The place between dimensions, as you have taken to calling it, is just as strange as usual. No time nor space to get in your way, and yet you feel as though you're moving in some weird way.

Anyway, your target is a 'location' you already know about, so this will just be an easy and simple-

"THErE you aRe, FRIENd! i/wE hAD a MesSage." All of a sudden, you are surrounded by a swirl of colors (despite knowing that no lights exists in this non-place) and shapes, the combination of which you can just barely interpret as a variety of thoughts. "HaRd to rEacH out To PLAces nOT YET iNfLuENCeD bY my/Our/sElF."

Oh hey, you remember that voice, too. "Nice to meet you out here, then," you 'intone', despite there being no air around you. There's a reason you need to specially keep a grasp on anyone you take with you when you do this. "Come here often?"

"LIVE hEre, tecHnICAlLY. NATURaL hABITat. AlsO, mEsSaGe. I hAd a reQUEST."

You do note that you're still 'moving' towards your destination, so you give your best approximation of a shrug when your body doesn't actually exist at the moment. "Sure, I'll hear you out at least."

Whatever this guy is, they did help you with finding Okita, if nothing else... and making enemies is always a bad idea when what you're talking to is like this.

"I/WE NEEDED You To HeLP WiTH an ISsue," they open up. "sOMeONe stARTed cReAting TOo mANY paRaLlEL DimEnsiOnS aT ONce by LETtInG An iNfINiTe Number OF theM percEive eACh othEr, AnD It Is GIvINg ME/us a HEaDAChe. It iS UNDER CONTrOL, But having yoU sTEP In AnD DEAl WITH tHe roOT caUse WouLD bE grEAtLY hELpFUl."

"I... see?" You're honestly lacking too many of the details here.

"WoRRy noT, It IS nOThINg beyONd Your PoWER. ShOuLd noT TAke TOo LOnG, eiTHer, aNd tHERe iS A ReWaRD, Of courSe. jUsT hEAD To THe cIty UnDER The wateR or tHE PlACe we fIrsT mET if yOU Want to HElP." With that, the eldritch entity you met once before in this world bursts apart, visibly turning its attention from you to elsewhere.

Interesting, how that works, you think. Either way, you're nearly there, so any thoughts you're having will have to wait a moment- re-entry into reality always itches a little.

You arrive in the same spot you last left this dimension from, the otherwise unremarkable side room filled with the same people, even, except for the priestess you took from this place being replaced with Emily, the teenaged girl embarrassedly covering herself with both arms as she comes to stand there completely naked.

Okita's breasts, of course, are proudly held out like usual as she goes to retrieve her original sword, left right where she put it only moments (local time) ago.

She waves it around a little, giving it a nod. "Mhm. Light."

"You did get a lot stronger compared to when we left off here," you shrug and pick up the clothes you'd been wearing when you returned to Earth Bet last time around, smirking at the glances Emily is stealing from the corner of her eyes.

And walk right up to her, naturally. "Here, put this on for the moment, we'll get you something to wear in a bit."

"Thanks," she faintly says, clearing her throat and quickly dressing herself. Sarah is already done with it herself, having been the first to do so.

"Gabe, weapons," she asks, going over to get Okita to actually put clothes on instead of just standing there with her sword in hand.

"Of course. To the shadows we give, from the shadows we take!" Grabbing the equipment you took along inside the somewhat metaphysically functioning storage (it works by using your shadow as access point, no matter where or how, your shadow always leads to the same location is shadowspace), you hand it out to everyone, letting Emily hide her face behind her mask again.

"Did you want your other sword, Okita?" You ask, holding the Remnant-style weapon you made for her out.

She nods, tilting her head. "Dual wield."

You aren't quite sure what to say to that, so you just shrug. Whatever floats her boat, you suppose.

... Watching the half-naked girl juggle her oversized murder implements (that's just what you like to call anything she holds, really), you idly consider if you can't get her a single weapon heavy enough she'll use two hands for it.

The rest of the castle is still more or less as you remember it, and so it is simplicity itself to find a few of the oddly competent servants seemingly lurking around every corner (a few of them are literally hiding in secret rooms and passages always ready to spring forth when called, as you can now easily see) and have a room arranged for Emily.

One with some protection from the sun, just like yours and Sarah's. Just because sunlight doesn't literally burn you alive anymore doesn't mean it is any more pleasant.

Now then, on to your usual thing. The princess is probably going to find you in a day or so at most, but that still leaves you with about a day or so to work with in peace while Sarah begs off to get right back to what she was doing last time around and Okita is looking for some random courtyard to try and get used to her new idea of dual wielding greatswords.

It takes a little time to start with, but getting down into the dungeons where the prisoners fearfully shuffle as you come through and picking out some meat for what is to follow keeps you occupied well enough until Emily has her new room finalized and is available for what you needed.

Speaking of which, she is well aware of what that is, and nervously shuffling around outside the basement room her (and your) future victims are tied up inside of when you open the door. "So, you ready, Emily? Last chance, as I like to call it."

"Let's just do this already, okay?" She asks. "The wait is worse than anything else at this point."

"Alright, alright. Come right on in and make the acquaintance of a bunch of war prisoners that won't be coming out. Alive, anyway, their bodies will be put to good use later."

"Isn't that, y'know," she dithers for a moment, "a war crime?"

"It might be, if this dimension had ever seen any legislation about war on either side of the fence," you shrug. "Also, abouttobevampedsayswhat?"

"I'm not going to fall for that one," the brunette says drily, crossing her arms.

"Too bad, still doing it anyway," you shrug. A single well-practiced moment later, Emily has a steady supply of blood to drink even as you free up her neck a little.

It will disappear and heal up in a flash, but it's still the one bite that will turn her. You figure it may as well look good.

She snorts, but goes along with it... And before long, she has her own set of fangs, ravenously jumping the men stinking of sweat, excrement and panic.

The scent of greatness, that.

Emily is taking rather well to the prospect of undeath, though you fear a few of the servants will have to do a lot of work to get the bloodstains cleaned up after the two of you are done.

Nevertheless, it's done, and Emily tells you she has gained control over fire in some capacity- something you insist she doesn't try out before she has some safety measures in place.

She calls you a worrywart, you call her an 'impertinent whippersnapper', fun is had and she is off to try out a few of her other powers for the time being.

You, on the other hand, seek out the princess, who is mildly surprised at you doing so. "Gabriel! I thought you were taking a day off?"

The exact nature of your ability to avoid her however long you wish to is completely unrelated, of course. "I have unlocked the powers of the universe and am now capable of groundbreaking feats that will turn this nation on its head."

Rose tilts her head, subtly moving a pile of parchment to the side so she can prop her chin up on her folded hands. "What precisely might you mean?"

"I figured out how to share a measure of my powers with others and thought you might be interested. It's easier to do it directly, so I can direct the exact effects, but I can also leave a barrel of my blood for anyone you trust with this to drink and get a shot," you explain, one hand lazily waving through the air. "Interested?"

"What kind of 'effects' are we talking about?" Of course she's going to interrogate you on the specifics first of all. This is going to be a long couple of hours...

In the end, after Rose got done going over everything you could give her and made her choice, opting to gain powers more socially oriented than anything else, the two of you went over a few of the latest reports together, methodically organizing what you know before anything else.

The situation right here in the capital seems to have stabilized if nothing else, the populace being peppered with news of the Border Fortress falling back into demon hands and rejoicing. Incidentally, while the more individually influential parts of society- rich merchants, important leaders of various kinds and the guilds- were still doubtful and insisted that you, as the guy that claims to be demon king, needs to make a few public appearances to prove you exist and are strong enough to be worth the position, polite reminders that you're busy fighting a war and they can go fuck themselves tend to work so far.

Rose is doing good work, really.

Meanwhile, there is somewhat of an army coming together again, a proper one instead of the ragged groups of survivors you united and led against whatever was in sight so far. More of said survivors are slowly but steadily gathering at the capital, morale is improving and all that jazz. You're still far from what there used to be before your predecessor got himself ganked, especially as demon armies tend to be smaller in numbers in general due to their already naturally small numbers, but progress is being made, at least.

You'd like to think it helps that you had Rakul ordered back to the capital together with the siege breaker undead you sent with the bulk of your men so far, making for a very present and obvious sign of your power. Unrelated to the actual reason, that being you wanted to make some more changes to the big thing before sending it off again and have a talk with Rakul, too, so you just made him come over while commanding it, but hey, you'll take it.

As far as the Border Fortress itself is concerned, a skeleton garrison is being assembled towards the side facing humanity... Seeing as a skeleton garrison is all you have the men for. It should help, hopefully, that the halls are also haunted by the undead you left there, the Skitterlings that are also known as 'Cuties' by virtue of Okita.

Otherwise, things are mostly fine; a few disturbances here and there, but nothing that looks like you need to immediately go and do something about. Monster activity around the heartlands growing due to all the corpses you had no time to put to the torch after your victory, a known and accepted issue in times of war, a few reports on issues in some of the fishing villages- and one city- along the west coast, but really, it's actually going fairly well, overall.

Now, as for foreign affairs... Humanity is reorganizing, has been ever since the Border Fortress fell, and though some of the southern provinces are in some chaos, reinforcements are scheduled to arrive from further up north. Food supplies are getting scarce in some areas, too, but again, it's not like your opposition is new to all this- the issues you caused during your last visit to this dimension are being fixed, it just takes a bit.

Troubling, but while it is a problem, again not an immediate one. it would seem you'll have your choice on how to proceed, rather than being forced to react from what you can find out so far.

The rest of your day, once you're done with the princess for the moment?

Undead time. Or more specifically, time to really work on and update the big siege beast, as people have started calling it, you named Clarence.

Just to have a name to relate to it. You were thinking about that one girl you kidnapped that one time to have her teach Sarah about painting and stuff, Clarice, and so it just kind of was the first thing that came to mind in terms of naming.

Now, as for what you do to it... Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's been a while since you were around, in personal time, and it really shows when you think about how you created this thing. Dozens of little tricks, useful modifications and small changes you found actually work for big undead like this ever since you last left Thule are among the first things coming to mind.

You do have a couple of dead bodies from when you turned Emily, not entirely coincidentally, in fact, and so you take them as raw materials to work your wonders on the structure of the giant undead monster. Reinforcing structural key bones, adding a bit of architecture inside of it for something you're adding here and there, the usual. Incidentally, you also imbue it with a bunch of outright magical effects, adding everything together to fit your final vision.

Yes, you're treating this as somewhat of an art piece, what of it?

When you're done, it mostly looks the same as before, though it very much isn't. Immune to small issues like decomposition, magically enhanced hide and fur, just a little more effective against inanimate targets and steadily regenerating a supply of the wonderfully horrid chemical that Nolac calls their 'pain baby'.

The stuff is pretty weird, as per usual Earth Fallout conventions, but what is does is basically stimulating any nerves relating to pain it gets into. It's somewhat bad on skin contact, but when it gets onto mucous membranes like, say, the eyes, it's usually bad enough to completely incapacitate most thinking beings for at least a while.

Fired from its smaller right arm's hand, its mouth or a series of small holes between its visible ribs, the reservoirs of the stuff take a while to recover as you didn't ration any particularly great amounts of magic for this purpose, but they are decently large so it should be alright for shorter fights, which is what this design is meant for.

Then you also add regeneration, a scream somewhat more likely to cause fear and panic (finally a use for those lungs) and finally one particularly tricky ability; simply put, you let it double the size of its dominant bigger arm for a few seconds every now and then.

The results should be amusing. Perhaps not as amusing as a roar that doubles as a spell that calls down ice meteors on a target every couple of minutes.

The whole affair does take you quite a while, seeing how you need to take Clarence apart and put it back together again all over the place, but hey, it should be worth it. Oh, and while you're at it, you also add reinforced bone spikes to its feet. To help it stay on them, of course, as well as to better murder anything thinking to use its large size against it.

When night falls, you are busy making use of the bodies you have on stock still- in fact, you use up every last one you have on hand, meaning you're running empty after this until you get yourself a few new ones. Not that it isn't worth the bother, mind you.

Inside one of the more roomy hidden spaces deep under the demon king's castle, a veritable army of undead is standing, formed out of everything you had available. Eight of your bird-like Watchers, standing at the ready with fifteen Hunters, the quadrupedal armored undead not so much as twitching.

Also, two dozen skeletons in heavy armor. You don't really have the infrastructure to make it simple power armor for them, but hey, the Avengers (Sarah hates the name and you love to tease her with it) are still very much dangerous as they are.

You did need to find heavy armor like this, of course, which was pretty hard since demons don't really do heavy armor in general, preferring lighter stuff to keep their frankly insane mobility in a fight, but a quick talk with a few of the blacksmiths employed by the castle has them casually hammer some simple cheap iron into shape.

Hurray for the miners up to the north-east being even more insane than usual and supplying you with all the simple ore you could ask for.

And now, off to the side, you have the barebones (heh) of your current project, a more complicated affair than most also including some of your knowledge and expertise in the realm of engineering.

It's not... really a car, you wouldn't say, but it is meant to transport stuff. Mostly you and whoever rides with you, really.

Made out of bone, a little smaller than you were initially intending it to be but you only had so much of the stuff available, furnished with decadent pillows and silks you pilfered from the castle's more luxurious rooms. A small compartment to hold some emergency supplies of blood, along with more normal food just in case, all kept chilled by onboard systems.

A big pair of wheels, supported by scores of skeletal legs driving the whole thing, a plethora of spiked spines either stabilizing its position or ready to jab out at nearby foes.

Roomy insides unaffected by movement and the various alternate forms built into it to be taken by unfolding, extending or retracting various parts all according to the situation at hand.

Made more stable through magical effects, immune to decay as per usual and with controlled inner temperature, speed increased such that it needs everything it has to keep stable even with the gyroscopic systems you built in, regenerating any broken parts and adhering to pretty much any surface it traverses as required.

It can also swim, by the way. It has a mode for that.

Imbued also with the same spell you use to collect soul fragments from people, this is one rad fucking ride. You can't wait to show it to Sarah.

Of course the moment of your great unveiling has to be chosen carefully. Hence you simply go to the meeting you asked Sarah and Rose to come for, in the hours just before dawn.

Can't ever be too melodramatic for stuff like this.

The princess' study has, by this point in time, become the focal point of somewhat of a war against an ever-rising tide of paperwork and leadership, piles and piles of reports and documents waiting to be vanquished.

You're probably overstating it; it's just the nightly backlog, really. You know Rose and Sarah will have this under control by midday at the latest. Right now, however, that's not what you're here for. Right now you are engaged in a conspiracy ruling half the world seeking to conquer the other half through means both public and secret, to overthrow the world order and-

"Gabe, stop being melodramatic to yourself and take a seat," your sister interrupts from where she's munching on some baked sweets.

"Spoilsport," you grouse as you do as you are bidden. "Okay, so let's get this meeting underway. First off, let's exchange information as usual and see what fires need to be put out the most."

"Yes, let's," Rose agrees. "For one, what exactly happened since yesterday and who is that girl that has been spitting fountains of fire from the central courtyard all night?"

"So, uh, funny story that..."

Yeah, for the time being, domestic disturbances should probably be your priority. Such as, say, whatever is the issue over towards the west.

You do hope it's not another eldritch entity gathering all the fishermen and making a fishermen union or something. Nothing against what seems to be your own kind or whatever, but one is quite enough for your sensibilities.

Sarah doesn't disagree, though she does mention she'd prefer to stay in the castle and, y'know, do stuff here- apparently, there's always some kind of dissidents and troublemakers to be uprooted. Rose is staying as a matter of course, naturally, but that still leaves both Emily and Okita in terms of your vampires on hand that you'd prefer to keep busy somehow, not to mention Tada, the naginata hero, and Lana, that one mage you had a few talks with and subsequently kept around.

You do wonder how that one noble daughter is doing, but alas, you simply do not have the time.

The meeting goes on and finally concludes, with a rough plan in place for what everyone would be doing in the near future. You'll go take your group and travel towards the west, take care of things and hopefully be back within a few days. Sarah and Rose will say, to root out dissidents and ensure a smooth running of daily affairs, respectively.

Incidentally, they will kind of naturally work together on this, and Rose's spy network of sorts will be thralled in parts with the blood you left with her- less for the increased strength this gives and more for the sake of the telepathic network they will get access to.

Either way, now that you're here already... "So, Rose, how have you been lately? With the whole situation going on," you say as you gesture vaguely towards the nearest window, "it's probably not the easiest on you."

"Of course it isn't," she replies, Sarah already having begged off the conversation and just sitting nearby looking through her own set of reports while listening in passively, "with my father's death and the chaos befalling the nation, everything I ever knew being upended and the last hope for the continued existence of demonkind, anyone going about things relaxed and unworried in my position obviously would have a few screws loose."

"True enough," you shrug reassuringly, gesturing at her with a cookie. "I was more asking how you in particular are handling things."

"Wouldn't want the stress getting to me, hm?" She snorts. "I'll be honest, for all the havoc all over the place and half my life's work so far being ruined in the course of a week or so back when Father died, I actually enjoy this, when I'm not too swamped in work. Being busy is good."

Ahh, you got it. She's pulling a workaholic on you. "I see. Just make sure to take regular breaks, alright? Things can still accumulate and before you know it, you're rampaging around the building beating your own people with a broken bottle."

"I'd be more likely to make them explode all over the place, but I get it," Rose chuckles. "And don't worry, demons are pretty robust you know? I've known a few of the librarians to pull 72-hour shifts to keep things in order, back in the day, a bit of work isn't going to get me down anytime soon."

And here's the reason demons can keep humanity in check with their incredible difference in numbers, you suppose. In more ways than one.

"How was it like, actually, when your father was still around?" It isn't like you've ever seen Thule back then, after all- the moment you were summoned, things were already fucked this side of the border.

"It was... Well, he was there. Everybody knew it and they knew they didn't want him to come after them, so they kept in line and did everything they could when a letter with his seal on it arrived," Rose says, eyes drifting off into the past. "Nowadays, it's like pulling teeth, but back then all it took was mentioning who I am to get my way with most things."

"What, you were a spoiled princess?" Your smile becomes just a little teasing. "Wouldn't have thought that."

"I will have you know I was a proper lady of good breeding, which for demons means I used whatever I had to screw over everyone in my way," she smiles right back at you. "Unfortunately, I was never as good as my father in... Well, anything, so I just took to the tasks he avoided. Next thing I knew, I was running the administrative parts of governance while he busied himself with showing off his power to keep the humans in check."

"I get the feeling being the demon king usually involves a lot of showing off in general," you comment, taking a sip of your tea. Say about the maids whatever you want, but they still are good at their job.

"Like you wouldn't believe." Rose shakes her head mirthfully, sighing. "Demons are very much temperamental assholes, by and large. They'll take any sign of weakness for their opportunity to strike and establish themselves as the stronger one, all the way to the top of the nation. It actually used to be that demon kings held regular tournaments to prove their power or else abdicate to whoever won against them at the end, though Father stopped at some point a century or two into his reign when nobody dared to challenge him anymore."

"Must've been nice to have some peace and quiet."

"On the contrary. Dear Father was disappointed, he was always chasing a good fight. There's a reason he used to personally hunt down and duel tarrasques whenever they appeared," she explains. "It's why I'm not too torn up about his demise. I'm sure he went all the way with a smile on his face."

"I wouldn't know, but hey, he sounds like someone I could've gotten along with," you ponder aloud. "Tell me a bit about him? You sound like he was important to you, beyond just being the demon king."

"I wouldn't... Okay, you're right. He always had a smile on his face whenever he saw me, even if we both got rather busy for some time and rarely did see each other. Where to begin..."

Time to take notes on how to be a good father.

Clinging to the roof of one of the countless rooms dotting your palace, using nothing but your body strength as your powers don't work inside of this place.

What has the ruler of your inner world do so? Well, for one, there's the insane cultists you somehow managed to accrue, mostly recruited from the former soldiers of this very same world you're on at the moment and a pretty great amount of splicers from back in Rapture, and you've been hiding from the cult as best you can- you know it's kind of pointless when you could just as well tell them to stop worshipping you, but seeing how they're literally worshipping you, you also kind of want them to continue despite how inherently weird that is.

So you've just been hiding so far whenever you're inside your inner world- a bit of Latin chanting while they're looking for you is perfectly acceptable, by your own reckoning, at least.

Then there's your Maid. Or Maids or however one wants to put it, the hiveminded Guardian with infinite bodies that tends to take a rather amorous approach towards tending your needs.

Which is fine in principle, but damn if an infinite orgy isn't distracting at times.

So when both groups went to corner you, you just jumped out the nearest window and have been hiding ever since, steadily moving to escape search parties and keeping to the ceilings of your palace more often than not.

... What exactly were you going to do again? You think you were in the process of deciding when-

""Et pacem faciet gratia,"" a group of cultists nearby chants, causing you to skitter along and find a hiding place nearby, ""ubi est mortalitas.""

You get the feeling you're being watched, so in your expert opinion, time to run before- a tide of Maid bodies rumbles in through a door. Dammit.

Tada Mizuki. Naginata hero. Her power allows her to enhance her 'reach', both directly and more fundamental than you would first think. Whether using it to accurately let her weapon reach her foes or just on her naginata's blade to scythe down anything in sight, even that much is extremely powerful, but when considering the physics involved in a long staff with a blade attached at the tip suddenly having several dozen times its usual length in effect, things get fucky.

For people she is fighting, anyway. Which is the whole point, you suppose.

Then there are more esoteric applications, such as increasing the range her senses can perceive things at. Good for when she is aiming at things too far away for a normal human to actually see, for example, though it's also a great way to detect things.

All of this is a long-winded way to say that she is actually pretty powerful, when she wants to be, though you've kept her from actually fighting anything for as long as you've known her. Given respective sides, both past and present, that just seemed the most prudent.

But now you're here, having a second hero after Okita on your side, and for all that Okita is more dangerous up close, Tada is more dangerous to you... simply because she isn't nigh-completely autistic and full of communication disorders keeping her from connecting with anyone you didn't introduce her to.

"Say, Tada, what made you decide to join me after all?" The question is the very opposite from innocent. "Was it really just the sex, or..."

Blushing, the heroine with the short stature contrasting her power sighs. "Of course not. That was just how we met."

"Then why?"

She blows some air out of her mouth for a moment, thinking about it. "If I had to say, I guess it's... womanly intuition?"

"That one doesn't work when my sister tries to hide something from me, and I won't let it work for you, either," you flatly declare. Sarah would be absolutely livid.

"Jeez, fine. I just guessed you would be too powerful to beat in one go, so I first tried to get to know you better once I caught on. I didn't have anything but my naginata on me at the time, remember?"

"I do, meeting you in the bath was a pleasant surprise," you playfully smirk at her, earning yourself a playful bump of a fist.

