"Alright, let's cut the bullshit and consider what's the most important," you say more to yourself than anyone else. "If there's one thing we need to limit above all, it is the heroes on humanity's side. We all know how things turned out when they united their powers, after all."
Of course, while far from all of the heroes are keeping their movements and locations hidden, meaning you have at least some idea of where they might be (Rose really doesn't have perfect coverage ever since human spies started a shadow war of sorts with her own, limiting the ease with which she can gain information of all kinds especially deeper into human lands), not all of them are really anywhere in the area you're trying to keep your own operations within just to avoid wasting days at a time on travel.
Ultimately, considering the ones you know to be confirmed, you have a few options, the ones whose sightings Sarah managed to put together into something more cohesive. And wouldn't you know it, one particular hero does stand out, after all.
"... The Spear Hero, or Lance Hero or whatever. Matsui Michi. Traveling with the Sword Hero, Nakatani Kazue. Apparently, Matsui wanted to stay close to the Border Fortress because Tada was also staying here, but she also wanted to get away from the whole war business, so she and her other friend decided to travel around the area, see a few different places while they waited for her to return with them. They'll be hurrying to rejoin the other heroes after they've heard the news, but until they do I have a window of opportunity."
You would have to hurry, of course, simply because they would rejoin the others otherwise, but as it is it'd be a crime not to come for them. If only so you can take care of Tada's request before things get too chaotic all around.
"That's nice and all, but do remember the big fat army, 'kay? Kind of important that one," Rakul interrupts your musings. "Not claiming I'm some master strategist, but losing the fortress at this point would suck big time, not gonna lie."
Well, nobody can say you don't put your all into things once you really get going. While it does take you a few minutes, summoning one of your Watchers, the birdlike undead made to survey large spans of land with relative ease, and imbuing it with your Ice Meteor spell should hopefully let you harry the enemy from afar with minimal investment of effort for worthwhile results.
Then, of course, you make it rain. Manipulating the weather remains a ponderous and sluggish affair when starting from scratch, but it's already fairly cold and wet this season anyway, so it shouldn't take all too long to drum up a little rainstorm or two. Naturally, having it over the Border Fortress itself is the opposite of what you want, so you're mostly bringing up some sharp winds in the upper atmosphere to carry the moisture and clouds you're creating towards the area you want them to go.
Not to brag, but you did actually put some thought into how to effectively use your power over the weather.
And, last but not least, one of your older paintings is getting some use. As in, one you made inside of your soul palace. While you've been too busy with other matters to keep on creating more pieces of art in there, by and large, the ability to essentially gain more summonable auxiliary powers is still one of the more handy results of your inner world's continuing growth and evolution.
This one is the painting you made of a world overgrown with dark green crystals, with the power to bring those selfsame crystals into reality around it in a cascade of growth. All it takes is finding a suitable location for the thing where it won't get damaged (a small cave you find after a few minutes of searching suffices) and leaving it there to start with its thing.
The crystals that grow as long as the painting remains are mostly inert, meaning that you can't use them as explosives or fuel or anything, but what they excel at is fucking over entire ecosystems if allowed to propagate long enough as well as hindering most kinds of infrastructure. If you were using this thing on a city or something, everything would have to be constantly cleansed of the hard material growing rampantly over buildings, inside sewers and inside living space all.
It just kind of keeps on growing and overtaking everything, is all it does. Kind of a pain to remove, in your experience from what few experiments you conducted with this painting, but not directly dangerous unless someone just lies on the ground for a few hours without moving. Just making it difficult to walk around in this setting, really.
Incidentally, Yoshi's analysis power considers the stuff to be somewhere between silicate crystals and simple glass, with a molecular structure reminiscent of both.
Anyway, off you go! You know the general area the two heroes you're off to find can be found in, so you may as well get a move on. Your compass soul will let you find them easily enough, but you still have to actually move into that direction first.
The flight is largely calm, the night almost seeming to hide and guide you with a constant wind letting you go faster and faster; it isn't actually some absence of the giant cancer ball doing so, of course, but rather yourself as you keep on brushing against the weather and the wind themselves.
You fly over the mountains for a bit, your course curving soon to bring you instead over forest after forest, trees stretching off into all directions more miles upon miles. This, however, isn't the jungle-like forest you are used to seeing on the other side of the border, instead a perhaps not tamer, but at least less wild enormous mass of nature.
The biomes and ecosystems really vary wildly across the mountain range serving as the border between nations, to the point you kind of do doubt it to be quite natural. Probably just an issue with mana or something- pretty much everything weird in this dimension has to do with this ethereal form of energy, in your experience.
Anyway, aside from a few foolhardy birds that didn't get the memo when you just keep on flapping your wings with full effort nonstop and got to taste a quick claw to the beak and eyes, nothing impedes your journey, and so you soon catch sight of your quarry. Two young women, riding inside a carriage pulled by a pair of horses. There's a few others around, too, soldiers and auxiliaries by the look of them, the small convey moving along the street towards one of the towns you considered as targets earlier but decided against attacking.
Of course, you don't immediately approach- what are you gonna do, just shadow inside the carriage and eat two heroes to the face for it? How about no thanks on that one.
First impressions are important, at least in relation to people whose opinions may be important later on. Important qualifier, that. So you'll just go ahead and follow them for a bit as they move into the town the street they're taking leads towards. You're pretty sure you know which one it is, some no-name place mainly serving as a waystation and supply depot for redistribution of supplies in the immediate area.
What's far more important is who will be inside it soon. While you doubt that they'll stay long, letting the horses recover or else switching them out, ensuring that everyone is alright, getting new supplies and maybe having a good few hours of comfortable sleep will be the least of what this group will want once they arrive- no matter how urgent they are taking the need to have the heroes reconvene, you doubt they'll push both the convoy and the heroes themselves hard enough to just ride right on through with new horses.
Naturally, you yourself will be making sure to stay well the fuck away while you follow, probably fly ahead a good bit and wait for them too. Nobody in this group should be observant enough to spot you in your raven form and consider it anything worrisome, you've been scrupulously keeping your shapeshifting quiet up to this point after all, but there's no need to risk having either of the heroes notice something unusual about your behaviour.
Sadly, mostly for the state of your personal entertainment, the little group arriving at the city gates and exchanging a few words with the guards on night shift before they open to let it come inside.
Not that them immediately closing the gates again keeps you out in the slightest, the dark of night serving as the perfect backdrop to let you fly right over the walls. Your extremely astute senses don't have any trouble following the movement of the one carriage with the two heroes in it, either, keeping up as they dismount the vehicle and let it roll off towards what you guess would be the stables whereas they and everyone not riding themselves walk off in a different direction.
Keeping far, far above them, you see them all move towards one of the bigger, fortified compounds around the city, the nearest of such to the gate they'd entered from. It would seem they'll be spending at least part of the night inside some kind of barracks or other military-related location before moving further.
On the way, you get a direct glimpse of the Sword Hero, or at least you assume her to be the one; Nakatani Kazue, if you are correct, is somewhat tall with shoulder-length black hair, still wearing some of the armor she must've been wearing while traveling. There's a sword sheathed at her side, which is why you're pretty sure you got the right person.
The distance you're keeping makes it hard to get a closer look at the other hero in there, annoyingly, but you simply keep track of her blood signature instead. They're constantly accompanied by the soldiers that just keep on swarming around them, so you don't think you should jump in yet anyway.
Contrary to your expectations, for once, the two heroes and their entourage don't settle down inside of the military installation; instead, they seem to be making some kind of arrangements based on the way they move around and meet a couple of people inside before moving out again, taking another carriage towards some other place within the city.
Which, as it quickly turns out, is some kind of inn, except guarded by men in uniforms and quite clearly connected to the army in some way. What's the chance they have actual reserved rooms for high-profile guests passing through?
... Come to think of it, you shouldn't underestimate just how modern some of the concepts in this world are, huh? At least in terms of humanity.
Either way, it doesn't take all too long before everyone involved has their own rooms, with the heroes' rooms in the highest floor by your best estimation, the 'inn' somewhat tall with a total of five floors total. Human settlements in general, or at least the larger ones, do tend to build up just as much as they build wide.
Infiltrating the best equivalent of a hotel you can think of isn't hard, your shadow form easily making its way through- not through the windows, this time, as you see a faint shimmer of non-light when you get close to them in the small gaps you usually use, indicating some kind of magical security system you don't want to risk tripping... But a quick search reveals that the drains you access through the (admittedly fairly simple) sewers down under the street don't share this feature.
Go sewer crawling. It has never disappointed you from the moment you reanimated to now.
Stealing a few keys just in case of more of that kind of shit doesn't take you more than a couple of minutes, few of the employees around in the middle of the night, and just like that you have access to the rooms of the heroes. Question is, which of them do you wake up with a tailored greeting first?
Matsui is Tada's best friend, and you do know her favourite sweets through her, some of which you have on you inside of your shadow dimension just for this purpose. Or more a general one, but getting some Japanese sweets isn't that hard in Brockton Bay so you went ahead and did so with eyes towards your visit to this dimension.
On the other hand, she is also purported to be rather impetuous and possessed of a rather forceful personality, by which you mean she may or may not flip her lid the moment you mention her best friend depending on how the situation so far has been described to her. She's kind of a tossup whether you can get her to listen to you for long enough for your mix of bullshit and truth to work on her, if you understand this right.
By contrast, Nakatani, the sword heroine, is more laid-back and focused according to your sources (aka Tada), but that might just mean she will strike first, ask questions later. It's... Well, nobody claimed this would be easy, you suppose.
Then again, few things are as easy as it was to chomp down on the buffer hero. Good times.
Sneaking into the female hero's room is easy enough, thanks to everything you have on hand, and the blonde young woman sleeping inside restlessly doesn't detect you, at the very least not easily. Taking a quick look around, you give the little sweets fairy avatar flying in circles inside of your inner world a few last instructions for this next part.
Remember, no matter what you do, remain quiet until I I tell you otherwise or else she's awake, got it? You ask, going over your plan one last time.
Gotcha gotcha, now can I come out and do sweeeeeets already?!
She's always like this, for some reason. Why does a part of you have to be like that?
Regardless, organizing a table you swiftly summon from inside your soul, created by some of the souls inside the workshop at some point, and a spread of all of Matsui's favorite shouldn't take you all too long with the use of half a dozen sweets fairies.
Laying out your spread of assorted sweets, as determined to be the most effective for this situation, you make it a point to personally arrange everything the sweets fairies create as silently as they can, still internally contemplating whether it wouldn't be better to bring out something to drink as well.
Screw actually making tea, as Tada did suggest when you asked her over telepathy, though. Matsui likes it apparently, but that's just a little step too far, even for you.
As it is, you have a couple of colorful dangos, several small little sweet cakes and rice cakes and various desserts filled with red bean paste. All it took you was a single sample and just like that, you can have your little minions reproduce them with little issue.
Though maybe the lack of massive amounts of industrial sugar is increasing the effective aura costs a little, you aren't sure. Not like you ever really bothered to measure the exact consumption of aura relative to the matter produced; so long as you get sweets out of it, you just pump soul juice into the little fairies and go from there.
Anyway, with a bit of a feast prepared, you sit down, using a pair of chairs stolen borrowed from the medieval fantasy hotel, and loudly clear your throat... Except the blonde hero still sleeping in fits and starts doesn't seem to be conscious of the noise.
In fact, she just bumps her head into your direction, as though to tell you to be quiet so she can sleep.
While this is quite amusing and all, you still kind of do need her awake for this, so you briefly consider what to do. Then, having come to a conclusion, you grab one of the little fairies swirling around you in boredom and throw her right at the sleeping heroine.
She squawks aloud, impacts the target face and one Matsui Michi reveals that she apparently sleeps with her armor on, leaping out of bed and looking around wide-eyed as the limp body of your aura minion drops off of her. "Who dares interrupt this great Michi-sama's beauty sleep?!"
Her weapon, never far from her grasp, doesn't take long to be twirled around so she can take a pose as she speaks (for some reason). As she actually takes in her surroundings, however, she blinks, clearly not having expected the little spectacle before her.
"Care to join me for a talk?" You ask, an inviting hand swiping above the table you're prepared.
"Not before I know who you are and why you're here," she says, threateningly pointing her spear at you even as she throws a few glances at the sweets just waiting for her. "Hurry before I call the guards and find out once you're in custody for trespassing in a girl's room!"
You smile apologetically. "Sorry about the way we're meeting, it was just the best way to arrange things from where I stood. I came here tonight to discuss how and why you should immediately defect humanity. Or at the very least do as Tada is doing and sit it out."
"You're not sounding like the peak of trustworthiness if intruding into my room in the middle of the night and setting up a stalker dinner made of all my favorite foods is the best you could arrange for," Matsui complains, not moving from where she is. "And how dare you address my Tada-chan like that? Are you the reason she left us and is missing now?!"
"I guess you could say that? I did convince her to stay well away from the fighting at the Border Fortress when I decided to conquer it for demonkind, at least," you shrug.
Her reaction is immediate and violent. Tearing at her hair with one hand, she lets out a keening noise. "Kiiiiiiiiii! Is this netorare? Have I been cucked of my adorable little Tada-chan?! Tell me, who is she to you?! Have you tricked her with empty promises and are you leading her down a path to a life of sin?!"
... Well now. "I am taking offense at these allegiations, I'll have you know. I always keep any promises I make, without exception, though I may get creative with interpreting them. As for Tada..."
", she is my lover, and she didn't ever mention any relationships with you," you forthrightly tell the Spear Hero, who gasps and clutches a hand over her chest in faux-pain. "I'm actually kind of surprised about how you seem to see her."
"Alas, my poor maiden heart! Shot down before I ever had a chance to confess my feelings!" She quite obviously is joking at this point, playing up the part. "Gone through the crucible of war together, only to be torn apart by a handsome stranger taking her from me!"
You do note she doesn't let go of her weapon for a single moment throughout all of this, though.
"I am, however, a proponent of free love between any and all of my lovers," you point out with a flirtatious smile, leaning onto the table. "So it isn't like there's no way for you to be with her, you know?"
"Wait wait wait wait wait. So you're saying you... Didn't just seduce my cute little Tada-chan, you actually introduced her to a life of debauchery by bedding her with any other girls you fancy?" Matsui's gaze is almost painfully intense now, but you don't really let it bother you.
"Hey now, it's not like I push her into doing anything," you wave her off, ignoring the very obviously deadly weapon pointed in your direction. "It's just something I generally try to encourage, but I assure you Tada was entirely calculating when she decided to stop fighting for humanity. The sex was just part of it."
She blushes at your brazenness, but forges onward. "And you're saying I could- I am not going to sully my pure love for my little Tada-chan by- by selling my body for a chance to be with her!"
"And I wouldn't want you to," you agree. If she gets into your bed, she does so of her own damn volition. "I merely felt you should be aware of this information and a few of the... side benefits to being seduced by me, so to speak."
If you have to speak her language to get her to work with you, then so be it.
"I will not be so easily be swayed by honeyed words and sweet nothings!" She points at you as she borderline yells- not actually loud enough to be heard outside of the room, however, as you note. She also turns much more serious afterwards, however, from her body langue to the tone of her voice. "More importantly, what makes you think I would so easily betray everything we've all fought for for the last two years? Bled and killed for? The sacrifices of our comrades and the ones we killed ourselves?"
Finally.
"A few things, if your apparent undying love for Tada isn't enough for you," you begin. She obviously wasn't entirely serious from the start, but now you can get to the meat of the matter. "For one, the same reasons Tada herself chose not to fight me."
"And what would that be?" Matsui's much more intent mode would be unnerving if you didn't deal with much worse on a daily basis. "Please do tell, I am very interested why she would do as she did without anyone knowing."
You lean back, threading the fingers of both of your hands into each other. "Do you remember the demon lord, when you fought him as a team?"
Whoo, she immediately has to repress a shudder at the mere mention of the guy. You don't give her time to answer, though. "Tada realized that I am much, much worse than my predecessor. So much so that she immediately chose to never actually fight me because she knew I would refuse to let anyone actually do so."
Matsui's eyes narrow as she digests your words. "You wouldn't fight fair, and you'd rather sacrifice the demons than to risk an open battle."
Hey now, seems Tada's assessment of this one's intelligence as 'surprisingly sharp at times' was accurate, after all. "Bingo. I was summoned much like you heroes were, and while I'll be the first to admit I am far from as strong as my predecessor, I am still very much capable of murdering even someone with heroic powers in their sleep, of tricking them into their deaths. There's a reason Tada is the only hero that made it out of the Border Fortress alive."
"I see... She always was pretty shrewd."
"Then there's also the fact she made me promise not to kill you. You know, she did have several reasons and all that."
"Tadaaa!" And she back to her joking persona. "You're so lovely and nice!"
"So yes, anyway," you interrupt before she can get into another of her joke routines, "cards on the table, I want you to defect and come join Tada where I'm keeping her well away from combat against her comrades, as you so aptly put it. Or former comrades, anyway."
"Because of the promise with Tada-chan, whom I still protest your way of referring without honorifics to, by the way? Or because you don't want fight a hero, or because you were also summoned?"
"Bit of all of those, if I'm being honest," you say. And you always are, duh. "If I can take you out of the fight without having to go to greater lengths, that'd be the best solution from my perspective. And I'm certainly not above dangling Tada in front of you as bait for you to do so."
"Some nice bait you've chosen, then," Matsui grumbles. While lowering her spear, however. "Just saying, though, I'm not, uh... About Tada..."
"What, no tragic, broken-hearted romance up in here after all?" You smile. "Go on, say it out loud. Contrary to what one might think, I'm not a mind reader."
Or at least not one without limitations.
"I'm not... like that with her, okay? I mean, I wouldn't be opposed, but..."
"Ah," you make, slowly beginning to et a feel for the dynamics at play here. "You wouldn't say no to landing her, but you don't want to make her uncomfortable or be pushy, so you've been mostly joking around about the topic so far?"
"Nonsense, that's great news!" You tell her. Right, wasn't Japan one of those places with a thing about sexuality, like most of the Earths you know about so far? "Tada is totally into women, too, so no need to be scared about rejection on those grounds."
"That's not- Stop it, let's just not even go there okay? She's-"
"Don't want to ruin your friendship by bringing mushy feelings into it?" If it's one of those subplots straight out of a fictional story, someone better pick up the phone because you fuckin' called it.
"We've been BFFs since we were in kindergarten, okay? We've been sticking together for longer than I can even remember back, all the way through being summoned into this stupid war and fighting it all the way to the end," Matsui pouts at you. "We even thought up combo names for when we combined our powers. You can't- It doesn't get any closer than that!"
"And yet you're still afraid of letting her know about your true feelings," you sagely nod. You weren't exactly expecting to play malicious psychologist for love-troubled teens tonight, but fuck it, may as well see this through. "If we are getting into this, I'm going to have to ask; are you into girls only, or bi?"
She sputters, not having expected that line of conversation. "I- what? Both, but why does that matter?"
"Mostly to figure out whether I should shapeshift into female for a threesome with both of you, of course," you blandly note. Really, why else would you even ask? Ignoring her atomic blush, you continue. "Because let me be honest, I wouldn't mind helping you get into your very best friend's pants if that's what you really want instead of fighting."
Matsui is covering her face with both hands, blushing all the way to the base of her throat. "Please just stop..."
"What, you don't want any of this?" You ask, gesturing at yourself. "I do have some limited shapeshifting out of my original form, so if it's not too far out there..."
Her voice is reminiscent of a teapot at this point. "Stop it stop it stop it I can't stop thinking about making sweet love to my adorable Tada with your strong arms around us both! It's too much!"
You laugh at this point, patting the desk towards her side. "Sorry, sorry, my bad. Take a seat and try to calm down a bit? You can try a few of the sweets, they're good."
They really are, you tried them out well ahead of time. You especially like the red bean paste buns that only count as sweets by technicality, you think.
Doing as you suggested, Matsui tries some, and almost immediately can't help herself but smile. "Tastes just like home... Do they have Japanese-style food on the other side of the border?"
"A few things, I think? I didn't really investigate, to be honest," you idly state. "I just created all of this with one of my powers. Say hello to my little sweets fairies!"
"Hey hey hey!" "Hello hello hello!" "Hey, listen!" "Hey, listen!" "Wheeeee!" The cacophony begins immediately as the dozen or so little bodies rise into the air from where they've been sitting around until now.
"Wow!" Matsui's eyes are sparkling as she beholds them, especially as they start to waste a bunch of aura to generate a little cake with 'Welcome to the Winning Team' written on it in frosting. "They're sooo cuuute! I wholeheartedly endorse everything Tada-chan has ever done if it gets me a few of these!"
"Take it slow, we can figure all of that stuff out later," you put the brakes on. "For now, any other questions?"
"... Are you really sexy enough to be worth being in a... Getting intimate with wo adorable maidens at once?" Your answer is to roll up your shirt, doing the thing with your abs the ladies always seem to love- undulating them and making the sides twitch alternatingly.
Matsui Michi collapses onto the desk, holding her nose closed with one hand. "I can die happy now..."
Weirdo.
Luckily, you already have pretty much everything there, so all you need to do is to transfer the desk with the still uneaten sweets as well as two chairs over to Nakatani's room, not counting the one you leave Matsui to sit in as she is for the moment.
You then carry her still on it over, too, of course. No way are you going to risk her trying to sneak in by herself and probably immediately wake up the quietly sleeping hero in there, so you have to take over all of this yourself, too.
Aside from a little flailing at the start, she doesn't seem to mind, anyway.
Matsui is keeping quiet enough to let Nakatani keep on sleeping while you arrange things, and so before long you have your table laden with the same sweets as earlier and maybe two dozen sweets fairies floating around, getting in the way and eating a bunch of the sweets themselves.
At least Matsui seems to have fun watching them chow down on objects their own size, poking them a little and feeding them, even.
When you snap your fingers this time around, the reaction is immediate; jumping up out of bed in a loose outfit most likely actually intended to be used as sleepwear, the tall girl raises a one-handed sword in the direction of the sound, expression filled with concentration and intent.
When she sees the minor spectacle you've put together, though, she just looks like she's having a cramp. "Hey Nacchan, want some? This is the real deal," Matsui mumbles as she chews on some of the little sweet rice cakes.
"Matsui-chan..." Looking like she's having trouble holding back the urge to facepalm, Nakatani lowers her blade, sighing. "You have one minute to explain to me why you're in my room with a stranger and a bunch of little fairies eating rice cakes. If I am not satisfied, I will take this to be a mental assault of some sort and attack."
Instead of immediately launching into your spiel, you gesture for Matsui when she looks at you, causing her to swallow and take the next little sweet cake before answering her friend's demand. "Nacchan, this is the guy that got Tada-chan to just stop fighting. And these are his magical fairies that make the best sweets ever."
"Are they drugged?" Nakatani asks, matter-of-fact.
"Nah, just really tasty," your advocate among the two of them corrects. "So anyway, I was promised free unlimited sweets and reuniting with Tada-chan if I go with him, though he hasn't said anything about a windowless van yet."
"So he had something to do with the reversal of the war's situation?" By the glint in her eyes, you doubt Nakatani is less motivated to try and murder you right now.
"Oh yeah, he mentioned he's the new demon lord and also summoned from another world like us? I didn't really listen at that part of the explanation, the unlimited desserts were too distracting." You decide to go ahead and have a bite yourself- if this turns to violence, you don't want to waste any of the food you had your summons create.
Yes, you could just create literal tons of sweets if you really wanted by using up enough aura, but still.
Nakatani, for her part, is raising her sword again. "Is that so."
"Yeah, so I'm not gonna try and fight him if Tada-chan really decided he's too strong, so if you do start something, I'll only stab him in the back if you get the upper hand, okay?" And of course Matsui had her own plans for how this would turn out, huh?
"You're making me seriously regret not just making a cardboard cutout of Tada and luring you out of the city with it," you groan, grabbing one of the sweets fairies brainlessly flying around. "Don't suppose your bond with your closest friends is enough for you to, y'know, not?"
"We all spent two years of fighting through hell to defeat the demon lord and end this war so we could get back home," she says as she shakes her head. "I am not risking never getting to see my family again because someone else was put in the same position as us, sorry."
However, for all her bluster, she isn't attacking- at least not quite yet. Closely watching her eye movement, you move the sweets fairy you grabbed to the side, her gaze almost reflexively following it.
To the left, to the right. To the left, to the right. "Yep, Nacchan's weak to small, cute and soft things," Matsui stage-whispers theatrically. "She tries to look tough, but she's a real softie inside."
"Matsui-chan!"
Well, you have a plan now. A weakness to exploit. Rotating your wrist, you toss the aura minion in your hand right at Nakatani, only a hurried gasp and catch landing the little fairy inside her hands instead of her face. "Wheeeee! Again! Again!"
"What are you-" Instead of letting her talk, you proceed to conjure up more sweets fairies one after another, using all your aura and doing your best to keep on producing more to keep up your barrage, ordering a few of the ones you positively cover the heroine with to return so you can keep on throwing them.
Such restrained, Nakatani can't stop you from continuing negotiations on your own. "You could try, but it's kind of hopeless, really," you begin, peppering her with little bodies. "Not to brag, but if there's one thing I'm good at, it's being just very, very hard to put down. Even if you're much stronger than I am led to believe, you won't manage to bring this war to an end... Again... This time."
