Enemy Mine

EPILOGUE

…Nazarick…Guardians break room…

"To think Lord Ainz could have planned so far ahead that he even got just the right boy kidnapped to corrupt the only weapon that the Theocracy had, draw her to our side, and bring with her a world item and all their finest armaments." Demiurge said.

"Truly the last of the supreme beings is the only one who could have done something like this." Albedo said, "He and he alone is fit to rule, as all those insects will soon learn." Her smile was radiant with joy.

"I could never have imagined it…and now…now we know who is responsible for what was done to me…and I can make them suffer." Shalltear said with a savage and hungry smile on her face.

"His strategies have such depth, I am in awe." Cocytus said softly and with great reverence.

"Yeah, Lord Ainz is the best." Aura said enthusiastically.

"Truly mein creator has no equal, I am proud that he is my father!" Pandora's Actor said enthusiastically.

"Yes, his victory through simple justice was beyond masterful, but I wonder…what does he plan to do next?" Sebas wondered in a voice of dignified reverence.

"As if we could even begin to guess." Demiurge said with frustration, "I am proud to serve him, yet it always leaves me feeling…inadequate."

This was met with a round of agreement, and as Yuri Alpha entered bearing various beverages, they took them one by one, and Albedo raised her cup and said, "Sasuga Ainz-Sama!"

"Sasuga Ainz-Sama!" They shouted in return and drank full of confidence and breathless anticipation.

…Nazarick Sixth floor…

Zesshi, Aorli, Climb, and the numerous elves found themselves standing on a great green hill overlooking a large lake, for all the world it seemed a paradise, and hovering above the water was Ainz Ooal Gown, the Sorcerer King.

"Welcome to my home, sadly you will not be staying here," he said, "I am sending you to a new land, where your lives can begin again, you will have land to farm, homes to live in, beds of your own…everything you need to have a dignified life, you will be considered citizens of my kingdom with all the rights that entails, which you will learn more about from one of my servants, and from those of your neighbors already there. So, let me say…congratulations on getting your future back." He turned to Shalltear who stood at the shore of the lake. "Open a gate, send them to the land we acquired from the Draconic Kingdom." He said.

"Yes, my lord." Shalltear said happily and opened the gate. Ainz gestured to the hole in reality, "Go, and enjoy your new lives." He said. The elves, already in awe at where they were and having escaped the nightmare of their lives, bowed deeply and began to walk through the portal presented to them.

Ainz looked to Zesshi, "I assume you want your sister to go there as well, for her safety?" He asked. She nodded, "May I have a moment though, sire?" She asked.

"Please." He said and gestured with a wave of his hand for her to proceed.

Zesshi was about to speak, but Aorli simply hugged her. "Thank you." She said with a radiant smile.

"And thank you." Zesshi said in return.

"Come see me, when it's all over." Aorli said sweetly as she stepped back and held on to the tips of Zesshi's fingers.

"I will." Zesshi said, and smiled back, and Aorli rushed through the gate with a wave behind her.

Ainz looked over to Climb. "It's time for you to return to your mistress. Princess Renner has missed you very badly, visits or no visits, and it would be cruel of me to keep you from a loyal servant, but you have played your part well, and I would be remiss if I did not reward you." Ainz said, "Is there anything you would like?" He asked.

"Prosperity for my people? Safety for my princess?" He asked uncertainly.

Ainz chuckled, "I'll do that anyway, well, think of something later, go back for now, she misses you." He said. "Shalltear, gate."

"As you say, my lord." Shalltear said, and the gate opened, and Climb bowed deeply to the Sorcerer King, and stepped through it, straight into the waiting arms of the princess, who stood ready to receive him.

Ainz turned to Zesshi, "You have done more for me than you know, by way of this gift, the item you provided me, 'Downfall of Castle & Country' has informed me of the answer to a long burning question. One I had very strong suspicions about, but until now, I could not have certainty over. For that you have the gratitude of the Sorcerer King, and I would like to begin fulfilling one of my promises to you right now." Ainz said, "Mare, please come over here."

Mare jumped down from the tree and scurried over to where Ainz was hovering, looked up at his lord, and asked, "How may I serve you my lord?"

"I want you to fight this woman, do not kill her, only defeat her." Ainz said, "You have no limits on what you use to do that, only ensure that she survives." Ainz elaborated.

"Of course, my lord, right away." He said and scurried over to twenty feet from Zesshi Zetsumei.

"Pardon me my lord…but…I cannot get pregnant by a girl." Zesshi said.

"I'm a boy." Mare said. "My creator just happened to want me to dress like this." He said.

"Oh." Zesshi said with her head cocked curiously. "Well, doesn't matter, even if you're young, you'll grow up, and I can wait." She said.

"Wait for what?" Mare asked.

"I'll tell you when you're older, Mare," Ainz said, making a mental note to remember to find someone to teach sex ed to the twins when they grew up a bit more, "for now, just fight her, and win for the glory of Nazarick!" He said grandly.

"Yes my lord!" Mare said, and Zesshi struck a fighting stance.

