Cannon Omake: Christ's Kingdom on Earth (Part 2)
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
The Globe Uprising
By late 11 A.E., Sarah Wyse had become increasingly estranged from her brother, as had their adoptive Downtimer parents. What had started as a pragmatic means of getting enough to eat had taken on a life of its own. Abiel's own family interacted with him less and less, as the self-proclaimed prophet spent more and more time with his followers and in great community gatherings that seemed to be half religious sermons and half training exercises.
Nevertheless, ties of family were not so easily severed, as an encounter with Senator Dean Barker would show. Barker held a strong hatred of both Abiel Wyse and his followers, which soon provoked a heated argument, which in turn attracted a crowd. When Barker lost his temper and punched the still-teenaged girl, the crowd transformed into a riot, and a combination of Globe police and Barker's personal escort only barely managed to keep them from literally tearing the Senator apart.
Things escalated rapidly from this point, as each side of the confrontation demanded the other's head, and began mobilizing forces to collect it. Whitefield, attempting to find some sort of compromise between an influential Senator with many powerful allies and the increasingly large Vanguard cult, discovered that the Vanguards of Christ were no longer, if they ever truly had been, under his control. The boy prophet was by now fully convinced of his divine status, and had grown increasingly disgusted with the New American Republic over his two years in residence. The drought and the resulting woes of the many impoverished Americans in the throes of hunger (particularly the young who lacked an education to find gainful employment) had struck a particular chord with the boy. In his next sermon less than an hour later, he denounced the New American Republic, its President, its Senators, and the entire system as hopelessly corrupt, calling for a full scale uprising to topple "This living monument to human sin and Greed."
The population of Globe, swelled by the dispossessed and radicalized by hunger, was more than happy to comply. Whitefield mobilized the Globe Sheriff Department to put down the Vanguards, but to his horror, they were utterly crushed, complacent after a decade of little more than putting down unarmed dissidents and two years of being able to rely on the Vanguards for dangerous duties and heavy lifting. The Vanguards of Christ meanwhile numbered almost ten-thousand at this point, and even if many were armed with simple tools instead of guns, most were hardened from skirmishes and confrontations with other NAR militias and mobs. Just as importantly, they'd stolen the march on the Sheriffs, storming the department headquarters and other critical buildings in the first half-hour of the uprising.
The capitol building didn't last much longer. President Whitefield was forced to flee, as was Senator Baker, who would go on to form the main NAR bloc opposing the Vanguardists. Abiel meanwhile, was publicly acclaimed by the Vanguards as Viceroy of Christ's Kingdom on Earth.
The nascent kingdom's first challenge was not long in coming. Dean Baker had rallied his own militia, executing Whitefield for allowing things to get this far and joining forces with Chuck Wise, who retained one of the single largest military forces of any Senator. Other disparate forces were also rallied, such as the religious militants of the Diocese of Globe under Bishop Henry Gibbons, along with what remained of Globe's Sheriff Department. This combined force marched on Globe at best speed, aiming to put down the uprising before it could spread.
The fighting was hard, but the speed of the Vanguardist uprising meant they had been able to seize most of Globe's pre-Event equipment stockpiles before they could be evacuated or destroyed, including large amounts of police body armor, assault weapons, and even a number of technicals. Furthermore, one of the first things the new Viceroy had done (alongside ordering that the city be fortified against a counterattack) was to command preachers to go out into the countryside and rally sympathizers to the cause. These uprisings reinforced the city's defenders and cut badly into the coalition's supply lines, and after three days of fighting, they were forced to withdraw in defeat.
Word soon spread of the success of the Globe Uprising, and within a week lines had been drawn across the NAR in what was fast escalating into a nation-wide civil war, and within a couple months would expand far beyond that.
Anatolia Ablaze
After the second victory at Globe, the Vanguardist uprising spread like wildfire. Rural farmers, urban poor, and Downtimer slaves alike flocked to it, drawn to a power that had shown it could take on the New American Republic's best and win. The Vanguards' acceptance of Downtimers soon had an additional blessing, as local Luwian resistance movements were well-equipped with weapons and ammunition smuggled to them by New Washington (and the NAR had done the same thing to their dissident Downtimers.) Now, many chose to join forces with the Vanguards. That one of Abiel Wyse's first acts had been to rename Globe to its pre-conquest name of Sfard was one of numerous olive branches that attracted them to this strange young American, another being the order to free any and all slaves they encountered.
Even a number of Senators ended up joining with the Vanguards. While few, if any, had any real belief in the Vanguard faith, this was perhaps unsurprising. The culture of the NAR's upper class had, after all, been built around loyalty to the President by virtue of him being the biggest warlord. And after the twin battles of Globe, no one had a bigger or better equipped army in the NAR than the Abiel Wyse. In particular, those who had converted before the uprising (which had likewise been a purely political move) hoped they could use their early conversion to curry favor within the new Kingdom.
