by Fuse
Beautiful… As sweet as a young girl, but such an overwhelming presence in person. This Rimuru, lord of the monsters—he is a fearsome demon lord, indeed. Merely thinking about him makes terror erupt from the bottom of my soul.
There was no way the king could ever put his own majesty above him any longer. The fear in his heart made the thought of defying him unthinkable. He had been rendered helpless, a cube in a box, forced to devour his own limbs. He never wanted to experience that again, and now he had to convince the ministers to see things his way.
In his mind flashed images of defeat and the assorted types of torture he had endured—and in between, the monster’s town, far more orderly than he had guessed. The birth of a new demon lord and the resurrection of the Storm Dragon. It was all the truth, and Edmaris knew it meant bitter defeat for him. Stained by greed, he had made a terrible error. If he had approached on friendlier terms, perhaps they could’ve worked together in a far different situation. But the time for that was gone.
No further errors would be allowed.
Diablo advised him that he was free to respond to these three conditions any way he wanted. In other words, his reply didn’t much matter. Diablo’s goals would be met either way. Instead, the king reasoned, his duty was simply to keep the fallout to a minimum—and that was the approach he took as he gathered his thoughts.
The choice for number three was a given. Further war would mean annihilation, from the king to the lowliest citizen. The second question was more worthy of debate, since it meant the people’s lives and livelihoods would be guaranteed. The glimpses he enjoyed of the monster town’s skyline were still fresh on his mind. He had even seen adventurers among them, smiling and laughing with their monster friends.
Perhaps it is not so bad a fate after all…
Edmaris enjoyed the fantasy for a moment but quickly dispelled it from his mind. It could never happen. Nobody would trust in a monster; not unless they saw that city for themselves. I laughed it off as the ravings of a madman myself…
The nobility had a duty to keep their people safe. If they opted for unconditional surrender and life as a vassal state, it could overturn the entire nation. The neighboring kingdoms would resist, no doubt, and it was doubtful the resolution would pass parliament. A king had the right to force his will upon his subjects, of course, but the assassination attempts would no doubt come along shortly after.
So far, question one offered the most obvious decision. Abdication meant that Edmaris would step down, handing the crown over to someone else, and be made to swear never to wage war again. There was a demand for reparations, yes, and while there was no legal basis for that, it was difficult for him to turn it down. It would lead to a much faster, and cheaper, peace than continuing this war would.
There was no guarantee that the monsters wouldn’t pile on more demands later. But with these two in particular, he could tell they had a solid aim in mind.
Diablo had extensively interviewed King Edmaris, and as he did, he made it clear that Yohm would become king of a newly established nation. Edmaris had three children—two girls and one boy, the youngest. His daughters were married off to noble families abroad, which left his ten-year-old son the only viable heir. If the king abdicated now, there was every chance of a bloody power struggle. The king even had an idea of who would aim for his throne—that would be Edward, his half brother and head of the nobility faction in this palace.
Reading that far in, Edmaris could tell what Diablo wanted. He sought to take advantage of this potential power struggle and make the royalists and nobility fight against one another. In fact, this was bound to happen no matter what decision he made. Whatever he chose, Diablo could easily factor it into his own plans.
The king sighed to himself.
…So it just doesn’t matter?
And if it didn’t, if the results were the same regardless…
“All right, everyone. Allow me to state my views.”
Just when the debate was starting to die down, King Edmaris began to speak.
“The nation of monsters calls itself the Jura-Tempest Federation. It is a gathering of assorted species of monsters, all bound together by an overseer by the name of Rimuru. I do not feel it is such a bad thing to join them in this federation…”
“You seek to become a vassal state?”
“No, not like that. I am merely stating my belief that their nation is governed in a surprisingly peaceful manner.”
He stopped for a moment, allowing the audience to gauge just how resolute his expression was.
“This war was a mistake. It was not for the sake of our people, but of my own greed. That is why the heavens saw fit to forsake me. The price of that made Veldora rise from the dead and spread the seeds of disaster across Farmus. If I had followed the Marquis of Muller and the Earl of Hellman’s advice, none of this would have happened…”
“My liege, please, none of this is…”
“We are unworthy of your great modesty, Your Majesty.”
“Thank you,” the king said, nodding in heartfelt appreciation. “There is no longer a second chance for us. None. Thanks to Sir Rimuru, lord of the monsters, I stand here before you now. There is no ‘next time.’ One more incorrect decision, and the flames of war will descend not just upon me, but upon all our people. My pride and honor no longer matter. All I want to do, at the very least, is ensure my people are not engulfed by those flames. What can we do to steer things in a better direction? What will make our people happier? That is what I want us all to consider!”
The ministers froze in surprise. Their cold, calculating king, always putting his own profit ahead of everything else, admitting to his mistakes and calling upon his advisers to come up with a better idea. Their shock was understandable. They all looked wide-eyed at their king, reflecting upon their own thoughts. The selfishness within them, as they used pride or whatnot as an excuse to protect their own assets, was now all too obvious to them.