"Meanie. Someone sneaking through the Fortress had to be someone special, right? And then you just told me you were the new demon king and I knew things were about to go pear-shaped, so I had to make a choice. And, well," she coughs, eyes veering off, "Yoshiaki may have been a drunkard, but his predictions were usually right, you know? Most of the others didn't believe him when he said that something worse was totally about to happen, but me and Nishiyama stayed with him at the border for a reason."

"So you guessed I was powerful, too powerful to deal with, and applied the principle of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?" You finish up. "Can't say that doesn't make sense..."

"Look, if a bunch of soldiers get themselves killed, or... or worse, that's on them. They're soldiers. And in times of war, sometimes bad things happen, on both sides," Tada reasons out. "That doesn't mean I like it, and if I have a choice between becoming a casualty and joining the winning side, I know which one I'll take... So long as things don't go too far."

"And the sex did help make the decision, I bet?" She blushes, but nods.

"It may have. But I'm serious, I am with you, but if you overdo it, I will totally backstab you. Got it?"

"Mhm, I do remember your request," you tell her as you rub her head. "Matsui Michi, the spear hero. She's your friend?"

"Best friend," she immediately clarifies. "She's the only reason I made it as far as I have, and... Well, she's my best friend. But this isn't just about her, okay? I mean, I recognize you're a reasonable man, and you aren't just going to wipe out humanity for the sake of the demons.

... Are you?"

"As you said, casualties can't be avoided sometimes, sometimes of civilians, and sometimes on both sides," you begin, face kept completely neutral and maybe even a little sad, just for this occasion. "But no, destroying humanity would be an entirely pointless, massive waste. Not even considering the ethical implications," because you aren't, "this world is entirely large enough for both humanity and demonkind to exist together. I'd even say it is too large, in a very practical sense."

Tada tilts her head quizzically, so you chuckle and stretch out a hand to stroke her black hair. "Just from a standpoint of civilizations, demons reproduce much slower than humans, after all. The time it would take them to settle just their own half of the continent even if humanity were to stop existing right now just isn't practical. If I had a choice, we would just integrate both races into a single whole and be done with it."

Of course, said integration would involve a lot of slavery in all but name and segregation over several generations, but hey, details.

"But we can't," Tada sadly agrees. "Because..."

"Because this isn't a conflict about territory," you say. "It isn't a matter of ideologies or even economical profit. This, is a war about religion. An eternal crusade against each other, with generations upon generations of bloodshed to reinforce itself." As you speak, you can almost feel the mountains of corpses piled up, both demons and humans standing on piles of their past comrades and ancestors and climbing to ever higher reaches of hatred. "They hate each other," you whisper, something in your eyes fascinating Tada and not letting her stop staring into them. "They will kill and plot and murder until one side is no more, unless something changes. The last demon king put a stop to it, for a time... But in the end, well."

"But in the end, we killed him," she takes your turn this time around.

"Don't feel too bad about it," you suggest even as you know she's been thinking in this direction for a while now even before you went and said it out loud. "He couldn't have stopped the war forever, no matter how things turned out. Sooner or later, humanity would have found a way to end him, or he simply would've grown too old and weary, or... You get the idea. The heroes were just the first attempt that actually worked."

"That doesn't change we are kind of responsible for working," and is that the first hint of bitterness you can hear in her voice, just a slight note? "Because we had to, because we were in a position to... But that doesn't change how I feel about it. And the demons, all the servants know who I am, or who Okita-san is, and none of them actually blame me, or us, I think. It's driving me crazy."

"Ah, that one's just because they're demons." You pull Tada with you as you go to sit down, letting the diminutive girl rest on your lap without resistance. "It's a matter of how they think. You were strong enough to do it, so you have the right to."

"... that's a pretty messed up way of thinking about things."

"It's a pretty messed up world," you shrug.

You're silent for a long time, the girl on your lap just breathing and thinking and pondering. When she finally opens her mouth again, it is to your amusement.

"... Can I stay like this... Just a little longer?"

"You already are, dummy." You lean back. "I have some other stuff to do, but until then, feel free to cuddle as much as you want."

The dungeon for the actually important and/or noble (hard to differentiate with the mess that is demon society) prisoners are kept inside of hasn't changed much since your last visit, still mildly dreary while not sharing the drafty and shabby character of the place your still living prisoners are held.

Most of those have been used up by this point, killed by you or one of your vampires (aka Sarah, really) or sold off as slaves for whatever reason. Most demons are so much physically stronger than humans that hard slave labour doesn't really work compared to just hiring someone to take care of it in most cases, but that still leaves other things- tedious work that 'even a human' can do, simple jobs a slave would be trusted with, and of course a couple of brothels.

It does deeply amuse you to sell prisoners of war off to become prostitutes, the few you had Nolan (back when he was such, anyway) change the genders of or not.

Anyway, here you are, one somewhat nicely decorated cell with a warm carpet and some actual books arranged on a shelf, but empty, whereas the other one is filled with an inmate, but mostly blank and uninviting, a simple bare bed the most of its furnishing.

Time to have some fun.

When you come in, you do so in your best clothes; none. Naked even more than her, given she sometimes wears a few rags mostly to keep warm, you guess, you step in front of the young woman's cell, smirking.

She gasps, and lurches up from where she was lying on her bed in a sudden motion to get to you. "Whoever you are, please-"

It is then that she realizes you are very much not someone friendly.

"... You aren't here to gather information, are you?"

"What gave me away?" You ask, voice silky and smooth. "The clothes? The walk?"

"The fact that no infiltrator would be naked and showing off their lack of demonic traits," she replies without a hint of humour. "Who are you? Who sent-"

You stop her from talking by reaching through the bars, gripping her by her chin and keeping it in place. "Ah ah ah, you wouldn't want to speak to your mistress like that, would you? Only good girls get rewards, but bad ones get punished," you purr at her, pulling her closer just a little bit even as your own breasts just barely brush the cold metal making up her prison. "Unless that's what you want?"

Well, being a woman for once and all, you'll just have to get used to the tits. Not like you don't like letting the girls out to breathe every once in a while.

"You." The word could not have been laced with more venom if she tried, you suspect. "Only one... person, would be this brazen and-"

"Sexy? Generous? Please, do continue to praise me." But too bad, the blonde refuses to engage, keeping her tongue to herself as she retreats further into her prison.

Can't have that now, you have plans for that tongue. "No, really, I would very much like to hear your thoughts," you drawl and play with the keys you held in the hand you kept away from her so far. "Why, I might just be convinced to let you play a little."

"I don't care how or why you turned female and pray you will stay like this forever to spare real women the depredation of existing anywhere near yourself. And did you really expect just coming to me like this," she bites out, gesturing at yourself, "would have me chomping at the bit to do your every whim? I am more discerning than that."

Wow, if you didn't know better, you'd say you just got turned down. "What, no questions about the little priestess? I'd have thought after all that time the two of you spent together..."

"I doubt you will give me any real answer that I would like to hear, so why bother?" At least someone is getting a feel for how this usually turns out. "If you are going to do anything, do it already, coward."

At this, you can't help yourself; chuckling aloud, you give the noble daughter you imprisoned a taste of your voice when you are genuinely happy. Unsurprisingly, she finds herself shivering at it, for several reasons. "Oh sweetie, if you want to rile me up into doing something unwise, you will have to put some work into improving. An adorable attempt, though. Now..." You lick your lips, the gesture lascivious enough to put a mild blush on your prisoner's face. "How should I use you today, hm?"

"You could release me on human territory with all the gold you have?" She tries sarcastically. Still hiding her privates with her hands, though.

"Better idea." You pick out the right key- perfect memory helps with this, because obviously all the dungeon cells need to have a different lock- and open the door to her cell. "I am coming for you. If you are a good girl, you get a reward. Need I repeat what bad girls get?"

The nearly naked blonde grinds her teeth, but stays silent. Good.

"Mhm, that's a good look on you," you comment. "You want to say something, but don't. Because you have understood what the results of doing so would be. Good girl."

"I am not your 'good girl'," she hisses out, backing away from every step you take towards her until she bumps into the cold stone of the dungeon wall, its temperature driving goosebumps along her skin.

"That remains to be seen," you placidly note. Only, how shall you make her pleasure you? Right, best to start with the basics. Demonstratively stretching and moving slowly, you take a seat on the bed, fingers idly stroking along your thighs. "Come here."

She doesn't move, and so you sigh disappointedly. "Do we really have to go through this song and dance again? Or do I have to return as a man and rape the attitude out of you the hard way?"

The idle threat hits its mark; twitching and with a grimace, the young noblewoman comes to stand near you.

"Now get on your knees and eat me out," you say, spreading your legs just a tad wider to make clear what you expect of her. "You've done this before, so unless you want to be trained from the beginning?"

She follows your orders, if reluctantly. She can't help but release her own breasts and pussy as she sinks to her knees, glaring up at you even as you enjoy the view. While she doesn't exactly have the best living conditions down here, thralling has helped prevent her from growing any unwanted body hair, and she remains just as shapely as from before her captivity.

In other words, you have a hot young woman kneeling between your legs. If not for your current state of femininity, this would be completely normal for you, but as it is, you may as well enjoy it. You don't often bother to do this, after all.

"What are you waiting for?" You ask genially, a hand wandering over to tangle itself up in your prisoner's hair. "Don't tell me I have to tell you every little thing."

A good grip secured, the face glaring up at you between your tits is pulled into your honeypot, soft lips kissing and a talented little tongue licking with remarkably little delay. Her hands have come up to rest on the insides on your thighs, you note, and it's hard to say she isn't showing at least some enthusiasm for her task.

She's actually really into this, after all. And just perhaps you're hitting a few of her kinks? But as a warm, wet tongue laps at your folds and a careful nibble on your clit shows, this isn't the time to relax and ponder the mysteries of the universe. Instead, you apply a little pressure, guiding your eager little carpet muncher (even if she did need some... encouragement) to push her tongue deeper, giving your insides a few good licks.

Ahh, this is the life... Especially as both of you know just how horribly outmatched she is, physically.

You reach your peak more than just once, with the pussylicker you're availing yourself to, the powerless slave in all but name unhesitantly doing everything she can to make this end as fast as possible and drinking every bit of juice you produce.

You end up settling in to murmur depredations and humiliations, lightly degrading your victim even as you experience a more female kind of climax than usual. However, all good thing have to come to an end, as you like to say, and so you soon pull a very much wet face from your crotch after a while, having found a satisfactory use in it.

You look down at where the daughter is subconsciously licking her lips clean, freezing when she realizes what she is doing and that you can see her. "Time for your reward," you hungrily say, getting up off of the wet spot you left on her barebones blanket and shoving her right over it, a surprised shout all she can bring to bear against how she's being manhandled.

"What-" she brings out as you take her prior position, except you are decidedly more predator-like about it, both hands kneading her buttcheeks and letting you get a good look of how she's twitching downstairs.

"You're getting your reward, of course," you say as you lift her higher, adjusting the angle even as you mock her, "what did you expect?"

"No, I meant-"

You dig in, lengthened tongue uncoiling from within your mouth and piercing deeply into her pussy even as a hand moves around to pinch her clit, quickly driving your victim into a twitching and shaking orgasm. It is not the last.

One thing to take away from this, you consider as you finger a cute butt and lick your lips clean of clear fluid shed plentifully upon them, is that you still got it, in female form or not.

Before you, the noble daughter lies, slowly losing consciousness after what you did to her. And kept doing to her, without any pause whatsoever. If anything, you're even more relentless in this form, you'd say, tirelessly stimulating girls and women without end.

Still, much as you'd like to keep on toying with her, you have other people to talk to during the day before you get a move on as soon as the sun goes down, so you simply make a mental note of how many times she came- a mere eleven times she managed to withstand being brought to her climax, unless you're mistaken- and the corresponding number of orgasms you are most definitely still going to inflict on her next time you're here, making eighty-nine in total.

For the moment, though, all you do is cover her with her only mildly wet and soiled blanket before exiting her cell, closing up after yourself. Now then, how about you go ahead and take your usual secret tunnel back to the main living areas and hit up Clarice, the painter girl you kidnapped that one time?

Can't hurt to let your creativity out of your pants before you go and busy yourself for a couple days; even with your new ride, it'll take a while to get to the area trouble has been reported in.

When you go to grab Clarice, the slim girl swallows heavily, but does as she is told, even if she's shivering just a bit. Neither your first acquisition of her nor the occasions in which you showed her just a bit of how good you are with a brush yourself have been forgotten by her, it would seem.

Sarah is naturally coming, too, and so all three of you soon find yourself in the room you set up just for this purpose, mainly by having instructed the servants to make the requisite arrangements.

Including the pretty large piece of canvas, though you have no idea where they even got it. Still, it's reasonably clear and wide enough for what you're planning, so you aren't going to ask any questions.

"Alright, today we are going to paint a scene that occurred during the hostilities around the Border Fortress," you announce to your two impromptu students, Clarice shivering when the name of the place is dropped while Sarah just smiles eagerly. "It didn't actually happen like this, of course, but that's what things like artistic freedom are for. Also, this little bugger here will take care of ensuring we have all the paint we need."

Summoning a paint fairy, you get her started on filling up a few containers with a wide and rich variety of colors. Clarice seems overwhelmed, but if anything that just seems rather cute at this point.

The whole picture you get to making turns out pretty nice, in the end; the fortress itself, jutting into the sky amidst inhospitable rocks and mountainous terrain, manned by steel-eyed soldiers and archers readying a salvo.

The sky itself is filled with dark clouds, but none darker than the arrows already in flight, rising like a threatening storm and yet leaving the approaching army undeterred.

A great column of demons is marching towards the fortress, weapons at the ready and gleaming even in the dreary surroundings, horns held high and determination in their eyes. At the very front, a single figure is walking, pointing at the edifice of war in front of them and screaming something at the men behind him.

"It's complete bullshit, of course. In truth, I infiltrated the fortress ahead of time several times to sabotage and spy on the forces inside, then used the ancient traps to mess them up in the middle of an attack from the inside through a secret tunnel," you say as you apply some dark grey to add a couple of additional clouds. "There were also maybe half as many demons present as we're portraying here, and they certainly weren't this well-equipped at the time- a hard and fast war is still a war, and they just went through the meatgrinder. Most of the survivors that managed to gather for the occasion were a lot more scruffy."

"I- is that right?" Clarice asks, watching with rapt attention as you work. "How did the fortress fall in the end, then?"

"Mostly through a combination of morale shock, the surroundings turning against them without rhyme nor reason from their perspective and the effective use of small, but concentrated forces of demons," you idly mention as you consider where to next work on. "In the end, few things can really hold up against a determined demon up close. Once their preparations and strategies to deal with them are removed, human soldiers just don't measure up."

"And then you just kept on crushing them all over the place," Sarah adds, carefully measuring out the angles on a fortress spire. "Little wonder they all either fled or died."

You give off a hum. Not incorrect.

Clarice remains silent, but steals a few glances at you throughout the course of your shared labours directed by yourself, blushing and clenching her fists when she thinks you aren't looking.

Almost makes you want to tease her more, but... Well, priorities. You still slap her butt, though, just for the squeaks.

And once you're all done, the finished work displayed before you, you dimply give a nod and grab for a plate of stone, your fingers morphing into your claws once again.

Demons are strong and most things they make is adjusted for their strength, which is why you're using stone instead of wood. Now all you need to do is scoop and scratch out everything until you have an imprint of the work of art you just completed- such that one of the robust printing presses you saw once while exploring the castle could use it to mass-produce copies of it.

Sure, they'll only be in black and white, but the spirit counts. In the meantime, you can go ahead and hang this painting up in some decently prominent part of the castle- or, more likely, have the servants do it. Screw doing this kind of stuff yourself.

At the very least, it came out quite well, if you do say so yourself. This thing will make for some good PR, or at the very least be worth a lot of cash in a century or two- you know, the usual time a painter's work begins to pick up in attention.

There's a reason vampires live forever, and if anyone asks, this is the one you'll give them.

"Uhm..." The way you decided to greet the mage you stole away from humanity and keep to yourself is by ambushing her to gather her up into a princess carry, her purple robes unable to hide her blush from you. "W-What might be... happening?"

"Oh, I'm going to be on a little expedition to the west for a few days, is all," you say as you carry her through her own assigned rooms, not that you imagine she'll have complained- your guests are very much treated rather well by sheer virtue of being your guests. "So I thought I'd come spend a little time with you beforehand, make sure you're doing alright suddenly living among demons and all."

You bring her through and navigate right through the door that leads to her resting chambers. Also known as a bedroom. "Oh, it's been rather nice, actually. Nobody is looking at me weirdly for using dark magic."

"I'll bet," you chuckle, repositioning a little for the next step. "Has that been a common issue for you?"

"Not as much as one would think, more than I would like," she sighs... and shrieks when you throw her through the air. "Eeeek!"

She securely lands on her bed, of course, and you waste no time in joining her on it, sitting crosslegged. "Mind telling me a bit more about that? I mean, you'd expect any mage good enough to join the army would be treated with respect before anything else."

"Few that don't respect a dark mage do so twice," she nods, a flash of something darker crossing her face. "Not like something like a 'dark' mage actually exists, it's just the old coons in the big academies not recognizing the existence of any magical traditions older than their own. So what if it's a similar field of study to that observed in demon clergy and has been passed on from elder to student for millenia instead of analyzed and publicized like more modern schools of thought? If any of them cared to learn, they could, they just don't."

"Why might that be?" You ask, playing with the hem of her robe. "You'd think a bunch of scholars like that, at least a few would jump at the chance to go for a different form of magic, if just to see if they can't adapt anything of it for themselves."

Or at least that's what you understand of the mago-political landscape on the other side of the border right now, which is admittedly less than it should be. You never did get around to analyzing the memories of the mages you ate in detail.

"It doesn't help 'dark' magic was outlawed a couple centuries back and these people are old enough to have lived during those times," Lana grumbles, her purple hair illuminated by the light of the evening sun coming in through a window. "But when we get down to it, they just don't like things they don't understand. That's the ultimate difference between magic categorized as dark these days and everything else. When you curse someone, you don't need to understand how it works, in the end; you just have to do it right. Same when you addle someone's mind, which is entirely different, mind you, or communicate with animals directly."

You know, some of that sounds pretty close to some of your own powers. "And you can do all that?"

"Of course! I'll have you know I aim to learn all kinds of magic I can, did ever since I first apprenticed with the old medicine woman near my birth village. I only moved on once she chased me out claiming I was wasting my time, so I moved on to the big city, but nobody wanted anything to do with the witch."

"What'd you do then? Or was that how you joined the army?" You ask, smiling right into her also purple eyes. She really does go for a color scheme, doesn't she?

"No, that came later. At first, I just settled down and began making potions, selling mostly to adventurers and the odd housewife glad to have a quick patch for any bruises and scratches on hand," your unlikely lover continues her story, not even realizing you're slowly pulling up her robes to reveal her deliciously juicy body. "Then the local mages made a stink, of course, so I challenged any that would try their luck to a magical duel. A barbaric custom, but once half the city's mages went home with their privates purple and itchy, I had some peace and quiet... until they conspired to get me conscripted, of course. That's how I joined the army."

"I didn't know mages could be conscripted," you interject with some humour, noting she isn't wearing any underwear as you arrive at her wide hips.

"They can, it's just a matter of calling upon even more centuries old laws that were never technically repealed," she grumbles, subconsciously helping you undress her to your even greater amusement. "So I ended up having to show off my magic to prove I qualified for the title of warmage, and I wasn't ever going to pretend otherwise just to avoid this whole mess."

"A sufficiently powerful offensive spell, a shielding spell capable of protecting both oneself and others and at least some capability to heal, was it?" That at least you're familiar with.

"Humpf, a necrotic ray works no matter what it's aimed at, and if there's one kind of mage that can bring you back from the dead, it's a witch," Lana says, her nose held up into the air from where she's lying on her side. "And some of the actual medical mages, of course, I'll readily admit."

"And what about the shield?" You complete, now pulling her robe up over her chest. What you reveal is still as plump as always.

"I dared anyone present to try casting an attack spell on me. They missed, hit each other or fumbled the cast, one and all," she proudly proclaims. "If I'm prepared, nobody can actually aim at me or anyone I have the mana to protect."

"That's quite impressive," you agree, leaning forwards to give a cute nipple a good kiss and lick, a squirming little witch blushing explosively as she realizes the position she's in. "Mind lifting your arms?"

"Why?" She squeaks, the urge to cover up obvious in her twitching hands.

"So we can have some more fun while trading stories, of course," you tease her, a mischievous smile on your face. "I just found out I have a genuine little witch to play with, after all."

And despite her protestations, she never does try to push you away as you begin peppering her neck with kisses... Or as you proceed, really.

Before you embark upon your little expedition, you finally get around to doing a few things you'd been putting off so far; though it has to be said that it couldn't be helped seeing how you weren't particularly motivated to study the particular metallurgy made possible through the whole magic thing this world has going before.

That changed when dust entered the picture, in the place called Remnant. Now you're a... not a reasonable man, but still, you hate the stuff and want some other metamaterials you can work with just to show it who's boss, and so you request Rose and Sarah to gather a few small quantities of any magical metals they can get their hands on in your absence.

While you're at it, you also feed a couple of prisoners to Sarah, Okita and Emily and use their bodies to create a few more biomass generating undead, the process relatively quick and streamlined by this point thanks to your extensive practice with it.

They should have a decent stockpile to work with by the time you'll return, though you ask the servants to keep them clean in the meantime. Just because decay and rot don't phase you doesn't mean you like having it around yourself in particular, either, and it'd be terrible if part of the castle started stinking.

With that taken care of, you assemble your little group- Okita, Emily, Tada and a still fuckdrunk Lana- near one of the exits leading out of the castle. Come to think of it, you've never once actually left this way, have you?

Well, no time like the present. "So I guess we just get going?" Emily asks, her voice sounding a bit off due to her mask; still worn out of general principle, if nothing else. "Unless there's something I'm not seeing."

"You could say that," you smile flamboyantly, holding out a hand. "That which I have brought to unlife, heed my call, feel your chains, and come to your master, for a task awaits!"

"... Even for you, that was very cringe," Emily comments, Tada nodding in awkward agreement even as the effects of your spell make themselves known. Out of the ground, bulging as though being pushed against, your brand new bone carriage surges, moving straight upwards before it slams forwards onto its wheels.

Given the size of the thing, this is neither quiet nor inconspicuous. "Our ride," you drily introduce. "Don't worry about the looks, it's actually pretty nice inside."

Okita doesn't even wait for you to finish before opening the nearest door and jumping inside. "A cute car."

Should've expected that one.

The departure from the capital was perhaps less of a big deal than one would expect the leader of a nation to make when leaving for something, but you've already established that demons don't really tick like that... And more importantly, you just don't really have the patience for stuff like that, weird as it may seem.

Sure, you usually love making a little drama about things, but that's because you want to sell a persona. Make a point to those around you; that you can afford to do this, that they have to take you seriously because of it.

None of that really matters in this dimension, or at least this half of the continent, and so you don't really see a need for any of that.