With their powerbase now established, the new Christ's Kingdom on Earth and its Viceroy quickly began mobilizing for war. Globe had a reasonably sized industrial base that had swelled with the cheap labor suddenly available thanks to the drought, while the decentralized nature of the NAR meant small-scale, often cottage industries were widespread. Much of this would now be turned to military production, producing equipment for the CKE's military. The military itself would be organized, with Vanguard veterans organized into cadres, around which the thousands of new recruits would gather to create combat formations. Others would be concentrated into elite shock units, equipped with the finest in Uptime armor and weapons. So prepared, the new Vanguardist army marched out to war.
Resistance to the Vanguards coalesced in the west, closer to the coastline. Here, Senator Baker used his connections and fragile but still functional alliance with Chuck Wise to declare himself President, leading the anti-Vanguardist forces of the NAR. Between Baker's web of favors to other Senators and militia commanders and Chuck's own personal force, they still held at least nominal control over the majority of the nation's professional military forces. However, they failed to realize the extent of the popular support for the Vanguards, or more accurately, underestimated how much the general population disliked them. Chuck Wise's mass buyouts of land had made him the single most hated figure amongst the NAR's rural population, and Dean Baker was a well-known far-right extremist and conspiracy theorist even by the standards of the generally right-wing NAR. His persecutions of anyone "Liberal" (including doctors, lawyers, scientists, and almost any career that required a college education) were so infamous that ironically, many such figures within the NAR and unable to flee the nation entirely decided to throw their lot in with the cultists, which would prove to be a great boon as the Kingdom developed into a proper nation.
As a result, the torrent of defections and sympathetic revolts to the Vanguardist cause only increased with every passing week, not helped by the CKE's policy of sending preachers out across the countryside. Military confrontations with the CKE didn't go much better. Not only did the elite Vanguards of its military come equipped with the finest of plundered Uptime wargear from Globe, but the rank and file rebels, fuelled by religious fervor, attacked with a fanatical determination, and rather than fighting as a disorderly mob as many expected, the Army of Christ's Kingdom on Earth fought with startling professionalism for a force that had only officially formed less than a month prior. The NAR remnant found itself driven out of the interior, and was increasingly pushed back across the countryside.
In late November of 11 A.E., barely two months after the start of what the Vanguards were beginning to call the "War for Heaven" and everyone else called the Vanguardist War (or Great West Anatolian War in its later stages), the scope of the conflict expanded. In neighboring New Washington, a polarized and heavily contested election had escalated into an attempted coup by the far-right Conservative Party. When the coup failed, the remnants of the Party, fearing destruction, approached the CKE forces garrisoning the border, pleading with them to intervene and save them from the "Liberal-Communist Purge" and offering to bring the nation into the Kingdom's fold.
Bewildered at this sudden offer, but also realizing the golden opportunity presented to the Kingdom, General Sebastian Martinez quickly mobilized his forces and marched into New Washington's interior, the Conservative-sympathetic forces in the region simply letting them in.
This would prove to be a fatal error on the part of the Conservative Party. Not only were the Vanguardists militantly opposed to the landowners and social conservatives who made up much of the Conservative Party (viewing them as simply New Washington's version of the NAR), but they also had a level of connection to many of the nation's Downtimer resistance movements, and the Vanguardist faith had spread fairly rapidly across much of the hinterland. Widespread lynching of the landowners across New Washington's interior occurred, and a mix of Downtimers and American defectors frustrated with the nation's recent reverses both internationally and internally. Christ's Kingdom on Earth was now fighting the two largest and most powerful nations in Anatolia… and winning.
Ouroboros
As the world entered 12 A.E., Christ's Kingdom on Earth seemed to be surging from strength to strength. With the harvest season over and the next year's planting season yet to begin, the army's ranks could be temporarily bolstered by thousands upon thousands of rural levies. While the levy would only last for a few weeks at best before it would need to be disbanded and many of the new conscripts were equipped with crude pipe-arquebuses or even tools and improvised melee weapons, this size of this temporary levy, allowed by the sheer proximity of the enemy, may nevertheless have outnumbered every other army in West Anatolia combined.
Against this overwhelming force, the NAR military resistance collapsed. Maddunassa, the last major city in NAR hands, fell in late January to a combined external assault and internal uprising, forcing the Baker government to flee once again. Meanwhile, the rest of the NAR was on the verge of total collapse as the population rebelled while Senators and militias defected to whichever neighbor was both nearby and seen as willing to accept them. The push into New Washington was far less impressive, with a much smaller invasion facing off against the still mostly intact forces of its professional army augmented by National Guard units, but still managed to gain several kilometers of ground.
