The Greatest Sin [Progression Fantasy][Kingdom Building]
Chapter 326 – Embodiment of a Nation

Malam hadn’t noticed it, but Iliyal did. He looked through the reports coming out of Rancais. Of course she wouldn’t, Helenna hadn’t either, they were directors of speeches and propaganda who talked in great and grand ideals.

Collapsed bridges? A failure of administration. Subways overran? It was merely populations running for shelter from the surface. Traffic routes blocked? An obvious answer, people were too afraid to leave. Prisons emptied? The guards had turned traitor and were causing chaos for the sake of it. A complete lack of media? In this day and age?

Yet as Iliyal saw the reports, he rubbed the butt of the blade on his sheath. Civil Wars were chaotic messes with town rising against town, with the most common men suddenly becoming great leaders, with purges and death and with there being at least a half-dozen factions involved, from the criminal underworld to what should be different factions. Spontaneity was the name of the game: a civil war without spontaneity was like a cake without flour.

Malam may have started this chaos, but it was as organised as a bloody coup.

Olonia raised her blade and swung it around in a circle as she called upon the Bielik, the great eagle of Lubska. It screamed in the air, as the Goddess of the nation looked at the city in front of her. Zawitz stood tall and grand, its skyline a silhouette of a series of giant spines bursting from the ground. Each spine was a skyscraper, a huge needle of steel and glass that spiralled upwards to try and catch the clouds.

And on the ground, around the edges of the city, the local populace had come out to watch Olonia. It would have been impossible to miss, they had blocked the central S7 highway from Kaczaw to here. Olonia came in with a full division behind her, ten thousand men, more than a hundred heavy tanks and a thousand trucks to carry the men. The Goddess herself jumped off the grey truck that had been carrying her, and started marching towards the line of men that was blocking her entrance into her capital.

A line of riot police, each man heavily armoured, holding a baton and a riot shield. Each man’s face behind a visor, but they weren’t darkened. Olonia could see the uncertainty and the worry that had been painted on their faces. The Goddess of Lubska moved her sword forwards and shouted. “I have come to save Lubska! March with me or be marched on!”

Olonia heard the wind blow and then a news helicopter fly above her, there wasn’t even a need to look at the cameras. And once that helicopter passed, the wind returned. The silence came in like such a vicious flood that it would be able to wash away a storm. Olonia felt the surge of strength as her eagle came down by her side. It towered by her side, easily larger than a small house, with a wingspan multiple times that.

And Olonia took another step forward. What did these men think they were going to do to her? Would she be cowed? Was she to run back to the frontlines? To simply return to the times of being a mascot? That’s what Jozef no doubt wanted for her. Jozef and Wissel and Aimone and Artois and Richard, all of them. The entire Coalition. This past week, everything that could have had snapped within Olonia. When she heard herself be referred to as a mascot, when she heard herself be called a new breed of Divine.

And so, Olonia raised her blade as she began to shout. “People of Lubska! Men and women of this country! My children! I have not come to hurt you!” No. She had come to show the world that this age could still produce Divines worthy of respect. She had come to prove that within her heart, there was a spark of noble Divinity that burned even after seven hundred years of mascotry. She had come to prove that even if she could not stand physically against someone like Fer or Kavaa, she could be unashamed to stand by their side in terms of bravery and spirit. She had come to prove Allasaria wrong. She had come to make a decision for herself. She had come to because she didn’t need to. Because there was a way out, because the option of seizing the military out from Iliyal was still there.

Olonia disliked a great deal of things about herself, but one thing she knew she wasn’t was stupid. She knew that the elf was using her. And she let herself be used. Just as Kavaa or Fer were used. Because they were Divines, and because she was Divine. Because they had trained her, and she had seen how they submitted to Iliyal. Not out of prestige or some vain hierarchy, but because the elf undeniably knew things they did not. Olonia wanted people to kneel to her in the way people knelt for Iliyal. Because they wanted to. And not because they had to. Olonia had to come to prove it all.

And most importantly, Olonia had come for herself. To prove that she could take a risk. To prove that she could step off past the cliff of conformity and into the world of unknowns.

“Men of my nation!” Olonia took another step. “I will not repeat myself!” She saw the police shift uncomfortably as she closed the distance. From the sides of the S7 highway, news-teams had began to set up. Olonia wondered if it was spontaneous or whether it was Helenna’s doing. She wouldn’t put it passed the Goddess of Love. Maybe they expected a speech? “I am Olonia! Goddess of Lubska! I have come to save this nation from itself! We are in a war against the Pantheon! The world is out to crush us for our noble rebellion and now, we have traitors in our midst who think they can return to how it was!”

The police cracked. They took a step back. From behind them, the crowd started to chant as Olonia’s eagle took off into the sky again. “There is no going back! Things will never return to the times of the Epan Community, and the Epan Coalition, no matter how noble its goals are, is simply not cut out to lead Lubska in a war! We will not be managed by veterans of peacetime bureaucracy during the turbulence of war! Rats are steering our ship! I have come to clean the rats out!”