Every last one of them stood up, then kneeled before their king.
“My liege,” Muller said on their behalf, “we apologize. We were all foolish. We must seek out a better path…for our nation and for our people!”
The rest of them shouted out their Hear! Hear!s as their heads touched the floor.
The talks continued well into the ensuing night, as Yohm and his team were invited to participate as advisers.
“I believe I did a fairly good job of shaking them up,” Diablo reported, smiling.
Whoa! Wait a sec! There’s so much I could comment on there, I hardly knew where to begin. But I suppose the biggest issue was:
“You showed them that thing?”
“I did, sir. I thought it the best way to instill fear in their minds.”
Wow. He showed it to them. That…meat cube. Shion acted awfully proud about it, not that I did anything to encourage her. No crap they’re scared, man! If this was before my slime reincarnation, I totally would’ve been blowing chunks. That’s the kind of impact that thing had.
Like, this is totally demon lord territory I’m stepping into now, isn’t it? I tried to keep a clean image, and now that’s being replaced with something downright terrifying. What’s done is done, I guess, but still. Mixing the terror with the relief seems like an easy way to earn their trust in us, at least, even if it is an approach the yakuza would use.
I hopped off Shion’s lap. Some tea, in human form, sounded good. I needed to relax and switch gears a bit.
“With regards to the peace talks, my lord, I have requested ten thousand stellar gold coins in reparations.”
Bpph!!
I spat out all the tea in my mouth. Ten thousand stellars? I mean, yeah, I did ask him to use reparations as a wedge to drive between the king and nobility, but that figure’s beyond unreasonable. It deviated so far from reality that I wasn’t sure the neighboring countries would see it as fair at all. Bartering was still the preferred method of trade in this world—currency was the norm in population cente
rs like Blumund or Englesia, but over in the farming villages, people could go their whole lives without seeing anything more valuable than a silver coin. In other words, money had a lot more value here than I originally gave it credit for.
One copper coin was about ten cents, one silver coin about ten dollars, and one gold coin about a thousand. That was the general understanding I worked with, but even that only applied in the big cities. In real life, the differences were even starker. For example, your average laborer in the city earned six silver coins a day, 150 per month—around $1,500. In the villages, meanwhile, you wouldn’t even make a hundred silvers a year. That’s less than a thousand to live off. The economic disparity in this place is nuts.
Of course, there weren’t as many diversions to blow your income on. You probably weren’t throwing your money around all that much. Really, coinage didn’t hold much purpose at all for a lot of people. To put it one way, disparity or not, your living circumstances didn’t change that much from social class to social class. And if you consider the lack of any international financial organization dictating the terms of the economy, maybe it was healthier this way anyway.
This meant, perhaps, that right now was our best shot at building an economic superpower. Diablo’s a smart guy. When he heard me talking about multiple races sharing one another’s prosperity earlier, he immediately connected that to economic domination. We needed a distribution network, one capable of bringing products from low- to high-demand areas, and coinage was a must for that. Taking control of the flow of money would let us essentially dictate the world economy.
There were many local currencies used by the world’s nations, but in practice, the coin of the Dwarven Kingdom was the main one in use. It would be easy to build a world economic sphere reliant upon a single currency. I could imagine that being on Diablo’s mind as he made his moves.
Getting back on topic, despite my initial impression, it turns out that money in this world was treated more like one copper = $1, one silver = $100, and one gold = $10,000. Ten thousand stellar gold coins, then, meant we were asking for war reparations to the tune of $10 billion. This wasn’t Japan. There wasn’t as much stuff all over the place, no great need for a national budget to be that massive. Thinking along those lines, the figure we asked for was astronomical.
“Don’t you think that’s going way too far?”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh… No, it is not a problem. I gave them three choices, but there is only one real answer. Question three hardly deserves debate, and neither does question two. The only real decision to make is on question one, and it is from there that their negotiations will begin, I suppose.” He then added with a laugh, “As much as I’d like them to go my way on question three, however…”
He was right. There was only one real choice. Would they try to talk us down on the price? Nah, they weren’t that dumb. They might ask for payments spread out every ten years, perhaps, if they couldn’t cover it now.
“I have no intention of offering a discount,” advised Diablo. “Farmus will be forced to give in to our demands. However, I doubt it will ever come to pass anyway. If that amount of coinage leaves their markets, the effects on their economy would be staggering.”
Yeah, I’ll bet. I knew Diablo was doing this on purpose.
“I suppose what they’ll decide to do is force the obligation on some third party.”
Oh?
Here was what Diablo pictured. Basically, they’d make a deposit, then pay off the balance with something else. That way, even if the owner of that something else refused to back it up with coin, that was no longer any of the kingdom’s business. They’d be off the hook, and if we complained about it, they can turn us away and claim they lived up to their end of the bargain. The approach would only work if you were dealing with a very stupid adversary, but if we fell for it, there could be trouble.
“What would we do then?”
“It is all factored into the plan. I am sure we can recover at least a thousand stellars, and that would wrap up the first part of the operation.”