But all was not well within Christ's Kingdom on Earth. The rapid expansion into the two largest West Anatolian nations had left it with numerous holdouts of resistance, ranging from Downtimers who proved unenthusiastic about accepting what they saw as an American faith to settler militias who feared the CKE as nothing but a mad mob of Downtimers who would kill them all. Their New Washington holdings in particular suffered from this, with many National Guard units in nominally occupied territory having been fighting them even before they turned on the Conservatives.
Furthermore, while the wave of defections and desertions into the Vanguardist ranks was welcome, it had made the military situation much more chaotic. Aside from the core forces formed from those who had directly followed Abiel Wyse, there were also now the private armies of ex-NAR Senators, Downtimer resistance fighters, militias raised by independent firebrands, New Washington and NAR defectors, bandit and mercenary groups of nominal loyalty at best, and even a number of warbands from neighboring Downtimer nations who had joined in pursuit of vengeance and plunder.
Combined with the rapid expansion of the CKE's territory, and the internal situation of the Kingdom was increasingly messy, with vast swathes under de-facto military rule, with generals acting also as warlords ruling over their own petty-empires. There had even been a number of outright battles between different parts of the CKE military. From the situation on the ground and up into the highest echelons of power, Christ's Kingdom on Earth was rife with infighting. Further complicating matters was the arrival of smallpox, which was sweeping across the Mediterranean, and the chaotic nature of the CKE, combined with strong anti-vaxxer sentiments by much of the ex-NAR American population, meant that the kingdom suffered heavily and inoculation via cowpox occurred far too late for many.
Saying that Abiel Wyse was a powerless figurehead during this time wouldn't be quite accurate. The boy king still after all, held the fanatical loyalty of the Vanguard core and had blossomed into a genuinely impressive public speaker, capable of whipping up mobs of eager converts across the CKE into a frenzy to follow his commands. However, in the early days he was largely uninvolved in the actual statecraft, instead leading processions to preach the word to the various populations of newly conquered or liberated lands. While this did much to turn Vanguard Christianity from a thing most merely paid lip service to into a genuine force of belief, it did little to halt the infighting within the Kingdom itself, as his nominal advisors and vassals were free to run their own petty empires with impunity.
Things came to a head in March, when the internal squabbling reached a fever pitch of combat between the various factions within the CKE, and with it a great deal of bloodshed across the upper echelons and lower ranks of the Kingdom. Accusations of heresy and treachery ricocheted across the leadership, each one bringing with it an internal purge between former Senators, Downtimer warlords, and even a number of the original Vanguards killed by either their rivals' followers under the guise of faith, or baying mobs whipped into a frenzy by the mood of the times.
One of these casualties would be Sarah Wyse. Sources differ on why. The supporters of Abiel Wyse claim that the deed was done by agents of Ryan Wall, a turncoat NAR Senator who had amassed great influence both before and after the rise of the CKE by converting to Vanguardism, as part of an attempt to isolate the king by removing anyone else who could influence him. Detractors of Vanguard Christianity instead claim that she was overhead discussing her wish to escape the madhouse that Anatolia had become and was executed for her perceived treachery.
Regardless of how it happened, Sarah's death would devastate her younger brother. Despite how the creation of Christ's Kingdom on Earth had only further estranged the siblings, Abiel still held no small amount of affection for Sarah, crediting her with his survival after their Uptime parents died. For a week after her death, he secluded himself in his quarters within the old capitol building of Sfard, barely accepting food and water that was brought to him. Many feared he would waste away and the kingdom would collapse. Others hoped that this was their chance to rule instead, and the internal conflicts of the Kingdom raged on, and in some places even escalated.
But instead, after that week was over, Abiel Wyse emerged from his quarters, and quietly began assembling people to him, a mix of Vanguardist old guard and new fervent converts, most notably the many young Americans who had, like him, been mere children when the Event happened. Those who had known him before noted that while Abiel's eyes had always burned with a mad fervor, they now seemed more focused in that zeal than ever before.
The Sermon of Sfard
Upon his recovery, one of Abiel Wyse's first acts was to call for a grand meeting at Sfard upon the end of May, declaring that he had received a vision from God and all the noteworthy of the Kingdom must attend, so that the Kingdom could be properly shaped towards what the divine willed. In the cases where faith was not enough, Wyse made sure to imply that this meeting would be what decided the true shape of the kingdom, and that to ignore this summon was to lose the chance to influence it.
