Order and Chaos

Clean up this sinful town with the power of diplomacy instead of swordmongering like your asshole dad did

Yes! Of course!

"Mr. Mayor, wait up!" I said.

Mr. Mayor waited up. "Yes?"

... I still had no specific ideas on how exactly to accomplish this goal.

Fire renders wooden money useless! Show them the error of their ways!

A flash of inspiration struck me! With a big, goofy grin on my face, I took out a book of matches, lit one, and threw it into the brush and leaves and trees. It caught on like wildfire! Euphemistically, I mean. So far. Surely, this would show them that Communism Is Good. Christianity Is Stupid. Give Up. Give Up. From 5 O'Clock In The Morning, To Ten O'Clock At Night. Seventeen Hours A Day. Give Up. Give Up. Communism Is Good.

"...Yes!" said the mayor, clapping with delight. Did he get it? "Yes! Yes!" He grabbed for my book of matches, which I let him have. He used all of them to light fires throughout the area. "This is perfect! We can burn up all the trees and money and then we'll just leave one big coin everyone's gotta share!"

Was that... communism? To be frank I don't really know what communism is. "Or..." I said.

your money should now be fire

"Or even better, what if we set fire to the money in order to spend it? You know, gotta burn money to make money! That way..." He stopped. He didn't have an easy time thinking of the possible implications. "Wait, even better: what if our money WAS fire!"

He grabbed a handful of the burning embers from what was now the raging inferno around us. His hands started to burn, and they smelled exactly like chicken barbecue. To cool them down, he shoved them in his wet, dark mouth, embers and all, which helped in a way, but in other ways, made everything a lot worse.

"Mr. Mayor," I said, "I'm not sure you catch my gist..."

He looked at me with wet eyes and both his hands stuck in his mouth and probably cauterized into place there and he was drooling everywhere and also he had a huge string of snot hanging out of his nose and also when he looked up at me he swung the snot-string around and it somehow affixed itself inside of his other nostril like a crazy trick shot, and now it was like a loop, a nosering.

"Will you, Mr. Mayor, marry me Miss Mary?"

He nodded enthusiastically.

"I do!" you say, completing the wedding ceremony to the knight MAYOR

, because, as we all know, mayors have the ability to officiate weddings on the fly. I kissed him on the wrists and accidentally got some of the snot in my mouth.

I dashed away from my pathetic husband, through the conflagration. He took one step and then tripped on his own snot ring. A burning tree fell down behind me, blocking my path. I would never see my new husband again and he was probably just gonna die back there. Also the whole town I was mayor of burned down too. Man, honeymoons never go according to plan.

So that's when I passed out from smoke inhalation. In my dream, De the goddess of brevity had a — naturally enough, short — chat with me. We'll circle around back to that. You don't know what happened in there exactly yet, because you are not in the dream, or any dream.

You got the power. You got the might. You're ready to battle. You're the black knight.

You are Malcolm Vindictus. Currently, you are in the midst of what is, technically speaking, the greatest military campaign of all time, in terms of pure land grabbed. You and your original army of forty thousand Vendet men and women set out two years ago and have been sweeping through hitherto-undiscovered regions of the world ever since.

You have also grown reflective in your old age. It was fun, and you had no regrets, but what was to be your legacy? You suppose your wife, Melissa, was a competent enough bureaucrat, and your boyfriend and second-in-command, Commun Marx, was able to use you to enact his vision of sweeping social reforms named after himself (which you had no capacity to understand, to be frank, though you tried your best to parrot,) but you weren't entirely sure the authority of the Vendet crown was respected and it wouldn't just all collapse as soon as you died, especially among these newly-conquered areas that have just plain surrendered to you on sight. Even in these distant, uncharted lands your reputation precedes you. It's flattering, but it means that you and your accumulated eighty thousand men never got to actually FIGHT, everywhere you go instead automatically surrendering to you.

Your only hope for your more long-reaching anxieties (something you never thought you would have) is your heiress, Mary. She's a good egg, or at least was when she was 17. You hope she's run away and discovered the world and come back more worldly by now.

As for your short-term problem, war boredom, there was only one solution in your mind. You rallied the troops and took their attention with a speech.

"We are going to kill the gods."

Silence. Confusion.

There I was, two days later, sitting on a rock, freezing my ass off in the middle of the night, searching the darkness for any unexpected visitors. Guard duty sucked. I bet fuckin' Malcolm Vindictus never had to do any guard duty. Nothing ever happened, anyway. I mean, hell, nobody was gonna attack us tonight! We wiped the floor with their holy asses! Either they were gonna surrender tomorrow, or we were just gonna wipe the floor again and again until they did or there was nobody left.

