The Systemic Lands (Dark Progressive LITRPG)

"What about your mother? After yelling at me about her?" Clarissa demanded angrily. I just shook my head.

"She is already dead. And if she isn't then I won't allow myself to be put into a position where I need to save her," I replied calmly. Giving me time to think and plot was never a good idea.

"You are sacrificing everyone," Clarissa muttered and sank back in her chair. She looked at me in shock. I nodded at this.

"Extreme circumstances require extreme measures. All the incidents that have occurred up until now, the unrest, and rebellions, didn't just occur in a vacuum. The sphere created an opening and my enemy has been capitalizing on it. I am going to trade my Empire for information. You can stay or you can leave with me," I replied.

"So that's it then. And me?" Clarissa asked.

"What about you? You are a capable administrator, but this government is your child. You can't cut it off even if you wanted to. Even now you are probably thinking about what you can salvage," I replied with a shake of my head.

"I have my own arrangements," Clarissa replied slowly, and I nodded at this. I had suspected as much. "This is goodbye then?"

"Yes. A shame things didn't work out," I said.

"The fallout will be massive. Huge swaths of people are going to die," Clarissa said morosely. I nodded at this.

"Yes, they are. But there is nothing that can be done. The only way is to draw out whatever enemy there is. And this is the best way. Even if there are no taxes, well it will be easy to recoup them in the future." Clarissa shook her head at this.

"You underestimate how difficult it is to manage a working government in this kind of environment. I did everything I could," Clarissa said quietly. I nodded at this.

"I know. That is why I offered to let you come with me. But if you can't save all of this, then no one can. Nations are just too vulnerable to terrorism and super powerful beings. The only long term currency is power," I said.

"You think they will go for the towers?" Clarissa asked me.

"That would be interesting, but I already have cleared the towers in the level 3 zones. I am more worried about the sphere and the sword. Powerful things that aren't easy to counter," I replied.

"And the Avatar? Doctor Katz?" she asked.

"The first will be coming with me as a guest or prisoner. If the sphere shows up again, I will throw her at it. Doctor Katz, well that will be up to him. If he wants to go with you or stay here, I won't stop him," I replied. Clarissa looked old, far older than she had an hour ago.

The stress and realization that everything she had worked on was absolutely useless. It was nice to have confirmation that the path of power was the correct one. It was something under my control to a large extent unlike the political situation. I just had to invest my own time and effort into getting stronger.

I would go off to a level 7 zone and begin grinding heavily there, occasionally returning to a city in the Western part of the Systemic Lands. I would let the Eastern half with my former Empire marinate, like a fine roast, until I returned and figured out whomever was behind all these attacks.

It was much easier being a terrorist than the government. The aggressor not the defender. By giving up my defensive position, there was very little left for me to defend. It was wasteful to the extreme, but at the end of the day almost none of the people had any current value. The simple fact was most people didn't matter. They weren't NPCs, but their actions didn't matter on a larger scale. The acceptance of this fact was the cruelest thing I had done and a betrayal of everyone who had believed in me.

I wasn't going to pretty my actions up in any way. Letting things fall to chaos. Letting my soldiers fight, die, and struggle without my support backing them. Letting atrocities occur was all on me. I subscribed to the belief if you broke it, you bought it. I had broken any other form of governance in the cities my Empire controlled.

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The people contributed through the economy and creating tax revenue used to empower myself. That was the covenant I was breaking. A nation was its people, but I was the government. It was painful, but any other move I made would just lead to the same outcome with more steps.

Whomever my opponent was, they were clever and well prepared. They weren't any idiot without a plan. They were intelligent and capable. All the energy related stuff coming in about the attacks could be attributed to Jacob, but the actual plans themselves were impressive on their own. Like a surgeon carefully performing an operation, I was the target and had been isolated.

