Chapter 21

  ‘Hades Heal!’ I cast for the third time, the level 1 skill claiming 39 HMP for using the healing spell.

  After each cast I would run a scan, seeing small but promising results. Even with only a basic understanding and no experience with spine re-construction, I felt like I was doing a good job for the injured demon. Unfortunately, the IFD scanner couldn’t determine whether the nerves inside had been re-growing or not, so I had to ask poor Reinos if he could feel or move anything after every cast. And improvements were coming: his long fingers could now twitch, and he even managed to move a leg, even if just a couple of centimetres. It meant the healing spell affected the nerve bundles, too, and while my instructions were vague, the spell was doing its best to interpret them correctly and was doing a wonderful job. In the end, I had to cast Hades Heal eight times total, having to wait to replenish my HMP store before the last cast.

  Reinos didn’t smile as he clambered to his feet, he didn’t say thanks, and neither did his best buddy Grashon. They just stared at me. As did everyone in the camp, doing so in deathly quiet. Even Tarashak was speechless, although he was shaking his head, his expression of disapproval and a look of “I told you not to reveal yourself as an upstairs denizen, you fool!” boring into me. Well, he wasn’t wrong to be honest, but what was I supposed to do? Let my own soldiers die of injuries I myself had inflicted on them?

  ‘Daddy.’ Flamey knocked on my armour. ‘I think you should say something to them,’ she whispered.

  That was good advice, and I knew I should follow it if I was to avoid a fresh wave of challengers to my fledgling rule of this place. So, it was speech-time once again.

  ‘I am Hyde, the Hellfire Lord and Champion of the Fourth Ring! If I want something, I take it. If what I want is the healing spells the Blessed of the surface possess, then I take it. It is mine. And so are you. We have a job to do, people, those minotaur bastards aren’t going to kill themselves for us. Stop standing around and get back to work before I amuse myself again with your pain.’

  [Skill: Will of the Infernal Tyrant reached level 3.]

  [Skill: Hades Heal reached level 3]

  Oh? Two whole levels for my Tyrant skill? And for healing? That was … not entirely unexpected, to be honest, considering I had a hundred or so demons constantly under the skill’s psychic influence while performing the type of surgery that would have been difficult under the best of circumstances. The crowd seemed to be happy with how things had turned out, judging by the nods and grins I saw — I probably had my Tyrant skill to thank for it — but no-one moved until Tarashak stepped in.

  ‘You heard the Hellfire Lord! Get back to work, set up the camp properly, we have strategy to discuss!’ he bellowed at the soldiers, then he turned to me. ‘Follow me to my tent.’

  I trudged after the demon with Flamey in tow, while the crowd dispersed and got back to chopping down trees, building more tents, and fending off the occasional monsters that appeared. The tent was quite large, both the roof and the rug under our feet made of a rough, tree bark-like leather I recognised: minotaur skin. Huh! These demons were not messing around. Tarashak sat down on the ghastly rug, and so did Flamey and I.

  ‘Well, that went considerably better than I expected. I never would have thought my troops could accept a weird and small demon lord after just one display of power, and especially not after performing spells that belong to the Blessed.’

  ‘I have my ways,’ I said, now convinced he did not know about my Will of the Infernal Tyrant skill. I was also beginning to understand how the previous demon lord, so looked down on by his general as well as his own daughter, had managed to get everyone to obey him; definitely not just his physical or magical might. And I wasn’t going to let Tarashak in on my discovery and my possession of this skill. ‘So, we are going to discuss strategy, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘The scouts have brought in some stragglers in the past two days, so I have one hundred and seventy-eight soldiers. It’s pitiful. Less than pitiful. But the number will increase.’ He sighed. ‘You, as the lord of this ring, need to start a campaign. Then we can start organising and building up our forces. And then fight.’

  ‘Right. Then that’s what we’ll do,’ I said, and I called up the “military” menu of my Ring Management System interface.

  Fourth Ring Military

  Generals: 1

  Armies: 1

  Garrisons: 0

  Ongoing Campaigns: 0

  Ongoing Invasions of Your Ring: 1

  Ongoing Invasions of a Ring by Your Forces: 0

  Available Ring Energy: 13,805,220

  Please open menu points for more details.