"Bring it on little guy!" She said, with real happiness on her face.

…Resettlement lands of the Sorcerous Kingdom on the border of the Beastman Kingdom…

When Aorli and the other elves found themselves on the other side of the gate, they found a dog woman waiting for them, she asked that they follow her, and she led them all to an amphitheater in an empty city. She gestured to the entrance and said, "Please seat yourselves." It took some time for them all to enter, and when it was done, the dog woman took the stage and began to explain where they were. It was the city of Forton, a former Draconic Kingdom city that had been purchased by the sorcerous kingdom…and gradually she explained where they now were in the world.

In the next few weeks after that, the elves were assigned to villages or city living according to their skills, with most being tasked to the villages, while leaving a small city population that served as a trade hub.

Thanks to the lack of hard feelings between the new elf settlers and the Beastman Kingdom, they were even able to exchange goods over their eastern border, albeit in small quantities with respect to both locations as they were still establishing themselves. Elves however, turned out to be excellent conservationists, and the small corps of Beastman merchants quickly found utility in hiring them as 'advisors' on how to restore the shattered environment that was still recovering from the devastation they had inflicted on themselves years before, and most of the surviving beastman villages had at least one elf advisor to the chief.

In turn however, some beastmen found that they could make a very good living working within the new elven city as guards, which with the permission of the Sorcerer King, was proudly rechristened as 'Zesshisa', meaning 'Zesshi's honor' in deference to their rescuer. Aorli found her feet within the city, regaining her will to speak, and her connection to their rescuer by blood and service gave her considerable influence over her community and allowed her…under some protest by herself, to rise within the government of the region. Eventually, she became a governor. And to her credit, she took the position very seriously, not wanting to disappoint her half sister, or the Sorcerer King by poor performance. The city in the years to come became a thriving metropolis and a major trade stop between the kingdoms, and during the war, would serve as the first stop for refugees of all kinds, though they could perhaps be forgiven if they were somewhat less generously inclined towards humans, and Zesshi herself would become a regular visitor as she sought out still more of her unknown brothers and sisters, giving the battle maniac a sense of satisfaction, and helping to ease the self hatred born of her origins, by way of the comfort of common experience and the warmth of knowing you are not rejected for reasons beyond your own control.

…Kami Miyako…Slane Theocracy…

When Zesshi didn't show up for meetings, nobody thought much of it. Truth is, she more or less did what she wanted, she was humanity's trump card and there was rarely any arguing with her. They just slid an order for her under her door on how to deal with Climb, and left it at that, after all, nobody would bother THAT house, and if the boy lived one more day as a result, it was of minor importance, which is to say…not at all.

But when she wasn't seen…by anyone, for a solid week, then people grew worried. At first, they had simply thought that with the killings stopped, she had sought out the perpetrator herself, found them, and it was either someone strong enough to mate with…or perhaps the killer was stronger and had ended her instead. That was a real concern, most of the members of Black Justice were unknown, which meant that by extension, how strong they were was also unknown, and it was cause enough for them to start investigating, beginning with the tower Climb had been kept in.

The boy Climb and the slave Aorli were nowhere to be found, and had not been there for quite some time, that much quickly became obvious. They'd not known because it was Zesshi herself who was tasked with minding him, and Aorli seemed to be a favored servant of the guardian of the treasury, and it was considered impossible for that weak gold capped fighter to outfight the Black Scripture's strongest member.

When it became evident that Zesshi was also missing, suspicions were aroused, and when Raymond went to her home, he found one corner of the envelope containing her instructions, still hanging part way out from under the door, he grew alarmed. He pounded on the solid wooden surface of the entrance and called for an answer, however none was forthcoming. He went around the side of the house and looked inside the windows, and what he saw was even more alarming.

Zesshi's house was always somewhat 'minimalist' she slept there, ate there, changed and bathed there, but it was never an overly furnished place, not filled with knickknacks or other materials of personal comfort, it was utilitarian to a fault, and yet now every room he could see, was completely empty. He rushed back to the door and took it down, hard, his time as a Black Scripture still with him as it flew in and hit the wall. He stepped through the threshold as the door bounced closed behind him, and he began calling her name and rushing from room to room on both floors, but everything was gone, as if nobody had ever lived there.

When he came back to the front door, that was when he saw the note. He tore it off the door and opened it, and he fell to his knees in shock and horror as he read its contents. He sighed and shook his head, he should not have been surprised by this, no… not in the least.

Still it was overwhelming, and he didn't move for a very long time, it was so long that the other Cardinals, who knew he had intended to go to her home, decided to go there as well, they however, fearing something must have befallen him as he had not returned, came escorted by guards. They found him still sitting there in the middle of the floor just beyond the front door, reading the letter again as if he could not believe or could not accept its contents.

They stared at him from outside for several minutes, he did not acknowledge their presence, Berenice was the first to approach, she walked through the broken door and knelt next to him. She put her hand to his cheek and turned him to face her, "Raymond…what is it?" She asked gravely.

He held the letter out to her, unable to read it aloud or speak its contents.