Instead, you make yourself comfortable inside your bone carriage as it rushes through the streets, carefully avoiding hitting anyone or anything, and so soon enough the wild assortment of wheels and hands and feet is carrying you and your expeditionary force of a total of four along the roads leading towards the west.

Roadwork is a tad bit rough, but actually fairly well developed by medieval standards- then again, demons are just strong enough those standards pretty much never really apply to them, disregarding how things look. Either way, thanks to the gyroscopic suspension you scrupulously installed when you put this giant vehicle together one piece at a time, you don't really even notice much of that.

A few monsters do cross your path here and there you're pretty sure, but... Well, you're riding inside a bus-sized undead moving at bus-like speeds and armed with a bunch of limbs and sharpened spines.

Roadkill is the kindest thing you feel you can call the occasional results.

Still, on the inside, everything is going fairly fine. You're all comfortably seated, except for Okita who is pacing around touching the bone you carved the carriage out of. Tracing along edges and nodding satisfied every now and then.

If she's happy, so are you, you suppose.

On the other hand, Emily, Tada and Lana are amicably chatting, though the topic of conversation is right over there busying herself as described. "I just... She was always a little scary, you know? And then she somehow got super strong and nobody knew what to do or to say..." Tada, in particular, is explaining why Okita's position among her classmates has always been a little tenuous. "Didn't help half the girls were jealous of her, you know."

"Feminine charm? Chest size? The Kita Doinkers?" Emily suggests, snorting. "But seriously, she's Okita. I don't get how anyone she isn't trying to murder would be afraid of her. She isn't doing it at the time, she won't do it unless Gabe tells her to."

"She was different back then," Tada disagrees. "She was even more... random, I guess? And people were worried."

Lana looks like she's itching to enter the conversation, but has no idea how... which makes sense. However, before you can play your role as the living social lubricant and change that, you notice something outside of your bone carriage, several blood signatures that are decidedly not monsters, instead looking a lot more humanoid than most of those.

Goblins don't count, and more than a few basically ran at the bone about as hard as steel that is your current transport just to get splattered like the total morons they are.

Curious, you mentally bid your carriage to stop when it arrives near them- they seem to just be waiting around, and so you'd like to find out why now that you're there already.

Of course, by the time you're near them, well...

"Come on out, Gabriel the Demon King! I, Black Eyes Stanton, challenge you to a duel for the throne!"

... That one moron is shouting. Honestly, you aren't quite sure how to react to this, but assuming you aren't wrong, this guy basically somehow found out you'd be coming in this direction and brought a bunch of people to act as witnesses? Or maybe...

Bah, doesn't matter. "What will you do?" Okita asks, the Japanese girl tilting her head as she stands next to you- having come along when you got up. "Should I just go kill them?"

You shake your head for Okita's benefit as you consider the demon standing there awaiting your answer. Dressed in light black armor, with a pair of equally black curved swords loosely resting in his hands and a fearless smirk on his face. His skin is a light red, such that it could be mistaken for human coloration, and he doesn't have any horns, instead sporting a tail held out behind himself, likely prepared to help him move at a moment's notice.

"I'll take care of it real quick," you tell her, measuring out the distance and jumping out of the front of your carriage, having deliberately given it the ability to open and close shutters made of bone unfolding or retracting on demand.

The hangers-on respectfully step back as Black Eyed Stanton, apparently, grins, laughing joyfully. "Hahaha! There you are! Nobody's seen hide nor hair of you before, some people even thought you were just a myth or something! How are we-"

"Don't care," you say as you adjust Last Embrace, your trusty weapons sitting just as securely on your arms as the first time you put them on. "I have shit to do."

With that, you all but jump at him, racing along the ground to slam into the demon whose swords are already raised, the somewhat deranged grin on his face all the way through your first fist hitting his stomach. Now, normally you would hold back a bit, but this guy is both a demon, which means he's extremely and downright supernaturally tough, and kind of in your way, so you immediately trigger Last Embrace to drill your first piledriver into his front armor.

The next smack by your other extended clawed hand is what slams him off into the surroundings, hitting a tree, breaking right through it hard enough to fell it and slamming into the next one after that.

He lies there for a moment, coughing up some blood and breathing exaggeratedly. Then, he slowly pushes himself to his feet, his weapons never once leaving his hands.

"Hehehehehe..." He laughs, slowly gaining in pitch. "HehehhuaHAHAHA! A GOOD HIT!"

"I... I can't believe it!" One of the faceless bystanders mutters. "Black Eyed Stanton, taken out in one strike?"

"It is my honor to make your acquaintance, Gabriel the Demon King! It may be presumptuous, but please let me attempt to return at least one hit!" You have absolutely no idea what all these idiots are going on about, or why they need to add titles to everything, but you just shrug, keeping the roll of your eyes contained within your mind.

"If you must," you agree.

"HUUUAAAARGH!" With every ounce of strength he has left in his body gathered, Stanton or whoever comes running at you, at least putting up an admirable attempt- especially as the second tree he landed inside of comes crashing down with a loud, wooden breaking noise.

A pair of swords intersects, and you let the hit land; not really much point in it, you can always just kill this guy if he turns out to have an ace up his sleeve. But as your aura repels them, grey and blue intermixing to block the dual attack, he simply keeps on grinning at you, blood running out of his mouth and nose... And then faints, simply falling over backwards.

""Stanton!"" The dozen or so people that came with him cry out and swarm over him, leaving you to stand off to the side.

"... Am I done, or...?" You probably are, but you aren't exactly sure about it.

The rest of your journey turns out to be comparatively quiet, if not downright pleasant. You even have a few cookies stashed away in one of the cupboards of what you like to call your VIP lounge, which makes sense considering it is the only lounge you installed in this thing it is meant to house you on the move and all.

Unfortunately, however, quiet contemplation and trying to decipher the secrets of the universe or multiverse or whichever you're at at the moment can't keep you entertained forever, and so you ponder the possibilities for 'fun' now that you're here, with four beautiful girls and women inside a relatively small room all around you.

The horror, really. Whatever shall you do?

Well, you know what you're going to do. "Hey Okita, want to have some fun?"

"Mhm." Immediately, the long-haired girl is on you, sitting on your lap and wrapping her arms around you to make out in a hot kiss.

"W-Wha- I know we saw each other do that before, but-" Tada is stuttering, surprised by the sudden intimacy. Lana, on the other hand, is just staring intently, unwilling to let a single moment pass unobserved.

"Oh, you did?" Emily asks, leaning back in her own seat. "Kinky."

"It was right after the Fortress, give me a break!" Pouting, Tada huffs and turns her head away from the newly minted vampire... Though she doesn't stop looking, either. "Jeez, how much longer will they keep going?"

Pulling your head away and slurping your own elongated tongue back in (Okita does let it go, but not easily), you grin at her. "Bold of you to assume either of us is going to stop anytime soon. Or at just this much."

Lana blushes harder. Her eyes may or may not be glowing just a little, too.

"Want to try something," is what Okita says before you can get any further, giving your lips one last peck before sliding down your lap. You watch bemused as she begins fiddling with your pants in an attempt to pull them off you, until she realizes they can be opened with a few buttons.

As soon as your cock springs out, she starts opening up her own top, letting her prodigious breasts join it in breathing freely.

"A-are they really going to..." Lana is absolutely mortified, but it isn't like you don't see the way her eyes are peeking between the hands held before her face.

As Okita's large, full okitatas push up against your legs, a pair of little nubs showing she is indeed enjoying herself as she stretches her slimy tongue out of her mouth to lather your cock in saliva, Emily shrugs. "Dunno, going full vamp just kind of nukes body shame, I guess. And shame in general. I can recommend it."

"'Vamp'? Vampirism? Is that what is happening?" Tada questions, making no qualms about openly watching now.

"Uh, maybe? The way this was explained to me is..." You leave those three to their talk for the moment, instead concentrating on Okita. Your trusty spawn seems to be done with what she wanted for the moment, now looking up at you as her breasts are pushed upwards with both of her hands.

Both of them come to squeeze themselves around your cock, handily burying most of it and leaving only a third of it poking out up top. "Good," she says, satisfied, nudging herself a little closer. "Saw this online and wanted to try it."

"Wait, when did she access the internet? Or did she-"

"Oh yeah, we actually jump around between our own version of Earth and-"

"What's 'online'?"

You steadfastly ignore the three with you, Okita's strong up-and-down motions keeping your attention still. She went a bit too hard for a bit, but when she sees both of your auras flare, she modulates her approach just fine.

You yourself go ahead and stroke her hair, something you've found she actually does like in a general 'if it doesn't get in the way' fashion. So there she is, looking up at you with her very slight Okita face telling of eagerness to anyone that knows how to read it (the angles of her eyes and her mouth are important for this) as she uses her soft titflesh to milk your dick.

Her tongue, too, rejoins the fray, licking and slurping along any part of your length is not covered by said kita doinkers at the moment, and you can't help but describe the experience as just as good as sex, in the end.

Or at least nearly as good. It's hard to tell at the moment.

When you finally do come, it is all over Okita's breasts, and face, covering both with several surges of your seed and causing the girl in question to happily lick her lips and directly suckle on your prick for a moment as soon as she's satisfied.

"Mhm. Who wants some?" She asks as she turns around and gets up, proudly displaying the pearly white fluid all over her front.

This must be what she's been after all along. You have seen through her dastardly plan!

"Well, sorry girls, but I won't resist," is how Emily ends the stunned silence, approaching and making out with Okita to lick up as much of your cum as possible. Lana isn't much later, carefully licking and nibbling on her breasts to 'take samples', apparently.

Tada, on the other hand... "... If both of them are going to... I'll just get it from the source!"

You simply open your arms to welcome her, and the rest of the ride is perfectly entertaining indeed, with one of the girls riding on your lap while the other three either play with each other or fuss over you to get you to play with them, too.

A successful endeavour, truly.

The coast here on the southern side of the continent has few real towns or cities, but among those there are, the port town of Inniscier could be described as one of the more important, mostly due to its location- easy to reach by over half the kingdom's western side, with relatively well-travelled roads (a must when said traffic is also the only thing beating and eating the monsters all over the place) and well situated insofar as its nearest waterways allow straightforward shipping both up and down the coast and a decent bit into the mainland, this place is considered by many to be the beating heart of the demon kingdom's marine trade.

Which isn't wrong, even if said trade usually involves a lot less getting out to sea with a boat and hanging out nets and more grabbing a spear and swimming like a madman to fight and murder the various aquatic monsters native to the sea in the general area and lugging the bodies back to be processed and eaten.

Demons are really pretty metal, aren't they?

Either way, Inniscier isn't simply a logistically important place, it is also the one location you are going to find clues as to why around a third of the salted fish (or 'fish', you saw one of those things and it had to have been your size after being cut down to size) that would usually be circulating around the entire nation just somehow managed to turn up missing.

Because if there's one thing demon fishermen like over a big catch, it is comparing the sizes of said catches, apparently. The proverb describing the whole thing is a bit weird and makes no sense in any language you can ever recall having spoken, but that's pretty much the gist of it and it's usually used to deride particularly boastful warriors, as you understand it.

You're getting all of this right from both Sarah and Rose, of course, because screw actually taking the time to figure even a fraction of all of this out yourself. You would do it, but really, why bother when you have people that just love talking to tell you everything you need to know?

"Okay, so we could go ahead and get ourselves some actual lodgings, but do we really have to?" You ask into the carriage, receiving no answer from Tada nor Lana. Not particularly surprising, as they're both unconscious at the moment. "Thought so."

Okita nods along, but Emily sighs, put-upon. "At least get them something to sleep on, jackass. Does this thing have, like, a couple blankets or something?"

Smirking, you show Emily where you have everything stashed away. You did prepare whatever you could think of for a journey like this, after all.

Anyway, as you don't really intend to waste time sitting around in your carriage, parked a short distance outside of the town as such. Leaving Emily to keep an eye on things and guard everyone, as you don't trust your carriage to be strong enough by itself and also don't really want to drag Emily into the sun and expect her to actually function yet.

That can wait for until after she's gotten her first taste of the undead life and can be forced into 'sunbathing' a while.

So there you are, taking Okita along instead and approaching the town. You don't really have any outward signs of being a demon or anything, but none of the town guards make any issue of it, even describing the way to the town council's chambers- it seems there's an actual governmental structure set up around this place, for once.

The streets seem... Well, more or less normal. It's not like there's some sort of general crisis going on as you pass through them; to the average demon living here, there's nothing particularly out of the norm. Considering the kinds of scenarios that could have occurred, this at least means you aren't dealing with, like, enormous monster invasions or a naval attack all over the coast.

... Or at least it would only affect half the coast. A bit hard to say, really, with these people.

Luckily, it doesn't take too long to get to the approximate center of the settlement, the relatively small number of demons even for places like this and resulting limited size of them working to your advantage. The council chambers themselves are surprisingly not too big, simply a relatively large, but modest building kept in red stone and with some colorful decorations here and there- nothing too far out there, at least.

There's a pair of guards at the doors, but they seem to be more there for show than anything else, just slacking off and playing dice against each other as they wait for the end of the night shift (or however things are handled here). Simple armor, but armor all the same, and each of them carrying a sturdy, almost too thick spear (a human wouldn't want to lug something like these around for any length of time) make it clear that even if nobody expects trouble, these guys are the ones that will end it.

Or try to, anyway.

As you approach, one of them looks up and, blinking in mild surprise, rises to meet you when it becomes obvious that yes, you have official business and all that. "Hello there, might'n I ask what'cha need? Council's in session, so if it's sumthin' small, we might be able ta help ya right away and skip all that drama. Each of 'em get all in a tizzy whenevah they get a chance ta make themselves look important."

"I see," you frown a little, tilting your head. You are hearing an awful lot of shouting from inside, though it is fairly muffled. "How annoying. I was originally coming here to inquire about a few irregularities with shipping up and down the coast, so I thought the Inniscier council would be the best place to hit up first..."

Awkwardly scratching his neck, the guard that got up to talk to you shrugs. "Yeh, ya'll have ta speak ta them fer that. Can't be helped, ah s'pose, 'less ya want a coupla' rumours. Ya just head right on in an' go straight through tha next door, should take ya right ta the council room."

"Much obliged," you thank him as the other guard unlocks the door, and before long you are stepping into what passes for a town hall. The instructions aren't particularly complicated or anything, and so you soon stand in front of the door you are hearing a bunch of voices behind... Though you're already getting the gist of things.

You open them and step inside.

"AND I'M TELLING YOU, IF THIS NEW LORD WANTS TO SIT ON THE THRONE; HE HAS TO EARN IT JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!" An elder male voice, though it's really more of what you'd expect from a middle-aged person- it's just a matter of how demons age, you're pretty sure.

"AND IF HE KEEPS ON FIGHTING THE WAR, WHO GIVES A SOGGY SOCK ABOUT TRADITIONS FROM TWO GENERATIONS AGO?!" A somewhat younger one, though again the difference is academic for all that you can keep male demons apart aside from their more interesting characteristics. Both have weird skin colors and one has horns, the other one claws, but that's all you really care to note.

"WELL MAYBE IF-"

"Ladies, ladies," the only female member of this council calls out, "all this shouting solves nothing. Let us lay the core of the matter out clear and straight and go from there, shall we?"

"Hmpf!" The first speaker is, quite obviously, one of those grumpy old men that want things to be how they've always been without ever really managing to deal with changing circumstances. "It's simple. The demon king has to prove they're worthy of ruling the oceans above all that live there, so they have to defeat the Seven Challenges when they take the throne. Always been that way, always will be."

"More like it's been that way ever since someone from the coast became king and instated that rule," the fourth member of this merry go 'round adds, though you aren't exactly going to bother differentiating him from the fifth one, given they seem to be identical twins, even. "But the issue is clear, isn't it? It's been a long time ever since the Seven Challenges were even needed. Even most citizens here have forgotten about them."

"And more importantly, Demon Lord Gabriel is known to be embroiled in the current war- the same war that caused his predecessor's end," the younger demon that was arguing for all of this being unnecessary adds. "Yes, as per tradition we would be required to close off the Tooth Coast's transit in all material goods until he came and did the Challenges, but it is very understandable that a new king's reign has other priorities."

"And that's it!" The older guy insists. "If he thinks the coast can be kept waiting, the coast will wait, but we could and should shut everything down until he found the time!"

"It does not help that all inquiries so far have been returned with no mention of any word on the matter," the second twin adds. Way you're seeing this, there's the old geezer and the young dude generally arguing against each other, the twins taking both sides whenever possible and the woman acting as the final arbitrator... Though you could be wrong.

For all you know they exchange their positions weekly, though you doubt it. Places and structures like this often lead to entrenched opinions and partisan politics.

"So from what we know, we can only do two things, given the messages we sent have brought no real answer," the female demon concludes. "Either we wait for them to get around to it, or we barricade the waterways and declare the Seven Challenges the hard way."

"Or we could choose the third option," one of the blue-skinned twins interjects, shrugging as his brother points towards you and continues. "We could ask our guest, who seems to be more than he seems."

You roll your eyes as you come inside. Of course only the twins could see you as you were listening in from where they were sitting, especially as you weren't really trying to hide it or anything.

Alright, seeing as things are as they are, you may as well get this whole little diversion underway and taken care of as quickly as possible. "Yes, yes, I'm Gabriel, the demon lord and whatever titles you feel fit the occasion," you wave them off, striding into the council chamber like you own it (which you kind of do). "So, I haven't exactly gotten any messages from anyone around here, but it has been noted that marine products that would usually be circulating the nation have been on a bit of a downturn lately. What are those Seven Challenges of yours and would taking care of them solve this issue?"

The council members give each other a few awkward looks, and so you just sigh aloud and shrug. "Look, I've been very busy and whatever you're arguing about over here is surely very important and relevant to the entire area, but the fact of the matter is that the War, you know the big one, generally needs to come first. So tell me everything and we can all decide what to do." Your last words have a bit of steel in them, just a little. "Or else."

While all of this is going on, Rose is naturally already sorting through every scrap of paper available to her, but she's also swearing she doesn't have any correspondence from the Inniscier council, which usually acts as spokespeople for most of the coastal regions, so you're willing to take her word for it.

One of the twins clears his throat as the others turn around as required (though the younger guy has trouble moving his chair, even with a demon's strength). "The Seven Challenges were originally a method to ensure that the demon lord would always be a rightful heir to the throne of demonkind, a ritual of sorts meant to ascertain their worth. To our understanding, it is not the only one of this kind, though many are not taken as serious anymore after the previous lord's reign."

"Hard to after that man on the throne," the old timer grumbles, eyeing you unhappily. "Doubt anyone's gonna ever blast through any doubt quite like he did ever again."

Ahh, it is worse than you thought at first. Much worse. This guy isn't some fossil stuck in his daydreams of everything used to be better in his day.

He's a fanboy.

"Quite," the other twin takes up. "Setting aside the way the Challenges heavily favour someone that knows their way around the sea, they have been an essential tradition for over a thousand generations of demon lords, and more to the point are seen as a sign of succession by many of the coastal inhabitants to be found."

"We certainly didn't limit the trade in anyway, however," the younger demon insists, "no matter what Jolly Roger over here wants. That had, uh, other reasons."

"By which he means that a lot of people went to war and haven't returned, so the aquatic monsters some of the villages would usually manage have run out of control," the one female council woman says. "Reduced workforce, it is how it is. Means less fish and seafood, getting the stuff is becoming harder in the first place and all of that. In addition, there's rumours that a couple of villages might have to move around due to the current situation, which isn't true, but you try to keep fishermen from gossiping."

"The uncertainty has people pay attention and stock up, exacerbating the difficulties that seem to have been noted," twin number one adds for twin number two to follow up on. "All of which was supposed to be described in the letters we had sent, but although the messengers returned, they never did bear a reply. Curious."

"This will have to be investigated, of course," you readily agree, aware of how Rose is currently tearing up half the castle for any place this correspondence could have landed even as Sarah is using her power at full throttle to figure out where it might have gone. "Either way, how might these problems be solved and how would I, as the demon lord, be able to help you?"

"Not being a pansy for one," the noted critic against you grunts, though everyone's looks (except yours) have him snort, but give it up already before you decide to make an example after all. "People missing are people missing. Unless you fancy setting a few soldiers at the coast, which might help, there's not much to be done about that."

"We could reorganize the villages," one of the brothers notes. This time, it is the woman that speaks up in his wake.

"That would be a solution, at least temporarily," she agrees with a nod. "Divide the various monster habitats anew, like it was last done when the... previous, lord went through his challenges and a few miles of seafloor went missing."

"Not a secure solution per say, seeing as monsters react to changes in their environment, including so much as larger or smaller groups of fishermen coming after them, with even greater aggression than usual, but if we organized the villages for a Great Culling, it might be possible to minimize the damage," the other win rationalizes.

"Of course, the Seven Challenges would still help, make the festivities complete, so to say," the younger councilman concedes an earlier point, "but the point stands that all of this is a matter for the demon lord himself to decide."

"Alright, fuck it," you grouse, rapidly getting fed up with this whole situation but unwilling to leave things undone. Let's just, figure out what exactly you're even deciding about. "Tell me about these challenges and how I can take care of them to an extent that keeps people happy already."

"Well, there are seven of them, as the name implies," one twin says before clearing his throat. "Seven great tasks to be fulfilled to prove oneself worthy."

"It's mainly just a competency test, in simple terms," his brother intrudes. "Half of them can barely even be called a challenge, truth be told, it's just showing one can rule over the fishermen all around the area by being better at them at the things they do."

"Nobody actually expects a new demon lord to actually be better than everyone else, even if it was probably the intention at the time to try and make it harder for any non-fisherman demon lord to rise," the younger council member clarifies.

It is the woman and possible spokesperson, as you thought earlier, that finally gets the details for you, counting off against her fingers- you only really notice this now, but she's missing two fingers from her left hand. "In order, the challenges are rowing a boat race against a few of the locals, holding your breath underwater for at least half an hour, crafting your own spear from nothing but the ocean's bounty, diving after a treasure from the bottom of the sea, creating a decoration worthy of your reign to be added to the townhouse, an arm wrestling contest with anyone that dares to challenge you and hunting a 'great catch' by yourself and only what you brought or crafted in the course of the challenges."

"Nobody's going to really care about the details, of course," the grumpy old man interjects. "You don't have to win any of the contests, it just looks a lot better. Similarly, nobody really cares if you cheat while holding your breath, or what kind of 'treasure' you fish up so long as you actually get it from the sea floor."

"Heck, a pretty stone was enough in the past, and it was doubled up as a decoration for the town house," brother number one agrees.

"Okay, let's talk business here," you begin after a moment of thought, going deep inside yourself... Deep... And bring yourself to not just genocide the entire coast's inhabitants in what amounts to a tantrum. Not only are you better than that, you also want these idiots to keep working for you and all. "I don't really have much time, but I am willing to go along with this... IF doing so helps keep the situation here in the west under control. Which it will, won't it?"