She's scrunching up her face, so you cover it in another fairy. "Next off, let's say you don't take the offer I'm making. How do you estimate your chances of survival in what amounts to a magical World War- and don't be mistaken, that's what this is- when someone on the other side knows to take out the heroes first of all with everything they've got?"
"That's kinda mean, don't you think?" Matsui asks, only to get a flick of her nose and a dango shoved into her mouth for the interruption.
"I'm not going to pretend I won't fight people that choose to be on the opposite side, duh," you state, going back to your fairy barrage. "And summoned or not, I wouldn't be able to go around calling myself the demon lord if I didn't have the strength to match. Then of course there's the question of whether or not you actually can go back to your previous world, isn't there?"
"What do you mean?" She has to use two hands to keeps her face clear of the fairies actively swarming her, so she's dropped her sword at her side, but Nakatani is back to talking now. "As soon as the war was won, we were supposed to-"
"And you believe that?" You've taken up juggling the sweets fairies by this point. "Not saying that it's a lie, but isn't it a little suspicious how everyone was glad to let the heroes disperse and split up as soon as the old demon lord died?" You lean towards her. "Almost like their purpose was completed and they had to be split up to dispose of them easier."
"You don't know what you're talking about," she mutters, but doesn't move still. Looks like you hit a sore spot.
"Could be, of course. I can be wrong," you allow easily. That's the joys of not always having to be right, after all. "But all the same, can you state with complete confidence that you will return to your home dimension at this rate?"
When the hero you're working on at the moment doesn't respond, Matsui once more jumps in. "Jeez, demon lord-kun, you're gonna make poor Nacchan cry! Don't be so hard on her!"
"Sorry, sorry," you immediately apologize, nevertheless satisfied by the look in Nakatani's eyes. She does, if anything, look... lost.
Almost as though she was part of an enormous war, saw people kill and die and did so herself, for a significant amount of time only to now be brought to question the reason she did all of it. Figure that.
"I just... I just want to go home," she says, voice tightly controlled. "Is that so wrong?"
"It's not wrong at all," you say gently. It helps that you're saying the truth- if your home isn't shit, obviously you'd want to go back. "The question is how you really could go back. Heck, who knows, maybe there's some kind of magic that can do it, too- I wouldn't have any idea, but it's worth a try trying to figure it out, isn't it?"
Nakatani actually takes a seat, more to steady herself than for anything else, you guess. Her hands are kneading through the mass of fairies she's gathered by this point, gathered into a huge lump despite their attempts to crawl in all directions.
"Seriously, just have a try, Nacchan!" Matsui pokes over, shoving a rice cake into her mouth. "See? They taste just like home."
You could be mistaken, but just for a moment, you think you can see Nakatani's eyes tear up just a little. Then she chews, though, and nods. "Yeah... Still yucky just like at home."
"Whaaat, this stuff is delicious! I don't see why you never admit it!" Matsui pouts at her friend.
"I just prefer western sweets, okay? It's a matter of preference." You exchange a look with your fairies, or rather, at the big ball of aura sitting on Nakatani's lap by this point.
A deluge of any kind of sweet you can think of happens.
You make it a point to make both of your new... Not quite recruits, you guys? Your new companions or whatever, anyway, eat as many sweets as they can until your fairies' aura charge runs out, going from the stuff you already made earlier to cakes and even ice cream, with cookies and brownies and other baked goods galore.
You also take the time to explain how and why you came to create the fairies in the first place- truly, the ability to eat whatever sweets you want to at any time is the one thing anyone with your powers at the time would have done. Though you don't go into the details, naturally- they don't need to know all about aura, how it works and what it does. Yet, anyway.
"I see why my Tada-chan went with you," Matsui proclaims at some point of the night, proudly puffing up her chest for some reason. "You're a very dangerous demon lord-kun."
"Oh yeah, I never did introduce myself, did I?" You ask. Rhetorically, of course. "The name's Gabriel. Gabriel Livsey. A pleasure to properly make your acquaintance."
There's an art to introducing oneself, one you often feel people simply don't get, sadly enough. The way you speak, the way you intone your name, the way you have to make your opposite believe that you're genuinely happy to get to know them.
And your smile, of course. You have to do it right, without looking forced.
Matsui, at least, seems to be affected by it. "Kyuuuuun!" Why she's making these noises of hers, though, you have no idea. "I'm sorry Nacchan, you have to go on without me... My parents warned me, but a handsome foreigner has come to sweep me off my feet!"
"Cut the crap," the black-haired hero says with a roll of her eyes, smacking her friend across the head. "Let's talk about how we'll leave the city and go live south of the border apparently, instead."
The city of Brittlehelm had been abandoned by many of its inhabitants, with stories of strange fog and monsters invading it as though purposefully spread by the first survivors that had made it to the nearest guardhouse set up along the road, causing a chain reaction as the news travelled through one fast rider to another until they reached the closest outpost, from where they were spread through all relevant channels.
Strange happenings here and there were one thing, and indeed often nothing particularly big or worrying, though still investigated by the locals as appropriate, but the apparent destruction of an entire city, with guards and churches and most of its populace missing as was confirmed in short order, the military naturally needed to react quickly.
It could be an attack, after all. Everyone knew who would always, always attack if they had an opportunity. Or it could be an actual monster attack, as the reports indicated- more akin to a natural disaster, then, but still something that hard steel and clever magic could resolve.
Or take revenge for the fallen on, at least. Humanity was very, very good at holding grudges at this point in its history.
So, as men were already in motion and flooding towards the border region of the kingdom, a subjugation or reclamation force was assembled- depending on what had happened inside the city and what had to be done inside of it. Initial scouts had found that it seemed to be a ghost town, of sorts, with not a single living soul in sight despite the bodies slowly beginning to rot in the street- and sometimes, the scouts had not returned at all.
A map was quickly drawn up with notations on such, of course. The affected areas seemed to be static, at least, meaning some of the corpses- whether they were seemingly trampled by others, torn to pieces, pierced by bone or killed by themselves or another- could be buried accordingly ahead of time.
On another note, and the reason many assumed it to be a monster or monster horde that had stormed its way into the city, were the traces to be found of such activity. Spikes of bone and longer lances of the same could be found all around and inside the city, something no known mage (human or demon) would have done, whereas strange powers and abilities such as growing massive spurs of bone as weapons and projectiles was quite possible for various kinds of monsters.
Or it could be some demon aberrant, as the vile creatures were known to produce from time to time. Or perhaps it was a new species of monsters The Enemy had somehow tamed and directed towards human civilians, for that matter. One could never know.
As it was, a full-fledged subjugation force needed to be assembled to ascertain the situation and either destroy or quarantine whatever was still causing deaths, making camp outside of the city walls for fear of the faint fog rising up over the danger zone the especially sharp-eyed among them could see on some days.
Even, as some of the grunts pulling latrine duty because they couldn't seem to keep their mouths in check whispered, a Hero had joined them from the way elsewhere, leading the soldiers sent to bring the weight of humanity's iron fist upon whatever had caused this tragedy.
Hard to tell otherwise to someone that just spent days digging mass graves and knowing many more were to come as they moved deeper into the city.
However, not all was smooth sailing. It would seem that this situation required some more in-depth research, seeing as some of the corpses littering the streets were seemingly coming back to life upon the approach of the soldiers coming to pack them into carts, imbued with fiendish strength and speed and absolutely no regard for any wounds they were taken.
It had taken a mere few days for the bodies of soldiers themselves to join the ones of the townsfolk, though at least the sight of a dead comrade's body was advance warning for most of the ones that came after them. It was quickly determined that bringing along at least one mage along with all retrieval squads was required, as it was near impossible to fight the unquiet dead off otherwise- even a trained squad could have issues, as while they were nothing more than wild animals seeking to strike at them however possible, the undead were still easily as strong as a demon, physically, and simply did not care about injuries that would limit even them.
Simply having magical support to physically destroy their bodies as quickly as possible while the ones with spears kept them at a distance reduced casualties in the early days by an enormous measure.
The phenomenon of undeath was not unknown in the world of Gaia, though rare; when a sapient being died and received no proper burial, only to be 'infected' with a specific frequency of mana, its mortal shell sometimes gained the capability to rise once more, exhibiting several of the same characteristics the ones these brave men (and women, particularly among the mages) were facing.
However, while they were untiring and dangerous, they were simply what they were, reanimated corpses. They tended to be stronger than they were in life, true, but a single armed man could defeat one with relative ease, which was the reason the study of the phenomenon was widely regarded as ineffective- a demon did not care how many times it crushed the same skull, it could defeat them with even more ease than any man.
But this was different, as the first expedition deeper into the city's affected areas showed once some of the more outlying districts had been cleansed of whatever unnaturally strong walking corpses had been found.
The first of the monstrous, mutated creatures wiping out two squads before the Archer Hero put it down exemplified as much.
Invisible. Watching. Waiting. Staying hidden until they could kill without remorse and from ambush, only to return to hiding once they were either done massacring everything in sight or dead.
For these ones, they brought entire squads of mages, and sometimes even that was not enough.
The Archer Hero, in a display of power and accuracy, had begun hunting them down, only to be interrupted by even worse; shrieking, immaterial figures began tearing out of seemingly normal surfaces, immune to anything but magic, whether in the form of spells or weapons. And still capable of inflicting a great variety of attacks on those that had to bring them down.
Or, in the Archer Hero's words: "Fucking dammit, now we have literal RPG monsters running around."
In the end, the reclamation of the once proud city of Brittlehelm would be a work of weeks, if not months, by and estimation, and the epicentre of whatever seemed to have caused the city's destruction had left behind nothing but an enormous crater, filled with more invisible horribly morphed bodies, destroyed buildings full of holes still slowly sliding into it from all around the main impact site.
Humanity would endure. Like it had always done. Even if somehow, this had been done by The Enemy's hand.
Susy watched carefully, keeping away from the one guy with the bow. She had to hide every time he was around just in case, but she wasn't gonna stay around the city for much longer anyway.
There were too many people around the outskirts now. It was getting harder to sneak around.
She still got everything she needed, though. On her back was a little pack of food that would keep a bit, with a bunch of clothes and tools tied all around her body. It was getting colder by the day, after all.
She looked up at the sky. She smiled. Maybe just a little faster than it should be.
In one hand, Susy was carrying mommy's arm, the limb a little bit used- to pry open doors and hammer open a few locked containers. But she had gotten it to work just right- sometimes, when she really concentrated, it would twitch and move just a little, and it was very much durable. She knew it was important to have good tools that didn't break; daddy had always told her that was the most important thing to look for in a new pickaxe.
She'd been at this for just a few days, but she would say her progress was very good. She was just trying to imitate what the eye and the mouth and The Eye and The Mouth and THE EYE AND THE MOUTH ANTHEYMO had done.
Susy giggled, and held a hand over her mouth. Nobody had heard her. Good.
Letting go, she picked up the shield They had left behind, the traces of Their power still on it. It wasn't going to last long, but she was going to use it as quickly as possible. Quickly finding it when she'd started to scavenge for supplies had been a lucky find, surely.
She raised her hood over her head. Time to make like a bandit. Literally.
Elsewhere, quite a few hours later and yet much earlier than one would expect, a figure was walking along a street, dragging a severed arm twitching unnaturally in the night air and a piece of wood along.
When she, for it was a young girl by any measure of the imagination, reached a particular spot on the road with particular traces around it, she let out a disturbing (and disturbed) laugh as she marched straight off into the wilderness.
"Oh bandit misters, oh bandit misters... Wherefore art thou?"
Not much later in turn, a full band of grown men would be traumatized for life, repeatedly hit over the head with a sign maybe a quarter of them could read and that somehow had a cold sweat run down their backs and, in the case of their soon former leader, emasculated by the iron grip of a shivering arm.
Yoshimoto Kimi was hailed as one of the Seventeen Heroes, but her heroic power was what some might consider a weak one, seeing as it did not grant her an extraordinary power beyond the reach of anyone else like many of the other heroes' powers did.
She could not punch someone from across the room, nor could she be bafflingly strong and tough and capable of doing massive damage with means that simply shouldn't be able to, she didn't even get to have any less flashy things like the power to perfectly analyze any foe or miraculous powers of healing beyond all a 'common' mage or cleric could achieve.
Of course, anyone actually making this assertion would earn nothing but scorn from her. Her power was to literally learn magic, and magic was perfectly all-powerful on its own already.
She could increase her mana pool (that was what she was calling it, regardless of the documentation she read on the topic) just by using it, and her ability to grasp anything on the topic of magic she was taught was supercharged, too. Just like that, she was a serious powerhouse in her own right, with her only true limitations in a practical session being her creativity with the spells she had and her ability to remember them at all.
Something she was suspicious her power might also help with on the sly.
Attack magic? She could choose from dozens of optimized spells at any moment, deploying them with ease. Healing magic? She just needed different spells for different injuries, diseases, poisons or whatever else. Easy. Defensive magic? First thing she'd plumbed the Royal Library and the Central University of Magic's archives for and then made her own spells on top. Supportive? Pshaw, she could turn a puppy into a mankiller with ease if she so wanted.
She'd just ended up... really learning any spells she could find, really. And when she thought that having a spell she couldn't find would be useful, she'd just formulated it herself. It took a good bit longer to 'learn' new spells this way, but in the end it was really just... science. Applying the math, so to say.
So there she was, sitting in her study and staring blankly at the piece of paper she was writing the details of her latest attempt at an interdimensional gate out. It wasn't going to work, of course, but she didn't expect it to; it was just that to arrive at a solution, failures were to be expected on the way.
She'd just do what she could with what she got. And keep on going no matter how long it took her. Though...
Yes, she wasn't making any real progress at the moment. Standing up, Yoshimoto went over to the door, exiting into a hallway consisting of bare stone.
She'd made her little research base herself once she'd returned to the capital, digging into the ground and fortifying it with magic and enchantments of all kinds. It wasn't that she didn't trust anyone in the city or anything; she merely preferred the quiet solitude when she was working.
That and the apparent 'issues' with returning the summoned Japanese back to their own world. They'd gone and defeated the demon lord, like they'd been asked, but apparently that wasn't good enough in hindsight.
And she wasn't going to rely on anyone that had to alter deals after the fact, one way or the other. So she'd settled in to spend the next few decades of her life trying to experiment and get this to work so she and any of the others that wanted to could return home already.
With nothing to base this off of, however, and interdimensional physics being quite a bit beyond what high school education she had to call upon, a few decades were an optimistic estimation.
She looked in on her kitchen. Breakfast was prepared by the enchanted cookware she had installed inside, so she took a seat and got to eating.
If only she had some way to create coffee. All the magic in the world, and no way to liven up her spirits like only the divine juice of the gods could.
First thing every mage learned when they started being taught how spells worked, never directly affect your own mind. It never turned out well.
As for others' minds, well... A lot of options existed, truth be told. More than Yoshimoto was honestly comfortable with. Not that she was going to condemn their existence, of course, it was all a matter of how someone used them over anything else.
She fired off a quick prayer that what had happened wasn't her fault, but the missing girl had gone off just after she had done something to her, so... Anyway, time for some more magic.
That's right, she'd agreed to help with research and development at the Central Academy of Magic from tomorrow onward, hadn't she? On a few weekdays, at least.
Urgh, she should get back to trying to make a magical dayplanner again. Maybe then she'd have an easier time remembering things she wasn't as enthusiastic about as magic.
A quick look into her personal archives to make sure they were all in order, then she'd get back to formulating whatever project she wanted to focus on next, aside from her background experiments with dimensions. Even if the bookshelves did take... quite a bit of space.
She kept on trying to remember to clean them up and sort a few of them out, but she was going to procrastinate until she couldn't just add more shelves at the far end, she was already sure of it. And with some subtle space magic, she could get some mileage out of where she'd dug her research bunker directly under the royal castle.
Tada Mizuki was already waiting in the courtyard when Gabriel was slated to return, with her two best friends in tow (and yes, Nakatani-chan had earned herself that rank, even if she sometimes forgot to include her). The sun was about to come up, but it wasn't like she really needed that much sleep lately anyway, so she was simply sitting on a big stone bench chiseled with lots of creepy imagery.
Why anyone would ever want reliefs of dragons burning down villages, she would never understand, but demonstrably not all demon lords had taste in their choice of architecture.
Of course, when it happened, it happened very fast. One moment she was sipping some tea one of the nice maids had brought for her to keep herself warm while she was sitting outside, the next a giant owl was diving at her, her friends held in its talons, with weapons and armor on them.
"TAADAA-CHWAAAN!" And of course Matsui-chan was in full blast as always. "I MISSED YOU I WUV YOU WUV YOU WUV YOU!!!"
Tada sighed, getting up to receive the thrown heroine and best friend. Matsui-chan was taller than her, so it looked kind of ridiculous when she ended up holding her waist with both hands above her head, limbs flailing. "Hey, Matsui-chan. You been doing alright?"
"I missed you so much, Tada-chwaaan!" The overbearing blonde began raining pats with down on Tada's head with both of her palms, looking for all the world immensely pleased with herself. "The flight here was so bad, let me tell you, there wasn't any onboard service or snacks and Nacchan was just quietly developing her feather fetish the whole time! It was super creepy!"
"Excuse me, but I do protest," the calmer of her two friends interjected, dropping securely down onto her feet once the owl released her. "Gabriel-san is just very fluffy in this form, so I took advantage while I could."
"Do we need to hold an intervention to keep you from taking advantage from him then?" Tada joked, though she really mostly just pleased her friends hadn't changed a single bit since they'd split up so she could investigate what had Yoshitani in such a fuss. She knew Matsui-chan had just gone off to keep Naka-chan company in her stead and still felt a little indebted about it, but Naka-chan really didn't seem like she could stand to be around the last battlefield they'd fought on any longer back then.
Off in the background, the owl turned back into Gabriel-san, shrinking and twisting. The sounds were kind of disgusting, actually, but she did her best not to let herself be affected. "You should see me in my cat form," Gabriel joked, "I have to ration its uses because everyone thinks it's way too cute."
""You have a cat form?!"" Everyone present asked.
The 'weapons trio' (she still felt the name that their group had been given was stupid, they weren't the only ones to focus their styles around a specific weapon, what the heck) didn't often let anyone know, but they all were huge fans of funny and cute cat videos. That was how Naka-chan had joined Tada and Matsui-chan's friend group when they'd met in high school.
Almost without thinking about it, they all lined up from tallest (Naka-chan) to shortest (Tada, much as she was annoyed she was so short), looking at Gabriel-san. ""Pleeeaaase?""
"... I can already see how you three are gonna be a handful, huh?"
Taking stock of your supplies and the state of your operations, it would seem that the production of magical materials, as you started before riding off, is beginning to bear fruit, even if slowly. Then again, it's been maybe a couple of days, so you aren't too worried about it quite yet.
You do, however, go ahead and replace the piece of jewelry Rose lent you with the small chunk of adamantite you found, taking care of that. And make sure to wash it before you return it, of course. Thoroughly.
Next up, a good bit of biomass is available again, not enough to create some enormous undead like you have plans lying around for, but enough to work with, at least. It's something.
In other news, things have been going well, with a few rumours going around about you and manipulated by Sarah, who has taken it as a personal challenge to set the record straight about you as far as the public talks about the topic of your reign. It always is nice to know things are going well for her.
Sitting on your room's bed with Sarah on your lap, gently stroking her belly you can already feel new (un)life developing inside of, you pepper her neck and ears with kisses as you usually do when you have some alone time with her.
Your love for your family is obvious, but you want to make sure that every member of it is constantly reassured of its magnitude, both the ones you're basically married to at this point and the ones not yet born.
Your kids are gonna be adorable. And wonderful. And the most amazing little people in the world- in any world you go to.
However, that is not enough. "Hey Sarah," you whisper, "did we ever figure out if this dimension's magic can be used to ease childbirth or childcare?"
Your sister's response is to sigh as she leans back into you. "Are you still on about that? You know, there's a point where it stops being endearing how worried you are about having kids."
"We all have our weaknesses. I will gladly admit this is mine," you reply without an ounce of shame.
"Jeez, what am I ever going to do with you... And yes, I've actually looked into it. Stop grinning like that."
You absolutely won't stop smiling stupidly at just how similar you and Sarah are.
"Thing is, I figure there's no real point- I'm pretty sure giving birth is going to be much easier for our kind than for humans and demons or whatever," she continues once you soothe her spirits by stroking her shining hair a little. "So while there's spells and potions that one can take to ease it, aura and base biology is going to take care of most of that already."
"And once they're born?" You as while making a note to acquire a few of those potions and have them ready at all times just in case.
"It's mostly a matter of easily available healing magic that keeps infant mortality down in this world, especially for humans," your sister explains, grabbing one of your hands and pushing it down her stomach again. "One reason they have such a huge population. Aside from that, it's mostly the same as you'd imagine, just that people have a few magical toys for kids. It's apparently easy to enchant certain crystals and the likk to display lights and stuff."
"... Wait, they've got holographic magic?" If so, that's pretty neat, for more than one purpose.
"Not really, no. It's more like mood lamps, for the most part. No real precision to speak of, so at most they can show different colors." Still getting on your internal shopping list. "They also take mages to enchant, of course, so it's not like they're cheap or anything."
"Still, nothing but the best for our children," you say as you give her a peck on the cheek. "Also, how long are you three going to listen in?"
A bump can be heard from the door, followed by two more. It slowly swings open, revealing the trio made of Tada, Matsui and Nakatani lying in various poses of 'just fell over'.
"Hahaha, since when did you notice us?" Matsui asks.
"From the start, obviously. If it wasn't you, I'd have started killing everything beyond that door already."
"These two dragged me into it," Nakatani says, a 'what can you do' look on her face as she dusts off her legs.
"Nevermind that, you're having a child?!" Tada inquires. "Isn't Sarah-san your sister?"
"I am, and I can speak for myself," said sister faintly smiles at their antics. "And yes, we're having kids. Not like there's any laws against that."
"Uhm, but aren't you-"
"No," Sarah cuts off the question. "Not human anymore, and even if there was a law against it in this dimension, we'd just break it anyway."
"That's right, show 'em, Sarah," you cheer her on.
Seriously, this is some prime Saturday evening entertainment going on.
"Uuugh, this is super up there in the things my parents warned me to never do, you know?" For all her complaining, Matsui is drinking the blood you feed her without stopping (while you had her and Nakatani there already). "Going with a weird gaijin and drinking his stuff..."
"It's not like it's particularly unpleasant, just think of the power you're getting in exchange," you wave her off, keeping up the steady stream of hemokinetically controlled blood. "If you put your all into it, you may even catch up with Tada!"
"Yeah, about that, why is our color scheme broken like this?" You have absolutely no idea what Matsui's on about. "Tada-chan's got white soul stuff, Nacchan's got black, but I've got orange? How completely out of nowhere is that?"
Ahh, aura colors. "Just think of it as the thing to let you stick out? What would have even wanted?"
"To have grey! Or some black and white mosaic!"
You sigh. "This is literally the color of your soul. Just... Just take it for what it is."
Next to her, Nakatani nods. "I like your color, okay? No need to pout about it."
"Nacchaaan! You are my only hope in this dreadful world drowned in despair!" And there she goes again, throwing her arms around her friend. Who, in turn, just waits for her to be done.
When Okita and Emily went off to fight whatever monsters had apparently massively increased their numbers in the demon nation's heartlands, the assumption had initially been that they would go there, take care of things and then return. It was, after all, just a bunch of monsters.
Reality, of course, was far from the idealized quick job it could have been. When they arrived with their escort of demon soldiers, what they found was less a forested region consisting mostly of what few grasslands there were to be found, and instead an overgrown mess of weeds teeming with small monsters wherever one looked.
Apparently, this was a known phenomenon. The ambient mana levels were high enough that a massive wave of growth broke out whenever a sufficient amount of monsters spread out and added their own emanations to the issue.
Bright side, it would go back to normal once a sufficient amount of monsters were defeated, and the mana all around meant that some crops could easily be farmed and harvested all throughout winter with little issue- to demons, the seasons were apparently completely unimportant, domestically speaking, simply due to their extreme resistances to temperature changes and lifestyles.
So they got to work. And by that Emily meant using her power to methodically burn down the weird magical plantlife, forcing the things living inside it out to be killed by Okita while the demon guys just stood in the back and watched. They were making some good progress, too- the plants were somehow resistant to fire meaning they couldn't just burn everything down in one go, but she could burn large swathes into the area they were trying to work on.
Then the fucking dinosaurs happened. Resistant to fire, scaled, big and kind of what a kid opening up a random book on them might imagine them to look like, with spiked tails, huge maws and teeth and big bodies just charging right at their group.
They got killed by Okita. She seemed to be having fun, so good on her.
Similarly, she also killed the giant praying mantises, the weird animals that attacked by shooting spikes of bone out of their bodies, the little green fuckers the demons identified as goblins (Emily just called them the uggos, though) and any other monster that came charging as soon as they realized people were there.
