Your journey back on your trusty carriage, the thing having patiently waited for your return and probably being anthropomorphised far too much inside your almost random thought strings, is spent quietly contemplating the uses of your magic capable of simply generating useful information out of thin air and how to better unlock the secrets of the cosmos.

In other words, you're busy figuring out how to make the universe cough up more info. You have the feeling certain members of your immediate circle of confidantes would prefer this way of explaining it.

Kate is coming to mind. You kind of do miss her easily roused bloodlust and attention for large-scale explosions and destruction sometimes; now if only Earth bet wasn't such a boring place. Heck, even when the Slaughterhouse Nine attacked, it was just one day of action and you all went back to normal more or less.

Plus a few new members, whoop-de-doo. How'd that ever happen?

Anyway, before you drift too far off the topic of what you were planning on doing... "Kalinerva Eristralezz, Kalinerva Eristralezz, Kalinerva Eristralezz," you say, invoking the name of your lawyer.

You know, it is kind of a mouthful. Sure would be nice if you had some way of shortening it- maybe an idea for the next time, if you feel like it.

Either way, you immediately feel the attention of an otherworldly entity gathering inside your carriage's insides, the woman's essence somehow more immediately perceivable than when you summoned her in person. You suppose it might have been because then she had a body to keep her malevolence hidden inside of, compared to now when there's just this general, creeping sense of almost palpable doom surrounding you.

In other words, a lawyer is near and anyone with a sense for it can feel the evil intentions in the air- not that it particularly bothers you, mind you.

You're paying her, or have paid her in a way that ensures she will be continuing to be your advocate and all, and unbeknownst to her, even if her side of the unbreakable contract somehow doesn't hold up...

Yours will. You think. Not exactly everyone summoning demons has the same power as some devils like her exhibit, after all.

"Sooo... I was wanting a quick consultation- is now a good time?" You give your surroundings a quick look and, sighting a vague figure appearing in the reflection of some silver decanter the servants put in here to let you drink blood and other fluids in style, shrug. Looks like she's available, even if there's nothing where that vague figure should be standing.

Basic demon summoning stuff, you suppose.

"Very well then, you see, I was considering my options in regards to reliable messengers to allow me contact with others that I don't have a telepathic connection to already anyway, and so my thoughts inevitably lead me to more demon summoning. How viable is this approach in the short and long terms, and how much would it cost me, in your estimation?"

You watch as a set of letters appears on the surface of that carafe, Yeah, this might take a bit, it seems this method of communication isn't the fastest. Note to self, have a mirror around next time you do this, if reflective surfaces are Kali's thing.

Anyway, long story short, if all you need is a quick deliverer of simple messages, simply summoning and beating a hellhound into submission should work. It wouldn't be reliable in the longer term, of course, but the things are fast, decently strong and they can be reasonably stealthy if they need to. Beyond that, more sophisticated approaches are possible, but quickly begin costing more.

Simply put, if you were to trade in a soul every time you needed a message delivered, you could probably find something that can teleport and ignore most barriers and the like easily enough; the problem, of course, being that you don't want to spend souls nilly-willy. More interestingly, if you somehow got a well-suited demon to take on a long-term contract and essentially have it run errands like this, it'd be another story, the only issue being that doing so would require that same demon to be put into a position to essentially enslave itself to you.

Any demons that do so easily and willingly are probably experts at twisting everything you do and say against you and shouldn't be trusted by default. You don't need Sarah's silent recommendation to figure that one out.

This type of arrangement is apparently called making a demon a familiar in some magical traditions, but seeing as you are essentially defining the one you are part of as you go, you'll have to consider whether or not to adopt the term eventually.

Anyway, some basic information along these lines is more than enough for the time being, and so you soon dismiss Kali's attention and get back to the things most important in life.

Beating up reality until it coughs up what you want to hear.

Once you're back at the castle, of course, you shift gears and go down your mental checklist of things left to do at some point; it's really more a list of stuff you didn't want to bother with so far but aren't really opposed to doing, nothing more.

Minor stuff that needs doing, but isn't as important as, say, going treasure hunting in unknown and ancient dwarven cities and similar. You know, the really good things about fantasy worlds like this, in retrospect.

Note to self, try and find more ideas for treasure hunting. Sightseeing tours like this are surprisingly fun.

Anyway, off you go to see the Archer Hero, Yamamoto currently being busy doing target practice in one of the gardens as you find out upon asking one of the servants. Quickly moving over there to avoid Sarah- you know what you'll end up doing if you 'bump' into her on the way- you are soon treated to the sight of the guy capable of firing off, like, thirty shots at once actually not using his power and carefully aiming at a practice target.

And hitting it just barely.

"You know, maybe there's a reason your modus operandi is saturation fire," you drily remark as you approach, thoughts already on the possible uses of orichalcum and how it may interact with demonic essence. Head back in the game, though. "Not used to not using your power?"

"Ha-fucking-ha," the Archer hero replies, carefully lowering the rifle capable of disintegrating most matter. Note to self, try out your ion weaponry on both admanatium and orichalcum at some point. "I just keep expecting the recoil, okay? Even with a bow, you have to take into account how the shot is shaped by your weapon, but this is... It's too easy."

"Funnily enough, that's a thing I would say about most guns were I the type to have qualms about taking lives on a whim," you observe absently. "Anyway, completely changing topic, I'm assuming the other heroes already mentioned this part about drinking my blood giving them greater power and stuff? Because I've finally cleared my schedule for a couple hours, at least, in case you're interested."

"... You do know that's really creepy, don't you?"

"Hey, not my fault I'm so awesome just drinking my fluids makes you better."

The guy gags. Mission accomplished.

Now that you're (finally) done pumping the Archer Hero full of your evil magic juice (aka blood), you may as well take a little time off- you haven't really had any 'you' time for a while now and while the psychological needs and wants of a vampire are quite removed from that of a human (at your guess something to do with being immortal and having a much longer feeding cycle than humans do, if necessary), that doesn't mean you don't enjoy a little quiet work for its own sake every now and then.

Which is how and why you finally find yourself working inside your little potion brewery, mixing up a batch. You already did some healing potions last time, so now... Now you're doing the same for the strength potions.

It's simple, really. You're just going through the motions, your hands busily working away even as your brain is randomly going down all the rabbit holes it dug itself over the past week or so. Turns out you're actually pretty good at just working with your hands and turning that into a meditative experience.

Then again, it's pretty much the same as when you're painting or drawing a picture, you suppose. For all that you're very much capable of designing elaborate plans and building complicated machines using automated means, you do very much appreciate using your own two hands to create something, whether it's a magical reality breaking potion, a carefully crafted undead or a piece of art.

In your own humble opinion, of course. Some people never really learn to appreciate the value of stuff like that, after all, which, really, their loss.

Anyway, the potions. They're turning out well enough- you're putting the ingredients in and getting the results you want out. Easy-peasy.

Once you're done with your day, and have finished handing out a bunch of minions you have newly created and that have proven to work reliably, of course (regardless of Sarah's comment about you handing them out like water, they're meant to be used and so you are, by making others pay their aura upkeep all around), of course, the inevitable happens; you, Sarah and Rose are meeting up to discuss plans and ideas for what needs to be done.

Responsibilities, while nearly completely anathema to your personal opinions, are still something you feel you shouldn't neglect for too long, and so the three of you do your best to come up with important projects and time-critical situations that would benefit from your personal attention; as it happens, there isn't exactly any shortage of fires to put out or else to create in your enemies' backyard, after all.

Also, while you don't exactly mind spending time with the people hanging out in the castle, most of them being only there because you put them in it, some things are best enjoyed in moderation- and really, the weapons trio can go have fun without you every now and then just fine while Okita has started reading every bestiary she can find inside of the library, a rather expansive collection even just in itself on account of the rapid, mana-fueled evolution of monsters far and wide, so she doesn't require your personal attention either.

Unless you decide to take her along as backup, but that's another story altogether.

Now, among the goals of your immediate future, strategically speaking, one of the most important would be smoothly preventing your foes from actually mounting another large-scale offensive anytime soon, keeping this war cooking on a low flame for as long as possible to buy as much time as you can.

The idea isn't to end the war quickly, it is to force as much manpower out of humanity as possible to bleed it out as hard as you can. It's a basic strategy and unlikely to be successful in the extremely long run, simply because humanity is set up to recover from pretty much any and all setbacks that don't destroy it, but for the moment, you can weaken your opponents' position while keeping your own intact- a net win, really, and it leaves you with a greater advantage the longer you can force a stalemate favoring yourself.

Perhaps it's your nascent and very subtle sense of megalomania speaking, but hey, if you prefer to think of one side in this war being 'basically yourself, with a few demon hangers-on', you aren't entirely incorrect, so who's going to tell you otherwise?

Anyway, your next target. There are several townships and outright cities even set up all throughout the human lands that just kind of evolved from military outposts and logistics centers, turning into logistical powerhouses and proceeding to support the chain of logistics that allow for a smooth operation of a military the size of which should be unsustainable compared to population size by any conventional wisdom... Derived from any realistic expectations, that is.

Against any lesser foe, the logistical capacity and absolute determination of the Kingdom of Hannovens would have spelled victory literal ages ago. Against the demons, it has allowed humanity to present a strong, united front and actually keep the ridiculously powerful race making up the other side of this conflict in check for however many generations it has been now.

So it is also the point you are going to hit. Repeatedly, if that's what it takes. Step one of keeping armies away from your borders, make it impossible or else extremely hard to keep them supplied past a certain point, in turn complicating things for any large armed group attempting to approach the big border.

They still can try, they just have to pack more food the longer they have t march separated from any reliable supply sources, and transporting all that crap is a challenge and a half in itself. Goes to show that even with magic and stuff, it is the simple everyday tasks that make or break an army, you guess.

Now then, choosing your next big target is as simple as looking at a rough map created by Rose's spies over years of effort and determining which big part of the known network of transportation keeping your foes running you should disturb with full gusto.

It's a minor city, all in all, but Waffleheim will have to be subjected to your exceedingly tender mercies, after all. Of course, getting Sarah to stay behind while you go into enemy territory takes a bit of convincing and brushing a pouting fox blocking your lap for a good while, but still you do what you have to do.

After you're done scratching your sister behind her ears, naturally. Can't forget that. Next stop, the Border Fortress, whence you shalt properly formulate your further planning.

The journey itself is taking place via your carriage once again, naturally making it as comfortable and (relatively) swift as always. Therefore, it is only a few (dozens of) monsters being ran over later that you arrive without further incident, your own actions mostly limited to minor contemplations on the nature of undeath and what it means to be driven by nothing but pure reality warping in the first place.

You know, normal everyday stuff everyone has thought about at some point.

Once you're there, of course, you soon return to your little planning room, the same place you were in during the actual 'siege' of this fortress when you had your various minions storm and take it over. Really, sometimes you wonder if you aren't missing some big thematic aspect of being a vampire; wearing long black cloaks is out of the question simply because while you would no doubt look fabulous in one, you much prefer either casual wear or suits, but what about those other big things you've heard other people mention in relation to your ostensive species?

Though, come to think of it... You do have a castle and all, at least in this dimension. And though you live in a bond villain base on Earth Bet, that just makes you a vampire bond villain, apparently, or at least Okita is asserting the opinion when you talk about this with the three other vampires currently in this dimension. Unfortunately, you aren't exactly an expert in 'traditional vampire lore' or anything beyond this, however, so you leave it be for the moment.

So, Waffleheim. Waffleheim, Waffleheim, Waffleheim. The city is a not inconsiderable distance from your position, but assuming the wind is blowing North, which... you can make it, you should be able to reach it reasonably soon, in the form of a bird. From there, you'll have to decide how to 'permanently disable' everything that would allow a human army to rely on it as a supply redistribution point.

Both an overall way to gain something from killing all of these people and a methodology to do so. You... really are spoiled for choice, on this part. You could just massacre most of the citizens and eat a bunch of them personally, see if you can't find any noticeable souls all the while harvesting soul fragments galore, especially if you send out minions or prepare killing fields that kill in a specific manner resulting in a desirable type of leftover soul fragments, or else you could simply pull a repeat of Brittlehelm, maybe luring the people toward the tree another way this time around...

So many atrocities to commit and only so much time in a day. If you were the type to cry out about lost opportunities, you may be tempted to do so at least once every time you visit this dimension.

Waffleheim is, well, it's a pretty standard city, looking over it. Most buildings are held in the same architectural style you're already perfectly used to by this point from your visits to other cities this side of the border, with central city squares and wide, open streets and people coming to and fro even before sunrise, busily carting stuff around and organizing things on every street corner, from preparing the bakeries for opening in the areas there even are any to inspecting warehouses and moving supplies into place to be ready for the day as soon as the sun rises.

Yep, some poor bastards have to get up even earlier than you did back when you were still alive. No, really, note to self, whenever you get around to creating a little utopia in your own name, make sure that if there's one thing everyone can be assured of is the right to sleep however long they want to. Aside from, you know, always being fed with decent enough food, homelessness being removed as a factor along with discrimination and all the usual stuff you'd expect utopia to have.

No idea how you would even implement something like that, but it's just one of your vague, far-off goals you think would be cool to take care of at some point somewhere anyway. When you have eternity, procrastinating on your personal ambitions is perfectly viable, you're in the furthest thing from a rush for any of this as you could be.

It's just, y'know, you're gonna be a dad. It won't be easy and it won't be simple, but... Well, if you're gonna have a big, happy family, you may as well sit down and ensure the environment you're surrounding yourself with is nice and family friendly.

How many hookers it would involve remains unknown, but hey, you'll cross that bridge when you get to it.

Back on topic, though, the city you're looking at. Decent size, smaller than Brittlehelm but still fairly sizeable all the same, and it has the same air about it as the place you pulled yourself a few heroes out of; perhaps unsurprising, given it's the same general type of city.

Only question, then, is what to do with it.

For now, you preliminary plan, kept open enough to leave you a little room for improvisation as you deal with things as they come, contains three broad steps, the preparation, the lure and then the execution, if you had to describe them in sequence.

For the first step, of course, you'll need to lay down a lot of groundwork if you want the rest of your plan to succeed; it can't be helped, but in comparison to the last city you just kind of threw curses onto to kind of brute-force things with the tree, you want to try your hand at being just a tad bit more elaborate this time around.

First off, you will need some local collaborators, something thankfully made significantly easier with the powers you have been using and training for pretty much as long as you've been undead. For starters, the mayor will know what you need to do to kick off a spontaneous festival, as well as be in a position to help you with it, while the local garrison's highest ranked commander is a must-have for something like this, too.

Best person to ensure that every soldier not on duty gets free drinks, if nothing else.

Beyond that, you'll just have to see- if the mages in this small city here have any actual leadership separate from the commander you'll already be going after, you'll take that over as well, you suppose, but otherwise you have a surprisingly coherent and complete picture of what you'll be doing next already.

"Find me the mayor of this city!"

The mayor's modest little mansion (you kind of like that alliteration) is easy enough to infiltrate, not protected by much beyond a few guards and what little protective magic is imbued in doors and windows; sneaking in and biting out his throat in his sleep just before his work day begins doesn't take you long, and a quick round of 'you're dead and work for me now, here's your orders' is all it takes to complete setting up your little sleeper agent.

He's surprisingly good at his job, too. Turns out it was just a temporary posting for him before he would have moved on to something bigger down the line. Well, can't say he hasn't, now, either.

The commander of the local forces is a little harder to snatch, being already up and busy personally checking the walls as the last night shift gets ready to leave and catch some sleep. However, he isn't really escorted by any number of people, so all you need to do is ambush him during one of the moments he is relatively alone inside one of the watchtowers, ambush and overwhelm him without letting any sound that would alert the nearby guards escape.

Not quite as easy, but a bit of patience and supernatural power applied by surprise as you jump out of his shadow is still all it takes.

With both of your puppets ready and resuming their normal lives while you dispose of their bodies outside the city, the time has come to instruct them as to what they shall be doing for you now. Honestly, humanity should really try to make doing things like this a challenge for you, at least.

There is work to do and not much time to do it in, but thankfully you managed to snag yourself an excellent little mayor to do it for you in the record time you will be demanding of him, huh? Now, Waffleheim is a fairly average city, all told, as far as these big depot cities employed by the human military go, which means it is still a city first and foremost. The people are no strangers to holding festivals and the like, which is exactly what you want right this moment.

It'll be a bit of a surprise, but you will have the mayor establish the idea that several of the heroes, led by the 'Braver Hero' (you get the feeling the translation magic is on the fuzz every time you think about the title), will be visiting the city and that the occasion calls for a festival. It's not like you particularly care about the justification for it, truth be told, so long as you can get a nice excuse to have a lot of people gather in one place of their own free will.

To this end, permits will be given out to open stalls and the biggest plaza in the city will be converted to a large stage for performers to do their thing, all the while rumours are going to be spread that a famous singer from the capital is going to be there come evening. That being yourself, of course; you do have a little something planned, after all.

Aiding in all of this will be the Secretary, one of your aura minions supernaturally capable of performing administrative functions and the like, along with a trio of Carmillas whom you're releasing to work on spreading the word in particular. Also to have them use your own cooking skills to run a food stall of their own while pretending to be triplets, incidentally, to have them in position to support the final stages of the plan once the time comes.

It's a surprisingly busy early morning, all in all. But hey, a lot of people are going to rejoice at getting a day off work, so the atmosphere around town is pretty positive at least. Always important to enjoy the good parts of life, if only because an omnicidal vampire might just suddenly kill you one day. You would know.

Note to self, mixing in that bright red plant whose sap smokes when in contact with the open air is probably not a good idea, all in all, seeing as all test subjects of that one potion iteration melted temporarily.

Literally so, the screams were quite impressive as long as they kept their lungs intact enough to expel them.

Anyway, entertaining diversions about the various things you can find inside of your inner world's Garden aside, you've made some good progress today, figuring out another basic potion recipe and noticeably speeding up the pace at which you can turn one solid material into another. The speed of this particular ability seems to mostly depend on the density of the matter you start with compared to that of the final product, but at the end of the day, that doesn't really matter... yet.

The day is far, but eventually you will simply be creating any and all matter you wish to have on hand to throw into your manufactories, possibly using your necromancy to duplicate it beforehand, and just build whatever you damn well please completely free of material requirements. And if you also figure out a way to do more than just turn iron into gold, say by turning iron into superconductive gold or the like, and turn that whole process into one of mass production, well...

That's a lot of very gaudy super robots you would be creating on a whim, is all you'll say.

Anyway, back to the present. Not good to get ahead of yourself. Time to turn this city (or at least a good chunk of it) into fertilizer for your tree.

Honestly, this whole place is kind of a big military installation once you get down to it, which means that everything is optimized to move large amounts of supplies to all corners of the kingdom easily, but its nature also very heavily implies that everything is regulated and without the nicer things you would imagine to see centered around civilian life.

Long story short, it's kind of a pain to get your hands on art supplies. Oh, not impossible by any stretch of the imagination, just... difficult, to a certain extent. Even with the connections the mayor opens up for you, annoyingly.

Heck, it's just getting some reasonably high-quality paper (because apparently, one side of this war has already graduated from using parchment) in large enough sizes, you have your tools and as much paint as you might wish for in the form of your fairies already there on your end, but you're still running around a solid hour before you can finally sit down in the room you borrowed inside the mayoral mansion and get to drawing and painting.

A bit of bright color here, a happy family there... Your heart honestly isn't super into this, these are just temporary works meant to last a day or so before being forgotten and overshadowed by your 'performance', and it shows. Still, it's not like you do shoddy or substandard work, and they placards come out about as well as you could expect under the circumstances.

Being an artist is hard sometimes. There's a reason you don't pursue the profession full-time.

A few hours later, once you have enough of the things drawn up and clearly advocating the 'festival held in the honor of the Brave Hero', you're going out to hang them up on public message boards, inside pubs and taverns and the like- everywhere people would see or hear news, in other words.

It's still a bit of a short notice, but getting a bit of a hype going is naturally part of your job here- talking to people you meet, out on the streets and asking about what you're doing, you make sure to impress upon them that the sudden festivities are an incredibly lucky and joyous occasion and all that crap.

To be honest, you spew so much bullshit you can hardly bother to remember from one conversation to the next it's a small wonder this entire city isn't stinking to the high heavens already, but technically, you're only telling the truth. It is a joyous occasion, first for these people you're luring to their gruesome deaths and then for yourself once they're all dead and processed into juicy, delicious tree fruits.

You're still going to apply for overtime benefits, though. Or, you would be if you weren't your own boss. Being self-employed in an independent family business under your own direction can be pretty hard, sometimes.

Your subsequent renewed training on the topic of telepathy and what more it might be used for beyond, you know, being in permanent contact with Sarah 24/7 and having to tell and show her whatever it is you're doing (or whoever, really), is being complicated just a little.

By which you mean Emily and Sarah, having both grown just a little too bored in your absence, have naturally caught wind of what you're doing and started having a selfie contest.

Naturally, it involves naked selfies. And where they started out posing naked in front of a mirror and sending the equivalent of pictures at you, they eventually turned toward looking for other people to strip and think about at yourself... Okita seems to be just mildly confused, but she stripped of her own volition just fine as soon as Emily asked, whereas Rose is giving you an embarrassed smile as she, too, participates.

On the one hand, the thing you have taken to calling the Lewd Effect is letting you advance much, much faster. On the other hand, you have to honestly evaluate and judge each and every 'picture' you are receiving to tell some of the women in your life exactly how beautiful, cute, stunning and similar they look.

Well, good relationships are based on honest and direct communication, so you'd better do it while you have the time.

Once night falls, you proceed toward the next part of the preparations, though you're still doing the exactly same thing, truth be told. That is, you're setting up the lure as best you can, as you're fairly confident in the execution of the harvest at the end of things either way.

Checking over how things went for your two puppets, it seems the free day for the soldiers and most of the mages not on duty is being received well on the military side of things, while the same can be said about the city workers most of which are directly employed by the city itself, technically speaking, which is in turn under employ by the military at large.

It's kind of a complicated legal structure here nobody really wants to waste time with, given all of humanity is working toward the same end anyway, or at least pretending to when someone else is looking, which is good enough to be the same in a practical sense.

Anyway, preparations are proceeding apace, with several stalls already being set up in anticipation of tomorrow and people being reasonably aware of what will ostensibly be going down. However, the most important part of it all- that is, yourself- could probably do with some more publicity again.

If you want people to notice you, you have to make them. True for pretty much all situations in life, really.

So it comes that you end up taking a seat in one of the pubs you scoped out earlier in the day, wearing different clothes and all, of course, and order something to drink before looking over at the guy next to you, looking as friendly and approachable as can be. "Hey man, you heard about that big performer?"

The bearded, black-haired guy you just suddenly spoke to looks up from his beer, nodding toward the poster you hung up here during the day. "Hard not to, starin' right at tha' thing."

"Point," you shrug, quickly receiving your own cheap beer and downing some of it, repressing your distaste at the alcohol (thin as it may be in this stuff) and gesturing all around. "They say she's famous up north, don't see people like that often down here."

You're making sure to speak just loudly enough for people all around to hear you without seeming like you're doing it on purpose, and just like that you have a couple of the pubgoers listening in effortlessly. And yes, the posters indeed say that this performer is famous, you literally wrote that... And you've heard people connecting that to the North and the royal capital on this side, too.

Meaning that you're even telling the truth, and if you're abusing the fact that the southern human holdings are generally molding themselves after the cultural life of the northern ones because that's where all the new trends and social standards trickle down from, well, tough luck. You didn't tell these people to live closer to the neverending war grounds.

Similar scenes to this one play out a couple of times in several places, of course, with you doing what you can to generate the hype you need. Anything less than a packed festival full of people curious to hear you sing is unacceptable, after all.

Seriously, you would like someone to acknowledge and praise your work ethic sometimes. You're literally hanging in there nonstop at the best of times, and now, without any of your lovers nearby, there's nothing stopping you from playing your little games and drawing the noose you're putting around this city ever tighter; however, for all that you're making a lot of progress and getting a bunch of people genuinely curious about your performance, you're also really looking forward to getting it over with already.

Ah well, it's not like you aren't used to this kind of thing.

It is deep in the night when you stop your little carousing tour- turns out you can actually get people to make merry surprisingly easily, compared to when you were alive and all the other guys just had these bitter faces once you tried to extricate yourself from whatever arms were slung around you at the time- and go off to disappear in a dark alleyway, becoming nothing more but a shadow in the night.

Your goal, of course, is to go and inspect the gates while remaining unseen. As it turns out, using the lab extensions you have inside your inner world to have Yoshi go and build some crude explosives is perfectly easy, and though you have a rather very limited amount of them you can summon (each still does take up a summoning slot, two of which you have already filled with your puppet leaders as it is), you can work around this to an extent by just having your science slaves make a few cluster bombs you can simply take apart and install in several places that way.

Of course making one that's too big and powerful would take up more slots in turn (because you can't ever have things be easy, why would you), but a handful of moderately powerful bombs you can blow up remotely per summoning is still possible.

Fun fact, you do not want the city gates open once the fun starts. Hence you will simply clog them through lots of explosions. You have no real idea exactly how much of a yield you'll need per gate, but as long as it can't properly be opened nor traversed easily, that's pretty much all you'll need anyway.

And while you're at it, a few of the most populous streets you saw during daytime get a little love planted in them, too. You're going full terrorist act on this city, may as well do it properly.

Man, if only Alice was here. Shed have a blast with this.

Thinking of her, though, you also pull out a few of the explosives she gave you as a just in case measure back on Bet, way back when you made sure to stock up on anything you might need to carry inside of your shadow. She only said it was a couple of bombs, not exactly what they do, but... well, you have the stuff, may as well use it.

Only challenge will be to make sure to blow everything at once, but you'll just have to manage when you start massacring everyone.

The day of the spontaneous little festival you forced on these people (a little) is met with a sense of cautious enthusiasm, the Braver Hero whose name you're stealing for this whole shebang widely regarded as the greatest hero amongst the populace and so garnering no small amount of attention from the plebs you're luring to their deaths.

As it is a full-day festival, only the most urgent tasks are still being fulfilled; the current orders for whatever is to be delivered from this city being filled and sent off, guards on the walls and all that crap. That said, though many shops are open as usual, some of the more enterprising bakeries and the like have already started offering special 'Bravery Buns' and similar related foods improvised for the occasion, more than showing how easily and eagerly this song and dance is being received overall.

The internal screaming the mayor is doing is most exquisite along the way, naturally. He keeps on trying to tell people that everything he is doing is completely suspicious and they should investigate things, try to evacuate the city and so on and so forth. In comparison to him, the local commander is mostly forcing himself to stay calm and watch for any opportunity to disrupt your plans through the various (absolute and binding) orders you gave both of them.

Ah well, you still have most of the day to waste until evening, when you're scheduled to perform, so may as well use it constructively, you suppose.

You decided, of course, to spend your day at the festival, going around and setting a few things up last-minute. For one, a warehouse you quickly take over serves just fine for the purpose of you summoning several of your Bartender minions, having them milk themselves into several barrels and kegs you got for this.

And, mixed with all of this, some certain little additions you had Yoshi look up in your internal databank of things some soul at some point had to have known about. "Here you go, one drum of beer with extra froth and laxatives," one of the Bartender bodies says, waiting a moment longer until her nipples stop dripping. "Next will be done in half an hour, and we'll need a refill ourselves by then, too."

Ugh, this is murder on your aura reserves, just to note it somewhere. "Got it, I'll go and get this stuff drunk really quick then," you nod at the dozen or so of them hard at work.

Truth be told, this is perhaps a little too easy, but the more of those soldiers and militia guards on duty near and around the festival (to 'keep order', which was too sensible a concern for your puppet responsible for this to ignore openly) you can keep from responding in time, the better.

So you go around the festival, conspicuously visiting a few of those sentries and 'sneaking' them the spiked alcohol. "To keep you guys warm during all the festivities," becomes your most-uttered phrase for a bit, but it seems your 'civil initiative' is well-received, at least, a few of the guards seeming downright grateful for the excuse to relax a little while playing dice or cards.

Idiots, though in their defense it isn't like it's easy to intuit that you're planning to literally murder everything.

While you're at it, of course, you also go ahead and lay a few curses upon a few of the officers you manage to sight, especially any that seem unappreciative of your efforts to get every guardsman in sight drunk and shitting his bowels out simultaneously. Everything from 'Carelessness and bad luck haunt your steps' to 'Just go get fucked by a dog', mainly to keep things from going too stale and provide some additional entertainment along the way.

By the time evening rolls around, you know of at least one case of the latter actually happening, mind you. Still, for all that some petty little spiteful part of you is fulfilled by doing all of this on a reasonably large scale, you're quite glad when the time for you to go on stage finally approaches.

When you step on the 'stage', really just some elevated ground meant to let people from all around see what's going on, it is in the form of a female, just like you've been advertising on the posters and getting people to talk about, in a nice, dark dress and smiling in anticipation. Your looks, at least, seem to live up to the image you've been hyping up all day yesterday.

