The Greatest Sin [Progression Fantasy][Kingdom Building]
Chapter 280 – The Men from Zawitz

Kavaa rested her hand on her silver sword as a Lynx tank squashed some of the cars which had been left behind in the evacuation of Kilifi. Her Clerics made a line in front of her, a classic battle line, the same sort that men about to form a shieldwall would do. Ahead of them, Uriamel’s horde of troops or what was left of them, was trying to close the distance.

They aimed their rifles, and Kavaa channelled her blessing when she saw a storm of arrows approach from above. Kavaa’s blessing of Health was at least partly the reason for why the bow and arrow had never gotten to be too popular in armies. A Cleric would need his head cut off or his heart wholly destroyed before he would drop dead. An arrow could neither.

Clerics braced, a few grunted. Two dropped onto the ground, they had taken an arrow to the head. And Kavaa’s blessing started to work as men pulled arrows out of their bodies and their wounds started to grow. Organs reformed, bones rebuilt and muscle restitched as Kavaa silently healed them. The two who dropped, paralyzed but alive, were assisted by the men next to them. The arrows were simply pulled out of the heads, and Kavaa’s blessing worked to rebuild the damage.

Kavaa gripped the butt of her sword as she raised her other arm and pointed it straight up. “Fire!” She sliced it forwards.

Uriamel’s horde faltered under the barrage. They did not even make it half way.

Olonia crossed her arms from behind Iliyal as she looked at the new arrivals from Zawitz. She stood, white-haired and annoyed that she was being kept here, in the full-plate that Iliyal had called in from Arika to gift to her. The elf had cancelled her mission last minute and kept her here. At first, she had been annoyed, but now she understand exactly why Saksma and Paida had both been allowed to go off yet she had to stay. Iliyal had led them to the gates himself in fact, and he had made a big show of it whilst Olonia was supposed to stay at his command tent.

She had never considered that there would be such beauty and such grace to subterfuge, but the elf proved her wrong. In the same way that a master pianist would gently stroke the piano’s keys, nothing Iliyal did looked impossible. It was that he simply did not take a single shortcut in the entire operation of the fronts. Nothing was left to chance, and yet the elf knew what was manageable too. Just as he took no breaks, he did not try to micromanage the men nor waste a single inch of effort through overwork. The more time Olonia spent with him, the more she realised that the man operated on a level of intelligence she had simply never interacted with.

And nowhere did he actually try to condescend to her either. The man was simply straight in everything he had. Frankly, she had grown to respect so much that she didn’t know if she would disbelieve him if he said that the Sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow. So now, as he stared and looked at the men who entered Iliyal’s command tent from Zawitz, the weak, limp-wristed politicians in perfectly clean and blue suits. None of them looked like the soldiers in Iliyal’s camp, instead these men were either too skinny or too fat. Not soldiers at all, how could she take orders from these people?

Iliyal did not even have to issue the command, Olonia simply realised what the man wanted, why exactly he had made her stay behind instead of going forwards to take out one of the White Pantheon’s new armoured units. She made her voice cold and commanding, exactly the sort that a Goddess representing an entire nation should have. “Iliyal leads the armies, by my permission if not yours.”

The men made nervous expressions, one opened his mouth to raise argument, Olonia followed Iliyal’s teachings: strike first, strike hard. Incapacitate on the first blow, there was no need to work upwards in strength, if you let someone strike at you, then you were effectively rolling on dice on your life. What sort of idiot would willingly do that? “If Zawitz keeps half-assing war support and does not follow through on the requests that ECCLA has made, I will force elections in this country and trust me, every single one of you will be charged by the next government for treachery against the nation.”

And somehow, one of these fools still had enough confidence in him to try and raise argument against the Goddess of the very nation he was born in. “Goddess Olonia, Iliyal Tremali is not a member of any Epan Coalition country. It’s not that…” He saw Olonia’s face.

“Can you lead the war?” Olonia asked. She stepped around Iliyal as the elf behind his desk. His fingers interlocked as he stared daggers at the men from daggers. The men gave no reply, so Olonia raised her voice. “Can you lead the war?” She repeated the question. This time, there was indeed an answer.

“The war is going quite well!” The tallest man replied and Olonia laughed.

“It’s only going well because Iliyal is leading the front.”

“It was actually proposed that you lead instead Goddess!” The man shouted. Olonia straightened her posture and blinked. If there was one thing she had never been… Jozef would give her that? She would be allowed to lead?

“The entire army?” Olonia asked.

“The Lubskan front of ECCLA, yes.” The man said. ECCLA was the Epan Coalition Combined Land Army, every organisation in the coalition needed some huge acronym. Olonia turned to Iliyal, the elf looked up at her.