  Cost of adding new, custom menu points: 10,000 Ring Energy (RE).

  It all looked nice and all, and somehow the available Ring Energy points had gone up — whatever it was for — and I had no clue what to do.

  ‘Button!’ I called out, Tarashak unable to hear me with my helmet on.

  ‘Leave Button alone, my man, he’s having a haircut. I’ll talk you through this. I know all about campaigns.’ Burning Darkness butted in the moment I opened my mouth.

  ‘Ooohkay,’ I sighed wearily. ‘So, what am I expected to do?’

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  ‘First of all, designate this … camp as a garrison. Then you’ll have defenses and free up the guys on wildlife-duty.

  I went into the “Garrisons” menu, and found the option to do just that, and chose to designate the demon-made clearing as a garrison, and as per my sword’s instructions, I enabled “defensive measures”.

  ‘Ah, good,’ Tarashak commented.

  I didn’t know how he knew what I’d done, because I hadn’t felt or noticed anything happening. I looked around, and since the tent only consisted of a few posts and a minotaur-leather roof, I could see demons rushing back from the edges of the forest to help setting up more tents and stocking up their supplies in a more-or-less orderly manner. It seemed everyone had noticed the change. Whatever this measure was, it would keep the wildlife out. Useful. And as I looked at the menus, it had cost me — or rather the Fourth Ring coffers — a whopping 34,000 Ring Energy or RE.

  ‘Hellfire Lord, designate Reinos as garrison commander, and give him control of defense of this camp,’ Tarashak suggested, and I did so, costing me another 20,000 RE. The moment I did that, a message popped up.

  [The garrison commander, Reinos, wishes to spend RE on defensive aura emplacements. Authorise?]

  I thought “yes” and checked the result: another 105,000 RE left the coffers. I could see that Reinos hadn’t wasted a single second and purchased an early warning/detection function that covered an area around the camp, roughly half a kilometer radius. Another purchase he’d made was a “defensive field”, which was basically a large-scale aura effect, bolstering our troops’ Hell Mana efficiency, and reducing any enemy unit’s strength and constitution stats, covering the same radius as the detection area.

  ‘Okay, that’s good, that’s good, my man,’ Burning Darkness hummed in approval. ‘Now, you need to start that campaign, and as much as I dislike this Tarashak fellow, you’ll need to put him in charge as he’s your only general currently. Oh, and set the campaign to encompass the entire ring! Then all relevant demons will know if and when they become a part of a campaign objective.’

  While it was as easy to use the menus as any other function on my NeuroHUD, this was making my head spin. I had never had to talk strategy with generals, not even colonels. Or anyone. I was — or had been — a sergeant, a combat medic, which meant I had always been attached to army units — or the occasional marine units if they had a shortage of corpsmen — and that meant following orders from squad or platoon leaders, while having some freedom to act against some orders some of the time, if I deemed it necessary in order to perform my job as a medic and save lives. This whole thing was uncharted territory for me, and not just on account of being in the middle of a demon war in Hell. I hated to admit it, but for now I didn’t have a choice but to do what Tarashak required of me, and what Burning Darkness was telling me I should do. I hoped I would grow into my role as a demon lord sooner or later.

  I opened the “Campaigns” menu, and selected “Start a new campaign”, and since it was asking me to give a name to it, I called it “Death to the Third Ringers”. Then I designated Tarashak as “the general in charge” and I watched the demon’s lipless mouth curl into the biggest grin I’d seen from him so far.

  ‘Good,’ Tarashak said, his vicious smile growing impossibly wide, showing his sharp teeth. A map popped up on my NeuroHUD, apparently something Tarashak could open now as the general in charge. ‘Can you see it?’ he asked.

  ‘I can.’ I nodded.

  The map was of the Fourth Ring in its entirety. The Ring was not a ring, more of a jagged-edged square some five hundred leagues or fifteen-hundred kilometres across. Quite a large territory, and I wondered what the borders looked like or what lay beyond them. Red dots marked cities and settlements, a yellow dot at the southern edge of the place marked the gate between Fourth and Fifth, which was the place I had first arrived. A black dot represented the gate between Fourth and Third at the northern end of the realm. We were currently in the Wilds; these huge swathes of forested lands seemed to cover at least 60% of the Ring. A dark red X marked our new garrison, and a black X appeared not far from us. It was Tarashak who had done that.