"Hello Waffleheim," you begin, just calling upon what little experience you have on celebrities in the show biz doing their thing. "I'm so happy I get to be here today and sing for you all. Now are you all ready for a little show?"

The response is reasonably enthusiastic, so you shall allow these little blood bags to live a little while longer, long enough to hear you sing at least.

Taking a stance, you begin to sing without further ado, relying on your sheer presence to fill out the area and turn things from just listening to your voice to actually watching you move and dance a little as you let yourself be heard all around the plaza and beyond.

Of course you begin with a perfectly normal voice, just singing whatever random songs you managed to come up with, but all the while also conveying a little more than words. There's a certain curse resonating in every sound you make, slowly but surely building up to actually be effective as you keep going.

The crowd immediately surrounding the stage is affected the most, of course, showing signs first. Slowly, they just move around less, watching you more, growing less and less caring of their environment in a gradual process you like to call the 'Simpleton's Bane'. Completely made up, but you like the sound of it all the same.

Simply put, you can layer curses onto your voice when singing, actually getting them to be a bit better suited toward influencing the minds of your audience than your normal standard version... and, in exchange for being significantly weaker, you can affect however many people you can get to listen to you at any one time. And, well, they can add up over time this way, as you said.

You aren't even trying to get them to do much, which also helps, you'd presume, along with your singing voice honed over several lifetimes' worth of practice you mostly stole from others. You just want these people to... listen intently. Get lost in your song. Let their minds be filled with it, to the exclusion of almost everything else, a task that seems to be crowned with success as you sight more and more of them staring blankly in your direction, fascination setting in.

A couple stumble away, quick-witted enough to realize that something weird is going on, and around an hour or so in you also spy that one soldier in the area that always seems to perk up and notice something going wrong (genre-savvy to the rescue once again) around an hour in, but by that point it is far too late, and no matter how much he calls for his buddies to come over and investigate, none of the literal hundreds of listeners you have accrued is really capable of caring about the noise so long as it doesn't drown out your by this point supernaturally loud and echoing voice.

You needed the reach and ramped it up slowly, naturally. Even the nearby streets are filled with only sluggishly moving passerby, keeping conversations just a little quiet to let them hear you better all the same.

You can already taste the blood in the air.

It all goes very fast, once you step into action. One moment you are moving in the rhythm of the beat as you sing, some simple song popular in the taverns further up North you cribbed from some of the soldiers you ate that come from the area, the next you are ascending up toward the sky, soft skin of your form twisting and changing as you bulge out with muscles and metal, taking the familiar shape of an armored angel with a bare chest, long wings spreading out behind you.

They are too heavy to let you fly, but you shall allow the use of your powers to stay in the air with them, at the very least.

Your horn is hanging from your arm heavily, chains wrapped around one arm, but you shall not have any need of it for the moment. Instead, you point out a finger. "Raise a wall/Raise a wall/ of ice and frost/of ice and frost so none may pass!/so none may pass!"

And as you have decreed, so it shall be.

Reality shudders under your attention, but realigns itself all the same, solid masses of frozen water growing from nothing where you have specified, and several streets are blocked off for the puny beings you have chosen to consume on this day. And, as all of this is happening and you are turning around to repeat the same process opposite from the first edifices of your will, under you the tree is finishing the process of noisily digging its beating heart into the earth.

Leaving its roots free to pierce and skewer the mass of people you have kept spellbound in your lesser guise until now.

You cast a wide net with your magic, cutting off routes of escape for the livestock bleating beneath you and, through repeated application, soon define an area you shall see emptied of living meat.

A few escape, scurrying away through buildings and back alleys you shall graciously ignore, busy as you are, but soon enough, as the until now compliant masses slowly awaken from their haze only to be processed on the spot and their cries ring out, you begin forcing them closer to your meat processing device.

You do so by casting once again, even the same spell twice in the same breath once more. However, instead of creating walls of ice bearing pleasingly geometric patterns along the ground and seamlessly connecting to the crude constructions these lesser beings claim as their dwellings, you create them on top of your previous creations.

This makes them unstable, deliberately so as you intended them to be when you chose the angle they would sprout at. And so, with little recourse, the lesser force known as gravity directs them as it shall.

Falling. Onto the simplistic paths used as streets.

Many die, crushed under the sudden weight applied to them, but more escape, moving away from the obvious danger. Herded, as their kind always shall be, into the greater crucible.

The roots are stretching in all directions, unstoppable by the creations of mortal hands, and so many, many more find their ends. You do not count them, for such an effort bears no purpose, but all the same you are convinced you have succeeded in your goal.

Then you have to drop onto your Tree to avoid a lance of fire coming for you, and the gall of these lesser beings stuns you momentarily. No matter how futile, it seems some among them are not satisfied with their role in existence and shall attempt to oppose you.

It shall not matter. Not for long.

A few stragglers fail to let themselves be consumed by your Tree, and yet you shall simply leave them be for a moment; their futile struggles will cease when their time comes within the next moments.

Returning your extended manifestation back toward its proper place by imitating the act of taking a deep breath, you reel in your horn, the majestic instrument sitting securely in your hand as you raise it up toward the front of your head. Bringing it into position, you concentrate for a long moment, then let it sound with all the gravitas the act demands.

As a long, singular note produced through doing this emerges toward the heavens, the heavens answer it in turn, stirring and moving with singular intent matching it. A bright shine is visible from above for a brief moment, the only precursor to the full might of your righteous wrath seeking the ground and impacting it in the form of a solid, massive ray of golden light.

Within moments, it scours all before you from the face of the earth, your Shining Brilliance expanding in all directions and swallowing up your immediate surrounding, all earthly matter around you dissolved into fragments that quickly float up in opposition to the onrushing force and disappearing. Once a suitable width has been reached, it then moves in one direction in particular, leaving a path of razed ground sitting several mortals deep beneath its surroundings.

With the inexorable force of an erupting volcano or a similar phenomenon, Brilliance simply mows through this lesser dwelling erected by lesser creatures, teaching them their place before a superior being such as yourself. It moves on and on, erasing a part of the grasslands and several hills in the surroundings before fading out, its purpose fulfilled.

You can see the material buildings and what few survivors remain around yourself, a vast space surrounded by cleanly bisected constructions to all sides but one visible from where you are floating. There is not a sound to be heard, the animals, whether flying in the sky or floating on the ground, the very wind itself, they all are holding their breath for fear of attracting your attention.

It is satisfactory.

You are loathe to waste any more time than necessary now that you have received all that you needed, and so you shall return toward the area you have already permanently claimed under your name, rather than remaining in the parts of this world populated by the rebellious kinds of lesser mortals you have yet to break into their proper place.

You refuse to use your wings for the occasion, as they remain too heavy to let you fly. However, you can still use your strength and speed to your advantage, elevated levels of both allowing you to run and jump over large distances at considerable speed. The lesser beings you leave behind in the mostly ruined leftovers of their 'city' may have seen you speeding away, but you are unconcerned; nothing they can do can obstruct you in any noticeable way.

A few other lesser organisms stand or fly in your way in the time that follows, but they quickly learn the folly of their actions as you demonstrate such shortly. And so it comes that, as you once again stand inside the halls of the Border Fortress, you shake your head at yourself and give off a mightily aggrieved sigh.

'Seriously, whenever I do this, I feel like a massive idiot afterwards,' you think to yourself, a hand held over your face. 'It's just... Do I really think like that, deep down in some part of me? I seriously should re-evaluate things one of these days.'

Well, the mild and thorough cringe you're feeling right now aside, you'd best return to your castle once again sooner rather than later; you go ahead and let the demons currently in garrison know of your swift return and update Rakul, the poor sucker you charged with keeping this place in order, on recent developments as you pass through the fortress again.

Of course, while you're at it, you take a moment to retrieve any and all soul fragments from the more massive undead you have stationed in this place before moving on inside your carriage, as you've finally decided to really lay into what you can do with the things lately and the sheer amount of humans that died in the cold back when you went hog wild with weather manipulation did supply a significant amount back then- you used your ability to share a single spell to let your undead store a good amount of them inside themselves, a store you now access even as you recall your other minions to the capital to let you retrieve the ones you put into them, too.

Time to get to fusin' what you have, something you can do on the go once your carriage disembarks easily enough.

Of course, these preliminary fusions are not all you are going through with; inside your inner world, small mountains of food are already being delivered to your room, the cook inside the place obviously having decided not to waste a single moment now that such copious amounts of ingredients are available. This, will honestly help you a lot- as you have learned and can now apply, the fruits are merely a metaphor for things that could be, and so by eating and incorporating them into yourself, you are taking these possibilities and making them true.

In other words, lots of fruits mean you're going to learn a whole lot, but man eating all of this will take a while.

The process of eating the (still surprisingly rich and varied) food made of your fruits takes a bit longer yet than you'd anticipated, the dishes going from cakes and chocolate fondue to casserole and skewered chunks of meat and more than you care to list, really; long story short, you're sitting inside your inner world and eating a lot of stuff, feeling as you grow more powerful with every of the nigh innumerable bites you are taking.

Still, it is only a few hours later that you jump out of your favored vehicle once again, with several powers and types of magic noticeably more potent after the food orgy you just pulled. However, contrary to what you may expect to be doing immediately after your return, you do not, in fact, immediately go to see Sarah and pat her head until you're satisfied- instead, you merely poke in on her and Rose, give both a quick peck on the lips and get back to what you were planning on doing before the brief intermission that was going out to play in Waffleheim to make use of your tree while your inner world was off cooldown in regards to your big summons.

That is, conducting a few tests on some of the orichalcum you brought back, a couple dozen ingots you pretty much dragged out from under the earth along with the adamantium you took on the same occasion. Though you've already thrown a decent amount of both metals into more of your resource generation undead (and it only dawns on you now that you have basically used them to create an item duplication glitch, as it is known in terms of video games), you still do have a very generous amount left to work with for the moment even discounting the already active groups of reliable demon agents sent to get on the rest of the treasure trove you found.

So then, science! Or the best excuse for it you can do, at the very least. Orichalcum seems to be made by combining several kinds of metal under specific circumstances, being a kind of alloy as you have already found out from what you've read in that giant drill, though the exact process is still a bit beyond you; nevertheless, what you can tell already is that it seems to transform the component materials almost completely through some magical quirk of how orichalcum is created.

It has to, to make adamantium go from weakening or even outright negating reality warping in general to actually reversing this property, any reality warping directly affecting orichalcum being strengthened or increased in effect somehow. You've tested that one out easily enough by simply taking a bit of it and using a spell to cool it rapidly, then comparing the resulting temperature with steel, wood and adamantium, respectively.

Long story (and several further tests) short, orichalcum tends to be a sort of general amplifier for magic and the like, which you shall be using as shorthand for reality warping at large as you have been doing already, come to think of it. When cast on directly, it increases effects- but for a while afterward, it then tends to ignore any further magic cast on it, so long as the first go can be said to still be affecting it, in fact.

This brings you toward a new hypothesis. Once enchanted, orichalcum would function similarly to adamantite in that it is highly resistant toward magic, as it would be under constant effect of this enchantment already, without the low spread that pure adamantium tends to be characterized by, making it exceedingly useful for the same reason the latter is, without most of its downsides.

However, it has to be said (and you did verify) that adamantium remains even more physically sturdy, thanks to its exceedingly tough and flexible nature both, not to mention the 'natural' memory alloy feature. By contrast, while orichalcum is certainly tougher than steel, it simply cannot measure up to the sheer nigh indestructibility of the darker material. Luckily, at least, it seems there are no negative side effects of keeping both of them in physical contact with each other.

But what about using orichalcum as a casting focus, as they're fairly common in this dimension? Your own magic is pretty much entirely divorced from this kind of thing, but in the various legends and references you managed to find around the library, orichalcum was also famed for its ability to conduct magic in this manner in particular. Did they just keep on casting 'through' it, then, simply following any spell with another one to both make use of its almost catalyst-like interaction with magic and keep it protected against possible hostile magic?

Turns out that no, there was a more elegant solution for this, or at least you're pretty sure there was. As you know based on the knowledge of the various mages you have eaten thus far, most magical focii are enchanted to let them function properly, the whole thing a science of itself. Assuming orichalcum would be used in place of the plethora of other materials one may be made of, it would make sense that it could be made to allow one to cast through, but not at it by making use of its nature.

Honestly, overall you're going to go ahead and say that orichalcum seems to serve as a sort of catalyst for anything that warps reality, at least until you stumble upon some form of reality warping that suggests otherwise. Which, of course, makes it quite interesting for your own use- and undeniably useful in general, truth be told.

Also, cleaning up the small battlefield you have created through the rigorous testing you put it through will take someone (that is not you) a lot of time and effort.

Next off, now that your troop of undead accompanied by a bunch of demons that went out to hunt (a considerable amount of) various monsters has finally returned for a bit of a touch up and you retrieving what soul fragments you had stored in them, you go to test out what various fragments can do... Except you have very few types available, skewed toward those that come from people that froze to death as they are.

Meaning, you don't really have the kind of variety you'd need for this kind of thing, sadly enough. While you're at it, however, you also take toward repairing the undead you sent out in the first place, once you're done drawing the fragments from them and fusing said fragments into the biggest chunk of soul matter you've ever seen. The monsters out there really did a number on your minions, outright managing to destroy a couple of them, even.

Not all that many, as most of the more common monsters can't just casually smack around a Hunter as you refer to the template as, but still- that's just one of the risks when venturing into the wilderness anywhere on this side of the continent. A couple of angry giant troll thingies can certainly do a number on most other things out there, including the ones you sent.

So that took a decent amount of time, too. At least you have more than enough material to do it with, having first pick of pretty much everything thanks to the guys (and gals) you sent being pretty traditionalist in regards to the whole demon lord thing, which is nice.

Now if only you knew where Sarah went and hid your first idea sketches and schematics for the changes you're considering for Last Embrace... You don't exactly need them, of course, having perfect memory and all, but you'd still like to have them back. Unfortunately, it seems your foxy little sister demands thorough pampering before she will reveal that one to you.

The horror.

The next day, once Sarah has been satisfied and fed a few grapes to make her feel like the pampered little princess she is (your pampered princess), you get toward making a round of the dungeon, letting the prisoners that have made it this far instead of being either eaten by one vampire or another or sold off to do simple menial work or the like contribute to your cause yet another way.

As it happens, you have figured out a trick for the retrieval of those soul fragments you like to work with; you do not, in fact, need to wait for the source to be dead before extracting one, making captives powerless to resist you even more useful than they already are anyway.

"Okay, now hold still," you tell one of said powerless victims- one that is tied up and unable to do much of anything right now as it is. "Take all that is left!"

The man dressed in a prisoner's rags struggles against his bindings as your spell fixates his still intact and living soul, eyes bulging out and gurgled sounds escaping the gag keeping him quiet, but there's not exactly anything he can do and before long you receive the immaterial material you are after, a little chunk of coagulated despair joining the rest of things inside of your storage for the things.

Now then... just a few dozen more to go, you suppose. Sadly, you can't exactly just target all of them at once the way you would be able to with free-floating soul fragments, but that just means it takes a little bit longer; not exactly enough to be an issue, for the moment.

More of an issue is how some of these guys' spiritual insides, once extracted, just... fall apart and fail to stick around when you try to take a little bit out. While fascinating and possibly showing you why many people don't leave any fragments in the place they died, this also does mean you don't get anything out of a bunch of them.

Kind of annoying, you won't lie.

Still, with all of that taken care of, your next stop is once again your little alchemy room, just spending a couple hours on brewing up a set of mild resistance potions that should help with most kinds of environmental hazards- exceeding heat, cold, static electricity and so on and so forth. Just, y'know, useful to have around, even if they won't do much more than that.

The heroes currently present inside of the demon lord's castle (as in, yours) are, for all that you have gone through about half of them already, six in number, consisting of Okita, the Weapons Trio, Arakawa and the Archer Hero, Yamamoto. Six of them in total, one already having been turned into a vampire and kind of naturally going to return back to Earth Bet with you, leaving three spots open after you also turned Emily.

That if, if you are going to bring the heroes back with you. You still do remember the little priestess you had working on that little side project, which actually did finish by the time you went to this dimension again, for example, and though you don't mind having more people around (the more the merrier and all that), it isn't like you have to bring along any of your thralls at all, either, and you very much do expect to be rather busy back home anyway, making more people accompanying you less likely to actually see you with any regularity over on the other side.

And naturally, they do have their own opinions to consider. "If we're going, we gotta go as all three of us! Sorry, Yakkun, but it can't be helped," Matsui apologizes at Yamamoto, who just shrugs.

"To be honest, I expected as much. Do you guys even want to go at all, though?"

"Mhm..." Tada seems undecided, so it is Nakatani that ultimately speaks up.

"On the one hand, modern conveniences would be nice. On the other hand, it isn't all that bad here, either, and without any of our families... It would feel weird, wouldn't it?"

"It would," Matsui nods decidedly. "Without uncle and auntie there it would be super weird to go wake up Tada-chwan every day."

"Come on, you don't have to do that... Haven't needed to for a long time..." Tada seems to be slightly embarrassed, but not actually hate it. Signals, girl, you're sending them.

"I mean, if none of you really want to go, you don't have to," you say, drawing the attention in the room back toward yourself. "I just thought I'd offer."

"Yeah, if there's anything you particularly need, we would probably come, but otherwise... There just doesn't seem to be much point," Nakatani reasons, to agreement from the others in the room, including Yamamoto.

Well, good to have that cleared up. That said, there's still one person in the room that has yet to say anything.

"W-Who'd want to go with you, baka!" For some reason, Arakawa is blushing as she crosses her arms and looks away from you when you throw her a questioning glance, but hey, it's her prerogative.

"Alright, then don't," you easily allow. "Not much point in going if you're happy where you are, at least until we figure out a way to get you back home."

Getting Lana to stop compulsively reading up on and experimenting with any kind of magic she can find referenced in the library takes a bit of actual effort once you get down to it, the ambitious mage almost completely heedless of anything but the object of her obsession, that being anything to do with magic.

And, as it so happens, your cock, actually, most likely owed to the occasion on which you first introduced yourself to her. So with a quick bit of groping to get her out of her current trance, you finally have Lana's attention on yourself, her round butt rubbing against your lap once you finally manage to wrest her into sitting on your lap and listen to you and what you want from her.

Somehow, you're suddenly a lot more appreciative of the way Sarah perks up whenever you're in the room.

"So I'm giving you a soul to boss around that'll instinctively know a lot about magic, even if it can't use it anymore," you say as you do just that, finally getting to use one of the souls you fused together from the various mages you've eaten up to now. "What's your thoughts on what I found out about the orichalcum?"

Soul 984985 bound to Lana

"It sounds like a superior magic conductor in addition to being a catalyst like you've outlined here," the busty ravenette murmurs as she reads through your notes. "A good focus needs to conduct magic somehow to be suitable, then enchanted to become a focus, but this sounds like orichalcum would be a universal magic focus, rather than trending toward a particular type or methodology of magic."

"Which is a significant concern, as I understand it," you reply, kneading her thighs under her purple dress. You have managed to pick up a few things here and there regarding general magic topics like this.

"Yes. Here, for instance," your pet mage says, grabbing a small doll that has been lying on the desk this entire time, "we have a typical 'witchcraft' focus, made of plants and rough leather formed into a humanoid receptacle. It works well for curses and remotely cast spells, but offers relatively few advantages for more direct and open kinds of magic. Most are like this, with very few capable of supporting any type at will in one package."

And here you thought it was just a voodoo doll... Or a doll in general. Goes to show what you know.

"So, just theoretically, what would it take to enchant something like this to be a magical focus?"

"It would probably be quite easy to do, actually... Just at risk of being a waste if whoever is doing the enchanting is of insufficient skill," Lana ponders. "Oh, and fashioning it into an appropriate form, of course."

"I see. On another topic, I wanted to ask if you would like to come along when I travel back to my homeworld for a bit, for an undecided amount of time until I come back to this one," you say.

"... Just to confirm, but there is no native magic on that world, am I correct?"

"There isn't, no."

"In that case, no thanks. Tempting, but not quite enough," the mildly neurotic mage replies, biting her lip as she keeps on grinding against you. You're pretty sure she isn't wearing any underwear, come to think of it. "Very tempting, but still."

You know, you'd say something about how nobody wants to come to Earth Bet, but let's be real here- it's Earth Bet. Aside from being the only modern world you've ever seen (that isn't an irradiated wasteland), it's just kind of a shithole, much as nobody likes to openly admit that's what sustained Endbringer attacks have turned it into over the decades.

Actually exploring the demon kingdom's capital has been taking a rather secondary priority for you so far, mostly because of how busy you've been in general and you already having at least nominative control of it- in truth, it is more Sarah and Rose's wheelhouse, thanks to them working out of it, pretty much, but all the same you just haven't really been around for any particularly great length of time, and whenever you are in the capital you pretty much just stay busy inside of the castle anyway.

Also, you have noticed a certain lack of regular targeted sun exposure inside the vampires currently with you in this dimension, meaning that you spontaneously decided to hit two birds with the same stone and drag all of them out with yourself into the evening sun, pointedly ignoring any complains about it.

"Ugh. Vampires... don't mix with sun," Okita murmurs.

"Yeah, the Bearer of the Big Titties here has a point," Emily agrees.

"Just count yourselves lucky you aren't actually burning to death right now," Sarah grumps mildly. "I was the only one turned before that wasn't a thing anymore."

"Only authentic vampire quality..." Okita seems to be going on about something, but, not really having the pop cultural background for this, you'll just leave her be for the moment.

""Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight!"" The crowd is cheering as the next challenger steps in the ring, guard up and glaring with a concentrating expression on his face.

His opponent, on the other hand, just tilts her head, considering where to put her fist. Considering you taught Okita how to throw a proper punch when accounting for superhuman strength properly earlier, that is not a good sign for whoever will be on the receiving end of things.

"Come on, show me what you got!" The enterprising demon seeking to display his strength speaks in a deep voice, slowly edging himself closer toward his opponent in a rough approximation of a boxer's stance.

"Mhm," the dark-haired heroine replies. And promptly takes a heavy step forward as she plants her fist straight into and through his stomach, building up immediate momentum on a short-live charge making full use of the insane strength and speed she has going through being a vampire, her bloodline power making her even worse and the tonics you gave her on top.

The demon flies out of the ring of cheering and whistling onlookers, smacking solidly against a nearby building and beginning his descent as a barely-conscious grinning idiot slowly sliding down and leaving behind a bloody trail from the point where Okita kind of tore open a hole through him.

It isn't a lethal hit, he'll be fine.

He is not the first challenger to share this fate or, indeed, the first to hit that particular spot; after the first couple of times, you decided to use your hemokinesis to trace a couple of concentric circles to make a big target for Okita. She's been consistently hitting the two around the middle point ever since, sometimes getting a bullseye on top.

"Remember, anyone wants to fight the demon lord, you have to get through his subordinates first!" Sarah calls out- she's kind of taken the position of the announcer here, while Emily is helping her organize the betting ring.

Speaking of which. "Alright, who bet on bullseye? I got two mithril coins for whoever bet on bullseye!"

Ah well, looks like people are having fun, even with Okita deliberately holding back a lot. Not all that much, though, she's really more used to fighting with her greatsword in hand.

Oh, also, an old... acquaintance (?) of yours showed up, too. "That's right! This Black-Eyed Stanton shall take on any comers! You want to get at the boss, you better eat my fists first!"

It's a regular old circus in here.

"Okay, so walk me through this," you ask, having brought Stanton and his posse back with you to the castle and sent the background characters off to do whatever. "I defeated you, I got that much, but why am I your 'boss', now?"

Stanton, who is looking mildly confused but otherwise just shrugs, answers easily, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "You're stronger than me, so you're the boss. I'm stronger than most others so I'm above them and under you, unless someone else beats me and proves they can have my place."

So far, so good. "Okay, so you're just planning to sit around and wait until I have something for you to do?"

"Yass! I was going to take the guys out to train against the monsters around here, but if we can stay here, we could do some static training instead of hunting for food!"

... You take it back, he's just an idiot, "Okay, so if we're doing this, I'm just going to thrall you for a bit to make you a little stronger and give you more powers, I guess. Just don't break the castle." You honestly have no idea; it isn't like you usually have people like this guy just run up and become your underlings.

"I got you, bro! No breakage of the castle allowed while I protect it!"

... Huh. You may have just found the one kind of person you have no idea how to deal with.

With Stanton running off to play with his new powers and all, you are left to ponder the secrets of the universe once more- meaning, you are drafting up a few first drafts on how the next version of Last Embrace could look like.

To begin with, you are very much planning to use your newfound wealth of orichalcum and adamantite to make the pair of weaponized bracers out of, which was the whole point of your little adventure to find some of the former. You did get more than you initially expected, but hey, that just means you're skipping the part where you would've had to wait for your undead to generate enough of both.

Similarly, you have the essence of a Greater Barghest lying around, having acquired it for the same reason. Hopefully, whatever putting it into the things will be amplified by the orichalcum you'll be using, though if not it's still a very much useful material for other reasons. That is the premise of this little rebuild, but from there things open up a little more.

You're almost certainly reworking the guns slash ion matter dispenser parts of the weapons, though how you shall do so remains a little more open. You could look into making small-sized undead in both to take advantage of the ridiculous things you could do with that, such as using railguns firing adamantium-tipped projectiles regenerating inside of the things, though it would probably make the next version of Last Embrace a tad bit bulky... Or you could keep it simple and just use rapid-fire ion lasers instead, after all.

Maybe add a few more alternate fire modes.

Oh, or you could keep the current design, but let the things rotate around inside the bracer semi-automatically through using the mind you'll be putting inside of it... Kind of.

Oh, and then there's the pile drivers, you could look into polishing them up a little. You're almost certainly going to add tips of adamantium to them, but you've been noticing that they're been kind of having trouble penetrating targets on occasion, being neither as tough nor as sharp as your claws.

Perhaps it would make sense to turn them into some kind of drills to better get all up into your foes' insides. Or you could just use more adamantium and turn them into longer, nigh unbreakable stabby weapons you could use for larger enemies...

Decisions, decisions...

Okay, to begin with, you are almost certainly going to go for the adamantium-tipped drills, that's just about certain. You have to keep your personal and technological attack options capable of keeping up with your claws somehow, and they may come in handy in case you need to get through exceedingly hard material or, say, fight an adamantium golem hand to hand.

Or a solid granite wall, or you may just need a pair of drills in general. If nothing else, they'll serve as even more intimidating weapons than tools- you remember how Delta started out with nothing but a bit drill back in Rapture and it isn't like he did a bad job back then, before the upgrades you gave him on the fly.

Issue is, while you have the raw strength to (hopefully) use something like this effectively, the same isn't necessarily true for the leverage involved. The discrepancy between how much you can lift and how hard it can be to apply the strength of an African elephant (just a rough guesstimate) in the body of a man can be somewhat of an issue, frankly speaking.

Your solution to this, up to now, has been simply using the recoil of the firearms built into Last Embrace, letting you both maneuver around more easily and, decidedly, add additional force to things when necessary, such as when staking through tougher enemies or those that require that extra bit of penetration. You could simply keep going like that, or...

Or you could be a little more creative while you're doing this anyway. And, thinking back, you have recently discovered some forms of technology that may or may not be applicable to being adapted to your purposes here...

The dwarves had this nifty system where they created plasma and kept it stable in pre-defined states. They used magic to do most of it, but a non-insignificant part of it was actually simple physics, to the point you could probably just use a couple of your extremely downsized fusion cores as a source of energy and fudge around a little to make things work.

You couldn't really 'shoot' plasma the way you've been relying on until now, but that would be entirely backwards in the first place. Instead, you should just make it thrusters, releasing a steady, controlled stream of the stuff off to one end to generate a constant thrust of adjustable strength to let you punch, claw and drill harder on demand.

And also, of course, absolutely savage anyone you point the plasma streams at, not to mention you may even be able to reach stable flight or at least even more enhanced jumps with this. Of course, it'd be a waste to ignore the 'solutions' you've been applying so far, but that just means you'll need to use your magical engineering and a little ingenuity to let you still use ionized matter to disintegrate things. And maybe being able to fire specific payloads could become important down the line, too, you're trying to future-proof here as much as possible, after all.

Nothing is made for eternity, but that doesn't mean you can't do your best to go as much of the way as you can at any one time.

Your plans for what should probably be described as man-portable war crimes, now that you're taking a moment to really consider them, aside, you still have a few things to do for what you like to call your day-to-day business.

As much as anything that involves you going around pretending to know what you're doing in leading a nation of hotheaded assholes and fighting a war pretty much single-handedly can be called such, anyway.

Not that any of that changes what you're doing, of course. And in particularly making other people do, most of all Sarah and Rose. Really, you'd be lost without them, a fact you make no secret of and often tell them about, especially whenever you have the time to actually take a moment and talk to them about how much you value their work and engagement in this little operation known as a kingdom.

Hey, you're largely in the dark in terms of being a sovereign, but your specialty is human resources and delegation in the first place. Can't nobody tell you you don't use what you can do.