It was the best time for such a meeting to take place. The planting season of 12 A.E. had begun, which meant many of the militias of all combatants in the war would need to return to the fields. With the drought of the previous year, a good harvest was sorely needed by all participants, despite their mutual suspicion of an attack during this time. Furthermore, New Washington's recent annexation of the New American Republic with widespread autonomy (including retaining the legalization of slavery and lack of democracy) had sparked widespread revolts. With its foes so distracted, the Vanguardists were free to prepare to assemble at Sfard.
The first day of assembly began in front of most of Sfard's population, which, despite the damage inflicted by Smallpox, was still vast and devoted to the Vanguardist cause. Abiel Wyse had declared the day a holiday so that they might witness this historic moment, one that would begin with a grand sermon detailing his revelation. His advisors and vassals, deciding to humor the young boy king, agreed to this.
The sermon would begin like many others from the boy, emphasizing the importance of keeping to the holy mission that God had sent Tucson across the Sea of Time for, and the need for the Vanguards to return the people of Anatolia to this task they had shirked for over a decade. But then it began to change. Abiel began to openly weep, speaking of the loss of his sister and how he had, for a moment, allowed his weakness to consume him. Until he received another vision in his isolation, one of his sister resting in Heaven. There they had reconciled and spoken of various wrongs done to each other. Sarah Wyse had apologized for leaving her brother, but said it was a necessary step. After all, by doing so, she had ensured that Abiel Wyse's eyes had been opened to a new enemy: a corruption festering within the very Kingdom of Christ on Earth.
As Abiel spoke, the crowd grew ever more fevered, furious at the idea of such rot within their Kingdom and Faith, and began calling, begging for Abiel to name it so it could be destroyed. It was at this point that the various attendees began to truly notice the identities of the many guards who had been appointed to protect such a vast collection of VIPs. To a man, they were former participants in the initial Globe Uprisings, with many having fought for the Vanguards since their formation. Well-armed, experienced, and zealously loyal to Abiel Wyse above all others.
While the internal fighting within the CKE meant many of the major figures within its politics had brought their own personal guards, they were nowhere near enough to fight not just the Vanguardist veterans, but also the increasingly zealous mob of thousands that Abiel had whipped up into a frenzy. And so, many simply stood, stunned and terrified, as Abiel began speaking of the chaos that had engulfed the kingdom over the past months, and began speaking the names of those identified as the greatest ringleaders and most dangerously ambitious. The first names given were those of Ryan Wall and his entourage, who were quickly disarmed and hurled into the furious crowd, who proceeded to, quite literally, tear them to pieces.
Despite this gruesome start, most of those assembled were not killed. If nothing else, Abiel Wyse desired to have a functioning kingdom at the end of this sermon, and not a blazing ruin. As such, many were simply called upon to reaffirm their oath of loyalty to the Vanguard faith and Abiel Wyse as its prophet. For many this was the first time ever meeting Wyse in person, and, thoroughly impressed by his charisma and well aware of the likely consequences for refusing, did as requested. Even many of those who had been involved with the infighting were given some leeway, provided they displayed a repentant nature at Abiel's urging. They would be allowed to continue to live in relative comfort in exchange for their graceful retirement, with a few even still serving in the administration… with careful eyes on them. Some had even been approached before the sermon had started, quietly given hints at what would occur and offered a chance to retain a good portion of their power, and even prosper from future rewards, by turning on their compatriots.
Others however, were less fortunate. In particular, various warlords near Sfard were quickly and brutally disposed of if they could not make even faster and very public displays of total loyalty and submission to the boy king. In the aftermath of what would become known as the Sermon of Sfard, the city's militia would be sent to their former territories, securing for Abiel personal control over the most vital agricultural, population, and industrial centers of the CKE. Other Vanguard zealots would quickly take control of their personal armies, merging them with the main Vanguardist core. In the months that followed, the lull in the fighting would be used to lead many to Sfard to swear loyalty to Wyse in person.
The Sermon was not entirely successful. A few local power-figures had escaped, or simply not been present when news arrived, and many rose up in revolt, taking advantage of the general chaos across the Kingdom. The rest of 12 A.E. and much of the following year would involve putting down this internal strife, which likely played a part in at least a few of the military reverses the CKE would suffer in the coming months. Nevertheless, the bulk of the worst and most dangerous offenders had been dealt with, and the various factions that had risked tearing the kingdom apart had been thoroughly disposed of or tamed. In a single stroke, Abiel Wyse had made it clear that he would be no puppet, but a ruler in his own right. The teenage boy, one whose pre-Event education had ended at preschool and who was still largely illiterate, had solidified his control over the largest nation in West Anatolia, having triumphed over dozens of men older, more educated, and more experienced than him in the process.
