Chapter 2: Life Till Now

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"Men are not men on the battlefield. We turn into some other creature. You can do the cruelest things… It doesn't even matter if it's an order or not. To protect yourself, your mind shuts out any emotions you have. It's like a steel door. But once the war ends, you can't keep it closed forever."

- Edward Elric, (Fullmetal Alchemist)

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<(Atem POV)>

There is a difference between being a god and an emperor. If you are a god, you can do anything you like, do whatever you want and nobody will ever question you but if you are an emperor you will always have to think about your people first, about those loyal to you, you will have rules and morals stopping you from behaving like a god to your people.

However different from the two previous positions, a God Emperor is something completely different. Being a God Emperor was both about having fun as well as doing twisted stuff that would make any sane normal person puke with disgust... like slaughtering an entire army without mercy.

Yeah, it isn't exactly as fun as it sounds on paper or in high-budget films and shows. No, an actual slaughter in real life can challenge even the people with the strongest will to throw up like a fountain. People dying left and right due to blood loss, severed limbs lying about, or severe burns melting off people's faces even when they were practically begging you to spare them, promising their eternal servitude and everything else they had, even sometimes resorting to curses and threats when they lost all hope. The entire thing can be pretty intense and stomach-churning.

The same thing occurred to me when I had to stand and watch my lifeless para-sentinel droid troops made of remodified mutant-hunting sentinels emotionlessly annihilate an entire race of green-skinned fantasy creatures. In my defense, I didn't have the desire to throw up but I did feel disgusted at the sight, at the bare cruelty of the crime that I was myself committing yet I kept on looking forcing myself to etch every moment of the event into my mind for eternity.

I didn't want to be someone naive who had no idea about the bloodshed that war can possibly cause, someone who thinks that a war is just a way to gain more power and influence. No, I wanted to always remember what war could do to civilization so that I would never become a war fanatic who would crave bloodlust just for some ego boost.

Of course, one might ask why I even followed through with the slaughter, wasting time, resources, and a perfectly healthy supply of free soldiers and labor.

It was because it needed to be done. As a New god, I had quite amazing psionic powers and through one of those powers famously named telepathy, I could read all of their minds, the programs embedded into their very souls, their bare instincts... And I was disgusted at what I saw.

The green-skinned warrior race wasn't a natural species but an only male race made by Karnilla's magic meant only for battle and war. It thrived on suffering and chaos, killing others, raping women to breed them, torturing them, eating anything they got their hands on, not even sparing babies. Even if I had let them live today, even if I had shown them pity or reprogrammed their minds into being my followers and obeying me, their souls would still always belong to Karnilla, they would always be spiritually loyal to her. Their instincts would always be of savage bastards wanting to cause suffering rather than loyal soldiers.

And I had no need for savages, no need for cowardly deserters or possible traitors, and believe me or not, they would have definitely betrayed me in due time. My para-sentinels were much better than them albeit they would probably do better with some software upgrades especially to quicken their decision-making and reflexes which proved a little lacking in this war resulting in some of them getting destroyed during Karnilla and Morgana's battle. But since this was their first mass testing, I was satisfied.

As one of my winged droids finally made a fist-sized hole in the last Norn warrior who hadn't been captured by shooting red plasma with its blaster mounted on its wrists, the massacre officially ended.

There were barely about a hundred casualties on our side in the form of broken or missing para-sentinels and more than eighty percent of them were from the spells of Karnilla.

"It's done, master. The para-sentinels have wiped out the entirety of the twelve-thousand-strong army and have imprisoned the ones who seemed to be their generals. Should we start repairing the castle?" An emotionless female voice sounded from a glowing brick-sized cube floating near me.

[{Image}]

"Only twelve thousand? Isn't that too low of a number? How did Karnilla even have any hope of winning and successfully defending her realm against the godly factions of the ten realms with such a low number of soldiers especially since there wasn't even a single sorcerer among them? Even human countries like the US, China, or Russia have more soldiers and better military tech than them." I asked curiously as I looked towards Karnilla who was still bound in those thorny chains and was currently being interrogated by my Morgan Le Fey, my own New god of magic.

"Each of these Norns can be said to be seventy times seventy humans. From skin as hard as steel to claws as sharp as axes, the savage instincts of wild animals, and smart strategy, they had everything they needed to counter armies like frost giants or dark elves at least until Karnilla could use her magic. It was only due to the cutting-edge design of the sentinels as well as the carbonadium metal formula we 'took' from the Russians that they were strong enough to face the army like that.