I could even respect this kind of move. It would have been the same move I would have done if I had to go up against the Divine Empress with some kind of secret weapon as a backup. To force me to react and respond. If I didn't, then I would keep tightening the noose until the flow of crystals into the city was completely cut off.

Once that happened, we would be under a soft siege. A large enough force could make it out to another city, but it would be attacked and worn down. This kind of strategy and terrorism had always been the fear with summons. The force projection was disproportionate to the number of individuals involved. As for back tracking based on the tethers, that was possible, but the skill wasn't widespread. Since a person needed enough stats.

It hadn't been seen as an urgent issue as the overall strength of our forces was being raised and there were enough people per city. But once the sphere happened, there were manpower shortages. People left to take up grinding positions that had been vacated.

While the government was many things, people could only be recruited through incentives. With the sphere it had made people gravitate away from the central area of Purgatory and towards grinding positions. Clarissa had reports on this issue, but the end result was a manpower shortage.

There was too little buffer to combat this kind of terrorism. The sheer scale of investment and time needed to build up a large force was not something we had anymore. Back on Earth a soldier could be put into boot camp and come out three to six months later and tossed onto the battlefield. But with our system it was like training up knights or longbowmen. There was just a huge investment in resources, which made it incredibly difficult to have enough people to counter terrorism on a wide scale.

The best case long term might actually be some sort of feudal model with one strong person per city, which was what Clarissa was going for with the governors, but they were neutered too much. There was too much faith in my combat ability and the force Clarissa could have called on in the past.

The real question now was what my opponent would do now that I was going to abandon everything and let it all burn. If they remained in hiding, that would lead to an ongoing shadow battle, which made my head ached just thinking about it. Where they would make some moves to annoy me, I would make some moves back, each side trying to gain the advantage over the other.

I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the Divine Empress at this moment. A god could crush an ant easily enough, but it was exhausting to keep crushing ants over and over and distracted from the important things one needed to focus on. There would be no shadow war. I vowed this in my heart.

At best they built something up and I would track them down and kill them, and then take it all over. I would be back a year from now. Even if they had a trap planned for me, maintaining it for a long period of time would probably require the mastermind's presence. They would just fall further and further behind in terms of power.

The only true surety during all of this was power, the power I had focused on from the very start. Power that other people didn't focus on. Governments, armies, religions, were transitory. While they did provide research and airships, they weren't necessary. They were things that were nice to have.

"If only it were easy," Clarissa muttered, and I felt some of her pain. I was killing her child that she created with her own two hands. She was a defeated woman. But that was her cross to bear not mine. The fact that she was a friend, meant I offered to give her an exit path with me. But I didn't plan on staying here to become a trapped rat.

"For what it is worth, I am sorry that things didn't work out. I just don't have the patience for administration," I replied softly. Clarissa just kept staring at the table in front of us. I did feel bad for her, but there was nothing I could do.

Her mistakes were strategic, long term mistakes. Mistakes that even I hadn't seen coming. It was the kind of disaster that was impossible to predict. You could build a system and try to make it as robust as possible, but at the end of the day there would still be a breaking point. While my death was the most obvious point of failure, there were other weaknesses.

Weaknesses we had never considered as a serious issue. Managing a government or any large group was like driving a ship. You could set the direction and speed, but you wouldn't be able to turn quickly unless you were in a smaller ship.

Having so many cities and being so large, while pushing to the West meant we had over extended and now we had hit an ice burg. I was taking my lifeboat and leaving the rest of the people to figure out things themselves. Many would die. I was the captain, but I wasn't going to go down with the ship.

It felt dirty in a way I didn't like. Out of all the things I had done, this bothered me. Killing people was fine, but betraying people who believed in me hurt a lot more.

"I will be staying," Clarissa said. I looked surprised at that. "I am going to stay." She repeated what she had said and I nodded at this. I didn't think she was going to stay.

"That is your choice. But know that you are a friend, despite our issues." She gave me a brittle smile which I returned.