Trolls, ogres and the like also happened, though those Emily could just set on fire a lot until they died easily enough. There were also giant bird monsters, small bird monsters, some kinds of moving venomous mushrooms, more overgrown lizards, some monsters that could use some form of instinctive magic, apparently and more. She had perfect memory and all, but going through all of them would just be tedious nonetheless.
In short, Okita was having a lot of fun hacking apart a whole bunch of different kinds of monsters, because according to her it was 'fun' to do so. Oh, and she spent a bit just poking a few slimes, gelatinous masses of soft flesh held together with magic (probably) she called 'a little cute'.
Also, Emily wasn't even going to get into the insane killer deer. Nope.
Upside, the couple of farming villages their group found were pretty welcoming, even helping in showing them to the current hunting grounds and taking apart the corpses of the more worthwhile monsters. Methodically killing a bunch was apparently a proud tradition in the whole area, and anyone that came there to make some good money was helping keep the fields fertile by doing so, as she understood it.
... So yeah, that's about how things are going over here, Emily finishes up her little report. We're making some good progress, but I think we'll need a few more days to really stamp this shit out last I asked one of the locals. Turns out mana overflow is a nearly yearly occurrence anyway.
Gotcha, and good luck on the rest of the hunting, you send back. You're kind of relying on her to tell you how things are proceeding, seeing as how Okita is... Less than adequate when it comes to letting you know things.
Fun. Lots of more killing. See, you get from that she likes the fact she's increasing her weird damage multiplier thing against various kinds of creatures, but she's still rather sparse on details all around compared to what Emily can tell you if you so much as ask.
On a related note, your Watchers, the flying undead you imbued with a particular spell to summon giant chunks of ice onto your enemies' heads, are doing their thing quite nicely here and there, wherever they can find a sizeable detachment of soldiers moving around.
It's not exactly a surefire way to kill, unfortunately, at least after the first day or two; already, your enemies have men keeping an eye on the sky at all times, letting their mages counteract the ice meteors falling into their general direction.
Mostly by conjuring some kind of forcefield in the way to safely redirect the projectile, even if it breaks in the process. At least that seems to be their main method of deflecting them, your undead have seen other ways from shooting explosive spells at it to growing big trees in the middle of the road to catch them.
For this same reason, your Watchers have also taken more than their fair share of spellfire, but nothing actually big enough to bring them down. Turns out the usual reaction to sighting one is to watch out for the direction of the attack first, negate it second and retaliate at a distant third.
A couple hundred casualties from before they managed to figure this out can confirm it's probably the best solution. Turns out having every part of your body crushed by a giant chunk of ice isn't very conducive to your health, figure that.
Also, dealing with the big ice chunks when they manage to land on the streets supposed to be kept clear seems to be pretty annoying and consume time, which in itself is worth it as far as you're concerned.
The meeting this time is a bit shorter than your usual, mostly because many parts of the overall situation you're in are mostly the same compared to as far as a few days ago. Bunch of humans still coming at you, demons still kept quiet by the fact things haven't fallen apart so far.
Simply put, you have two big tasks right now: Keep the Border Fortress in demon hands, so as to avoid a reversal of the war's current strategic situation, and strike at humanity to weaken it in preparation of your eventual counterattack.
That's it, really. Of course, the pretty enormous army marching into the Border Fortress' direction right now does complicate the entire affair somewhat, but nobody said things would be easy. Not that they have to be hard, you just need to approach them correctly.
Generally speaking, so long as you have the border in your hand, you have the advantage, that much is clear and obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together on either side of it. Just having taken it in the first place gives you a lot of clout- but also will have your foes amass their best men and women to oppose you on every level they can.
More importantly, the current state of affairs is giving you a lot of freedom on what to do. The full army marching to gather against you is currently delayed quite a bit, thanks to your recent activities and a few storms you may or may not have whipped up while you were in the area, and so you have some time to work with to further your objectives.
Time which is, as anyone that's ever been in a fight, worth more than any amount of gold, or whatever precious resource one is inclined to use in the current culture.
Ride out to further sabotage the enemy, weakening their army, prepare traps and obstacles to delay them from actually coming at the Border Fortress even longer, assassinate key figures and commanders, turn or remove enemy heroes, destroy infrastructure to keep critical supplies from reaching them, increase the fighting forces on your side... The sky's the limit for the moment, really. Or, of course, you could take a day or so and see what your eldritch acquaintance is up to and needs your help with and see if perhaps they could aid you in your plans as well.
Then again, it's apparently not really time sensitive, so it isn't like you're in any hurry about that whole thing.
Obviously enough, while holding back an entire army of half a million people (still quite a lot of human sacrifices marching at their direction, for all that they effectively were sacrifices) singlehandedly would be a bit much to ask for, that's no reason not to do what you can do in this regard; harassing and sabotaging the enemy is probably the best use of your own time at the moment.
To that end, your first step will naturally be to return to the Border Fortress once again, just like your plan was before your unplanned return to the Royal Capital- the two newly turned heroes will likely stay around and just acclimatize to their new circumstances for a while, meaning you don't really need to worry about them while Tada takes care of everything, so that at least is taken care of.
Your carriage, incidentally, has already arrived at your location, having been ordered by you to return to the capital so you could head back again in style.
Now then, as you have nothing particularly urgent to do where you are, but all the more so over where you just came from to make your delivery, you head off with all due haste, once you're done giving everyone around that deserves one a hug before you do.
Next stop, the Border Fortress, to determine where you head from there.
The already familiar trip to the Border Fortress goes by quickly, thanks to how engaged you get in using your Shadowstep spell to move from one end of your bone carriage to the next while adding small variations to the metaphysical way you are doing so- it's the equivalent of fiddling with some video game management simulator until your factory is just those couple percent more efficient, but it's actually useful so you immerse yourself in changing the way you apply the spell as hard as you can.
Nevertheless, for all that you can spend literal hours upon hours concentrating on something once you really get into it, you think you have made some noticeable improvements by the time you once again arrive at the Border Fortress. Perhaps you should try to spend less time in transit between various locations, given just how much of the timespan you can be in this dimension at a time it eats up, but on the other hand, there's not really much you can do about the necessity of it as it stands.
Unless you were to, say, build a massive network of teleporters and radio stations or the like, but like hell are you going to do so in a place where it is actually possible for your opposition to steal your secrets and use them against you.
Same reason you don't have massive robot armies over on Earth Bet (yet) and can't just teleport around the globe on your home dimension.
So then, once your transport is once again stowed away (with the emergency rations you have stockpiled inside of it, of course), you go over your to-do checklist. First off, you're switching the weather out a bit; you've had a couple of storms blowing northwards happening for a bit now, the aftereffects still going on in the atmosphere by the time you get back and easy enough to pick back up on, but now you're leaning further into the already approaching winter, working towards lowering the temperature and causing more snow in the coming days.
It's slow, as these kinds of things always are, but that's just how it is.
Reorganizing and sending out the undead you seeded all over the territory directly to the north of your current position, you nod to yourself, just taking a quick look around the fortress itself before you move on. Fun fact, now with your enhanced senses you can actually see a couple of soldiers that you managed to entrap within its walls completely by accident when you conquered it, most of them already starved to death by this point.
Heh.
Next stop, the area you guess the enemy will be gathering inside of in preparation for their big assault. And, of course, getting back to your feathered monstrous form, to use the lingering effect of the places you pass through to your advantage.
Hey, if it works to unnerve people, it's a good thing.
You survey a lot of area, making note of the terrain- say what you want, but humanity has very much been used to taking this place as a staging ground, with lots of easy to take open ground where it can use its numbers against any forward forces, organize large armies as it seems to prefer and set up defenses against counterattacks as required.
You're even pretty sure they must've even removed hills and the like at some point, given how flat and even the terrain is compared to its surroundings.
Either way, all this does is make it easier for you to spread the effect of your presence around, all the while avoiding the soldiers already hard at work preparing a semi-permanent camp out in the plains far enough from the fortress to be reasonably safe from the defenders therein. It's really just a scouting force in truth, a first barebones crew preparing for the main force.
Not unlike the setup during the invasion you fought back when you first came to this dimension. Seems to be standard strategy for Thulian humans, unless you're mistaken. All the same, it's not really a large enough force to be worth attacking, more bait to see what happens than anything.
So you ignore them for the most part, instead wandering around the nearby area. There is quite a lot of vegetation, but nothing bigger than a few bushes- the plants in this whole area have had some time to grow, but not very much.
May also be related to mana and the fact it seems to be omnipresent and increasing the growth of various kinds of organisms in this dimension, but you're really no expert on this stuff.
Aside from that, it's actually a pretty pleasant and uneventful stroll through the night. There's very few monsters in the area, and pretty much none of them are eager to try and annoy you in your enormous birdman form, so you complete your objective without too much incident.
Annoyingly, no really big detachments of the human forces are within range of any of your flying semblance summons as of yet, as in the range they can fly out before simply dissolving due to aura consumption, so you can't really do much in that direction yet.
Once your monster form's duration has been used up for the time being, you naturally begin with the next step of your preparations, the night far from over for you. Getting high up in the air isn't particularly hard or anything at this point, giving you a nice overview of the same place you just traipsed through down on the ground.
Next off, you begin to cast. "Raise a wall of ice and frost so none may pass!" Again and again you chant the same spell, raising wall after wall. The ice you conjure, growing out of the ground as it is, is sloped, stretched towards the fortress and littered with short, but nasty spikes all over it.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, you have gone out of your way to create an easily deployed field of spikes. The spell is actually pretty versatile like this, and thanks to the weather conditions (that you have caused) the ice will remain for a good long while.
Sure, the spikes may also become ineffective if more ice manages to add itself onto them, but that's a risk you're willing to take. Worst case scenario you're still looking at very uneven ground hidden under ice and snow, making it very treacherous indeed to approach, and that's all you can ask for at the moment.
Also, this really really brings back memories from the first time you visited this dimension. Good old times, when you first deployed mustard gas and all. Sure, you're doing some widespread preparations much further ahead of time, but still, a guy can think back and smile.
Incidentally, you also considered digging pitfall traps, but you don't really have any ways to do so efficiently enough to be worth the bother to do it personally. Attempts to use Yoshi's power failed despite you framing it every way you could imagine; it's really geared towards putting together raw materials into a finished product, whereas this would require digging away (mildly frozen) soil. Annoying, but expected.
You still have more than enough area to cover to last you until sunrise even so, however, randomly varying the distance between sloped spike boards or however one wants to call these things. Setting up a bunch of traps for later, ahh, if only you were to up and play the part of an ambush predator it be just like in your youth. As in, relative to your undeath and second life and all.
It hasn't even been a year, and yet so much has happened... Time really flies, doesn't it?
It is through quite a bit of time and effort, as well as a bloodbath worthy of a military tribunal or two (if civilization in this world had any of those, that is, or at least any that involve massacres of the other side's population), but you have for a while now found that you have a much easier time mentally connecting to the souls you have incorporated into yourself.
Specifically, where it once took some effort and attention to telepathically connect to the souls of the ones you ate, it is now as easy as breathing, to the point you can set up and keep as many connections open as you so please, making a few administrative tasks much easier than they would have been before- that is, if you'd ever bothered to deal with your inner world beyond what you need from it in the first place.
It also doesn't give you some bullshit infinite multitasking either, so although you can contact as many as you want at once, you can only really actively keep up with maybe one or two dozen at any given time, though switching those in and out is indeed child's play to the current you.
Then there's your ability to sort of define 'nodes' in the network your subconscious hold on the souls of the deceased has evolved into over time, particular individuals kept inside your stomach that can then take a sort of 'sub-commander' role insofar as you can allow them to stay in contact with a subset of other souls to convey information and thoughts to you in turn.
It's basically the building blocks of a sort of hivemind structure, where you can rely on those souls directly subordinate to you to relay any significant information or thoughts those under them have to you in turn (seeing as they have no choice but to obey your orders both direct and general).
Only issue is, you don't really give all that much of a fuck what the souls inside you are thinking or doing, and if the gathering of what you have simply termed soul cultists outside of the barred doors of the throne room you're currently sitting inside of as you work your way through everything that's happening says something, it is that you still don't want to do so.
You have no idea how they even found you where you are- the various screens throughout the palace only show what you experience with your actual body in the real world, so their continued ability to sniff you out in this place is vexing at the best of times. Then again, maybe you should just make them stop- but on the flipside, they're literally praying to you, as you can sometimes hear.
And say what you want, but your little god complex is something you have been carefully nourishing over the time ever since you rose from the grave. So ultimately, you'll just leave them as they are and make use of your power's new extents as they come up.
In other words, you'll just go on ahead and wing it, like you pretty much always do. It's worked so far.
The situation for certain bands of deserters has been... tumultuous lately, to put it like that. Having fled from the defeat at the plains in the demons' heartlands and the lucky few that managed to run out the other side of the Border Fortress when it became clear you were wiping everything inside out starting from where you entered, these (un)lucky souls found themselves confronted with the choice of whether to return to whatever regiments they would be thrown into if they rejoined the rest of the military in dishonor and shame or to try and survive as disparate bands of armed men out in the wilderness.
The ones you're concerned about today are the ones that chose the latter, for one reason or another.
Mostly off in some ragged camps in the wilderness, they are trying to live off the land in one way or another. An interesting aspect of banditry in human lands is that it is much more common further up north, where the constant threat of demonkind isn't as immediately present for the common man and therefore the uniting hatred and determination to exterminate their opposite number doesn't burn quite as brightly.
Hence, it is more common when harvests are bad and times are hard for certain young men to go out and ensure their and their families' survival one way or another, as opposed to the southern holdings which usually just send their young people off to war or at least the army, where they can get some decent pay some of which they then send back home.
It's a whole system, apparently. Anyway, to get back to the topic, while banditry is more common the further north one goes, more than enough of the survivors of your massacres are from the north themselves, hence they quickly made this jump. Of course, very few of the bands out there immediately jumped to robbing travelers and assaulting villagers, more focused around trying to make a semi-honest living without returning to civilization for fear of being pressed into service again, but there's only so many men that can feed themselves by hunting and scavenging, especially seeing how winter is fast approaching.
They need provisions, they need warm clothes and they need places to live that are more sophisticated (and warmer) than a bunch of tents, if they're lucky enough to have even that much. And then there's keeping their equipment in good order outside of the context of a fully supplied army, keeping discipline... They're basically spiraling towards the place you want them to be, that of the ruthless bandits surviving only by what they can rob from others.
Only issue is, the whole process is going too slow. You need them to get desperate and robbing military supplies now, instead of the middle of winter when things will be cleared up one way or the other already anyway.
Hence your current initiative, calling up Rose and having her guide you to the approximate location of the groups her agents have indirectly taken leadership over through the souls you gave out to them for this very purpose, otherwise simply hiding in the area and ensuring no issues occur with their various missions. You know the right codewords to say, you know where to search for them, all that truly remains is going along with the charade and convincing the former soldiers to turn on their former comrades.
Nothing easier than that.
With the right passphrases to get Rose's people to just tell you what they found out about the bands they're responsible for through their puppets, it is child's play for you to simply walk into various bandit camps, openly calling the men gathered in them together to deliver your little speeches.
And what speeches they are! You really put your all into them, using the knowledge you brought and what you can glean off of the men themselves by looking into their eyes to know their deepest fears. You tell them of the unfairness of the world, of how the nobles lord it over their lessers and take the fruits of their labours for themselves all the time, whether on the fields of the farms of the battlefields of the war going on eternally anyway. You tell them of how they were sent out to die just like every generation before them, and before and before and before, and how it wasn't ever going to do anything for them, as opposed to those that sent them out.
You tell them of how winter approaches, and how they will need to act right away, before they freeze and starve and die a dog's death dozens of times over. Of how the war was continuing, and how nobody was expecting nor would care all that much, surely, if they were to make off with a few supplies here and there. May as well get the pay they were still owed for the time they'd served another way, no?
Some agree right away, never having been bastions of morality in the first place. Some are thoughtful, or as thoughtful as a peasant in a society that prizes hardworking and unquestioning peasants over those that make trouble when they don't have any magic talent to make up for it. Some are opposed, but those you work over a little more with little issue- it isn't like anything you're telling them is untrue, after all, and simple self-preservation against a world that seems like it is determined to bring you down due to events and choices you consider outside of your control is a powerful motivator once you really press into it.
And if all that fails, well, you certainly aren't above riling up the other men to get them to silence any dissenting voices, one way or the other. Get them started on their new career path, as it were.
You naturally don't manage to find all groups out there in the wilderness, not even Rose's trained agents have managed to sight all of them, scattered in all directions as they are, but you'd say you've made some good progress in this regard. And as for the details, well...
For the time being, the various bands you are aware of will be staying as they are, but put into contact with each other, with the simple men among them completely unaware this is being accomplished through Rose's people, who you all thrall the quick and dirty way, leaving behind some of your blood for them to slowly sip and join the telepathic network, and grant aura to, having been assured that each of them is completely loyal and professional enough to be trusted with it.
You aren't too worried, you'd just be somewhat annoyed if your enemies somehow managed to get their hands on aura themselves. This stuff is somewhat of a game changer, but you can easily give it to your own people to make them even stronger than they already are in relation to humans easily enough.
So they will be striking at targets of opportunity, all the while calling for help when the army closes in on them or they spot a good target they'd need some more sword arms for, or spear arms of whatever may be the case. The whole idea is to do pretty much the same thing humanity has been doing for generations, decentralizing them so as to ensure that even if a cell or two is summarily wiped out the rest will remain around and continue to act in your stead out and around the border region.
You, on the other hand, are simply known to them as the bandit that's going around doing just that, getting the groups that feel they have a bite to take out of the army in touch with each other. No name, no real identity you share beyond that, and you always make sure to keep the humans in the dark as to your real appearance and affiliation, using a cloak and some minor shapeshifting as required.
Oh, and before you forget, you also went ahead and left a couple of your semblance minions with the demon agents. Carnage mentioned she wanted to get some more action, and although it isn't with you, she gets to mess up a bunch of your enemies instead! And also a couple of others, naturally. A few Osteas, the osteokinetic minion proving just extremely useful in lots of ways, really, a few of the little dragons like the one you gave out to Ren back on Remnant... Really just whatever seems like it'll be useful.
And lots of additional eyes everywhere, of course, reporting directly to yourself at all times. Did you ever mention just how absurdly useful your semblance is? Because it really, really is.
Good work all around, you'd say. Even if you keep getting this niggling feeling in the back of your head, like something that could have happened just barely didn't... It's really hard to describe.
Getting some decent amounts of biomass together takes a bit of doing, given the area you're in and your hesitance to just returning to the Border Fortress only to use those slowly rotting bodies still hidden inside of the stone block traps' maze, but you can manage easily enough thanks to a bear that donates its body to the progress of science.
Or your evil empire-to-be's undeath program. Same difference.
That and a couple of small monsters has you provided with everything you need. And really, just a little bit of experimentation later, a few hours at most, you have what you are going to call a biteworm on the ready- an undead, worm-like creature with a very big pair of chompers indeed.
Say whatever you want, but your ability to customize different kinds of undead for different circumstances is indeed quite handy. This particular monstrosity will be used as an underground attacker, digging through the earth under your enemies' feet and surfacing in showers of gore due to the poor fucker that gets to be its first victim, if you have anything to say about it.
Their jaw strength is certainly sufficient to cut through iron like butter, with your seal of approval. Only issue might be that these things take a bit longer to prepare, due to just how much muscle you need to wrap around their core and the exoskeletons you have to manually create, but once you have them going, they should serve as yet another unpleasant surprise for your foes.
So then, with the sun down and light out for most of the world around you, it is time for you to once more interfere with your foes' operations! Specifically, you are somewhat frequenting that one township mainly used as a depot for supplies and waystation for soldiers, so you may as well get in there and find yourself something you can work with.
You're mainly thinking about just dumping a bunch of your cursed blood inside some kind of water supply or whatever they're using to keep soldiers hydrated around here. Could very well be they're just using thin ale or something to take advantage of alcohol's propensity to keep itself drinkable where simple water would have long since been contaminated with bacteria and shit much like people in antiquity did even back on Earth Bet- though with everything else going on, you wouldn't be too surprised if they had some magical solution to the problem anyway.
So there you are, taking a closer look around. The town is a bit quieter at night than in the day, you'd assume, though still bustling with activity; people and material are being moved this way or that, a constant buzz of movement and energy filling any place you care to see.
However, what you do care about finding isn't any of that, and so you start to really search once you arrive. It isn't like they have 'Water Supply' written somewhere on a conveniently available street shield, but it can't be that hard to find, right?
Turns out it can, or at least it's taking you longer than a couple of minutes. Kind of frustrating, but you've never given up just because you need to waste a bunch of time on simpler things like this.
On the contrary, you're actually quite good at mindless labour, now that you think about it. You just avoid it if you can.
And so you just move around town, using your shapeshifting and swiftness to your advantage... Until you find something.
Not exactly what you were looking for, but it's something, at least?
One of the quite numerous warehouses all over the place is currently accommodating, as you can see through the figure of moving blood within, a single person, something that while not quite the completely usual is at least not particularly unusual in this place, either.
What does bring your attention to focus on this person, however, are the details. In this case, the fact this person is sitting down on something, their heartbeat quickened as their legs are spread wide open.
And, of course, the things your other senses can pick up on. Chief among them the quiet gasps and hastened breathing of a woman currently getting herself off- naturally, you must go and investigate with all due haste! Someone could be in need of assistance, after all.
Easily infiltrating under the guise of a shadow, what you find is about what you were already halfway expecting; a redheaded woman is having the whole place for her own is pleasuring herself freely, not bothering to keep it down in the empty warehouse.
Not that empty, of course, with several wooden crates and the like standing around everywhere, but no other people, which seems to be her main prerequisite. Her clothes, or at least most of them, are neatly folded off to the side, leaving the shapely woman in just a few bits and pieces. Notably, she's actually wearing a bra made of soft leather, though it's halfway pulled down off her bouncy chest already.
One hand between her legs, two fingers rhythmically pushing between her lower lips, the other is pinching a nipple, a decorated sword lying off to the side. She's objectively quite beautiful, so you don't really see any need not to go over and say hello.
You don't bother to do anything fancy, instead simply getting up out of the shadows outside of her field of vision and adjusting your clothes. By which you mean you unbutton your pants, letting your cock flop out as it rapidly hardens.
When you come upon her, you do so stroking yourself and quite obviously looking at her, letting your actions speak for themselves. "What- Who are you?! This warehouse is-"
You cut off the panicked attempt at asserting authority off by closing in on her, pushing a hand through her bright red hair. A blush spreads on her cheeks, so you take that as a sign to lean in and kiss her.
Gabe...
I know, Sarah, it's happening again, you reply to your sister, who naturally knows what you're doing due to you transmitting everything that's going on with you to her at all times. In my defense, I'm just going with the moment.
It can't be helped. Sarah just can't seem to stay calm for longer periods of time without contact with you, so this is kind of the solution you came up with to keep her happy while you're having fun playing war.
Back to the present. Stealing the woman's breath in the same moment you let up, you look deep into her shocked, wide-open eyes, listening to her breathe for a long moment.
Then you reposition, still fixating her. The redhead is completely quiet, not wanting to break the moment by speaking up, even as your hands roam her soft body, feeling and teasing her all over.
Her legs remain spread, but now they twitch, hesitantly moving towards you in clear invitation. Not one to disappoint a lady, you come closer, molding your body against hers. You have to lift her up a little, but her butt proves to be a perfectly adequate cushion for her to sit on your hands with, and soon you go back to making out with her in the middle of this random warehouse.
When you push inside, you do it slowly, but insistently, her hot folds enveloping your cock eagerly and easily thanks to how much she's already worked herself over, wet and quivering and sucking you in. With her hands around your back, you can immediately start thrusting, making sweet love to the woman whose name you don't even know.
She seems to be having some trouble regulating her salivation, seeing how much she's slobbering all over your lips every time you go in to kiss her, kind of reminding you of how Sarah used to do the same thing every time you fed her. You can't help yourself; you chuckle, kneading her ass and tasting her tongue on yours.
That is a perfidious and malicious lie. I forbid you from spreading it.
You can feel it when she clamps down around you, coming hard even as her limbs cramp down on the rest of your body. Her eyes are watery and bright, their blue shine reflecting what little light the street lanterns throw through the few windows.
Then she blinks, clarity returning to her. The next look she gives you is more questioning than anything else, but you just kiss her again, continuing to thoroughly fuck her against the crate behind her.
She's sweating as you continue on, the physical activity seemingly a bit more than she's used to, but she still wholeheartedly embraces you with all her strength. It doesn't take long for you to come yourself, she's only on her third orgasm at this point, and you fill the unnamed redhead up with as much spunk as you can give her.
It was never a small amount, even when you were alive.
However, just as both of you come down off of it, she grits her teeth, pushing you off a little and grabbing for the sword you saw nearby earlier. Ramming it into the wood of the crate she's sitting on, she tries (fruitlessly) to hold back her absolutely adorable blush. "Who... are you?"
"Why now, I would've thought we'd be long past introductions," you smile at the redhead, careful to block her sight of where your fingers turn into claws and pierce your palms to let some blood creep out of the shallow wounds with your body. "What say you we have a little more fun, hm?"