Anyway, time to look into doing a thing once again, just as soon as you've figured out what that thing might be with their help.

"Okay, so let me get this straight just in case," you ask, leaning back inside the chair set up specifically for your use inside of Rose's study turned office shared between her and Sarah. "There's exactly one religious organization inside this kingdom that we're ruling over, which is usually completely inconsequential and keeps to itself inside of a mountain monastery without interfering with anything."

"That is correct," Rose confirms. "Though that is only if they do not interfere. On the occasions they do, they have historically shifted the balance of the war either in favor of or against demonkind, and there's very few indicators of which."

"And that is because they have these big, secret magic rituals and tricks that let them massively change events they should have no influence on at all from afar and with little input by themselves, as I understand it."

"Yup, it's pretty similar to those curses you can cast yourself," Sarah points out the obvious. "More limited, but they did wipe out the human royal family a few generations before the last demon lord took power, hence that kind of magic being outlawed north of the border for a long time."

"I knew that one, actually," you mention in remembrance to that one time you talked about this topic with Lana. "So this secretive, religious organization, which is unique because nobody else in this kingdom really takes religion seriously outside of private, which is extremely volatile and dangerous to both sides of the war when it wants to be?"

Your summary seems to find agreement. "They don't step into action often, but it is known that at least five demon lords within recorded history were judged to be of 'lacking faith' and eliminated by them," the demon princess says, pushing a few errant strands of hair behind her ears and horns both.

"And Sisters of Darkness are also purely female, wear lots of black leather and fetish gear?"

"Gabe, no."

"Please don't, Gabriel."

"Hey, I just want to really make this clear," you defend yourself. "This is important information. They're essentially fetish fodder and they've only decided to show up now?"

"Just... just promise me one thing, okay?" Sarah asks. "Please, no matter what, under no circumstances, decide to have an actual relationship with any of them. Fuck 'em all you like, but keep it at that. Please."

You frown, making a vague sound as you recall some of your early memories. "Normally, I would promise without a second thought, but chicks like that don't always take no for an answer. There was that one police woman I first got to know in elementary school, or that lawyer that refused to leave me alone a couple years later... I actually had to put a lot of work into avoiding a few kidnappings there."

Sarah's stormy face hardens into neutrality. "You'll tell me everything about that later, for now just, try not to get personally attached to any evil fetish demon nuns, okay?"

"I'll do my best," you solemnly promise. Just as, in the same moment you finish speaking, the door opens, revealing the 'guest' that caused this conversation to happen in the first place.

"Hello, oh Demon Lord, the Sisters of Darkness send their regards," the scantily-clad woman with one hidden behind an eyepatch says. "I'm bringing news and stuff."

This can't possibly not turn out well.

"So, like, this isn't normally how this goes, but we all put it to a vote and it was decided we'd send an envoy to you instead of just sending a letter or something," the envoy explains, grabbing another mouthful of the grapes you have the palace staff stock by the tons- a part of the gardens is overgrown by some mutated plants producing the stuff at an insane rate and the gardeners seem to be engaging in a full-blown war against them, so you thought you may as well do your part in it.

They're absolutely delicious, of course, juicy and sweet in just the right way. One theory is that some past inhabitant of the castle tried selectively monsterifying grapevines and producing their current form at some point, but by this time only the Head Gardener would know, and he isn't talking.

"So what's this whole deal about then?" You ask, reclining on your own padded seating. Seeing as you're apparently doing this, you're doing this right, and that means receiving the envoy inside one of the nicer gardens, adjusting your way of speech to hers and doing it all bare-chested.

"Yeah, so the sisters, they don't really care what's going on usually unless the Queen Bitch herself decides something needs doing," the Sister of Darkness begins, whereas you are already considering whether you'll have enough time to try creating your Sarah statue made of grapes today or not at this rate- it sounds like it'll be a long story and simultaneously take her forever to tell you about. "But even if she didn't, we'd have wanted to show up at some point with the circumstances."

"Mhm," you make, indicating for her to continue.

"Seriously, you're summoned by a freak accident and stuff. Head honchos like yourself are rare, y'know?"

So they know you were summoned to this world, rather than just some demon that was strong enough to take the throne quickly after your predecessor bit it like most demons just kind of assume.

"I do hope I'm living up to expectations, then."

"Oh, I sure ain't complainin'," she leers with her one visible eye at what she can see of your body. "Not what I came here for, though."

"What did you come for, then? Go ahead, I'm just about to burst with curiosity," you lazily wave at her.

"Yeah, Queen Bitch. She, uh, she sent a message through the monastery oracle," you are informed, mildly alarming you that the term seems to be referring to the Goddess of Darkness, instead of whatever leadership there is to this religious order. "This shit is usually really vague, but for once it's actually a couple of complete sentences at least."

"Guess that's why you came in person, too. If it's a message I'm supposed to receive." You repress the urge to sigh and take off a pair of nonexistent sunglasses as you sit up a little. "Go on, out with it."

"So, uh, yeah, you really should go visit our place in person at some point for the complete version, we ain't supposed to ever say a word about any of this outside normally, but this is kind of an exception and crap. 'Good work finding the dwarves, be aware of the elves. Get used to bondage gear.'"

"... That tells me a lot and very little at the same time," you say, acutely aware of the newest discoveries you've made in terms of Thulian archaeology and the existence of some kind of species war going on in prehistoric times, pretty much.

More importantly, this sounds a lot like a warning. If some divine being beyond your current grasp and apparently at least kind of on your side by any reckoning you can come up with is going out of its way to let you know about a potential threat, you are not going to disregard it out of hand.

Maybe after thinking about it, but not out of hand.

"That, and the girls found out you got a bunch of 'chalcum now, right? Turns out the sisters kinda need a bunch of the stuff, so if you could spare it, we'd prolly make it worth your while," the woman you're talking to says with a sheepish smile, adjusting the straps of her leather panties a little.

Quick thought time. Orichalcum is kind of a big fucking deal. It's massively rare and subsequently hard to acquire, while extremely useful and a powerful tool if applied correctly.

On the other hand, once you have a couple of expeditions coming back loaded down with the stuff, you'll be figuratively swimming in it. Right now, you're very much determined to hold on to all you brought with you, but down the line that's another story entirely.

Now, you do not necessarily trust these Sisters of Darkness, but you also do not see yourself turning down a whole group with unknown means at their disposal offering to owe you one... Though, better to make this plain and clear right away.

"Okay, so let me be clear about this," you say, looking the nearly naked woman right in the eyes. "I don't trust your sisterhood and I do not intend to let go of something like orichalcum easily any time soon... But I am open to giving some of it away some time into the future, once I have enough for my own ends and I am relatively sure you won't stab me in the back on a whim."

You smile at her, showing just a hint of your very much extended and jagged rows of razor sharp meat shredder teeth along with a split second of your unrestrained intimidation power. "Are we clear?"

"Gotcha," your interlocutor replies, acting unconcerned- you can see the sudden apprehension in the shifting of her spine, the now just a little forced casual smile. She's actually thinking about what kind of person she is talking to, now.

"Good. I hate to be like this, but given my position, I'm sure you'll understand why I have to," you drawl. "Say, would you like to stay for dinner? It's getting awfully late and I'd hate to send you off without being a decent host."

"Nah, nah, that's alright. More important." Oh, looks like she isn't done yet. "If you wanna know more, just uh, come by the monastery. Can't say a word about why we need orichalcum or how we know about it, but, y'know," she shrugs.

"I see." You honestly just assumed they had some kind of divination magic or something, or maybe this Goddess of Darkness mentioned it when she sent down her divine message or messages. Either way, good to know- and yet another thing for you to take care of sooner or later.

You'll just add it to the list, you suppose.

"Daughter," you say, "daughter, daughter, daughter... What am I ever going to do with you?"

"I have name, in case you hadn't noticed" the ever-hostile young woman grunts out between grit teeth, glaring at you from within her cell where she sits on her bed.

"And I am pointedly not using it. Your point?" You half-joke, half ask. "Seriously, though, I am actually considering what to do with you, in the end."

"What, has constantly humiliating and leaving me to rot in this cell ceased being amusing?" She snarks, still covering her breasts with an arm at your presence just out of principle.

"A little, yes," you bluntly state, mildly shocking her going by her confused blinking. "Don't get me wrong, a bit of recreational rape and the like is always nice, but without the priestess here, there's just something missing... And she isn't exactly available at the moment. Which leaves the two of us in somewhat of a conundrum, doesn't it?"

"Thinking about just killing me off, after all?" Your prisoner asks bitterly. "Could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort if you'd just done it from the start."

"Oh no, you have been most appropriate as a plaything so far, it'd be a waste to," you immediately deny. "Really, what do you take me for?"

"An evil mass-murdering rapist? The antithesis of all that is good and right? The literal Demon Lord?" She enumerates, counting off on her fingers. She looks like she may just go on for a bit, there.

"Yes, sure, those all fit," you interject before she can do so, "but one thing I am not is needlessly cruel or wasteful in general."

She gives you a look that downright says she can't believe what you just said.

"No, really, any cruelty coming from me is just a means to and end, even if it's just to rile you up and tease you a little," you explain your behaviour toward her with a wry smile.

"I can't fucking believe you would stand there and say that with a straight face."

This has to be the first time you've ever actually heard her curse.

"Oh, believe me sweetie, if there's one thing I am, it is honest." You haven't really lied to anyone since... Oh, forever, really. You can't spontaneously think of any incident in which you have told an outright lie no matter how much you think back. "But back to your situation, you wouldn't happen to be open to finding gainful employment and not sabotage me in some way, form or shape?"

"... Of course, feel free to trust me with any state secrets you can think of and send me North to serve as your official envoy to humanity, nothing could go wrong with that," she states with a blank stare in your direction. "Any time now."

"I'm afraid it isn't quite as easy as that," you grin. "See, I don't want to have to lock you up in here by this point, but I also can't have you getting up to any mischief... Notice the problem?"

"Fuck you." She's forcing herself to remain calm, but she's still crumpling up her bedsheet with both hands, tension being repressed all throughout her naked body. "Fuck you and everything you stand for. You don't get to kill so many people, capture me, rape me and then get to act all considerate as if was all nothing of consequence."

You look at her, really look at her for a long moment, taking your prisoner whose name you are deliberately ignoring in in her entirety and giving her the time she needs to understand the not unkind look on your face.

"Oh my sweet summer child," you say, a flicker of sympathy in your eyes you know is just making this even worse for her, "of course it was of no consequence."

She's gritting her teeth now, fingernails digging into her palm. "You're wrong."

"I happen to disagree. Why don't you tell me why I'm wrong, then?"

"You can't just-" She takes a couple of calming breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth. "People have lives. They have families and hopes and dreams, and I know this is hypocritical of me to say, but just killing and raping them matters. People matter.

"Nope," you answer, easily and unburdened. "They do, in fact, not. There is no inherent value or worth in lives, human or otherwise. If any of them happen to disagree, well, it's on them to prove they matter."

"... How can you just... stand there and say that?" She is mildly desperate, now, looking almost a bit forlorn.

"Because it's the truth," you shrug. "In the grand scheme of things, individual fates are hardly even noticeable. You'd think someone part of a human army would understand that- I've personally wiped out, directly or indirectly, about a million lives by this point, and as it happens, none of them did actually matter all that much, in the end. Though I really would've wished I got to actually do a lot of that more personally."

"..." Behind a curtain of blonde hair, fallen before her face as she draws a shuddering breath, she looks at you, taking you in much as you did with her earlier, seeing and understanding.

"You're a monster," she whispers with what sounds like an awfully dry throat.

"You aren't wrong," you freely admit. "Though really... Aren't we all, a little bit?"

Her lack of answer feels like victory.

"I suppose from your perspective, I certainly am, at least," you continue the thought. "And really, that isn't a bad thing. After all, it helps you to think of me like that, doesn't it? To take away all the nuances that make up a person and reduce me to this personalized evil you can direct your hatred and frustration at."

"Stop," she squeezes out, realizing what you're about to say.

"You need it. You need to hate me to preserve your fragile little sense of ego, to make yourself believe you matter, for everything to make sense in your so very isolated worldview," you begin tapping into the thing you've been aware of for a good while now but keeping for a special moment.

"Stop," she all but begs now.

"Because if you didn't hate me, if you ever considered me to be anything but 'The Enemy'... What then? Your imprisonment, your rape... It would all lose meaning. And all of a sudden, you would have to question the things you're doing everything you can to ignore. Why you are here, why you have to suffer..."

"I'm not some doe-eyed priestess you can just wrap around your finger like this." A single eye filled with too many emotions enters your view from behind her hands. "I don't believe like she did. Asking if I was forsaken won't have me hanging on your filthy cock."

"Ah, but you're aware you were, aren't you?" You smoothly reply. Honestly, you're just making up ninety percent of this as you go, but by the way she's unraveling, you have to be doing something right. "And that leaves, what? No family nor heritage, no official nor unofficial position, no image to present to anyone... Just a scared girl inside a lonely cell, with nobody and nothing there to confront but herself."

"..."

"Go on. Say it," you say, the kindness in your voice almost drowning.

"... I'm scared, okay?" It's all she can do to hold back tears now. "I-I'm scared of what you might do, and of what you could do. I've been in here for longer than I can imagine and it's just been hell ever since you took her out and, and I'm scared of what might've happened to her and of not knowing what'll happen to me and..."

You let her babble a little while longer. As soon as you breached her defenses by making her admit how she's been using animosity against you as a crutch, she was pretty much done for.

You have her where you want her now. Vulnerable. All she needs is one last push.

So you mist form through the bars, materializing right in front of the naked and barefoot young woman... And lower yourself to her level, embracing her.

In colloquial terms, you are giving her a hug, complete with stroking her back and pulling her head over your shoulder. It takes mere moments for something wet to hit your clothes.

"I hate this," she whispers, clinging onto you for dear life.

"I know," you mutter unperturbed.

"I just- I wish you were never born."

"Okay."

"I hate you with everything I have."

"That's alright."

And throughout it all, even as she begins to sniffle and sob and cry all-out, you simply and calmly continue stroking her back and letting her work through things at her own pace. Because you're just immensely considerate like that.

"... and you're just doing this to make it harder to hate you or agree to what you want or whatever," she finishes up.

"I am," you admit without the slightest hesitation.

"I hate you," she reiterates one last time, more to convince herself she still does than anything else.

You don't bother responding. You've said everything you needed to already.

"..."

It seems she's run out of words, however, so you only stay silent for a little bit longer.

"I could let you out of here," you whisper into her ear, the next shudder coming more because you are actively speaking to her again. "Let you live inside the castle, wearing clothes and talking to others and doing all the many things that let you distract yourself."

"... And?" She asks when you don't follow up.

"You just have to ask. Politely." You do not stop physically comforting her while you talk, of course.

"..."

"It's all up to you."

When the words finally leave her lips, they do so in a broken whisper, almost inaudible if it weren' for your enhanced senses. "... Yes please."

Alright, so. You are working on that little upgrade for Last Embrace, having ordered the maids to upgrade Blaine's (the daughter's name) status to that of a 'guest' much like that of Clarice and not even been particularly surprised to find out they had it prepared already.

Freaking mind-reading ninja servants.

Anyway, Last Embrace and the shiny new orichalcum and adamantium parts you're making for the pair. Of course you'll be using a modified manufactory to actually do the dirty work, thanks to Yoshi's manpower being diverted toward introducing a plasma chamber and several mechanisms to actually make use of it to let it work these metals.

Interestingly, orichalcum is actually easier to form, though it tends to become harder and have a milder version of the whole memory alloy thing going on when treated correctly. You just made the science team take care of implementing all of the fine details like that, really.

Which still leaves you with the actual planning and engineering, because no way in hell will you let anyone else do that part of your babies. Every bit of data input into the beefed-up manufactory will be lovingly crafted by you.

With some help and testing inside your inner world, sure, but the final work is all done by yourself. Particularly the rather complicated interchangeable plasma expulsion, ionized matter expulsion and electromagnetism-based solid matter expulsion (also known as small-scale rail guns) meant to be able to rotate in and out of the expanded space you will be installing when you do the final assembly.

Now you just have to use the testing and various prototype parts already done in the background and come up with a coherent system, then have the manufactory print out the parts you will be needing. Surprisingly enough, when you're planning on ignoring most conventional engineering already anyway, there's relatively few of those same parts to deal with. Yet another score for your mostly scavenged and stolen tech base.

To be honest, you've stopped counting those a long time ago. What you're pulling is just straight up super science, even if you do understand about half of what you do with it.

It takes perhaps a bit longer than you should be taking in some ways, but you want this to be absolutely perfect, or as close to it as you can reasonably get. And, really, as you get what you want after feeding precious metals into your machine, gleaming with an odd, off-silver sheen or dark and almost purplish or both at once, you can feel what ancient smiths or more modern factory workers may have felt like.

On their first days at work, anyway. Everything can get stale and mundane after being exposed to it long enough.

Still, somewhat narrow drills actually intended for battle, complicated mechanisms that should by no rights fit where you will make them, very dashing bracers that will house both and more... You should have pretty much everything ready, now. All that remains is assembling all of it into two identical, if mirrored, complete pieces (and making sure the little setup you included to make them both accessible enough to do just that and allow you to take the 'heavy ordinance' on and off still work as intended).

As soon as you have the soul fragments you're planning to put into them. Those plus the essence of that Greater Barghest you bargained for (had someone bargain, whatever) and any other preparations you will need to make shall let you create a pair of weapons powerful enough to elevate you to another level of 'horrible, horrible thing no sane man would ever wish to stand against'.

And of course you will be availing yourself of the aid of several little tricks while at it; you have entire semblance minions and a soul or two whose powers revolve around things useful for this. A few finishing touches by them sure won't hurt, either.

Oh, these will be some absolutely disgusting monstrosities of weapons. Just the adamantite-tipped drills... You may or may not have tried them out, but even without the torque the mechanism will be providing them and just your carefully applied physical strength they can pierce into stone like butter.

You decided not to test them against your aura. If you managed to lose a hand like this, Sarah would never let you live it down. ... And neither would Emily, come to think of it.

"And with this, I hereby call for the beginning of the first *Tada-chwaan* *Seduction* *Committee*!" It is with a mild amount of reluctance that you take a seat inside of the room you asked Matsui to come to, eyeing the trio of sweets fairies she organized from somewhere (you've started to just leave them around the castle where they may come in handy) and Nakatani also sitting already, the tall-ish heroine looking to be torn between laughter and the urge to facepalm so hard it spontaneously summons Tada herself to just get this over with already.

"A bit more of a turnout than I first expected when I asked you to come secretly, but alright," you say and promptly think at the central fairy mind inside your inner world as you pump them full of aura, receiving your order quickly and efficiently (ignoring the antics of your minions as they start flying in formation and pretending to be aircraft).

Instead, you simply turn toward the Sword Hero herself. "I'm assuming you're aware of the purpose and background of this meeting?"

"I have eyes and know both Matsui and Tada, yes," she drily responds. At the shocked gasp coming from the Spear Hero, she just holds up a hand. "Come on, it's high time I dropped the honorifics already. We've all known each other for how long?"

Matsui seems to be crying, that's how touch she is.

"So anyway, before all of this devolves into useless teenage drama, as opposed to useful teenage drama, all in favor of Matsui just confessing her actual feelings to her crush and getting it over with already?"

You're trying. You really, really are trying.

"No way! Impossibru!" The blonde heroine's hands and hair both wave wildly through the air as she shakes her head. "I already tried, but she always just thinks it's some playing around from when we were younger."

"Is there really no way? I don't think she'd just ignore it when you try to explain your feelings," her supportive friend says. "You'd just have to drop your usual antics for a moment."

"Impossiburubruh!" Oh hey, the Engrish is getting worse. "I tried confessing to her from when we were both ten, but she stopped agreeing to marry me after just two years! We never even got to go on a honeymoon! That's how bad it is!"

And now she's pretending to be crying. However, before you can say anything, a leering Matsui jumps onto the table in a single smooth motion.

"But now! Now I have a plan, finally! My poor, innocent Tada-chwan may be too pure (and dense) to notice my feelings, but with the aid of the filthy manswine that seduced her, I shall finally-"

"Are you really sure that's a good idea?" Nakatani interrupts her. It sounds very practiced, as though she does it all the time. "Don't get me wrong, if you are, then I'll wish you all the best, but starting a three-way relationship to get together with Tada sounds like the kind of thing you regret but never actually admit you do until you're thirty and then go on a suicidal rampage as your emotions break out and you can't take it anymore ending with police shooting you to stop you."

"Uboh?!" Matsui falls off the desk. "Th-that's a really harsh tsukkomi for once...!"

"She does have a point, you know," you idly note. "I know I kind of sold you into this whole arrangement with the idea of a threesome with Tada, but if you aren't going to commit a hundred percent, it may be better to just sit her down and tell her how things are. I'll help you with that, too, if you want."

"... Ueeeh! Waaaah!" Matsui, still lying on the floor, starts bawling.

"Oh, what is it now?" Nakatani grumbles, leaning down to pull her back up to eye level.

"It's, it's just... You're being so nice, both of you... And I'm just too indecisive and can't decide whether I want to try or not and... And it's just too much!"

Ah jeez, why does she have to actually get emotional now? At least, you think she is.

Finding Tada takes you just a few minutes, most of which are spent also finding and appropriately sized closet not too far from her current position and instructing Matsui to wait inside of it, then tasking one of the servants with bringing you the key to let you lock it.

The maid in question already had it on her, by the way. You aren't even going to ask.

Anyway, there you are, just casually strolling up to the shortest of the weapons trio (though she has been growing a good bit lately). "Oh, hey Gabriel," she greets you, "did you see the others? Nakatani-chan told me she'd go take care of something with Matsui-chan, but I have no idea where they went."

Smooth move there, Nakatani. "Oh, yes, I do happen to know. Come right along, I'll show you. Also, for future reference, if you need to find pretty much anything within the castle, just ask one of the servants, chances are they can either tell you where to find it or know how you can find out."

"... How would they know where someone is when they're in another part of the castle?"

"Oh, trust me, they will. No idea how, but they will," you state, shaking your head. "Anyway, good thing I caught you like this, I actually wanted to talk to you about something."

Tada stays quiet, letting you sort your thoughts and consider how you can be the most blunt about this you can possibly be.

"So, you're aware Matsui is actually into you, yeah?"

"What? No, she's just-"

"Because while she's usually playing around and grandstanding about it, she's actually serious at least half the time when she tells you how much she loves you," you continue, talking over her words. "Of course she's a clumsy idiot about it and never really worked up the nerve to actually tell you how she feels in plain words."

"That..." The Naginata Heroine chews over what you just told her a few seconds. "That sounds a lot like her, actually."

"Glad you're seeing reason," you quip.

"But why would she- I mean, Matsui-chan is usually so bold, but I could see it. But why would she want to be with... me?"

"Dunno, ask her yourself," you shrug. "Though if I had to guess, it may have to do with the fact you've been friends for pretty much your entire lives, she's extremely clingy, she just likes you for who you are... And before you start arguing, let me tell you that of course people can be into you. I am, aren't I?"

"More like been inside me," the girl, or young woman really, grumbles. "Okay, next time I see her, I'll ask her what this is all about herself. Oh, uh, except... Is that okay? Since we're..."

You ruffle her hair, much to her indignation. "Don't worry about it, it doesn't count if it's a girl. And especially not if you actually and honestly intend to respond to her of your own free will."

Incidentally, you have actually timed things correctly to leave both of you standing in front of one particular door, unremarkable and almost part of the background in its inconspicuousness. Making sure Tada is still distracted and mulling over your words, you open it in a quick move, your other hand pushing the heroine's back to get her inside where a mildly terrified Matsui is already waiting.

"Gwack!" She does make funny sounds when she's surprised.

"Ueeh!" Matsui is still wishing she never went through with this, it looks like. Seriously, though, why are some people so scared of their own emotions sometimes?

Either way, you close the door, lock it and tuck away the key. Immediately, Tada begins angrily knocking, but you just whistle and turn around. "I'm coming back in twenty minutes to see if you're done or still need a bit," you announce as you walk away.

You have a game of poker scheduled with Nakatani to kill the time with, after all.

"... You're cheating, aren't you?" Nakatani asks, eyeing the pile of candy you've got lying on your side of the desk in lieu of chips, the two of you creating some of the stuff as stakes to play for.

She also is absolutely correct, but hey, you didn't tell her to let the sweets fairies climb onto her shoulders and rub against her face like some unruly pets, either. "Maybe I am, maybe I'm not," you truthfully state. "Think those two are getting anywhere?"

"I sure damn well hope so, this would be one big waste of time if they didn't," the Sword Heroine grumbles as she reorders her hand. "Can you believe Tada never actually realized the girl regularly throwing herself at her may be doing so for a reason?"

"In her defense, she thought it was just her usual sense of humour," you point out. "Anyway, let's finish this up. I want to hear you squeak when you try to squeeze out more aura again."

"I told you to never bring that up again!"

Meanwhile, as all of this was happening, thousands of miles toward the north events were still ongoing in a cascade of pieces all in concurrent motion, influencing and being influenced by each other in turn.

One particular set of pieces in this invisible, all-encompassing game was currently in the middle of carefully following the instructions of its leader, the pint-sized terror that kept on ordering them around and being obeyed not far and seeming to be in deep conversation with the disembodied arm said leader kept on her at all times.

Some said it was the arm of her first victim, now forever bound to serve her and give her a bit more reach. Some said, in hushed whispers, that it was her own mother's arm, torn from its socket bloody and raw just shortly after giving birth to the creature masquerading as a little girl. Others claimed it was the arm of whoever last displeased her, having been eaten whole except for it and waiting to be replaced by the next man foolish enough to make himself an... issue.

What everyone agreed to, though, was that the girl on occasion referring to herself as Susy was completely insane, not that she paid any attention to their opinion whatsoever in the first place.

Susy, as it happened, was currently indeed talking to the arm of her mother, carefully guiding His power through it to let her know what to do and where to go. "Mama, mama, on the knuckle; where to go and make some trouble?"

The arm twitched, guided by unknowable forces, and slowly, but surely pointed toward the direction Susy wanted it to. Nodding, she lowered it, letting her weapon and closest companion sway idly by her side. "The sun's up already, everyone wake up!"

Some may say that being woken up by her shrill, bone-shaking shout every morning was a reward. The others would tell them to shut up and get ready already.

As the encampment full of bandits, former soldiers and good-for-nothings both, roused into action after a night spent drinking the last wine they stole from a caravan that probably hadn't even noticed one carriage was empty yet, Susy's second in command, a former lieutenant that cursed his fate for ending up where he did at least once a day, suppressed his hesitation and came closer.

"So we got a target?"

"'Course we do," the girl hardly half his height said, holding the severed arm she used for everything up toward his face. He could deal with that- he'd stopped flinching after she'd done so a couple dozen times.

It was an accomplishment to be proud of. He'd seen her use that thing like a nutcracker on a man's family jewels straight through armor.

This time, though, the hand, uncannily alive and moving as it usually was, held out four fingers, the thumb under them to form some weird shape. Then, it began to flap open and closed like a parody of a mouth, a ragged woman's voice being produced from it in a sudden development that made the former lieutenant queasy again after all. "To Waffleheim, where spoils await."

"Oook... kay." He was not going to comment on anything. Just nod and move right along. Sometimes, this gig was really just the same as being in the army. In some ways.

"I still can't believe you just left them down there."

"So did you with your earlier prototypes, I will have you remember."

"Yeah, but this is this and that is that," Darkness responded to the snide comment. "My creations didn't even have a consciousness yet."

"Assigning blame will bring us no closer toward a solution to this conundrum, however."

"'Course not, but if the game goes sideways because of this, I will have you know that I told you so and also win."

"The rules say nothing about this eventuality, so-"

"No," the void in reality she expressed herself as said. "No more rules twistery. Your old 'prototypes' mess up the game, you're responsible for it and lose. Simple as that."

"Instead of trying to shift things on me despite creating organisms that serve as natural barriers to our sight, somehow, how about you at least try to help me prevent this from coming to pass instead?"

"I already have," Darkness said. "Made preparations and got my best man on the case. It'll probably be fine."

"... You mean you informed the eldritch creature you brought to this world in a freak accident about this?"

"Duh, he'll take care of it no problem. Before or after he's won me the game."

"... Sometimes, I do wonder what I even see in you to entertain your moods like this."

"Aww, you know you love me!"

All around the twinned beings, a strange form of not-energy oscillated, their own personal dimension in constant, chaotic movement. The environment that birthed them, itself similar more to the void between dimensions than not, yet firmly disconnected from it and obeying entirely separate rules, was in unending motion, mirroring their thoughts and desires just like it always had as long as both of them could think back, before they ever found out there was more to existence than each other.

They continued bickering a while longer, but now it was merely a matter of Darkness poking at Light to continue the weirdly person-like dance of feelings between them, and so we shall leave them alone for the time being.

