by Fuse
Said talks came all too quickly—as did the signing.
Several days later, the great nation of Farmus, with all its proud history, had signed an armistice and a peace treaty with the Jura-Tempest Federation. On the surface, Farmus had recognized Tempest as a nation, and while formal relations were a ways away, they could no longer flout international law when dealing with them. At the same time, Tempest was not a member of the Council of the West, the Western Nations’ primary legislative body, so even if Farmus did stage another invasion, there was little anyone could do to legally stop them.
Tempest had attained nation status only in the most basic of definitions. But this treaty proved, once and for all, that this new country called Tempest could defend itself. It was led by the demon lord Rimuru, who boasted the Storm Dragon as a key ally, and in just over two years, he had laid claim to the entire Forest of Jura. Whatever he was, he was a nonhuman brilliant beyond any human measure. Considering that, no nation dared to open hostilities with Tempest. Compared with the potential profits waiting to be reaped, the projected losses were just too great. It could even knock out the attacking country entirely.
From that day forward, Rimuru began to be treated as an impenetrable leader, a disaster-class demon lord—and thus, without major difficulty, the first part of his plan was completed…
…exactly as Diablo had pictured it.
CHAPTER 2
ROLES TO UPHOLD
Shuna and Soei were the first to return to town the morning after Diablo’s report.
“I have returned safely!” Shuna proclaimed, rubbing her cheeks. She had apparently exhausted her magical force in battle, requiring several hours of recuperation before she could cast Spatial Motion. I could just use Dominate Space to pop myself over to where I wanted, but Shuna’s relative lack of magicule storage meant she could only tap so much magic per day. Soei could’ve used Shadow Motion himself, but he waited, thinking it gauche to return first despite being Shuna’s guard. Even now, several of his replications were patrolling Clayman’s main base—I guess nothing too dicey was happening right now.
“And where’s Hakuro?”
“I asked him to clean things up for me,” Shuna replied with a smile as Soei averted his eyes. So they threw all that work on him, huh? Hakuro, unable to use Spatial Motion, didn’t have much recourse if they left him alone. But I dunno, he always saw Shuna as kind of a beloved granddaughter anyway. Maybe he didn’t mind that treatment too much.
Currently, he was working with Geld to investigate Clayman’s castle, divvy up the war spoils, and command the prisoner-handling process. I gave him an internal word of thanks for handling all that boring follow-up for me. It must be a ton of work, but an amateur like me couldn’t offer much help. I think I’ll just keep mum unless asked.
Benimaru and the others made it home by that evening.
“Huh? What’s our chief general doing back here?” I asked.
“Hee-hee… With the war over, there is no reason for me to stay there forever. So I gave my command over to my talented officers, and we left the scene.”
He seemed remarkably invigorated. I guess this means Benimaru let the Three Lycanthropeers handle the rest. I could see the anguished faces of Alvis and his cohorts in my mind.
Those two, Benimaru and Shuna—guess they really are siblings, huh? They just pulled the exact same trick on their subordinates. I wish they would learn a little responsibility from someone like me—
Understood. I believe this to be the result of following your example, Master.
I didn’t ask you to “believe” anything! Besides, you know that has to be wrong. Did something go haywire in the circuits between morphing from the Great Sage to Raphael?
Negative. Such a phenomenon has not been detected.
Oh, sure. Deny it. I bet that part of its logic got extensively upgraded. Better let it slide—it’s not an argument I’d ever win anyway.
I decided to turn my attention back to Benimaru. “So is Gabil still at the battlefield?”
“He is, yes. He has kindled a friendship with one Middray, a priest in the service of Lady Milim, and they are tackling the post-battle cleanup together.”
“Ah. So Geld’s in Clayman’s castle, and Gabil is outside?”