"Don't fuck with me," she bluntly replies, sword arm tensing in an attempt to hide how jello-like her legs are right now. "This is a restricted area, only quartermasters and supervisors are supposed to come in here on their own."
"Oh, is that why you got naughty all on your lonesome? Hoping someone meeting those descriptions would come in and catch you in the act?"
She blushes a little stronger and looks away, clearly embarrassed. "Well, I won't tell anyone if you don't."
By now your blood has managed to securely creep all the way into the nearest boxes and crates, where you have it split into very small bits and pieces to avoid detection in the future. All it takes is touch, after all, and so though your blood may dry out and lose its properties in a couple of days, for those few days it will cause havoc among your foes.
Weird blood-centric vampire powers for the win, you suppose.
"Oh, you just won't tell anyone?" You start pouting. "And here I was hoping we had something special between us..."
She swallows, completely unaware you are continuing to sabotage everything around the both of you without giving off the slightest hint as to what's going on. "I... may be open to sharing my officer's accommodations with you? On occasion?"
"Why, I might just agree to that," you reply, once again leaning over her to seal her lips with your own. "Let's just stay here a little longer though..."
Over the next hour or so, she doesn't once disagree with the notion, if anything enthusiastically agreeing every time you change position and move from one corner of the warehouse to another, leaving bodily fluids of both amorous and cursed nature all over the place.
Mission accomplished, if you do say so yourself.
Once you've accompanied your new acquaintance (the two of you pointedly don't exchange names still) back to her place, a small apartment in an annex of a larger administrative building (fairly normal officer accommodations, in other words), you get right back to repeating what you did to the supplies you could find in the first warehouse you visited elsewhere, with one key difference compared to before.
This time around, you have a map, courtesy of your visit to the redhead's place. A bit of snooping around in the adjacent area and your perfect memory were all it took to get one, and so you simply make your way through a majority of the stored supplies currently awaiting their delivery elsewhere that you can find.
The joys of being able to just shadow into and out of places on a whim and extremely easily accessible horrible horrible substances running straight through your veins. Honestly, these warcrimes kind of commit themselves at this point.
Good old Thule. It never disappoints about this.
Up in the sky~, up in the sky~, oh when you're a flyer, the better the higher~
Look, you may be a decent singer, but you aren't about to devote any real time or effort on this crap. What really counts is that you're currently flying around the approximate height of the clouds, where only your undead physiology is allowing you to breathe... Or, as it is, not freeze to death on the spot.
Why are you all the up here? Why, to personally lay a hand onto the weather, of course. You've been working towards a complete blizzard for the past few days already, steadily lowering temperatures, kicking up random winds generally pointing towards the north and inducing more humidity to produce rain and snow all over the place.
Now you are simply taking things a step further, flying around really high up and casting one of your very first spells. "A colder place!" A simple gesture, and all of a sudden a sizeable part of the sky around you is filled with much lower temperature.
A single use of the spell wouldn't do all that much, in the grand scheme of things. The wind is already bringing the temperature to the approximate equivalence of the surroundings, what with how physics usually end up working out. But you keep on casting it, all around in every direction and very much deliberately aimed to affect things on a larger scale.
After all, a bad enough winter can and probably will force entire armies to capitulate. History back on Earth Bet is ripe with examples thereof, and though you will readily admit the presence of magic changes the paradigm somewhat, it still forces your enemy to deal with it somehow, consuming time and resources that would otherwise be free to be focused on defeating you.
Hence you going out of your way and turning autumn into a hellscape of snow and ice. It isn't quite there yet, of course, but things are looking good- at this rate, you'll mobilize the weather faster than the enemy can mobilize their army.
It does help you're regularly flying in closer to their forward camps and affecting the sky directly above them, of course, as well as the act of disgorging a couple of semblance minions every now and then to send down against them- followed by a hasty retreat, of course. They aren't entirely braindead and have a couple of mages to target your approximate location with a bunch of explosion spells whenever they manage to see you, after all.
You repay the favour by exploding their eyes, just out of spite- and to force them back until they've managed to get them healed. You'd like to call this a preliminary dick measuring contest between you and them, in fact.
And all the while, it just keeps on getting colder and colder... All the way until the sun comes up and seeing you from afar would be too easy do you fly, absolutely spamming your spells and keeping up the pressure. Though your foes do seem to have started to take countermeasure, or at least there's additional watches keeping an eye on the sky specifically, and the enemies' mages have started to hide amongst their common soldiery to avoid your notice while using spells that hit directly without any projectiles or obvious tells as to their origins.
Honestly, good thing you have aura, otherwise you'd totally have lost a limb or two, not to mention the wings you've grown for this.
It's been a bit since you decided to paint something completely at random just for the sake of painting it, so you choose to take the time when you next have a bit of a favorable time dilation in your inner world going for yourself.
Just you, the canvas and your brushes, with a few colors to work with and a general theme. You may not look it, but you still do remember all those biblical references you just love making on Earth Bet all the time, so you decided to go with that for a bit, and when talking about the bible, the one most obvious thing are fallen angels, aren't they?
Like, angels are literally directly created by god, but apparently he's such a shit dad he ends up throwing them out when they disagree. It's just something you relate to on principle at this point, and so you end up going with one of those bible picture kind of things,where a roughly humanoid winged figure is thrown from heaven in a beam of light.
It's a bit simple, with much less of the precision and detail you usually try to add to your works, but you think this way lets the completed painting express itself just as well, if not better. Keeping it 'raw' and less sophisticated to speak more directly to the viewer and all.
Or maybe not, you aren't exactly all-knowing over here. All that matters is that it's done, and so you set it aside to return to your usual. Painting is nice like that.
Fallen Fury: Upon being summoned, the painting can be 'pointed' towards a single location once a day, whereupon the skies will disgorge a single, vaguely humanoid projectile made of fire that will bore a hole into the clouds, if any, as it streaks towards the intended destination, dealing 3d1010 points of damage to all within the medium area of effect
Norman was a fairly normal youth growing up in the big city, the third son of five to an indeed very good carpenter. Not seeing much of a chance at taking over or joining the family business, he simply wished his brothers well and sought out a living elsewhere.
Specifically, in the army, enlisting at an early age and throwing himself into the training that wasn't really any worse than helping out in his father's workshop had been, Normal soon discovered he had a handle on the lifestyle of a soldier fairly quickly, the discipline and camaraderie speaking to him in a way he figured he could work with.
It took some time, but he soon rose through the ranks, being given responsibility over his fellow soldiers and taking it as seriously as could be. Not satisfied with simply being good enough, he drove his men into being the best they could be, something they repaid him with lots of grumbling and steadfast service all throughout their shared careers.
In the end, he was a sergeant after years of effort, frequently writing back home where his eldest brother had since taken over the workshop of their aging father and the second eldest had joined a bigger one in another city much like he'd been expecting him to do for a while already, when all of a sudden, on an unusually cold autumn morning...
It's easy enough to find yourself a guy that looks important, but not too important, to munch down on, ambushing him as he comes out of his small, but single-occupant tent and stashing the body inside under his cot where it will take a while to be found. Once you've stripped it of his clothes, of course.
Said clothes you then put on yourself, including the light armor this guy used to always wear just earlier when he was alive, overlaying him to copy his appearance and mannerisms as best you can. Now then, best get right on impersonating him for a bit before you get started on the real fun!
So first off, you actually had some pretty great timing and aim, as this guy was a sergeant and about to head out to inspect his men's order (he had a thing about having them keep their weapons and armors in order) before going off to join an officers' meeting to receive new orders.
So first off, you follow his exact steps, everything he would've done, made much easier thanks to having him literally along for the ride and forced to guide you through his exact motions, thoughts and actions, each word spoken directly from him. A bit of shouting to get the men up to snuff, a little joking about the weather and telling them not to miss the snow when they piss and just like that, you're done.
Then you start to make your way through the camp, having put 'your' second in command in charge while you're gone. It's pretty bustling, with people moving this way and that and making sure everything is as it should be, warmth stones handed out here and there to ensure every soldier has one in case of emergencies.
They're pretty much just enchanted stones of certain kinds, the closest thing to being mass-produced in this world thanks to being fairly simple and straightforward to create, meaning most enchanters make them as practice when they just start out and they're easy enough to source even for most commoners, widely regarded as one of the essentials to stock up for winter.
They just give off warmth, but when shit gets cold, that's pretty much exactly what you need and all. Kind of like handwarmers, but they can be added together in these little braziers to let them warm up entire rooms as required.
Note to self, may want to deal with their existence later on.
Back to the meeting, the one you just joined as you came into the big command tent where the sergeants were told to gather. Luckily, you don't have to suffer through formalities for long; all it takes is a quick salute in step with everyone else as a general comes in, a noble from what your current guise knew, and you get right into the tasty, tasty information to be harvested.
Simply put, due to certain irregularities and unexpected hindrances, the Second Offensive, as they're calling it, is being delayed for a bit to deal with said developments, but expected to resume its timetable as intended in five days from now. The logistics are, sadly, not discussed in-depth, but you know at least that a constant stream of reinforcements will be coming to this forward camp over these five days to join the eventual attack together with the supplies and 'equipment' meant to be brought along.
You're not told what said equipment is, but you doubt it's just more weapons for your men to hold.
In other news, at least three heroes are, apparently, slated to arrive and assist the army in this battle, though they are meant to be held in reserve and kept as aces up humanity's sleeve just in case The Enemy tries to target them. The Archer Hero, the Sword Dancer Hero and the Saint Hero, all readying to take on humanity's foes!
It's obviously something to take back to your respective subordinates and raise morale with, but you don't let that bother you or anything. More importantly, you can get a rough idea of what you may be up against if they actually try to fight you instead of running... Or you ambush them to keep them from joining their compatriots at a later date, of course.
Interestingly, you also manage to get the suggestion in to organize a little get together with some of the men, suggesting the whole thing in such a way that it looks like you're doing it to follow the same vein of thought. It's allowed without too much issue, so all you need to do is figure out a time and place with the other sergeants.
Hurray for your enemies actually being organized in a way you would approve of, you suppose.
It does take a bit, but the army is nothing if not quick to put things into practice once they've been decided, and so you soon find yourself in one of the communal tents set up against the bad weather, overseeing somewhat of a gathering of soldiers and letting them drink to warm up a little.
And, after a few conversations and some shitting around, you get things rolling in the direction you want them to, so before long people start to have a little singing competition, taking turns to sing and show others the songs of their childhoods.
People seem to like it, at any rate, and considering you have a bunch of people from all corners of the kingdom gathered in one place, well, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
Naturally, you feign some initial hesitance, but still sing your own little song, except as you've been planning all along underlaid with your very own curse on top. It's the good kind, too; it lets those affected ignore the effects of the cold just a little better, taking the edge off and making it easier to bear... While also actually worsening them.
https/watch?v=sf0XLOloDaA
You sing so well, in fact, a few of the soldiers all around currently off duty join in listening, filtering in and out of the tent you're using for this little event and just letting you affect more people overall. You love it when they only make it easier to pull your diabolical schemes through.
Once everyone'd dispersing and stuff, you get right to the next part of your plan- incidentally getting rid of the shapeshift into the good sergeant you've been impersonating, seeing as he's exceeded the end of his usefulness. Instead, you use what knowledge he has of the area and a quick excuse to turn into a shadow and crawl off towards a very particular area- the place where a sizeable amount of the mages are being housed, that is.
They're essentially just more tents, except a little bit bigger than the normal ones. For commanders, that is- simple soldiers are sleeping in communal tents still, though they may just be preferable with the cold that won't stop intensifying anytime soon.
Anyway, some seem to have defensive spells keeping their occupants safe, meaning you avoid them, but a decent few tents are completely undefended in this manner, so you just dart inside wherever you sense any sleeping victims-to-be, bring them a quick and brutal end and then move on before you're discovered, blood dripping from your happily grinning teeth for a few moments before it drops as you press yourself against the ground and any nearby surfaces again and again.
You get through an even baker's dozen of them before the first calls go out, but the damage is already done; you abscond from the camp with a full belly and a clear idea of what your enemies will be doing over the next few days.
A cursory search for the heroes, by which you mean using your compass soul to get directions, shows a few interesting details that determine your next steps, once you've gotten out of the army's camp. For one, while you don't have any exact locations, you know that the Saint Hero and the Archer Hero are located in two different directions, but both somewhere to the north, to little surprise.
The Blade Dancer Hero, on the other hand? She seems to be somewhere to the south, and quite close, too, once you start moving around while overlaying your compass. This, of course, means you immediately investigate.
As it turns out, the Blade Dancer Hero has been inside the camp all along, now alarmed due to your activities and apparently searching for you in the direction of the Border Fortress. Maybe because that would be the natural place for the perpetrator of an attack like this to retreat towards?
Either way, time for a little meeting.
It is out in the wide expanse that you find her, the area between the army's camp and the fortress you are trying to keep secure, that you find her. The spiked ice fields you set up can be seen off in the distance, and the green crystals growing along the ground are visible under a thin layer of snow that has begun to fall after your continued influence on the weather. The Blade Dancer Hero, Arakawa Gina, is striding through the area, meticulously searching for any traces of whoever may have attacked.
She has some light around herself, most likely courtesy of a magical item of some kind, while the soldiers also part of this attempt at finding you looking around off in the distance have torches and similar items on them. She also has a scarf on, perhaps because of the cold, the blue and black striped cloth doing... something funky with the temperature around her, you think.
Could be something else, but your ability to see infrared and temperature directly is telling you she's far from as cold as she should be right now, especially given the rest of her outfit.
Then there's also the oversized swords she's wielding as though they were daggers, unsheathed and held behind her in preparation for a fight at any moment. Her pale red hair is blowing in the wind, a little, but her expression is more confident and determined than anything.
Oh, and she's also got strings of tattoos on her thighs. You do wonder what they are for- the color is similar to the one on Okita, but they're obviously shaped differently.
You can't really see all of those tattoos, of course, due to them being partially hidden under those armored stockings and the rest of her armor, but that doesn't stop you from analyzing what you can see from where you are, staying in shadow form as you follow her around in the dark of night and having your souls refer to the library inside of you to compare the runes you can see on those thighs.
Side note, the hivemind-like structure of souls inside you is coming in handy.
They... Don't really make much sense for a moment, not really corresponding to any of the runic languages any of your victims are familiar with, but you already know this issue from Okita's tattoo, so you simply have them compare singular elements and look for similarities between what you're seeing and various kinds of runes at once.
Which, surprise, surprise, gets you some results. It's not a full hundred percent clear, but after some thorough research in sped up time and your own opinion on the end result, you are fairly sure you have a grasp on what's going on.
"If you're out here, I am gonna find you." You ignore her muttering to herself.
Simply put, these tattoos along both of Arakawa's thighs are somehow strengthening her, giving her various boosts at the cost of mana. Increasing her physical prowess, sharpening her senses, letting her do stuff better than she otherwise could, in short.
At least you think. There's a dozen different runes all intermingled and overlapping on what you can see of her thighs, seeing as there's nothing as convenient as a single 'be stronger' rune someone could add to someone. It takes several concrete runes to do things like strengthen muscles, strengthen bones so they don't rip apart or take damage from those stronger muscles, something to increase the amount of oxygen in the subject's blood to let the muscles keep functioning throughout the more extensive use, increasing the resiliency of sinew and skin to make it through the whole ordeal... And that's just the one function.
There's a reason runes aren't a widespread booster in modern humanity's repertoire. They're just way too complicated and not really cost-efficient if you have the mana to power them for stuff like this.
Meanwhile, Arakawa Gina is looking around the area again, balancing on the sharp spikes of one of your sloped ice walls on her shoes' toes to get a wider field of vision. "If I was an assassin, where would I be?"
Either way, good thing you're keeping your distance and sticking to the dark.
Then again, now would naturally be the perfect moment for this. Hey Sarah, you busy right now? I could use some Coil for a bit.
Go for it, may as well let the worm be useful, your sister replies. She's such a nice girl.
Slotting in a certain Buffer Hero into your overlay for his power, you swoosh on over behind the heroine, smoothly gliding straight up off the ground. "Right behind you, of course," you intone with a smile, watching with amusement as Arakawa launches into a jump that lets her turn around in a backflip come to stand again facing you this time, "though I don't know about any assassins... A king, on the other hand, is right here."
"... I was completely expecting this, just so you know," she claims. She's obviously lying, of course. "So... What brings you to this bend of the woods, stranger I have absolutely no idea about beyond that one report about a guy claiming to be the new demon king rampaging through at least one city?"
"The opportunity to have a talk with you, of course," you smoothly schmooze, giving her your charming smile. "You see, I'm kind of in a position to have to defeat humanity, but I'd prefer not to fight the heroes, so-"
"Nope!" You'll be honest, you've been expecting someone to interrupt you mid-speech for a while now. "Sorry to tell you, but I have no intention of letting you genocide humanity. Yes, I know that's what's going on in both directions, but we've all already taken sides, see? Too late to back out now, no matter what the others may think."
She raises her swords again, but isn't making any move to attack you. You guess she's trying to tell you to either try her or run?
"Who said anything about genociding humanity?" You ask, playfully shrugging at the statement. "It wouldn't really get me anything while being a massive pain to actually do. All I want is to break all resistance and stop the whole nonstop crusades thing this world has going on. Anything more would just be a massive waste of time."
"Funny, so is this talk," Arakawa jokes, her eyes intent and watching every move you make. "Peace also happens if the other side loses, and so far you just sound like you just want that side to be the one I'm on."
"Well yeah, you aren't wrong," you admit. Old trick- agreeing with someone is the best way to shake them out of disagreeing with you. "It's just that I'm trying to be more nuanced here and give you a way out that doesn't involve your death. And also a guaranteed way to a modern Earth, not the one you came from by any account but at least with, you know, modern amenities."
"Tempting." And you can see it in her smirk; she is tempted, but won't agree. "But this world has plumbing and baths if you have the money and I'd prefer not to make a hypocrite of myself at the last minute. If I bite it... Well, shit happens. I could think of worse things to happen, so don't feel too bad about it."
Well, there you go with that, you suppose. "It seems we've come to an agreement, then," you slowly say, rapidly thinking through what you'll do next. One hand, you could just kill her. On the other hand... It still would be kind of a waste, and now you want to keep her just because she hasn't jumped at the chance to switch sides yet, dammit.
"We'll just have to fight it out," you conclude, readying Last Embrace on both of your arms. "If I win, you come along quietly and don't make any trouble, that alright?"
"And what if I win?" She asks, cocking her head.
"What makes you think you stand a chance?" Really, it should be obvious how this will end. Not to brag, but... Well, you have a lot of advantages over her.
Like, it isn't even funny at this point.
"We'll see about that, bring it on! Oh, or do I get first strike as the challenged party?" For all that she's messing around, she's keeping her stance up rigidly.
You can't help but smile at her question. Opening your mouth as though to answer, you instead grin as you begin chanting. "Feel the bite of winter!"
She immediately feels the effect of your spell, her body temperature plummeting despite her magical countermeasures against the cold. "No fair!" She calls out even as she jumps at you.
Unfortunately for her, you've already overlaid Kason, the good old soul you've had with you for the majority of your journey with the aura causing everyone within its reach to be weakened. And you're summoning one of your Bondage Demons, the chained woman already throwing out her namesake and wrapping said chains around the heroine.
Simultaneously, you're gesturing with one hand, pulling her towards you and bursting open the capillaries all around her hands to hinder her from using her weapons. It is, in all honestly, impressive how Arakawa manages to react to your barrage of fuck yous.
One sword comes around to break through and cut apart the chains, letting her go with the flow of your telekinesis and try to strike at you in a downward slash with the other one, which you naturally sidestep with contemptuous ease, your speed and reflexes more than up to the task. "See, unlike the last guy," you tell her, "I don't fight fair."
She's keeping her breathing steady even as she warms back up, her scarf hanging by her sides and seemingly emanating heat to get her comfortable again. "Yeah, I see that," she pants. "I was going to get the soldiers, but they wouldn't really help against you."
"... Seriously, just give up," you advise her. "This is just sad."
Given you haven't actually bothered to fight her in person and she's still coming to her limits just with your quick disabling spell, you don't expect this to be anywhere close to a real challenge anytime soon.
"You're right, but since when did that stop anyone?" She asks, fanning her blades out behind her. "At least defeat me yourself."
Jeez, how stubborn can she be, honestly. Shaking your head, you shrug. "Whatever the lady demands, I suppose. Wouldn't have taken you for someone that likes this kind of play."
"Ha, fucking, ha," she deadpans as you come closer. At the last moment, she tries to strike you, not giving up until the very end, but well... A quick application of telekinesis and a good hit to the head with your closed fist and she's out cold.
Seriously, what were they feeding this girl for her to just keep on trying to fight like this?
Arakawa remains out cold as you bring her with you, the brief fight mostly unnoticed by the net of soldiers searching for any irregularities in the surrounding area for a while yet, and so you soon arrive back at the Border Fortress, the sight of a giant owl carrying people around nothing out of the usual after the last time you passed through with someone. Mission accomplished, you'd say, and with any luck you might even be able to get her to minion for you down the line.
Which brings you to the part of your night, loading her into your carriage. It does have foldable beds usually hidden in the walls in some of its rooms, and so you can even stow her away comfortably while the undead you use for more convenient transportation than just flying everywhere gets going.
The suspension is just as great as always, so it isn't like she's shaken around all too much... Except for the part where you're stripping her down, of course.
What? You wanted to make sure about the rest of those tattoos, not to mention disarming a defeated enemy you want to keep alive is just common sense.
So to start with, her dual swords are actually made out of a mithril alloy, if your smith souls are any indicators on the subject, and enchanted as a matter of course. You don't have any convenient way to analyze those enchantments, except you totally do thanks to Yoshi. A quick overlay tells you they're magically sharpened, with increased swinging speed and capable of imparting additional force on every hit, but the real bullshit is in the 'recall' and 'bloodshed' enhancements, as what you can only describe as Yoshi's UI titles them.
They literally return to their user's hands when dropped or thrown and actually cause more damage than they should be able to when used against any living being, with augmented damage dealt to flesh and bones and wounds that bleed extraordinarily badly, to the point of bursting when these things stab or slash at someone and manage to draw blood.
They're also just very, very sharp and well-balanced. Some good craftsmanship in these things.
Beyond the obvious, of course, Arakawa has a decent amount of other things on her- the scarf that protects from temperature changes (it actually warms and cools both, depending on outside temperature), as you'd surmised already, the gloves and tights she's wearing that grant some general protection from damage just like the actual armor pieces over her torso. She's also wearing a pair of rings, for increased dexterity and visual acuity on one hand and the ability to throw fireballs with limited charges on the other.
Those are actually fairly rare, you think.
Also, hidden under her scarf and the armor you find an amulet that Yoshi is going completely crazy over in the back of your head due to its one-time use ability to automatically teleport the user to a predetermined safe location when they would otherwise die. Which explains why she kept trying to get you to fight, you suppose- she wasn't tired of living, just trying to activate her backup escape plan.
Too bad for her you're just so exceedingly reasonable. You also first thought the straps to the side of her outfit were used for something really involved or something, but it turns out they're just there to let her 'sheathe' her swords on them.
Now, as for the tattoos... Once you've stripped Arakawa a tad bit, setting her tights and armor to the side and leaving her in her underwear, you can see that they continue with the seeming gibberish you take a long time to try and interpret, though you can't see any untoward parts to them... Though you really aren't confident in this crap.
Of course, the hero you're currently molesting as the runes run all over her thighs and up to her stomach in parallel strings has to wake up at some point, and just chooses to do so right at this moment.
"So I lost, huh?" She asks, covering her eyes with the back of an arm. "That sucks. Pervert."
"Hey, if I wanted to get grabby with you, I'd have waited for you to wake up," you throw back. "I'm just taking a look at these tattoos. I trust you won't cause any trouble at this point?"
"Aah, you won fair and square, no point for me to mess around," the redhead hero waves you off. "It was like a child fighting an adult, too, so screw it. And yeah, this was Kimi-san's doing, I asked her if there was anything she could do to help me become stronger with her magic. She just said they would make me stronger when I channel mana into them, no idea how they work exactly."
"Figures," you grouse. "Ah well, this'll be a long ride, so don't mind me if I poke them a bit."
Arakawa looks to the side, blushing. "I do mind, actually. This is pretty embarrassing."
What, she only realized now? Or maybe she was just repressing her reaction to the situation. "No can do, I want to get a good look," you say as you squeeze her thigh.
Her blushing intensifies.
"Y'know, I didn't think you'd be this hospitable, but I ain't complaining," Arakawa says as she stuffs herself with cookies and chocolate provided by your sweets fairies, a couple of which you've conjured by this point. "This is some good stuff."
"Of course it is, or did you think I would bother using magical powers to create crappy sweets?" You scoff. "As if. Oh yeah, we should also arrive soon."
"Good. All this sitting around is making my butt hurt." You refuse to make the obvious joke.
Now then, it takes a little bit longer, but soon enough you're disembarking from the bone carriage and making sure-
"Wooow, you really came, Gina-san!" Matsui is as needlessly excited as always, it would seem. "We all thought you'd be as stubborn as usual and never ever agree to come with Gabriel-san!"
"She means she thought you'd put up a fight," Tada interjects. "I bet you'd just do the smart thing instead, so which was it?"