"Definitely," brother number two agrees eagerly. "Any excuse to get these people we are at least nominally in charge of to sit down and get drunk enough we can swindle them into going along with the changes we need to make."

You know, somehow demon governments outside of the capital are something you can empathize a lot more by comparison, now that you really think about it.

"Gathering a few people shouldn't take too long, and we can always make a longer festival out of it to gather some of the fishermen further away," the spokeswoman suggests. Finally, these people are being constructive here.

"I'll just leave all of the planning and execution on that end to you," you drily remark. "In the meantime, those challenges. I don't really need to breathe if I don't want to, so that one's trivial, and the rest is really only a matter of whether we need an audience."

""Don't worry about it, we can take care of it,"" the twins simultaneously say, giving each other a fist bump for some reason. ""Just give us ten minutes ahead of time and we will do the rest.""

... Huh, looks like you're getting a plan together after all.

Having left the girls behind at the carriage (and told Emily and Okita to get to sunbathing already, with the other two to watch out for them a bit), you somehow don't find yourself too surprised when they turn up amongst the spectators dotting the shoreline instead, Emily scowling and trying to shade her eyes to see something without the urge to rip out her eyes due to the sunlight.

"WELCOME, WELCOME, EVERYONE, TO THE NEW DEMON LORD'S SEVEN SEAS CHALLENGES' FIRST CHALLENGE! AND WHAT A FINE DAY IT IS THAT HAS BEEN CAREFULLY CHOSEN TO HOST THIS EVENT!" Why exactly this suddenly turned into a sports exhibition match, you have no idea, but alas, here you are, standing atop a stable rowing boat much like many of the demon fishermen usually use, it seems. "OUR NEW DEMON LORD, GABRIEL THE MIGHTY, WILL BE UP AGAINST SOME OF THE FIERCEST, MOST TENACIOUS FISHERMEN THIS SIDE OF THE COAST HAS TO OFFER!!! HOPEFULLY HE WILL TAKE IT EASY ON THEM, EY?!"

At least the twin doing this is having fun, you suppose?

Looking around at the other guys currently standing in their own boats, you shrug at the ones looking towards you. "Not like this is gonna be particularly dangerous."

Most 'fashion' around these parts tends to be even more lacking than elsewhere around the demon kingdom, by which you mean covers even less. Most of the muscled people around you right now are barely wearing some kinds of shorts, a few loincloths even visible here and there, and if anything, the female fishermen are wearing less cloth on them, if anything.

Good thing demons tend to all look surprisingly good, otherwise this would be absolutely hideous. As it is, though, you can tolerate this- and are even going barechested yourself.

"Last guy accidentally broke the legs of every other competitor, is all," one of the downright chiselled men rumbles out, his voice deep like only someone huffing too much seawater could have. "Heh, just promise to only take one each, yer majesty."

"I'll take it into consideration," you joke back. Right, just waiting for the start signal now.

They actually did bring out a big gong, a burly fellow with bright red skin and shoulders the size of a brick shithouse alone swinging an enormous club at the big metal disk easily his own size to announce the beginning of the race.

Immediately, everyone starts rowing with full strength, which is kind of an issue for you given you've never before done this kind of thing in your life. Or afterwards, really. Still, it's not like you don't have a lot of physical strength and functioning eyes, and so you soon end up at the tip of the racers, everyone still finding their place for a moment longer.

These guys are good, you'll give them that, but what really counts for this more than anything else, is strength. Pure physical power. Which, granted, a few of the demons rowing against you can keep up with you with, to your mild surprise, but it won't be enough.

Only three of them are fast enough to be a serious challenge to you, two guys and one female demon. Muscles are churning, entire bodies in motion and they seem like they might actually overtake you for a long moment... And so you use your secret weapon.

Fun fact, vampires are naturally stronger than in life, that's just how they work. However, when their 'natural' strength isn't quite enough for a specific task, some can and will have a little trick up their sleeves: By using up blood to power themselves up, instead of keeping themselves alive, they can momentarily boost themselves up quite a bit, physically speaking.

In other words, you end up displacing large swathes of water with every rhythmic swing of your oars, less rowing and more pulling yourself across the ocean water and getting your closest competitors wet all over. The others try to keep up, but, well... You are very much the first to get yourself across the finish line, a long band of cloth laid out into the water.

Man, if you were still alive, you'd have some aching muscles right now, just like after a good workout or something, haha. Either way, that's the first challenge down, and you certainly did win it, to cheers from the crowd and jeering from the other rowers.

There's a quick break after the race, mostly to let the food stalls that somehow popped up while you weren't looking do their thing a little while longer, you suspect. Either way, it's not like this next part will be any particularly big spectacle, so it won't really matter much to the crowd that has managed to gather by this point, with a few of the nearest fishing villages' people joining Innscier's festivities after they managed to get wind of them- more or less according to plan, really.

As for yourself, you took the moment to hit up the four you dragged along, mostly making sure they're alright and that nobody's giving them any trouble. A few of the more female demons around are also giving you flirty looks, but unfortunately while you wouldn't be opposed to a little fun, you also don't want to waste any more time in this place than really necessary.

Even if a few of those abs are pretty nice to look at, you won't lie.

Technically, none of your companions are actual demons, but with Okita and Emily around, you're confident anyone getting wise won't be too big of an issue either way. In fact, all four of them are currently going around trying out the festival food, with Tada in particular showing them around and giving recommendations such as the squids grilled on a bare iron plate they're sharing.

Apparently, this is actually a fairly common Japanese thing, where she and Okita come from. Okita on the other hand was never really at those kinds of things, something the naginata hero seems to be taking as a personal affront.

But hey, as long as they're all getting along without getting bored... Incidentally. Lana is enjoying herself a whole damn lot, while Emily is demonstrating her talents as a firespitter by grilling things with nothing but her power.

Anyway, time for that treasure hunt at the bottom of the ocean. You did tell people not to wait for your surfacing again, what with the whole breathing thing you can ignore, but here goes nothing-!

Diving into the ocean isn't particularly hard, much unlike it might have been for you while alive; you'll admit, you actually used to be afraid of the sea, or more specifically of the great amounts of mindless water just as capable of dragging you under and crushing you under its weight as anything else, but, well...

You've literally been to the ocean floor before. It really isn't that big an issue, in hindsight, though the advantages of undeath surely did factor into that, too.

Either way, here you are, simply not breathing as you glide through the water. Thankfully, you can move at a fairly decent speed even underwater, and so you quickly move as far out as you can manage.

The good stuff will be hidden further away, where less people are around and therefore less likely to discover it themselves. Basic treasure hunting logic right there, obviously enough.

You dive and dive, heedless of how long you do so while telepathically starting up a little chat to keep an eye on things, so to say. Sarah and Rose are currently busy interrogating anyone they can find, as they are sure they've found some kind of irregularity in the reports and correspondence they've been receiving, but the exact point of sabotage is still unknown to this point.

Or rather, they now know there is stuff they haven't been getting, but not even Sarah's power has let them find so much as who has had access to that disappeared stuff.

In other words, something has to inherently be fucky, obviously enough. Only question is exactly how fucky and how much of a wrath of Gabe you need to bring down on whoever is responsible. For the moment, though, you'll simply have to leave things to them.

Back to your own pursuits, it seems you have found the crater the last demon king purportedly left behind when he bothered with all of this crap, and so you first search it. It's really pretty far out, simple physics say stuff might be more likely to drift down there and stay.

Which, uh, it did.

How the fuck did a ship like this actually get down here? Especially as demons don't really do big ships like that, so it has to have been human in origin.

You're totally taking this thing, but... Now how the fuck are you going to get it back to shore, or at least close enough to count? A quick look inside (and massacred population of various aquatic monsters living therein) shows that there's still some objects of interest inside- no great big treasure chests that you saw, but old weapons and armor, somehow uncorroded by time and salt water, something you will chalk up to some magical protection on the stuff.

... You'll need a lot of rope to keep this thing from falling apart as you move it.

"Alright, that's three challenges down," you say once you've returned another time, the huge ship in tow. The travel time back and forth took quite a while, even at your speed, and you'd have salt crusting all over your skin if you weren't just going to drop anything clinging to yourself trivially later. "What's next?"

The twin that's facing you right now, seeing how the other one is currently busy organizing the demons that were startled when you literally dragged an entire ship with you after asking for a lot of rope, drily chuckles a little. "Well, as far as our barely existing timetable goes, there would be hunting down a monster, crafting a spear or a decoration left at this point," he says, gesturing off into the distance apologetically. "The arm wrestling contest will take a bit to organize, so if you would..."

Luckily, you did keep an eye out while you were diving for treasure, and did note several corals and reefs for their colorful exteriors- not particularly strong or otherwise remarkable, but...

Well, with a bit of work, just a little bit of thin rope and some carefully judged application of your claws, you managed to use that. The corals are surprisingly hard and tough, something you are again going to ascribe to this dimension's omnipresent magical mumbo jumbo as opposed to them just being naturally this way, and once they dry out you have roughly shaped weapon that lies comfortably in your grip.

Its tip could bear some improvement, but you did carve swirling designs all across its length, drawing attention and focusing it towards a direction... If that makes sense, anyway. You did use a few longer pieces of stone in its construction, hence the thin rope, but it was necessary- you just couldn't find any coral reef that was naturally big enough for your purposes.

Still, it's all incorporated to look more majestic than rustic or hastily thrown together, and if anything it still does work as a functioning weapon. A spear, just like one might find on many of the typical fishermen around here, of the appropriate length and anything. Working to stab a big, scaled monster just as soon as it would a grown man, whether human or demon.

It took you, what, an hour or two? Man, these supposed challenges really don't take all too long at this rate. "There, that's both the spear and the decoration for the town hall done," you say as you hand it over to the gathered council, having decided you may as well get this all done in one wash. "What's next?"

They're a bit busy staring at your work, but you can wait a moment- you did kind of anticipate this, after all. Perfection does demand attention, and all that.

The arm wrestling contest ends up being more of a series of attempts by any that want to try their luck against you (as described to you at the beginning of all of this) to get you down- and it isn't like anyone is really going to make a big issue out of whether you win or lose, if anything the whole deal is about the people getting a chance to come closer and 'talk' like 'real men' to their new overall lord, whether you will ever come back to this place or not.

Naturally, as you are entirely untiring, it isn't like you particularly care about any of that, and though demons are technically physically stronger than your vampiric strength would allow you to be, the additions of your tonics and aura take care of the rest in that regard.

A couple of good attempts are made and a few actually come close, but in the end none can really match your ability to stay tense and push for literally arbitrary amounts of times when you want to, though according to the girls with you the sight of you all but wrestling with a bunch of men and women both just as half-naked as yourself seems to be... very nice?

You just ask them to send copies of their thoughts to Sarah and Rose so they can evaluate them later while you were in the middle of things, truth be told. Still, no amount of sweaty, burly fishermen can bring you to your knees, and so you're declared the unequivocal victor of this little contest in short order.

It is only obvious, really. Your strength doesn't come from your muscles, it comes from your heart. And your soul. And the abominable force animating you as well as at least mildly eldritch super cancer you ingested, but mostly those two.

Only one thing left to do, then you're through with this, at any rate. Now where are you going to find an appropriately large sea monster to butcher alive?

With your work left behind ashore and stories already being spun about it by all and sundry- depending on whose words you believe, the spear was apparently already finished and lay there on the ocean floor, waiting to be claimed by you, or else the Goddess has to have left it for you to find as a gift and the affirmation of your rightful rule over demonkind, that no man nor woman may think you unsuited for the throne.

Complete bullshit, of course, but it's entertaining bullshit, which is the point. If anyone that asks gets a good enough story, they aren't questioning the fact you're calling the shots all over the kingdom. Normally, of course, a ruler wouldn't give a fuck about individual subjects' opinions, but with the way demon governance and society works...

Well, every single vote counts when there's less votes to go around, to put it that way, which is why you're playing along with this ridiculous farce in the first place.

So here you are, Okita reportedly demonstrating her capability to juggle heavy loads to put on a show after Emily goaded her into it, even as you are flying above the ocean in search for a sufficiently large and impressive thing to murder and call it a day.

You did get a few directions on what areas to look in, the council just as intent on this whole thing turning out well as yourself and showing you a few maps of the surrounding ocean to give you an idea of where the local monsters tend to roam.

You already saw and discarded a few blood signatures so far, mostly what you think are some kinds of giant crabs and eels the sizes of people at minimum. Because those just seem to be 'average' around this place, and while you totally could just take a few of them and technically complete the challenge, you want something actually impressive.

Something like... the very, very large blood signature you only just realized was there, gliding through the water underneath you. It isn't some kind of trickery or anything- it's just so damn large you didn't consciously perceive it as something else than the background for a bit there.

Flapping your wings, you consider how to do this, flying after the surprisingly fast creature in your bird form and looking through the water's surface as best you can. That said, the best you can get is the impression of scales, and the approximate size of the ship you (carefully) towed all the way to the coast earlier.

This is a big un' if you've ever seen one.

Naturally, this thing should be enough to do the job, you reckon. Only issue is actually killing it, up- well, not to brag to yourself, but you are rather good at killing things by this point.

That said, something of this size does require you to put your all into it, and so you get into position and start shapeshifting. Shooting through the air, you let your skin harden and grow out as your form shifts, limbs becoming longer and wings and tails sprouting behind your back.

And, of course, your horns. You've noticed this recently, but you've actually started looking a lot more impressive lately, haven't you?

It is the horns, it has to be. There's more of them and they've started glowing. Then there's also your now segmented tails growing longer when you weren't looking, you suppose.

Diving straight downwards with all the force your wings can muster to add to your velocity, you aim almost straight forwards and down, hitting the water with a big splash and soon getting a better look at this monster you've managed to stumble into. Scales, as you thought you saw earlier, and the deep blue all around you roils along your skin during your continued descend, not stopped by the new fluid medium in the least.

A very chonky boy over here.

You can feel a deep vibration all around you, as though it was roaring in response to you landing on its back, but you don't really pay it any mind. Instead, you get your claws right into the tough scales covering its hide, ripping and tearing and letting your initial impact speak for itself.

You aren't quite sure, but you think you might have broken its back.

Next thing you know, the water around you seems to be drilling into you from all sides, but contrary to this sucker, you have some actually good armor and simply proceed to tear further inside it, pushing your way around its spiky fish spine and towards its neck.

Luckily enough, you actually can suck blood even faster than usual when in this form, unhinging your maw to actually get your teeth into what you can only describe as a vein or something and starting to give it some good suck.

It can't really reach you from where you've managed to get yourself into, and so before long all it can do is writhe in place and try to do something. Which is the same as nothing, in this situation.

Good part is, you actually end up much much closer to the coast again by the time it stops moving and you register having eaten its soul for yourself. The last of its death throes seem to have been visible from shore, or at least half the town of Innscier seems to be rather wet to your untrained eye when you finally get out of the monster.

Progress.

As it turns out, this thing is actually a monster called a Sea King, a very rare and sought-after giant fish that has dozens of fishermen after it if sighted anywhere near the coast. Apparently, managing to kill one is seen as a sign of good fortune... Which, given the worth of the bodies, is kind of self-evident.

You asked Rose, and the recorded number of these things killed lies at only four- five, now, with the one you just bagged, across the entirety of written history. Quite a few of their scales has actually ended up being used for decorative purposes around the castle, in fact.

So suffice to say, anyone that so much as sees this thing is very much getting an idea of just how powerful and awe-inspiring you are. As is only right and proper.

On another note, the people are also whispering already about your transformed state as you are showing it off a little- things like how this is obviously your true form usually kept hidden so you do not overwhelm your surroundings with your sheer presence alone or to fight at a weaker level and draw more enjoyment out of even weaker opponents.

Tada whispered 'just like a demon king in some game', with Okita nodding absolutely seriously in response. You don't quite know why, but you feel vaguely ashamed now.

But hey, as long as it works towards your purposes, you don't mind posing in the middle of town for a bit... Even if a few of the muscled demon women feeling your body all over are overdoing it a bit.

Just kidding, you totally love it.

The saga of the Sea Spear began on the most auspicious day of the Last Demon Lord's pilgrimage along the Tooth Coast, this old and now mythical ritual which each Demon Lord since the creation of the demon race underwent to prove their virtues to the people of the western coast, much like they did for the Heart Valley, the nest of uncountable monsters beyond all reckoning and the Deep Mountains to the east of the realm at the time.

Having already finished the rites elsewhere while beating back the savage hordes populating the north of the continent back in those times, accursed be their mention, Demon Lord Gabriel was said to have saved the most laborious of the great tasks for last, which was why he only came to conduct them once the rest of the realm was secure.

Riding on his untiring steed the size of a house, he disembarked before the astonished eyes of the populace, whom immediately prostrated and began to praise his dignified bearing. However, unwilling to wait for the Litany Of Three Nights that was the number of days it would have taken them to finish proclaiming his name and titles in their entirety, the Demon Lord bid them to stand and instead proclaim the seven sacred challenges the sea itself had made to him to prove his right by conquest.

Seven days and seven nights did he labour, and it has been said that such was his power that the ocean itself shivered at the mere mention of his name for centuries to come. The trials were overcome, one by one, but the one we are to talk about today is not the trial of the sea king, that most auspicious of events you all know about anyway, but instead the creation of the Sea Spear.

That's right, it may look like it does, but it wasn't just found like that, no no. Not many people remember, these days, and fewer yet get to see the Royal Archives about things like this, but the Sea Spear was in truth made in small parts. First, the Demon lord swam all the way to the deepest bottom of the ocean, where exactly truly nobody knows except maybe for him, and asked the sea to part with its treasures so he may shape them into a weapon. The sea, always jealous of all its treasures and desiring to gain ever more, told him that for it to be so, he need first hold a conversation with it until it got bored, feigning loneliness at how few people could speak within it.

It had sought to trick the Demon Lord, you see, but he simply smiled, breathing out all the air he had brought in his lungs and began to talk about the first thing that came to mind. The sea had never expected he would never need to breathe, you see, and would simply expel water to speak in bubbles instead.

And so it came that for one day, the sea tried to outwit him, only for the Demon lord to keep on talking and talking until it ran out of things to talk about. "Well," the Demon King spoke, once it was silent for too long, "didn't you promise me a treasure?"

Grudgingly, the sea did as it had been bidden, unwilling to break its word outright. From its floor grew a spine of stone, radiant like a rainbow and yet hard as adamantite. Thanking it with a sly smile, the Demon lord took it for himself, now armed with what would become one half of the Sea Spear as we know it today.

Why it doesn't look like that? Well, you see, the sea was a sore loser, the sorest of the sore even. It truly hated having to give up any of the countless things it had taken into itself over the countless aeons, and so it attempted one last deceit to bring the righteous King into its clutches as well, as it had desired all along.

From its hidden creases and caves, it dredged up the ghost of a ship it had swallowed whole, once upon a time, putting it into the way between the returning Demon Lord and safe harbor. Never one to shy away from a fight, he immediately raised his spear to strike, only for it to lose all its luster and fade into simple green seastone, the sea replacing its power to fool him into striking the ship with it for naught.

One night the battle raged, Gabriel fighting without mercy nor forgiveness, until at last the simple stone splintered and broke, turning into fragments against the hardened wood bearing its punishment heedless of the damage it was taking, baleful sails and twisted magic letting it ram into the single man it was facing like a lovestruck whale again and again.

Its opponent, however, smiled and told it that, as it had been broken into pieces by the spear instead of the other way around, it was now bound to it and would have to follow the commands of the one who held it. After all, the sea had given it to him, and so it followed that all that was within it would know of its power.

The ship was just a ship, of course, but the sea, controlling and guiding it, could not find it in itself to argue against this, having been outwitted again and again the day before. Thusly forced to meekly follow, it could do nothing but watch as the Demon Lord gathered the broken fragments of his spear, assembling them inside the most colorful corals the sea harbored.

"The sea has given me this spear," he told them, "and so it has chosen fit to grant you the honour of becoming part of it."

"But Demon lord, oh Demon Lord, this is not a spear, these are but splinters!" The corals responded.

"You dare claim your liege a liar?" He thundered in response, the exhalations of water washing over them scathingly. "I should have you tell the sea itself, see what it thinks of your perfidity!"

"Demon Lord, oh demon lord, please no!" The sea had to fume and boil as its servants were fooled, for it had to stay silent and could could naught but watch anymore. "We will grow onto this mighty spear and proclaim your splendor forevermore!"

And so it came that the Demon Lord Gabriel returned, bearing the Sea Spear as we know it today. Sometimes, when his name is spoken, the ocean will still whisper it back into your ears, and when it thinks if him and what it could not have, it will break out into storm and furied dance.

The sea Spear, on the other hand, was left in the Port Town we see and know here today, for the Demon king decided it should stay close to the sea- whether to taunt it or because it was fitting, none know in truth except perhaps the five families guarding it to this day. It is said that, when catastrophe threatens to drown the coast, it is meant to be revealed in all its magnificence, even now as a thousand mages and one have attempted to return it to its original glory and more.

No more then eight times has this happened, that is known anyway, and more than once its sheer sight was enough to tame or slay powerful monsters and beat back savages and invaders of all kinds. So we pay our respect to the Sea Spear, and may any that claim otherwise be shown to the sea for a good dunk.

There you are, having used your remaining timer to gather a veritable bounty of fresh sea creatures you basically airlifted straight out of the sea. It's not like most of them can really, y'know, do anything when you come along in your superior form.

The peasants are also appropriately awed and in various states of adulation, so you have absolutely no regrets about it when you run out of time and shrink back to your usual size.

Because hey, none of the ladies has ever complained about your size in the first place. Not like there's anything you'd need to be embarrassed about in that regard.

Luckily, you did keep your head about you while transformed into your other form, meaning that you managed to have Emily tell the demons to have your various pieces of loot ready for you for when you have the time to get back on it and do the big things you were planning on.

Specifically what you mean by that are the shipwreck you literally towed out of the ocean (how exactly you managed to do that you still aren't quite sure) and the corpse of the Sea King you lucked into finding while looking for a big enough monster.

So. So, so, so. You have the two giant objects halfway inside the water as it is, not quite the exactly same size with the Sea King noticeably larger even but still approximately in the same size category when you squint a bit.

Now how do you best go about combining and fusing both of them using all your powers and spells and abilities? Twisted, that one S9 member with a strange grudge for you, slots into yourself easily, the overlay and constant ironically twisted hatred for you immediately present without any difficulties even as his power, kept after death, manifests with a weird pressure you feel in the overall area of any biomatter nearby.

It's easier to sense people when there's fewer of them around, mostly because differentiating between things in a general area is pretty hard with this power alone, but that wasn't why you went and used him. Concentrating a bit, you can easily warp space inside the dead meat and skin and scales of the dead Sea King, effortlessly reshaping all of it.

This will make the rest of this a lot easier. A lot of work is ahead of you if you want to make some proper use of this ship.

