It was finally time for him to set his own feet on the battlefield once again. Having assigned work to all those who would run the nation in his absence, Kain was now about to add his own personal power to the fray for the first time in what, to him, had felt like an eternity. He had missed the rush of combat, the sounds of battle, the thrill that came from seeing his foes die up close and personal, their limbs flying as their bodies were ripped apart by his own hands.

He had secretly enjoyed slaughtering his foes personally, rather than sending waves of undead to deal with them. Or perhaps it wasn’t that much of a secret, but still, it was something that he enjoyed. He had enjoyed the sensations that came from ripping men and women apart as they either tried to fight him or simply fled or froze, but unlike how he had been so many centuries ago, he felt no joy in the act of killing the average civilian.

All of that was why he was barely able to hold back his mixture of mirth and fury as he saw the forces arrayed against him. It was an atrocious display of sociopathic evil that made his military policies look rather tame, and there was a decent part of him that hated the idea of not being the most malign being in this world.

Perhaps as a holdover from who he was before that part of him arrived on Mortis and became one with its creation, Kain wanted to be evil for no other reason than to shoulder the sins of this world himself. His body already had hands stained with an ocean of blood, guilty and innocent alike, and by becoming the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) of this world he could make all the malign acts of all others become his own.

Those acts of malice and evil would be ascribed to his existence, and the good that happened would be the work of others. That was the mindset he had now, but even with that, he still had his limits. What he saw before him now was something he outright refused to let his own people do, even if they demanded to. He was evil, yes, but he was not evil enough to make the front rows of his army be comprised of nothing but civilians, both men and women, young and old, sick and healthy alike.

He would shoulder the world’s evil, but his soldiers, his subjects would not be allowed to behave like this, no matter how dire the situation would be. To use civilians as combatants in this way was a slippery slope, and all he needed to do was to sign off on it just once to result in it eventually becoming more and more accepted amongst the military men of Darksol.

He scanned those civilians, hoping that they were bound by some spell or charm, maybe even having consumed some chemical or material to make them arrange themselves like this. But, no, they were clean, which meant that they were either there of their own volition or had been forced to turn themselves into meat shields. Well, regardless of why they were there, he would be able to deal with this issue, one way or another.

He took a few steps forward, letting the full force of his own aura surge outwards and roll over all that stood against him. He saw them fall back a few steps as he moved towards them, his stride full of confidence even as their retreat showed utter fear. However, a spell washed over the civilian meat shields, giving them the confidence needed to move back into position.

Kain cursed under his breath as his face turned into an even more intense scowl, and he began to run towards the massed formations. The civilians all either fired wildly at his general direction with hunting bows or tried to raise makeshift spears or brandish crudely made weapons of other kinds, but they were not Kain’s target.

No, he was focused on the people behind them. If they fell, the spell infusing the civilian mobs with foolish and unnatural courage would fail, and, hopefully, send the civvies running for the hills. If they still stayed and fought even after the more elite elves and tree people behind them were taken down, though, then that meant (at least in Kain’s eyes) that they really were here at their own choice.

After he had picked up enough speed at a normal person’s pace, Kain decided to give the civilians yet another scare. Maybe this one would be enough on its own to render their enchanted courage impotent and, therefore, send them running for their lives. Well, it would either work out the way that he wanted, or he would need to be a bit more careful.

Either way, there was nothing that could stand between him and his targets for very long.

…

“Yes… excellent.” The Great Tree mumbled to itself as it watched Kain run towards the elves and plant people. “All is proceeding as I have foreseen.”

That was a big, fat, lie, though. And it was not a lie to others, but more one that he had told himself. As if he was a character in the book ‘1984’, the Great Tree had become a master of unconsciously using doublethink on himself. The reason the war was going the way that it was could not be because he was doing a shit job of leading and supporting his loyalist forces; no, it had to be because all of this was actually just part of a greater plan that he had concocted that would, without any doubt, lead him to world domination.

He had always been a liar and a sociopath, to say nothing of him being a total and unapologetic narcissist, but as of late he had begun to slip ever further down the rabbit hole that was his own delusions. Now, when he lied, he not only lied to others, but also to himself. And, like the people who lived under INGSOC in the aforementioned book, he had managed to get himself into a place where he could lie, convince himself that the lie was the truth, and then forget that he had ever lied to himself, to begin with.

He now was so far into his own delusional state, one which he embraced without even knowing it, all because of how his plans had panned out so far. That, combined with his acute sociopathy and self-absorbed, narcissistic personality, extreme aversion to any and all bad news, and tendency to lie up a storm to hide his own failings and convince others to do what he wanted, now had turned him into a being for whom the past, present, and future alike held no meaning or purpose.

His lies were truth, and the truth was a lie, and from that paradoxical statement was borne a perfect delusion, and one that the Great Tree was trying to force upon all those beneath him. While he saw Kain as a threat, he honestly believed now that these events playing out right now were some small part of an intricate and expansive web of plots and schemes that he, in his infinite wisdom and utter perfection, had prepared for over one thousand and five hundred years, all leading to his eventual victory over all things.

“Yes, he will fall soon. That is what will happen, and if he doesn’t fall soon, then it will because of my plans needing him to be around just a while longer. I honestly cannot believe my own brilliance at times! My younger self must have blocked these plans from me for a reason, but all will be revealed given time. And once I kill them, all of them, I can remake the world in my perfect image.”

…

Of course, that wouldn’t end up being the case, but it wasn’t like you could actually convince him at this point, no matter how much time and how much energy you spent on him. Kain may have been evil, and he certainly was, but even he refused to turn Darksol into a state like INGSOC. After all, there was Evil, and then there was something far, far worse that bore no name or definition that could match it.

Perhaps in an unknowing act of good, Kain would end up destroying a greater evil, just so his lesser one could remain. Well, at least he understood that he was a bad guy, and tried to make things better for anyone under him. He wasn’t the kind of person to commit genocide, or at least, not anymore.

That Kain was now long since buried and lost forever to the sands of time. And, in his own words regarding that change; “Good Riddance.”