Even Gabil’s lending a hand, huh? Between him and Geld, it was a relief to see all these people handling the practical side of warfare for me. I could really rely on ’em. War, after all, didn’t end after you won it. Things got even hairier afterward, especially given how we captured nearly all of Clayman’s forces alive. There were untold numbers of prisoners, on the field and in the castle, most of them capable of labor. We guaranteed them all their lives, so we’d have to step up and take care of them. At least they were magic-born, not human, so you didn’t have to worry that much about upkeep—although even they would get grumpy if you didn’t feed them.
Whether someone held a grudge against you after losing a battle or not, the victor was responsible for what happened afterward. Transporting all the POWs from the site at once was a major job. I didn’t want them revolting when our eyes weren’t on them, so we’d need guards on patrol at all times. Disarming a magic-born didn’t neutralize them much as a threat, either. This world had magic and skills. Thinking about it, no wonder the take-no-prisoners approach was preferred up to now, huh?
If only there was a surefire way to make them do our bidding…
“Oh, nothing to worry about there,” Benimaru said, that easygoing smile still on his face. “I brought them all together and simply, ah, coerced them to see things our way.”
“Um… Yes. Good.”
I instinctively nodded. No need to ask what exactly they talked about, I’m sure. Some of the prisoners must’ve been around to see Benimaru burn Charybdis to a crisp, and once word got around about that, I doubted too many of ’em would want to try their luck. Besides, the Three Lycanthropeers were there, and beastmen seemed like well-qualified candidates for prisoner management.
“So I guess we won’t see Gabil back here for a while?”
“Likely not. He can’t use Spatial Motion, so I suppose he will return with the Lycanthropeers.”
He’d fly back once things settled down, I imagined. But hang on—
“Wait, the Lycanthropeers are coming, too?”
Why them? They weren’t planning on bringing all the sheltered citizens and disarmed prisoners back here, were they?
“Well,” Benimaru replied, “remember how Lady Milim blew the Eurazanian capital to pieces? We were talking about housing them in our nation for the time being.”
As he put it, the beastmen were hardy enough that they could march all the way over here without complaint. Which wasn’t what I was asking about, but…okay?
“We really can’t take all of them, can we?”
It took ages to set up campsites for the twenty thousand we took in last time. Even worse, Geld and his team of high orc engineers, whom I’d usually rely on for jobs like this, were busy elsewhere. We had some extra land available—space we cleared for future development—but again, organizing camps would be a huge hassle.
“We discussed that with Geld and Alvis,” Benimaru explained. “We’ve decided to divide the prisoners into rough brigades. They’ll be sent to a variety of destinations, actually.”
Well, that’s a relief. And it sounded like they were pretty carefully screening each of them. If a prisoner had a village to return to, they were sent off by themselves. Only the beastmen seeking to learn a trade or skill would come to Tempest. Beastmen or magic-born with muscle, meanwhile, would stay on-site and serve under the command of Geld’s team, redeveloping the vacant land that used to be Eurazania.
With Carillon stepping down from his demon lord post and joining Milim’s side, Eurazania was now technically Milim territory. It was situated south of the Forest of Jura, spread out in the middle of a vast, fertile land, and plans were underway to construct a palace for Milim in the area. I had suggested to her that she
ought to move her capital there, since they were building it from scratch anyway, and she instantly agreed to it. No further discussion. That’s so Milim.
Thinking about it, though, I realized Milim didn’t exactly have a…staff, per se. Middray and the rest of the Dragon Faithful were her servants, in a way, but—at least on paper—they merely worshiped Milim; they weren’t bound to her at all. Thus “relocating the capital” was an odd way to put it, since she didn’t really have a capital to start with, but I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Carillon and Frey both readily agreed with the idea, and so we plunged into the construction of a new city. Our funding was provided by Clayman’s hoard of gold, silver, and treasure; we had a ready group of POW laborers being organized and assigned work details; and Benimaru and Geld had things going so smoothly over there, I had nothing to be concerned about.
I was constantly amazed at their growth. Hey, Tamura! Remember me? Your boss, who had to explain everything to you fifty times and you still couldn’t do it right? Yeah, I have this entire horde of monsters who do better work than you!