Crafting a big work of downright art like this takes quite a bit of effort and attention, you know that much from long experience with working with undead of all kinds (but especially the really big ones you made in the past). So when you start on this one, you're well aware of the kind of approach you need to take to get everything you want done.

First off, materials. You have quite a lot of biomass, thanks to the Sea King, and some more miscellaneous parts you can extract from the additional monsters you hunted and gathered afterwards. That is one thing you need to worry about less, at the very least, as you plan everything out.

First off, you take the big fish you have on hand apart, roughly dividing it into parts and getting right to work. The first and most obvious thing you do is to patch up the hull everywhere it is damaged, then drawing a thin layer of muscle and skin over the whole thing as a protective screen. No use in an undead ship if it's leaking quite that much- this one had half a dozen holes the size of small buildings in it.

Not satisfied with that, you then get to laying out a mesh of bones and more muscles along the inside of the hull, followed by your work towards installing a bunch of 'cannons' made of empty chambers meant to be filled with air or water and a lot of muscles and membranes meant to draw more and more of the same in.

Should work according to what you calculated, optimally by shooting out whatever fitting projectile is loaded into them. Just opening up at the tip and boom. Even if empty, the blast itself should still be fairly deadly up close.

Then you get to the meat of the matter, or rather, the ship. The insides have to be completely revamped (heh), replacing every single room you come upon piece by piece. Long story short, by the time you're done with everything, you have a giant ship that's actually grown a little in all dimensions, an interior that can close up completely airtight for when it submerges (as you built it to), eyes on every side taken from the various monsters you hunted and connected to the greater whole (and if those optic nerves weren't a giant pain) and, of course, a bunch of semi-humanoid 'bodies' grown partially into the ship itself.

You're particularly proud of those, by the way. They came out rather well and allowed you to take a few shortcuts for various internal functions to boot.

And, as you modulate your voice and begin to chant the various spells you need for this, a wide variety of useful and complementing magical abilities are added to the whole thing, bringing it to unholy unlife and a well-deserved status of 'fucking dangerous'.

And to top it all off, you won't even need to control it yourself. Raising the cheap spear you threw together out of oceanic materials earlier, you add the finishing touches. "All that I control, all that I have taken, be bound to this thing forevermore, that you may serve my will!"

There. Now anyone holding the spear will be able to give the patiently straining monstrosity you created (it's just giving you that impression, you have no idea why) orders it will actually obey.

Hopefully this will take care of everything in this region. Now how to tell the council you basically created a mildly cataclysmic threat and made them hold the reigns?

Sitting back inside of your bone carriage, you can't help but sigh out a long breath of air, thinking about the enormous pain all of this trip turned out to be. Around you, Emily, Okita, Tada and Lana are taking their own seats, each radiating some level of exhaustion and slash or contentment.

"This was... something," you finally say as you mentally go over your checklist of everything you needed before returning. "You four have fun while I was busy? I didn't mean to just leave you to yourselves, but as it turned out..."

"Don't worry, we had enough fun," Emily shrugs, throwing a strand of her hair behind her ear. "But next time, let's come for a night instead of a day. Much less suck that way."

"Mhm," Okita nods. You don't know at what exactly, but you'll just take it for what it is.

Those two having made their judgement, you turn towards the other two- Tada and Lana. The latter speaks up first. "It was, um, different? Demons are a lot rougher than you would see in a human town, I think. They were nice, though, and the food was delicious."

"I was surprised how much like some ancient Japanese village everything was," Tada finally adds her own input. Surprising you, you wouldn't have expected Japan to have been like these guys- was that the reason Leviathan crippled it?

... Well, Lung was, like, what, half-Japanese?

"A lot of traditional Japanese festival food, too, once the festival just... happened. The only thing missing would have been some fireworks in the evening. All in all, I wouldn't mind coming again." Well, if the only real Japanese part of your retinue says so, you'll trust her judgement.

... Okita is not Japanese. She is an Okita. That's its own thing, and nobody can ever convince you otherwise.

"Suppose we could maybe come again at some point then," you reluctantly say, gesturing off towards the (closed) windows vaguely. "Or you could always make it a day trip or two, not like you're confined to the capital or anything."

"Are you kidding? I hardly even saw the capital beyond the castle so far. Lots of space to explore," Emily mumbles. Tada and Lana agree, both nodding along.

"We've been in the capital for a few days only so far... Actually, does it have a name?" Lana asks. "I wondered since nobody ever calls it one..."

"Technically, it's the Royal Capital, but everyone just shortens it if you'll believe it," you tell her, settling in to relax a little. You'd best get going already, so you mentally give the order to your carriage.

"Mm. Gabriel fun." Only to receive an Okita jumping into your lap, her back glowing with the impact as your auras keep either of you from hurting yourselves.

"Yes, yes, you just want to keep having fun and don't care where you are," you translate for everyone else's benefit. "Alright, I hope nobody forgot anything?"

"Got my souvenirs loaded up while you were busy with that ship!" Tada raises her thumb at you. "I hope everyone at the castle will like them. I mostly just got seafood that will keep a bit and some fancy stuff, but it wasn't like we were going to use our spending money for anything else."

"... We had spending money?" You ask. "I kind of just assumed everything was free for us."

Tada sighs.

Meanwhile, back at the capital, Sarah and Rose have been hard at work, as you well know. Mainly thanks to Sarah ranting and venting a lot during this whole time and you, naturally, dutifully serving as her sounding board.

Not that Rose didn't do her own fair share of talking through the telepathic network, of course, it's just that she also did try to keep things direct and to the point. She simply has yet to embrace the line of thought that is how everyone else considers the network; as an even more convenient kind of smartphone equivalent, ultimately.

Especially in worlds you have a lot more participants hanging around the thing. But though quite a few demons have joined it, most are just Rose's spies and infiltrators that you gave minimal permissions to due to the extreme lack of interest you have for them.

According to their shared investigation, the letters and documents relevant to this situation simply... disappeared. They were brought into the city, that much they can confirm, and handed off to couriers or castle personnel that should have brought them in just as normal.

However, for one reason or another, every piece of paper sent from anywhere further west that the first big trade street winding around the kingdom in that direction seems to have entirely disappeared. The problem is actually much bigger than just the Tooth Coast's local administration's correspondence never arriving; a lot of damage control is being done over there at the moment, but at least you managed to stumble into this before things became worse over time.

Whoever did this, because it has to be sabotage, they left seemingly no trace of their interference and yet were so thorough Sarah is absolutely livid over the whole affair. Normally, you completely agree, her power would have clued her in that something had to be going on, that's just how it works as you understand it, but this is very obviously not a normal case in the first place.

It is obvious Sarah would have seen through anything like this easily in the first place. Therefore, the only possibility is that one of humanity's heroes is responsible for this. Nothing else could've been it, after all.

An obvious conclusion.

Sarah and Rose, on the other hand, are doubtful, but you are completely sure. Only a hero's power would ever be enough to fool Sarah.

Elsewhere, a certain man in a certain place is sneezing. He has no idea why, it came out of nowhere.

"Someone must be talking about me, huh..."

On the bright side, several people have been summarily executed after being found guilty of corruption, both of your party members left in the capital taking care of them. It wasn't really something worthy of death, just taking a few bribes here and there and maybe having certain political rivals killed in a ridiculously lethal game of politics (as demons just kind of naturally developed towards), but hey, if it gets the rest of the bunch to tighten up, you won't exactly complain.

Though perhaps Sarah's stress levels should be monitored a little closer. You know she hates not knowing things- there's a reason she used to want to play detectives all the time when she was a kid- but perhaps a bit of Gabriel-mandated relaxation is on the timetable.

Something to consider for later, at any rate.

One of the nifty little uses of your power to have that whole inner world business and related abilities you haven't made all too much use of so far is the one to transfer the memories of the souls you've consumed into various forms, from books both analog and digital to actual movies and video clips you can play at your leisure.

To that end, a minor experiment you once conducted has been an equally minor success towards increasing the availability of such stolen memories. By physically building a television set inside your soul (or rather, making Yoshi do so), then linking it with the pre-existing systems inside there to copy certain memories into it, you have been able to breathe it out and make it show everything that was saved on it beforehand, including memories.

Quality sometimes does lack just a little, seeing as your insides don't seem to include an incredibly skilled movie editor or anything, but it does work just fine for some things.

Such as, you could've guessed it, things a given soul has seen on a television while alive. You've never been a particularly big movie guy or series watcher while alive- just not particularly interested in that kind of thing- but you totally see the appeal in having a digital drug to shut yourself down with on hand.

Hey, you never were into drugs in general either, but to each their own.

Now, though, you are finding yourself in a situation where having something to watch with company would actually work out for yourself, just so you can have something to talk about. A stunning and cunning linguist you may be, but keeping four teenage girls occupied for any length of time is still mentally exhausting even so.

And yes, Lana is totally a teenager. Your acute senses have judged her to be such and nobody can tell you otherwise.

Of course, there's still the issue of things like language barriers, and you're fairly sure that something fucky is going on with that whole thing. But, well... Since you were thinking of Yoshi already anyway...

Yoshi, tell me the complete and honest truth, you begin, making sure he won't fuck around and waste your time, if there was any one single thing you would recommend watching on a screen among any and all things you ever did in life, what would it be?

... Have you ever heard of the anime Dragon Balls?

What's an anime?

...

As it turns out, among your number only Tada has ever heard of Dragon Balls, and watched it, and she seems quite shocked when not only you and Emily but even Okita got no idea what this 'anime' is even about.

Naturally, this meant you had to force Yoshi to go through the records you have of the Japanese cartoon series and add translations in all applicable languages you want this to be understood in, Lana becoming quite interested in this type of entertainment commonly seen in other worlds.

The anime itself is... Pretty funny, really. A bit much corny here and there and clearly meant to entertain a wide front of viewers and so not quite hitting the humour you enjoy, but it's fairly fun to watch all the same. And hey, a later bastardization of the Journey To The West (which you do actually know about, much to Tada's melodramatic surprise) is something you enjoy on principle.

Back when you were trying to 'find yourself' during your teenage years, you actually went around skimming quite a lot of classical literature with the help of a couple of nerdier girls you were acquainted with and one of them happened to be both Asian and all up for having you read it while she sucked you off. You're pretty sure it was some kind of kink, but damn if she had a mouth on her, in all the best ways as far as you're concerned.

And so it happens that you recount the story, without names involved of course, in-between episodes as you wait a bit for Yoshi to do the translating. Okita, surprisingly easy to get into the mood (or perhaps she's just always horny in the first place) is the first to get any ideas afterwards, but with a bunch of horny young women it's a small miracle you actually manage to even really get anything else done once the next orgy starts, with Dragon Balls running in the background for everyone to pay a little attention to on the side.

It's a weirdly wholesome sex pile you find yourself part of, but hey, you aren't complaining.

It may be a little weird to actually sit down and read all those dry books about psychology you scanned from the internet (you made Yoshi do it) and pilfered from the memories of some of your souls, but you do feel you actually are learning some stuff here- mainly what people trying to scientifically analyze the human mind are doing wrong by and large.

Seriously, some of the crap you're reading makes absolutely no sense, or else only makes sense in specific circumstances so particular it's essentially just a study of a single person, real or imagined, that a researcher went and completely overanalyzed to the point of uselessness.

And don't even let yourself get started on Freud. The man had a blatant thing for his mother and never got over it only to go so far as to write literal books about how completely normal and natural it is for someone to want to fuck the place they came from. Like, seriously dude, just... accept it and move on. Even back in his own time, nobody was judging him except himself.

You may personally be just a little weirded out by it, owed to certain occasions when you're pretty sure your mother was coming on to you (and the few times you couldn't get out of there fast enough), but hey, you're also perfectly capable of taking a step back and rationalizing that other parents don't have to be like your own.

Still you are actually finding some gems among the muck of modern psychology (and let's not even get into the few things you got from Rapture's psychologists and the office you 'inherited' from Sofia, it was even worse back then), comparing with your own experiences and observations and drawing conclusions, coming to understand people's actions and reactions from new angles.

In other words, you're experiencing the phenomenon known as 'learning', and it is quite nice, actually.

That said, this is not the only thing you're doing while inside your soul palace...The idea you settled on after considering the circumstances and the kinds of scenarios you see yourself encountering in this particular dimension you're in is frankly speaking less a complete design and more a design concept that simply needs to be applied consequently with details depending on the situation.

Simply put, one issue that large-scale undead construction has is that it takes not only a whole lot of dead bodies (or dead matter, more generally speaking), it also requires a lot of time and attention, to the point that you just need an alternative to spending days on end crafting your most massive undead to throw at the enemy next.

Because while you could do it, you doubt it is the most efficient use of your time in a situation where you find yourself needing some titanic undead like that.

So what are your alternatives? Large battles and massive casualties are somewhat of a forte of yours, so just ignoring the avenue of expendable fighters that your necromancy represents would be too large of a waste in itself.

A few attempts and discarded drafts later, you have what you'd call a workable approach. Simply put, if the more in-depth forming and morphing of dead bodies so often required for your carefully designed crafted pieces of murderous art is not efficient, you could just... turn things around.

Minimal streamlining and changes to the whole thing, whether for form or for function, minimizing the disadvantages thereof. Simply fusing dead bodies together haphazardly is viable, and you actually did do so once or twice, so how to best scale the concept up to the most ridiculous degrees?

Obviously, just fuse more and more bodies together. The trick, then, is in how to do so in a way that allows them to actually work in concert to move a bigger and bigger greater sum than themselves around.

... Humanoid, just for ease of use- a quadrupedal body would probably work better for purposes of weight management, but you want the added reach. With human bodies (default assumption on what you make it out of) making up the main body... And some metallic framework for stability, you suppose, as well as for added armor.

Some spikes here and there to give it a better option than punching with meat only, some close rework of how a metal 'skeleton' would have to look like to support this kind of enormous weight, and not to mention the added factors of the resulting undead constantly straining and using all the muscles it has.

The bodies will have to be fused together, of course, around the metal, and the ways you could do this in a way that preserves their effective strength need to be figured out and added to your mental notes.

Honestly, this is almost more like an engineering task than anything else. Still pretty entertaining, in an intellectual kind of way.

When you arrive in the palace, you are not particularly surprised to see the servants to immediately begin unpacking the carriage, loading boxes in and out to prepare it for the next time you use it even as everything you brought with you is sorted and delivered to wherever it is to be stored.

Tada of course immediately launches into a list of everything she brought and who should receive it, a maid actually writing it all up and handing the pieces of parchment off to what you presume to be the respective servants responsible.

So that's handled, at least. Meanwhile, though, you're about to be hit by a ballistic sister in 3... 2... 1...

Phasing through the ceiling above the large reception area you parked in (you're pretty sure it was built with carriages in mind, at least), Sarah slams right into you. You catch her, of course, and she ends up facing you with her cute little butt resting on one arm. "Gabe!"

"Sarah," you answer, giving her a kiss on the cheek. "You been well while I was gone?"

"Mh-hm," she agrees. "I missed you."

Aww. "I missed you too, sis. C'mon, let's go catch up in person."

Naturally, Sarah actually tends to be more high maintenance than most of your lovers- it really can't be helped, though, she's just so cute you want to indulge her anyway.

And hey, it's not like she's actually all that hard to handle; if anything, you'd say everyone else is just too easily satisfied in terms of how they require your attention. You could go through them one by one, but-

Long story short, Sarah is the one that needs the most time with you to keep her mental equilibrium. Normally, vampires are fairly fine without much worry about anything like that, but, well... She's always been a high achiever?

So anyway, seeing how you may or may not be busy for the next while, you just go ahead and spend some time with her. Feeding her some sweets (no, that's not an euphemism, actual sweets you had the maids arrange), chatting with her about whatever comes to your mind and talking about funny old stories (such as that time a boy tried to be mean to her and you promptly arranged for a work accident for his father) (he didn't die, unfortunately, but accidental castration was still a fitting punishment for misusing his ability to have kids like that) and just taking a walk, for once.

You've never really... taken the time to do that in this dimension, have you? Not that you've ever really been the type of person to do that in the first place. The castle is actually quite pretty to look at, you suppose...

After a while, Sarah gets that little twinkle in her eyes, the one she always got when she was about to do something fun- and gets up on her toes to stretch just a little further up than she would usually stand, just high enough to kiss you. "This was really fun," she says once your lips let up off of each other. "We should do something like this more often."

"Glad you enjoyed yourself." Instead of wasting any more words, you kiss her back. "Back inside?"

"Yeah..." The two of you make your way back inside the castle, into your rooms, holding hands all the while.

And if you end up discarding all your clothes and frantically making out with your sweet, lovely little sister afterwards, that's nobody else's business.

Now then, it's a bit of a rush order, but you'd best get a head start on that little request you made to Rose before leaving towards the west. Would be no point in it if you didn't, after all.

Metallurgy in Thule is... Weird, if anything. Much like literally everything else in this world, metals seem to be able to be warped and given strange, anomalous properties by the broad category of phenomena simply called 'magic'. In other words, magical metamaterials that you can just mine out of the ground are a thing, as are more that can seemingly be synthesized through various means if your sources are correct.

Said sources being a few passages and summaries taken from various books describing all of this Rose got someone to put together for you. It's not like you ever really pay attention to it, but having a bunch of bureaucrats and scribes at the ready to take care of things like this is a great thing in dimensions where the internet hasn't yet been made a reality.

Of course, you don't exactly have samples of all the kinds of metals you would like to have on hand, this being this short notice, but it isn't like Rose would have had issues getting most of the more common kinds of magical metals in at least small quantities... And although most really interesting items left around the castle were either used or lost in the recent war and all, just a few bits and pieces could still be found, apparently.

You don't exactly make a list of all the observations you could come up with, and most of the things you test through aren't really that interesting, by and large, but then again, a few... Well, perfect memory means you just have to test everything relevant once and go from there, really.

Most is as simple as confirming what you know from the information you already have available, but some is more along the lines of actually testing things out and messing with them a bit. Some is fairly minor, some is frankly completely insane... Such as a metal that seems to build up a magnetic field when swung around, or what you can just call primitive metamaterials that people with a good hammer and enough patience can create out of materials you would consider completely unremarkable.

Also, a lot seem to follow naming conventions from other worlds, based on what (strangely) Okita could tell you when you asked around just in case. Apparently a couple of these names either follow some memetic naming convention transcending realities or whoever named them somehow cribbed notes from other worlds.

Darksteel/Thundersteel:

Essentially a steel alloy that has to be forged in a specific way

About as strong and flexible as normal steel, outwardly only differentiates through its dark sheen

When in motion, it generates an electric current, presumably through a magnetic field of some kind

Often used for weapons by those that can afford it

Brightsteel:

Actually naturally occurring and reminiscent of a mix between stone and ore in nature

Harder than iron, but less flexible, making for poor weapons and armor

Also a little heavier than iron

Seems to absorb light and release it in the dark as a steady glow

Bloodsteel:

Seems to be made by quenching steel in blood during forging, similar to mundane variant

Various places have individual details on how to do this, apparently

Looks like steel, but with some very slight red veins running through it

Slightly stronger, but particularly more flexible than normal steel

Wounds caused by it seem to bleed stronger than normal? Needs confirmation

Can be affected by hemokinesis, if more sluggishly than actual blood

Mithril:

Some kind of magically modified silver, apparently

Sometimes occurs semi-naturally, but no way of synthesizing it is known

Lighter and yet stronger than steel, making it... interesting for various purposes

Easily takes to magic of all kinds and somehow 'conducts' it

Can be forged with magical tools, but becomes resistant against magical weapons afterwards

Cold Iron:

Essentially just specifically treated iron, mostly the same as mundane variant

Has a consistently low temperature, though never to a point it would be a danger to most organisms

Often used in conjunction with enchantments to create coolers and freezers on larger scales of construction

Alchemical Silver:

Magically liquefied silver

Used in some magical business such as potions and enchanting

Literally silver, with all its properties, just in liquid

Orichalcum:

Another alloy involving alchemical silver, darksteel and mithril

Very tough and resilient, conducts magic almost dangerously well

Very expensive, almost nobody can actually work the stuff

Can momentarily be liquefied by a skilled user to repair damage and circumvent armor? Need confirmation

About as heavy as steel, but can apparently be made lighter instead? Need confirmation

Adamantium/Adamantite:

Much heavier and tougher than baseline steel

As in, stupidly tough; sample somehow bent stupidly tough vampire claws

Extremely flexible and mild memory alloy, confirmed during experimentation

Some anti-magical properties; reportedly resistant to direct magical influences; testing shows that this is true even for vampire magic

Note, possibly greatly useful or dangerous. Must obtain more samples than the brooch Rose lent

On a closing note, getting your claws damaged actually hurts quite a lot. It seems to be regenerating just fine, but you're still tempted to wave it around like a loon as if you just hit a finger with a hammer on accident.

Your investigations don't quite end there, of course, though the topic of what you're doing varies extensively once you're done applying the few devices you need and your own vampiric senses and powers to the samples you got; as it happens, you still had a thing to do in regards to whoever seems to have been sabotaging some of your communications.

Or to put it bluntly, you have a sucker to murderize horribly. Using your compass soul to point in the direction of 'whoever removed the correspondence from the western Tooth Coast' doesn't get you anything, annoyingly enough; subsequent attempts with other wording doesn't get you a direction, either.

Either whoever it is worked through intermediaries they since disposed of or maybe they actually committed suicide; or else they're actually hidden from powers like this one. Either way, annoying.

You're also still convinced it has to have been a hero with some insane power, so you ask Okita and interrogate Philip and Kiron for any of them that have a power that would let them hide on a fundamental level like this, the kind of thing that would be required to keep Sarah from discovering them within moments. Once again, results are... mixed.

Okita has no idea, but that's not too surprising as she never really actively asked her classmates about their powers. The two teachers of the heroes, on the other hand, tell you that they can't recall anyone with that kind of power among the summoned heroes... But as you know from Aisha's example, that doesn't have to mean anything.

How exceedingly vexing.

Honestly, this is pretty annoying. So annoying, in fact, that you feel the need to punch someone over the fact you can't resolve the big issue plaguing your sister right now in the face.

What? You're a caring and gentle big brother. Parts of your inherent duties involve feeding her with sweets (especially ice cream), keeping her engaged in productive activities such as studying for school and challenging her big Sarah brain and making sure that nobody, absolutely nobody messes with her.

You literally beat up middle schoolers for talking badly about her. This shouldn't be a surprise.

So you just spontaneously send a quick note you're going out for a bit to Sarah and Rose and... Actually get into the capital itself.

It's honestly surprisingly nice, compared to what you would've thought- you're aware the buildings are mostly constructed out of stone, just so they aren't accidentally damaged all the time, but aside from that demons are mostly just like any other people, just with an extra helping of superstrength and casual violence.

Nothing, like, super big, but when people can casually ignore a bodyslam to the head, the basic level of 'rough play' you can expect is just a little higher. Where in what you're more used to boys would slap each other on the back or give playful punches to the shoulders, demons throw each other around or bury fists in stomachs by way of greeting each other.