Olonia didn’t know what she felt, but it was a glorious feeling indeed. For a brief moment, she hoped that Saksma and Paida could experience this sheer joy and energy. Her heart burned with such heat that she half expected to set the air around herself alight with her sheer energy. The creation of the Epan Community and the training by Iliyal, Kavaa and Fer had cracked all there had been crack within Olonia. That poof of something cracking had long stopped, and listening to how mortals talked about her as a mascot once again had made her realise that even though she herself had changed, the world had not.

She had to blow the sawdust away. “This is my land!” Olonia declared it so proudly that the soldier behind her cheered as they started their drive to the capital once again. And the police took anther step back. One man stepped off the road and onto the grass. “Lubska is me and I am Lubska! Where I point, Lubska marches! Where I march, Lubska follows! Where I fight, Lubska fights! Where I kill, Lubska kills! Where I bleed, Lubska bleeds! Where I will die Lubska will die!”

There was going to be no convincing, no begging, no pleading with these people. They weren’t her slaves or fanatics but they weren’t her equals either, did Iliyal plead with Kavaa? Did he plead with Fer? Or did he simply order and command? And did they hate him for it? No. Just as Iliyal ordered her around and she marched with glee, she would show Lubska the joy of what it meant to rally behind a leader one could believe in.

She marched without slowing for even a moment. Her snow-white hair flowed behind her like a cape, she sheathed her sword. She carried her worn and damaged armour proudly. And she knew that she would succeed. Somewhere deep within her, there was a little cynical voice. It told her that she would succeed because of the ten thousand men behind her, there was no force in Zawitz that could withstand the full division and that division was already loyal to her. In that context, when it came solely to the men who mattered, Olonia had already won. Olonia pushed it away, she would succeed because she adored Lubska and because Lubska adored her. That was a better reason, one that was suitable for a Divine.

Line after line of police was shattered by the flood that was an approaching Goddess. Some left to watch from the sidelines, some had fled back to their homes or stations, and others turned to join in on the march. Olonia kept up her march to the thundering drumming of tens of thousands of boots behind her with the choir of heavy military vehicles supporting it. It was a pace only a Divine’s long legs could set. Above, helicopters filmed her coup, and ahead, there were more police barriers. These ones, Olonia did not even need to give a speech for. They had heard, they must have heard, Olonia saw their terrified faces through their visors as she confidently strode ahead.

An army entered Zawitz, a terrible snake of grey and black. Of rolling vehicles that cracked the concrete roads under their treads, of ten thousand soldiers sitting with rifles in the backs of trucks or personnel carriers. And that snake only swelled. Behind it came a trail of many more thousands flooding into the city. The streets of Zawitz, whether in the shadow of the mighty steel skyscrapers or in between the tight tower blocks for housing or exposed to the sun, were swarmed by a flood of people as if they were ants devouring carrion by their nest. And Olonia marched, her heart beat in time to the sound of her step, and that came in time to the tune of marching song from behind her. She walked past cars and she walked through more police barriers. Some, the boys in black actually waited to catch a glimpse before they scattered out of her way.

And so Olonia marched through all of Zawitz, until she got to the nation’s centre of governance: the Sejm. A magnificent palace of a building, with a shallow, rounded pyramid of a roof and a balcony over a balcony. With balustrade and column and tall window smattering its walls as if they were paint, the building almost looked out of place for the skyscrapers around it. A quaint relic of a past that stood in the capital. A series of painted white steps led to the grand wooden doors.

Those steps were crowded with policeman after policeman. This is where they must have been recalled to. Three walls of men in black armour, holding heavy riot shields and batons. Then a line of men with guns. Olonia felt the fires of conquest burn within her as she kept up her march towards them. They didn’t crack. A worthy opponent. Olonia took a triumphant final step and came to a stop. The swelling horde behind her. She glared forwards. She felt the energy of a hundred thousand eyes looking at her from behind. She couldn’t stop now.

In one smooth sweep, Olonia drew her sword from its scabbard and waved it in the air. “March with me, or we will march over you! I have not trekked from the front to here only to turn back at the last moment!” The Goddess of Lubska stood in her armour and her shawl of flowing white hair as her soldiers lowered their rifles.

And just as she was about to make a motion of hurling her blade downwards and was about to yell to her men to fire. Something stalled her. Some great figment of imagination that wasn’t her, but was a grander idea in the form a terribly simple question: Could a Divine truly not do better? And to that. Olonia had no answer.

She lowered her blade, she took a deep breath, and she stood there.

A second stretched into an eternity.

Her people, her land, the nation she embodied. Her victory was their victory, their defeat was her defeat. Her glory was their glory and their blood was her blood.

How could she spill her own blood?

Paida watched her troops spread out. Her mighty capital stood before her, and it stood with all the grace that a diseased corpse could muster. Paida started to weep.