by Fuse
“Hmm… If we ignored them, would that lead to trouble?”
“It would. I think it best to allow him to testify to them, if only to see what the Church’s next move will be.”
“Yeah… I’m sure they’re hungry for info, what with there being just three survivors.”
Out of the former king, Edmaris, the court sorcerer, Razen, and Archbishop Reyhiem, it made sense that the Church would want to hear from Reyhiem first. He was the only real candidate out of the three.
“But wasn’t the Church monitoring Veldora? Because right now, it’s true that he’s revived again, but the timeline we’re giving is a bit off from the truth. If we lied to them, wouldn’t they see right through that?”
“You think so? Shall I have him speak the truth, then?”
I thought about this a moment.
The Church could very well be a monkey wrench in our future plans. Ideally, I’d want to engage them in a way that didn’t cause interference between us, but given their flat-out refusal to work with monsters, I didn’t like my chances. Not even the Dwarven Kingdom was on very good terms with the Church. The dwarves’ habit of treating monsters as equals violated their whole doctrine—but it hadn’t erupted into war yet. The two sides were simply ignoring each other.
Should that be what we aim for? I didn’t want to trample over a millennium or so of Church doctrine, but I didn’t want to unconditionally accept it, either. If they wanted all monsters to die, I wasn’t about to lie on my back and wait for the dagger. I had to respect them, and we had to be considerate of each other. If one of us said something the other couldn’t accept, it could lead to war, in the end. A deep understanding of each other would be a must, along with a prudent effort to keep away from any potential land mines in our talks.
Of course, that only applies if the other side plays along. Otherwise, we’d just be deluding ourselves into complacency. If the Church branded us a divine enemy, we’d have to resist that—and I wasn’t afraid to smash them to pieces, if it came to that.
For now, though…
“Hmm. How about I send them a message for the time being? We seized some magic-image-recording thingies from Clayman, right? I’d like to personally record a message with one of them. We can have Reyhiem take it over there and see how the Church reacts.”
“Very well.”
“Great! I will bring one over at once!”
Diablo sagely nodded as Shion ran off to fetch a crystal for me.
A few days had passed now, after Diablo reported that Reyhiem had commenced his journey to the Church, but we had yet to hear any response. The reaction from them was muddled confusion, and I could see why. Veldora was back, and there was a new demon lord in town (i.e., me). Figuring out how to deal with us wasn’t something they could make a snap decision on.
Well, if they didn’t react to me, I didn’t mind. For now, I was satisfied with sitting and waiting to see how things shook out.
The Three Lycanthropeers arrived a while later, along with a procession in the tens of thousands.
They didn’t take nearly as long as I thought. You gotta hand it to these beastmen and magic-born. Just in terms of their core strength, no human could compare with them. With magicules all over this world, they could run on magic when physically exhausted and with their own two feet when magically exhausted. Their marching speed was several times what an army on Earth could manage—and I’m talking about all of them, down to the average beastman on the street. They really were bred for battle.
I didn’t see Gabil among them. Presumably, he was in the rear somewhere, I thought, as Alvis and Sufia came up to greet me.
“Hmm? Isn’t Phobio here?”
“About that,” Sufia began. “Phobio stayed behind to tend to the magic-born we took prisoner.” He was sticking around while Geld was at Clayman’s palace, apparently, to ensure no revolts took place. In other words, they were pushing the boring work on him. Sorry about that, Phobio. But even if Benimaru had bullied him into that role, we did need someone on surveillance. We should appreciate him for working with us instead of pushing the responsibility on someone else.
We had, by this point, fully prepared to accept this crowd. I had worked with Kaijin and Kurobe, our manufacturing specialists, to work out how many people should be assigned to this or that department around town. These were all volunteers with a keen interest in technical work, but we could only accept so many, so we agreed to set up rotational shifts for the more popular work details.
It might be a good idea to build a technical school of some sort around here, I thought as we quietly handled all this work. Someplace where we can provide year-round instruction on what we were doing. It seemed smart to me.