Not everywhere, of course, or even that often, but nobody bats an eye when it does happen.

Not that you particularly care, but people watching just so does happen to be one of your little hobbies when you're going places. It's something to do when you're walking, y'know?

In fact, however, you've just arrived at a fairly wide open space, a plaza or something that will work for what you're intending. "Hey, everyone listen! Wanna bet I can beat you all within an inch of your lives without breaking a sweat?"

Demons being demons, the brawl takes less than two seconds to break out.

Once you've worked through a bit of your issues, an activity not really required for a vampire such as yourself but still highly therapeutic, you make sure your clothes aren't too ruffled under your aura as you get back to the castle. Now, time to see how your undead biomatter producers have been doing!

Which, as it turns out, is 'pretty well'. You don't exactly have the kinds of wealth in terms of dead meat you used to enjoy back when you went and genocided Rapture's population of splicers, but enough to work with at least for a bit.

And with that, the clumps of flesh you have had them producing, you get right to work... making more. That is, more production undead, also just like you deployed on a large scale back in Rapture. That said, for the time being you're mostly doing so with a slightly different goal in mind- Instead of any and all of those raw materials you needed at that time, you're sticking the few bits and pieces of magic metals you got earlier during the day into the fleshy spaces you use to let the magic of your undead copy matter.

Generating something that isn't biological in nature like this takes a pretty long time, compared to something that is, anyway... But hey, if you can get unlimited amounts of this stuff, you aren't exactly about to complain about the wait. Unfortunately, you don't actually have any orichalcum, but most of the things you investigated are there in at least small amounts for you to work off of.

As it turns out, Okita's sword is also made of adamantite, containing most of the human kingdom's supply gathered over a couple of years. Which... really puts into perspective just how rare the stuff is. You're also pretty sure the stuff's properties may or may not make it just that much harder for your magic to create more of this particular metal, itself probably somehow magical, but... Well, worst come to worst you're just wasting a little bit of time on this.

Doesn't fucking change the rest of the stuff you'll hopefully be able to harvest. The internal mechanisms to these particular undead are still annoyingly complicated and require a bunch of fine work, meaning you're at this for quite a but, but hey, you'll just consider it an investment into the future.

... Some of these materials are quite promising, after all. In several ways.

On a side note, the 'seeds' you're using to grow them inside the fleshy mass of the oversized carpet covering a spacious room whole consist of a chunk of cold iron taken from a wall of a warehouse, some alchemical silver Rose personally transmuted really quick, darksteel and brightsteel bought from a good refinery specializing in this stuff and taken from the stores of what the cults in the north-eastern mountain ranges have delivered lately, a candle holder made of mithril Rose has been keeping around instead of selling it off yet and the brooch she lent you.

Said brooch was actually a gift from her father for one of her birthdays, once upon a time, and you did promise to high heaven you would get it back to her undamaged once you had some adamantium to work with and just use instead of it. Considering the kinds of prices the stuff demands, you could easily buy a couple of cities whole with what it's worth alone, but you're fully aware it probably manifested just a little bit of the love her father felt for her.

As a father-to-be yourself, you fully understand. You're also considering using some adamantite to make similar pieces of jewelry for your lovers and kids if you manage to reproduce it, in fact. Though, perhaps you should look into learning the secrets of actually shaping the stuff beforehand- both to actually make use of any that you potentially get and because gifts like that should be handmade, in the end.

Aah, so busy, so busy, so much to do.

"So Rose, I can't help but feel I still know very little about you as a person." Your incredibly suave and subtle way to broach the topic still hasn't failed you yet. "I know we talked about this just recently, but... Tell me some more about yourself?"

With a mix between a sigh and a shaky smile on her face, as though she has trouble holding back her laughter, Rose stops writing out the budget for the city's infrastructure based on the income reports for this year and looks at you. "You really just say whatever you want, don't you?"

"Duh, of course. If people don't speak, how else are they gonna talk?" She must be thinking about something weird to arrive at this statement.

"Fair enough. Why the sudden interest, though?"

"Oh, you know," you say, "I figured since we're kind of in a physical relationship and the state of the war is cooling down a bit, it wouldn't hurt to get to know you better. That's really all there is to it. You're such an interesting and intriguing person, who wouldn't want to?"

"Are you serious? No, wait, don't answer that." At Rose's held-up hand, you do as she bids you; sometimes, people just need a moment to sort their thoughts. She clears her throat, lowering it again. "It wouldn't be fair if I was the only one to tell stories of my past, so how about we trade them instead?"

"That sounds fair enough, I suppose," you ponder aloud, smiling right at the princess' face. "Since I asked first, though, I get to ask my question first. You sure were eager to get fucked back when you first summoned me and Sarah, any deeper reasons behind that?"

Blushing, Rose looks away, crossing her arms. "No, not at all. Why would you ever think that?"

"Then why? Not that I'm about to judge, I was just as up for it as you after all."

"..." The words are very, very quiet. In fact, they're completely silent; although Rose is moving her lips, no sound is coming out. You'd have heard it with your senses otherwise.

"Could you repeat that, I didn't quite get it." You can't help the small grin forming on your face; she's being surprisingly cute.

"... Nobody would ever actually bang me, okay?" Slamming a hand onto the desk, Rose glares at you. "I've never actually gotten anyone into bed my whole life and I was getting desperate, so I jumped on the first chance I got, happy?!"

You tilt your head. "Huh. Wouldn't have thought that. I mean, you're beautiful, decisive, well-mannered and just a wonderful person overall. I'd have thought you'd have anyone you want to crowding your privates."

"Please don't put it like that," the demon princess grimaces. "It's just that whenever I try to approach someone handsome, they immediately try to make excuses and run and what am I supposed to do at that point?"

"I don't know, why might they be running?"

"I have no idea. I just know that every time that happened, I went to the training grounds to blow something up," Rose steams. Could it be she's just been accidentally intimidating any possible suitors so far?

What a strange concept. Not having sex with someone just because they could murder you in an instant. Having a gun pointed at your face never stopped you so far.

"How about you? Do you usually just tell women you want to have sex and does that actually work?" Rose's question pulls you out of your momentary remembrance of that one time you had to literally fuck your way out of a particularly dicey situation back when you were alive- and no, looking down the barrel of a gun didn't stop you from being a 'good boy', as the woman pointing it at you at the time insisted.

Turns out the archetype Kate practically embodies isn't that uncommon, after all. Upside, you managed to defuse the potential hostage situation and get out unscathed.

But back to the conversation. "You'd be surprised," you confirm. "A nice smile and the right attitude can go a long way. Though I guess it's also a matter of knowing whom to approach in the first place."

"Such as the most desperate ones around looking for any way to get you to do something, huh?" Why, Rose, almost like you have first-hand experience.

"Desperation tends to be a great motivator." Not like you're about to disagree. "A lot of the neighbours also were very happy to get frisky back in my youth whenever I went around helping out with stuff around the neighbourhood- especially in summer. You wouldn't believe how much fresh juice and sex I got from lonely housewives and bored teens whenever I took my shirt off in the heat. Mowing the lawn was somewhat of an euphemism in my time through no fault of my own, I assure you."

"I can imagine. Did your life only ever consist of having sex and pretending to be an average handsome guy otherwise?" Rose asks, drily.

"Hey now, I'll have you know I have always tried to just be a normal person, okay? With hobbies and everything. I actually used to really like sketching things, got pretty good, too, but the girls in school just kept on talking about how I was a 'lonely, misunderstood artist' and tried to 'ease my burdens'," you scoff. "Or just tried to get in my pants in general. And none of the boys ever helped me with any of that."

"Oh, you poor thing."

"Enough about me, my turn to ask a question. What did you ever like to do in terms of hobbies?" And so the conversation develops, the two of you getting to know each other a little bit by trading stories and thoughts on various topics.

It's actually rather nice, even if Rose gets a ghastly expression on her face halfway through upon realizing she hasn't been working ahead for several hours already.

Alright, enough of your little break you suppose. You came to this dimension to get stuff done, may as well really get to it instead of just hanging around and goofing off indefinitely.

No matter how much fun it is to just goof around and come to cuddle a naked foxy sister every couple hours.

So, things that need to be done. There would be the apparent infiltrator whose traces you still can't seem to really find, though exactly how to change this issue is currently beyond you- your compass soul doesn't seem to work and pointing Sarah at the issue has failed so far, so your options are running rather thin in this regard.

Then there is always that favour you could do for your rather unreal acquaintance- it would take a few hours, but coming to the subterranean cult thingy in the mountains shouldn't take all too long, by your reckoning. And then you could always see about going on the offensive against humanity- half a continent's worth of much denser population than on this side offers a great variety of targets for you to strike at before they have organized a counter-offensive.

Because they will, of that much you are sure. Rose's reports are by necessity limited, but troop movements are rather hard to disguise even if you weren't willing to assume your opponents would be doing something like this sooner or later.

Thinking it over, that favour can wait a bit, apparently, being as far from time-sensitive as it can be, and you doubt you'd really be using your time productively chasing phantoms when you could instead get to drowning yourself in the blood of your enemies.

You may or may not be getting a bit peckish after spending a while on the simpler rations that is not drinking people whole. It can't really be helped, but now while you're at it again anyway...

Of course, there's several ways you could go about doing this. Planning out major military action would normally be a lot more involved and time-consuming, but you do pride yourself in the spontaneity and suddenness of your strikes as far as these kinds of things go.

It certainly makes you a lot more dangerous on a strategical scale.

Your exact knowledge on enemy operations remains limited, of course, but even so a strategy meeting with Sarah and Rose lets you identify several potential targets you may want to hit and disable as thoroughly as possible this time around.

First off, there's the obvious; the forward fortresses on the human side. Three in total and manned to full capacity even after recent events, they used to be the main deterrent against the demon lord before you sailing out; in the event that one of them was attacked, the other two would immediately launch a counterattack at the Border Fortress and cause as much damage as possible while the attacked location would be slaughtered.

Perhaps a bit much ruthless, but humanity had its ways, it would seem. As it is, those fortresses will be the place human soldiers will be gathering and organizing at by any stretch of the organization, so sabotaging or ruining them would be a good way to weaken their eventual position once open warfare breaks out again.

They may or may not still have their previous responses set up and as it is, that would be a serious issue for your own soldiers currently sitting inside the Border Fortress- you may have taken over, but the same responses that would have worked before may still spell a lot of trouble for you, one way or another. There could also be heroes present and supported by a bunch of soldiers, which is the very last kind of opposition you want to be forced to meet in open combat if you can help it.

An alternative, then, would be a civilian target. Hit a township or city, do some significant infrastructural damage and disappear before reinforcements ever have a chance to hinder you. Depending on what kind of place you go after, garrison and volunteer forces may still be a significant challenge, especially if any particularly impressive mages are around and take issue with you turning their homes to rubble, but at least they wouldn't necessarily be a literal army.

Of course you could also not just attack everything. In fact, organizing certain less than reputable elements of society (such as always inevitably crop up in large enough population centres), bandits and smugglers and whatever else you can find together with the spies equipped with enemy souls already present and doing much the same may just be enough to cause some serious economical damage- and massively sabotage enemy logistics.

The real killer, in other words.

A rough list of targets doesn't take all too long to assemble, places that have some significance nationally while also not being big population centers that are known to house big groups or schools of mages or renown knight orders and the like- aristocratic orders with money and influence and, more importantly, lots of magic of their own, enchanted equipment and whatever else they've managed to scrounge up.

Human nobles rarely, if ever, step onto the battlefield outside the nation. As you understand it, they are born and bred to be both administrative personnel and a last line of defense in case of attack, hence most of them don't really participate in offensive wars, but ironically enough they very much are mirroring the demon's propensity for having individually strong individuals in control of groups of others, just on a larger scale.

One of those little things, really.

Your first stop, then, will be the Border Fortress, taking the bone carriage there and using it as somewhat of a forward base of your own. Covertly flying out from there as a bird will get you the rest of the way to wherever you decide to attack, one of the cities already noted on your list, to then enact whatever plans you come up with in place before returning to gauge enemy responses and sailing out once again- or to change your focus, of course.

You do your best work thinking on your feet (or paws, or talons, or...), no need to fix something that ain't broken.

In the meantime, you'll just go ahead and ask the four girls you're just slightly trying to keep occupied somehow to take a bunch of demon soldiers stationed around the capital and strike down the continued monster infestation around the heartlands, get yourself some raw materials and ensure the farms you actually do have access to can continue to grow food to feed the populace with.

If you remember correctly, the heroes actually used to go out and fight monsters just to get practical combat experience in the past, so Okita and Tada should be right at home, whereas Emily won't burn down too many important things out there and Lana can hopefully talk to a couple of demon mages, if you can find any, to exchange a few spells or something.

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this.

Arriving at the Border Fortress after about half a day of travel (as in, five to six hours, you didn't exactly pay super close attention), you step out of your mechanically shifting and transforming bone carriage, the vehicle packing itself up for easier storage while keeping everything inside in place. A few monsters died during travel, of course, mainly goblins that you have started to consider to be the same as flies or similar insects that just splat on windshields all the time.

The demons in place already know you are coming, of course, having been alerted by the agents Rose has stationed here that are now connected to your telepathic network, and so it takes just a little bit to have your carriage shown to a courtyard it can stay inside of while you're busy elsewhere.

You do go over to greet Rakul, the de facto field commander even after the reorganization your forces have been undergoing to scramble to actual combat readiness outside of the wild chases you have taken them on posing as actual battles, but it isn't like he has anything particularly interesting to say. Clarence (the siege beast) is ready to launch into a wild attack at any moment, the Border Fortress is brutally undermanned but focusing the manpower available towards the human side, everything's about as you expected.

Now then. Time to go on the offense- there are more than enough victims just waiting to be subjected to your tender mercies.

The city of Brittlehelm. How the name came to be is not particularly important, considering your plans, but what is a bit more relevant is that it is a fairly large industrial centre this close to the border, an easy source of equipment and related supplies for the army slash armies when things get heated and some quick resupply becomes necessary.

With a mine nearby and keeping up a steady stream of ore, several large smelters and hundreds of smithies keep on working day and night to produce all the weapons and armor imaginable. In fact, there's even a few famous smiths hailing from the place known for working with darksteel and capable of working adamantium, even, though hard facts are harder to come by according to Rose's spies and infiltrators.

That have wisely left the city for a few days one and all. Figure that.

What matters is that, while actually getting to this location took an incredibly annoying amount of time, you are finally circling the airspace above the city, the light of the sun slowly beginning its descent over the horizon more than enough for you to look over the city.

Honestly, you should be surprised about the ballistae sitting ready and waiting across the city wall in regular intervals, with frequent patrols across it made by well-armed and armored men, watchtowers made of solid stone built into the whole thing serving as rest stops and higher elevation for look-outs.

Many of them are carrying some solid looking crossbows, though some also just have their spears on them, and although their armors aren't actually made of mostly metal, they do have pieces of them made of the stuff.

All in all, this is a city that is well-armed to deal with any minor attempts at invasion or, as you suspect is truly more of an issue, regular monster attacks. The things do tend to be hyper-aggressive for some mad reason, and so areas where more of them tend to occur need to be correspondingly capable of beating them back.

Now then, massive swathes of smoke are rising over what you're fairly sure is the industrial part of the city, or at least one of them, and crows of people are busily moving from one place to another. The atmosphere is grim, determined; these people are aware the war isn't going well, and yet will do everything in their power to win it anyway just like they've likely done for generations.

Oh, how to break their spirits along with their backbone, you wonder...

The weather slowly starts to turn as the sun sets, a cloudy, wet wind letting the people know that a cold winter is ahead. Or, well, it would be if you weren't the one behind it, but nobody has to know that quite yet, do they?

Turning into a shadow keeping to the corners and the sides of everywhere you go, it doesn't take you all too long to get a decent grip on the area, staying out of sight and listening in to conversations both open and quiet.

It seems the local garrison is on good terms with the citizenry- not surprising, they've had to live next to each other for a long, long time by this point and everyone hates the demons before anything else, not to mention the former is oftentimes made of the latter, so them getting along is somewhat of a necessity for everyone's daily lives.

Too bad for them those same daily lives aren't going to go on much longer, one way or another.

The mayor's residence is fairly easy to find, simply moving around and actually avoiding the mansions of a few of the nobles around town. All it takes is making it to the posh district further away from the heavy hammering of what you're fairly sure might be some magical or just fairly advanced (for this technological level) trip hammers and listening to people until you have the correct place.

And yes, you may not have much of a real education as an engineer beyond what you taught yourself, but you've eaten a lot of people that did and their knowledge is yours to command. Pretty much just heavy hammer guillotines or power hammers or however you want to call them. Completely possible to use them even with minimal technology so long as one knows how to and has the materials.

Heck, they might even be powering them hydraulically, you saw at least one river flowing through parts of the city earlier.

But back to the mayor. Infiltrating the small mansion he has for his own isn't too hard, the couple of guards around far from enough to keep you from slipping in through a window, the slightest crack still more than enough to let yourself in, and a cursory examination of the building through your almost unfair senses lets you home in on the man's own location rather easily after just one or two false starts.

He's sitting in an office of sorts, a small magical lamp to his side keeping a steady amount of illumination as he reads through a small pile of documents, signing and writing a few short sentences every now and then.

Paperwork. The same in every damn dimension, really.

It is simplicity itself to creep up behind the man's chair, a modestly extravagant affair of dark wood and thick cushions, and soundlessly rise from the ground.

You just need to grab his mouth securely to keep him from shouting, the balding man immediately struggling against your grip but completely powerless to loosen it. Keeping him seated, you dig your claws into his face, his muffled scream growing in intensity but unable to go beyond the room.

You almost play with the thought of tearing his head off whole to guzzle from his torn neck, but decide against it after all. Hemokinesis could let you clean up, but a good bite means less mess in the first place, as the surprisingly spry man's throat soon experiences firsthand. He actually took the time to grab for a dagger hidden underneath the desk, but- well, a crushed hand speaks volumes about how that turned out.

It really is nice, to be this physically strong. Casually overwhelming any opposition while eating. Compared to the desperate struggles you were part in for the longest time after crawling out of the grave, this is downright heavenly.

The mayor doesn't manage to stay conscious for long, most of his blood leaving his body at a supernaturally fast rate, and a quick spot of cleanup and dumping the body inside your shadow takes care of the rest. Now to leave.

Micah Appleton was born to a family of mayors, not that this in itself was anything particularly noteworthy; though the position was somewhat hereditary, it did not come with a rank, meaning that it could be taken away if enough ground for doing so was presented. Not that most noble titles didn't share this distinction, they just were harder to lose on a single bad heir, in effect.

The Appletons were, as history had shown, an apt hand at organizing and administrating the city of Brittlehelm, having served in this capacity ever since it was first founded and the first of their line was instated as the effective foreman of the mine, the initial reason for its founding.

Micah held no grand ambitions in life, for he was quite satisfied with his station; finding himself a lovely wife and having two children, all he wanted was to do his job and do it right, increasing the prosperity of 'his' town and ensuring none would go hungry within it. A bit of a lofty dream, surely, but still one he could put all of his work towards with his head held high.

The city's nobility, concerned more with matters of military and greater statecraft, was happy to support him in this, and so he was perfectly happy with his family, his subordinates and superiors, trying not to let the state of the greater war concern him overmuch.

Until it caught up to him one day, unforeseen and quite sudden indeed...

Scouting doesn't have to end just because you're also interrogating your last meal for any particularly interesting information to be had, and the city of Brittlehelm does offer lots of opportunities to look around even as the mist you're causing continues to grow thicker. It's slowly coming to the point it is readily apparent, and while visibility isn't too limited it is creeping in on parts of this city.

As for the mayor... Most of what he has to say isn't too interesting, seeing how he acted as more of an administrator and organizer for the civilian parts of governance, but a few things do arouse your attention nonetheless. For one, he can tell you where most of the city's local nobles live seeing how he used to work with them before you just gobbled him up, as well as how things have been going for the city guard and the garrison. He did get regular reports and updates just in case they needed something from him or vice versa.

Most of the city's daily operations are going fairly smoothly at the moment, no particular deliberation necessary by any of the big decision makers. The craftsmen and workers, mainly miners, smiths and the like, all have their work orders and all, so most of what the mayor was doing was limited to confirming orders and keeping things on track in case any of the places around had an issue and work needed to be divided among other smithies or smelters.

Interestingly, a big delivery of various wares is supposed to come to Brittlehelm in the next couple of days, goods required for daily life- textiles, food, the works, stuff that isn't really produced locally in large enough amounts to supply the entire city. The human kingdom's logistics are actually fairly elaborately set up, but again not the focus for you right now.

So first off, there aren't any heroes inside the city at the moment- it isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, so any that did show up would be visiting at most. However, there are mages to be found, some of which actually work closely together with some of the smithies to produce magically created equipment, while a few are simply living in the city. Not everyone and everything needs to be focused on this one thing, after all.

None of them seem to particularly stick out, though the mayor isn't exactly an expert on this kind of thing. More importantly, the garrison does have a mage battalion among it, a sizeable amount of battle mages capable of laying on some real hurt if they get a chance to organize.

Lastly, large veins of copper and silver ore seems to have been found inside the mine near the city, a good omen as both are quite valuable when sold to the right buyers and silver ore being a potential sign of mithril deeper down. Not a guarantee, of course, but where one is found, the other often can be found as well.

Also, foot traffic is going down, but not quite cutting off with the setting of the sun. Analyzing and watching the patterns of people moving about as you slide around from one dark corner to the next does keep on beign your entertainment of choice as you listen to the mayor babble.

You have a couple of ideas on what to do to this place already, but many of them hinge upon minimizing the number of escapees once the action starts.

... Okay, maybe not exactly hinge, but you'd prefer not to waste too much food and raw materials. The joys of enemy civilians not only not being protected by any international treaties, but a literal resource to be used by yourself. This, you suppose, is why stories always have necromancers be the bad guys.

Regardless, a good look around (as a raven again, this time) lets you know that the city wall is fairly comprehensive all around- a sturdy construction of solid, thick stone, with several gates all around. In fact, you may as well use it for your own purposes in this- simply bar the gates and anyone trying to get out of the city has to either know some secret way out or jump, likely breaking their legs with the height of the wall.

At least. Could also just die, depending on how they land.

If you wanted to go further, you could also take some time to summon several of your undead currently awaiting your orders back in the demon lord's castle to patrol the surroundings, especially through the combination of Watchers and Hunters. Keeping an eye out all around the city and also brutalizing anyone trying to flee, one way or another.

At least as long as no real attack force is organized to defeat them. You like your undead and would prefer to say they would effortlessly slaughter any opposition, but a decent amount of soldiers working in concert and maybe with some magical backup would be a serious threat to a single Hunter or two. But hey, if you take your time and continue to thicken the mist, they would have a hard time either way.

