The answer was simple.
He couldn't.
Adrian slumped back on his chair, eyes fixed on the screen, the controller limp in his hands. As Kael finally re-entered the boundaries of his hard-won region, a new notification blinked into existence at the top right corner of the screen.
[Province of Greystone has entered a state of Rebellion!]
He blinked. "What?"
A quick zoom-in, and the map shifted with a low rumble, revealing the chaos in the heart of his newest province. Greystone, the supposedly quiet, compliant settlement that had welcomed Kael through open gates not long ago—was now ablaze.
Flames dotted the towns. War horns echoed across the screen. And flags... not his.
And the cause?
The Steelclad Order.
"Of course," Adrian muttered, jaw tightening. "Of course they'd embolden the locals."
The game panned to three armies, not one. Three thousand troops total. One ragtag in appearance, the other adorned in proper metal, and the just starting to march out of their capital. They marched with frightening speed, converging toward the command center of the province like a pack of wolves smelling blood.
Adrian's fingers hovered over the D-pad, indecisive.
He'd made a mistake.
He thought back—when the people of Greystone had opened their gates so easily, had that been genuine surrender? Or had insurgents already been planted inside, waiting for the right time to act?
Was it all just a trap?
His mind whirred. Had he gone too soft on them? Would an iron-fisted approach—stationing troops, establishing martial law, rooting out disloyalty with fire and steel—have prevented this uprising altogether?
The question came far too late.
With dread rising in his gut, Adrian swiftly guided Kael across the map, his armored figure galloping across the burning fields toward the capital. There was no time left to posture, no room to play the conqueror. The board had shifted, and now he was the hunted.
The capital gates closed just in time.
Inside its stone walls, Kael holed up like a cornered beast—regal, armed, but dangerously close to ruin. Adrian didn't need the blinking threat icons to know the stakes. A single wrong move now, and he wouldn't be fighting one enemy, but three. The Steelclad Order from the north, Eisenreich from the east, and now Greystone's rebellion clawing at his underbelly.
The game would be over.
Adrian let out a long, slow breath and sank back into the couch, the hum of the screen the only sound in the dim room. His eyes drifted toward the digital clock sitting beside his console.
17:00.Or, 5:00 PM, local time.13:30 GMT.
He stared at the numbers, thumb lazily brushing the joystick.
Then, almost without thinking, he clicked into the system menu.Exit.Load Save.
A pause.A flicker.
And then—a gut punch.
The list was nearly empty. Only one save file remained.
[Auto-Save: Start of Session – Repelled Successionist Army]
Adrian's brows furrowed. Confusion shifted into disbelief, then into cold realization.
"...What?"
He scrolled again. Refreshed the screen.
Nothing changed.
His heart beat a little faster as the truth settled in. The game—this strange, brilliant, cursed game—had wiped the past clean. The earlier save files were gone. Scrubbed from existence.
There was no going back.
Adrian frowned.
'That's an odd thing to do...'
But Adrian only shrugged.
He didn't need to rewind everything. No grand reset, no desperate do-over. All he needed was to return to the point where Kael had first seized control of the Empire's initial province. That was his foothold—the anchor point from which empires rose or burned.
And so, the hours bled into each other. The world outside dimmed, forgotten, while Adrian sank deeper into the strange digital realm. He became sharper, quicker, more ruthless with every decision.
There were moments—plenty of them—where frustration nearly got the best of him. The temptation to smash the controller into the nearest surface flared with every sudden loss or miscalculation. But one glance at the peculiar, foreign-looking device in his hands was enough to humble him.
This wasn't an ordinary controller. And it hadn't come into his life by ordinary means.
He clenched his teeth. Swallowed the rage. He couldn't risk it. Not when the line between reality and the game world had started to blur so completely.
But none of that mattered anymore.
Because when the clock ticked to 23:21—11:21 PM—(International Time: 17:51 GMT)Adrian finally leaned back into the couch, the synthetic leather sighing beneath his weight.
His fingers loosened their grip, and his chest rose with a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. On the screen, the results of blood, calculation, and grit flickered proudly.
Two provinces. Unified under the same imperial banner. His banner.
A crooked smirk tugged at his lips.
"Heh. Bitches really thought they could oppress me."
The Eisenreich had fallen.
Not compromised. Not negotiated. Fallen.
Their so-called leader, Gonald Welsh, had been dragged from his keep and butchered like cattle—personally—by Adrian's hand. The armies of the north, once proud and disciplined, had been broken not through sheer numbers or luck, but through merciless application of foresight and terrain. Every ridge, every valley, every stronghold had been a trap waiting to be sprung. And Kael? Kael had sprung them all.
But even as steel clashed and blood soaked the battlefields, the true war slithered beneath the surface—politics.
Petty nobles whispered. Foreign agents schemed. Council votes turned into ambushes. But Adrian had learned the game by now.
His answer to political resistance?
Burn their homes, kill their sponsors, and empty their coffers.
And so he did. One province at a time.
His domain grew not only in land but in power. What had once been a bleeding economy clawing at a deficit of -750, was now a surging powerhouse flush with +5000. Wealth flowed like a river into Kael's hands, though Adrian knew the gold would soon be spent again—new enemies required new armies.
The Steelclad Order had been routed. Their remnants scattered, fleeing like whipped dogs across the borderlands. Eisenreich now bowed under Kael's iron rule. With his position secured, Adrian forced his people onto the Elector Council Seat—whether they were ready or not.
Naturally, the opposition came. Passive-aggressive notifications. Diplomatic warnings. Thinly veiled threats.
Adrian read every message. And then responded.
"Do you want me to visit your province too?"
He didn't need to bluff.
He had earned the right to speak like that.
After all, he was the one who had butchered the cow, The Gore King—Karthalax the Butcher-Beast—and carved him into pieces with such minimal losses it bordered on divine.
With a knowing flick of his joystick, Adrian positioned his second wave of cannon fodder—just fodder in name—high atop the jagged ridge overlooking the valley trail. The placement wasn't inspired by luck or intuition. No, this was the work of sacred power of Load Game.
Thanks to it, Adrian already knew the precise path those oversized bovine brutes would take.
"Wasn't there a Chinese idiom for this?" he muttered, amused by his own tactical genius.
"The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind."