out of hand, or maybe it wouldn’t.