Having opened the closet you shut your two little lovebirds into up, only to promptly close it again and give them a bit more time when you saw the way Matsui was crying (again) and Tada, also all emotionally charged, was giving her a hug, you left the key with Nakatani for the time being, instead choosing to turn toward a more immediate project than watch the awkwardness of superpowered teenagers trying to figure out how dating works.

That is, you're busying yourself clearing up a little bit of a detail you meant to investigate for a bit now; though you never did actually meet her, the Saint Hero, seen by some as the 'most holy' among the group for obvious reasons, only very narrowly missed interfering with the siege of the Border Fortress you broke as your last official big action in the war, a couple towns being disappeared by you notwithstanding.

You only really found out about this later on, of course, as it seems the Saint Hero has a way to rapidly move from one place to the next; Sarah took one look through what scant few reports you have available on her and her movement to figure that one out, but this knowledge alone isn't enough to tell you anything about how to counter or abuse her abilities.

Asking the other heroes just tells you they had no idea either, as though the Braver Hero actually has some sort of group teleportation power they all used a few times, the Saint Hero seems to have been keeping her own teleportation under wraps.

In short, you don't really know how she moves around nor where she's going, making finding and intercepting her at some point extremely difficult. According to Sarah, again, it's highly likely she's using some divine variant of magic to teleport between temples and shrines dedicated to the Goddess of Light, but... That also doesn't really help you in that regard, sadly.

You've been to the human kingdom. They have at least one major temple in every city, some bigger ones have more, and the suburbs and countrysides are chock-full of shrines someone regularly comes by and maintains.

Even using your magic to try and pinpoint her current location at least lets you observe the direct line toward her move almost imperceptibly, meaning she is still on the move.

Annoying. Guess you won't be coming after her in the next few days, after all.

Of course, demonic essences, being what they are, are of some interest to you in how exactly they work, considering you only have a very rough understanding of them thanks to your innate reality warping. For example, you know you can put them into objects, but what exactly does that do beyond giving them 'special powers of some sort'?

Well, turns out it gives special powers of some sort. It's really the best description you can come up with after summoning a couple dozen imps and forcefully extracting their essences to mash those into various test objects you had readied beforehand.

It isn't some gentle, purely immaterial process, sadly, though you have reason to suspect that that won't be an issue for your own projects, at least directly. Simply put, when adding a demon's essence to an object, said object takes on characteristics according to that of the demon- which makes sense. 'Essence' is a literal term in this case, it would seem.

As an example, you have been using a wide variety of bladed weaponry to try this out, mostly simple stuff left over from the spoils of war your people sent to the castle at one point or another. When adding the essence of a particularly feral imp to a sword, you can observe changes that just... make sense, really- the creature was a short humanoid wearing the pelt of some animal over its back, rough face filled with misaligned teeth and wielding a sharp spike as a weapon. As a result, the simple, functional sword you used became a jagged murder weapon, one side of the blade sharper than before, the other filled with saw-like teeth meant to completely savage whatever it hits and leave gaping, bleeding wounds, with some fur wrapped around the pommel of the weapon and dangling just a little bit under it.

An animalistic, frog-like imp that just looked like an oversized frog going up to your knees? The weapon started oozing just a little bit of mucus, only ever enough to cover the blade and probably poisonous or sticky or something; swinging it flings some of the stuff off in an arc and all. A simple, short, red-skinned humanoid wielding a fork sized up to be a weapon for it? The sword just darkened a bit and you left it alone for the time being.

In comparison, armor pieces you also brought for this did pretty much the same thing, except they trend more toward motifs that make it even more obvious what kind of essence was used in them, even if most changes seem to be largely cosmetic. Then again, could be the crappy essences you're using for this on account of not wanting to wrestle with anything stronger at this time.

Even simple tools take on a somewhat 'demonic' appearance when infused with something, most likely changing most things they're used for in turn in some way- you have neither the time nor the inclination to really go in-depth on this, but it seems creativity is really the only limiting factor here. Well, that and the strength of whatever demons you can reliably source.

Also of note, not all changes made are necessarily beneficial. Few are downright making what you infuse worse, but you do have a couple of swords that can't be used like they would have been before you tried smashing marble-form demon juice into them, and you get the distinct impression some may break a little easier now.

All in all, you're getting a lot of new data on this whole thing, though, whic really is the main point of it all.

As far as prophetic warnings go, being told to 'watch out for the elves' is fairly straightforward, thankfully, though still lacking in some key information that might come in handy down the line.

For one, you suspect, based on the wording used, that not only did the elves actually exist, as you found out during your little go at having some adventure time for yourself, they still exist in some form and pose a threat of some sort to your current power base.

By simple process of elimination, they are not really around in any of the known territories around the continent, nor have they been in contact with any human nor demon presence (that you know of). Consulting with Sarah and Rose confirms your own thoughts; they are either hiding out in some magical pocket dimension and waiting for the right moment to come back out... Or did as their ancient enemies once did and hid underground, a whole place mostly unexplored by modern societies as you know them.

It is of little surprise that the Goddess of Darkness would let you know of the issue of their apparent approaching re-emergence seeing as how they seemed to have been created and employed by the Goddess of Light, if you understand the nuances and what you read down in that unnamed industrial facility correctly, so you will have to look into fending off both the elves and the humans at the same time, if that's how things will be.

Joy.

For starters, you shall use your magic to find out where this new front may open up. "Find me the place elves will emerge from!" You try.

The result? Your spell fizzles, returning uncertain results to you. The reason? 'Too many possible targets, can't determine intended one.'

Well, balls. This is quickly turning into kind of a pain.

Your trip to the dungeons to experiment with fragment extraction is somewhat of a mixed bag; using your magic to directly interface with the prisoners' minds, you can, in essence, force them to feel certain emotions. One thing you quickly notice, however, is that the more you just slam down on the 'mindless rage' button inside their heads... the less they are capable of genuinely thinking and feeling for themselves, meaning there's somewhat of a sweet spot where they grow angry and hateful, but don't become too braindamaged to be worth the effort of casting extraction spells at.

In short, while you can make a large amount of changes inside a human (and presumably other kinds of) mind, endlessly spooling up a particular emotion just kinds of tends to break them. A few controlled tests did have a few of the now mindless ragebeasts you 'accidentally' created nearly kill both other prisoners and themselves as they ceased caring about their own physical wellbeing and went so far as to break their own bones trying to break their bindings and murder anyone they saw, but hey, that is progress already.

It's a genuinely useful application on enemy civilians, if nothing else. You know, if you don't feel like just eating them and using their souls and corpses for something else.

Anyway, for all that a constant press onto their brain's anger and impulse areas can force them to express their issues through reckless violence, it seems the change doesn't last for particularly long; without your active enforcement of this state of mind, they seem to be returning to normal after a while. Yet more important data; if you want to effect a lasting change, you will need to make their minds make that change themselves.

Should be quite doable, really. It's just the barest of sophistication you'll need to take into account if and when you get to it, but for now, this current process suits you just fine for the purposes of generating hateful fragments you fuse onto another.

Next stop, the castle's throne room, where you shall be doing some more art.

"Okay everyone, take a look," you say after you're finally done working over the big canvas, lowering your paintbrush and taking a step back. "How do you like it?"

"'s good," Okita says a moment later before turning around and wandering off, considering things to be done inside the throne room and now looking to return to doing her own thing.

As for everyone else, reactions are mixed between those that are impressed by your work, those that are a little confused until their instinctive comparison to a smartphone camera (a high-end one, mind you) passes and some... Some are just shrugging and getting back to cuddling into your sides.

Sarah is, as so often, the chief offender in this regard.

The picture you drew depicts yourself, lounging on the throne this entire room is built around and surrounded by the others you asked to come here for the express purpose of making this a group picture. Your immediate sides are occupied by Sarah, Rose and Emily dressed in harem girl outfits your sister insisted on, with Okita sitting before you and resting her head on one of your knees (she said this was the most comfortable).

The heroes, including Arakawa, are grouped around that, of course, the Blade Dancer Hero trying to hide herself behind the throne which is why you deliberately gave her a little blush when you went to work, a fact she wastes no time complaining about as she grows beet red in actuality, her cheeks giving her hair a run for its money.

All in all, the opulent throne room and your colorful subjects made for a rather nice painting, even though the arguments on whether you should draw yourself barechested or not kept on cropping up every now and then. Either way, it shall be hung up in an appropriate part of the castle as a reminder on how everyone on your side of the war is totally getting along with each other.

Also because it's just a very pleasing picture. Not your best work up to date, but not bad, either.

Incidentally, you also went ahead and produced a couple of potions whose recipe you figured out inside your soul palace earlier this morning, just to have a couple on hand. Anything that allows greater speed is a good step, in your book- staying on your feet and ready to run at a moment's notice served you well back when you started out as an immortal vampire warlord and you aren't about to dismiss the strategy of fighting another day.

Sadly, not all of your day is fun and games, however. Simply put, as you distinctly recall pondering at some point in the past, the demon kingdom is in essence a series of fires that need to be either put out or otherwise counteracted one after another, with no real end in sight beyond whatever local demons living in a given area taking care of things themselves and leaving you and, more realistically, Sarah and Rose, to deal with the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, it seems the bigger picture has, for once, intruded on the smaller one and there's precious little chance a settlement of demons or two will be able to do anything about it. After all...

"A tarrasque," Rose mutters, seemingly feeling the need to lay a hand upon her face as she does so. "One just had to happen, didn't it?"

"It can't be that bad," you say, only to have her irate gaze fall upon yourself.

"Excuse me, but yes, it really can be that bad." And now she's pointing at and lecturing you. "It's an enormous, all-consuming monster immune to magic and capable of destroying anything in its path, with a maw large enough to swallow entire buildings whole and capable of regenerating from nearly anything. Anything!"

Sarah, aware of the particulars of the situation but also with you in wanting to calm the princess down, clears her throat. "They can be killed, we know as much. If you tear them into into enough parts, that usually does the trick, and without a brain they're too stupid to meaningfully defend themselves."

"Which is the only reason this entire continent isn't overrun by them," Rose laments. "I'd hoped we'd be free of tarrasque incursions for a few decades at least in my father's absence, but as it is, we'll need to-"

"I'll take care of it," you interrupt. Really, the soul and body of one of these things would be downright invaluable to you. "Do we know where it is and where it's going?"

"It came from the western Border Mountain Range, taking a course toward the south-west," Sarah jumps in, now gently patting Rose's back. "Right now, it just seems to be randomly hunting down and eating anything it sees."

"If it isn't stopped within days, it'll be a disaster," the pale co-ruler of demonkind groans. "It could hit a town or village before anyone knows it with how fast they can move, or worse yet, someone else finds out and a couple hundred demons go on a rampage to fight it and get themselves killed until someone gets lucky."

Come to think of it, that's a serious concern, given demons being demons.

Knowing where to find your quarry means that by the time you can hear the roars echoing through the mostly empty countryside, you're already waiting and ready, having finished what you were doing on the way already and readying your everything for what's about to happen.

Stepping out of the carriage, you discover that you misjudged things- the tarrasque is there, off in the distance, just... further away than you first thought. The thing sure is damn loud.

And also huge. It's hidden from you by a couple of trees and some rocky hills off in the distance, though calling them hills is somewhat of a misnomer, but you can 'see' its blood signature just fine- and what you're looking at has to be eighty, a hundred meters tall, several times that in length and currently seems to be engaging in a game of 'whack the forest', judging by the way it keeps on flinging trees around in all directions.

Those you can see, at least. And dodge, in one case.

Anyway, disregarding the sound of a humongous amount of air being explosively expelled by a gargantuan monstrosity echoing off in the distance, it's about time you get any last-minute preparations out of the way as you approach it slowly but steadily, the titan seemingly content to move around and savage the countryside relatively slowly.

When you arrive at the top of a particularly rocky outcropping and sight the creature, you wear your current version of Last Embrace, taking in the view and holding back the urge to give off an impressed whistle.

It really is one huge motherfucker.

Okay, about time you actually got serious for once. For all that you do like to play flippant and dismissive in front of Rose, you don't make a habit of underestimating opponents... And this thing's size alone is going to make it dangerous enough already.

Anything that large that can casually move itself around can produce enough force to casually topple mountains if it wants to. As its current goal of absolutely wrecking the scenery amply shows, in fact. You do not want to share the fate of these trees being reduced to splinters left and right.

First, you pull out the potions you produced yourself and kept in handy for just such an occasion, drinking the various concoctions one after the other. As you do, you notice you are starting to feel strangely full- despite normally only being able to do so close to another cocooning phase, it seems drinking potions can still 'fill up' something inside of you. You get the feeling you really shouldn't overdo it with too many at once, nor should anyone else, but really, it would take at least a dozen potions at once before you'd be in danger.

Something to investigate further at a later time, right now you have to concentrate. Also, adding something for flavor really was the right decision when you brewed these up.

Consumed Strength Potion 1, Speed Potion 1, Resistance Potion 1

Combined 20 to combat rolls and 3 damage resistance against elemental damage

Next, you mentally seek out one particular soul, one that has been sitting up your proverbial sleeve ever since you originally obtained it and stayed there just in case; even beyond you definitely not wanting anyone to know you kind of got his power, just in better (or worse, depending on perspective), it's not like you usually have need of it when you could instead solve your problems with a more nuanced application of your other abilities.

That said, you aren't screwing around right now, and so you quickly overlay the soul of the parahuman that used to be known as Lung.

Almost immediately, you can feel strength flooding your limbs, your surroundings warming up from the steady heat you give off at the mere sight of the being you intend to fight in just a bit. However, you are not yet done; seeing no issue in going ahead and letting the steady transformation into a dragon-like creature combine with your monstrous form, you take on the shape of the giant reptilian cat you favor when going up against singular, strong opponents.

A low growl comes out of your snout once you're done stretching yourself, flickering streams of heated air escaping your nostrils as you take in your prey once more with new eyes.

You will need to be fast, fast and precise as you fight it until your already steadily escalating size allows you to cause truly disastrous wounds and bathe it in fire or, better yet, plasma if you can swing that.

It doesn't take the abomination the size of a small mountain long to notice you after this, and true to its nature its reaction to any living being it sees that is not running from it it charges without a second thought, head lowered to try and swing it horns at you, either piercing you in one go or flinging you away.

Your response is to look down your nose at it disdainfully and pondering whether to lead it on a merry chase or confront it and stop it in its tracks while you grow to match its brute might.

Meeting its charge head-on, as you refuse to back down when presented with such an obvious challenge, you jump with the correct timing to land on the enormous monstrosity's head, digging your claws into its skull near one of its eyes only to be viciously thrown off in turn when it immediately slams its face into the ground to get you off.

You land on your feet, however, and swiftly manipulate space, changing the way it works for just the split-second you need to let both the following claw swipe and the bite hit empty air and one particularly unlucky rock that swiftly gets ground to dust between the tarrasque's teeth.

Figuring you may as well make use of this distraction, you slam your slowly overheating body right against the side of its head you have yet to hit, followed with a swipe of your own against its neck. Unfortunately, you don't seem to have dug in far enough to hit anything important, and just then you're caught off-guard by the creature's speed despite having told yourself to watch out for just that, a rapid turn of its body letting its tail slam you aside.

It's not a particularly grievous strike, however; your aura can easily eat it up on the side. Pushing your claws into the earth beneath you to arrest your momentum, you eye up your foe anew, the tarrasque mirroring your actions in form if not in function, soon resuming its wild rampage against anything in reach.

Just with an actual target this time.

However, both you and it have begun playing your respective cards after this first exchange; the gouges in the creature begin to fill out and heal, the one eye you kind of may have slightly popped swiftly returning to normal just as its owner shakes the earth with an enraged bellow, whereas you have begun to visibly grow, your scales glowing red and the air around you mildly steamy whenever you move.

You're still much smaller than your opposite, but you're starting to get there. What you need now is more heat, more size!

Just then, your development accelerates. Huh. Turns out this power actually responds to thoughts and mindset of its owner, after all.

Clearly, you need to find a better angle for this. Or at the very least, keep this little bastard from having a clear shot at yourself.

Hence, new plan: Dashing towards the tarrasque, you deftly redefine your coordinates to both avoid its attempt at smashing a clawed hand down on yourself and reappear right above it, careful to avoid the spikes on its back and immediately digging your claws into the brown and red expanse of its back.

Then you lean toward the base of one of those same spikes and dig your teeth into the tough, leathery skin that seems to hide an even tougher, stone-like layer underneath itself. The tarrasque, until now mildly confused where you went, immediately goes apeshit, but you simply continue to try and dig into the presumably painful location.

A few times you need to abuse your powers a little more, but it is surprising just how easy it is to stay stuck to something when you not only always land on your feet, but can also refuse to fall and adhere to a surface instead. And so you tear open the thick, leathery skin, soon discovering that it merely hides a harder, rock-like layer underneath itself.

And once you break through the at least probably biological matter with a thickness of the length of a human arm, using your claws to great effect once again, all you find is even more thick leathery skin, hiding an even tougher layer next.

Ugh. What's more, the tarrasque's body, perhaps having identified you as an intruder, has begun to secrete some sort of acid, all the while surprising amounts of muscle seemingly positioned just for this are beginning to press down on and crush you.

Any such mechanisms are useless, of course, as you are a cat and can simply slide right out any openings you feel deserve the honor of your passing. However, it does make staying deep inside and digging to whatever base that spire of bone harder than rock has rather uncomfortable.

So you explode out of there in a burst of gore, the wound having tried to heal over and entrap you, instead having left behind one of your quickly summoned minions.

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's down the shaft we go!"

It's always nice to have motivated servants.

And while you're at it, you shake yourself out a bit, molten bone peeling off of you with a sensation that you imagine is the same you would have when shaking off magma after a thorough bath in some. Just what exactly is a tarrasque made of again?

Not that it matters. While you were busy, it seems your opponent has managed to ram itself into the nearest mountain's side, actually smashing through solid granite and getting stuff inside the newly created hole. It is already pulling its front out again, crumbling rock slowly but surely giving in to ungodly strength and size, but for the moment you have free reign.

And the way you're heating up and scorching even the tarrasque's flesh just by standing on it, it seems you've made some good progress yourself... You're about the size of one of its paws now, you'd say, in fact.

Well, you have an enemy stuck and incapable of defending itself. And an enemy that can't fight back... may as well not be an enemy at all, and instead be called a victim.

And you do so love it to have a few victims on hand.

Taking a moment to jump back, you ram your entire, slowly overheating and still growing body into the tarrasque's back, leaving a few scorch marks on its hide and slamming it even deeper into the rock it managed to get stuck inside of. From there, you use whatever leverage you have to tear strips of flesh from the monster, your claws extremely hot to the touch and large enough to let you grip a more substantial amount of matter than before in addition to the frequent electrical discharges as you begin to pump as much electricity as you can through them and into your prey to slow its struggles down just a little bit more.

You're still much smaller than your opponent, but where before you were dwarfed by it, you are now of sufficient size to be a credible threat going by what little common sense one may try to apply to this situation.

Also, you create another body for Carnage, throwing it at the already rapidly healing wounds you just tore into this thing. Really, say whatever you want, but its ability to regenerate from anything done to it is indeed remarkable.

Not that that helps it as you manage to rip open and bite through its hip joint, all but severing one leg from the rest of the body. That doesn't stop it from kicking out and driving you off anyway, swiftly reconnecting the lost tissue with regrowing bullshit biology, but you're still making a point of grinding away at the tough piece of bone inside your jaws.

You can still feel yourself growing larger, of course. Your scales are now giving off a metallic gleam, the heat pulsing beneath them shining hot and red from the gaps, and while your body structure is mostly unchanged, it seems you've started to grow stubby little wings on your back, all the while your muscled limbs are bulging out and the surroundings have begin heating up even more than before.

The ground under your clawed paws has become quite crumbly and a few harder pieces of rock and glass are poking at you from below. It's a little ticklish.

However, it seems Tarry the Tarrasque is quite unhappy with the current state of affairs, roaring and just not ceasing to do so as its whole body tenses, monumental amounts of rock above and below it both trembling and moving as it heaves.

You simply teleport to the side as the tarrasque turns around with the mountain still mounted on its back and promptly slams it into where you just stood, shaking the earth and turning everything around the two of you into collateral damage.

Now you're talking.

The titan of a monster still isn't done, however; shaking the ground with every step, it begins rampaging, wildly stomping and randomly swinging its claws and horns with every step it takes.

However, contrary to how it looks like, it isn't just going nuts, even if it probably also is doing that- you can see that it's actually aiming to drive you into a corner and against a sheer mountainous wall yourself, continually lashing out in all directions to keep you from evading and attacking it from the side and even accounting for your ability to automatically warp space and avoid attacks by keeping you where it wants you even if you do so.

Surprisingly enough, this tarrasque, while more a natural disaster than anything else, is still capable of actually fighting you and making smart decisions, a certain animal cunning in its eyes letting you know it is actually thinking about how to best crush you, after all.

Too bad for it you're just that much smarter and, more importantly, better than it.

Jumping backwards a few times to let it think its ploy is successful, you finally see the opening you need, bracing yourself against the rocky ground and growling as you grow further and further, becoming more dragon-like by the moment. With ever more power surging through your body, and adding a bit of your own internal reserves to it, you tackle one of the tarrasque's forearms, both of your own frontal limbs latching onto it.

Then, with all your strength and momentum behind it, you just so... manage to spew a hot enough deluge of flame onto the ground to glass it slightly, having roughly intuited you can do so now thanks to Lung's memories of using his power back when he was alive. With the ground giving the monster you're fighting a little less leverage and yourself still pushing, you soon manage to do the impossible.

You push the tarrasque back. And, better yet, you are pushing part of its body backwards, still holding onto the arm, and so you exercise a bit of basic knowledge on physics.

The tarrasque is moving forwards with all its might. You are taking control of one of its forelimbs, pushing it backwards instead, and though it is audibly breaking under the strain the two of you are subjecting it to, it is still holding on more or less.

Consequently, the front of the tarrasque's body has its momentum redirected, slamming into the ground with all the force of its own charge and nearly completely snapping off the limb you're still holding on to, whereas you are jumping upwards to increase the force applied and stay out of danger yourself.

In short, you have applied a suplex to the tarrasque. And it would seem one of its horns broke off, even, once its head was forced deeper into the ground and met a massive enough piece of solid rock hard and stable enough to leave it stuck inside.

And in a sudden bout of deja vu, you have a dazed monstrosity of a living being unable to defend itself against your assault.

Except now you're even bigger, about the size of one of its limbs, leaving a trail of glass footprints behind due to the intense heat of your body and joyfully ripping and tearing away at its side in an attempt to just make it die already.

It's a work in progress, of course, and the tarrasque doesn't stay down for long, not to mention the Carnages you've inserted into its body starting to really suffer damage even while digging out and assimilating its flesh to keep themselves going far beyond what they should be able to.

The next exchange between the two of you is somewhat of a repeat, now that the tarrasque has understood that simply flailing at you until you are hit won't get it anywhere, is confined to repeating the same pattern; it tries to tear open the earth beneath your feet to drop you into the rift it created only for you to jump aside far too fats for it to follow, then it tries to use its bulk against you and just... jump on you.

Which you respond to by cat-shifting up and grabbing onto its throat, swiftly turning around your own center of gravity and essentially pulling another suplex. Followed, of course, by you savaging its face and shoulders, including biting through and snapping at least one sinew that you know of.

It keeps on regenerating at an unreasonably fast rate, but it seems the semblance minions you keep on seeding inside of it are slowing that part down somewhat; you'd have killed this thing several times over by now if it weren't for it just ignoring pretty much everything you do to it.

Up to and including eating half of its heart straight out of its chest before it manages to throw you off just so. Or at least you think it is its heart, it's a big chunk of pulsing organic matter inside of its chest. A bit far in the middle and involving a bit too many thorns growing out of it, which made eating it a bit painful and caused you to impale your tongue once or twice, but close enough to count for a tarrasque.

It also seems to have grown largely immune to your constant bombardment of fire and plasma, no matter how much heat you keep on throwing at it, but that just means you need to put a bit more enthusiasm behind things on your end. You can fix this.

Incidentally, you've also grown so hot that the grasslands and forest off in the distance seem to have dried out and caught on fire by this point as you let a pair of wings break free of your back with a resounding mreow, but you're sure that won't be any trouble at all. Also, as you have not stopped growing even once, you're now at the point where you're somewhere between giant reptile cat and rage dragon.

Comparing yourself to memories of Lung at this stage of his transformation, you seem to be looking a lot more like a western dragon compared to the more snake-like form he would have taken, with four strong, long limbs in addition to the wings and a tail that isn't half your entire body length.

Also, your maw isn't split in four so much as you can just unhinge it even wider than you already could before (vampire powers for the win) and your senses are pretty extensively sharpened, to the point you can hear the stampede of monsters currently running from the battlefield you and your foe have created for yourselves.

Now that you can fly, the fight is almost too easy to win. You can keep out of your opponent's reach, using your speed and maneuverability to your advantage even if the larger creature is technically just as fast as yourself, diving in to land crippling strikes and bombarding the tarrasque with balls of fire and (as you have finally succeeded in creating) plasma.

A bit more persistence as the damage you keep inflicting on it outpaces the speed of its regeneration and just like that, you have succeeded in decisively weakening the thing.

So once it seems to have trouble moving properly, its endless vitality apparently already at work fixing the part of its brain your kind of blew up and used as a kiddie pool just now, you move in, ramming yourself into the thing's throat and searching for the largest blood vessel you can find.

A bit of confusing mutated monster biology later, you find something that tastes close enough and, latching on as you aggressively shred and boil everything else in reach, begin drinking.

Fun fact, you can drink a lot when you don't even need to swallow and never get full, and with your current body size you can drink more fluid per unit of time expended. In short, you manage to successfully eat the tarrasque's soul after a while of its regeneration being too busy with other matters (such as getting you out of its body) to replenish the creature's supply of blood compared to how much of it your are drinking up.

And using hemokinesis to get more of from ist entire body as best you can, of course.

Taste-wise, the tarrasque tastes surprisingly good, kind of like a rich stew containing lots of various vegetables and meat. Weirdly close to having some actual morality, but then again, who really cares? It's yours now.

Wet with ichor and dark, almost black-ish red blood, you crawl back out of the throat of your defeated foe.

Now then, with all of this taken care of, you languidly shake yourself clean before you reverse your transformation, or rather both of them, returning to being a roughly human-shaped Gabriel.

Once you're back to normal, you... Actually, you first take a moment to really get used to the hellscape you turned your surroundings into. Cracked glass and rock dominate the landscape while the air is dry and hot, almost making you feel like it may rasp away your lips and eyes into nothing.

Off in the distance, where you already noticed something happen earlier, an inferno is merrily burning away, causing a mass migration of monsters fast enough to escape from the massive walls of flame emanating from your battlefield.

... Ah jeez, this is going to be a pain in the long run if some monsters manage to mutate rapidly enough to perpetuate this kind of environment. On other hand, who even cares? Nobody really lives anywhere in this area anyway.

First things first, you summon the soul of the creature you just ate, identical second mountain manifesting next to the one you just killed. It tries to immediately murder you, of course, but you merely order it to cease and prostrate itself before you.

With a rumbling sound like thunder striking stone repeatedly, it does, having no way to oppose your demands. So you have an easy time hopping onto its head, turning around to seat yourself and use it as a throne.

Then you let it roar, making for an absolutely gorgeous ending to the quasi-recording you just made, your thoughts and memories of the fight having been transmitted to any and all of your spawn and thralls that wished to witness your glorious victory.

This took a bit of work, but you sure did get what you came for.

Of course, once you cut the connection and just leave the recording on the 'telenet', you immediately get to work drumming up some little bit of rain to drizzle down on the mess you just made and quickly reanimate the corpse of the tarrasque, bidding it to dig into the mountain it liked so much earlier and staying there until disturbed.

Which should hopefully keep it for later well enough. You also do eye the horn it lost earlier...

Pulling it out of the massive rock is kind of a pain and requires the use of your summoned tarrasque soul again, but eventually you have the giant piece of monster horn loaded up on your carriage.

Before you move on, you also do take a bit to fly upwards, casting one of your surprisingly efficient spells when it comes to firefighting like this. The chant is still kind of awkward, but not terribly cringe-inducing for once, which you will consider a step forward.

Basically, what you're doing is taking an overall area and telling the temperature in it to reduce itself immediately. You being an authority on this matter, it obeys, incidentally largely smothering most of the fires still raging and letting you cut down on the conflagration currently spreading through the nearby forests.

Incidentally, though you get vastly reduced returns in terms of soul fragments when compared to widespread deaths of more sapient creatures such as, say, humans, you still do manage to fish out a good few of the things out of the burnt-out ruined woodlands you make a quick circuit of. Every little bit helps, as they say. Fusing everything together, you are just about done with this place, finally.

Next stop, the capital again! Honestly, if you keep on wrecking stuff at the rate of day trips you are taking lately, it's only a matter of time until you've destroyed every part of this continent you don't really need at the moment.