"... Haha." Arakawa seems happy they're the same as they would usually be, you guess? Not like you're really into the social dynamics here.
"She totally tried to fight," Nakatani shrugs by the side of the conversation. "Let me guess, he's actually as strong as he plays at being?"
"... Hahaha."
Getting Arakawa to let you thrall her takes a bit, but you've got making people swallow the blood you feed them down to a science by this point and so things take their natural course easily enough.
She, for her part, seems more than happy to just relax around the castle and crack jokes about Japanese RPGs on the Earth the heroes were summoned from, jokingly comparing last, ultimate and hidden bosses to everyone around... Whatever the difference may be, you guess.
You aren't really big on JRPGs, as she keeps on abbreviating it. What can you say, your childhood wasn't really conducive towards that kind of thing and you never got into the whole thing later on, either. You were kind of busy with other things and all.
Next, you make a point of ensuring that your 'team' here on Thule is doing alright, as Okita and Emily are done with the cleanup of the farmlands, for the most part, leaving the rest to the locals themselves and returning to the castle again for the moment.
Funnily enough, nobody is surprised by her presence. Or, as Matsui puts it: "Yeah, if anyone was going to join you out of nowhere, it was her."
Okita's reaction is to give you a hug and refuse to let go until you kiss her. She's weirdly romantic like that sometimes.
In other news, you end up having to do the same when your other lovers get jealous and demand their own spots of making out, though thankfully there aren't that many of them around in total- Sarah, Rose, Emily, Okita (again), Clarice (surprisingly) and Tada get their cuddle time, all with the other heroes present watching in various states of joking disbelief and mild concern.
Hey, did you forget to mention the part where you're very much in a poly-amorous relationship of the model sometimes described as a 'harem'? Because when Matsui keeps on asking if this is one, you tell her that yes, she is absolutely right.
Then you grope Tada's butt, because it is very cute.
Things develop from there into somewhat of a meeting for your various paramours, with the other three heroines invited to sit in. Instead of, say, an orgy. Because while you wouldn't be opposed to one, you are also very aware that relationships are built on more than just lots of endless sex.
So you make the effort, and it's reciprocated by the others. Everything that's going on in everyone's lives is talked about, hobbies and thoughts discussed and you end up playing translator for Okita's Okita-ness.
You actually kind of like this. Introspection may not be a favorite of yours, but you can say with little doubt that you actually do like this. Being together with your lovers, sharing things with them, being part of each other's lives in a definite positive sense.
Or, as Sarah puts it, you're a big softie and family man. Incidentally, babies are very intently discussed, and Rose is actually mildly freaking out about the fact Sarah is pregnant- not because of what you might assume, but mostly because conception is a pretty rare thing for demons and has a whole bunch of cultural things about it.
Or in other words, anyone that knows is gonna be extremely careful around Sarah and make sure she's feeling alright at all times. Progress.
While you're at it, you also go out of your way to ask a couple of questions relevant to the situation at hand- as in, the general situation, rather than the fact you have half a dozen young women at the tips of your fingers.
For one, the hero that you suspect to have been behind the whole disappearing documents incident isn't popping up in anyone's minds, disappointingly, no matter how precise or broad you formulate your inquiries on the matter. Which sucks, but you're already expecting as much by this point.
Sarah, however, mentions that she's got the issue handled already, though she doesn't let anyone know about the details just in case. You feel she might just be teasing you judging by her smile as she does, but you'll trust your sister to know what she's doing.
As soon as you finish goading Rose into feeling her tummy as petty revenge, something she faux-stoically endures with a wry grin all the way through.
Another hero you have taken an interest in would then be the Sage Hero- Yoshimoto Kimi, said to have mastered a million spells or whatever tripe people are telling each other. It's literally wartime propaganda, like, who would even need that many discrete spells in any realistic circumstances?
Anyway, whole Okita is totally sure that she was the one to put the weird tattoo on her thigh, the color and cursive rune of which matches with what the same person is confirmed to have put on Arakawa's thighs, the other heroes have nothing particularly bad to tell about the girl, and are in fact shocked and confused she would have put something like this on Okita without her permission.
Someone's definitely going to have a few explanations to make whenever you manage to get a hold of her. Which, might be mildly difficult; last anyone present knows, she headed back towards the human capital after the battle against the demon lord with about half the class, most of the heroes perfectly happy to return all the way from whence they were summoned to this world.
Of course, a couple of them actually headed out to do other stuff along the way and do their own thing for a bit, but news tend to travel slowly if the human government isn't deliberately circulating them, so predicting where some of the heroes may have gone is kind of a crapshot. Your compass soul, frustratingly, is actually useless in this regard once more, unable to get you a direction towards the only person in this world bearing the name of the heroine in question.
"Knowing her, she's probably holing up in some bunker somewhere doing her own thing," Tada suggests, slowly chewing on a bar of chocolate. Because yes, of course you are busy producing a bunch of aura to feed into your sweets fairies during all of this.
They're the one type of summon you use the most, ever since you left Remnant, huh? Feels weird.
"Oh, did you know her well? Or is that just something immediately obvious with her?" You ask, turning more towards the room at large.
"Kimi-san is very... She has her own way of doing things," the Naginata Heroine replies, avoiding your eyes.
"She's a magic nerd, is what she's trying to say," Arakawa clarifies over the other girl's protests. "There's a reason I went to her for help when I felt I wasn't cutting it."
"Yup yup, most likely she's using some kind of sustained spell to make it impossible to find her with remote viewing or stuff," Matsui agrees, nodding and satisfied at clearing the issue up. "She's a wizard, after all."
Nakatani is keeping quiet, seemingly having no reason to speak up throughout the whole discussion and preoccupied with her own sweets.
Lastly, you went into a bit of a heavier topic, but, well, better to get it out of the way first. Namely, you are going to be killing a lot of people, by which you mean an absolutely enormous amount. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say you will be conducting entire massacres, in fact, sadly enough- though you don't really care about the morality of things or the sanctity of life or anything, it'll be kind of a waste when you could otherwise just use the people involved as minions yourself once you're done taking over this world.
So, to avoid any overly hard feelings about it, you're abusing a simple and fundamental part of human nature, and asking the heroes in the room if there's anyone in particular you should absolutely spare or keep alive throughout the war you're still totally busy with.
People don't really sympathize with large numbers of people. It's a curious phenomenon where a single person's fate is considered significant and worthy of note, whereas a million people are simple statistics. That's right: Humans don's really sympathize with great numbers of other humans.
So by asking about particular, single, individual people, you can make yourself look reasonable and benevolent even as you absolutely butcher the faceless masses. Sure, their families all over the human kingdom might disagree, but then their opinions don't fucking matter in the first place, at least not for the moment when you have more important concerns to deal with.
Sacrifices have to be made sometimes, and wasting a couple hundred thousand lives of people you don't care about is one you're perfectly willing to make, is all.
So then, in order...
"Hm," is all Okita has to say on the topic, not really paying attention. She, kind of never really did have that moral compass or attachment to people, which is why there wasn't really any chnage when she became a vampire, come to think of it.
Tada's request you've already fulfilled. "I've got Matsui-chan and Nakatani-chan, so I'm happy already."
"TADA-CHWAAAAN!" Matsui is useless.
"I... would feel bad about it if I request some to be spared when others die," Nakatani professes. "War is just like that. People die in it."
She may or may not be fed up with the general topic already, you think. A quick peek into her fears confirms that she's also already lost friends in the war and is mostly afraid of getting attached to someone that's just going to go and die in a fight, which explains a lot about her so far.
"... I don't really have the right to ask anything like that of you," Arakawa finally concludes. "Just do what you have to."
... She's really, really stubborn, huh. Everyone else exchanges a glance, but she doesn't seem to notice, or else care.
Anyway, with everyone doing well in the capital, minor and mostly joking quarrels notwithstanding, you'd best get a move on already- armies don't tend to defeat themselves, at least outside of special circumstances such as you going around and making them starve and kill each other somehow.
So you board your bone carriage once more, checking everything over and making sure things are packed away as they should be. Your to-do-list has been taken care of for the moment, so theoretically all you need to do is embark on the usual journey and hope the obvious trail your carriage has been leaving isn't making it too easy for any spies or similar to keep track of your movements.
Then again, what are they gonna do, even if they wisen up? You'd welcome any attempted ambushes with open arms as more souls and blood to feed on.
Okita keeps on smooshing up your face with both hands, making you do silly faces as she leans over your lap.
You aren't complaining. Knowing her, she's probably just curious how you look like this and moving to sate her curiosity. More importantly, she also doesn't particularly mind when you knead her massive kita-kitas, and so the two of you have yourselves a silent arrangement helping to pass the time in-between the moments of intense concentration on your part as you use your undead to mess around by proxy.
You also may or may not have experienced some measure of enlightenment by playing around with Okita's full tits and perky nipples under her clothes, but you can't quite be sure. Something to verify later on through thorough testing and repetition, truly.
Still, eventually you arrive at the Border Fortress once more. When it comes closer, Okita tilts her head at it, speaking the first words she did ever since the two of you embarked from the castle. "... This place again."
"Yeah, I know what you mean," you commiserate with her. "It really is the center of this world in more ways than one."
She nods.
"And 'nother one," Michael grunted as he waved the man that'd come into the tent in. "Lemme guess, you spent too long pissin' and your dick froze 'n the air?"
The place was pretty spartan, but field accommodations usually were- the healer's tents had to be functional above all else, and so the standard small setups meant for use on the go or in camp just had a pair of chairs, a place to lay a wounded and all the instruments of the craft. Enough to deal with smaller issues and sick stomachs, and if something worse was at hand- Well, then it wouldn't be treated like this. That was what field hospitals were for.
"You wish, old man," the soldier that couldn't be older than thirty replied with the voice of a man twice his age. "That's what the stones are for. Nah, I was on guard duty and spent too long holding my weapon directly."
He peeled off his glove to show the Michael what the issue was, the healer groaning when the obvious signs of frostbite became apparent all over the fingers of the right hand. White to blue coloration, obvious numbness in the way they were moving. He'd seen more than enough of that shit by now. "Siddown, take a minute, I'll be wit' ya in a sec."
He went to grab the gauze, as well as one of the additional warmth stones the healers had been given to hand out to anyone that was at risk of freezing anything important off. "Wouldn't believe how much frostbite Ah'm gettin' in here these days."
"Duh, it's freezing like fuck out there," his patient grinned as he relaxed a bit. There was a reason Michael kept his work tent reasonably warm. "All of a sudden, too. Don't get this kind of weather even up north."
He grunted in response, palming the bandage scissors too, while he was at it. "Mhm. Bloody unnatural, 's what it is. Had a good dozen freezing boys through here today alone, an' my shift just started. Hol' still."
He measured out the gauze for a moment, figuring the soldier in front of him wasn't feeling any pain in the affected digits- yet. "So, ya'll want ta make sure ya don't stay in tha cold for ta long after this, but 'cause Ah know none of ya tough munchers are gonna listen ta that one, just take this," he said, pushing the warmth stone into the boy's hand. "Now fer the bad news, I'll be cuttin' off yer fingers."
"Wait, what?!" Alarmed, the man on his patient seat nearly jumped up, but Micheal kept him seated with one hand while the other clicked and clacked the scissors a little. Just for show. "You can't- I need those fingers! Hard to hold a weapon without them!"
"Relax, Ah'm just joking," the healer grumbled as he got to cutting the thin fabric off when he decided he had enough. "Yah'll wish I wasn't in a jiffy, though."
It wasn't usually necessary to scare even the rowdier men with actual frostbite into keeping their extremities warm, but it never hurt to make sure and all. Grabbing the suddenly hesitant's patient's hand in both of his, Michael started concentrating.
"YAAARGH!" No shame in screamin' when your skin ballooned up and blistered red, but it was just part of the healing process.
"The Goddess may bestow 'er grace, but she don't let ya cheat 'less you're a real good church boy," the professional healer explained, keeping the magic on coming. "Jus' think of it as pain leavin' yer body."
You know, if he was some sicko that took joy in this kind of thing, being a healer would be the ideal career. As it was, though, he was just going to wait until the boy's fingers weren't going to fall of the minute he didn't look at 'em and prescribe him a warm broth, then wait for the next patient. The intermittent shrieks and screams coming from all around showed amply that the rest of the hastily assembled medical area Michael was assigned to work at was busy enough as is.
What were they even waiting for with the warmth shields? Yes, it was tiring as fuck to maintain, but still better than the freezing cold. Not like the army didn't have enough mages, despite what the people were saying all the time, and now would be a pretty great time to use them.
With Okita securely tucked away for the moment and unlikely to get into trouble while she's playing with the 'cuties' in the fortress, you have a bit of time to continue your operations against the huge-ass army gathering to storm your current forward base of operations. And you may be biased when you say this, but...
It really is way too fucking huge. Like, you've been away for half a day, and the ranks of your foes have swelled in size, what have to be hundreds of thousands of soldiers joining the ones already there in the span of time between you making off with Arakawa and now. A massive sprawl of a camp is out there, visible easily even from the heights at which you're flying.
More concerningly, you can sense... something, in the air. Like a shield or barrier around the camp, not quite visible to normal senses and even for you only apparent thanks to some of the more exotic ways in which you perceive your surroundings, the senses you don't even have any idea what they're for picking up on something unusual.
Your best guess, they've put something into place to keep you from coming back in... Or maybe it is the reason the temperature around the camp itself is significantly higher than outside of it. Still cold, for a human being, but not as freezing as it should be, either. Troubling, that.
Then again, it could be both. Or something else entirely. It's hard to tell from out here, without any direct access to the effect or its creator or creators.
Analyzing the field with Yoshi equipped (and yes, he counts as equipment, evidently), it would seem as though it definitely is some kind of heat shield- a wide-area temperature adjustment spell simply there to keep the camp warm. A direct countermeasure against your strategy of using the weather against your enemies.
Which has successfully blunted the worst of the storm you've called up, annoyingly, though the soldiers are still going to be cold as heck. You may need to step up your game soon-ish, at this rate.
However, there are bigger issues. Such as the fact the magical field is actually twofold, capable of detecting intruders- at least in theory. You don't have a full picture, but it may be triggered by anything that has malicious intentions? It's definitely kind of a pain for you, given that sums up literally everything you feel for this army.
Well, alright. If they're going to this extent to add difficulty to your continued intrusions into their camp, you will simply need to respond with the kind of determination this requires. By which you mean you just won't.
Security measures are such a wonderful thing. You have dozens of ways of circumventing them usually, and even when you don't- like in this case- you can simply... not do it.
They can set up magical barriers all they want, you'll just go ahead and attack elsewhere in areas that aren't protected like this. Speaking of which, it's about time to really turn things up a notch with the weather conditions; how about you go ahead and set the weather's controls to a nice and proper storm that won't stop, now that you have enough consistent wind in the area, and add a bit of snow and hail on top? There's a been a bit of that already, just due to the cold and the general stormy-ness you've been accumulating over the past few days, but you totally can just directly drive the settings up a bit.
And if you just so happen to mix a few bits and pieces of hail specifically shaped to be rather sharp, then well, all the better! You'll have to be careful not to let any of the stuff blow over towards the fortress, of course, and while you could probably make it mono-molecular in terms of how sharp exactly they'd be, simple air resistance would shatter the hail in short order, but still, at the speeds this stuff will be coming down at, it'll pierce through any unarmored flesh just fine.
Next question, where exactly do you attack instead of at the main camp of your enemy...
It's ironic, really, in that way that is completely obvious from your perspective and as such not even all that amusing, but those three small fortresses meant to be an intercepting position on humanity's side to keep any sizeable amount of enemies from slipping through are, in the shoes of someone that considers enemies just as much enemies as a resource to be used in a fight, more a collection of treasure or maybe a tasty buffet than insurmountable fortresses.
Especially considering you're planning to use the bodies for a large-scale undead again to use as a distraction while you attack that stupid camp. Screw them, if they're using a detection field for any intruders, you'll just give them a very big intruder indeed to deal with while you do your own thing under the cover of the ensuing chaos.
It takes a short flight, but by their nature of vigilant watchtowers against any incursions during the long 'calm' that the previous demon lord caused, the three fortresses naturally have to be relatively close to the border pass the Border Fortress itself is built upon, and so you don't take all too long to arrive.
Naturally, the exact locations of these things is among the intelligence you can easily receive from Rose's spy network, meaning you don't even have to bother searching for one of them. On the way, you also make the annoying discovery that you probably shouldn't fly around as a bird in this big storm some inconsiderate ass must've caused due to all these sharp projectiles whistling through it in addition to the hail, but it isn't quite all that intense this far north (yet), so your aura can manage well enough.
Of course, the place you finally come upon, having chosen the central fortress just to blow a hole into this neat formation of garrisons and regular patrols, has a magical barrier around it as well, but you're way past caring about that.
It's a large construction, though of course dwarfed by the Border Fortress itself, laid on wide plains and made of grey stone. You can see several watchtowers, solid walls in all directions, a clearly artificially dug moat surrounding part of it and with signs of life clearly apparent even through the steadily worsening storm. Everything is already covered in a thin layer of snow, but it is kept at bay around your target itself, the surrounding landscape giving the impression of an early winter.
You don't have much time and you need to cause as much destruction in as little time as possible if you want to get anywhere, and normally that would mean you would go in with a complete plan to leverage one or more of your powers as hard as possible to do so. However, you literally have a whole branch of powers to deal with situations such as this, so you'll just go and ram this fortress into the ground.
Literally.
It takes mere moments to unfurl your wings beyond what you have as an owl already, unfolding flesh that hardens into something hard to describe and growing larger than your usual form in all dimensions, until you are standing there in your full-on winged, pop culture angel form.
You take a quick peek at your book.
The ice and snow are still there, but they hardly bother you; covering you like a blanket and no more than that. You momentarily ponder whether to float upwards to gain the required gravitas for what you are about to do, but your wings remain far too heavy to fly under their own power, and negating gravity would just see you thrown every which way by the wind as strong as it is now.
So you proceed on foot. Looking into the dark storm ahead of you, where you know your target to be.
The innumerable possibilities in your Book outline a few approaches, but you are fairly sure you know what to do already. First, you will prepare, and let them taste a piece of finality. Then, before they can rebel against your will, you shall do as is natural.
You grip the chains in your hand tighter.
"I inflict my will/My will I inflict/ in ice to crush all that may oppose it/ to crush all that oppose it in ice/ with overwhelming force, to flatten the earth under its weight!/to flatten the earth under its weight with overwhelming force!"
Far overhead, buffeted by the air moving erratically under your instruction, not one, but two masses of frozen water materialize into being, your will imposing on reality to bring them into being.
They are set on a collision course with the construction you wish to see destroyed. Perhaps they will make it difficult to retrieve the husks left after you are done, perhaps they will not. What matters is that they shall crush stone and magic just as surely as flesh and bone.
Meanwhile, as a rash of activity is breaking out before you, though you remain hidden in the storm, you reel in your instrument.
Your horn. Your bludgeon. Your trumpet.
The twin comets made of ice continue on their course, but before they have a chance to impact, you bring it to your armored face, setting it upon lips that do not currently exist.
And you blow.
https/watch?v=LffSZfRSwTI
(Recommended listening and one general theme for these occasions)
A sound rings forth, vibrating through the air and shaking the loose snow dancing through it. Further and further it resounds, with little attention paid to what... until it meets the fortress.
"The Works Of Man Are Feeble And Fleeting Before The Hand Of God." And what God could better make the point, then, than yourself?
It is unlike you to get lost in philosophical questions in this state, but such is the act of blowing the horn. It cannot be helped.
Before you, stone vibrates with the sound meeting it, the frequency merely a side effect of the execution of your will. In a swift wave, the sound of your trumpet spreads and spreads, encompassing all of the fortress before you.
It continues on, through the woods and the snow and across the paths and streets, its effect spreading wholesale. It even goes so far as to strike at the other two fortresses, equidistant from your current location.
You are not omniscient (not quite). You only have a very rough idea, and finding the information inside your Book would be very time-consuming. However, it matters naught. They will be affected, or they will not be; all that you care for is the location before you.
It is very fast. The humans within the fortress halt, stunned by the magnificent sound of your prime instrument as you continue blowing, no such thing as limited lung capacity enough to inhibit you. Your trumpet drowns out all sound, all thought, for a single long moment, heard by all within its range.
Then the fortress walls... crumble. With the pair of icy harbingers above still approaching, all hasty reaction to them is rendered unto nothing as every stone, every piece of rock so much as stacked upon another, is turned to dust.
It is not limited to stone. Metal. Wood. Cloth. Everything made by mortal hands in the area your message has reached, is now meaningless. Nonexistent. Clothes and armor, weapons of all kinds, furniture, construction-
Reduced to nothing. Falling apart into dust that then ceases to exist itself, as though an actor leaving a stage. Shouts of surprise are heard, men and some few women tumbling onto each other as they fall in the vacancy of the structure that housed them until now. The walls, the towers, all erased in an instant and leaving them to the merciless call of gravity.
It is chaos, but not for long. Onto the ground do they fall, into the basements dug out by human hands only to become their graves. The brave men and women that, until moments ago, were doing everything they could to avert the fate rushing on towards them from above fall to their deaths one way or another.
Some, the lucky, die as they impact. Broken necks and spines, crushed skulls. Others do not share this luck and survive, with broken legs and arms or even entirely unwounded.
Few are in any state to run. None that do have a chance to escape.
The fortress was a significantly large walled compound housing easily a hundred thousand souls with room for more, if it is needed. None of them escape tonight.
You watch, motionless, as the ice falls. You are well out of the initial impact zones, and so when screaming piles of bodies are crushed and turned into less concrete corpses and more smears on the cold surfaces around them, you are merely battered by the shockwaves escaping in a thunderous cacophony.
The storm around you is blown away in all directions, every living being nearby battered and broken by the forces now at play. Perhaps it is a mercy, to die this quickly and thoroughly, in contrast to what you will do to many of their comrades later on.
Some still live on, you are sure, clinging to life with the last of their strength. You do not begrudge them this last act of defiance; they will expire by the time you have arrived at the place of their demise.
All according to your will.
There is nothing left of the earthly institution, but you are not deterred from exerting your truth upon this reality all the same. "Change and twist, morph and mutate!"
Your work is not yet done, and these bodies will do quite nicely. Of course, many of them are barely useable, but the ones that are are quite sufficient according to your designs. You simply require a little more effort in utilizing them. "Change and twist, morph and mutate!"
Broken limbs are irrelevant. Crushed and mangled skulls simply added as armor. One by one, you add the lesser pieces into something greater than the parts of its sum. You have already made the plans, now you simply need to execute them. "Change and/Change and/Change and/Change and twist, morph/morph, twist/twist, morph and mutate/and twist/morph, twist and mutate!"
You keep on casting your spells for a long, seemingly endless amount of time, though you are acutely aware your time in this state of being is limited and has to be used optimally. Your hands never idle, taking upon the ice you conjured for the purpose of ending these lives and shaping it with what might be mistaken as practiced ease.
In truth, it is simply certainty of purpose. You have already envisioned each piece, all you need is to create and combine them.
Efficiency will suffer, but only minimally. Installing one body at a time in the frame you are creating, you barely bother acknowledging the efforts of your Carnage, receiving one ruined corpse after another. You used nearly all your Light, but you do not require it otherwise at this time, and so this was merely the expedient way to sort through the rubble of the former garrison and related personnel.
In this surrounding temperature, the massive spines of ice you are lifting out of the greater whole, simply pushing your hands inside it and sculpting them with swift swipes to be lifted out of it, will hold just as well as iron, and your power over frozen water allows you to connect the beams as though you were forming clay.
You are satisfied with this, and naturally twist the ice and the flesh into each other. The end result, when your superior form has already run out from overuse and you have returned to your baser self, is a nightmare born from the frozen depths of winter, an amalgamation of ice and frozen meat twisting unto itself with a sound like cracking wood with every move.
Your zombie giant ice variation is fully functioning, and though you had to use a few additional corpses in its construction to make up for the instability of ice when it comes to holding up some of the weight you're putting on it, the additional muscle power contained within the added bodies should be able to make up for it.
Also, man, you're kind of a prick when you go full angel, huh? Ah well, you're still yourself, which is really the important thing. Now then, your abomination against all that is good and right is ready and groaning as though in perpetual suffering out of hundreds of ragged lungs, so you should probably get going on actually using it before someone comes along to investigate the whole, uh, 'all manmade objects in this enormous area spontaneously disappearing' thing.
"Ready, steady, here goes daddy!" The dozens of Carnages all around you chant, pulling a little cheering routine and jumping onto each others' shoulders. "Gonna kill them all already!"
... Jeez, it really shows how much they are like you, despite them being made of raw muscle and bone only. Well, technically, they're made by a part of your consciousness and a bunch of aura, but eh, same difference.
The flight back towards where you came from is exponentially harder than the one towards the fortress, as you are continuing to draw upon a worse and and worse storm continually blasting up towards the north against which you have to go now. Which is why you, of course, don't fly at all.
Instead, you simply transform into your shadow and slide and slither back in that form. You know the way, after all, and so even though all the snow falling onto you tickles a bit and you're marginally slower that as a bird thanks to the need to adhere to surfaces (despite your still considerable speed, if you might add), all you need to do is keep moving in the right direction for a while.
