The Game Called Revolution - - (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📗

into one of the electrified rods which she hoped would find his metal hide a worthy conductor.

He hit the rod, cracking it and causing it to send out a hail of sparks. However, it wasn’t the effect she was looking for. While it did send blue energy through his armor, it seemed to only stun him for a moment. “Nice try,” he said. “But did you really think I’d fight you in this environment without a means of defending myself from all the voltage in here? My armor is insulated. You may not know that word, but it means I’m hardened against electricity.”

Jeanne felt frustration setting in. She knew she had to fight it; frustration would make it impossible to come up with a strategy for beating Robespierre in time. Looks like I have no choice.

She reached to her eye patch so she could use her God’s Eye. It had been so long since she had needed to do so that she had almost forgotten its usefulness. She received an unpleasant surprise, though, when something wet suddenly hit her on the head.

It was beginning to rain. “Robespierre! You have to shut this thing down now! There’s no telling what rain could do if you fire off that dish!”

Robespierre, however, continued to laugh at what he perceived as another of her futile attempts to stop him. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Doing so at this point would cause a catastrophic overload, wiping out a large portion of the city.”

“I’ll have to take that risk, then.” She went to remove her eye patch.

Without warning, though, Robespierre suddenly lunged at her. “I won’t let you use your God’s Eye!” He unleashed a flurry of strikes that she did her best to parry, but he was employing a technique called prise de fer, pressuring her blade to keep her from maintaining control of it.

She was forced backwards towards the center of the cylinder and the blood pool. Completely on the defensive, it was all she could do to keep from being completely overwhelmed.

She soon ended up a few feet from the blood pool. With a final push, Robespierre managed to wrest Jeanne’s rapier away from her, sending it sliding across the top of the cylinder, eventually falling off the edge.

He then backhanded her across the face and, to add injury to insult, he ran his rapier through her shoulder. It pierced her irodium armor like it wasn’t even there.

She staggered back to the edge of the blood pool. Crimson essence fell from her wound into it, joining with the blood of countless others.

Robespierre laughed again, harder than ever this time. “What do you think of my custom rapier, made impossibly sharp by alchemy?” he boasted. “How ironic! You came to shut down this tower, and now you have just added to its power.” The entire tower began to rumble. The electricity flowing up the dozens of rods on top of the cylinder increased dramatically, and the rods themselves started to shake. “We only have a minute or so until Vienna is annihilated. The dish is already pointed towards that city. Would you like me to tell you the secret to how exactly all that blood will make it possible?”

“What do you mean?” The effort to speak caused Jeanne to wince from the pain in her shoulder.

“It’s something the Count taught me. There is power in blood.”

“Power?”

The demonic head nodded. “Yes—power! The blood contains the true essence of a person, and that essence holds their will. Because of that, it can do amazing things.”

That didn’t make sense to Jeanne. “Then, why is it doing your bidding?”

“Because,” he said, “there are so many individual wills in there that it’s all become a confusing mass of voices. They have no leader, so they just do what I tell them.”

Jeanne thought about it. If what he said was true, there was still a slight chance she could pull this off.

She knelt down and, using the extreme concentration she normally reserved for the God’s Eye, she focused all her attention on her will. What she wanted, and what she desired.

 

***

 

“It’s no use praying,” Robespierre said as he watched Jeanne kneeling beside the blood receptacle. As far as he was concerned, prayer was the last resort of the desperate, of people who had given up. Not that he could blame her for surrendering to the hopelessness of her situation.

At that moment, though, strange things began to happen. First, the blood in the receptacle began to churn. It was only minor at first, but then it began to bubble enough to escape the receptacle in small drops.

Second, the electricity running through the rods abruptly stopped.

“What the hell is this?” he exclaimed, his heartbeat speeding up. He could feel himself starting to sweat underneath his armor.

Jeanne suddenly broke her prayer and locked her eye on him. “My will.”

“No—that’s impossible! No one is strong enough to—”

He didn’t get the chance to finish his expression of disbelief, because at that instant the rods facing him lit back up with blue energy. This was followed by a massive surge in his direction, all the rods in front of him focusing on his demonic form.

He didn’t feel anything. He didn’t even realize he had been lifted off his feet until he was well in the air.

 

 

 

 

***

 

Jeanne watched with supreme satisfaction as the rods’ voltage was bent to her will—thanks to the power of all the blood in the pool—and rocketed into Robespierre, lighting him up with a near-blinding brilliance. She savored every moment of seeing him hurled through the air.

He landed on the top of the stairs of the cylinder. His momentum then caused him to roll helplessly down them. She didn’t have time to check to see if he was still alive, though, as there was still a job she needed to finish.