Arakawa Gina, the Sword Dancer Hero and, in her own not at all humble opinion one of the stronger heroes in a one on one fight, sighed into her hand once she confirmed nobody was there to watch her do so.

Having fought in the war (contrary to what some may think, the heroes' participation was far from confined to the last battle they fought as a group) and defeated the Demon Lord in his prime, she was very aware that strength and physical size did not necessarily go hand in hand, but even so she could tell from what she'd been able to see from the fight That Man had beamed along that the monster he had fought was extremely strong.

Not on the same level as the Demon Lord, but just below it. And she'd been keeping an eye out for it, but That Man had not once been seriously hurt as he basically turned into a monster himself, either.

... Arakawa took a deep breath, holding it in and doing everything she could to stay like that. However, she couldn't help herself; sitting up, she let out a weird sound. "Kiiiii!"

How dare he! How dare That Man be that strong! She could accept he was good in a fight, however much it galled her to admit he was actually stronger than her. But to legitimately be on the level of the Demon Lord was unfair!

It had been hard enough to defeat him when everyone was all together, but as it was now, half of the class might just side with That Man instead, so winning was all but impossible for the good guys now. What was more, Arakawa herself had kind of inadvertently agreed to his deal when she had been defeated and kidnapped.

Because she had been kidnapped! There was absolutely no other way to describe the circumstances under which she had found herself with unending daily free time and eating delicious food every day!

She just absolutely loathed That Man. Who had dared to defeat her, twice! Not to mention him always showing off his strength, his diabolical plans and thoughts uttered from his unnaturally perfect lips and the chiseled nature of his physique as she'd seen it!

This was unacceptable. Especially the way he casually used her given name, to her face! The gall! The relaxed look in his eyes whenever they made eye contact, even though she was this tense every time!

And so she went in circles a little while longer, eventually indulging in a fantasy of teasing That Insufferable Man and making him flutter just the way he did with her when she flinched, hearing voices only moments before the Weapons Trio entered the common room they had claimed for heroic endeavours.

"-so of course its size remains relevant as long as its speed can keep up with whatever it's fighting!" Michi-san said, evidently embroiled in a discussion Arakawa had gotten over minutes ago.

"Whatever you say, but- Oh, Gina-san, hello," Mizuki-san greeted her. "What might you be doing here?"

"N-nothing," Arakawa waved her off, the short heroine shrugging and resuming discussing the virtues of size against skill.

Kazue, however, continued to gaze at Arakawa for along moment. "W-what?"

"... Oh, nothing," the Sword heroine shrugged. "You just have something on your face."

Following the finger pointing at her own cheek, Arakawa felt her cheek, noticing how hot it felt.

She ran out of the room in record time. Dodging the door's frame counted as practicing her power, that was all she was doing!

Staring at your claws as you sit inside of your carriage, you idly ponder what you know about your true nature, questioning a few of these things you would have simply assumed otherwise. Your sharp digit extensions are made out of some complete bullshit material you are, in essence, warping reality to force into existence, being extremely hard, tough (yes, there's a difference) and capable of regenerating due to beig a part of your body.

So why wouldn't you be able to use the same seemingly miraculous stuff for other things? You don't think taking it out of yourself would let it keep its properties for long, but-

Huh. The feeling of inadvertently growing a layer of eldritch 'fuck you' along your entire body, while weird, is strangely pleasant at the same time. You could get used to this.

... For now, back to the capital, though.

Incidentally, you feel it should be noted that you're also reworking your bone carriage just a little. Not in any major way, really, you aren't going ahead and designing the changes you'll need to make to cram some controlled Lutece Particles into this thing, you're just... Working on the spiritual side of things.

By which you very much do mean you're really setting up a couple of enhancements that might just come in handy. While letting this thing phase through objects would be nice, that wouldn't really mesh with the possibility of any passengers with it, who wouldn't be affected by such an enchantment and consequently get whatever it is the carriage is driving through to the face at whatever (now enhanced) speeds it is moving, but that doesn't mean you can't go ahead and pursue alternatives.

Such as just letting this thing drive through whatever is in the way the hard way.

A few more bells and whistles are also considered and selectively implemented while you're at it, of course; a paralysis aura, capable of pulsing a couple of times per minute and shutting down most things that can't just break through such things and a little more speed, speed and control over momentum, for more speed and keeping the contents of the whole thing in place at the speeds it can now move.

Doing some good work here, you feel. Now you just need to rebuild it and add a little technology to make it an aircraft and you have a tactical weapon, basically, that still allows you to travel in style.

... Thoughts of your upgraded bullhead do come by you a couple of times, but hey, you have a similar minibar in here. That has to count for something.

"A bit further to the right... a bit more... perfect, just like that," you say, instructing Okita as she balances the horn you took as a trophy on one hand and holds it up against the wall.

The wall of the central throne room that is, where you usually don't actually hang around inside of but still somehow the center of your authority as the demon lord. You felt that, given you aren't (as of yet) planning to use the materials you could take from one of the largest land animals slash monsters on this continent for anything personally, you may as well accessorize this place a little, give it that personal touch.

And hey, the horn of the first tarrasque you ever hunted certainly does count for a 'personal touch'. In fact, you have it hanging right opposite from the one your predecessor hung in here at some point of his long life.

They're about the same size, honestly, but if anyone ever asks, you will forever suggest yours is just a little bit bigger. That's just how this kind of thing works.

Anyway, actually getting the horn installed properly takes a little bit, but thanks to the castle staff's excellent spread of miscellaneous abilities, it would seem it's all taken care of rather quickly.

Now then, on to making a bit of a fuss about your successful hunt before you go back to business as usual.

The event you've planned is honestly not all that grand in scope, all told- just you and your spawn and thralls as present in this dimension gathering to have a good time and a meal while you show off a little more with the (now edited) memory-movie you're going to add to the raw footage you're also keeping as it is inside your telepathic network, having found that the thing has seemingly unlimited storage space for as much data as you could wish for.

In other words, since it's not like you can't just have an improved 'cinematic' version, you had Yoshi put his recently tested editing skills to work to make something like out of a blockbuster movie out of the experience.

Note to self, look into making movie night a thing back on Earth Bet at some point if this turns out well- forget about using telepathic stuff like this, even, you could just use one of the base's larger rooms as a movie theater after a few quick renovations.

Food is prepared just fine thanks to the expansive culinary competence of the kitchen staff and the regularly restocked stores of food, mainly particularly tasty monsters and the like, though some plant-based diet is also quite possible to find, and everyone meant to be there is present, even Arakawa and Blaine, now that she's re-earned her right to have a name.

Honestly, you feel you might have missed out on something by just never eating any normal people food within the castle. The dishes are varied and quite delicious, all told, definitely a good enough reason to go out of your way and learn a couple of the local recipes; the steaks are one thing, for all that they're done extremely well still soft and bloody on the inside and yet crispy and perfectly grilled on the outside (also, you have to find out what seasonings they used, seriously), but however they used meat broth and eggs to create this meat souffle you have to figure it out for yourself.

This stuff would be great food for fussy kids, and you are planning on having some, so...

Anyway, back on topic. You're letting everyone who's interested view the edited footage at their leisure as you eat and chat about whatever generally inoffensive topics come up, going from how things were like on everyone's respective birth worlds to Thule's surprisingly advanced magical engineering if you know where to look for it.

Turns out there's a pretty complicated set of enchantments used for the sake of having functional sewers and similar, streetlights are a fairly common sight over in most human cities (not really in demon ones thanks to their innate ability to see in the dark, however) and so on and so forth, just for example.

Things develop from there and before long you're making a show of the things you've seen and learned in different dimensions you've traveled to so far; whether Earth Fallout's irradiated wasteland and the weird dichotomy between more or less normal people just trying their best to live and completely insane raiders and their ilk on a background of the starkly mutated crops and purified water making up the main subjects of the wasteland's economy beyond the trade of weapons and ammunition keeping everything alive and moving along.

And, of course, the currency being in caps. As in, the ones from bottles. There are theories they used to start as representative wealth for the supply of clean drinkable fluids and just became their own thing from there, but at this point that's all they are: Theories.

Then there's Earth Rapture, the mainly normal parallel dimension with the exception of certain eldritch deep sea organisms and the implications of a significant part of society's best and brightest disappearing under the sea one day only to pretty much completely degenerate under super drug cancer influence a while after its discovery and cease to be anything but insane splicers that you eventually disposed of.

What about the rest of the world? How are science and politics going without these people, compared to any other version of Earth?

And yes, the fact that four of six dimensions personally known to you are some parallel version of each other (Earth Bet, Earth Fallout, Earth Rapture and Earth Okitatas, five out of seven if you count Earth Aleph) has not gone unnoticed by this point.

Which brings you to the next part of your comparisons, of course. Remnant, the land of the horrible endless hordes of murderous creatures and the cultural insistence on self-expression and art.

An entire society developing around needing to avoid negative emotions and castling in to fend off the things that want nothing more than to end you in a great variety of ways. It's honestly pretty interesting from an anthropological standpoint, and you're quite glad to be getting an audience you can talk an ear or two off about your thoughts on this matter.

Of course, while you're doing all of this, you also go out of your way to make this a multimedia affair and not only freely let the others avail themselves of your relevant memories, you even go so far as to conjure up some honestly impressive illusions of the things you''re talking about, using a part of the room as a projector. You can't exactly have those same illusions move around freely, but just a static three-dimensional picture with a few simple elements giving the impression of movement instead is quite nice to look at in your own humble opinion.

A deathclaw inside the ruins of a city, snarling and claws swiping with one a few pieces of plastic and trash moving in the wind nearby giving one the impression of time having stopped for the creature, for example. Then there's bands of supermutants, the hovels that most farmers out in the wastes live within and of course the various kinds of Grimm you've seen and fought, all brought into reality through your illusions.

Good times.

Your magical practice following the evening's events draws itself throughout the entire night, the importance and upcoming important use of increased mastery over some aspects of it drawing closer day by day, though it's not like you're about to run out of time quite yet.

Of course, a series of distractions is coming and going as you mess with imbuing random demons' collected essences (you've made it somewhat of a practice to just summon a bunch of imps at once and extracting them one at a time for this purpose).

When Sarah isn't coming up to grope whatever parts of your body she decides need groping at the moment, you have Emily sitting around giving off assorted commentary on how the items you hammer demons into turn out or Okita poking her head at what you're doing and sometimes nodding approvingly at what she's seeing.

And of course Rose and Lana, both of whom are interested in this particular application of your spooky vampire magic, if for different reasons. However, say what you want, the frequent appreciative blowjobs you're on the receiving end of do, somehow, make you learn at an accelerated pace once again, regardless of whether it is Sarah looking up at you adoringly or Lana having been fooled into believing doing this increases the potency of your works.

It does, kind of, but you sure aren't telling her.

You have somewhat of a sweet tooth. You know it, people that know how much ice cream you used to eat back when you had the time to regularly do so know it, it's pretty much a clear fact.

You're also getting into cooking in general a bit, in part due to simply having gained a few insights and thoughts on the topic after you ate sufficient amounts of housewives and other cooks, in part because you may or may not be worried your kids might be fussy about normal people food and miss out on a lot of simple delight offered by what someone can do with the right ingredients.

And make infiltrating normal society harder for themselves, but that's a distant concern compared to the important ones.

So you went ahead and asked a few of the servants for where the nearest kitchens are, get a few recipes from whoever is responsible there and get to work. It seems most of what demons do in terms of sweets revolves around honey or simply refined, mostly brown sugar, by and large, from simple soft bread rolls baked, then glazed in honey and baked again to large amounts of confectionary you work your way through making.

The results of your baking binge are a bit much to comfortably eat by yourself, so you go ahead and share them with everyone you can find, with varying reactions once they try some.

"This is sho good!" -Emily

"Mhm... Almost as tasty as you." -Sarah

"Tasty." -Okita

""More, please!"" -The Weapons Trio

"Oh!" -Rose

"Mugu mugu." -Lana

"Oh, hey, thanks... These are really good!" -Yamamoto

"It's not like I like these, okay? I'm just, mf, dishposhing of shem so nobody else has to taste them!" -Arakawa

"..." -Blaine

Looks like everyone liked them.

Back to business though, after this little taste testing session. You have the elves to worry about and you have full use of your divinatory abilities once again, so it really is high time you went and used them to determine what, exactly, you are supposed to be doing about this whole thing.

Naturally, you do so in the company of both Rose and Sarah, again, the two of them having confiscated leftover sweets of yours to consume during this meeting.

Now then, you can receive a single answer to a single question of yours, but the answer will be short and to the point judging by what happened last time. You'll need to think about how to phrase your query for best effect, in a way that can be answered with few words but still be highly informative for you...

Time to get tricky about this.

Really, there's too many unknowns in this situation. There's a couple of things you should find out, but what is the most pressing one right this moment and how may you glean the most relevant information to make further plans?

Those are the questions you and your two advisors slash equals in this business relationship have to tackle and, after some period of deliberation, you finally come up with something that should, hopefully, let you read into things and determine how to best approach this whole situation you're finding yourself dealing with.

"What," you ask reality itself, voice echoing in your usual mildly distorted chanting, "is the objective of elvenkind at large in this dimension?"

You were warned the elves would become a problem, after all, and so it stands to reason that the entire race of sapient beings is more or less in on it. So you wait a moment, working the information you receive in return for your question over inside of your head a little.

"And?" Sarah asks, popping a little piece of stacked candy into her mouth. "C'mon, what's the result?"

"Kind of a shitshow," you shrug. "'To exterminate and subjugate all unlike themselves, fulfilling their purpose.' Looks like they're definitely out for blood."

"Huh, a third party in the war, assuming they have to be taken seriously," Rose comments, reaching for her own sweets. "How likely is it we will be able to play them against humanity?"

This right there is the reason Rose is capable of pretty much single-handedly holding this kingdom together.

"No idea, but we should definitely keep the possibility in mind," you agree with the sentiment. "Also interesting is how they've apparently collectively made it the purpose of their entire existence to subjugate everything that's not them."

"What, you think the Goddess of Light might've created them as some sort of first attempt?" Sarah raises an eyebrow.

"Could be, based on what I found in those ruins. Speaking of which, how's getting those riches out of there and into this castle going?"

"A first caravan has successfully made the trip and we have a wagon's worth of valuable metals, next time they're sending more people to ward off the monsters down there," the demon princess lets you know.

"Good, good." You steeple your fingers, pursing your lips as you consider your options. "Back to those elves, they're planning to come up all over the place at once, circumventing defenses to strike at soft targets and cripple the opposition, that is, us and humanity, in doing so."

"Most likely, yes."

"If what we know about them is correct, that is indeed the most likely strategy they will be pursuing."

"Reveal the past, reveal the future!" Scanning through realities and possibilities, you catch the barest glimpse of things that might yet happen, in the most generous of descriptions; technically, you're really just casting your spell on Rose and hoping you'll get something useful.

And, to be fair, you do, if only barely. Most of the information you receive is just... general stuff- her name is Rose de Nyx Blackhorne, she is the daughter of the previous demon lord, can use a lot of sophisticated magic and she liked the steak she ate last night.

Also, in the near future, she will be subject to an increased workload due to something. You have no idea about any of the specifics about literally any of this (what you find out is very generic), but yeah.

You open your eyes, giving Rose an apologetic shrug. "Sorry, but all my cosmic powers can tell me you're going to have more work to do."

Rose sighs. "To be honest, I was kind of expecting as much. Thanks for trying, anyway."

Incidentally, however, you also did make a separate inquiry regarding a mildly concerning matter that you noticed recently, asking the question out aloud to both of these two, but Sarah in particular.

"Oh yeah, before I forget- there was something I wanted to mention," you begin. "I was keeping an eye on the telepathic network and I found this one repository just titled Gabeislive, and-"

"It's nothing, don't worry about it," your beloved sister shuts you down.

"Are you sure? Because-"

"Don't worry about it, Gabe," she repeats herself.

"... Alright." If Sarah tells you not to worry about it, you simply shan't. That's that taken care of, then.

Your former prisoner, now 'guest' or still a prisoner depending on how you look at it, has been mostly staying inside of or near her room, the simple living quarters serving to keep her more or less content with her living situation while the fact she is literally within demonkind's capital city dissuades any thoughts of escape- if she ever does try to sneak out, you know it'll be because she's figured out a way to cross half the continent and get past the Border Fortress in one piece, otherwise there's no real use in trying in the first place.

That doesn't exactly mean she's particularly happy about it, either, of course, but lucky you it's not like you give a fuck. A sentiment you don't particularly feel the need to rub in her face at all times, but still something both of you are aware of as you come by for a little talk.

"So I suppose the heroes are doing well, at least the ones living here now," the blonde (whose name you do know is Blaine by the way, you've even decided to use it every now and then) says, though she's more thinking aloud than anything else. "That's good. Father always did regret having to use them as weapons of war before you killed him."

"If it helps, he still thinks that way," you reply. "He even still tries to take care of the ones I've also eaten now that there's pretty much nothing more he can do."

In doing so, you of course mildly disrupt the harem comedy routine currently happening between Philip, Yoshi and a couple of the more or less female souls oftentimes trying to get a piece of him while the former plays the part of a surrogate father, but you don't see any need to interfere with them.

At least for now. Note to self, have Nolac edit memories of what's happening around their little group later before you put them into the open network, just to torture Yoshi even more.

"And the fact you can say that with a straight face is amazing in its own right," Blaine drily points out. "Have you ever considered how it makes bereaved family members and loved ones feel that you steal the souls of the people you kill?"

"I mean, I'm aware of it, but I don't usually interact with anyone fitting that bill," you shrug. "I usually either don't stick around and get involved or just eat them as a whole family unit, if that."

Blaine just shakes her head, as if you were proving some kind of point for her.

"Anyhow, you been settling in alright? I try to keep up on how people do, but you know how busy governance can be." You're mostly just being polite now, but it does pay to keep the mental state of others in mind when talking to them.

"About as well as I could expect. What, are you worried I'll go look for the heroes and tell them about everything you did to me in an effort to try and turn them against you?"

"Not really, no," you casually reply. "They probably wouldn't believe you or at least question me about it so I could talk them around again."

"... I hate how confident you sound in that, but if the heroes were born on Thule you wouldn't have gotten them to stop fighting in the first place."

"Oh, so you are aware of the unreasonable hatred between humanity and demonkind," you happily point out. "I mean, think about it, if everyone just stayed on their side of the world, there wouldn't really be any point in fighting."

"Except innumerable generations of bloodshed and grudges and the divine commandments we'd all be ignoring," Blaine points out, brushing a few locks of hair backwards. "You call it unreasonable, but from a native's perspective, not fighting would be the unreasonable thing to do."

"Eh, I tried," you say with another shrug. You kind of expected that reaction, to be honest. "Speaking of locals, though, as you've found out I'm not one, have you considered how it would be to go to another world yourself? The one I came from, specifically- there's a couple open spots one the next round trip I make and there's not much of a reason to keep you here, so I thought I'd ask."

"Any society that created you is one I'd like to keep well away from." Your victim slash psychological test subject looks away from you, apparently deep in thought. "More than anything else, though... Everything I know is here. Not here here, but relatively speaking. I... Even if I won't be of much use here, I'd still like to, I don't know, be there all the way."

Ah, you're entering the muddled realm of emotions again. "Fair enough if you don't want to," you stop her from tumbling down another rabbit hole- you can have more of that kind of thing at a later date. "Actually, would you like to talk to your father? I'm sure he'd have lots to tell you."

Or at least Philip has never once stopped yelling inside of you ever since he got to a reasonably secluded room to do so inside of.

"... Yes, please." And you do so very enjoy the defeated look on Blaine's face every time you're being nice to her and she can't defend herself against it. It is both hilarious and interesting to observe.

Leaving this whole situation to itself for the moment once again, you proceed to consider something you have been idly wondering about for a little while now.

Well, it's more a general curiosity combined with wanting to make an effort in making your subordinates stronger once again, but still; aura, being the magnificent soul juice forcefields that it is, has more advantages than just being able to bestow greater combat potential directly by increasing speed, strength and survivability, pretty much anyone that has it also has some kind of personalized superpower just by virtue of doing so.

Though if anything, you yourself are somewhat of an outlier in this regard, you feel, considering the theme and scope of your semblance. There's no such thing as a 'normal' semblance, of course, but most of them you've seen seem to be rather more... simple, or straightforward, or at least more limited.

You have stuff like some manner of superspeed, or gathering strength to then discharge it somehow (Yang and Nora both, arguably) or even the creation of temporary clones and similar- that one in particular is surprisingly common one way or another.

But your semblance lets you just create pretty much anything capable of doing anything as long as you have the necessary aura to do it, though from what you've seen, the sheer amount of aura you consume to create and keep up your minions is actually pretty extreme as far as active semblances that require aura to be used to function go.

Still, even with that as a drawback of sorts, your semblance is just way too versatile and powerful. Though to be fair, the Schnee family's hereditary glyph semblance is just about on the same level, if with its own rules and limitations.

Outliers, you suppose. Not much more you can really say or do in this regard.

However, to come back to what brought you to this topic, you certainly can try to help others figure out their semblance with a little luck. Unless they're as specific and fiddly as Nora's electricity absorption shtick, anyway. It's honestly mostly guesswork and subjecting them to various stimuli in the hopes of chancing upon the one thing that'll let them work the figurative magic- as opposed to any literal magic, that is- and use their semblance for the first time, whereupon it reportedly becomes much easier to do it again at will.

Turns out you actually seem to have a hand for these kinds of things, or maybe the people you're working with just have easy to discover semblances... Even if it turns out not everyone needed the help, after all.

"My semblance? Oh yes, I found that I could cast more spells than before ever since I first gained aura," Rose explains once you ask her about it. "I chalked it up to some placebo effect at first, but it turns out I can use aura and mana both to cast more. It's quite handy."

... More like an insane cheat code considering it's not normally possible to gain more mana than you have innately as far as you're aware, but sure, whatever. So that's what Rose's semblance is.

Next up, and ignoring Sarah who is demanding you try help her with her semblance too despite already being aware of what it is, you just decided to work your way through the whole list one after the other.

Emily, your little Spitfire, actually turns out to be Nora's twin from another dimension- where one can absorb electricity to temporarily strengthen herself, the other does it with fire to become faster and emit flames herself, though notably not heat in general, it has to be actual fire. Considering her other powers, well... Incidentally, while transformed into a shape of fire, this kind of causes a feedback loop that allows her to slowly, but surely generate waves of heat more than capable of keeping up with what you managed during your transformation using Lung's power combined with one of your monster forms.

Actually putting out those fires took a lot more effort, however. The reason she didn't immediately find out the function of her semblance when she first transformed was that she always just kind of associated 'breathing out' with 'using power', as opposed to breathing in, which is what she needs to do to use this function.

Next off, you went to work with the Weapons Trio. Tada, who according to herself, has first pick when it comes to spending time with you, has one of those more 'common' semblances, in function if not in form; upon using it, she visibly speeds up to a considerable degree while ignoring trifles such as air friction and the like, leaving behind some discolored blur whenever she moves.

Combined with her naginata and the insane reach she can just decide to give it, she has officially become a wide-area blender. Seriously, she can swing her weapon fast enough to be too fast for the human eye to track, and she can hit just about everything she herself can clearly see as well as cover everything within her reach at once.

Nakatani's semblance seems to be some sort of energy stockpiler, next off. Every time she hits something or is hit, she gathers a small amount of power, then she unloads it once she's reached critical mass or whatever better description there is for it. Interestingly, this doesn't consume any aura in exchange for taking a while to charge up.

It also hits harder than a truck, you're pretty sure. You'd know, given how you first found yourself dead and buried. Her full-on strike was basically her sword emitting a sudden shine of light, and next thing you knew you were slammed through a wall and nearly all of your aura was consumed to keep you in one piece.

Hey, how else would you discover these semblances if not through a mild sparring match that has you flaring your intimidation aura at everyone? It does work, surprisingly. You just have to put your test subjects into situations where their semblance would activate, and since most are somehow applicable to combat...

Anyway, next, Matsui. The Spear Heroine has a semblance that is as impressively inconspicuous as it is deadly in a fight. Simply put, she can consume aura to selectively remove friction from anything she or her weapon touch.

Combine this with her ability to always hit (and the combination between her and Tada) and several applications open up immediately. Remove friction between an opponent's weapon and them and they effectively can't grasp it anymore, which is pretty much guaranteed to leave them disarmed the moment they try to block. Remove friction between said opponent and the ground and, well, they won't be keeping themselves standing for any length of time.

Unless they, like you, can cheat with other supernatural powers to adhere to surfaces anyway (a fact that has Matsui pout and call you a cheater unworthy of her Tada), but the point stands. And yes, she then took revenge by negating the friction between yourself and your pants.

Only to then blush brighter than a Christmas tree and run away with all her might. Seriously, if she didn't wanna see your junk, she shouldn't take off your pants. It's that simple.

After a short break during which you went out to look for her, you got Arakawa to stand still for long enough you could test for her semblance next. Which turns out to be one of those body double ones- whenever she's moving fast enough, she can have a single double of herself emerge moving in the other direction.

Said double is still under her control and perfectly capable of striking just as easily as herself, being for all intents and purposes a complete double of her... Except, that is, it just kind of fades away and disappears the moment it gets more than a scratch, and making them isn't exactly cheap in terms of aura.

Then, to complete your go of thralled heroes in your employ, it's Yamamoto's turn. Except the guy requested you don't go at him in close combat and to try something else instead first, which you agreed to.

To protests from the others present, but they could've just asked, as well.

Anyway, his semblance seems to be the power to actually aim. But no, seriously, it looks to be some sort of combat precog, actually, letting him envision what will happen up to a moment in the future so long as he concentrates on things. And consumes aura, of course- more semblances do so than they don't, you've found.

Incidentally and before you go on, Rakul, the commander you've pretty much left in charge of the forces at the Border Fortress (so all your forces), has also figured out his semblance- it's some kind of combat trance, you think? It's not like you're there to assess it in person, but according to him it lets him just concentrate fully on whatever fight he is in and determine what he needs to do with a clear head.

He seems to think it's some awesome power, so you won't disabuse him of the notion. For now.

Lastly, Okita, like Sarah, has apparently decided she should play around with her semblance in the name of improving it with your help, too. You get the impression the desperate struggle for survival that ensues on your end when she just activates her 'Cutie Crusade' and goes to town on you is causing amusement in your audience.

Long story short, another two destroyed walls, some ruined furniture and several aura breaks later Okita has found out that she doesn't strictly need to use her semblance around a greatsword she is already holding... and can, in fact, use it to just create a second, weightless one in one hand.

And also use her semblance on her actual weapon so she can still dual wield it. You are faintly traumatized by the end of things.

Also, Lana's semblance, before you forget it, was rather easy to reveal. All you needed to do was threaten to evict her from the library while she was deeply absorbed in something and the terror of this idea was enough to have her fire off a wave of black-purplish energy that caused everything it touched to begin gently floating upwards.

And pushed you out the door and to the ceiling. You had to walk back down to the floor while sticking to everything until you coached her through finding a way to turn her semblance's effect off again.

Once again calling your nightly strategic planning, or the 'elfslaying committee', as you like to joke about it lately, you have one of the servants on call bring up a large map of the entirety of your territory, the newest and most accurate one available- which is to say, it's out of date by half a year and several geological features are most likely changed by now due to random monster fights and environmental mana discharges, not to mention various knock-on effects of your own actions.

Doesn't matter for what you're using it for, though. Hopefully.

"Okay, so we know those elves are likely underground, planning a widespread surprise attack on us and unlikely to be reasoned with," you sum up the current state of affairs. You're taking your time with this, but you're still looking at a possibly continent-wide threat- it's just been quiet for at least the last eight millenia, so you doubt it's going to pop up any moment now.

At some point, sure, probably, but you have a bit of time, at least.

"So," Sarah chimes in, taking over for yourself, "what countermeasures could we put into place to screw this up for them?"

"In the first place, knowing what they are planning is a tactical advantage we should be using fully." Rose is already a step ahead, however. "We should consider how we can turn the surface into a trap for them that allows us to counter-invade quickly enough humanity cannot strike us from the back or else simply strike first so we are not forced onto the defensive at all."

"Can I take that to be your strategic evaluation of our situation?" At her nod, you get up and begin pacing a little, letting your body act while your mind is busy. "On the one hand, I fully agree- defending the entire kingdom is nigh impossible when we take all the villages, townships and cities such a thing would involve into account, so attacking preemptively is preferable. However, let us assume for a moment that we cannot do so, or else that we do and fail to decapitate the enemy in one strike. How difficult exactly would our situation be?"

"Up shit creek without a paddle," Sarah judges. "In the first place, we just don't have many soldiers still after the losses the army took before we took over and while we could call for conscription, it's doubtful many demons would take well to being told what to do like that."

The troubles that come with an entire race of bloodlusty arrogant assholes, statistically speaking.

