That still doesn’t excuse wiping out hundreds of innocent people. No matter how you slice it, what he did was atrocious and wrong. My family was hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and killed during the Holocaust. Their so-called friends turned on them. I’m descended from the lucky ones who managed to escape. People still tell me they think the Nazis should have done a better job eradicating us (and all Jewish people). But that’s exactly why I would never do what the Darkling did. I would never put innocent people through what my ancestors suffered just to get back at the few in power. A whole city died to get back at one or two men. That’s not about protecting anyone. That’s about payback. It’s not justice or protection. It’s a threat to those who would stand up to the Darkling. There are lines that the Darkling crossed in slaughtering Novokribirsk. In the books, if I remember right, he didn’t do it as any kind of payback. He just did it to show that he could.