  ‘That’s the last known location of the king of the Third Ring,’ he said, his eyes moving as he was studying the map. I was curious if he could see it the same way I did on my NeuroHUD, but I didn’t want to interrupt him as he spoke. ‘If we manage to kill him, we’ll have won; his generals will be cut off from each other, and we can take our time to get rid of them. But he could be anywhere by now. He has the numbers to keep the cities under pressure while he organises his troops to hunt you down so he could claim your title.’

  ‘So, the first and probably most important objective of the campaign is to capture and kill the minotaur king.’ I stated. Having a little bit of knowledge and experience about what a demon lord of a ring meant, I had to agree with him.

  ‘Correct,’ Tarashak agreed.

  ‘Except we don’t have the numbers,’ I commented.

  ‘No,’ he growled angrily.

  ‘What about that gate? How does it work, and am I right in assuming it’s the only way he could get reinforcements from home? Are we in control of it?’

  ‘No, we are not. And yes, he could summon more troops through the gate. If we cut him off from his realm, he’ll only have the troops he already has here,’ Tarashak said, and thus setting another objective for the campaign: control of the gate.

  ‘Okay, so the question is: how do we build up our forces while avoiding the enemy destroying us in the meantime. Am I right?’

  ‘You are. Hm. Graunthal the Whispering Blade and Eksareth the Burning Rage are gone along with their armies, only a few stragglers left. Ugrathar the Painfully Stupid is also gone along with his personal guard. Of the other armies, I’m hoping the most that Riaret the Severing Strike and Kralsen the Dreamer of Pain are still alive and fighting. They are the most capable, not counting myself. The others are … less capable,’ he explained. ‘We’ll need to have the two join you as your generals and have them join the campaign.’

  ‘Hm. Something to think about then.’ I nodded. ‘What about supplies? Food, water, weapons, other stuff, whatever you demons need to keep going?’

  ‘All the cities you see on the map are built around water sources, which are a rare and precious resource. It is also where you’ll find the numerous lower-level demons who took on skills for building and crafting, so it’s the cities that can provide weapons and armour as well.’

  ‘It seems like sooner or later we’ll need to get to a city then. Probably sooner.’

  ‘Yes, the only problem is that the enemy has the numbers to keep our strongest cities and armies at bay so their king can focus on hunting you down without hindrance. With our current numbers, we won’t be able to break a siege.

  ‘So … we don’t have the numbers to make it to a city, but at the same time we can’t build our numbers up if we don’t do exactly that.’ I drew my conclusion.

  ‘Yes, unfortunately,’ Tarashak said, sighing and growling.

  ‘Shitty situation,’ I commented.

  ‘It is,’ he agreed.

  ‘Why are they invading, by the way? The minotaurs, I mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Hm. Resources. Their numbers grew too high I imagine, and their realm can’t provide enough EXP for everyone to grow and Ring Energy for the ring to function properly. This is my guess. Invading another ring is a good way to relieve the pressure and to free up resources, and if the invasion succeeds and a demon lord takes control of a second ring, it solves all problems and increases his own power. Until they’ll have to do it again. And minotaurs breed like no other demons.’

  ‘Okay.’ I sighed. Overpopulation and resources then, a surprisingly common reason for war, if I looked past the fact the resource in question was basically magical energies. I would have thought this was nothing more than demons being violent and doing demonic things. ‘So, can you think of a way to get out of this situation?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it some more,’ he said, sounding rather morose now.

  ‘If big cities and the armies of the other generals are out for now, we could start with smaller settlements. They might not be under siege. Some of them might be completely intact. It’s better than nothing, right?’ I suggested.

  ‘Hm. Right. We might have to do that, although the quality of troops we can get from them will be low. But they will have some water, some crafters and supplies, so that’s good,’ he mused. ‘As you said, Hellfire Lord: better than nothing. I will think on this and make plans.’