Lastly, you suppose you could just fly up really high and use magic to conjure a bunch of ice walls all around the city, instead of just inside the gates. It would take a decent bit, as you would need to put them everywhere one by one and casting spells still does take time and be the very opposite of subtle, but you could probably do it.

A bit more straightforward and blunt than what you usually do, but it's not like you absolutely have to be precise and elegant in all you do all the time or anything.

... Alright, a plan is forming. To be sure, one you've been playing with for a while now, but the details are about to become much clearer.

So first off, you will need more mist. A thick cloud of it covering the whole city, making it hard to see as much one's own hands. Once that is taken care of, you can get towards laying down a few curses, most likely on buildings and districts as concrete locations. While you don't really have much skill in this- there's ever more to do and concentrate your efforts on- using a bit of synergy will hopefully let it be enough.

Your blood is a rather powerful catalyst for certain things, as are your feathers when you turn into a raven. It won't be anywhere the same as compared to a 'proper' curse cast by someone that can really put some oomph into it naturally, but it's not like you need much.

Just a reliable nudge to have people confused by the thick mist wander towards a single, specific location.

Once both of those things are in place, you can get to the next step. But first...

You detransform on a roof, keeping only your wings and shifting them towards the back a bit. A good tug once you repress your aura has you with a handful of feathers in hand and what feels strangely like a bald spot, but you pay it no mind- any 'damage' like this will recover the next time you eat someone anyway, most likely.

A quick cut later, you have a good few feathers covered in your cursed blood, smiling down at the street. Hopping into a back alley, you keep an eye out just in case anyone comes along, stretching a hand with your catalysts out to touch the ground people walk across in the thousands every day. "Mislead them to the center."

This street is a part of the city. It had better know what center you mean. Now then, as you keep on pressing onto the world with the back of your head, calling up more moisture into the air and increasing the amount of mist hanging over Brittlehelm, you have your work cut out for you.

This had better be worth it.

There are a few close calls as you work, moving from place to place and laying down curse after curse, but by and large the dark of night is serving you well in keeping you mostly hidden from any and all observers, doubly so as you keep well away from any of them thanks to your ability to keep aware of your surroundings with some of your more advanced senses.

Slowly, but surely, visibility is getting more and more screwed by the changes you've been making to the local climate, too, meaning the plan is going along without a hitch. Then again, you probably should make sure the morning sun, once things proceed that far, doesn't interfere too much, so...

A nice layer of clouds may just do well in that regard. White and grey and very much filtering out at least some sunlight, yes.

It isn't exactly easy to just change the weather all willy-nilly, but it certainly is part of your capabilities, and the very center of Brittlehelm, a large town square you would imagine, is hopefully going to see increased traffic as the malevolent influences you're spreading push people into its direction.

Funnily enough, the largest obstacle towards your search for the most notable smiths in the city is the fact that not all of them went home at reasonable times. One whole workshop is still pumping the bellows, hammering metal and comparing work.

However, few smiths really ever think about their own personal safety, strangely enough, despite the magical weapons and armor you see in various places both laid out for the public and hidden away as you take a little tour all around the city's more upscale industrial district.

Many of these people have honed their skills for decades, knowing their smithies better than the average man knows the palm of their hand. And now all their expertise is at your command, regardless of their will- for all that they had some muscles on themselves, there was precious little they could do once you started eating them alive.

Though one particularly stubborn old man managed to get a few strands of muscle stuck between your teeth, somehow. Props to him for doing more than literal hundreds of other candidates in his situation.

It does take a bit to find yourself all the victims you had on your shortlist made by interrogating the mayor, but you'd say it was a couple of hours well spent. An even twenty of the best smiths of Brittlehelm, squared away ahead of time just in case to keep them from being caught up in your main plan.

One of the smithies you work your way through even has a little treasure hidden away, only found by you thanks to the foresight to make each of them you eat spill their guts for anything particularly noteworthy.

In a small hidden space underneath the anvil of one of the best smiths inside the city, crammed into the floor, is a lockbox you have to open in a specific way, enchanted even to be hard to get open otherwise. Inside, you find a small package, in turn containing a bare handful of dark, shimmering metal, more a clump despite obviously having been refined somehow.

A handful of adamantium, the real deal as you immediately recognize. Its weight, its coloration, the smooth feel of it on your skin- this is the same stuff Rose's brooch is made out of.

You ignore the minor civil war breaking out inside your inner world as the smiths realize that one of them actually had this stashed away (but wasn't really capable of using it for anything, because adamantite is... what it is), carefully casting your chant and dropping it inside your shadow. For once, it doesn't simply go inside, instead slowly sinking inside, but before long you have it secured.

It feels like its weight counts double or triple of what it should for the purposes of your capacity, but you aren't in any danger of overburdening yourself quite yet.

Now then, the night won't keep up forever, even if the very solid amount of mist and clouds you've conjured by this point makes it seem otherwise. You need to get a lot of preparations done.

For one, you've been keeping on creating more bodies for Ostea this whole time, casting off parts of your aura and bidding her to have them wait and consume as little of their energy as possible. Now this changes; having them fly high in the sky, they reposition amidst the dense fog, clustering outside of the city walls and especially the gates.

You yourself also close in on one of those, creeping over the wall as a shadow and popping up outside of the large doors of solid wood reinforced with even more solid steel. "Raise a wall of ice and frost so none may pass!"

Within moments, a thick sheet of ice is growing out of the ground, flush against the large gate and about twice your own height. This will not necessarily be enough to stop everyone, but it will be a very definite hindrance.

Meanwhile, the Osteas are taking action, conjuring and growing spikes of bone to complete the barricade you're setting up. Now you just need to do the same thing for all the other gates (only six of those in total, thankfully) and you'll be just about done with the preparations... And just before dawn, when the gates are supposed to open, too!

When you come over towards the main stage to start the show, the morning sun only just beginning to peek over the horizon, there's already a few people present, talking and walking about. You don't exactly have a comparison for how foot traffic around this area would normally look like, but you'll just assume it is increased thanks to your actions earlier.

Looking over everything, you'd say a hundred people pass through the space before you as you sit on a roof overlooking the area every minute or two? It's a pretty busy city, all told, people need to get around and this is somewhat of a big intersection as far as these things go.

Ah well, no matter. The cloud cover you created for yourself is doing its job of keeping the sun from lifting the fog you also called up, making it hard to see very far. Perfectly enough to have the kind of effect you wanted, really.

Standing up in your vampire form, you open your mouth wide, a torrent of silvery-white mist breaking out of your lungs and mouth and all over the town square. It's hard to see at first, what with the weather being what it is, but a few panicked calls are ringing out anyway as people realize that this isn't natural.

Too bad for them this realization won't be saving anyone. With a resounding crashing and breaking, the Tree manifests itself, murder-wood and life-robbing leaves stretching in all directions. As it apparently always does, its roots break and dig into the ground to bury the enormous, beating heart at its centre, moving around tons of earth and rock within moments.

Chaos breaks loose, townsfolk trying to get away, gain some distance from this sudden phenomenon. The Tree doesn't give them the time.

Whipping through the air and shooting through the ground, its roots pierce one body after another, a hundred pieces of hardened wood rooting into chests, into heads and stomachs, sucking up and drinking in blood just as greedily as you would yourself. It takes less than ten, twenty seconds for the Tree to settle itself in, reducing anyone in its immediate vicinity into drained husks discarded violently once they're empty.

The screams continue sounding out, however, and the Tree doesn't disappoint; now that it's settled and has murdered everything right near itself, it's starting to push its complicated network of roots further and further out even as the blood and life it took from its victims already flows through its branches, a couple dozen meaty fruits beginning to grow amongst them without delay.

Off in the distance, you can hear the lovely melody of its activities continuing. Shunk, scream, splat. Shunk, scream, splat. Over and over and over again from all directions. Its reach isn't that large, sadly, but as long as you are inside of it when it gets summoned?

Some of these people ran fast, but none ran fast enough.

Time to do your own part. Jumping from the roof into a random direction, you spread your wings, flying through the mist and not stopping on spreading your dark, feathery limbs outwards, bone sprouting from all over you just as much as the loose cloth does.

And as a twisted piece of wood grows to sit loosely in your hand, the darkness of your wings reveals misshapen skulls, falling from it and bouncing on the chains wrapped around them and their insides.

You land, and immediately you can feel the effects of your presence spreading out. The meatsacks in the adjacent buildings, those that didn't run outside (yet), immediately feel cold sweats on their backs, shivering and twitching at the unease they feel.

Knowing, feeling just how limited their pathetic existences are has that effect. Obviously.

Raising your torch, you swing it in a wide arc, its fires lashing out like a whip and slashing straight through the walls around you, passing through them untouched. They scream, but the effects are immediate; the urge to come out, come out wherever you are is overwhelming for their feeble minds, driving them relentlessly to march themselves to the place they heard the screams from.

As you pass onward, doors open behind you. More sweet screams are heard off in the distance.

You keep on burning thoughts into your victims (for what else can humanity be described as) as you wander around, randomly strolling down whatever streets you decide to pass. When the prey meets you in the open, you do many things; some you hold in place, thrusting your torch into their heads until all they can do is follow your desires, some you crush to death with the skulls sent out with waves of your wings, their hard forms making for perfectly fine bludgeons even in the absence of their greatest use.

Some are left to shiver in the mist, your form burned into their thoughts and minds even without the use of your fire. Some you smother in your feathers, watching them recoil from their soft touch again and again and again even once none touch them, reduced to screaming madmen for a while yet.

And some... Some you behold, your glowing eye directed straight into their face, to take a closer look. Some simply stop, ceasing to move and think and even breathe. Some laugh, and laugh and laugh and laugh and they can't help themselves but scream out their twisted joy at the revelations their minds undergo. And some, well, some stay calm.

Those are the best. They either grab a knife or a dagger and slit their own throats, dying with smiles on their faces, or else they do the same and calmly, quietly fall over whoever else is in sight with the same sound that nightfall makes.

Oh, if only, if only your skulls were alive already! You could have taken some and made them sing. Oh well, you will simply have to keep on walking. And dancing and singing in your oscillating voice of the place in the town square and its many-rooted wonders. Not in words, but in thoughts, feelings, emotions!

Mainly hatred, disgust and contempt for these disgustingly weak creatures populating the world around you, but the thought counts.

Swooshing and jumping ahead, you choose another random direction... But wait, perhaps you should choose a direction this time?

So may ways you could go, but they all seem so... limited. No matter your choice, there are so many you won't get to take, after all... There's a reason you didn't choose one before.

So why not just go straight up? A little bit of every direction in that, if you think about it.

A single leap brings up up into the misty depths of the sky, a little twist of what you have done already turning the grey and white above you into dark clouds to better fit your skin today. Now then, your boney maidens are already present up here, carefully choosing their targets and husbanding their energy. You share yours with them, the power of your soul surging outwards anyway.

They strike with renewed vigor and punish any that attempt to flee from the clearly marked boundaries of your hunting ground, the mist stopping mere wingspans from the wall. Spires of bone are shot out and slung from sinuous tails, your creations far too elegant and efficient to waste their strength.

As you scoop down to crush and pulp a family attempting to run uselessly, your eye shining its light onto it, however, you feel one of your maidens shot out of the sky, three lances of flame hitting her from ambush and sticking to the bone she is made of, blackening and cracking her and destroying the aura she is made of.

Immediately, a dozen more converge, greeting the interference as a welcome new target.

Susy shivered, tightly clutching her mother's arm.

It had been so sudden, that morning. Beginning like any other one, just very misty outside, she had gotten up to greet her mommy and her daddy and see what was for breakfast.

They had started to eat, some tasty rice with scraps of meat from the last day's supper and some vegetables, when the screams began. People were running along, warning everyone that something was wrong, so daddy had told them to wait and gone out to ask what was going on.

Then he'd come back inside, his face all frowney. They'd packed everything they needed up, daddy taking his pickaxe and mommy taking some food, then they'd gone out. Susy was a good girl, so she held her mommy's hand and off they went.

She couldn't see much, it was too foggy in front of her, but mommy's hand led her along. Faster and faster they went, walking and hushing and running, because weird people here and there, making weird sounds and saying weird things.

Daddy said something, to get to the gates and seek shelter with the soldiers, but Susy was out of breath and couldn't hear him well. They had to sneak on their tippy-toes once, because people screaming about 'the root at the center' were trampling really loud, but she thought they might come to where daddy wanted to go.

Then a shadow fell on them, though, and Susy saw it. Saw the big black wings and the grinning faces on them and the fire.

Saw the big glowy eye. It was also a mouth. Mommy had screamed, but daddy had jumped, so he was the first- it was very fast, just a swoosh and a flick and Susy was all wet and daddy was gone.

Then mommy's face disappeared inside the big black hand and a loud crack came and she disappeared into the ground, all squashy and flat.

Susy was still holding her hand. It was the biggest piece that was left. And all the while she kept on looking into the eye that was also a mouth that was also an eye that was also a mouth.

Susy wasn't sad. Mommy and daddy were gone, but they were with the Goddess now, the priest had always said so. But she was there now with her mommy's arm and the eye and the mouth and the eye.

Susy smiled.

Looking up, you consider racing along to see what happened, but Ostea insists that she has the situation under control- no need to worry yourself over the area, it seems.

Well, if she insists she can take care of it herself, who are you to doubt that part of yourself? You can't be wrong, after all. So you look down at the only leftover member of the family you just pulped, considering what to do next.

... Yes, the walls. A lot of fleeing citizens are trying to meet up with the guard or the army, but as long as the walls are covered in corpses, you doubt too many are going to be willing to brave them. Spreading your wings, you jump, using them to steer your momentarily weightless form towards the point you're going to start with.

The first men on the walls scream as you land, dropping on a group from above and squashing some under your weight, breaking their necks and their backs and pulping them to burst. Then the survivors call out, grabbing for their weapons.

None of them are equipped to deal with you. You hold your torch out in front of yourself, miming blowing at it to spread its flames. Of the first set of meatsacks trying to stop you, half immediately jump off the wall, to their deaths more often than not, while the rest are thrown off by you manually.

Some of them are too stubborn to do it themselves, after all.

A few you also go ahead and eat, raising them to your head and letting the spurs of bone that your jaws became upon your transformation pierce them from both sides so you can drain their blood in one go. What little armor they wear is, by and large, far from enough to stop your fangs, made of hard steel and yet much too flimsy in the face of your physical strength.

Their blood flows right into the face opening you use for everything, though sometimes you shake them a bit to let it drain faster before you drop them. On and on you go, smashing them aside and crushing your foes without any real opposition.

Until it happens.

One moment you are trying to get an update on how everything is going, the Tree being unable to tell you much on account of being a tree while Ostea is telling you she has defeated several mages and has now turned towards abducting people and feeding them to the Tree by way of piercing them with long poles of bone to carry them off, the next you are assailed by a wave of light driving you back just as you exit a door, having been looking forward to a dozen or so meatsacks lead by a particularly bright example.

"Up to here and no further, abomination," she says aloud, voice held steady and strong.

Your answer to the shinily dressed woman's challenge is to thrust out your torch, a swathe of immaterial flame bursting out of it and covering the wall before you. "Do not falter!" The group's apparent leader screams, raising her shield and presenting a strong front. "Attack!"

The men and women behind her, you can now see, seem to be more than just normal soldiers, some of them armed with staves and other magical weapons. Though some don't manage to do as they're told, a small barrage of spells comes flying at you, from a ball of lightning to glowing beams of light, all the while a couple of men come join the defense now that you're momentarily halted in your advance.

If you had a tongue right now, you'd click it.

The answer, then, is obvious. Tilting your head to the side to avoid the lightning, you reach behind yourself, dancing to the side and ripping the heavy door of the watchtower you just came out of out of its hinges to smack the two spells that would otherwise hit you out of the air.

An explosion rings out where one of the glowing projectiles impacts the wall behind you, the heavy metal door in your hand melting from whatever you just used it to avoid. As if it was heated to a temperature where it would, just without any heat.

Dropping the piece if iron quickly becoming useless, you get ready for more, but the female knight is eyeing you as she raises her sword. "It's too fast to hit normally, use spells that affect the target directly!" Meanwhile, she is beginning to glow, not unlike earlier when that shine of white light hit you.

Whatever she's doing, she seems to be strengthening herself instead of attacking.

You need to get rid of her. However, whatever she's doing might spell trouble. Obvious first step:Take out the mooks. Keep them from harrying you on the side while you deal with her shit.

Immediately, you jump. You may have considered this before, but your form's wings allow you some excellent maneuverability in the air once you shut off gravity, and a quick re-angling has you dive back downwards towards a new location.

"No!" You aren't the only one to notice, it would seem. "Get ba-!"

It's too late, though. Slamming onto the wall, you kill more than one of the humans on it, your bulk (about two to three times their size, really) meaning that the action alone kills and maims whoever you're landing on. Then of course you lash you, throwing the people around you off the wall in all directions until just three are left, the ones that were smart enough to take their distance from you, and the newcomers, mostly soldiers armed with spears and crossbows.

Just a few, though, and without magic you doubt they will be an issue. And as for the rest...

A new light flares up around the armored woman when you try to affect her, but her henchmen quickly experience what it feels like to have their eyes mildly exploding out of their sockets. Screaming, writhing maggots now cover the area- the perfect backdrop for what's about to follow.

"You-! 'But the fiends and the nightmares had betrayed the Goddess, and brazenly took from Her creation!' Holy Smite!"

As she chants, the woman stretches her sword into the sky- your immediate instinct is to dodge out of the way, but regardless of your repositioning, a flash of light slams onto you from above, not unlike how you just slammed downwards out of the mist making it impossible to see what's going on.

You feel an impact, as though something heavy just purposefully rammed into you, and a loud crack as your feet break into the wall underneath you. When the light clears, you can see and feel some smoke rising off of you... But your aura took the brunt of it without any issues.

"How..." For the woman that did this, it's too late to have second thoughts, or to reconsider her life choices. Breaking back out of the ground you're standing on, you reach out not to go for her, but rather to grab for one of the blinded magic people you just disabled, the one that seems like he's keeping his cool and trying to find the direction of where what is at the moment.This state of affairs does not persist past the hand grabbing a hold of his leg to slam him into his leader, the surprised shouts drowned out by the gong-like sound of some protective spell going off and breaking half the bones in your flail's body.

A second try reveals it was a single shot, though, and so even as she attempts to catch her comrade, she suddenly finds herself lifted into the air.

"The Goddess Protects!" She calls out, trying to thrust her sword right into your facehole. Joke's on her, though; a quick clench of your bone mandibles allows you to wrench it out of her hand and shatter the enchanted metal in twain.

"... Well, I always did suck as a paladin," your victim drily mutters. Then she raises her shield, banging it against your shoulder. "Well, get to it already!"

She's looking behind you though- you jump again, dodging the barrage of crossbow bolts and the odd thrown spear launched by the soldiers that managed to gather up to this point.

"... You know, this is almost nice. Not the dying part, but the endless white mist. Makes me feel like this is some real door to the afterlife for once."

You can't help yourself and chuckle. "Not wrong," you say in your distorted voice, like half a dozen kids pretending to be adults.

Her eyes go wide, but this time you actually bite her; your morphed teeth pierce through her head and neck where her lack of helmet leaves both uncovered, rapidly draining her blood and her soul all at once.

It takes moments before she dies, her soul passing into your stomach, and you simply drop her now worthless body back down.

If you had lips and maybe a tongue, you would lick them now.

Julianne. The name still felt weird on her tongue, the western pronunciation and naming convention involved like referring to a foreign colleague she was collaborating with rather than her own identity.

And yet there she was, with platinum blonde hair and surrounded by people that considered this to be normal. The accident had been sudden, and perhaps staged- she'd known how these things went back then- but all that she knew was that she'd died, except she didn't stay dead.

She knew what this was about. Isekai. A new world and she was direly underequipped to deal with it. She'd been a researcher, but far away from any of the really important and integral projects, she wouldn't kid herself; sure, she'd been part of the team that'd made the final breakthrough on the material that would later become Academy City's city streets themselves back in the early days, but she really had no idea what to do when monsters were a thing that had to be fought off all the time!

And yet she'd been born again, with no sign of her parents in this life to be found. Instead, she was raised inside a religious orphanage following a deity she'd never even heard of, not that she was surprised.

It was weird, but having to pray at mealtime wasn't too far off from what she was experienced in from Japanese customs, so she adapted quickly enough- except one day, she had a thought as she watched the smithy two streets from her current home. She'd been reincarnated like this, so maybe, just maybe, there was something to this whole spirituality nonsense.

She'd try actually praying with all her heart once, just once. It wasn't like she couldn't be wrong after all, and magic was apparently real in this world, so hey, why not, yeah? Stranger things could happen, after all.

Then she started glowing and had no idea how to shut it off again and just like that she was hailed as the orphanage's very own holy woman. Julianne would have objected, but... She'd felt something, in that moment. A tenuous connection to something... greater. So she'd swallowed her pride and didn't object when the priestess came by the next day and confirmed that she had a talent for 'divine magic'.

She'd continued to live with the orphanage for a while longer while a good place for her was found, as nobody wanted to make her feel like she was taken away from home and her friends, but she just took it as an opportunity to try and experiment with what she could do. Literally laying hands onto the other kids to heal scrapes and bruises was pretty neat, for example, even if for the life of her she couldn't quite figure out how it worked.

She could find out a little bit about how magic was supposed to go, but... No matter how much she tried to conceptualize some kind of energy she could use or program to influence the world, she got nothing. Nada. So being a divine caster it was for her, after all.

Damn, but if she didn't wish she'd paid attention to those RPGs and stuff in her old life. She was sure she could've gotten some use out of the information.

Anyway, fast forward a couple of years and she was taught the art of combat, because apparently she was such a crap shot with magic it was her best bet at getting anything out of her talent. Her own words, she wasn't going to rely on people trying to cheer her up as anything other than empty words. And hey, if she could get to meet a couple of smiths (that were apparently the closest thing to colleagues of her old profession to be found within a year's journey) because of it, then all the better, right?

Shaddup, it wasn't because of her melancholy or anything, okay?

Anyway, it wasn't so bad. Sure, she had to pray to some deity she didn't really believe in all that much, but she could work with weird magical materials and do a bunch of fancy stuff, she got a good three meals every day as part of the church and she even got to help out around the city if anything needed fixin'.

Wasn't nobody gonna outdo her with the miracle of repairing stuff!

It was a simpler life than she was used to, but she couldn't really complain. And hey, if she never had to see another Kihara ever again, all the better.

Until, that was, something like straight out of their wet, twisted dreams appeared, covering the city in fog and speaking with the voices of lost children...

As she stepped through the doors of the purported library, Julianne couldn't help but be taken aback by the three figures already waiting inside. And they were waiting; as soon as they saw her come inside, the young with blue hair stopped fiddling over the only male member of the group, everyone's attention turning towards her.