Now then, you have the spell to summon an undead to your side, even if it only works once an hour. That will take care of your distraction just fine. Unfortunately, the Carnage bodies you summoned up to help you gather the bodies aren't really able to make the trek by themselves- just moving all the way could've been possible somehow, especially if you took the time to pump them full of aura while moving, but with the storm beating down anything and everything in its reach, they would simply lose aura too quickly to be viable in this sense.
Sorry to Carnage, but she really did help earlier. There will be an opportune time and place yet.
Returning to full corporeality near the human army's camp, you first take a look around, noting that the field around it seems to have grown in size while you were away for some reason. More importantly, it takes you just a moment to ascertain a few key locations- the places to find mages, healers and the places those warmth stones are gathered.
You were kind of worried this soul might've lost its touch, what with all the fuckers you couldn't locate recently for one reason or another.
One, minor, issue with that, though. While compass guy's power works just fine on pointing you at singular persons or stashes of certain kinds of objects, it's kind of crap at determining where groups of people are and it only ever gives you the direction of the nearest large amount of objects when requested.
Needless to say, this complicates things, but you can make out a decent few places where warmth stones seem to be stored in larger numbers, whereas the mages and healers are a bit more complicated. Unsurprisingly, there are several places they seem to congregate in, meaning there are several areas set aside for them respectively.
So in order to deal significant damage to any of these targets, you'll need to either find and eat someone that knows a lot about the camp's current setup, then use that information once you know everything they did... or just rampage around hard enough you're likely to fulfill your goal anyway. The whole 'just kill them all until you get the right ones' gambit.
Yeah, better to have an actual plan. With that in mind, you eye the area and overlay your compass soul once again, simply choosing to look for 'a high-ranking officer'. Vague search terms like that could get you anything above a simple soldier in rank, but it's not like you need much.
In other words, a gamble. If you lose it, not much lost beyond a little time. Time which will be costly, in a few moments, but all the same it's a risk you're willing to take.
Behind you, a wild collection of undead you created gathers under the cover of the storm, undoubtedly unable to stay hidden for long even under these weather conditions. Not this close to a rather vigilant army, at least. Then again, they don't particularly need to.
You've been steadily summoning them to yourself while you've been traveling around this side of the border, every once in a while casting your undead summoning spell one at a time. A round two dozen of your Skeleton Avengers, the needlessly edgy name you gave to the template notwithstanding. Exactly fifteen Hunters, banged up from a few ambushes they pulled on small, detached groups of soldiers over the course of the past few days but still more or less intact.
They stopped sending their men to die pretty quickly, of course, but it still did help kill a few hundred here and there.
Then, of course, there's your Biteworm, snaking through the knee-high layer of snow steadily building up at the moment, and your eight Watchers that are mostly just riding on the Hunters to avoid the weather. Which leaves a total of ten Skitterlings and your Bone Carriage as well as your two undead wyverns not present at the moment, left to defend the Border Fortress and for various transportation purposes, respectively.
All in all, you still have a rather potent amount of effective combat strength, even if the absence of even minimally advanced technology means you don't have all the disintegrating ion weapons installed in your creations.
Laying on a few hands, it doesn't take you all too long to change out a few spells among some of your undead, doing something that Yoshi seems to consider applying 'TM's to your 'team'. It's... probably a reference, but you don't have the slightest idea to what.
A fact that seems to, in turn, enrage him. You'll never get what some people have about their internet culture foibles.
By the way, you're doing this to just cover the area with your Miasma spell, one you rarely, if ever, use because it's kind of PR-unfriendly as fuck and doesn't discriminate friend from for, but in this situation, it'll do exactly what you want it to. You're also giving it to all of the bird-like undead to have them cover a wider area by casting it simultaneously- a single spellcaster can only ever have one instance of this one active, so you're just adding together more of them, easily enough.
Either way, time for some action. "That which I have brought to unlife, heed my call, feel your chains, and come to your master, for a task awaits!"
Yes, still bitter about the whole chanting business. Magic would be so much better if you could just use it like any of your other powers.
At your side, snow and ice are blown apart as your zombie giant pulls itself 'out of the ground', shrieking limbs howling loud enough to rival the wind bearing down all around you. The many corpses twisting around each other are the very opposite from subtle, but then again you aren't trying to be, anymore.
Showtime.
The alarm is raised within the first couple of seconds, but it doesn't stop you or any of your attackers. Similarly, the warmth shield around the camp just keeps the inside of itself at a particular minimum temperature, while the detection field does just that; i detects intruders.
Anyone with eyes can see that the camp is currently under attack by a giant abomination born of a lot of dead soldiers and ice, however. In other words, you have successfully neutralized the enemy's static defenses for your assault.
All shall bow before your superior intellectual prowess. And yes, just sending in a bunch of minions to stir shit up is a great and sophisticated strategy, no matter what anyone else says.
It is always nice to see, how deceptively fast even large creatures can be. Case in point, though the Zombie Giant seems to move like a literal lumbering giant, the length of its stride and reach mean that it is easily breaching the simple palisades set up around the camp you're sending it out to attack.
And trample over them with its sheer weight easily enough, of course. In fact, the thing wastes no time in immediately stomping and kicking away anything near it, allowing the rest of your undead to storm right in. The guards on shift immediately meet them in battle and a huge fight breaks out, Avengers parrying and counterattacking and using their armors to blunt attacks, ripping deep and bloody wounds into any openings they see.
They are countered, then, by the human soldiers employing excellent teamwork to keep them in check, limiting their mobility, occupying them to buy others time to strike from the sides or behind where they can encircle any of them. It very quickly becomes apparent that your skeletal undead, while more than a match for a single human, are still in for a hard time as it is.
By contrast, the Hunters are using the commotion to clear the area of any lone foes, biting into them and breaking bones with swipes of their claws. Their armor is, if anything, just as strong as that of the Avengers, but they are also significantly faster, to the point they can avoid group fights by simply penetrating the enemy's ranks too quickly for them to react.
And their lethality has been improved much from even your initial design. Suffice to say, nobody but heavily armored fighters or perhaps mages stands any chance against them.
The Biteworm is already off, burrowing underground and awaiting your orders on where to strike, while the Watchers...
Well, good news and bad news. Good news, they've established aerial surveillance and deployed their spells quickly and efficiently, a good third of the camp now covered in the black smog that covers the affected area without impeding vision in its own peculiar way. Bad news, they're also an easy target, insofar as any flying object in the sky is, and are under heavy bombardment of hundreds of mages and thousands of archers.
The only reason it isn't more is that most of the enemy's firepower is concentrated on your Ice Zombie Giant. Lightning, fireballs, explosive spells of all kinds, disintegration, weird distortion stuff, any mages in the area are immediately doing everything they can to absolutely wreck your main attraction.
It won't work, of course. Or rather, it probably will, but they'll need much, much longer to kill this thing that way. Then there's the heavy arrows and crossbow bolts shot at full speed, and even a few ballistae fired at the monstrosity, but as it is, it is simply ignoring enemy fire while tearing through anything in its path, stomping and punch craters and trenches into the ground.
And all the while, nobody is paying attention to the single shadow darting through the half-lit chaos illuminated only by what scant few light sources are around and brought in by the second. Ultimately aiming for a certain soldier off to the side of the action a good way, one that doesn't seem to be interested in throwing himself at the obvious enemy and instead staying inside a tent to gather up various pieces of parchment.
As good a sign as any.
Information fills your mind, the direct connection to the new addition to your mind letting you access it with trivial ease, as you usually do. Distribution of supplies, magical and mundane both. Locations of various parts of the camp. This guy you just scarfed down didn't have access to all information you would want, not technically, but practically speaking, he was a quartermaster coordinating everything coming into this camp with several colleagues.
Warmth stones, first of all. Several dozen smaller depots have a few crates of them stacked up, where they are replenished regularly from three central supply depots. However, despite technically being the central ones, their stores are deliberately kept low so as to avoid complete losses in case of sabotage or attack, the greatest secret to the distribution of everything being that there are simply so many temporary storerooms in play they can be moved between them at a moment's notice without jeopardizing any location in particular.
However, you at least know of a significant amount of these locations now.
Similarly, mages and healers, the latter no being counted as the former on account of not being battle mages by and large, as they are distinct categorizations of military personnel and all, are evenly distributed around the camp both to keep them from being wiped out easily and to let them respond in case of attack as easily as possible.
Again, you have a good idea of the topography on this topic, so you can probably do something, at the very least...
You dash through the area, staying in the shape of your shadow as usual for stealth missions like this. Though you admittedly don't incorporate giant undead into your plans for situations like this in most cases, you may need to seriously re-evaluate your stance on that.
Seriously, this shit is amazing. You hardly even need to bother sneaking at this rate.
It's quite a simple matter, you just pop up inside the temporary storerooms built with easily available materials (a policy put into place to deny the enemy the use of any actually significant resources invested into anything more, no doubt), pry open the crates the warmth stones are stored inside of (they can't really reach any temperatures that would be dangerous on their own, which is a feature with them) and start to disable them.
By which you mean you 'vigorously apply your claws to the things'.
It doesn't need saying that, although the warmth stones are just that, stones, your strength and the durability of your extended claws are such that they crumble once you thoroughly squeeze them with little to minimal issue. Although you have your work cut out for you, thanks to the sheer number of the stupid enchanted stones, but you're literally superhumanly fast and efficient when you want to be.
Meanwhile, through the eyes of your creations (the many, many eyes of the zombie giant that are currently functioning, notably), you can see the battle outside developing. The Avengers are currently advancing as a group, to which the human opposition is responding by keeping a distance and organizing ranged strikes towards them- even things as simple as throwing heavy objects- to make use of the relatively slow walking speed of your skeletal minions. This is complicated, however, by the Hunters coordinating in turn to literally take bites out of the enemy formation, despite the spellfire focused on them at the moment.
Mages would obviously fire at the greatest threat, it goes without saying. At least the standard battle mages, of course, as if there was some archmage around things would be looking quite differently.
That said, that is one part of this fight. All but two of your Watchers have been shot out of the sky, and quite thoroughly, methodically destroyed for that matter. It does mean your eyes in the sky are about to be gone, but as long as they last you can still make out some significant movements on the ground, so you'll just use them as best you can.
Meanwhile, as for those mages... A lot of attention is focused on your Zombie Giant, likely by virtue of its sheer size and immediate presence, but it is currently busy doing one of the perhaps most devastating things a creature of its size can do.
It is falling over.
Not due to any injuries, mind you, but simply because you have decided that squashing the nearest gathering of mages, one of the twenty or so near where your breach occurred, with the weight of its body. Incidentally, it i also currently making use of a special power it gained after you infused it with a soul fragment made out of immense amounts of pain and suffering, the constant screaming the still intact lungs in its composition are exhaling at all times now actually causing pain in nearby humans.
It's indiscriminate, but it doesn't work on anything that's already dead, like many effects related to your necromancy. This includes all beings currently on your side on this battlefield, so it's the perfect time to use it, really. The affected soldiers are clutching their ears or have lost the will to fight entirely for the moment, though far from all are as thoroughly hit by this scream- many are simply gritting their teeth and fighting through it.
Doesn't save them from a quick decapitation strike by the Hunters, though.
With the shockwaves of the impact of literal thousands of corpses (though admittedly the low thousands) and massive amounts of ice spreading through the ground, however, the enemy's response doesn't take long to occur. A massive beam of light occurs, shining down from the sky and piercing straight through your lovely storm.
And, of course, impacting the 'back' of your giant, causing it to intensify its pain scream as though it actually feels something in response. It quickly tries to get back up again, but the force of the spell is holding it down for the moment.
Your response is instantaneous in that you immediately search for the likely cause of this bullshit, and find it in the form of a section of the camp lit up with this golden glow, the same color as the rip-off of some orbital laser currently being a problem for you.
Long before this fight, you loaded your undead up with a particular spell, except the Watchers, that is. Right now, you have your Hunters storm towards the area the group of mages that has to be causing this is in, generally speaking, and immediately encounter increased opposition.
Heavily armed and armored elites blocking them off, is what you mean, and pairs of mages cooperating to pin them down and hammer them with destructive spells.
You have them fire off the barrages they've been holding onto.
Said barrages do not need to be accurate; the number of projectiles now scything through every solid object not reinforced by some serious magic in the area is achieving success through simple saturation of firepower.
In other words, most enemies die. The ones that don't, are overtaken by the vengeful Hunters in short order, and the mages standing around a ritual circle evidently prepared in advance, while protected by a forcefield, not surviving much longer once it shorts out under persistent attack.
The Zombie Giant is smoking a bit where it started melting, and its lower back is a complete ruin, but you simple have it crawl around on all fours for a bit just in case the affected section couldn't bear its weight otherwise. Welcome to stage two, fuckers.
Meanwhile, a wholly different issue is beginning to make itself known for your opponents. For one, the Biteworm has shown itself above the ground, in the middle of a small congregation of mages preparing what seems like yet another ritual or large-scale spell, only half of its body poking out above the ground.
Needless to say, its sudden appearance coupled with the sharp protracted jaws make short work of the locals, though its capacity for violence against several targets at once remains low enough that a few painful spells manage to make their way onto it before it retreats before the approaching wave of angry humans.
Half of its head is missing, sadly. Luckily, you did think to stretch the brain along the whole body, so it's not destroyed quite yet, but with so much of its main weapon, the jaws, missing, it is having trouble digging at the same speed as earlier.
Quite annoying, that, but at least you got those mages out of the way. That shit they do ain't no joke.
That said, the real kicker is yet to come. There are, already, literal thousands of corpses strewn across the battlefield as you continued to crumble the warmth stones of this army to dust, and nobody seems to be giving the slightest thought about them as of yet.
The phantom mist of your Watchers' miasma spells is spread across the battlefield. The affected are already implementing various measures, from tying a cloth across their mouth and nose to try and filter it out to what looks a lot like wide-area healing applied as the area is vacated in an orderly manner to keep any casualties from appearing.
However, just as the Zombie Giant climbs on all fours and starts to whale on everything around it like an angry toddler, the dead bodies begin to twitch.
Then they get up. And next off, your enemies are in for a zombie apocalypse scenario.
One thing that has come up, your undead are having a hard time out there, despite the havoc they're wrecking in all directions. So you take a moment to fulfill that one promise you made just earlier, exerting nearly all your aura to form a handful of bodies for Carnage to inhibit.
"I want you to wait here until I've made a few of you before you go out there and kill anything human," you tell them, the irony of you talking to the voice inside your head (technically) through the real bodies your imagination has given it (technically) certainly not lost on you. They, though, just respond with enthusiasm.
"Does that mean we aren't supposed to do the cheer?" The raspy, inhuman voice of your 'daughter' asks.
"You can if you want to, but only once you start killing. Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise."
"Yaaay," all five of them whisper.
Why five? Because that's the upper limit for how many of them you can create at any one time without waiting for your aura to replenish. Your semblance is incredibly versatile, but just also extremely aura-hungry like that.
Still amazing overall, though.
Anyway, with that you continue to dart from one place to the next, shaping more bodies as you go and your aura allows. Nobody seems to be catching on to your presence so far, but with the chaos of the fight, little else was to be expected, you suppose.
More concerningly, the Watchers are down, or about to be, at any rate. One took an actual shot from a ballista, though you still call bullshit on that actually hitting it, whereas the other one continues to eat fireballs from a particularly zealous mage with some good aim.
That said, the Hunters continue to make some good progress in just running around and assassinating key personnel, mages first of all. One has lost all functionality, sadly, due to a particularly unpleasant use of what Yoshi's mind inside yours calls a 'classical lightning bolt to the face'.
To be more precise, the electricity produced and guided through magic hit the head just as the Hunter was about to eat the mage responsible for casting it and fried pretty much everything inside the undead. Which is annoying, but losses were to be expected from the start. Speaking of, the Biteworm is currently still hiding underground at your command, waiting for an important target to reveal itself.
If it's gonna croak, may as well make use of it.
As for the Avengers, it would seem the humans have brought out actual cannons, somehow operated by their mages, to bear against them. Eight of them have been destroyed by them while heavily armored response units are holding them back, the force produced through loading both metal ball bearings and rounded stones and somehow shooting them out with significant velocity proving to be enough to shatter bones through the heavy armor worn by your skeletons.
Sixteen of them are left, on the bright side. Massively outnumbered by literal thousands of foes, but they're keeping them busy, at least.
Lastly, the Zombie Giant... Is still causing complete destruction as it works its way over through the rough route you planned out for it, taking out as many mages as possible. The majority of them will have moved around by this point, of course, but you want their tents or other quarters with any personal belongings they aren't carrying on them gone, at least.
Petty spite? Yes. Perhaps a waste? Most likely. Something you're doing anyway? Most definitely.
On the flipside, some of these madmen have started to actually approach the Zombie Giant, actively jamming weapons into it to serve as handholds before escaping. Many of them get squashed, or torn apart by the limbs of the bodies it is made of, but many others also survive to repeat the process. Slowly but surely, they are beginning to gather around and on top of it, actively hacking apart an limbs and bodies in reach as they try to kill the monster currently ravaging the camp.
Not to mention the increased usage of siege weaponry on your biggest minion in this fight. You understand the ballistae, but using a magically reinforced and driven battering ram to try and crush one of the 'arms' is going a step too far.
Worse, it's working, or at least your Zombie Giant has lost a significant chunk of the dead flesh making up that part of its body.
Then of course the Carnages join the fight, around two dozen killing machines bursting out of the supply depots and throwing themselves at anything that moves. Arms become swords and clubs, grow claws and mouths to better eviscerate and brutalize the enemy, limbs are torn off wholesale and bone spikes are shot out in all directions.
In other words, Carnage is very much honoring the name you gave her, splattering blood and flesh into the bleak surroundings with utmost exuberance.
Right as shouts are heard to reorganize the battle lines, the humans still trying to pen in and destroy your smaller undead so the main fighting force can concentrate on the big one, things get just a little more desperate as thousands of corpses, produced by the recent fighting and lying around inside the effective range of the miasma, rise to throw themselves at any living beings nearby.
It's always hilarious to see someone fight reanimated comrades, especially when that someone is a nuisance in the first place. The shamblers (temporary name) are strong, though far from the kind of power the undead you personally raise would have, and coming in as a great big mass of bodies, more a horde than anything else.
Shields and spears meet them, but they care about their casualties even less than the opposition does and the sheer weight of bodies is pushing the humans back, at least temporarily. They are being cut down left and right, but to destroy them takes quite a bit of force and the destruction of their heads and, sometimes, spines, before they stop moving.
And all the while the miasma continues to eat at any living beings and causes them to join the mindless charge. Already, some among them have observed this tendency and are proactively destroying the relevant anatomy of any fallen comrades, lest they have to put them down again the hard way.
Aren't they a bit too determined? They could stand to have at least a few despairing people here and there, y'know.
Still, you're making progress. One step at a time.
For all that you're making progress with all the supplies you can access (a quick kick to destroy any containers for food you see here and there doesn't hurt), what you really need to be doing is to lay on some hurt on the enemy at this rate. Your undead are making good time, but at the end this was always going to be a minor attack, a diversion that involves a bunch of casualties, but far from enough to realistically stop this army.
Thousands are dying, true, but they have five-hundred thousand soldiers. It's not quite a drop in the bucket, but close. Your minions are already starting to get overwhelmed, so you'll have to act quickly.
Searching for a good vantage point, you come to crouch atop a large tent with reasonably few fighters nearby, eyeing the parts of the camp as of yet untouched by the sudden ambush you pulled on it. You've been sneaking around and taking out a lot of warmth stones, but you could probably accelerate the process...
"I inflict my will in ice to crush all that may oppose it with overwhelming force, to flatten the earth under its weight!" It's a bit sudden, but with any luck you'll be able to keep any currently untapped mages from interfering with the ice meteor you've personally called down.
To that end, you begin to surreptitiously stretch out your hemokinesis, ripping and tearing at the eyes of your foes at random. You're making sure not to give any obvious clues as to your location, of course.
Carnage is alerting you as to the location of several mages that have noticed the approaching heavy artillery strike (as you have come to think of the ice comets), so you naturally move to preemptively strike at them... By summoning a particular painting you finished inside your inner world recently.
A vaguely humanoid energy construct falls from the heavens, melting all the snow near it and unblockable in its path. When it impacts, it does so with a force not to be underestimated, burning a hole into the ground and melting the earth the camp was built upon.
As for the rest of the battle, as you already surmised, things are slowly getting harder. The army has the measure of your minions now, and it shows; though the Hunters are continuing to perform hit-and-run tactics, striking wherever they can find any weakness, they are being hunted down in turn by squads of heavily armored elite soldiers supported by mages, sacrificing a few men here and there to buy time to take out a single limb at a time and slowly reduce their strength.
Kind of a pain, but you'd imagine this is actually how these guys deal with strong demons on the battlefield anyway. Many spells you see thrown around are meant to main, rather than kill, likely under the assumption that trying to instantly destroy the targets wouldn't work in the first place.
Which, granted, isn't wrong. They have to literally hack apart the undead you created to make them stop working.
So you're down to nine Hunters, though the price paid for these losses is significant relative to their enemies. The Biteworm, too, is used up, ambushing another section of mages and paying with its continued existence for it.
The Avengers are taking heavy losses now that a way to deal with them is being implemented, reduced to a bare ten of them as they are, and the Watchers are long gone, too. The Zombie Giant, at least, is still going at it lively, even as a noticeable amount of its surface bodies are lacking limbs and heads and more and more artillery, both conventional and magical in nature, is applied to it.
You'll have to figure out what to do quickly. Things are going about as expected, but you're running out of time.
At least Carnage is having fun, though. Assimilating dead meat whenever they get damaged, her bodies are turning out to be extremely dangerous, especially as they have some just about perfect coordination going. A few are destroyed too quickly to heal up, of course, but as wounds are healed easily, they're just extremely durable and long-lasting compared to what else your semblance can do, simply because damage doesn't impact their aura reserves as badly.
... Yeah, best get going while the going's good. While you could probably inflict far more casualties if you really wanted to, the risk of staying around is rapidly starting to outweigh the potential gains.
Which is not to say that you get out of dodge the moment you confirm the destruction of the majority of stored warmth stones you could find. Instead, you start to cast one of your most reliable kinds of magic for actual fights like this. "Shoot a barrage!"
A dozen spires of ice materialize, already in motion from the moment of their creation. One after the other, they impact across the camp, battering down any defenses in the way.
This is what magic is all about, really. You have giant abomination minions and can cause death and destruction with a short sentence and a wave of your hand (added for the purposes of being more dramatic). Now, as for said minions...
You kind of want to keep the Ice Zombie Giant. Like, it doesn't take that long to make more, so long as you have the raw materials, but both your time and your raw materials are in short supply these days, so if at all possible you'd like to reuse this one. To that end, you keep on firing off barrages of your ice lances at anywhere you can see anyone shooting stuff at your biggest minion around, giving it orders to break through the camp and flee in the direction of the Border Fortress.
As for all the others? The shamblers are gathering into a giant horde already, you just need them to keep the enemy from concentrating on the big guy for a bit while all of this is going on. It's a worthy cause to sacrifice them for, at least.
The joys of fully expendable minions. Even if everything you sent out tonight dies, it isn't any particularly big loss to you in the big picture.
"One, two! Daddy's coming for you!" "Three, four, gonna grind you to flour!" "... We need better rhymes."
And Carnage is pulling her routine again while fighting. Good girl. Also, whoops, is it just you or is that a giant laser being fired at yourself over there?
You burst into mist, the immediate movement enough to carry you away from the onrushing tide of pure energy coming your way. Reassembling yourself closer to the ground and at another position, you take a moment to reestablish what you know of how the fight is going.
Most of your undead are destroyed or won't last much longer, while Carnage is covering for you by distracting the mages that are trying to counteract your ice meteor- by assembling two trios of her bodies into what amounts to a biological catapult and launching a rapid fire of shamblers at their direction.
They end together with their targets when the meteor manages to come down, crashing to the earth with the same immensely destructive effects you already saw when you used the spell earlier.
Unfortunately, the army is just way too enormous to be wiped out just like that, even if you very much expect a significant amount of casualties and wounded just appeared.
Magically conjured by yours truly, heh.
Meanwhile, the Zombie Giant has made good progress in getting through the camp, the horde actually serving as cover as it keeps on moving. At the very least, there's only two insane fighters still stuck to it as it scrambles along, and the volume of fire directed at it has decreased immensely. Unfortunately, it has also lost an arm and several chunks of its torso to several spells similar to the one you just dodged, but with enough time it'll... probably be fine.
As for the shamblers, they're being put down at an astonishing rate, only very few soldiers brought down by their frenzied attacks, but they're also keeping the enemy busy and giving your Hunters a few more chances to attack before they're destroyed.
Your purpose here is completed, even if it's kind of a shame you didn't get to eat your fill on these poor saps while you were attacking them already. Ah well, you probably shouldn't let your greed and hunger control you about this stuff- the next giant laser might just be aimed better, after all.
A quick flash step, and you're off, blasting straight past anything that might've tried to stop you. Disappeared into the storm, as far as anyone present might be able to tell.