The way Benimaru put it, we would be housing fewer people in Tempest proper than last time.
“So we won’t need to set up any new temporary housing?” I asked him.
“No, I think we should be fine. But it will not only be beastmen; we have magic-born prisoners as well. We had best make sure everyone is aware of that and exercises suitable caution.”
“I see,” Rigurd said with a nod. “Very well. I will explain matters to everyone.”
These guys are soooo reliable. I didn’t even need to order them around; they could make their own decisions. Wait… Couldn’t these guys get along without me by this point? The thought made me feel a tad isolated.
One evening, a few days after Benimaru’s return, Diablo entered my office carrying a box painted black.
“Our negotiations proceeded as planned, Sir Rimuru. This box contains proof of our peace agreement and one part of the reparations, totaling fifteen hundred stellar gold coins.”
Oops. Forgot about that. Today was peace-talks day, huh? He said I didn’t need to show up, so forgetting about it wasn’t a big deal, really…but I still felt a bit guilty. I felt like everyone else was working hard on this huge work project, and I was just sitting at my desk playing solitaire. Not that I was, but still. I didn’t want to be a lonely despot, after all.
Or that was how I consoled myself as Diablo presented the box to me.
“Ah, excellent. That’s more stellars than we expected, no?”
He had demanded the outrageous sum of ten thousand. As I found out later, nobody was sure whether ten thousand stellars were even in circulation worldwide. “We can only create one stellar gold coin per month,” King Gazel claimed when I asked. “Our kingdom did not begin minting them until a fairly long time after our founding, so I imagine they have some rarity value!” He had a point—there were hundreds of times more garden-variety gold coins flowing around.
And now I had fifteen hundred of them here. Over 10 percent of the entire world’s supply. It made my head swim. You could really see how strong Farmus was, being able to scrape this up.
“I guess Farmus really is a superpower, isn’t it? I’m impressed they collected so many.”
“Perhaps. But it seems the majority of this was seized from the personal coffers of King Edmaris himself.”
According to Diablo, most of these stellars were the personal property of the king, left in the vaults with no particular use to speak of. They had the backing of the Dwarven Kingdom, were worth loads of cash, and boasted artistic value as well, so they had been the property of the royal family for much of its long history.
“Luckily, King Edmaris’s thought process was as I had planned it. With no knights to protect his family, he reasoned, he was bound to lose it all once the nobles clashed with him anyway.”
So he cleaned out the royal vaults ahead of time. I see.
“…So does that mean we’re gonna have civil war soon?”
“No doubt, my lord,” a smiling Diablo replied. “The remaining balance exists in the form of an outstanding loan, but I doubt the new king will abide by that agreement for long.”
Taking the potential new king into consideration, Diablo had gone out of his way to have Edmaris’s younger brother Edward take the throne, instead of the young Edgar. This was done with Edmaris’s agreement; everyone involved felt it was the only way forward. Normally, the former king would be rewarded with a dukedom for his service to the country, but Edmaris turned this down, renouncing his post and becoming a viscount. In this role, he would be shortly moving to a small patch of rural land in the countryside—not far from Earl Nidol Migam’s own lands, near the Forest of Jura.
To everyone’s eyes, it looked like Edmaris had lost his lust for power. In which case…
Report. The Farmus forces who refuse to pay the remaining reparations will likely move to push all responsibility for this affair on Edmaris.
Yep. It was all going the way Diablo meant it to.
“Nidol’s domain of Migam is home to Yohm’s band, too. This way, they can come help out if anything happens, huh?”
“Indeed, my lord,” he replied, still smiling while Shion listened on behind me, scowling. Or maybe not listening. She probably tuned it out once she realized it was all way over her head. But I wasn’t talking about her.