"On the bright side, most demon settlements are already well-defended in themselves by both at least some fortification and their inhabitants," Rose argues. You kind of enjoy just having the both of them reason this stuff out between each other- the main reason you need both of them in their respective positions in this dimension, really. "If they were forewarned, they would at the very least prove hard to defeat, if not beating back any invaders entirely."

"Which runs the risk of alarming the vermin crawling under our feet," your sister objects. "We have no idea how they're gathering information exactly, so a general warning might just trigger the attack early and let them still hit our population unprepared."

"I feel we're ignoring one glaring practical issue here," you speak up yourself. "We know they're underground, which indicates they are capable of digging to at least some extent and they've had an unknown amount of time to prepare. How likely is it they could just cave in the ground under whatever targets they can't crack?"

Both young women making up your war council are quiet for a moment. Then, Rose, the pads of her fingers drumming on her desk, opens her mouth. "Possible, but all it would really do would be destroying infrastructure and maybe causing a few deaths if they're lucky. Demons are made for war and a large enough underground space to be dangerous like this would be nigh impossible to dig undetected and hardly remain such even if it wasn't."

"Still an issue if they can just destroy the foundations of buildings like this, but pretty unlikely unless they have a lot more mining proficiency, magic and technology than we should expect for now," Sarah adds her own analysis. "Maybe something to watch out for in some areas' soil texture, but we can generally explain smaller tunnels dug out to allow them to infiltrate unseen until they go on the offensive."

"And that just brings us back to the beginning of this discussion," you conclude. "If they can do just that all over the nation, every single place any noticeable number of demons is living, how do we minimize the damage they can do while we work on a 'solution' and is it worth the risk of alarming them if we act openly?"

In the end, after a good bit of discussion and weighing every associated risk any of you can think of, the three of you settle on a moderate response to the threat you know is out, or rather down, there.

Using your authority as the demon lord, you shall let it be known that your battle with a tarrasque that descended from the mountains has stirred up some of the monsters living further up there, some of which are capable of flight. Hence you are calling for demonkind to prepare for the possibility of more dangerous monsters appearing all over the southern side of Thule.

In other words, 'yo guys, there be monsters, better buckle up'.

It's not much, but it lets you alarm the nation while keeping the true reason for this call to fortification hidden.

Incidentally, however, you are making having a few other arrangements to prepare for the inevitable; in order to enable an eventual decapitation strike, you shall begin to stockpile the bodies of large monsters and the like in addition to your bloodslimes' continuous output of biomatter.

The exact logistics are still a bit up in the air, but you'll need some way to access your enemies first and foremost. Having a giant burrowing undead on hand for that purpose can only be helpful going forward, so first you'll be gathering materials to use for it.

It has to be said that it is a small miracle, at times, how you aren't just stuck inside one of the castle's rooms or another all day every day on account of the young women whiling away their time and actively willing to have sex at any given time of the day located therein.

Hey, at least you do try to satisfy everyone involved and no more. Unending vampire stamina would let you just devolve into a neverending orgy if you didn't actually know your limits- before, all you needed to do was watch out for when you started to lose your breath, have difficulty walking or keeping your field of vision where you wanted it, but nowadays knowing when to stop is all on yourself.

It is, surprisingly, not all that bad. I just opens you up to being persuaded to stay in bed for half a day sometimes when your partners really do want to, which is somewhat of a recipe for disaster when three of those partners are also vampires that can just keep on going forever.

Cue you being held down by three pairs of soft hands, Sarah, Emily and Okita all having come to the conclusion that you shouldn't be allowed to get up yet. Rose was there a while ago, but she eventually fled when it became clear exactly what kind of time this whole affair would eat up.

Leaving you behind to suffer at the mercy of your wives, as you like to think of them in secret, with a little wink while looking back as she closed the door to your bedroom. The traitor.

So there you are, beset on all sides by three beautiful, beautiful young women, Emily on your right and grinning down at you, warm hair and pale skin in contrast to one another on her slim, but curvy body, Okita on your left looking for all the world like the very picture of quiet smugness and pride (even though you know you're the only one that can read her face) as she keeps a hold of your shoulder and lets her mighty mammaries breathe freely while Sarah, to nobody's surprise, is sitting on your chest, giving you her trademark vulpine smirk.

"Gabe, it has come to our attention that you've been way too busy everywhere else and haven't been paying attention to us in comparison."

"In my defense, there was a lot to do," you assert from your position of being smothered by the women you love. Some of them, anyway. "But if I've been neglecting anyo-"

Your sister silences you with a kiss.

"That's why we're doing this, so you don't have to apologize," Emily explains the tenuous logic behind this intervention(?). "No need to thank us, you can make it up to us another way."

"Mhm," Okita agrees, too, one hand darting off to fondle your diamond-hard prick with deceptively soft and warm fingers. "One currency accepted only."

Honestly, if that's what they want none of these three needed to go out of their way to think up some weird script. Humming your assent into Sarah's mouth, her hot tongue wrestling for dominance with yours, you reach out your arms to get right toward coping a feel from the two at your sides.

It's not like you'd have ever said no to a threesome with these gorgeous beauties, even if you didn't love each of them in some way. Though a couple hours of just cuddling in bed would be fine with you, too, it doesn't always have to be about sex.

Not that Sarah agrees, your beautiful blonde sweetheart coming up from your makeout to let her already very much wet pussy rub against your length. "And nobody gets to say no."

You just smile at her.

A few minutes of making out and becoming a pile of writhing flesh with everyone in the room later, you end up having a particularly... interesting conversation with Sarah.

"So you know how I was technically the one summoned to this world?" She asks while squeezing your cock between her firm, but soft thighs, standing on her toes to let her do so without too much inconvenience on your part.

"I remember, yes," you say, curious where she's going with this.

"So as a hero, I am technically a religious figure. So if we decided to have a private wedding, for example, I could officiate it!"

"... I'm not sure that's how it works." No, really, you hate to be the guy saying it, but...

"Well I think it's close enough. Show of hands, who agrees with me?"

Emily raises a hand, obviously thinking this is a great joke, but Okita is taking a little longer, it seems. "As being summoned by a rival religion, is there a conflict of interest if I agree?"

"No, not at all," Sarah says. Okita nods and also raises a hand in response.

Turning back towards you, your sister gives you a winning smile, rubbing her naked body against you. "See? You're outvoted."

"I don't recall ever having made this kingdom nor our gang a democracy," you remark drily, stroking her side. What? Not your fault she's so fun to touch.

"Too bad, I hereby declare a revolution in this bedroom only. We have captured you and, as punishment for your wanton acts of tyranny, you shall be sentenced to marriage for unlife."

"The horror." And with that you give your unruly sister another kiss.

It would seem the preparations for marriage are rather quick and easy to take care of in this new religion Sarah is preaching, with Emily and Okita just sitting down on your bed while she as the bride and yourself, the groom, stand before them.

Dramatically clearing her throat, your sister looks up at you, both of your hands taken into hers. "We have gathered here today, yadda yadda yadda, the details aren't important," she opens up. "All that matters is this, anyway. Do you, Gabriel Livsey, want to marry Sarah Livsey? To cherish her always and forever?"

"I do," you answer without a second thought. "I love my impish little sister and every silly little thing she does, and I'll gladly spend eternity with her."

Caught off guard by your heartfelt declaration of love, Sarah freezes for a moment. Emily has to clear her throat for her to restart, though you certainly don't mind holding her hands for a little while longer as the two of you stand opposite each other completely naked.

"Th-then I hereby proclaim us husband and wife, brother and sister, to go forth and be fruitful forevermore," she finishes. "You may now kiss your bride."

Watching her bemusedly as she puckers her lips, you don't waste any time leaning down and joining yours to hers in a passionate kiss, embracing her delicate body all the while. And if you squeeze her butt a little, that's between you, her and the clapping audience of two.

You don't keep it up for long, though, and once you let up, your sister immediately sinks down to her knees, taking your cock in hand, hard as it has been this entire time, and looks up at you adoringly. "And now for the other two kisses," she proclaims, proceeding to plant her soft lips onto the head of your dick next.

And she wasn't kidding- she wastes no time making out with your manhood, shooting you happy looks every now and then as she slathers it with saliva by licking all along your length. However, as soon as she's satisfied her urge to do so, she stops, instead stretching out both hands for you.

"The third kiss is still left," she sweetly says, a moment of thought having you gather her up in your arms just in case- Sarah certainly seems to agree, arranging herself into a princess carry with some minimal work. "To the bed?"

Within moments you're there, Emily and Okita making space for you to lower your bride onto its soft surface. "Where does the third kiss go?" You ask her, voice low and just growly enough to be heard.

It's your bedroom tone, women love it for some reason.

"Down here," your sister breathlessly moans, pointing at her sweet pink pussy right where she's spreading her legs for you. "All the way inside."

You lower yourself into position, throbbing erection having been bobbing in the air for long enough. With both arms planted next to your Sarah to keep yourself in place, you push into her, penetrating your sister and violating that taboo you just love to keep screwing over and over again to the point you hardly notice it anymore anyway.

She gasps, her love tunnel accepting you inside after all the times you've made sweet, sweet love already, her tight inner walls constricting around your hard rod with all their strength.

"Just a little bit more," you breathe gently, slowly pushing deeper and deeper inside of your Sarah. "And you'll be mine. Forever."

"Yes," she grunts cutely, an art you believe to be impossible for anyone not female and extremely cute in the first place. "Make me your woman again! I want to be yours!"

The love is heavy in her eyes, and by the time you're balls deep and gently pressing against her womb, where you know your child to be growing up healthy (there's a small baby bump i her stomach, if you watch carefully, too), both of you are so lost to your passions it takes no more than a minute or two of heavy, slow lovemaking for you to flood your cute little wife sister with your seed, sealing the agreement as she screams out her own peak timed to yours.

It takes a few more minutes of gently stroking her hair as she looks like she might cry on you before either of you can get back to paying attention to your surroundings again, however. "Uh, hey, we still doing the other two rounds or do you need a bit longer?"

Sarah waves off Emily's vaguely concerned word. "Nah, nah, 's all good. Just, get ready and I'll marry you to my Big Gabey, too."

"Oh, are we at shared nicknames already? Because I've got a lot of those to call you," you jokingly tease your little Sarah, receiving a boop on the nose in response.

However, one person among you has been thinking, it seem, as Okita is tilting her head off to the side where she's waiting. "Something is missing."

Deciphering her words, you give her a quizzical look as you slowly pull yourself out of Sarah. "Something to add to the 'ceremony'?"

"Mhm," she nods. "White dresses."

"Huh. Think we can have the servants fetch something?" You ask everyone, only for Okita to pat the bed where she's sitting to keep your attetion.

"No. White dresses. Can make them ourself."

That one takes you a moment to work through, to the point Emily is getting up and pointing at the big-breasted heroine before you do. "Genius! Hey Gabriel, you don't run out of cum, so we can just cover ourselves in white before we do this!"

"... This is going to be such a mess, I hope you know." However, you don't exactly object.

Turns out that yes, you actually can produce enough sperm to cover a girl, it just takes a lot of time. And work, though you have a couple of eager helpers for that.

After your little stint as a one-man bukkake show, leaving all three of the girls positively reeking of yourself for however long they're taking before they go wash off, you first took a moment to re-order the newly created actual trio of wedding dresses that materialized inside of your inner world's treasure chambers to better fit their surroundings, then went off to go ahead and do a little more potion brewing- beyond being potentially useful, you do kind of wonder just how many different effects you'll be able to create with enough persistence and creativity.

For one, the potions that let their drinker experience a short trip outside of their body are... honestly pretty out there, you'd like to note. Speaking of, you did make a batch of those in particular, keeping one for yourself just in case and sending the rest off to be handed out at Rose's discretion- it might come in handy for any of her spies out there, for example.

Either way, that's her business now. You, on the other hand, have a few ideas on possible instruments to be added to your current setup- what you have works alright, but with a device that lets you determine possible ways you could take a given ingredient without all the experimentation beforehand would be incredibly useful, not to mention if you had a way to filter out potion batches likely to fail during production, you could in turn increase productivity...

Your design for your 'secret weapon', as it could be called if one were so inclined, is fairly simple, all told; rough, thick skin with rows of hardened spines going all along a long, worm- or snake-like body, with a deceptively small mouth on one end and a tapered other end opposite from it.

Of course you also do go out of your way to include a couple of extras. For one, the thing's insides are made mostly out of sheer muscle you transmute from what you have available, long thick slabs the thickness of several people added up strung together and overlapping in a structure that should, hopefully, allow this thing to dig through even hard ground by essentially turning itself into an oversized drill.

Yes, you may or may not be just turning everything into a drill due to your anticipation for a new and upgraded Last Embrace, it's still going to work just fine and that's all that counts.

Naturally, the 'head' of this enormous undead drill will have to be capable of actually making headway against even solid hard rock, though you end up going with a bit of a multifunctional solution in this regard.

Four large, curved spikes of bone are what you end up adding to the creature's head, with a little mechanism to let it shift them between two states; when digging, they're set inside of the worm, sharp tips kept from snagging on anything in the long groves added for this purpose, while the 'bases' protrude and should let it carve away at whatever needs some carving into using its raw strength and whatever magical additions you ultimately add t it- you already have several ideas, but are keeping your options open for now.

Meanwhile, the spikes also have another purpose. Beyond letting the monstrosity look even larger than it already is, anyway. When shifted into their second state, they shall allow it to ram its head into anything it wants to, wedging them into things and, potentially, creating wider openings... such as to allow more people to follow after it, for example.

Or just for the purposes of fighting, and to force prey into its mouth when used correctly... There's a bunch of applications, really. You just don't particularly care about most of them.

Unfortunately, you don't exactly possess enough of the raw materials required to finalize your creation- it's just too many tons of mass you need to really do the design justice. Still, you do what you can, and nobody can say that your worm's head isn't impressive by the time you stop working for the day.

Some of your prisoners seem to be wearing out, for lack of a better term- their psyches a bit worn out, a bit less capable of stringing together coherent thoughts. Not that this stopped you from your regular application of magic to first force a bunch of them into a wild rage and then shave off a few bits of their souls, but that's just how things are done at your castle.

It is fascinating to see the interplay of changes made to a person's mind and accumulating damage done to their soul over time, bit by bit. It almost makes you want to try to just... keep on casting at one of the prisoners. To see what happens, how the painful process keeps on stretching out, chopping up and mutilating their deepest self more and more until something happens.

You suspect the subject would die, of course, but how long would that take? It didn't take you long to determine a roughly 'safe' interval to let them rest between extractions, but how hard would you need to step over the threshold to see something... interesting?

And if they die, how would this happen? Would they simply... lie down, stop breathing and cease functioning? Would they become undone, revert into some animalistic frenzy beforehand? Would extracting their soul bit by bit grant you any special or interesting fragments, or would they be unable to bring forth anything beyond the most base, simplistic and unclouded pieces you tend to use for general purposes and to 'fill' with the stain of other fragments?

Questions upon questions. But no answers quite yet- you're just playing with the thought.

For now.

In other news, you've gone ahead and updated your local alchemy workshop, adding a few measuring devices that should let you monitor things you do not quite understand but are sure of the importance of nevertheless, not to mention the time you spent flirting with an emotionless Okita as you worked on practicing your use of demonic essences in practical application.

Fun fact, you've managed to get imbuing weapons down to a sort of science, and can more or less reliably use imp essence to make them more effective in combat in some way. Incidentally, you also do plan on doing something at least minimally special for a certain commander of your forces, lonely and probably bored as he is over at the Border Fortress playing garrison commander at the moment.

Just as soon as you've managed to extricate yourself from Sarah's newest plot to jump your pants all night...

Actually categorizing demons- that is, proper hell demons, rather than the watered down mortals someone decided to call the same thing- is an exercise in futility, as you understand it; hell, and the hordes of its inhabitants dwelling within it, are simply too infinite to make any attempt at doing so sensible.

You have no doubt someone, somewhere, is probably trying to do it anyway. An infinite multiverse, if you go by your own experiences, means that it's pretty much guaranteed at least one nutcase out there went and made a serious effort, wasted as it may be.

But that doesn't really matter to you, because you actually do have a rough understanding of a couple of broad 'types', a general archetype of appearance, personality and even most likely action that literal legions of weaker demons seem to fit perfectly more often than not. Heck, that one demon you bargained with through your lawyer, Bhar'resh Ignos Stratus, and even your lawyer herself, they all fit into broad categories you can work with.

You do not know all categories there are, of course. There are likely new ones being made and pushed into nonexistence somehow as you think about this, not to mention strong and nigh unique ones probably exist. But you do have a good few that are unlikely to cease existing anytime soon and that fit the bill of what you want.

So, if imps are the kinds of demons too weak and unimportant to merit being categorized and arch-imps those among them notably stronger or better in some way than the dross but still not really worth the bother, Corrupted are a single, small step above them. All roughly humanoid in build, though there are some minor exceptions, they are distinguished by their large frames, grotesque mutations, relatively considerable physical strength and toughness and a predilection for chains, hooks, metal spikes and all kinds of torture implements to be used as weapons and clothing both, happily applying them to themselves.

Oh, and a burning, sadistic, unending hatred for anything and everything, even each other if no other targets to torture are in sight.

Honestly, it's a minor miracle most of them even bother to wear clothes at all. You learned all of this, of course, from a mix of several notes in the big book of demon names your lawyer gave you as a signing bonus and your inherent knowledge of demons you became aware of only after you unlocked the ability to generally summon a given type of them.

Long story short, you decided to try summoning one and using its essence to create a nice weapon for the one demon you actually know by name among what passes for your military. Hence you asking Okita to stay around a little while you go to work and summon one.

Of course you were expecting a raging berserker to appear, perhaps even with the scent of burning and melting skin spreading as the demon comes through, each of its breaths announced with a rough grunt as a malevolent pair of eyes seeks you out, the face they're set in not so much a face as a mass of twisted skin with holes in it for both them and a wide, twisted mouth with oversized, sharp teeth lining it all the way around the creature's head.

Oh, and it really does a lot of grunting, as it has three additional heads growing out of the main one, each leering at you separately. Overall, an incredibly brutish and violent monster, it looks like- perfect for your purposes.

"Just to be sure, but are you actually capable of understanding me?" You ask into the relative silence of its arrival.

"Hrrg, hrrg, hrrg," it breathes. Not much of a response there. "Hrrrraaaaarrggh!"

With the clinking of its chains, the Corrupted throws itself at you, undeterred by the invisible threshold keeping it in place. Wild swings of the wicked hooks in its grasp, too, are simply bouncing off as it tackles against it, but the ritual circle you drew- extra thick with two added layers- holds.

For the moment. You'd imagine with sufficient time and effort, this thing might actually break through; luckily, that isn't what you called it for.

"As expected, then," you conclude. Ah well, time to get a move on. "You ready to step in if things get out of hand?"

Okita, having quietly stood in the corner and observing the happenings inside the room so far, tilts her head. "It's a little cute."

... You shall take that as confirmation that she is, in fact, ready to bail your ass out in case you underestimated this thing.

"Alright, here we go." Stepping closer, and causing the convulsive attempts to get at and probably do horrible things to you to intensify, you act with all the speed and force you can muster, slamming a clawed hand into the Corrupted's chest and breaking the protection of the circle, now that you've stepped over its boundaries yourself.

Your opponent, not at all bothered by the gaping hole you just tore in it, screams in hateful exultation, immediately proceeding to try and get its hooks into you.

A few dodges and bits of determined brutality later, you're looking at a de-limbed, partially de-headed Corrupted, many of its remaining bones broken and the smoldering glare still intact. It was tough, but not insanely so, and far too slow to keep up with you despite its great physical power.

It's basically a cheap horror flick monster, honestly. If you had a couple of teenagers out in some cabin in the woods or a summer camp or something, it would be an invulnerable, all-powerful creeping brute, maybe with a chainsaw or something to complete the look. Against you, though... Yeah, sorry bud, but this Gabriel here is far further up the ladder of horror monsters.

And monsters in general.

Still, demonstrating your superiority isn't the point of this exercise. Judging it to have been sufficiently weakened, you begin the process of turning it into its own essence, a much more useful (to you) form.

It does involve some additional mumbling over ritual circles once you've dragged the thing into one, but now that you have (physically) subjugated it, it should be relatively easy to do the rest.

And after just a couple minutes of work, you have a round, yet edgy and prickly 'ball' of energy in your hands. Essences tend to vary wildly in how exactly they look, but you don't really let that concern yourself overmuch- what counts is what you do with them.

So you get right to work, applying the parts of the Corrupted you prefer to have and suppressing the ones that would either be counterproductive or else just not fit your vision.

"Mm, become a cute sword." And if this thing was capable of understanding speech, it would be shitting its pants at being told what to do by Okita and hurrying to do it, but as it you suppose you shall be taking care of that, too.

When the bone cart thing arrived the next day, it took a little while before anyone noticed something was out of the ordinary. The soldiers, as the actual occupation of being in the army was called as opposed to just doing whatever, as demons often did, didn't particularly watch the insides of the fortress- men on watch for anything unusual approaching the walls to both sides and even at the secret doors they knew about, sure, but it wasn't like they were going to bother the freakin' demon lord as he came and went.

No matter how frequently, sometimes.

That said, eventually a certain telepathic message was sent to make sure a certain object had arrived, and so Rakul, the commander of the Border Garrison and veteran of the battles against the heroes, got up off his arse and went to take a look.

Once he bit the ear of one of the muscled demon women that took to sharing his quarters sometimes. She was just into it, what could he do?

So he came down to see the thing, and what a thing it was. Opening up, the creepy bone thing revealed to him the 'package' he was supposed to receive- a weapon made of solid darksteel, except entirely, pitch black, seeming to drink up the light around it. Lined with rough, but regular and wickedly sharp teeth on one side, extremely sharp on the other, lying on soft red velvet awakening the impression of it coming floating on a sea of arterial blood.

One thing Rakul had to give his boss, he knew how to do presentation.

Taking the sword, hilt wrapped in leather that felt like it might just come to life, he gave it a test swing toward the nearest wall, to see how it would fare against stone- a common practice among demons to ascertain their weapons wouldn't break in the middle of combat.

It cut right through the Border Fortress' solid stone like butter, only seeming to remember the material was there after a moment. Tearing it out again sent bits of gravel flying as the sawblade side of the weapon ripped everything in the way to pieces, relative hardness be damned.

This was one fucking fine sword. Rakul could hardly await using it on whatever pissed him off next- and made sure to send the boss his regards, to which the carriage drove backward right back to where it came from.

Still creepy as fuck.

Today, it would seem your inner world is being particularly giving in terms of time, such that you had ample enough opportunity to finish tinkering with a somewhat more specialized speed-increasing potion somewhat mimicking the effects of a certain Protectorate hero from back home, if you aren't mistaken; Velocity is, after all, not known for using his superspeed to pummel evildoers into submission, most likely for a reason.

You have no idea about the exact mechanics on either side of this, but it is amusing that two such wholly different ways to achieve a similar outcome would have the exact same limitations.

You know, aside from the fact that your potions are strictly worse than his power simply on account of being temporary and stuff, and also probably still slower. But hey, it's superspeed in a bottle, who doesn't need some of it in their lives?

... Oh dammit, you're already starting to come up with peppy ad slogans. Better distract yourself.

And what could be more distracting, then, than paying two very special places inside your fucked up little microcosm of an inner world a visit? You mean, of course, the little 'factory' the Dollmaker is working out of and the Pits far underneath it housing his 'brother'.

Of course getting a quick tour of how current projects are going means seeing them in person, and it would seem that the Dollmaker, at least, has delivered, showing you around in his usual grandfatherly manner and letting you know about the progress made over the past, well, a little over two weeks.

His subjects, or at least the ones he himself only is working on, as both him and the Pitlord seem to have agreed to leave the cooperative work they're supposed to be doing for later, letting the private little cold war between them brood a little while longer, once were religious fanatics committing honestly quite a few atrocities, but for all that he's only gotten around to working on a first batch of around a dozen or so, it would seem that won't be a problem anymore any time soon.

"Yeh, hehe, not much use ta be had fer dem numbskulls, so I removed most a' thems personalities," the wizened old guy explains, gesturing for one of the rooms inside the nondescript building he calls his home. Inside, you glimpse a man with his skull's upper half removed, letting his off-pink and grey-white brain matter see the light of day.

Two long metal sticks are poking into it, the paralyzed former member of the Fraternity of the Raven or whatever it was again (you can't even be bothered to remember) twitching in place as he sits on what looks suspiciously like an electric chair.

"Now ovah here, here's de real magic going on, if yah'll escuse mah French." The next place you're shown to, this time in depth, is full of industrial equipment of one sort or another, though you can't help but note that for all this looks a lot like a factory, it really shows how it produces cyborgs in particular.

As exemplified by one of the subjects being taken apart as you watch, his limbs removed with mechanical precision only to be replaced with freshly machined prostheses.

"Now, ah know what ye be thinkin'; why take 'em off an' replace 'em wholesale? Well, yah ain't, ye already know the score, eh?" As the toothlessly grinning Dollmaker says, you've glimpsed a thing or two about how this whole process works just by watching.

"You're taking off their limbs, improving them and putting them back on with the additions," you nod, your eyes following the path the organic bits have taken. "So what's so different about these new limbs and what else do you do?"

Because you don't believe for a single second that that's all the old man is doing here.

"Hehe, ye'll see, ye'll see, Ah got one in testing already." And like that, you're off to the next part of this show.

Which, as it happens, leads you to what looks a lot like an empty arena, overlooking the round room from above. Inside, you see a motionless figure, much like the one guy you saw being dismembered and re-membered earlier, just that this one looks a little taller and wider under the black cloak he's wearing.

"Initiatin' test one, go."

All of a sudden, the obvious cyborg extends a sword from underneath his clothes, his arm similarly extending as he grabs and swings it in a quick, clean movement. Running through a few moves, it quickly becomes apparent how stretching limbs and all joints being ball joints allows for acrobatic maneuvers that would be impossible for a normal human to execute, at a pace far outstripping what one could keep up with as well.

"'Course this wouldn't be all, 's obvious."

Next, the test subject begins to unload a few more 'weapon systems'; firing slugs from his feet and elbows, something you distinctly recognize as a beam of ionized matter from his chest and a laser from his mouth, unhinging his 'stomach' to reveal a gatling cannon held with both arms firing everything above as well as short-lived bursts of plasma in quick succession, then transforming his whole body into one big cannon discharging a blinding light that all but melts one of the test chamber's walls.

Considering that thing just ignored ionized matter, which by all rights should be having it disintegrate on the spot, is saying something. You aren't sure exactly what, but it's... something.

"An' this is what Ah'm havin' these boyos doin', pretty much," the cyborg soul's creator finishes up. "Dere's still some concerns 'bout the big cannon just destroyin' 'em at the highest settin', but for now jus' using it at lower power works jus' fine."

A most enlightening demonstration, really. And though it will take a lot of time, having fifty of these things on call just in case you lose or break some shall be most useful.

For you, that is. Not for the people you'll be sending them after.

And as for the Pit Lord, well...

"Oh yes, would you like to see my... progress?"

Behind him, the entire tunnel is filled with squirming flesh, silently screaming faces and elongated arms with several additional joints, not unlike the Warden's own, sprouting from it.

"I'm afraid the first batch is still a little... temperamental, but that's just how they're supposed to come out, no? Heheheheheh..."

More frantic scratching in the background, the creature the Pitlord turned his victims into randomly lashing out in all directions it can.

You'll just... leave it at this, for now.

Creating a few of your recently devised potions before you get going once again, you find you're making some great use of your also recently upgraded laboratory, brewing up a batch of potions literally twice as big as the ones you've worked with before, showing off just how useful a few of the additions you've made to your standard alchemy toolset are.

Incidentally, you've already got a few uses for your potions acutely in mind, for once, as opposed to just making them for general reasons such as the possible use they might be at some point in the future. Fun fact, your potions do not care who or what you feed them exactly so long as the recipient fits a few key criteria.

Meaning you can actually use them to dope up your undead, you just need to be a little creative about where you pour the stuff. Though on a related note, you've finally found a constructive use for the literal tons of grapes you have stored in a few of the castle's storage rooms- any kind of fruit or similar would have done for your current, admittedly basic, recipe, but seeing as you need to get rid of this stuff somehow...

And yes, your theories bear fruit, and so you soon sit inside a bone carriage whose speed feels like it might have been increased exponentially, watching the landscape outside of your vehicle go by in a flash.

These superspeed potions? They work off of the drinker's base speed. Your bone carriage is very fast. You can just pour the potion into the sink you installed and boom, there you go.

Literally, you're easily cutting travel time between the capital and the Border Fortress in half. You could be going faster yet still, but you're trying to be conservative with the usage of what you have realized might just be your most useful potion yet.

Now you just have to avoid just feeling the speed at which you're moving and letting what passes for an undead adrenaline high control you.

Once you've arrived at the northernmost bastion of demon forces loyal to you, leaving behind your carriage with the little package for Rakul, their commander, you get right to your next step in turn- it's a lovely day, if a bit cold outside as winter is approaching and the aftereffects of your little tantrum directed at the enemy army you ground down to nothing before your fortress are still echoing, but still it's the perfect weather for a little massacre or two.