Still kneeling, she focused all her willpower on the massive dish looming above. There was only one command she wished to give it: move.

She focused on that thought with everything she had, until her head began to hurt. Finally, though, her directive was heeded: The electricity somehow rotated the dish upwards. Away from any country or city.

Now!

With an overwhelming blast the dish released all its electricity into the sky. Jeanne had to cover her eyes because it was far too intense. Not only that, but the entire tower shook from the discharge.

 

***

 

“Look at that!” Victor shouted. From the deck of the Minuit Solaire II, they all watched as a brilliant flash of light erupted from the dish atop the central tower. Following that, all signs of electricity on the tower immediately disappeared.

“That was supposed to hit Vienna, right?” Celeste asked with hope in her voice. “Milady did it, didn’t she?”

“I sure hope so,” Pierre said cautiously. He didn’t want to start celebrating, just in case it wasn’t over yet.

Almost at the same moment he said it, it began to rain in full. It was a complete downpour. If it had come just a minute earlier, there was no telling what kind of damage might have been done.

Everyone on the deck began to cheer. There was no doubt in their minds that disaster had been averted. Pierre didn’t have the heart to point out that even if that was the case, what would France do now that so much of the country’s resources had been invested in the Alset Project?

For now, he had only one priority. “Let’s get in there and find the Commander!”

 

 

 

***

 

Jeanne reached the bottom of the cylinder’s stairs, her shoulder hurting from the wound Robespierre had inflicted on it, and found him gone. Somehow, he must have still had the strength to escape. She wasn’t worried; if he went out the way she had come in, then Farahilde would take care of it. Instead of hurrying after him, she went to retrieve her rapier.

But when she went back into the ballroom, she found neither of them. Only the bloody corpse of Madam Tussaud remained.

There was, however, a trail of small metal pieces leading out of the ballroom. Jeanne guessed it was from Robespierre’s alchemically-created armor; it was probably falling apart from the voltage it had absorbed. She just needed to follow it to him before he ran out of pieces to drop.

 

***

 

Naked, and still largely numb from the blast that damned woman had hit him with, Robespierre limped to the front entrance of the Tuileries.

Despite everything that had happened, he counted himself lucky he had evacuated the palace as soon as the Ordre invaded with their airship. There was no one around to see him in this humiliating state.

I was so close to saving France, he lamented. Now it’s all come to nothing! That chienne has cost me everything. Why, God? Why didn’t you stop her? Have you forsaken this once-great country?

When he reached the front doors, he reached out his one hand that could still move and fumbled with the knob. After several aggravating moments he managed to get the door open, and stepped outside into the large square in front of the palace.

Where everyone was waiting.

He gaped at the huge mob. Despite the rain, it seemed all of Paris had come out to see what was going on. As a result, he stood there in his wet shame.

“It’s Robespierre!”

“He doesn’t look so tough now!”

“Not only that, he forgot to put on clothes!”

The crowd was wet, and they were cold, but for the first time in ages, the people of Paris shared a laugh. “Why did we ever listen to this guy?” one of them said.

Another one answered, “We were fools.”

“He’s right. We turned our backs on the Ordre because we believed what this lunatic said.”

Robespierre couldn’t take the ridicule; he couldn’t take them making a mockery of him as if he wasn’t even there. “Stop it!” he shouted, while doing his best to keep his manhood covered. “I am your leader! You will show me respect!” To this they erupted in hearty laughter.

A voice behind him then said, in the most condescending tone possible, “It’s over, Monsieur Robespierre.” He turned around to see Jeanne de Fleur standing in the doorway. She had her rapier pointed at him.

The crowd was astonished at her appearance. “Jeanne la Juste!” they shouted, followed by pleas for her to forgive them for betraying her.

He let out a heavy sigh. He was defeated; he could not deny that. With nothing left for him, he dropped to his knees.

 

***

 

“Get it over with,” Robespierre said. Jeanne had waited what seemed like eons for this moment.

She pointed her blade at his black heart, the tip drawing blood from his exposed flesh. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to kill him so bad she couldn’t think about anything else. The thought of taking him down had been the only thing keeping her alive up to this point.

But was that really the way to live one’s life?

“Any last words?” she asked him.

He looked up at her with the most pitiful expression she had ever seen. “What I did, I did for the good of France.”

She didn’t know what to think of that. Perhaps, in his own twisted way, he had truly believed in the path he walked. But there was no possible to way to justify that, no way to make it up to everyone he had butchered to achieve his goals.

So, she stood there gripping the handle of her rapier. Her hand shook,