Huh? Hang on.
“How do you know we can earn that much?”
“Oh, that? Simple.”
To sum up, it was because Farmus simply didn’t have much immediate use for the stellars. That actually made sense, if you think about it. With one coin worth six or seven figures, trying to make change for them must’ve been a huge pain in the ass. It was nothing more than a hoard unless you were engineering some huge deals, and they’d likely figure—in Diablo’s estimation—that coughing up a decent number wouldn’t affect them all that much, day-to-day.
Gold coins were what drove the national budget most of the time, so the stellars were more like securities, inaccessible under normal circumstances. In a world without banks, you couldn’t generate interest off them. So maybe they wouldn’t put up much of a fight about them after all.
Well played, Diablo. I was willing to meet them in the middle and ask for somewhere between a hundred and three hundred stellars. About $1 million per victim on our end, plus a little consideration for the roofs and stuff we had to repair. That was the minimum I was comfortable with, so if Diablo thought he could extract a thousand, then I had no problem with going to the bargaining table. A cool billion was still more than enough for anything I could imagine.
Diablo, meanwhile, wasn’t content with just that. He was also formulating a plan to trigger civil war inside Farmus. Scary guy.
“What more do you really need from them if we’re already recouping our losses?”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh. King Edmaris may be freed, but he is now my willing puppet. He is under the thrall of my Tempter skill, so I can will him to do anything I want, to some extent. In other words…”
With Tempter activated, Diablo had life-and-death power over the king. He couldn’t fully take over his consciousness or anything, but Diablo had the right to “will” him dead at any moment. As long as he kept following his orders, all was well, but if he showed any signs of rebellion, Diablo would immediately spot them. He could kill the guy right then and there, and if he understood that, a betrayal just wasn’t going to happen. Controlling people with terror is a pretty scary skill, huh? Everything’s fine if you don’t cross Diablo, but still.
Anyway, that’s how Diablo was observing King Edmaris’s behavior. As he hoped for, the king primarily deliberated over question one and seemed ready to abandon the throne. He had asked Muller and Hellman to call upon Edmaris to take responsibility for this crisis, but that no longer seemed to be necessary.
I guess Diablo had been building relationships with the royalists in the castle, too—something that deviated from the original plan a little but actually worked out for the better, as he explained it. When Edmaris abdicates, the foundation of power he built goes with him—and with that, it becomes easier to pin the blame for everything on him. “With the Royal Knight Corps dead by your hand,” Diablo told me, “there is no one left to protect the royal family. Right now, antagonizing the nobility spells death for Edmaris. He’ll have to answer their every need—at least, on the surface.”
Nobody was around to speak for the king. The nobles wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of that—which goes into the third party Diablo mentioned. War would be the only thing to come from that. The nobility wanted to make King Edmaris into a sacrifice, and the king was racking his brain for ways to fight back.
So…what next, then? The royalists didn’t have an army; they were bound to be pummeled. How can we avoid that?
Understood. The best approach would be to bring in Yohm’s force and retain a cooperative relationship. This would allow for…
Oh. Right. Yohm’s connected with me. Edmaris knows I want him to become king, and if he makes concrete moves toward that…
Maybe an immediate handover of the crown wasn’t too realistic, but if we could frame it as Yohm saving the king’s life, perhaps it could look like a ruined royal family passing the torch on to another generation.
“So the king’s going to take Yohm, and us, as his allies?”
Diablo beamed. “Yes. A very wise assertion.”
Oh, I was right?
Having us as an ally would give Edmaris a force that made his Royal Knight Corps look like a bunch of kids. The nobility, carried away and assuming they had an easy win, would be slaughtered at the hands of Yohm the champion.
“So should we give Yohm more resources?”
“We should. Razen, who is also under my command, has been instructed to contact us when the time comes, so I hope I can count on you for that.”
That’s Diablo for you. He’s got all his men at work so he can kick back and relax. He was taking the motto Be prepared to its most elegant extremes.
Razen, though, huh? This super-great guy, the protector of the kingdom and all that? Guess that didn’t matter to Diablo. But no point dwelling on that.
“So can Yohm beat them, though? What if some other pretender to the throne forms an alliance with the neighboring kingdoms?”
“I am having Sir Fuze and King Gazel pressure their governments not to intervene. I think that is a possibility we can safely ignore. If it does come to pass, however, I will enter the battle myself, so don’t worry.”
All I could do was nod at his supreme confidence. Diablo’s totally intent on staying behind the scenes, isn’t he? Crazy to think he’s basically letting all these other people take down an entire kingdom for him. Raphael was also telling me the chances of an alliance were dim, so I had no complaints.
I gave the kneeling Diablo a pat on the shoulder.
“All right. I’ll leave that to you, then. Let me know if anything happens.”
“Yes, my lord! I assure you that everything is in good hands!”
So now I had been briefed on the general outline. Just when I was checking up on the little details, Haruna came in with a new dessert—something to accompany the tea, as she put it.