You briefly consider how even you yourself would have told you you're being wasteful with just massacring entire communities to harvest soul fragments from their sudden and violent ends in the past, but quickly shrug it off. In the end, you still would've been all for killing the same people, just intent on eating them yourself rather than using them in this manner- the end result is, arguably, more or less the same anyway.

So then, shadowing right past your own people (always a good idea to keep your own movements a secret from everyone you do not fully trust), you silently determine what area you should empty out on human life next. After all, the more of them you murder, the less those elves can murder whenever they get off their asses and ascend to the surface.

It's two birds with one stone. Getting to harvest what you need and cockblocking the elves.

As a general rule of thumb, the further you get toward the south, and thus closer toward the border, the less 'civilian' settlements you're going to see in the human kingdom; a natural result of the endless war raging since pretty much forever, really.

That doesn't mean you won't ever see more or less normal cities, just that most cities are going to be part of the military complex the human kingdom is sustaining in one way or another. Whether it's big metalwork towns or cities like Brittlehelm, logistically important locations that just kind of developed from there or whatever else is just convenient to have locally in addition to elsewhere.

Logistics are and remain one of the most important and integral aspects to actually keeping a war running, and generations upon generations of probably divinely inspired human leaders understood this.

So if you want to see places that contain more civilians than at least technically militarily employed people or that put a greater emphasis on culture and non-directly military-related industry, you need to wander further up north. Which, as it turns out, isn't even all that important for your current goals- food is important everywhere and having large amounts of it freshly produced is a boon to pretty much any region people are supposed to be living in.

In the human kingdom, most of this is taken care of by lots of farming communities or villages that are a bit further out and away from the larger urban centers you usually concern yourself with. Just because they kind of do need a rather large amount of farmland to begin with if nothing else.

So they're reasonably isolated by location, filled with people (though far less than a comparable city's population density, of course) and likely mostly undefended beyond a few militias or a small garrison. Perfect, in other words, for what you're intending, and you have been missing out on running roughshod all over the human countryside for a while now.

Finding out where exactly to go to doesn't take you particularly long thanks to your powers (telepathy in particular) and sources, and so you're soon looking at a village with maybe a hundred inhabitants at most, all nicely contained to a few areas and either out working the fields or at home at this time.

Only question now is how you'll go and harvest these suckers.

The plan, such as it is, is fairly simple. You're going in and brutally butchering the people living here with your bare hands. Considering your physical capabilities by this point, doing so is very much within your means, and hopefully the more personal factor will produce the results you are after.

And so you go. The whole affair is almost disappointingly simple; going after the ones working the fields first, you swiftly approach them one by one in the middle of their duties, attracting attention to yourself only when you're closer and promptly ignoring their questions and calls in favor of getting out your claws and thoroughly tearing them apart limb from limb.

In some cases, anyway. A few you also beat to death with their own torn-off arms, a few you go ahead and stake with their own repurposed ribs, some you simply beat to death the old-fashioned way, abusing your physical superiority. It seems like such a long time ago when you never would've done this kind of thing, always striking from stealth where possible and merely strong enough to overwhelm a single enemy at a time, rather than just casually strolling up and smashing someone's head in so hard it ends up inside their chest.

Once you're done with the outskirts, your enhanced senses capable of scanning for the blood of the living and the dead both confirming as much, you get right towards the rest of the village- there's a local baker, a scant few craftsmen and the like working from within to ensure the village's self-sufficiency and, of course, the families of the farmworkers that aren't currently out in the fields.

Those, too, you murder in increasingly inventive ways, though you don't take too much time for it- while forcing a mother to eat her own children alive through dominating her mind might be amusing, you don't want to waste too much effort for this when you can just as well beat her to death using them as easily breakable living clubs, after all.

Having claws that let you easily rend flesh and bone also makes this whole process go a lot easier. It's almost meditative, you quietly reflect to yourself as you slowly crush a babbling man's skull under your foot, to do this kind of thing. Yet another addition to your list of hobbies, you suppose- you haven't been painting nearly enough this visit to Thule, that has to be where the brutality is coming from.

Ah well.

Anyway, tearing down a church to the Goddess of Light around the ears of a couple of desperately praying believers that have been hoping to somehow escape you this way, you make a last round of the area, making sure you didn't miss anyone that might've been out toward the forest or something while you were busy. And lo and behold, you get to butcher a lumberjack and a hunter alive as the two are staring at their massacred families with empty eyes, a quick decapitation strike all it takes to release their souls and have them leave behind the little bits and bobs that coagulate into a fragment in short order.

A bit of mildly rousing exercise was just what you really needed, wasn't it? Next off, time to collect your reward for a moment, then you'll need to look into using what you have to get what you need for your further plans.

Good work all around, you'd say. And short work you made of all these families, but hey, it's just the course of what passes for nature with you in the picture.

Your continued work on your special little surprise for whatever subterranean enemies you might face is continuing by the time you have returned back to the castle, with some of the expected logistical problems, of course.

For one, size. The creature you're assembling out of various pieces of meat, not few of which are monster bodies your loyal subjects have gathered after you had it made known you require a bunch of them for something, is simply too large to fit into any of the underground chambers available as is.

On a related note, hurray for the weird form of subservience a great many demons show toward the demon lord. It's still strange to you how they just... obey you unconditionally, or at least enough of them do at any one time to suffice for your purposes. A cultural quirk of their hierarchy built on personal power, but an incredibly useful one when it comes down to it.

You didn't even have to pay anyone anything, they just... went out, hunted a bunch of monsters, large and small, then dragged their corpses to the castle or one of several gathering points near the city where they were then delivered to you.

Though Rose still had a few spontaneous barbecues organized with some of the meat and spice sponsored by your stores. Whatever works best, you suppose.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, you solved the problem by animating your creation ahead of time to have it begin using its powers, chosen by you upon doing so, to help simply dig out a larger underground area.

Turns out you're actually also adding to the royal castle's architecture at some point during your reign, after all. You're under the impression that's somewhat of a tradition among demon lords that have been securing their power for some time.

Still, it's a lot of work, actually, to create a giant sandworm thingy meant to drill through solid rock and go right on to do the same to any enemies you have available in the area. Most of the design is already taken care of, too, you're really just doing the manual work now.

Not for the first time you consider how useful it would be to have a vampire or two around that could help you in shaping the biomatter you're using here. They'd need to have the same branch of magic you're using here, of course, which isn't the case for pretty much everyone right now, so it's really more of a pipe dream right now.

Incidentally, you're also making another round of the dungeons. The old prisoners you've been using all this time have mostly gone quiet, former soldiers oftentimes just feeling too drained to get up to much these days and the ones that are holding up better are still far too fearful of your presence to risk drawing attention to themselves, memories of what you do to them fresh in everyone's minds.

Not that this stop you from extracting a few bits and pieces from them all anyway.

Finally, your most useful way to counterattack (potentially preemptively) is ready. A massive, magically empowered worm capable of tunneling through earth like it's swimming through water with a thickness of around ten meters along most of its body and leaving behind a certain lingering cold every time it moves, most likely thanks to the soul fragments you fed into it.

A few quick tests with more prisoners show that said cold is actually actively hostile toward living beings, turning into frost that settles on skin and causes frostbite within seconds. Also, lots of pain, it seems.

Good times. You're pretty sure this thing should be classified as a war crime in and of itself, though you're once again stopped from calling it one by the fact that most legislature on the matter you're aware of, at least, isn't really made for the many possibilities for horrible, horrible things nonstandard abilities open up in this direction.

You looked it up. Even with the existence of parahumans, legislature is horribly outdated back in your home dimension; there's a general lack of laws properly adjusted for the presence of powered individuals, really; sure, there's the things that had to be hastily instated at some point, like the legal groundwork to piss all over the Constitution and send people into a prison they can't appeal out of, kicking powers out of the civilian market with NEPEA-5 and all that, but although it's not allowed to be part of the military as a parahuman, there's nothing technically more wrong about using a parahuman power to commit a wide range of horrible, horrible crimes against humanity in the eyes of the law as compared to using any other power.

Sure, you're still going to be birdcaged if you're found out, but melting people's bones inside their bodies isn't inherently any worse than using a power on them to heal them. It's all classified as 'assault with a parahuman power'.

But regardless of the explanations Nora gave you when you had a chat about this, you have what you wanted. That's all that really counts in the end.

Next up, your other project, and the one you've been working on for a while now. Last Embrace Mark II, the same principle but a lot more polished execution this time around with magical metamaterials and added engineering, not to mention a few materials you didn't have access to back when you made the first iteration... Such as the essence you've been keeping up your sleeve just for this purpose, or your newly added capability to add soul fragments to items.

And, you can't repeat this enough, the shiny new metals you're making this thing out of. On deeper consideration, you're probably the kind of person to be fascinated by gemstones and gold and silver and pearl and whatever else there is in term of things people decided to judge as valuable because it's pretty.

Heck, you also do like to collect beautiful women, so it all lines up. Sure, not all of them are necessarily beautiful whee you first pick them up, but a bit of polishing and thralling usually takes care of that- much easier to fix that up than to have to work on their character, in your experience.

Sarah is perfect in all respects on an innate level, of course.

So then, your soul fragments are always on the ready, and two of the largest, most 'complete' chunks you have been capable of assembling to date- with some doubt as to there being any higher concentration of soul matter, considering what you have is about as dense as a real soul would be- and the essence you bargained for with the use of that one true evil soul has been inside your shadow all along, swirling black and green patterns manifesting on the round object.

That's most of the ingredients, but you aren't done quite yet. Concentrating on your aura, you draw out a couple of your minions, giving each of them a little extra juice just to make sure they have enough for what's to come. Four figures, coming into being one after the other, soon stand in your improvised little workshop.

Hack, the hyperactive technology-focused one, two of the short, dwarf-like twin bodies made for the same controlling one inside your inner world, but with different specializations to work with each other and, lastly, the metalwork minion you also haven't used ever since Remnant.

"Alright, time to get to work," Smitten announces, stretching her arms and taking a deep breath. "Not every day you get to create a masterpiece."

"Not like we have much ta do lately anyway," Hammerhead grumbles, checking over her tools. Next to her, Techhead shrugs.

"Eh, don't always have to be in a rush. If there's no work to do, you rest, and if there is you work. Simple as that."

"Speaking of, Last Embrace," you announce, bringing everyone's eyes to your workbench. Except Hack's, but she's kind of busy doing a handstand. "Smitten, you're making sure the metal is the best it can be and more, if you need more aura just say the word. Hammerhead, Techhead, you take care of assembly and additions as planned, while I add magical engineering and all the less physical components. Hack."

"Mhmhm?" She asks from over by the door where she's trying to climb by inching upward with her feet on one side of the frame and her back on the other.

"You make sure to help with the technical side of things and upgrade everything as best you can. You remember the plans I showed you?"

"Yepper-doodle-do, no problemo," she salutes, still pushing herself up one small push at a time.

"Good. No time to waste, then- this will be a bit, with all the pieces we need to cram into spaces that don't exist," you say, launching right into things.

Final Specifications:

Last Embrace Mark II:

80 to melee rolls, 3 damage dice and 2 damage to attacks, allows use of Unarmed Combat and Gun perks; ranged attacks possible using Unarmed Combat or Gun skill:

Cursed Plasma Fire, dealing 3d20 in an area before or behind you, affecting all targets in a moderate range and applying the effect of Cursed Claws

Ionized Matter Blast, dealing 2d2010 disintegrating damage to target, 10 Armor Penetration and Armor Reduction

Railgun Fire, dealing 5d1010 damage and varying ammunition effects

Special Abilities:

Wrath: May guarantee successful attacks for one round 1/day

Devouring Bite: May conjure a shadowy hound that tears into your intended target and deals 3d10 True Damage as a free action 1/day

Cryokinesis: May shape and control ice from afar by gesturing; stacks with Cryomancy personal ability and allows it to be used at range. May also slowly create ice freely in cold environments.

Shifting Shapes: Last Embrace can shapeshift whenever you do to fit to your body and maintain full efficiency

Shaped Ammunition: Can take in various materials and reform them to use them as ammunition for Railgun Fire, adding various effects and modifiers to its usage

It is unsurprising when what should be the finishing touches on a clever little piece of engineering end up taking most of the night, as what you're doing is really just as complicated as designing all the various little mechanisms and producing the parts you assembled with a whole team of extensions of your soul.

It's a downright grueling process. Each of your minions has their own part to play, each and every part worked over to everyone's satisfaction, only to then be added to a greater whole that repeats this whole thing. Smitten especially has to 'hammer everything in shape', the flat golden side of her main tool the size of a child impacting every metallic component several times before she is satisfied and the magical materials you're using are even more insane.

But still, you are emptying out your entire aura pool repeatedly, taking advantage of your magical engineering tricks to even make the theoretical side of this whole engineering project viable at the size you're going with, the shorter minions tinkering with the weapons' insides and Hack jumping into things at times to make small changes as you go along.

And then there is the fact you have to press the two soul-like constructs you're using for this into both halves of Last Embrace, one made from innumerable people freezing to death, the cold filling their last thoughts, and the other from a patchwork of anger, hatred and suffering you distilled repeatedly to receive pure, unadulterated wrath, the desire to crush and destroy and inflict suffering.

While simultaneously splitting up the demonic essence of that greater barghest you still aren't a hundred percent sure about the power (and powers) of beyond something about shapeshifting and being much stronger than most things you could reliably summon right now between both of the bracers, which is only possible because you're kind of abusing the fact you're making them as a pair. Also, you're removing the demon's consciousness from within it while you're at it- you don't need that in there and you don't know the thing, so screw it.

If any intelligence gets to be inside of your personal weapons, it is one you trust or one you've created yourself. Preferably both.

But still, all the labour is worth it, for you do it... with love. The only way to really enjoy what one is doing, you've found.

The final product looks sleek and powerful, silver and purple-black with the orichalcum making up most of its body and the adamantium strategically added to protect key parts and provide convenient points to put between you and anything dangerous. This second iteration is about as big as the first one, maybe a little smaller now that you do the math, but it looks a lot slimmer and more elegant despite or maybe precisely because it covers a little more, with flexible fingerless gloves (also containing thin plates of adamantium) on your hands and a bit of the weapons' body jutting beyond your elbows in a sharp point.

All in all, they're two mostly flat bracers around your arms, with a bit of space to house the mechanisms inside. One filling you with what feels like the the unbridled strength to crush a thousand men, the other almost icy cold to the touch at first but quickly normalizing after a moment.

When you wear both, you're filled with a cold, steady kind of emotion that makes you want to drive your beaten and enslaved enemies before you and hear the lamentations of their women. It's kind of inspiring to you as an aspiring father; your kids will need this kind of mindset to truly excel in life.

Though then again, you also don't want to pressure them. You can be content as long as they're happy, one way or another, and you shall never, ever let your idea of how they should be weigh in on how you treat them.

That said, enough quiet determination, back to Last Embrace. You can feel the gauntlet bracers almost as though they're a part of your body, and it seems despite being somewhat neutered, the combination of spiritual stuff you added to them part by part can still tell what you want as you move them.

A few quick tests show exactly how much you overshot the target in short order.

First off, the drills. They work excellently, smoothly boring into whatever materials you thrust them at- even, although extremely slowly and requiring great force, adamantite. The variable output plasma rocket drives show their worth here, as you can just keep up a steady push in any direction you want with them, incidentally also enhancing your punches and movement when used for this purpose.

Next off, the various fire modes... Well, you can bath entire rooms in plasma by changing the internal composition of Last Embrace, or alternatively disintegrate a bunch of material through globs of ionized matter that are discharged using a few of the same magnetized bits and bobs that are used for the railgun firing modes.

All of this works in both directions on both sides and doesn't seem to snag anywhere. Then, of course, you arrive at the supernatural abilities when you realize you can actually, with a bit of time and concentration, freely conjure ice in whatever shapes you so wish.

This whole deal was definitely worth it.

You have, on occasion and with mild interest, been keeping up a general study of Thule's monsters (and demons) and the way their bodies work, taking in various body types and functionalities and trying to filter out how inherent magic lets them do stuff they shouldn't be able to.

Demons, for example, beyond just being a little different from humans internally, also just passively strengthen their bodies in what you're pretty sure is a mostly subconscious process that seems to be a natural, instinctual thing for them. Which is pretty neat, for all that this means you don't get all that much useful data from having analyzed a few.

Still, you're finally going back to one of your earliest undead design templates, the myth, the legend, Mister X! The things are essentially just a bunch of strong, stable bones with massive amounts of musculature wrapped around them, but with what you know now, you can actually optimize the placement and structure of those muscles. That plus a couple of strategically placed sinews and you're turning your urban operatives into physical powerhouses easily keeping up with mid-tier brutes.

Especially once you finish experimenting around with additional magical quirks to add to them on creation. Still, keeping things like this updated is always good.

You have, after your last and somewhat more limited attempt to divine certain aspects of the future, made certain advances in regards to the particular spell you can use for things like this, meaning that another try at playing fortune teller for Rose.

This time for sure, you'll be able to tell exactly how overworked she will be and for what reason, when! "Reveal past and future!" You chant the shortened phrase, letting the thoughts that come from elsewhere wash over you.

This time, when you concentrate, you can kind of tell the rough temporal line you're following, and when you push things enough you can kind of tell more about what's going on. Rose is working, then she's exasperated, then she's working a bunch more... Then she's working a lot more all of a sudden, heaps of parchment and messengers rotating in and out of the office she's sharing with Sarah.

Doing your best to make the stream of information flowing through you do what you want, you 'stretch' your mental tendrils out for that parchment, catching a quick glimpse of the words written on a random one. 'Expected Attacks, Active Battles VS Concluded'.

It's shorthand she uses for her own notes. Feeling around a little, you get an idea of when exactly this is going on.

Two days. You have three days left in this dimension, and you have no idea how much time pacifying the situation might take.

Well shit, that's going to be annoying.

Blinking your eyes (your actual eyes, that is), you tilt your head at Sarah and Rose, both of which are eyeing you with some trepidation. "What?"

"Dunno if you realize this, but your eyes go kinda wonky when you do that," your sister says, waving one hand in front of her face in random patterns. "Looks kinda freaky."

"But regardless, did your efforts bear fruit?" The demon princess asks.

"Well, yeah, kinda," you edge. "I know that two days from now, you're keeping score how many places can repel the elves on their own, Rose. So we have a general time window. Bit of a personal scheduling issue in that, though, which is kind of a bummer."

"Any chance for more details?" Sarah asks.

"Maybe. Where does all the parchment in here come from and how likely is it I can find a few sheaves that will become important later on?"

Going through each and every individual piece of parchment in the literal storehouses Rose's administration is using for the sole purpose of never running out of the stuff is quite tedious, but you do have a system for it based on how it's delivered and what pieces are most likely to actually be important.

Casting your magic to glimpse just a bit into the future (as opposed to months into the past, which is in itself quite ridiculous) lets you know... a whole lot of useless information, honestly, from the current harvest of wheat brought in from the heartlands compared to that of last year and a few notes on what the farmers are saying (harvest is up this year due to the short-lived hyper-accelerated growth of everything in the region, by the way) to one half of a series of love poems one of the demons in the castle is sending to another.

Incidentally, it seems being crass and direct are actually quite prevalent in demon culture, considering this gal is telling a lucky guy she's gonna smash him all day just the way she likes it. Well, cultural quirks like that are always nice, you suppose.

Anyway, after a while of doing this you hit the jackpot. Reading the words to be written on a specific piece of parchment, you smile at what you're seeing- observations and gathered suppositions on key location underground based on what you, Sarah and Rose herself have been able to discover.

As you read and memorize the lines, the future wobbles, becoming uncertain and changing in short order in a rapid chain reaction, but that hardly matters; you have a few places now that you will be able to strike at ahead of time.

Good work all around. Three projected locations of importance the you of the future tried to figure out stand out from what you saw: One apparent gathering point of enemy soldiers not too far from the capital, going by the troop movements future you you make out, one larger task force moving in on the Border Fortress having dug their own tunnel and breaking in through a weak point in the fortification's foundations and several settlements toward the south-west that were taken too easily for no foul play to be in place.

There's most likely dozens of more places with reserve attackers and the like, but that's all you can tell for now. Which, to be fair, is quite a lot- this invasion has been under preparations for centuries at the very least, most likely longer.

Significantly longer. It's a small miracle these elves have managed to stay hidden while the underground is teeming with them, to be honest.

Well then, a decent weapon upgrade has been a long time coming now, and although you don't really have time to do quite everything you would like to, perfection is the enemy of good and all that. You can leave remaking all the weapons of pretty much everyone with adamantium and orichalcum to some later date, for the time being you'll just go ahead and stuff a few demonic essences you get on the fly into them.

Well, except for the pair of staves you use your usual summoned manufactory to make out of mostly orichalcum for Lana and Rose. Neither of them really have a major 'weapon' as such, aside from that sorcery fetish Lana showed you that one time, so you may as well- getting the things enchanted you can leave up to whoever Rose has for it.

Because she totally does have someone for it. You just kind of assume as much.

The essences you get by once again simply beating a few demons you go ahead and summon to a pulp and then forcing them into the form of such. Seeing as you're trying to do a decent job here, you're going a little further than you have before, taking the types of demons known as Demon Brutes and a small assortment of Lesser Fiends for this purpose.

Demon Brutes are actually quite interesting- almost uniform in both body and personality, they're tough, hard-hitting little monsters about twice as tall as a grown man even on all fours and capable of unleashing simple demonic magic meant to help them tear down enemy fortifications and tougher foes. They're basically basic soldiers for any stronger demons around, which shows in their demeanour; while they're as brutish as their name suggests, they also easily follow orders when given any reason to, and once they're obeying someone, they're pretty much incapable of betrayal.

Getting to that point is the complicated part, but seeing as you're just beating them within an inch of their lives and balling them up, all you need to worry about is keeping them from ruining the walls with an errant burst of energy fired by the complicated horn arrangement the things sport.

The Lesser Fiends are much more diverse in comparison, being a rough collection of generally big, mean and at least somewhat intelligent creatures. Many have wings and horns, some have additional legs or arms, armored dark-colored skin is also quite common among them... And there's a bunch that have at least some limited kind of magic. Which suits you just fine, to be honest.

They're going to those weapons that are less melee-ish or direct. All in all, it's a good few hours you're spending partially because the demons you're pounding to bits are kind of a pain in the ass and partly because you're putting some real care and attention into the process of actually empowering these weapons.

Yes, even Stanton's favored swords. You certainly plan to get your money's worth out of him once the action starts.

Anyway, you do hope your vampires in particular are happy with what they got. The sword you made for Okita is now capable of acting as a shield when required and basically inherited a Brute's ability to fire off energy projectiles, making the ion beam you gave it even better (somehow, it's magic and you ain't gonna question it), Emily's flamethrower got a flamethrowing four-armed fiend added to it and Sarah's pair of shifting weapons received their own bit of love too, naturally.

Then the heroes' weapons and stuff, though you'll really have to get around to imbuing their personal weapons with something good one of these days; for the moment, they're using backup arms to take advantage of what you gave them without 'wasting' their favorites. If you could, you would simply personally design and create a better weapon for everyone, but alas, it is what it is.

Aside from Yamamoto's ion laser rifle, of course. You have more than enough of them back home and so improving it with a bit of demonic special ingredients is just fine. The wonders of being able to mass-produce powerful weapons, really.

Next off, potions. Flash potions, as you're indeed calling them, are incredibly useful but especially so as ways to rapidly escape a badly developing situation; considering the expected levels of fighting, having these on hand for everyone important can only be a good thing.

With your usual routine business taken care of, a few hours spent practicing the flexibility of your hemokinesis (an extremely powerful power by this point, to the extent it could be an A-lister cape's sole one and still shine), specifically its application to blood you have frozen solid (something you have noticed you just do on touch these days), all the while directing your undead currently out there and in action toward settlements and the like you know will be under attack and requiring of support.

Them and the demons going along with them, anyway. They seem to have adopted your creations as parts of their parties, it seems.

Next off, you shall need to organize the various thralls (and vampires, of course) you have hanging around the castle into a rapid response team of sorts, using fast transport minions to let them swiftly knock out any particularly egregious threats while you work on solving the problem at its root, or at least as deep down as you can manage in the time you will have.

Of course the exact details of this idea need to be discussed, though you aren't exactly fully sure the focus of said discussion is weighted appropriately.

"In order to do this, we all need a fluffy owl we can ride on," Nakatani insists, her face betraying not a single hint of any lies or insecurities. "It is absolutely vital."

"I'm not sure you have considered the implications of the associated aura consumption for everyone at once over what could be a lengthy period of fighting when they aren't used to it," you point out.

"I don't care!" She exclaims in response, slamming a hand onto the desk of your quickly appropriated meeting room. "I want myself a cute fluffy owl!"

Negotiations require some time and a precise grasp of what is going on, as Nakatani is not the only one you have to keep on track- her two friends continually make fun of her desire for cute things, to which she reacts with a self-satisfied attitude exuding a sense of superiority (yes, she wants the fluffy, and she takes pride in it), not to mention the other people at the negotiating table with you, but ultimately cooler heads prevail and you can bribe the Sword Heroine into going along with what you want.

Which, as it happens, is the creation of several undead you can simply bind to each of the thralls and vampires you'll be dispatching, allowing for them to be carried to their destinations with great speed without overly taxing any of their reserves, whether they be those of stamina, aura or otherwise.

And perhaps that bribe was as much that as it was a distraction to keep her busy with something else, but as long as she's happy with her new murderbunny pet, it's alright, isn't it?

You steadily ignore the accusing black eyes your voiceless minions bores into your soul with. No remorse to be found in here, buddy.

"Cute widdle bunny-bunny," she whispers at it, a hand stroking the short-furred back while the other one plays with its long ears. "How am I gonna name you? You need a good name, don't you? Only the best name for the best bunny."

She's off in la-la-land already, it seems. She... really can't keep herself in check well when it comes to these kinds of things, can she?

Time until the predicted beginning of hostilities is a bit short and continues to grow more so, as time is wont to do, so you mainly concern yourself with last-minute preparations to let you be in top shape for the fighting you will try to keep as short and brutal as possible.

That means getting any quick training you want to have done beforehand and brewing up a couple of potions, much like you've been doing already to equip your various non-expendables. These potions of general resistance against everything don't do much on their own, but your hope is that they'll come in handy just in case the elves decide to get tricky about things.

A bit of a tense silence has fallen over the parts of the castle inhabited by your people, knowledge of the battle ahead bringing tension with itself, a mix of wary anticipation and disquiet.

Then again, it can't really be helped; you think that, deep down, all of the heroes you pulled in hoped to never have to fight in a war environment again. Most of them, anyway- Okita is as quietly content as always. There's just something to be said for employees happy with their work, isn't there?

Naturally, the accompanying night has more of the same as before, though it's not like you have any time to expend on just hanging out and ascertaining as much. One notable part of your preparations, however, is you going down to your material creation undead, the wide expanses of flesh and bone braces slowly, but surely granting you access to the same stuff you're putting into them.

Adamantium takes a phenomenally long time to be multiplied this way, but even so you do have a few slim bars of the stuff on hand purely through you screwing over physics with your complicated setup of regenerating undead flesh. And, as you test out one of the features you noticed after investigating your new weapon pair for a bit, perfectly workable for ammunition.

Sticking the thin piece of metal into one half of Last Embrace, you can hear a low grinding, crunching sound, almost as if the demonically warped machinery inside was trying to eat the stuff. Which you can't dispute as much as you really would like to, come to think of it.

Either way, within moments a few inches of adamantium are gone, and in exchange you have a small, but just barely noticeable amount of extra weight on your arm now. Idly eyeing up one piece of wall not covered by pulsing flesh, you raise it... and fire.

What comes out of Last Embrace is more a beam than a projectile, from the looks of it, for all that you know better. A chunk of adamantite, formed into what you need it to be and propelled by virtue of the fact it's still at least some kind of magnetic, so the railguns contained within your weapons can make use of it.

Now you have a sizeable hole in the wall where it impacted and a small piece of adamantium stuck a couple arm's lengths in solid stone- you could freaking shoot people through walls with this. That's a thought for another time, though- right now, you'll have to figure out how to get it back out and repair this.

... Maybe you'll just... add more undead meat to fill everything out? It's worked for you this far.

At least some amount of planning still keeps on being done, of course, made possible through free use of telepathy to discuss and exchange information as required. There's a lot to be done and not much time to do it with, both now and early tomorrow, so it is of utmost importance that both you and everyone else know exactly what to do when if you want to have a chance at minimizing the damage to come.

The actual attack, best you've been able to tell, will begin at night, but that's not to say there won't be any trouble before then; no attack of this size can ever be truly perfectly coordinated, and you very much expect that at least some assaulting groups will be going aboveground shortly before the sun goes down, while all the larger ones you know of at least are liable to wait until after dark.