Now that you're out of combat, the only thing still going on being the shambling horde and a few Carnages that have decided to launch suicidal attacks to try and take a few more targets with them, you can take a moment to reflect on everything that just happened over the past few hours, the familiar haze of battle falling off you. You pride yourself in your ability to keep a calm head even in stressful or hectic situations (certainly better now than you would have before your death), but even so you can't deny that it helps to come out of the mindset of an immediate fight and analyze what you did from a different perspective.
A few different perspectives, really. And hey, not like you have that much else to do while on the way back to the Border Fortress, your Zombie Giant getting back up and following behind you as it works against the storm you have caused.
Better to call it a blizzard, though. The snow's started to fall so heavily you can hardly see your hands held before your eyes- if you had either right now, anyway, because you sure as hell will stay a shadow until you're somewhere with walls.
While Gabriel was running around leading the human army by the nose, things were proceeding elsewhere just as much, if not more. Schemes and preparations were in motion, caused by various people all over the Border Fortress, the human lands at large and the Royal Capital at the heart of the demon kingdom itself.
In the last of those specifically, one Sarah Livsey was busy putting several plans and ideas into practice as she chased after several goals. One of them was to ensure that her beloved brother would find that there would be nearly no reinforcements coming for his enemy once he dealt with the army that was currently threatening the vaunted Border Fortress. After all, all this fighting meant he was away from the castle, which meant he was away from her, which in turn was unacceptable.
So she kept on directly linking up with the agents Rose had all over the southern-most parts of the Human Kingdom of Hannovens, organizing what might be the largest chaos in the human military structure this world had ever seen. Reports were 'misplaced', replaced with convincing enough fakes, supplies disappeared or were delivered to the wrong place and the wrong orders sent across the entire region.
In short, things were going well. A few of the demons sent out on these missions had been discovered, of course, but that was just to be expected with this kind of blatant interference, and as it turned out trained demon spies and ninjas (there was no other way to call it) were exceedingly hard to catch even once that happened.
That wasn't even to mention the other projects Sarah was working on, of course. Together with Rose, she was putting in a concentrated effort to bring demonkind into something approaching fighting shape, mostly by reorganizing the army that was still fractured after the last demon lord's death and ensuring a proper supply of everything necessary to wage war was delivered to the Border Fortress. Weapons, armor, construction materials and whatever carpenters and smiths that could be found that felt like they wanted to go to war.
One good thing about demons, they were all combatants in some way.
And then there was that little... setup, she was working on. Probably should have installed something like it the moment she arrived in this dimension for the first time, but better late than never. Speaking of which...
"You know, Strangers are always a pain to deal with, even with my powers," Sarah said into the empty room, smirking at the broken thread put up right atop the door leading inside of it. "But there are ways. Reveal yourself."
All of a sudden, the figure of a young man could be seen up on the ceiling, clinging to it with both hands and feet and dressed in black from top to bottom. Realizing what had happened, he reached for a short sword sheathed across his back, drawing it to throw himself at the vampire in the room, only for his downward landing slash to pass through her without hitting anything.
Immediately shifting into a desperate backflip to avoid the dagger coming at his face out of nowhere, the hero tried to gain some distance, only to be shot at from the gun the weapon had turned into with a mechanical click. "A trap," he said, just as much to let it be known he realized what was going on as to buy a moment of time.
"Yup," the blonde supervillain slash monster said, popping the 'p' as she finally unsheathed the second part of her weapon set and shifted it from rapier mode to whip mode, swinging it at her enemy. He parried it, annoyingly, his short sword guiding Sarah's trajectory upward and away from her target, but she just activated another one of her powers.
A surge of electricity went through Vine, the faithful whip rapier transmitting the charge right through the sword and, controlled by Sarah's will still, into the arm holding it.
"Guh!" The hero dropped his weapon immediately, the arm numbed. Next he attempted to draw a cylindrical object of some sort from his belt, but by then Sarah was already on him, more paralyzing charges emitting from her palm right through his clothes (that seemed to double as armor) to incapacitate him as she chewed through his neck.
One hero down.
Once she was done (and had called in the maids to stow away the body), she took a moment to follow through with a little investigation, of course, but she already knew the rough gist of things anyway. The reason the hero now in her stomach had never directly attacked anyone was that doing so would break his 'absolute stealth', the heroic power he'd been bestowed, and re-entering it took a long while once it was broken.
Another mystery solved by Detective Sarah. She didn't even care he'd made a fool out of them with his attempts at sabotage (successful as they might have been), now that she had done so and proven she was smarter and better at this game, so he would just receive the usual torture instead of getting any special attention like her old boss was still receiving.
Speaking of which, it really had been worth it to use Coil's power to simulate her using her mind control power every five minutes to see if someone was there. And check the traps, of course, which was how she knew to wait in this room in the first place.
Check and mate, and Thomas Calvert could go right back where he belonged: Into the rape pit.
Ahh... If only her brother was there. She always felt something was missing in these moments of casual cruelty if he wasn't there to laugh about it with her...
Right, once she was done with tonight's work, she was going to go visit Clarice and paint a few more pictures of him with her help. She was keeping only the best in her own room, but merely having a handful just wasn't enough. She needed more Gabriel.
Setting up a small set of biomass spawners once you arrive back at the Border Fortress takes a bit of doing, mostly due to the fact you didn't think to take any of the bodies from the battlefield you just left together with the big Zombie Giant trundling along, but with just a bit of ingenuity, luck and plundering a few bits and pieces from a few monsters you manage to find on the southern side of the border, you manage to get a few fleshy blobs of obvious evil spitting out chunks of flesh put together in the unused rooms of the fortress.
You must make sure no prospective heroic hires ever see these things before they've agreed to work for you, and maybe not even then. Well, same goes for certain parts of the castle's underground structures (calling it a basement simply doesn't do it justice), but the point very much does stand.
Anyway, once you're done with that and have bound the things to the parts of the fortress they are inside of, you also go ahead and take the time to bind the twisted creatures you call Skitterlings to parts of the fortress, forevermore having them guard and patrol the sections they are now confined to.
Okita is happy about it. You think it has to do with the way they can now wander the same place endlessly while doing their job, but you aren't quite sure.
While you're at it, you also breathe the crystal painting back in, you figure you should have enough of a field out there and don't exactly want anyone to stumble onto and destroy it. Oh, and avoid the stuff creeping onto the fortress walls- you want to keep that foreboding, black stone wall aesthetic intact.
Next off, the human camp... You kind of didn't get the opportunity to drop a proper curse on it, once they put up a proper detection screen and all, as once you got back in, everything was rather hectic. Perhaps a mistake, in retrospect, but perfect memory doesn't mean you automatically do everything right or anything.
You simply had other priorities at the time. Well, that and you were kind of rushed to deal with those damn stones.
Luckily, or perhaps you should say obviously, some bits and pieces of the camp got stuck amidst the roil of bodies that is your Zombie Giant, so, after a quick look over it, you soon recover a few useful pieces of wood, a little ripped canvas- nothing noteworthy in most respects, but quite significant for what you're planning on doing.
Namely, pulling something right out of the voodoo priest's manual, if something like that exists. Using what you have harvested, you are assembling a little replica of the human army's camp, destruction and all. Of course using other materials, too, but you're trying to get as close as possible to the real thing here.
The goal? Getting it close enough to count as the same thing for the purpose of your magic, much like a piece of hair and a picture would when you are laying a curse on someone. It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but generally speaking, this 'sympathetic' effect is what you're after.
You're quite good at little arts and crafts things like this, if you do say so yourself, and so all it takes is a bit of searching around the fortress to find yourself some materials and a quickly summoned Paint Fairy to get started. Somehow, you never really expected to be one of those guys geeking out over miniatures, but hey, it's actually pretty fun, surprising yourself.
Also, thank fuck, or rather yourself, for having the foresight to carry some art supplies with you at all times. Sourcing any amount of glue would have been a giant fucking pain otherwise.
It takes a decent while, even once you have a decently perfect replica of what you remember of the camp, but you expected that much- after the battle, it's obvious the humans would clean up and repair at least some sections. So you put in some guesswork, secretly thankful that your attack ultimately only struck a relatively small part of the camp in the big scheme.
Meaning the majority of your efforts in delicately handling little pieces of cloth to turn them into the various tents the army you're ultimately aiming for has didn't go to waste. Sooner or later, however, after only a few hours of work, you are done!
... Admittedly, maybe this took too much effort compared to what you're getting out of it, but whatever, you're having fun. "May misfortune doom those you house!" First curse in and you think it took, finally. "May sources of warmth within you end!"
Yes, humans give off body warmth, too. No, this is not a coincidence.
With your preparations done throughout the night, you step back out of the fortress refreshed and ready for the coming day, though you still feel an instinctive urge to glower at the despicable light of the sun setting off to your right somewhere.
Damned be the big bright cancer ball, even if it can't stop you anymore.
Flying off into the storm in your bird form, you also can't help but notice that several piles of rocks of varying sizes are lying all over the tops of the walls, next to whatever big siege equipment the demons have been able to build themselves- mostly catapults, though simplistic and with no pulling mechanism that you can see.
You won't comment on it, though perhaps you could look into using them later on. Most of the enemy army is still around, after all, so any delivery mechanisms for fun little surprises for the whole family might come in handy down the line.
Your compass soul has given you a direction you quickly follow, using the storm to speed yourself up this time around as it blows into the direction you want to be going. You could just be using your spell to travel through shadows instead, but now that you have this opportunity, it'd be a shame not to take it.
Yes, you quickly stop and just teleport instead due to the massive amount of hail you catch all over in short order, but you don't take it back.
Naturally, you still have to keep on overlaying the compass to keep on searching, but that's par for the course for you by this point.
Finding the Archer Hero turns out to be easier than you'd expected; demonstrably, he's been moving at a quick pace since you last checked up on his position. Simply put, he's currently camped out just outside of the persistent snow storm you've created, surrounded by a throng of soldiers. Reinforcements he's leading, perhaps?
Either way, you keep your distance for the moment, observing a bit. They seem to be gearing up for forging ahead into the cold, thick warm clothes and warmth stones being handed out among the soldiery. Not all of them are done yet, indicating they've only just arrived in this area, where your storm's offshoots are whipping through the landscape.
Come to think of it, maybe making it a literal wall of snow and frost wasn't too subtle from the outside. Still, it's doing its job.
You slither into the temporary camp, careful to avoid the gaze of any of the honestly surprisingly watchful guards and random soldiers going around and making sure everything is in order with the preparations for braving the storm.
A possible reason for their increased vigilance is audible when you home in on where you're pretty sure none other than the Archer Hero is currently situated, hiding himself behind a stack of rugged crates stacked together into an improvised wall.
And you can hear him mutter to himself, too. "That's a fucking plot gate if I've ever seen one," he says, the sound of a liquid being swished around inside a container being audible to your sharpened senses. "Or we suddenly started playing a Soulsborne and nobody told me. Would fucking suck, too."
Yamamoto Tetsuo, the Archer Hero, ladies and gentlemen. Your impression of him is a little split, going off of only what you know about him from the other heroes you've either recruited or eaten so far; kind of a huge nerd, if you understand the word 'otaku' right (it isn't actually translated by the weird magic that lets both you and the heroes understand all languages on Thule for some reason), he initially had a super huge thing about actually fighting to the death in a war he wasn't really related to in any way, but after a series of events resolved to at least try to pull his weight in a way that doesn't put him in maximum danger all the time.
Hence the bow instead of any other weapon among what was available to him. And for all that the girls you spoke to were seeing him in a negative light, he does seem to have shaped up in more ways than one ever since. His heroic power seems to be 'the ability to attack several times in the span of time it takes to attack', or some other convoluted way of expressing it according to Yoshi. It does make sense, then, that he may as well do so from afar and act as a sort of long-range artillery.
He took training seriously and, although he still has a tendency to describe things in gaming terms, he's actually turned out to be useful often enough nobody feels the need to give him shit over it. And, truth be told, although his power doesn't make any of his shots stronger than they would otherwise be, twenty to thirty enchanted arrows shot from an enchanted bow, both being the absolutely best humanity could create, fired by an archer by definition better than most and in the span of time most others would take to fire a single one is enough of a cheat as it is.
Happy to have caught him with his figurative pants down, you approach, noting the change in the sounds coming from the guy's position as you do so. They easily reveal themselves to be the effect of Yamamoto carefully ordering his way through a quiver of arrows, all marked with differently colored bands and some other differences- various arrowhead shapes, different kinds of wood and metal, some even have some fancy feathers or gemstones attached for fletching.
It isn't the only quiver around. In fact, the Archer Hero has a whole set of them arrayed near himself, all with a different loadout prepared. Next to him, you see a flask containing some form of drink, the dark-haired Japanese himself dressed in some hilariously fantasy-esque clothes and armor.
And immediately on high alert when you materialize in front of him, grabbing the bow lying ready next to himself and an arrow without delay.
"Hey there, no need to be alarmed," you say, palms raised to indicate you aren't planning to attack him. Thruthfully, too- you aren't planning to do so, you just will if you need to. "Just here for a little talk."
"... Really, because you look a lot like that encounter with the last boss at the beginning of the game," the Archer Hero responds, looking ready to use that arrow either as intended or a stabbing weapon. "You know, if this was a game."
"Really, how?" You're genuinely curious. You just have your normal clothes on, plus Last Embrace, so you don't get how you're looking particularly boss-worthy at the moment.
"... You're dressed in casual clothes in weather that has me freezing with enchantments to keep myself warm and you have torture implements on your arms to use as weapons." His tone is dry and to the point, so much so you would almost believe him if you didn't feel vaguely wronged. "And you just have that air about you, that says 'watch out this guy's bad business'. Speaking of which, who are you and why are you here?"
Boogeyman eyes
"Well, you aren't exactly wrong," you begin with a small shrug, "the demons basically summoned me as a replacement for the demon lord. You know, the one the heroes kind of killed. Same as the hero summoning thing, really."
"Ah." He spins his arrow between his fingers a bit. "That makes all of this really awkward, doesn't it? Sorry you got dragged into this whole mess because of us."
"Oh, don't worry about it. Events were pretty much out of everyone's control from the start," you wave him off. Except maybe the two Godesses, given they were the instigators and main culprits behind this whole species wide war of extinction, but it isn't like that really matters at this point. "I don't really blame anyone or anything. But yes, aside from the whole 'player two' thing, or player eighteen or however you want to count it, I'm just kind of trying to at least get the heroes humanity summoned to stay out of the war for the time being."
Yamamoto hums to himself, still wary but evidently more interested in conversation than fighting. "That sounds a lot like one of those choices where you can change sides at the end of the game, but most of those are obvious bad end flags."
Quietly, you use the moment while he's speaking to peer into his eyes, opening yours for the kinds of things you can see if you look at someone.
Death and danger, this world is way too scary/what is everyone back home going to think/this can't be real, is it all just a dream?
Yamamoto Tetsuo, it seems, is a young man of varying and deep fears, hidden behind a compulsive need to frame everything as game terms even as he keeps on thinking and worrying on the inside.
"Let me make my offer, at least? It isn't like I expect you to suddenly stop fighting just because I asked," you say as you put on your best oily salesman impression. "For one, I have a way to get you off this dimension and to a modern version of Earth? Not the one you came from, sadly, but it's got modern amenities and the internet. I am also fabulously wealthy back home, and I wouldn't mind setting you up with enough money to never have to worry about it for your entire life."
"That sounds too good to be true," the hero remarks, "and never seeing my family again is a bit..."
"Well, my home version of Earth also has superheroes and supervillains and Kyushu was kind of sunk into the ocean by a super monster years ago, true enough," you admit just to have something he can nod at being right about. "But I really can travel back and forth, and would it help if I do promise to try and find a way to return you where you came from?"
"That does sound nice, but it doesn't really address my big issue with the prospect." Yamamoto is leaning back against the crates at his back now, though he still refuses to take his eyes off you just in case. "We've fought and bled, all seventeen of us, to end this war and return home. It strikes me as selfish to just give all of that up at this point regardless of their opinions, so..."
"Oh, five of the heroes are already on my side," you reveal with a chipper voice and expression, stunning him into silence for a moment. "Okita didn't really care either way, the weapons trio was mostly fine with it and even Arakawa is sitting in my castle by this point."
"... Gina-san? Really?" He clearly knows her well enough, doesn't he?
"Well, she took some physical persuasion in the form of beating her down, but the trio calmed her down afterwards," you shrug. "I took Tada to a festival two weeks ago, it was pretty fun."
"Haaah..." The archer sighs, clearly feeling the urge to facepalm. "Guess some people just take things at their own pace, huh? How about the others, did they refuse to take your offer? I know Yoshiaki and Masaki were at the fortress when it was taken, and-"
"Oh, I had to kill them," you wave him off. At his surprised look, you give him a grin. "Hey, this was kind of the reason I was summoned, and I'm not exactly going to just not kill an enemy if it can't be helped."
Unsaid remains that you didn't exactly give them an opportunity to surrender, but hey, details. Unnecessary details like Yoshi's life don't need to be discussed all the time.
"Still, first names with everyone, is it? Ah, right, foreigner... Is it a snag in the translation magic?"
"So, how 'bout it?" You interrupt Yamamotot's musings. "I realize this would be a pretty big step and kind of a betrayal of what you've been doing so far, but I'd prefer not to have to assassinate you out of the blue."
The Archer Hero groans, holding a hand over his face. The arrow he held up until this moment is discarded on the ground. "Alright, fine, so long as the others confirm what you've said we have a deal. Just... Brittlehelm was you, right? I saw the place and I'm pretty sure something extraordinary must've happened here, which makes you the most likely suspect."
"I've been called that in the past, yes," you confirm. Though it was more of a thing people called you back in kindergarten, once you started having sex as far as you can remember.
"Just... please, please try to keep the massacres in check. That's all I ask." You nod, but conspicuously don't say anything. "Alright. Just a moment."
You watch as Yamamoto lays down his bow, taking off a few quivers and throwing them to the rest. "Why would you disarm at this point?"
"I got my weapons from the royal treasury, and it would leave a bad taste in my mouth if I kept them despite not fighting for their owners anymore," he explains with a straight face. "So I'm leaving them here for the time being, unless your plan to get us across the border somehow involves going north?"
"Guess you're in luck, I've got a sci-fi rifle lying around somewhere in here," you say as you sink to one knee, a hand grabbing inside your shadow and coming back out with your V4M-Pyre ion matter rifle- that you then casually throw at him. "Just make sure to use it responsibly."
"... Suddenly getting a gun is the furthest thing I expected when I woke up this morning." From the way he's holding it, you'd expect it to be a venomous snake rather than a weapon.
"Don't worry, the safety's on. I'll tell you how to turn it off later." Then you transform into your owl form, only you immediately start to grow bigger and bigger.
"Huh, those reports were right, after all," Yamamoto says, looking up at your head now a little higher than his own- and you're still going. "Somehow, this really does remind me of Dark Soul-"
No talky, more flying. You have to actually circumvent your storm this time just so he doesn't freeze to death.
The screams and cries of the Archer Hero as you carry him off in a surprise grab should hopefully serve to make it seem as though your owl-self is the culprit behind the disappearances of the heroes- you're fairly sure past incidents have left the impression already, but always best to make sure about these kinds of things.
Also, a surprise attack before the archer can so much as grab his weapons? It makes complete sense he would be snatched away by a powerful monster like you're pretending to be.
The flight all the way back to the demon capital takes most of the day, with Yamamoto complaining and actually getting into a conversation with you about the values of comfortable transportation, with you using your powers to speak actual words despite the beak you currently have in place of a mouth... and the rushing wind, the distorted vocal cords and all that.
And yes, you go out of your way to detail the bone carriage you made and all the way it would be just so much more comfortable compared to spending hours grasped inside of your talons. However, circling back around towards the fortress you left it at would eat up valuable hours of travel time, so it really can't be helped.
Though you do have it make the way back towards the royal capital on its own to pick you up once you arrive, of course. A fact that, somehow, really doesn't lower your urge to facepalm when you receive a certain message from the Border Fortress.
So uh, I dunno how to tell you 'bout this one, oh lord and master, Rakul's laconic mental voice rings inside your skull as you throw a sputtering Archer Hero to the ground (he promptly makes a good attempt to hug it), but it looks like the humans actually came already.
... Fucking quick shots. Suffice to say, your plans are immediately shot in turn.
"Harder! We need to work harder! If you're cold, then move your arms!" The Corporal bellowed at the men working along the frontline, using improvised pickaxes to tear into the ground before them. "Some hard labour is nothing compared to a real fight, so I expect you all to be up for more by evening!"
Progress was slow for several reasons, and for once it couldn't be blamed on the people doing the actual work. The ground the Grand Liberation Army needed to cover was completely hidden under packed snow, needing mages and the occasional bit of hacking to reveal what was under it. At least the occasional blooming explosion of heat was warming them all up.
"What'cha sayin', Corps, this ain't no hard labor," one of the particularly toothless soldiers grinned with a grunt as he smashed the hard ice apart with the blade affixed to a haft making for a tool after just a bit of working over by their smiths. "Could keep goin' all day an' still fuck up a demon bitch."
"Then I doubt you'll mind latrine duty if you keep on yapping," their superior officer said, quiet chuckles and sounds of exertion coming from the rest of the line.
It wasn't just ice and snow they were working their way through under the aegis of a slowly moving warmth shield, of course. Deep under the stuff, they had found the green crystal shit that people had been gossiping about, and anything that grew this close to the border was by definition no good, so they were methodically removing the growths wherever they were marching.
The mages could make short work of it, of course, but they needed to save on their juice as the all made it forwards, step by step, and after the warmth stone stores were reduced to worthless rubble, they needed to concentrate on staying warm instead, so there they went.
Step by step did they advance, always aware that the next one could be another monster came for them. None of the really bad ones like during the big attack, but a bunch of these big, wolf-like fuckers had shown up lately, covered in white fur and pretty much invisible against the storm.
They kept on going anyway. Even when visibility shrunk to within a finger's breadth from the warmth shield, even when they started to be ambushed by these new monsters, even when it turned out there were a bunch of sharp spikes hidden underneath the snow still, they advanced.
Because they were the army of humankind, and they would bring destruction upon the demons hiding behind their walls if it was the last thing they did.
Their friends and families depended on them; how could they bear to stop as soldiers, as men?! So they all grit their teeth, they laughed at the cold and got to fucking work.
The bigwigs had to instate a stricter schedule when some of them died standing up, pickaxes in hand, keeping on going in the cold for too long.
They would weather the storm, and they would batter in the fortress walls to get at their hated enemies within. And no force in this world or beyond could stop them now.
Using your spell to travel through shadows once is not particularly strenuous, nor difficult or even annoying in the grand scheme of things. Sure, you have to pay attention to the targeting if you jump really far, but ultimately, this form of somewhat limited teleportation is working quite well for you.
Even twice or thrice in a row isn't that big of an issue, truth be told. Sure, you need to actually be able to navigate, but it isn't that big of an issue. Now, using it dozens and dozens of times, however...
Suffice to say it's super annoying. It gets disorienting, you need to keep casting the entire chant all the damn time, you just keep on stumbling onto monsters all over the place and it's just a generally unpleasant experience.
If only you weren't pressed for time, you could just ride the damn carriage. Seriously, would it kill the humans to get a better sense for appropriate timing?
... Well, it would, but that's just a natural consequence of starting a fight with you, of course. It can't be helped.
The repeated jumps towards the north still take some time, but you can take down on the amount used for travel in this way still, despite your general annoyance and pissed-off-ness at the necessity of this whole solution. Note to self, it really just is bad manners to show up for a war when you're busy with other stuff.
Once you arrive at the fortress, it doesn't take you long to find Rakul, who is camping out in one of the control rooms set into the second wall on the enemy's side. It used to be actually manned properly and all, but currently he seems to have plastered maps and reports over every available horizontal surface. "There you are, been wondering if you'd bother showing up before the siege."
"Yes, yes, getting away with a little lip is cute and all, can we get right down to it?" You ask, very much interested in actually getting somewhere before the night begins. "What's going on exactly, what do we know, all that good stuff I should probably be aware of."
"Humans're on the move, which is why I called you here," he begins. "Last estimation, they're a couple hours' march from us, though I doubt they'll come at the fortress when it's going to be night soon. They usually go for daylight assaults, what with the vision thing," he says as he gestures towards his own eyes.
"They can't see jack shit in the storm as it is," you counter and sit on a random desk, ignoring the maps on it. "Could go either way, I'd say."
"Fuck, you're right." The advantages of having a bunch of military men inside your soul combined with your own admittedly quite acute mind. Sarah is, of course, smarter than you (or at least you let her believe so, she gets adorable smug when you do), but you certainly are no slouch in this area either.
"Okay, gonna need to give out some orders, have the men ready ahead of time just in case. They have a big warmth shield going on, otherwise they couldn't move at all, so their mages will be busted by the time they get into position."
"Any idea about where this position will be?" This will be kind of important going forward.
"Traditionally, they got a sweet spot close enough to let them get at the fortress while staying outside of rock range," Rakul says, his fingers circling a particular area on the map. "They may be using that place, or they may be faking out, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's usually where they've got the best chances in a conventional siege."