"See? Told you she'd come here as soon as she was done," the guy said, getting up to greet her. "Hello there Masumi-san, long time no see. Even if I doubt you're going to recognize-"

"Masumi-san, I remember," She said as soon as she recognized that awkwardness, even if it was exhibited by a teenager instead of a middle-aged man in a labcoat this time around. "Of course I do, our last names being the same had to be some sort of sign even if we hardly worked together."

"His name's Yoshi now," the statuesque woman sitting off to the side said, spinning her chair around lazily. "Seeing as all three of you are in the same situation, figure name should'a be figured out first."

"Right. I used to be Hisao Nakasone in my first life, but-"

"Ah geez, being reborn the wrong gender must've been rough." At the increasing awkwardness directed at her, Julianne backpedaled immediately. "Unless it wasn't? Sorry if I'm being really insensitive right now, I-"

"Don't worry about it," the formerly male researcher waved her off. "I'm called Indigo now, but I have to say I'm surprised you remembered both of us by our names alone."

"Haha, well, what can I say, I'm good with names like that..." Resisting the urge to scratch her neck, she looked around a bit. "So, uh, this place is...?"

"The stomach of a sociopathic maniac that personally ate each and every person living inside here, yes," 'Yoshi', as he was called now, said. "You can get some more information from the various books and computers scattered around this room, or you can come along into the lab if you would like- we have a connection to this place set up there. It, uh, it's okay if you need a bit, we all know how much of a shock it can be to..."

"To die," the only unintroduced person around said. "Jeez Louise, it's fucking painful watching you prance around it like that. She's not gonna flip just 'ceause someone says it straight out."

"It's called not being an insensitive asshole, okay? Like, you know, you."

"Funny you would say that, if anyone can judge an asshole on sight, it'd be you. Wanna check mine?"

Indigo came closer, standing up with a sigh and shrugging unnoticed by the other two. "Once they start flirting like this, they'll be at it for hours. Would you like me to just give you the grand tour of everything important in this place?"

Julianne blinked, unsure of how to react for a long moment. "I... guess?"

"Oh, don't worry about everyone being overly familiar, we just saw that you're a reincarnator from Academy City like us in the lab and came out to greet you," Indigo assured her. "We get that you lived a whole life in-between the last one and now, it's just rare to meet someone from the same place. Come along, I'm sure the greeting committee already told you you can ask the Maid to bring you elsehwere?"

Julianne was dead, this time for keeps, it would seem. But at least she wasn't the only one in her position, which was... nice?

Better than nothing, at least. She nodded.

While you were busy playing on the wall, things have kept moving elsewhere in the city, unsurprisingly; while the fog is keeping visibility down for Ostea as well as many of the now desperate victims caught inside of the city, she is still much more easily capable of seeing what is going on than any of them.

While most of the city itself is fairly untouched by your various activities, a very significant amount of people have managed to walk their way towards where the tree is waiting in the mist, led astray by the curses you prepared in advance. However, more yet are still around elsewhere, keeping their wits and trying to make sense of the situation if they aren't outright trying to escape.

To that end... You hear the boom as what has to be some kind of explosion breaks a hole into the city wall, letting at least small amounts of your bloodsacks escape. Annoying, but the reports of the Ostea bodies staying behind seeing what they can only describe as guerilla warfare aimed towards the Tree itself is even more worrying.

It should be able to look after itself, but it seems someone has figured out it is the reason everything in the area keeps dying, and so a group of mages and and siege mechanics(?) seems to be making it their mission to bombard it from afar, then move away before the retaliatory fire of your Osteas can destroy them.

They don't hit reliably, firing over buildings and through windows at times, but it seems they have figured out the trick of keeping the hell away from the Tree to stay alive and using the airborne nature of Ostea against her.

Troubling, yes, especially insofar as they might just be able to destroy a few of the fruits you have so lovingly prepared the harvest of. So you'll need to prioritize, much as you would like for these walking juicy grapes to just accept their fate and die of their own volition.

Pinky is a reliable fighter, and so you summon two of it to go block off the hole in the wall, along with two of your Bondage Demons to physically drag any that try to escape all the way back to the tree, if they have to. Along with them, you bring out... No, wait, you cannot quite summon a soul to send along, not while the Tree is still out.

All of this takes most of your aura, but it will recover, in time. For now, you send your forces off, you yourself coming back towards the Tree.

It is nearly about to return to you anyway, but until then you want it to stay out here in the real world and collect more fertilizer.

Naturally, it is child's play for you to find the prey scurrying around your tree and gnawing at your crops, even without your handy compass ready to be used for one. While true flight is difficult in this form (not impossible, just annoying), you can very easily jump from one roof to the next, keeping your 'eyes' peeled for the blood signatures of your next victims.

Something you have noticed, oh, a while ago, taking on the form of an animal does naturally grant you its strengths along with the new shape- whether the form of a wolf making your sense of smell much more effective and giving you an instinct for hunting (beyond the one you already have for hunting humans in most societies, that is) or that of a bird sharpening your eyesight beyond even that possible through your already supernaturally empowered senses.

It follows, then, that the more monstrous forms you found yourself able to take a while later, mainly based on the forms you could already take, bring this same tendency with them, just driven up to eleven. Case in point, as soon as you near the area your tree has been busy at work growing your future harvest, you can make out the moving shapes of several men acting in concert, their blood and their body temperatures and their movement itself betraying them.

This is really making itself too easy.

"Come on, we have to keep moving."

"Can't see any with this fucking-!" You strike from the mist, a flash of violence disappearing into the surroundings just as soon as you grab onto one of them. His screams ring out for a moment, then silence.

"Mike? Mike! Fucking damn shit!" His compatriots do not seem to be happy. Good.

"Has to be something else out there, too. Okay, we-" You do not stop, and soon enough you have two dead bodies with broken necks on you. Not content to just pick them off like this, you bring them with you onto a nearby roof, tearing and ripping their corpses apart like a child might a doll.

When the blood and body parts start raining down, the people lugging with them what looks a lot like some primitive cannon are completely freaking out and screaming like morons or else eyeing the surroundings and obviously thinking about making a run for it. By the time you're done with them... They'll feed themselves to the Tree just to escape.

By the time you're done throwing people into the tree, it has a very healthy amount of red, throbbing fruits nestled among its leaves, pulsing in time with its own heartbeat. Then, with the cracking of breaking wood, it shudders, its roots sliding and slithering back towards its main body as it dissolves into a silver mist even without your direction.

It really is quite limited in how long you can sustain it outside of yourself.

Still, there you are. You will remain somewhat busy for the next while, but even so you instruct the Maid to gather up the literal hundreds of fruits to bring them to the Cook for your next visit.

In the meantime, you shall use what you have left of your time in this form to toy with this city's inhabitants some more; by your estimation, about half of them ended up being fed into your Tree and fueling your further ascension down the line, while around a quarter were killed in the confusion and the fighting as you continue to drive as many of them as possible to dance according to your own script, but that still leaves a decent few to work with... Or just to prepare for once you leave, really.

Maybe it's just you, but all these weaklings taste a little weird in this form. Then again, could be your lack of tastebuds in this form, along with the absent mouth and tongue and all that.

... Actually, how do you taste the souls you eat like this at all? You were under the impression that your inherent magic had a tendency to work along with your physical body where possible for some reason, but...

Muh, you'll deal with that later.

The mines were, perhaps unsurprisingly, used as shelter by quite some of the fleeing civilians once the chaos started spreading through the fog, though far from enough for you to cherish the chance to go in there and eat them; tight, cramped spaces and long tunnels made of them are not what you would call wing-friendly.

So instead, you'll just go ahead and tear everything near the entrance down to ensure that they all die down there. Hey, not your fault they literally went and trapped themselves.

Using your immense strength in your changed form, you simply... get towards taking out as many of the support pillars as you can easily reach, down under the earth, and then start tearing the earth itself down.

It takes a while, and you end up creating a few more bodies for Ostea to send them off while you work, but at least nobody in there will have an easy time getting out. And maybe they'll eat each other, too, not like there's much in terms of food down there last you knew.

Either way, you can already feel the influence of your raven-self fading, so you take a moment to reconsider how everything went for this attack. A lot of casualties all around, even if, as Ostea can tell you, a few refugees escaped, making their ways through the hole in the wall and a few secret paths outside of the city, if you had to guess. Ah well, you never really expected a clean sweep anyway.

So you can expect a few days before a response really arrives, mainly because human forces will need to first find out about this situation (refugees, merchants or whoever might come to this place and see something is wrong), organize a response and execute it. Enough for you to run away and maybe leave a few little surprises with time to spare, really- if you decide to spend any of that time here, anyway.

Looking up at the sun standing in the sky, where you can feel it past the fog and the dark clouds slowly raining pieces of ash formed after black feathers (your very own special touch), you grimace, having reformed your face by this point. Stupid cancer ball.

So yeah, the initial rush is done with- mostly anyone around is either dead, gone or about to be either, the Tree is done and so are your monstrous forms for the near future, while the city is covered in a dense network of mind-distorting curses that should work towards causing a mixture of nausea, growing paranoia, slight hallucinations and similar helping to spook out anyone taking too long traversing this place.

You really went wild with it, honestly. Hurray for kind of passive effects like that and increased speed, you suppose.

Making your way through Brittlehelm, again, you discover that it really is way too large of a location for your tastes; in particular when you're trying to cover it with a bunch of undead you're using the bodies of the city's inhabitants to make, with the help of Ostea as the silent summon ferries all the raw materials you could wish for towards you.

Really, it's more that you take a moment to make the changes you want, minimal as they are. You aren't exactly complaining, as the creatures you've dubbed ghouls will be a major hindrance towards anyone you disapprove getting a single foot into the city ever again, but the time and attention required to make them properly still does add up.

Then of course there are the soul fragments left over all over the place, clustered up wherever a bunch of people died. The spiritual needs of the flock you are creating, so to say. From them, the tortured, despairing and twisted scraps of what used to be people, you craft faceless spectres just roughly humanoid that you bind to whatever location you are passing by, soaking up and storing the choice bits for later while you combine and concentrate them.

In fact, the majority of your day is spent just doing this, covering as much of the city's streets as you can. In the end you have maybe hundred, hundred and twenty ghouls hiding in various locations, waiting for the first enemy to step foot within the city of Brittleheim to pass by their hiding spots.

Oh, and they're invisible, in case you forgot to mention. Not quite completely- a good eye might spot the light shimmering in the air that can be observed when moving past them- but certainly close enough to 'proper' invisibility for you.

If you were alive, your feet would be killing you by this point, but instead you simply wait for this dull chore to be over. Ostea seems to be having fun, at least, using her power to set up traps all over the city while you keep on pumping out new bodies for her. Simple things like tripwires and swinging spiked implements and even the odd falling anvil if someone manages to trigger them.

At least this place will be a proper deathtrap for later.

Now with your layer of ghouls in place (and a few screams by the few unfortunates that have kept hiding in the city so far sometimes hanging in the distance in this otherwise silent ghost town), you get right towards the zombie apocalypse part of your plan.

Well, it's not exactly that, but you just like to call it as such. You're really just saying 'screw all of this shit' and stopping the whole sophisticated corpse modding plan- raise 'em, bind 'em, move on.

Most of the ghouls are in the general area adjacent to the town square you summoned the Tree inside of, so you just add a couple of simpler zombies there and work your way outwards. You don't exactly cover the whole city, but a good amount of it is still getting its own undead just lying around pretending to actually be dead- with any luck, all of the real corpses elsewhere will let them get a cheap shot or two in.

The town square itself, of course, is kind of nonexistent- the Tree isn't exactly small, and it did kind of dig into everything around it while you had it out so there's just a giant hole in the middle of the city now, with more destruction everywhere the roots tore through, but hey, not like you were ever using this place to begin with, right?

Right. Anyway, you work your way through... probably a couple hundred corpses? They all just kind of blur together after a while even with your perfect recollection and you don't really bother thinking about it too deeply.

Next to you, an Ostea body is doing something strange. Stretching both hands in the air, rhythmically moving them towards her sides... Is it a cheer routine or something?

At your inquisitive look, she drops her hands back to her sides. "... Carnage insisted," she explains in her raspy voice as though made by two bones rubbing together. "... To cheer you up. Because of how hard you're working."

"..." You look inside yourself, where you soon see the form made of raw muscle and bone standing in front of Ostea's own avatar. Left, right, to the chest! Daddy, daddy, is the best! "I see," you chuckle, strangely actually cheered up a bit about this whole... thing. "Actually, you think she would mind coming along for the feast in a bit? With all those fruits and most of the real annoying stuff done out here..."

"... Please invite her along. She'll pout otherwise." And you can't have that, huh?

Just quickly summoning the souls of a couple of the city's smiths, the very best ones you ate in preparation for your attack, you cast a quick spell. "That which I have brought to unlife, heed my call, feel your chains, and come to your master, for a task awaits!"

Yes, the chants are still horrible to actually say out loud, but at least you have one of your trusty wyvern steeds on hand just like that. "You five go out and take everything particularly valuable you're aware of around the city and especially your workplaces and bring it here to have it brought across the border," you order your soul minions, "and do try to choose the things actually worth taking along."

With that, you summarily ignore them- this is mostly just grabbing the valuable shit and getting out, but there's no reason to really concern yourself with it. Except maybe to summon the other wyvern, the one you imbued with the fragment of wrath and got some fire powers that way.

So much to do, so little... well, you would have time, you just don't have the patience.

Max Anders and Brad Meadows had, towards the ends of their lives, done a lot of things and, some might perhaps say, made a lot of mistakes. As they soon found out after passing, being caught inside the stomach of the monster that'd killed them.

For one, the death of Kyle Roose, the fundamental cause of the rift between the two of them, had happened under very different circumstances than had been assumed by everyone involved; as the sources within their new place of residence could confirm, he had been killed to set up following events. In fact, even he himself shared the fate that had eventually found them, meeting up again with both Brad and Melody after death.

However, it wasn't like this meant everyone got along again for some reason. Things had been said they didn't want to take back because, at the end of the day, they hadn't come from nowhere.

Kaiser still insisted that if Hookwolf just hadn't run his rebel routine and actually done his part as part of the Empire, they would be in a better position than they were- Cain had only been able to effortlessly cause the 'civil war' by taking advantage of his inability to control himself.

Hookwolf, on the other hand, disagreed most violently (or he would, if he could in this place) on grounds that if Kaiser hadn't been such a shit leader and just sat on his ass after Kyle was killed, things wouldn't have happened as they did either. He had, after all, started the fight during which they both died for this very reason.

So the lines that were drawn kind of persisted, though a few topics (such as Rune's early defection or the perfidiousness of their killer) both sides of this split of neo-nazis and affiliated members of the society that found itself happening inside of this place certainly could agree on. As it was, Hookwolf continued to antagonize Kaiser even as the man pretended to simply end the issue by open-handedly admitting that he could have done better but was totally in the right still.

Interestingly enough, many of their former followers (for as much as they can be described as 'many' compared to the sheer mass of human sacrifices added to the world they were in originating from entirely different dimensions) wanted nothing to do with the hostilities continuing even after death. Instead, a substantial amount wandered off to join other groups, aside from the core believers that truly believed in the message (and in turn divided themselves amongst which message they meant between the two factions).

Some joined the Cult of the Ascended, some tried to be productive with the infinite time they now had available and performed various tasks under the Council, but as it happened quite a lot of former followers really were just in it for the perks, such as the protection being part of a big gang offered in Brockton Bay.

Outside of the city on the East Coast... And the East Coast... And Earth Bet in general... Well, things changed.

And so it happened, with the ultimate ban on all violence in effect, that Max and Brad simply kept away from each other except in the few occasions they felt the need to scream at and insult each other, as old couples sometimes did.

None of their respective minor factions was happy about this, but what could they do? With the way this place worked, they couldn't coerce anyone into joining them through violence, while already existing bigger groups would very much take an interest in case they found some other way to do so. And so no matter how much it galled Kaiser and pissed off Hookwolf, they were reduced to small fishes in this new pond they were in.

Nobody wanted the Cult to start preaching at them for hours on end. It was hard enough to stay sane in this unending existence as it was.

And so it came that both halves of the 'Nazi Equation', as a certain scientist titled the whole phenomenon in an effort to qualify the various factors that lead someone into being a homophobic racist asshole and making this philosophy a central part of their life before being told he was doing it wrong, ultimately lead to the same ending: Holing up in a corner of the Soul Palace and pretending the better times hadn't passed them by.

That and calling the raiders populating the same areas morons.

Well, you're done with this city for the time being, at least, coming out of your momentary trance held inside of the same office you ate the mayor inside of. The food prepared inside of your soul was very much delicious, enough so to rival the taste of true souls at times, but you've scarfed down literally all the fruits you just generated by sacrificing half a medieval fantasy city, gorged on the power and instinctive knowledge provided and grown ever more powerful than before.

The sun doesn't even bother you anymore, or at least no more than in an intellectual sense. You still don't like it and have to fight the instinctive urge not to squint your eyes like you sometimes did while alive when confronted with bright lights, but overall it is much, much easier to ignore than has ever been ever since you rose from the grave.

Now then, with all other business taken care of, you simply leave behind a last quick bit of 'fuck you' to whoever will come to this place after you- a sign reading 'I can always come back, by the way' in the local language- and turn into a bird, flying off without delay.

You've left behind enough surprises, and your new capability to subconsciously stay connected to all your souls, particularly those you have summoned in this case, there is little way anything could go wrong with the little scavenging action you ordered, and so you don't even need to keep up any regular communication with the souls you tasked with taking everything valuable they had in life for you.

Convenient, really. Or, as you would like to call it, modern problems finally meeting modern solutions. You can now play Big Brother for more than Sarah completely without effort, and though you have no real interest in ordering your inner world or anything, you do make sure all of your souls know that you look over their shoulders now and for the rest of eternity.

A certain cult seems to take this as a reason to celebrate, but you'll just chalk it up as a win, even as you designate their leader to be a node in your network just to reduce the headache you would get from personally overseeing his followers.

Weirdos, one and all.

Getting back to the Border Fortress takes a bit- travel distances being what they are, it really can't be helped for all that you loathe the fact transit is eating up so much of your ever limited time. At least your constant flight at full effort, something no mundane bird could copy simply due to the energy it would eat up (it isn't like flying is effortless for birds, after all) does mean you're going about it appreciably fast.

Certainly faster than anyone that has to actually move on the ground, at the very least. Speaking of which, however, it seems you aren't the only one to have been busy as of late, as the reports coming in through Rose indicate.

Flying through the evening sky turning into night, you carefully pay attention to everything she has to tell you, and tell you she does. It may have taken a bit, though only a few days in local time, but humanity does very much seem to be violently reacting to the latest happenings you've been working on. Reports read and analyzed, plans adjusted and executed. Though the war was supposed to have been over, it isn't like the human military has noticeably decreased its standing power, after all.

Eyes on the ground are sparse, but from those Rose has Sarah has been able to extrapolate what is happening, by and large. Entire armies are being reorganized at full speed, gathering and preparing and outright marching around already. Wartime economy is showing no true signs of relaxing its ancient grip on the Kingdom of Hannovens; on the contrary, more rations are being produced, equipment prepared, infrastructure readied and used.

Hundreds of thousands are brought back into full order, determined to march. Though the blows dealt to your enemies have been great, they've only just begun licking blood. As far as you can tell, it will take a while yet, but it's hard to dispute humanity is very used to fighting this war. Those three fortresses near the Border Fortress itself, they're only just the tip of the iceberg, it would seem.

Literal millions of soldiers are being mobilized all over the realm, split into those who are to guard strategically important positions and the massive attack force gearing up to smash into the Border Fortress once again.

The human war apparatus is back at it again, it would seem.

As part of this, many of the minor bandit groups you indirectly caused to form when you beat back the invading human army back in your first days on this world are having surprising amounts of trouble finding softer targets; most travel and trade is being overseen by soldiers directly now in this entire region, for fear of whatever infiltrators or trickery might be afoot (a direct response to your tactics so far, it would seem) and though the newly minted bandits could realistically defeat smaller patrols and the like, most of them aren't exactly on the level of bloodthirsty psychopaths you're used to using.

So things are stalled a bit on that front. They may have turned against their former comrades, but many of them did so out of desperation over anything else, still reluctant to turn their swords on their common man. Apparently their idea of banditry was more along the lines of demanding 'tolls' from merchants and outlying villages (many of which have their own small garrisons filled up again now) to keep themselves fed and watered, but that's all a lot more complicated now.

And, of course, the heroes. In reaction to the known deaths and apparent 'betrayals' of several among their number after they were allowed to go their own ways after the old demon lord's defeat, it would seem they are being urged to close ranks again, to gather in a single group capable of defeating anything opposing them.

Which is, to say the least, the opposite of what you want them to do.

There's also a few more unconfirmed reports about certain projects in certain places being resumed, nothing but vague rumours so far you're lucky Rose got a hold of in the first place, but it seems that, after the heroes haven't been enough to take care of things decisively enough, some of the various 'solutions' humanity has been working on before their summoning are once again being pursued, this time to be combined with the heroes if that's what it takes.

In short, things are a mess. It doesn't help Rose's spies are being aggressively opposed by what everyone is fairly sure is one of the heroes and humanity's own secret agents, hence it taking this long to get this information to you.

In other words, by the time you arrive back at the Border Fortress, you once again realize you're up to your eyeballs in things to do without anywhere enough time to do them all in.

The Border Fortress itself continues to be a work in progress, if you want to be kind to the efforts at bringing it up to speed; it is, apparently, standard practice to disable the defenses in one's own direction when taking it, which is why just rebuilding a few of the gates on the human side of the border has been what your people have been busy with for the most part so far.

Luckily, they could simply move the siege engines over, at least. Surprisingly, quite a few of the demon soldiers around know their way around simple construction like this, though perhaps unsurprising, as many of them actually used to be doing duty right in this very location.

Of course, by the time you get back to the central map room, the same place with the hidden room controlling the wall traps all throughout the fortress, recent human movements on their side of the border have already been updated by the men Rose sent here for that very reason.

"Shit's fucked," is how Rakul immediately greets you as you come inside, leaning over the accurate drawings of the geology all around. "We're looking at five hundred thousand men marching right at us as a first wave to try and weaken us before the main forces arrive- standard human tactics, anyone can read up on it. No idea if there's any heroes along, apparently, but it wouldn't surprise me at this point, either."

Of course he is, as always, pessimistic and needs to be nudged into being constructive. "They won't arrive for a while, so don't bother doomsaying and instead think of how to use the time we have the best you can," you tell him with a shake of your head. You will take the lip in exchange for him continuing to be useful, at least. "How would demons usually react?"

"Ambushes and night assaults, obviously, I've already got the men scouting," he says without a moment of hesitation. "Most are busy getting the Fortress back into shape, though, so that's where most of our attention is for the time being. According to the reports I found nailed to my bed without me noticing, we have about a week before they get into business range, at least."

Say what you want, but Rose's people have a sense of humour.