Hmmm. Nidol’s land bordered Jura’s. By country standards, it was midsize, boasting its own Free Guild branch and a fairly decent population. If you were going to start a popular movement, it wasn’t a bad spot for it. That’s where Yohm was, and he was famous around those parts, hailed as a champion and broadly supported by his people.
“If the new king tried abandoning Edmaris, could Yohm stop him?”
“He could, sir. And having Sir Yohm denounce that new king for his insincerity would no doubt lead to conflict.”
So Yohm siding with Edmaris would lead to a pretty natural clash of wills, then. Sounds about perfect. If the new king really did pay off his debt to us, it’d be hard to do much else against him. We’d have to brace ourselves for the long haul, aiming to take Farmus down bit by bit. But Diablo was thinking two steps ahead of me, manipulating the minds and wills of the people to gain his results. In that case, things could very likely start moving in a hurry.
There was no doubt that the new king would try to get Edmaris out of the picture pronto. If the government was able to capture him, our plans would be ruined. Of course, we could ignore that new king and just push on in anyway, but that’d come at the cost of whatever trust the international community has in us. Always have the moral upper hand. That’s how the human world worked.
“Well, keep a vigilant watch, all right? Can you manipulate the new king’s side without getting too many people killed?”
“If that’s what you seek, yes. Allow me, Diablo, to handle it.”
So reliable. He’s almost scarily smart. If I left it to him, he seemed ready to accomplish well near anything.
“Then do it. If you’re short on war funds, you can use these stellars if you want.”
I placed a thousand of the coins into my Stomach and pushed the remaining five hundred in his direction.
Fortunately for us, all our wounded were now fully recovered. Apart from paying personal visits to their beds, I wasn’t called upon to do much of anything for them. A thousand was almost too much reparation, and we had also thoroughly looted Clayman’s home base of its valuables, so financially we were doing pretty damn well, I thought. Much of our newfound fortune would be spent on future urban development, but we had enough breathing room to provide Yohm whatever he needed.
Despite my intentions, Diablo smiled and shook his head. “I deeply appreciate your concern, Sir Rimuru, but it will not be necessary. As laid out in my plan, if you can provide me with a suitable army, the rest will take care of itself. That, or if you grant me permission to wage battle myself—”
“
Uh, no, that’s fine. I’ll give you all the troops you need, so instead of that, I need you to lay low as much as you can, all right?”
I had reason to cut him off. I knew how much of a freaky unknown Diablo was, so I definitely didn’t want to use him in the wrong place and expose myself like an idiot. Unleashing him against human armies would be far too one-sided—all it’d do was make people fear us. We’d be further away from a common understanding than ever, and I wanted us to have as amicable a relationship as possible. Besides, we had all the war power we needed. We had no enemies; not in public, at least. Even with Geld’s team tied up with engineering work, Benimaru and his army alone would be enough. Farmus, with the majority of its fighting force gone, was not a threat to us.
So I decided to just prepare reinforcements if necessary and use this stellar windfall to invest in the new nation Yohm was poised to build.
This was enough to convince Diablo. “Very well. I will remain firmly behind the scenes.”
“Right. You know, Shion, you could learn a thing or two from Diablo.”
“What?! When have I ever lost my head and failed to follow your will, Sir Rimuru?!”
I tried to throw a word of advice toward Shion like this now and again. She seriously never seemed to realize she did anything wrong. Yeesh. I guess that’d be a long-term project, gradually instilling in her mind that going berserk all the time wasn’t such a hot idea. It made me heave an internal sigh. Something told me it’d be a while before I could trust her with solo missions.
After finishing his report, Diablo brought up another question, as if it had just occurred to him.
“Sir Rimuru, the Western Holy Church has reportedly tried make contact with Reyhiem, one of my pawns. He has received a summons to visit their headquarters and explain the situation with the hostilities in Farmus. What do you think about that?”
Reyhiem? He was the archbishop of Farmus or whatever, right? Now he was just one of Diablo’s faithful dogs, but ignoring a Church summons sounded like a bad idea.