You look at the map. It's a reasonably accurate rendition of the Border Fortress' surroundings, and you agree to the demon commander's opinion after a moment of thought; the entire area is flat and featureless, by and large, but the place he outlined is protected by a small amount of the mountain's foothills.
They should actually help keep them safe from attacked, and if not they reduce the amount of space the mages have to watch out for for the sake of projectile interception. Worse, unless you show your hand and deploy some even less believable weather than a giant blizzard in autumn, they'll actually protect them from the storm you've caused, too, you think.
Stupid physics just have to keep getting in the way.
Taking a moment to think it over, you act quickly now that you've had to adjust your schedule. Rakul is best left to continue what he was doing before you showed up, whereas you hurry off to do your magic with Twisted overlaid and Othala summoned to grant you superspeed.
Simply put, your Ice Zombie Giant needs to get some adjustments, as does Clarence, the Siege Beast-type undead you left right inside this fortress pretty much ever since you came to this dimension. While you would like to create another quick and dirty Zombie Giant while you're at it, you just don't have the materials; your fleshy biomass producers are doing what they can, but they do have limits in how fast they create infinite amounts of matter, so without a convenient couple hundred corpses nearby you're shit out of luck in this regard.
Still, you can patch up the parts of the one you do have lying around with the pieces of flesh you have available, all the while aware that soon enough, you'll get to throw both of your two giant undead into battle and see how they do.
Meanwhile, you're also directing more wind at the area you expect the human army to take refuge in. Specifically, you redirect the direction the blizzard is blowing towards... From 'towards the north' to 'straight downwards'.
The good thing about having direct control of the weather through unnatural magical vampire powers like you do? You don't have to give a shit the physics of this shouldn't work like that, you're still using the air in the entire area like a compression hammer.
And, for good measure, you then shadow out and take a personal look at the place, the approaching army still on its way towards it off in the distance. You can see their blood signatures through the raging storm.
So then, you do wonder how they'll feel about the ice meteors landing in their general direction all the way towards their planned camp?
It's high time you made use of the fields of crystal you've went and lovingly ignored as they grew to the appropriate size, before the human army just marches right through only having been mildly inconvenienced by it.
So you tell Rakul you'll be off to sabotage it like usual, darting into the storm and making a big circle right as the humans are digging into the ice meteors you called down. Looks like they're just planning on using them as shelters once they've got the insides heated up, much like an iglo would work.
Except nobody expects Shatterbird. They never do, whether back on Earth Bet or on Thule. Dashing through the whirlwinds driving the snow before them, you exert your control over the vaguely silicate-like substance that grew under the snow, chunking it and tearing it into the air to make a nice little chime as it clinks against the rest.
Fun fact, Shatterbird's power itself, while with some very decent range, doesn't nearly cover the area it would take to affect a whole city like, say, Brockton Bay, for example. What she did in her lifetime, instead, is to actively use a particular quirk of her power.
Simply put, when sufficiently motivated, she can use her power to vibrate glass and similar silicates at a specific frequency... And let it resonate through any nearby silicates, thereby inflicting it on large areas in a cascading wave so long as enough glass or, for example, glass-like crystal growths are present in the area.
It's far from perfect and mostly lends itself to just turning glass into very sharp and numerous shards bursting off into all directions, but that's all it takes sometime, as she and you agree with her in the back of your head.
So what you're doing at the moment is simply put gathering up a lot of unexploded crystals that won't factor into things otherwise. With, naturally, the goal of simply... dropping them.
Onto the humans' heads. Right before you start 'singing'. Duh.
Speaking of, once you have a decent amount of glass replacements ready and hovering more or less stably in the air, you get right on it, making your way towards the army and getting everything into position.
The storm masks your weapons' approach, and all it takes to trigger the big boom is to let them drop and let Shatterbird take over for a moment.
About 104,000 people die
The commanders on your enemies' side seemingly insisted that the crystals be removed at any place their men would set foot. This is the only reason the casualties of the following events are this limited.
The vibrations start from above, the falling crystals going down right through the mages' shield and dropping onto the soldiers in the middle of the army- where you estimate most of their more valuable members to be, though any that die in this place are a good thing as far as you're concerned.
All around them, of course, the men are still busy clearing out and disposing of the small mountains of green material... Well, those also start trembling and pulsating, of course.
Not the entire army is within your extended reach, the absence of enough glass to transmit your frequency making it a hassle to push your influence all the way over the whole area, but the good quarter to a fifth you're hitting still is more than satisfying enough as is.
The crystals burst into fine clouds of razor sharp edges, cutting right through literally anyone near them. In some cases, they have enough penetration on them to pierce through the tough leather of the soldiers' armors and still embed themselves in the men behind them, so violent is their sudden propulsion at your behest.
Within seconds, tens of thousands die. Then your payload rains down from above their heads, and a few few more tens of thousands join the first batch, a literal rain of sharp edges pressed down by your unnatural winds cutting clean through the skulls of the people present in many more cases than any one sane individual should be comfortable with.
The mages erect shields as soon as they realize what's going on, the men take cover behind everything in reach, including the bodies of their dead comrades, and it's all just a single big mess. Chaos, in short.
Notably, the blood spilled from a hundred thousand bodies, by a rough estimation, almost immediately begins to freeze, meaning that you have only a very short time frame to proceed...
Warm lifeblood is shed in quantities that belie casual belief, and you waste no time in making use of it. Expending as much of your aura as you can (as most of it will be wasted in just a moment anyway), you conjure a single Pinky, attuned to the cold and largely immune to it in combination with a bevy of Carnages and Osteas.
Those two you send out to impede any attempts at getting at your position, for all that you're looking at the enemy camp from afar.
Pinky, in the meantime, is staying where you are to shield your two summoned souls from the storm, Shatterbird herself and Othala shivering in the cold but, at least for a time, alright.
You don't take long to receive your invulnerability from the latter, and just like that you're off. That is, in the form of a sizeable swarm of bats, braving the cold and the wind and the hail thanks to your current invulnerability- only a handful of the sixty-five bats you are right now stay behind.
Meanwhile, something quite peculiar is happening over at the army camp, a hurried defense and destruction of the many bodies now surrounding it being organized. Bulging and converging, the blood warmed by only the quickly fading bodies of the humans that gave their life for their cause turns black and furry, revealing winged arms and fanged maws.
In the camp, turning any of the blood you can 'see' into more of yourself, you are not a few dozen bats. Not a few hundred. Not a few thousand, even.
You are hundreds of thousands of bats, all of a sudden taking flight and darkening the hemisphere of the warmth shield without which you would quickly find most of those bodies freezing solid yourself. And without delay, you begin screeching your most horrid amounts of sound, covering soldiers and mages with dozens of bodies each to bite into and drain their blood with gusto.
They may flail and try to defend themselves, but your losses simply do not matter. They never did.
Unfortunately, the humans react to your attack as quickly as they usually do; flames are flooding the battlefield, not actually all that hot but hot enough to fry your scattered clouds of bodies screeching as they rapidly circle the area.
However, doing as you're told by Sarah running mission control while in control of Coil's power, you are already maneuvering to rise above the throng of fanatics you're feasting upon, leaving behind bleeding wrecks of human beings when you haven't just drunk them dry in one go. You deftly dodge, in other words.
The section of the army you were working on receives a plethora of light burns, of course, but if anything, they're just cauterizing the bleeding wounds you just left them with.
In return, you screech angrily, using your overwhelming numbers to burst open a few of the soldiers in the area through a quick application of your sonic-hemokinetic powers. The blood, in turn, simply turns into more bodies for yourself.
The mages are already starting to set up a wide-area kill zone and shielding in the form of multicolored panes of light you heavily suspect to be some form of forcefields, so you change targets appropriately.
You were never planning on actually keeping all of these bodies, for all that you went out of your way to create so many of them. With the force of all of them at once, you surge towards where you think the largest concentration of mages can be found, turning from a giant mass of moving shapes into a single force impacting everything in your way.
Fun fact, even in weaker, smaller bodies like this, you still have your various enhancements... even if your aura has fizzled out after the couple hundred grilled bats you produced in that first counterattack. With your sheer numbers you can simply force your way through, biting and scratching and producing an honest to yourself updraft from how much mass is moving in the same direction all at once.
You ram past the shields, ignoring the blasts of lightning and fire and whatever else a few panicked victims try to put in your way. You push through formations, breaking your own bodies against shields and bodies putting themselves in the way with the ones coming in after them. You ignore the golden shine of cleric magic even as it's cooking and blasting apart hundreds of yourself every second.
From all sides you strike against your targets, raw force coupled with sharp fangs and claws proving to be unstoppable so long as you always have another to take the place of a fallen body. One by one, you eliminate the foes you're after at the moment, even as your victorious selves are then crushed by the surroundings.
You could pay a thousand of your small flying rodent versions of yourself for every one of the mages you're tearing apart and it would still be more than a favorable trade for yourself.
It is really messy when you use this form, of course. Gouging out eyes, tearing skin away from raw muscle, opening up blood vessels with teeth and whatever else you have available, throwing your humanoid enemies onto the ground with a dozen of supernaturally strong and fast bats... And then there's the screams, including the particular power you have to use your hemokinesis freely as long as you can reach a particular frequency of screeching.
Making a grown man explode into bloody splinters of bone and mushy organs flying everywhere will never cease to be amazing.
You don't really count them, but by the time your bats created from the blood of your enemies run out in a torrent of reckless violence, you have eliminated a... significant amount of mages. They did make you pay for it, but, well... When one side can create currency freely, the trade suddenly becomes quite unbalanced.
As you are ground down, you also make a point to have some parts of your swarm retreat, including those that are mostly immune to conventional force. A few beams of damaging light in particular still seem to be able to punch through Othala's invulnerability, but by and large the bats your original body became are fine, and the ones you lost you can replace with a few of the nigh innumerable others.
Some of your powers are just fairly wonderful, in this sense.
The surviving bats, them retreat back towards the fortress, making no secret about where they came from. A few charges by the handful of minions you created earlier later, it would take a literal moron to mistake the message you're sending; the attacks are coming from you, and they can and will keep on coming however many times it takes.
Your souls are desummoned with all due haste, of course.
The human commanders are aware of the situation they are in, of course; they've been in it since pretty much the start of this 'engagement', if one is willing to call it that. So it isn't that much of a surprise when they order a full-on attack of the Border Fortress in the next twenty minutes, once the bodies are taken to the side and the worst of the injuries treated.
Back at the Border Fortress, the arguably oldest building ever built in this dimension to endure to this day, you take a moment to rethink how everything has gone so far. At the start of the battle, or 'battle', the enemy army had around 450 thousand men, a sizeable chunk of how many there were supposed to be missing due to the need for haste among your enemies' ranks.
That and your tender application of surprise violence to kick things off and kill a couple thousand in your preliminary ambush.
Then the cold and the forced march through the crystal field and the wide-area traps you set up cost another couple thousand men, roughly, only for you to come in and use Shatterbird to instantaneously kill off a good hundred thousand of them. So you'd say there are, what, 300 to 340 thousand members of this army yet to be eliminated? It's hard to closely estimate big numbers like this, so you're keeping a wide margin of error in your calculations here.
This is important because things are, finally, coming to a head. You need to be able to keep a rough idea of how many enemies are left if you are to ensure that as many of them die as possible instead of, say, somehow manage to survive and evolve to become a new type of vermin infesting the fortress you are planning to keep in the coming months and years.
It's not incredibly likely, but this entire world is patently ridiculous anyway. You're pretty sure you've seen a bunch of monsters already adapted to the climate you've been enforcing on this whole region for a couple of days at most.
As far as things are going on your side, it would seem the scattered demons are gathering at the outermost wall of the Border Fortress to meet the approaching army. Rocks are hefted up and jokes exchanged, simple catapults tested and brought into position by muscly demons physically pulling the throwing arms down with their sheer strength and someone must have told Okita the fun was starting, as she's stopped riding the 'Cuties' around the fortress' hallways and is instead standing around nearby, staring blankly into the void as she sometimes does.
You're about as ready as you could get, you suppose?
No reason to keep your hands still, of course. Luckily, you do have a section of your inner world offering just about anything and everything you might need for what you're planning to do next.
You breathe out none other than the Gravekeeper, the young woman covered in leaves and vines slamming her coffin onto the ground next to her just as you continue to spill out a bunch of the dead bodies she has provided you over time.
"Phew! Here we are, first deployment and already looking at an army," she says, one hand raised to shade her eyes and gaze into the storm raging at a small distance from the fortress walls. "I assume I should get started right away?"
"If you would," you nod. "I'll be busy animating these guys for a bit."
And so you do. You form the bodies into the simple, but effective undead template of the Ghoul, the twisted little monsters just as viable as leaving the things be as they are when all you really need from them is to be able to throw out another load of Miasma all over the battlefield each.
The Gravekeeper, on the other hand, has already opened up her coffin, revealing the dead within. The many, many dead surging forth endlessly.
They're fairly weak as far as undead you're familiar with go, but they are literally limitless in number, the only issue in their usage being how long it takes them to pull themselves from the tangle of limbs and hatred for all living beings that is the coffin's insides. One by one they stumble forth, gathering into a disorderly mob down below the wall after they're done tumbling down.
And yes, the Gravekeeper is doing this by holding the thing tilted over the edge of the imposing stone construction. She seems unconcerned by the handful of the things that don't get up down below, so you will just leave it to the professional.
"You know," Rakul says, the commander of your forces having come up to see what's going on and ensure everyone is ready in person, "the worst part about fights like this is the wait. The anticipation, that urge to get going and fight something already."
Demons and their weird issues, jeez. "Look at the bright side, more than enough of them are still around after I culled the herd a bit. Anyone that wants to can get at least a few kills in."
It does, however, not take long for the army driven by nothing but the will to destroy the current garrison of the Border Fortress to show up on the horizon, pushing against the constant throng of hundreds of walking corpses jumping at them without a second thought. Their arrival is answered by a first volley of rocks lobbed off towards the horizon by the muscled and many-colored demons that have been waiting for this moment.
Fun fact, superstrength like this is a lot cooler than most people give it credit for. The average demon is physically stronger than a human, yes, but they also get to, for example, run faster and all simply by virtue of that same increased strength. Simple physics, really.
In this case, they're displaying what happens when someone with this kind of increased strength throws a big, fat and heavy piece of stone over a large distance, with the aid of an elevated position and some good feeling for distances. Many of the rocks are blocked by slanted forcefields, but some do get through right on top of the steadily advancing lines of soldiers.
Maybe it is the fact that the mages are busy obliterating the ground in front of the army with a mix of explosions and some kind of matter deletion beams, but still, literal hundreds of them die, crushed and strafed by the rocks starting at the size of a grown person and only going higher from there. The demons hardly even bother to aim, relying on the angles and the rocks' tendency to skip along the ground to hit something no matter where they land.
A rain of magic and giant ballista bolts responds within moments, a few of the cannons you already saw during your earlier assault brought to bear and try to drive your own soldiers back, but your mages are unconcerned with anything but defending the fortress from such things, the demons' practitioners individually stronger and capable of covering entire sections of the walls.
All the while the enemy front line draws closer and closer...
Acting ahead of the enemy, you think towards the two undead you have up your sleeve, the Ice Zombie Giant and Clarence both waiting in the courtyard directly behind the outermost rampart. With a series of leaps, they scale the walls from your side, vaulting over them to reach the army just about to meet the walls itself.
They roar and shriek, launching into battle without delay. The initial confusion on the humans' side does not happen, unfortunately, their ranks closing again immediately and order being maintained flawlessly.
How inconsiderate of them.
Anyway, the main point of sending the big guys in, beyond the obvious havoc they're raising, is to draw attention of the mages and commanders towards them, letting your own mages act with impunity, or at least much more easily than they otherwise would. And indeed, as a barrage of everything the humans have is targeted towards them, spells and more mundane siege equipment both changing targets, wide-area destruction is in turn thrown all over the army before you, everything from fireballs to gravity manipulation to beams of sheer kinetic energy piercing through everything they hit.
The battle rages on, things coming to somewhat of a stalemate for the moment. The humans are racking up casualties, but far from enough to be a significant issue for their numbers (yet), while the demons are keeping them in check at the wall and continuing their rain of projectiles of a stony persuasion. Your undead are rampaging around, though they also are taking their own share of punishment, particularly Clarence.
These guys are getting awfully good at targeting those ballistas. May also be using magic or enchantments with them.
The cannons the humans brought are also brought to bear, firing volleys of magical projectiles near the top of the wall. A couple of demons have died to them, you're fairly sure, though most just laugh it off and go take a rest while they wait for their missing limbs or organs to regrow, possibly with the aid of magic.
Again, demons are fucking insane as a species.
Still, you need to effect a change in the tempo of the battle if you want to retain the initiative... Time to go monster form again, you would say.
Going for your angel version is tempting, but the horn, which you have recently realized is a big draw for it, is unusable in this battle simply due to the proximity to your own installations and minions, whereas the demonic looking one simply lacks the range needed to distinguish itself in this kind of battle. However, you do have one particular form you did go out of your way to prepare the field for...
Your flesh twists and morphs, growing tufts of white fur as your body shape elongates, your hands turning into paws on elongated arms that become your front legs in due time. Your face follows suit, turning into a muzzle quickly covered in golden metal serving to decorate your 'face' with long bands of similar material twisting through the wind at your side.
Your fur steadily grows longer, a mane of hair whiter than snow setting in, and a large wheel of the same, not-quite-golden matter with thick spokes coming between an inner and outer section materializes at your back, slowly turning in both directions at once while eldritch runes phase into and out of existence along it.
You roar.
Once your equipment is done putting itself on you, the frost drives at your hind legs in particular, you behold the battlefield and measure all upon it. The time has come to cull the weak so you may combat the strong among them, if any are to be found.
Okita. You announcement is short and to the point.
Mhm. It takes mere seconds until the dark-haired heroine is jumping onto your back, holding onto one of your braided strands of fur to keep steady. Good.
You jump down off the wall as though you were shot from a cannon yourself, deftly running down the fortress' rampart and diving into the ice and snow beneath it. Normally, you would hide yourself inside of it entirely, but you need to keep carrying her, so a bit of your head and neck remains poking out.
You dash onward, swimming through the frozen ground and snapping at anything in your way while relying on your speed to evade any attempts at stopping you, from a short-lived burst of golden light to a hastily assembled blockade. Once you've come a decent way through and into the army you are intending to test, you resurface fully, glaring at the men around you.
Not a single one of them has posed the slightest challenge to you so far. Pathetic.
Brace. Your command is answered by Okita jumping off of you and onto the nearest soldier's head, using the surrounding helmets as stepping stones to keep on moving as you take a moment to charge up. You, on the other hand, roar.
And you do not stop.
The wheel behind your back speeds up, turning faster and faster and its symbols flashing in and out rapidly as you channel your power through it. First slowly, but steadily accelerating, your surroundings are... slowing down.
On a molecular level, that is.
You do not bring things to a complete halt, by no means, but what you do is freezing them far more completely than any mundane methods ever could. The very air solidifies into ice in places, the ground covered in even more ice and the humans surrounding you are frozen to the bone right where they stand.
When you are done, stomping the ground to dig your paws out of the thick layer of ice covering them, everything in a wide area around you is frozen dead. If there was anything that managed to survive the blizzard up to this point beyond the humans, anyway.
You breathe out, but for once the surrounding temperature is low enough no mist escapes your nostrils. Off in the distance, you can see the survivors that were lucky enough to be so far away your power has not reached them... yet.
Okita quickly returns, this time leaving a series of crumbled ice statues falling apart as she steps on them in her wake. Before long, she returns to her previous seat. "Closer," she says while pointing towards the few survivors that are slowly starting to regain movement of their limbs after the explosion of your power.
Halfway towards the next area to be ravaged by your combined powers, you suddenly have a vaguely bad feeling. However, you have made your decision, and so you proceed anyway.
Okita, for her part, is raising her sword into the air once you approach the surviving members of the wave of soldiers you just wiped out, leaning the rest of her body against you. Your bad feeling intensifies.
"Cutieeee," she begins, her voice entirely emotionless in her usual way of talking, waves of what you assume to be aura casting a black glow on your surroundings, "Crusade~."
The air ripples as all that aura shoots towards and through her blade, manifesting as a giant sword made of black light ranging incongruously far with its sheer length. Easily long enough to measure up to three to five grown humans stacked atop one another, it shimmers with light despite the color of the aura it is visibly made of.
"Boom." Okita swings it around with childish ease, a horizontal swipe releasing a wave of black that proceeds to cut straight through the first group of survivors you were bringing her toward. They're bisected cleanly, falling to the ground in pieces without any way to defend themselves.
Okita keeps on going, proving her ability to handle enormous swords as she fires off several more of those same sword beams seemingly effortlessly slashing through anything in their way before she jumps in a double somersault, giving you a small 'V' gesture with one hand while upside down before slamming her enlarged sword into the ground right in the face of the next wave, causing a minor earthquake and blowing what you heavily suspect to be her semblance or something up into the direction it is pointed at, sending a hundred armed and armored soldiers flying in all directions.
Split up? She asks telepathically. Eat.
Yes. It would seem your semblance is not the only one around capable of some rather advanced effects. Nevertheless, Okita can handle herself, as she has so aptly demonstrated, so you shall proceed to continue yourself.
It may be that none of them are worthy of your attention, but you shall allow them to try and prove otherwise.
When you attack, you do so with utmost precision and grace, swimming through the ice and surfacing for surgical strikes against the most perilous of your enemies; the mage battalions either keeping up a variety of shields or launching attack spells on any targets they can perceive.
From the ground you surge upward, your jaws snapping shut around legs and bellies to chomp through and devour them whole, only to disappear without a trace again immediately afterward. You eat them, you fake them out with feints that have them bombard the ground uselessly, you appear behind and all around them instead to discharge a burst of frost that has the surroundings freeze again and again as you whittle away at their numbers.
The mages, dressed in either standardized, thick robes or whatever colorful individual equipment they brought themselves, naturally attempt to fight back, but empowered by your various enhancements, the form you are in and your aura chief among them, allow you to simply avoid any fireballs or deleterious rays of light or even sudden explosions at your position, your speed and coordination just too great for them.
And not a single one so much as manages to struggle in any even mildly meaningful way once you are upon them.
While you tear through the mages, the rest of the battle is still going on, of course. Okita is fine by herself, wildly destroying everything in reach and taking her time to seemingly randomly eat anyone near herself, whereas your undead have begun to struggle at this point. The soldiers opposing them are perfectly content to throw away their lives if it allows the men behind them a chance to score a hit, and hundreds upon hundreds of them are swarming both of the big guys.
They're reaping a bloody harvest in lives, Clarence swiping in mighty swings of its bigger, weaponized arm and the Zombie Giant smashing anything in reach, but even as the bodies start to pile up, ugly gashes widened by one weapon after another are widened one attack at a time, to the point one of Clarence's legs is all but useless from how it is hobbling around instead of throwing itself over the battlefield now.
Back at the fortress, the situation is looking... decent, you suppose? Rocks are still being thrown down to smash enemies, while siege equipment is in use, too- no ladders or anything stupid like that, but the cannons are slowly, but surely smashing down the wall and, more importantly, the mages you have yet to take care of are building stairs out of rock and, ironically, ice, in several places to allow the soldiers to climb higher and higher.
You suppose you had best draw some of the fire currently on your two rampaging creations upon yourself- just to avoid them being destroyed completely. You charge into the group of your enemies, your aura taking a few glancing hits you shrug off without need for further consideration.
Such is the way of life. You, the strong, dominate the weak, your enemies. It cannot be helped; without anyone capable of challenging your might, the inevitable fate of these fools is to be swept away by your power.
Once again, you impress the breadth of your will upon the world, such that it refuses to move for fear of offending you. Once again, a vast swathe of your foes is neutralized in a wave of complete cold.
So you go ahead, repeatedly applying your power to wide areas. You also use your frost breath, a deadly cone of cold normally but even more lethal in this cold you have brought upon the land. It can reach quite far, too, making it a very nicely applicable weapon.
Still none survive long enough to arouse your notice. Disappointing.
In the end, the battle can only conclude as it began; with your victory. The humans come in waves to break against your walls, and though the followers you have levied into battle take wounds and losses, none are so debilitating as to arouse your notice.
Like the winter, you press down on and strangle all life. Before you know it, the entire army has been ended as though in a single, agonized whimper, and all that remains are you and your minions standing victoriously.
The blood never did manage to keep sticking to you, continually freezing and falling off of you in small shards as you kept moving. It is very quiet; nothing but the howl of the storm bears witness to the victory you have attained, the demons manning the walls knowing full well whom this triumph is owed to.
Even that sound soon ceases, as you glance towards the sky and will it to be quiet. You return towards the Border Fortress in the full knowledge that you have proven, without a shadow of doubt, that you are very much at the top of the food chain.
Which is the ultimate expression of what it means to be the demon lord, as far as your subjects are concerned. Not that you concern yourself with such trifles, as you slowly morph all the way back towards your normal form, Okita still mounted on your back because she didn't feel like walking.
Also, man, all your big monster selves are kind of weird in the head, seriously.