But that's mostly a minor quibble, truth be told. You have the big questions to take care of and problems to solve, and that means you're telepathing at everyone involved to figure out everything even while you do other stuff on the side.

Such as plastering bits of muscle tissue over a destroyed piece of wall.

Ultimately, and using the information you gleaned from the future using your magic, you and your advisors slash regents determine that out of all the major fires about to start, the troops aiming to take over the Border Fortress would be the most problematic for several reasons.

They're most likely to be the enemy's elite units, considering the location they're attacking, control of the Border Fortress is and remains fundamentally important both culturally and strategically, it being taken over would allow this new enemy a lot of logistically important leeway aboveground speaking and then there's the little matter of the majority of what passes for your army being garrisoned in there, and you sure can't be arsed to go and recruit replacements if they all die.

Not to mention the question of pride. You have taken that fortress. It's yours now, personal in a way most of this kingdom simply isn't to you, and you'll be damned before you let anyone stupid enough to try and take anything that's yours get away with it. And when you say that, it has a lot more meaning these days, considering you actually know what happens to people that go to hell.

So yeah, that's your own participation, or at least your initial goal. As for the rest of things, you're planning to have your vampires and thralls head out to reinforce towns and cities under attack and unable to defend themselves effectively.

They're all at least some level of powerful and/or accustomed to fighting unusually strong enemies, so you're hoping they'll be able to make some actual impacts wherever they're sent. The zombie gryphons you made on the fly and your own two zombie wyverns will carry them where they need to go, too, you wouldn't have made all that racket if you didn't want transportation cleared up beforehand.

In fact, while some of them will be riding out in groups, you're almost pitying whatever poor fools will try to face off against Okita wherever she goes. In her own words, she seems to be looking forward to 'fight, yay'. Meanwhile, Emily has been practicing her fine control and long-distance bombardment capabilities while idle for a while now, and the Weapons Trio will be acting as a single entity decisively putting down any attempts at resistance.

Lastly, Yamamoto promised to keep Arakawa's back clear as ranged flying support. You appreciate it, even if she doesn't, or at least pretends not to.

Meanwhile, Sarah and Rose will remain where they belong, within the walls of your castle. Lana tried volunteering too, uncertain about how well she would perform, but you just asked her to guard both of them while you're gone.

You kind of hate having to leave in all honestly, but someone has to go perform your quota of war crimes, and you very much adhere to that one saying. 'If you want something done right, do it yourself'. Even if protecting Sarah and the child she's carrying is really more important to you.

Lana is bearing more responsibility than you believe she quite understands, honestly. If either of them is hurt in any way... This entire world shall be cleansed of all life as permanently as you can ensure. You have a few ways to do it, too, and not all of them are quick.

The day of the prophesied (by you) battle has come, and though it would surely be fascinating to observe and analyze the ways everyone that is going to head out and fight is feeling and acting right now, you're a tad bit busy brewing up a few batches of potions, most of which you hand out to enhance combat performance of whoever needs it.

You idly wonder whether that makes you a modern type of military now- you don't really keep track of any of that, but you darkly remember having read once upon a time that soldiers used to actually consume certain substances to ensure they don't poop out in the middle of a battle before armies as such just kind of ceased to be significant in most ways.

Maybe they're still doping up, they just probably aren't- the USA on Earth Bet just kind of ceased to really make use of their military once capes became the new thing and foreign intervention became just that much more likely to provoke powerful ones to fuck up a couple cities or something. it really only stuck in your memory at the time because the notion of nazis on speed during WWII was kind of hilarious.

Even if they kind of bombed London, but let's be honest, who even needs Britain anymore? And no, you aren't calling it 'Great' Britain just because it used to be the hot shit a few centuries back. It's just a dilapidated island with shitty weather, in the end.

Anyway, you just made a bunch of potions and wished everyone good luck before heading out first yourself, making sure to actually be inspiring and stuff (as well as ascertaining that everything is in place and all of your vampires know to be back in time for when you have to jump back to Earth Bet, no matter how much Sarah calls you a worrywart again). Next off, a couple hours of feeding your carriage's sink those accelerating potions and keeping track of your big burrower underground!

Your arrival at the Border Fortress is greeted with an almost uncanny quiet, as though nothing is actually wrong or out of the usual. That said, it really is the same as usual; if you would be able to tell anything was different from inside your carriage, something would be wrong- and Rakul had better have a replacement for himself ready.

The man knows what's coming for the fortress, of course, being linked into your telepathic network (note to self, top him up on blood at some point just in case now that you're here anyway), but just in case he's been keeping things quiet beyond having his people preparing for battle- something that demons pretty much always are, anyway.

You still don't have any specific details about what exactly is going to happen, despite your prep work involving a bunch of precognition, all you can tell by the quick notes you read through in future-vision is that the elves are actually using one or several of the secret tunnels under the fortress to break in from far below, circumventing the various countermeasures against just such a thing in all less secret parts of the enormous fortification.

Trying to dig though is nothing new, and at least a few of the uncounted generations of warring demons and humans up here have actually installed a series of enchantments to make this kind of thing an enormous bitch to actually do.

So yes, a few demons are currently stationed at hidden doors and entrances you found out about yourself when you first took the fortress by sneaking in through them, but whether or not that's going to be enough is up in the air as of yet; you have no idea exactly how many other such places exist in this gigantic set of labyrinthine hallways, and so there could be any number of them tucked away in well-hidden corners.

Add to that you have, what, a couple thousand demons doing duty in here, while the fortress is actually meant to house at least tens or hundreds of thousands of people? If you're unlucky, the elves could literally just walk in and occupy half the Border Fortress before you get word of it, that's how empty most of it is right now.

But right now, as it is? Now much you can really do about that. Your spell to find things doesn't really do well with fine distinctions such as 'elves currently inside a secret tunnel', so you may as well just go and take a look at the command room with all the funny switches and the one more or less complete map of this place.

As it happens, Rakul is already there and waiting for you, the effective general of all of demonkind (you do wonder exactly how long it'll take for him to realize that) studying the reports and writing up something himself. You quickly greet him, deciding to make some small talk by gesturing for the map and asking him where he thinks the enemy will be coming from.

"If I had any idea, I wouldn't be trying be trying to find out," he says, joining you at the monument-like control mechanism without so much as a sign of surprise at your presence. "We have our guys at the secret entrances we know about, a few patrolling the places guarded by the creepy things to give alert if a fight breaks out and a couple of patrols through most of the fortress, but that's it right now."

"Yeah, not much else we can really do, huh?" You remark idly as though this whole thing had no bearing on yourself. Which, let's be honest here, it doesn't, not really. It's just a matter of whether you can hold the fortress or everyone else dies and you need to cleanse it thoroughly.

"I kinda hate this bullshit, I want to just officially state this here." Drawn out of your musings, you give Rakul a bemused look. "No, seriously. Having to sit here and wait for them to attack is bullshit. Was bad enough back under the last guy and it isn't any better now."

"Huh, would've thought the anticipation of a fight would be nice to most demons," you note. "Guess I'm wrong after all."

"Anticipatin' is nice and all, but it sucks to have no idea when or where the fighting's gonna start. We should-"

Rakul is cut off by loud screech from afar, a series of them in fact spreading through the central bastion. The slightly unworldly sound has you perk up immediately.

"Ah, and that would be the alarm system I put into place. Guess they must've come up and tripped on the spirits while they were invisible."

"... You know, sometimes I just fucking hate you."

Well, good thing he's comfortable enough to just tell you as much. A positive work environment like this is important. "Thanks man, you too."

The enormous undead you created for this, giant Earthworm thingy that it is, is extremely efficient when it comes to moving underground thanks to the way it can kind of drill through most obstacles and use magical earth manipulation to just reshape the matter in question around it, leaving remarkably little traces of its passing behind.

At the surface, anyway. You've interposed your perception with its own a few times, and you're fairly sure it might have pulped a couple dozen larger monsters as it kept up with you on the way toward the border.

So it doesn't take particularly long to have a hole opened up not far from the Border Fortress, yourself sprinting right out of the fortress at superhuman speeds and jumping in to join it underground.

Hey, you're prepared for this. This was literally in the works for an hour by this point already.

The way down isn't terribly strenuous, as you're pretty much just falling straight down anyway, and so soon enough you're holding on to the giant worm as it burrows through the earth. You're already pretty much right next to the target location, so it shouldn't take all that long to-

You watch with mild dispassion as your worm breaks through into a large cavern, flying through the air with the force of its rotating push and the front half of its body already boring into the wall on the opposite side, and below you you can see a large mass of bodies; though they seem to have been in steady motion until just now, well, a giant worm just broke through the wall and is already emitting a glittering mist that is starting to descend toward them.

There's just some things that take a moment to take in. You understand.

So, as for these elves... Most of them are wearing armor, but it doesn't really cover every part of their bodies, so you can tell how they look like easily enough. With dark-colored skin ranging from mocha and reasonably within the possible range of human skin colors to outright black and ashen both, hair with a tendency to be either white, gray or black, though with some exceptions, their overall build trends more toward the lean and willowy, with long, slender limbs in both genders.

In other words, both male and female elves look kind of girly. And yes, the ears you do see are fairly long and sharp-ended, explaining what few details you had before about how these guys look.

Now, about those tunnels leading off and upward the elves are taking all over the place...

Yeah, may as well get right to it, then. You need these elves dead or gone and you have the biggest concentration to the Border Fortress right there in front of you, or at least your senses for blood can't find any other groups of humanoid living beings anywhere within your range.

So you jump off of your ride, turning back to your normal form (because of course you clung to it in the shape of your shadow) and land right in the middle of the mostly silent, heavily armed crowd, stretching your arms and making sure Last Embrace's new iteration is sitting perfectly.

"Okay, look, much as I'm sure we all would like to make this a massive production, I'm kind of rushed for time here, so can we just get to the part where you all die and I get back to what I was doing?"

"The Light shall devour your soul!" One of the elves nearby yourself shouts, swords being raised and spells readied and launched at your position.

"Yeah, good talk." And with that, you launch yourself forward, breaking through anyone in the way and changing shapes once again.

Your clothes are quickly absorbed into your body like usual, your flesh blackening and twisting in on itself and a line of fur sprouts all over your back that quickly bulges out into a hunchback as your insides reshape.

Your weight shifts and leaves you with most of your inner organs inside your upper torso, waist thinning out grotesquely and a short tail pushing out of your backside. All four of your limbs lengthen, fingers and toes now growing longer and longer without losing any of their strength. Your head, in the meantime, has sharpened, for lack of a better word, becoming an elongated snout, and more and more glowing eyes squeezing themselves out into additional holes now inside your skull.

You hiss sharply past all your uneven, sharp teeth, lower jaw snapping up against the drastically shorter rest of your maw, and you take a moment for your flesh to harden as small amounts of it slough off.

A few squeaks come from nearby, and all hell breaks loose.

Magic comes flying at you from all directions, a lot of it some kind of pale golden light you deftly dodge or simply grab one of the nearby elves to interpose between yourself and it, observing how the inferior creatures painfully bubble up and die under the effects of it. Most amusing, but not why you're here.

Snarling and leaving some of your black, brackish saliva to splatter onto the stone beneath you, you breathe out the Tree, enormous roots thrusting into the hard ground violently to dig its vulnerable pulsing heart into it. The response is quick, several of your foes gathering to try and hack it down with large two-handed swords and concentrated spellfire, but aside from a few hits at its weak point before it can be hidden all they accomplish is slightly splintering its wood.

The trembling, enraged shudder of its crown is all the reaction this elicits... And then the tree's roots poke back out of the ground, beginning a massive brawl as all sides attempt to destroy the other.

Incidentally, the cavern is just barely large enough for the tree to fit itself inside. A few of its branches are brushing up against its roof.

Meanwhile, you yourself have a lot to do, too. Many of the elves nearby are clutching their eyes, clearly affected by your glorious visage, but you do not have the time to spare to bask in the worship of your lessers.

Instead, you screech and snap, your long arm stretching out to let you grab onto one of them, letting you grab its head with one hand and its shoulder with the other.

Then you pull. It comes off with a pop.

Like a signal, this causes some of the creatures whose faces are already starting to die to try attacking you, but your simply flare your aura, your power spreading out to possess the bodies already flung around by your tree's many limbs.

They twitch, almost in unison, and any of the inferior creatures even mildly perceptive realize they are fucked.

Within moments, you have raised your own limb weapons, burning plasma on the ready. Nothing clears up pests like a good old cleansing fire.

The corpse rats already gathering around behind you, coming crawling and skittering from the nooks and crannies of the world, agree, too. Truly, none are wiser and more educated on these matters than yourself.

Slapping aside a desperate attempt at striking back at yourself, you eye the many, many bodies suddenly all around you- the smell of molten bones and burnt flesh is driving up your appetite, so you waste no more time and immediately throw yourself at the piles of half-intact bodies and the occasional dried-out treat thrown at you from your tree servant.

Most of them are also moving, dragging themselves toward you to be thrown down your gullet; your stomach is quickly filled, bloating with more and more meat while the lesser beings are distracted with other things. Or most of them are, at least- a steady bombardment from your flexible arms lets you put down any that dare try to strike at you.

Surprisingly, these beings are quite resilient, but being able to survive with half a torso missing just means that the pain shall last longer.

Your belly is bulging with more and more of the delectable meat of your lessers, the rats you are still calling upon slowly but surely spreading out and nibbling for themselves here and there. A few are struck down, but most are skittering too swiftly to be fought. And each and every one of them is giving off a thin, black mist.

However, you have eaten enough for the moment; now it is time for your feast to go the opposite way, your thin body engorged with all the meat you have taken in. You open your mouth wide, wider than most mouths should be, a twisted mass of flesh disgorged from it that should not have been able to fit inside you in the first place.

Hey, you do love BBQs. Not your fault if you chomped down on a couple dozen bodies real quick.

The creature you have thron up soon clambers onto its feet, a distorted humanoid with a few of the pieces that went into going it still visible. A wheezing roar makes its way out of it, and soon yet another combatant joins the battle against an increasingly dying enemy force.

Beset on all sides, they are dying to your Tree, choking on the necrotizing emanations of your rats and now a nigh unstoppable juggernaut, reinforced by your sheer presence, is barreling into them. And you are already busy creating the next. If this battle was less chaotic, perhaps these weak things might be able to destroy your creation- the pale light they use is potently destructive and slowly peeling deeper and deeper holes into your Tree, showing just how effectively it can destroy whatever it is directed at, but they would need far more than this to truly inhibit you for any length of time.

And soon, you will join the fray proper. Once you eat a few more. And take your time to crush a few skulls under your claws, slowly and methodically.

The elves are, above all, enraged at your presence, it seems, but for all their fervent vigor they all die just as well. You do not care what they scream, of course. Vermin does not deserve to speak.

Emily peered down from her flying mount, the glowing undead thingy hanging in the evening sky like a star that didn't get the memo on how high it was supposed to hang. There were a couple actual towns off in the distance, some of which she could just barely make out, but the main reason she was out in the wilderness was to find out where exactly the guys making trouble in this whole region were coming from.

Luckily, there also were a couple of scouts down below on the surface, people mass-thralled just to link them into the telepathy network. One of them alerted everyone else and just like that, they had them.

She herself flew off to find the small army camped out in some forest, though it was more a bunch of trees in one place- Emily was a city girl, never much leaving the urban sprawl of Brockton Bay she'd been born in, but after she experienced the sheer ocean of greenery further toward the north, it was hard to call anything else a 'forest'.

This whole situation was pretty annoying because the enemy was going to overrun the entire region and they had very little warning about where exactly they were coming from, but it seemed the target-rich environment and topography of the area had the elves actually coming out and hiding on the surface before they went and tried taking a swing. It was mostly the pretty loose soil near the surface or something, Emily hadn't really paid attention.

All that mattered now was that she had a general target area nobody was really going to miss and a couple fully loaded containers for her flamethrower.

She wasn't a pyromaniac or anything, of course, not by a long shot. Despite her power suggesting otherwise, Emily had a perfectly normal and healthy relationship to fire- don't get burned and respect how easily it can get out of control, yadda yadda yadda. No, if she had to say if she was into anything- her boss was more than hot enough for her tastes.

Seriously, the way Gabe could make a girl feel special was something else.

What fascinated her about fire these days, more than anything else, was what she could do with it. Before, when she could spit flames that could outright melt a person when she hit them directly, it had just been... Yeah, she had a power, she was a cape. Woo. But now she could do more- she could control fire. Become it.

She'd been fireproof the moment she got her power and accidentally burned the house down (and killed her mother, incidentally, she could think about it calmly now), but actively directing the red hot glowing heat felt different. So she wondered, sometimes, while she was practicing with her powers and spitting out almost solid lances of fire- Could she burn down the whole world if she just tried hard enough?

Again, she wasn't pyromaniac. She was just curious how far she could take this, how badly she could abuse her fell vampire powers in combination with her native one.

And it just so happened there were a lot of test subjects already in place. Coming to a halt above the treetops hiding the encampment she was there for, Emily smiled.

"Don't need to see you to burn you all down," she whispered, raising her newly pimped-out flamethrower.

It is said the force and heat of the subsequent explosions not only burned parts of the surrounding ground into unevenly colored glass, they were also great enough to send small chunks of it careening off in all directions so a steady plinking sound could be heard at the walls surrounding any nearby settlements for the whole night. The accuracy of these statements is questionable, but even so the famous crater eventually became a minor tourist attraction, as were the glass monsters arising from it.

There they went, going right to war only a couple months after all the warring was supposed to have ended. Plus side, riding on a wyvern was kind of fun, Tada had to admit, even if the reason they did was less so.

It honestly kind of sucked. Not only did defeating the Demon Lord fail to bring any measure of peace, in the end, even without Gabriel being summoned and promptly taking over there was little to no chance that this world would have known the absence of war for any length of time.

All because there was always someone that wanted to wipe out everyone else. Maybe it was human nature- or rather, sentient nature- at play, but Tada was kind of tired of it by this point.

It just... didn't really contribute anything. To anyone. It was literally just killing for the sake of killing, at this point.

She wasn't saying any of that out loud, though. Kazue-chan had just gotten out of one of her brooding periods, no way was she giving her more fuel to get right back into another.

Instead, she spoke out loud. "I think I can see them," she told the other two clinging to the reanimated flying reptile they were riding as a group. "Fighting has already started."

"Expected as much." Michi- Matsui-chan raised her spear. "Hey Tada-chan, think we can hit them from here if we try?"

"If you make sure to only hit the right ones, maybe," she uncertainly said.

Behind her, Kazue-chan stirred. "How's the fighting going?"

"... Pretty even so far, the demons are holding their own. Not sure for how much longer, though."

"Then just wait until we're closer," the tallest of the three decided. "No point in accidentally knocking over another building."

Tada's cheeks burned. "It was one time!"

"And we have properly reflected on it, too," Matsui-chan agreed. "Perfect accuracy and unlimited reach do not take the afterswing into account. Or some obstacles."

"Anyway, we can just land, take care of thing and then get back in the air," Kazue-chan said. "If we find a big coherent ground next time we can just flyby and hit them from above, but for now we fight the hard way."

Yeah, their group of three was kind of going to be hopping around in the more populated areas of the demon kingdom, decisively freeing up whatever towns or cities they could. As most of their role involved urban combat, Tada's heroic power was going to be mildly limited, but to be honest, it wasn't that bad.

Also, did that building just explode to reveal some kinds of golems joining the fight?!

"This looks like a job for you, Björn," Kazue-chan whispered to her new pet. "Can you go and eat all the nasty elvy-elves while we defeat those stone people? Can you? Can you? Yeees you can."

"Are you really calling it that? It was the worst out of all of your ideas," Matsui-chan threw backward from where Tada was holding onto her (and totally not groping her waist). She was probably just trying to lighten the mood.

"Björn the Fell-Handed shall brook no insults to his hallowed name."

Yeah, as long as she was being like this, Kazue-chan was doing alright, Tada decided.

"Next off, to jump off and surprise both of her friends. Tada had learned recently that her semblance could let her 'jump' faster, too, and mitigate gravity quite a lot- time for a heroic impact down there. Finding a spot to land was going to take forever otherwise.

Okita frowned, staring at the enemy in front of her. Her enemy did not stare back, because although it had eyes, it wasn't alive.

It was a weird stone person. Maybe it could be her friend?

"First golem squadron, advance! The Light Shall Extinguish All!"

The call from one of the weird stripper people jarred her out of her thoughts. Right, she was supposed to be fighting, wasn't she?

"Today, we shall commence the ancient crusade against all that stand in the way of Salvation! One of the arch-heretics has arrived to stem the flow of glorious release, but we shall-"

Okita stopped listening already. It was kind of weird to keep on talking when they were supposed to be fighting, but if that one speaky person wasn't going to fulfill his function, that was on him.

She would just kill twice as hard to make up for it.

They were in some city she didn't know the name of, as the name was really unimportant to what was going on. In the middle of it, one building had been replaced by a large ramp leading into a larger hole, with lots of stone people coming out of it.

Lots and lots. Okita might even have fun fighting them all. "Cutie Crusade," she politely informed them of the name of her semblance.

Then she thrust out her sword, now the size of a building to match what she had to cover, and slashed through everything at once.

And turned a house beyond her target to rubble. Oops.

It was probably alright. Also, it had, in fact, worked. They were all dead now. It was also quiet, finally.

Okita nodded, jumping down the hole. Maybe she could fight a little more before she had to go.

"This is just bullshit!"

"Please just concentrate on fighting!" Yamamoto called out.

"Aren't you seeing how bullshit this is?"

"Gina-san, focus!" He landed another dozen shots, silently thanking his new gun for being reliably horrifying to whatever was hit.

"One hit! One fucking hit! I need twenty to make a dent in these things!"

Down below a whirlwind of battle was raging, Gina-san turned into a flash dashing from one opponent to the next. She alone was stemming the tide of golems and surprisingly dangerous dark elves (or drow, whichever was the right term here) thanks to the sheer speed her power imbued her with.

"I don't think that is particularly relevant to the current situation!" He shouted down at the battlefield, scrupulously landing the next two dozen shots to ensure none of their enemies lived long enough to cast. This sci-fi rifle was growing on him, he had to admit.

"It matters because I can't just wave a sword and kill all of these assholes at once!"

Yamamoto sighed. This was going to be a problem, wasn't it?

In the kingdom of Hannovens, certain changes were ongoing at a rapid pace. That was to say, a massive invasion was taking place all over the densely populated country, turning many a town or even city into a hellscape of fire and destruction.

Not all such places were destroyed in a single night, however. In many places, churches became bastions of light, housing civilians and kept secure through the protective magic invoked by several of the clergy within engaging in intense prayer. Meanwhile, military personnel would methodically wipe out any attackers or else be wiped out in turn, leaving it up to reinforcements to come in time to finish the job and hope the barriers would hold out long enough.

Their attackers were strange, ashen- or brown-skinned people, possessing not the superhuman might of demonkind but instead more than their share in grace and precision, in addition to being mages to the last, and supported by tough automatons of ome sort designed to withstand the charge of an organized line by themselves.

Each and every one of them was capable of casting magic, yes. The most favored of their spells seemed to be one that cast a baleful light upon their target, eradicating it either quickly or, in some cases, exceedingly slowly. Many that witnessed it found that it was a twisted, repulsive imitation of the Light of the Goddess, a common name for the miracle bestowed upon her followers to heal the wounded and sick instead.

Suffice to say, there was a lot of charged emotion in regards to this matter.

Naturally, the heroes, champions of humanity and the Faith, led the charge wherever they went, often sent from the nearest cathedral to do the Goddess' will. Fighting became more and more fervent wherever they came, though they often broke enemy resistance in short order.

Whether or not there were any people left to save was another question, of course.

Leading the charge was the Braver Hero, shining diadem making her look like the warrior queens of old. All that saw her on this day remarked upon the profound sadness in her eyes at the lives lost.

Truly she was the most compassionate human being one could imagine.

Meanwhile, at the royal palace, the Second Princess was celebrating her success in dispatching an entire dozen of the intruders by herself, having secured the palace's east wing. She hoisted her enormous sword the size of her own body up in the air, letting out a triumphant humming.

Because a proper lady was not to shout nor scream, of course. That would be utterfy disgraceful.

Still, she had proven herself a great warrior. Wherever the Slayer Heroine was, she was sure she would have approved of her actions.

M-hm.

She never did find out that the guards had actually taken out the rest of the attackers, by the way, nor did any of said guards have the heart to tell her.

This night would later come to be known as the Night of the Long Ears, a hilariously vaguely racist description finding full approval of the Last Demon Lord.

The light these lowlives use can also be turned into a protective screen, aggressively eating away at whatever impacts it. Your tree loses a few roots to this application once several dozen of them come together to oppose it before you see fit to intervene and test out the adamantium bullets you prepared.

First field tests are a major success. The screen of light is more a wall of magical energy and, as such simply lets your bullets right through, mowing down your foes. With you preventing and organized defense, the rest of this vermin is promptly battered and drained by your not-actually-wooden servant with great ease.

It helps it is using the corpse-creations as ammunition itself, throwing them in random directions whenever it hits upon them and determines they do not contain blood.

Not many of them are left now. There have been no reinforcements after you stepped up the pressure, and so all that remains is to lounge around and watch them all suffer and die as they are eaten alive by rats you have called into existence.

It's good to be the king, baby.

By the time you're done turning the entire cave into a mass grave, you realize you really should get a move on- once again, extended travel times are being an issue in this dimension. Not as much of one, thanks to recent developments, but you'll still need to haul ass if you're going to get everything done in time.

... Actually, you should probably turn back. This form is quite useful with several of its powers, not to mention the wide-range effects it allows you to deploy, but your urge to continually walk all over everything in sight is kind of distracting. So you let go of the bloodless bodies you were tearing apart and shoveling down your maw and shake your head to clear it up a little, looking up.

A few jumps and just like that, you're starting to dig upward at a decent slant. It may be this mutated rat thing form talking, but you think you may like doing this kind of thing.

Long story short, you run right back to where you came from, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on all four. Nothing can stop you nor slow you on your way toward your beloved castle, where you reign as the rightful king over all the lesser races in the world.

... Yeah, you actually do turn back to normal after a while. Doing so actually does let you move just as fast as before even without the ability to just casually vault over mountains, hills and treetops, as you kind of just shadow step along to skip large parts of the journey once more.

Not the easiest nor most comfortable way to travel, but it gets the job done. Incidentally, the rough undead you created back in that hole you thoroughly patched up through your giant worm still persist for a while, ambling around and looking for any more targets to throw themselves at, but a couple hours after you leave your enhanced form, they eventually do fall dead and silent.

You think. Your worm's tremor senses aren't perfect, but you didn't want to go through the bother of actually giving it eyes or the like when it wouldn't see them much at all- sensory organs are kind of a giant pain to make and adjust to work correctly.

Seriously, you generally give your undead actually well-designed eyes when you have the time to make them properly, which does cut down on complexity required compared to 'natural', crappy upside-down human baseline models, but even so, it takes some actual careful work to get them to work correctly.

Finally, however, you're back, and not a moment too soon- your vampires are already on their way and it wouldn't do not to look like you've been waiting for them all along.

Have to keep up an image, after all. Even if Sarah totally sees through it the second she comes in, having been inside the castle all along, Okita won't care and Emily is probably busy thinking about something else anyway.

All the same, you may as well relax and take in the first taste of the fruits you got to harvest this time around. No matter how many of them you eat, they all taste of victory; sweet and a little intoxicating, each and every day you live and massacre you cause another step toward fulfilling your dreams.

What those dreams are is a secret, though~

"Hey Gabe, why're you hugging me like that?" Sarah asks, looking backward over her shoulder to peer at your face.

"Oh, nothing in particular." And if you stroke her belly a few times, letting your unborn daughter know you love her already, that's probably just a coincidence. "I'm just thinking about how happy I am."

"Aww, love you too."

And this all was as it should be.

Opening your eyes after your (brief) stint as a speed-eater, you realize you are surrounded by the people you wanted to take along, having kept an eye on the everpresent countdown dictating exactly how long you may stay before the chain of inevitability drags you with it.

Hey, you're allowed to be pointlessly melodramatic about this stuff. You're the big bad head vampire, after all.

"Everyone ready? We got a few minutes left if anyone needs to go to the bathroom before we get back," you smile, enjoying the feeling of Emily, Okita and (of course) Sarah's bodies.

It's a joke, of course. You're pretty sure everyone gets it, except maybe Okita.

"Yeah, yeah, let's just get this over with already," Emily demands, rolling her eyes at your antics. "No offense, but I kind of miss the internet.

Okita twitches. If you didn't know any better, you'd suspect she just 'remembered' the internet is a thing. Probably just generally... didn't think about it or something.

"Alright then, time to board the Gabe train, everybody. Choo choo."

And like that, you're off, disappearing into the point where dimensions meet, your way straight and without detours as your origin on Earth Bet demands you to be where you're supposed to be.

Home, sweet home. You kind of miss the corruption, stupidity and the cape culture, you aren't going to lie.