A moment later she collapsed beside him, one by one the other Cardinals, filled with fear and trepidation for what the scrap of paper said, approached and passed it from one to the next, and they were each in turn brought to their knees in shock and horror.

"It was her." Raymond said with absolute confidence, "She was the arsonist, she was the serial killer, she was the one freeing the slaves, and we're the ones who pushed her to that point! We introduced her to her baby sister, and we showed her how badly we could abuse the poor girl, we showed Zesshi that she was just an object, a weapon…and she herself wasn't a person to us and didn't really matter. Our country showed that she wasn't really a citizen, just a tolerated tool with no real place here, and we showed her what her fate would have been had she not been born powerful or to a mother who wanted her…we brought this on ourselves." He said with a grave and sorrowful voice, and her last words to him came rushing back…he'd thought when she said she was leaving then…she had meant she was leaving his house. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he recognized that she was making a choice of loyalty, a moral choice, a choice he hadn't made, which she had all but begged him to do.

Whether he was speaking to the other Cardinals or simply to himself, even he didn't know for sure.

Dominic's eyes widened suddenly, "The treasury! The artifacts of the gods!" He shouted and moved to jump to his feet.

Raymond raised a hand, "Don't bother, they're long gone." He said.

"How do you…" Dominic began.

"It's in the letter, what did she say? What we 'truly' valued most. She packed up out of here, got Climb out, got her sister out, got the slaves out, and she stole everything, I'd hazard a guess that she was even hiding the slaves IN the treasury, knowing that she was the only one to ever go there." He shook his head in abject dejection.

Several of the cardinals were shaking, whether with fear or rage, Raymond didn't know.

"So…what do we do now?" Berenice asked.

To that…nobody had a good answer, only silence, which for once…included Dominic.

In the days after the theft of the treasury and the departure of Zesshi Zetsumi, the Cardinals put it about that the serial killer and arsonist had been a Black Justice operative who had been caught and killed while trying to escape, and since the killings and burnings had stopped, the population was generally willing to accept this, after all, what else would explain why those terrible events had ground to a halt.

The position of 'guardian of the treasury' was officially ended, as there was no more treasury left worth guarding, or at least none that merited a Black Scripture presence, and the elite unit of the Slane Theocracy became a pariah among the other scriptures for producing not one, but two traitors, first Clementine, and then Zesshi Zetsumei.

Philip's sudden defeat and the rescue of all hostages and the sudden advance of the Royal faction were greeted with alarm and consternation, and the mood of the senior leadership of the Slane Theocracy turned dark. Curfews were imposed on slave use within the city, and ever tightening security measures began to throttle public discussion, and Raymond fell into a deep depression that kept him almost completely bedridden, while Dominic became ever louder in his demands for more active scripture support for the military advances, and to argue for a Theocracy invasion of the Sorcerer King.

Ginedine had at first raged openly at the betrayal, furious beyond reason at what was lost and by whose hand it was taken…but for the brilliant mind bound to reason more than emotion, even the most intense of feelings must fade and critical thought must return to the fore. And so tried to fill the void left by Raymond's ability to reason, but the louder and louder rhetoric made his voice smaller and smaller, and he had to make more and more concessions in voting to Dominic, in exchange for smaller and smaller gains for his even tempered advice.

And as his brilliant mind had caught up with Raymond's thoughts, through both private reflection and by conversation alone on his visits to the home of his distraught colleague, he began to understand how things with Zesshi could have gone so very…very wrong, and to better understand what had happened, he began to make a habit of touring the slave dominated districts where most of their labor was used and found himself vomiting so often at what he saw that his walks in the area required him to go without eating for hours to minimize the sickness. He gradually began to argue for anti-cruelty laws…but found minimal success as the both the price of slaves had increased due to losses…and the hatred that filtered down from the top ranks of the Theocracy's government infected the popular sentiment.

Berenice became a silent figure at their meetings, her spirit almost completely broken by the revelation of her part, however minor, in the destruction of Zesshi's more than a century of loyalty to the Slane Theocracy, she longed for the means to go back and retract the words of her conversation with…her colleague, but as she could not take them back, she chose instead to simply stay silent, offering little in the way of debate and unable to fully participate as her mind was so focused on her own mistakes.

Yvon was filled with outrage at the events that had transpired, and aligned himself more and more with Dominic's way of thinking, voting with him in almost every measure that further punished the elves for Zesshi's departure with their sacred treasures.

Maximillian became less outspoken, but more resolute in the things he did say, and found himself drawn to the militancy of Dominic and the increasing militancy of Yvon. With Raymond almost entirely absent, Berenice inattentive, and Ginedine short of support, Maximillian's legal expertise was turned to weaponizing the law, an ability Dominic found…very useful.

…Because without the tempering voice of Raymond's reason, Dominic began to gradually get his way, conditions grew ever worse for the slaves, and the war fever in public became ever more vigorous and aggressive as more and more blame was put on the elves for the 'problems' that the entire nation was now experiencing…a shift that would have ever more profound consequences as the war raged on, and…

As god continued to rise.