The plasma weapons that I had improved upon as well as their advanced targeting and dodging systems were also very useful in the battle to be efficient Norn killing machines. But even then I could have increased their effectiveness further if you had allowed me to directly control them." Zoya informed as she displayed a hologram of some graphs and numerical data in front of the New god.

"Nah, that way we would have no idea what the para-sentinels on their own were capable of. This was a necessary sacrifice to test their efficiency and capabilities in an actual war. You can have your fun next time." I smiled at the mother box who displayed a disappointed face on another holographic screen that she made.

"Oh and yes you can start the repairing and renovation process on the... space castle. I can't exactly sense any whole planet in this dimension thus we won't have to do any terraforming, so that's a plus. However, the dimension itself seems habitable like our own." I said after I had slowly spread my divine cosmic awareness all around myself in the form of a spherical barrier until it covered about the size of the entire earth, telling me all the information I needed to know about that particular space.

"As you command, master. I'll instruct the para-sentinels to start the repairing work on the Nornkeep after securing a dozen prisoners we took for our experiments. The entire process should be completed in approximately three days seven hours and sixteen minutes from now." Zoya answered as she floated away with a blinking sound to oversee the repairs.

She could just take complete control of all sentinels from anywhere she liked but I guess she was more of a hands-on kind of person, no pun intended.

"This is amazing." I could not help but mutter to myself as I saw my newest and first big conquest, an entire dimension as big as the Solar system. It's not much compared to some of the more prominent rulers of the Marvel multiverse like Thanos who ruled an entire galaxy consisting of billions of star systems but it was enough for me... for now.

Only if I could lead a slow life. Conquering stuff sounded really good while telling a story or creating a legend but actually doing it is really a big headache. Probably that's one of the reasons why most Japanese protagonists want a slow life nowadays.

I still remember the day I first came into the Marvel Multiverse about a decade ago. A teenage physical body and a childish mentality to get a harem of girlfriends for myself and be the ruler of the multiverse, armed with a choice-based system and all the anime, manga, movie, and comics knowledge one could possibly ask for but unfortunately, not even a single memory of the life I led previously.

I didn't understand it back then but now I do. It was a trade-off. One that I didn't really hate but I didn't exactly love as well. You see having memories is very important for a person to shape what his personality is and give him experience in life but without those memories back then, I was just a newborn idiot seeing everything from a 'comic plot' point of view.

Life itself had become a joke for me where I measured everything in terms of rewards and gains. I made a LOT of bad decisions that I regret even today like killing most of the beings that I termed as 'villains' from my previous life knowledge without giving them even a single chance to redeem themselves thinking that they didn't deserve it.

And all because of some reward that the system promised after killing each one of them. Of course, those rewards were important for my growth and survival. In fact, I do not hate my system at all, its rewards were the only reason I was still alive even after a decade of arriving at Marvel but what I am truly angry at is myself since every time I received one of those quest choices, instead of thinking about the best way to solve the problem or the most efficient way to fulfill the quest, all I used to do back then was just check the promised reward and jump straight into the fight killing everyone in my path like a real psycho maniac.

Magneto was just one of the many victims of my childishness and idiocracy back then. But no more, I had matured a lot in these ten years. The friends that I had made along the way as well as my trusted subordinates, had all helped me mature and become a better version of my past self.

Most of all, the few... lovers I had gotten during this period, particularly the metahumans Jean Grey, Ororo Munroe, Selene Gallio, Gwendoline Poole, Vanessa Carlysle..., and some others were my biggest inspiration to limit and quit my system dependence and reward addiction. And yes I already have quite an amazing harem curtsey of my earlier horndog self (although I am still just as horny).

Of course, I still claim and use all the quest rewards that I get whenever I fulfill a quest objective but I do it in a way that does not make my life a toxic hell of constant quest grinding. I do it in a way that I can grow in power without causing any adverse effects on myself or the world that I currently live in. Why, you ask that I care for this world? Simple, because in the words of a surprisingly wise person, I am one of the many idiots living on it.

And man I was glad I did it. It really saved my life and future because I found out a certain little thing about the particular system that I was 'given'.

Something that changed my entire viewpoint on gamers and their so-called OP systems.

As many intelligent people have said before, nothing in this world is for free and if it is then it's not free, It's a trade-off.

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