Then, a small light crested over a hill, waving frantically through the air in an arc. Oh gods, was it a god? Was it one of their faithful holy warriors, come to ambush us in the middle of the night? I grabbed my sword and stood up. More waiting. I wasn't about to go follow them. They were going to have to come to me.

I dropped the sword when they did. Turns out, it was one of our own soldiers. His arm, the one that wasn't carrying the torch, was flayed. His intestines spilled out of a whole in his chest, and looked like they had been through a sausage grinder after that. The left half of his face was slightly caved in, but the swelling compensated. Blood poured out of his mouth. His kneecap was somehow removed and then reattached under his shoulderblade.

"Oh my gods, man, I'll get you to the medic at once!" I said, then hoisted him up onto my shoulder like a sack full of potatoes.

"No..." he said. "No." he said. "Gods," he chuckled. "I'm... dying... they're..." he coughed. "They're all dead."

"The... the gods?"

He laughed once, again, hard. He spat up blood all over my chest. "Us!"

My heart dropped down my throat. "Us? Even... even Malcolm?"

He nodded. "All... of them," he said. "...But... me. Wait! Cor... correction." He died.

This was bad news. But luckily, I'm not the type of person who's prone to panic, so I quickly assessed the aspects of the present situation:

• Malcolm Vindictus is dead.
  
• Your so-called "B team" camp, the support, was only 20,000 deep.
  
• All the superior officers — captains, lieutenants, colonels — had been camped with him in the A team, so they were dead too.
  
• We are surrounded on all sides by, first, the faithful that had taken arms in support of the gods, or those who had surrendered, cowed by Malcolm's reputation alone, who would thus would be willing, ready, and able to strike at his retreating, Vindictusless 20,000.
  
• The remaining army of 20,000 is such a melting pot (from all those surrenders) that there is no true, common language, and as you return home they will surely peel off to return to their own homes, possibly even
  defecting to the enemy.
  
• The only thing holding the army together in the first place was a fear of Vindictus greater than their fear of the enemy. Without anything keeping you all in line, you're likely to fall into complete disorganization and thus become sitting ducks, for no individual can stand up to the whole armies that will be falling down on you.
  
• You have no horses.
  
• You have no boats.
  
• You have no food or water.
  
• You are extremely low on ammo.
  
• You are thousands and thousands of miles from home. My home, Vendet, that is. At minimum, you're looking at two year's travel.
  
• There are no local guides or maps among you.
  
• It is almost winter.
  
• The gods are, naturally, extremely displeased with you.
  

I still kept my cool as I enumerated the few relatively-positive spots:

• The divine retaliation will likely be mild, them having been badly weakened with the loss of thousands of their ranks, and not generally being known to give even the most extreme heathens the "your followers, your family, your friends, your land, your country, your pets, your pants" treatment, although who knows with a loose egg. You also got the sense they were humoring the great warrior fulfilling his inevitable, implicit destiny to seek all the power he could — a dog chasing a car who doesn't know what to do with it — and may even be slightly thankful over how he helpfully pruned their massive, massive, way too huge ranks. As such, you can expect the gods' displeasure to manifest only in consistently gutter luck, the effects of which can be minimized if you remember to leave nothing to chance.
  
• The faithful army is currently resting, either unaware of their victory or basking in it, allowing you a window to act first within.
  
• There's an exit that will neutralize the effect of a lack of horses because no horses can pass through. However, it is difficult terrain, and unfamiliar to you, so your memory of the road home becomes useless.
  
• Nobody besides me and the active enemy forces know Malcolm Vindictus is dead yet. Nobody knows that you just killed a bunch of gods yet. If you take the road, you would be able to stay ahead of the news for a while, at least until the horse-riding faithful overtake you, and if you take the pass almost certainly not.
  
• You have tents.
  
• You're no Malcolm Vidicti, not one of you, but you are still mighty warriors, highly-trained under his tutelage, well-equipped other than for ammo, and 20,000 is still nothing to sneeze at.
  

It wasn't inspiring. Though my mind was calm, my body was nervous — I was sweating like I was in the desert even while I shivered from the cold. I wrapped my loincloth around my sword's hilt so it wouldn't slip out of my hands when I needed it. I was going to have to wake up the others, and, very likely, fill the leadership vacuum myself.

So what was my plan? And what was that thing I forgot about while listing off all the ways we're totally screwed that screws us even more?