If he had some emotion in his eyes, maybe Olonia would have reacted differently. Maybe if he tried to argue back, if he showed some weakness, or some joy, or something… Or anything, maybe Olonia would have taken the bait. But Iliyal sat there, and he looked at Olonia in the same way he always did. Like a general about to issue an order to his soldiers. He could have not doubted for even a moment that Olonia would stay by his side.

And when faced with such discipline, when she looked upon the man and saw such sheer, blatant confidence, what could Olonia even do? It wasn’t a case of disappointing Iliyal or anything like that, it was that the option of her going against him simply did not exist. And Olonia turned back to the men. “I rally and I fight but I do not run the organisation of ECCLA. I am not going to lead this front.” There, that sounded true to herself. It was not that she did not want to, it was that she simply was not going to.

The prim-suited men looked at the Goddess in exasperation, as if they weren’t actually quite sure on what they were hearing. “Excuse me?” The tallest man spoke up again. “What?”

And with a reaction like that, Olonia felt that little pang of anger spark up within her. The same childish reaction she had as when Saksma baited her into an argument. She recognised the immaturity of it, she tried to control it, and she saw one of the men smile hopefully at her.

Poof. And something within her snapped.

What it was, Olonia couldn’t quite place her finger on, but a dam cracked in her chest. That petulant little smile of the man’s set off a piece of dynamite in her heart, and that dynamite exploded with the force and fury of a roaring volcano. Did they think she could be bought? Did they actually come here to try and win her support by giving her command of the army? And for what? So that it could be taken away by next month? The ploy was so obvious Olonia had to squeeze her fists together to get some of the rage and anger out. Iliyal spoke up from behind her. “Olonia is not for sale.”

Olonia felt her throat catch and her heart settle down. Five words was all it had taken for Iliyal to sum everything she had wanted to say up. The man turned to the elf sitting by his desk, Iliyal leaned back and readjusted his black military cap. The rest of the men wore Epan blue, he purposefully differentiated himself with the black. “Olonia is the Goddess of this country. I am a citizen of it. This whole problem exists because of the fact that you’ve ingratiated yourself into our-“

Iliyal cut the man. “This isn’t an argument. This war is fought against the White Pantheon and by the Epan Coalition. It’s larger than any of us.” He stared the man down.

“And what if she-“

“We’re here to do a job.” Iliyal interrupted the man once again. “Nothing more, nothing less. There are no personal feelings here, I am simply the most fit to lead, Olonia is the most fit to go on high-risk missions. You have barely a dozen Divines here. We will not remove one of them from the front just so that boys in suits from Zawitz can be happy.”

Poof. And something within Olonia once again grew.

It was that ‘we’ Iliyal had just used. Such a tiny word, Olonia did not even know if the elf had done it on purpose, most likely not. Who even thought about such things? But there it was though… Olonia was part of a ‘we’. Not the grand ‘we’ of noble and haughty Divinity, reigning from high on above, but the ‘we’ of a grand cause. One that encompassed all Lubska, all Epa even, where it did not matter whether it was Iliyal or Olonia or one of the countless soldiers under their command, they all belonged to that one whole.

One grand whole that Olonia was part of.

And what? These men thought that they would remove Olonia from it now? That they would return her to the position of Mascot-Goddess as the first seven hundred years of her life had been? That she would lie down and accept what they wanted to do? And for what reason even? Because they didn’t particularly like Iliyal? “If I had to choose.” Olonia said deliberately. “Who to trust, between you and Iliyal, I would lay my life in Iliyal’s hands every single time.”

The men looked at the Goddess of their own nation in horror as she chose an elf without a single shred of loyalty to the country over them. “Goddess!” One of the shorter men shouted this time, another forgettable fellow, he looked like the sort who would get tired walking up a flight of stairs. “We would never do anything against you! It’s just that how can we trust Iliyal with the future of the Epan Coalition?”

“How can you trust anyone but Iliyal with securing a future for it?” Olonia asked flatly. “Is anyone here more competent than him in this field? Tell me? Can Zawitz send anyone as a replacement to what Iliyal does on the front here?” She spoke faster and faster. “Well?”

“We could-“ One man attempted to raise a defence against Olonia, but it was hard to interrupt a Goddess who was almost twice the size of a man.

“Could what? Could find a man in Epa that rivals one a general who served under Arascus? Could find someone more experienced in warfare than him? Or maybe you’ll find a person who has spent more time fighting against Fortia and Maisara and Allasaria?”

“That’s not the iss-“

Once again, Olonia interrupted. “Then what is? Is that he’s not Lubskan? Is that it? He can’t be trusted because he’s an elf who served Kassandora rather than us? Well then I make him Lubskan, as of right now, by virtue of being Goddess of Lubska, I declare him Lubskan.”

“That’s no-“

“Have a passport ready for him by the end of the week.” Olonia said.

“Bu-“

“One more word and I will make sure it will be your last. I care not for your politics. I care to save this country.” Olonia made a very obvious gesture of rubbing the butt of her sword.

And the men from Zawitz had nothing more to say.

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