At the very far end of the procession, I finally caught sight of Gabil. “I have returned, Sir Rimuru!” he bellowed from the skies, not looking at all the worse for wear.
“Hey, nice to see you! You put in a fine effort at the battle, I
hear.”
“No, no, I still have so much to learn. Sir Middray, under the service of Lady Milim, practically pummeled me beyond recognition!”
Ah yes, that dragonewt with the crazy strength. Benimaru mentioned him, too.
“Yeah, well, if he worships Milim, he’s gotta like fighting a lot, no doubt. You aren’t exactly a wimp—maybe you just aren’t used to your newly evolved powers yet. You got a while to go.”
I wasn’t sure if this comforted him at all, but I said it anyway. He didn’t look too chagrined, so I was sure he felt the same anyway.
“Ha! I, Gabil, am prepared to expend every effort to live up to your lofty expectations, Sir Rimuru!”
That statement, and that smile, were all the proof I needed.
After I said my hellos to the rest of his force, he suddenly remembered a sheet of paper that he took out from his pocket to show me.
“What’s this?”
“I received this from Lady Milim, my lord. She told me to give it to you.”
What could this be? Nothing good, I was sure. She mentioned stopping by again as we said our goodbyes after the Walpurgis Council. But sure enough, there was her childish scrawl, written haphazardly across the paper.
This is Milim! Next time I visit, I’ll be bringing along some guys who just can’t seem to leave me the heck alone. I want you to teach them everything there is to know about cooking. This is an urgent request, so I figured I’d ask my buddy Rimuru for help!!! Please please please!!!!!
The urgency certainly came through in the message. These hangers-on; was she talking about the Dragon Faithful?
“Uh, did she tell you what this is about?”
“A little bit. I met a member of the Dragon Faithful named Sir Hermes while I was there, and he was kind enough to discuss his following’s internal workings with me.”
The way Gabil described him, Hermes seemed to have a pretty good head on his shoulders. Not battle-obsessed like Middray at all; more of a free spirit, one who had traveled to the Dwarven Kingdom and Western Nations.
Being in the Dragon Faithful, as he explained to Gabil, meant a life of frugality. “He claimed that the food they present to Lady Milim isn’t cooked or prepared in any way whatsoever. Perhaps they share some tastes with us. I’ve never enjoyed a fish that wasn’t best when it was eaten raw, you know.”
I’m not so sure you guys have that much in common, Gabil. Lizardmen’s digestive systems were probably just built that way. But they knew about preparing food, or at least smoking it, and they had a few non-fish staples they enjoyed as well. The Dragon Faithful, meanwhile, didn’t seem like they had heard of the concept of cooking at all. I doubt they were eating raw meat all day, but whatever preparation they did seemed strictly for the purposes of avoiding contamination and nothing more.
“Uh…okay? I thought dragonewts had the same sense of taste as humans.”
“We do, sir, we do! Thanks to my glorious evolution, I have gained the most wondrous, expert set of taste buds. All the bland meals
of my lizardman past pale in comparison to the vast cornucopia of delights I can now sample!”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. So when you eat a good meal, you know how you kinda want to eat it again later on?”
Gabil nodded sagely, growing increasingly excited. “Yes… Yes, now I see your point! This is Sir Hermes’s way of eliminating that Dragon Faithful tradition once and for all, is it not?”
Probably, yeah. Tradition or not, I could read Milim’s mind easily enough. If they worshiped her as a god, though, why were they deliberately ignoring her will? That’s kind of, um, blasphemous, isn’t it? And why can’t Milim just chat about this with them herself? Maybe, in her own unique way, she didn’t want to rock the boat with them. She knew they were only acting out of virtuous intentions, so she put up with that treatment without complaint.
“In that case, we’ll need to give them all the royal treatment, won’t we?”
“Oh, absolutely! A splendid idea, I think!”
We’d need to keep it casual, nonchalant, making sure we didn’t act all high and mighty. Then they could naturally observe, and learn, what made Milim happy. It sounded like a tougher mission than I first thought. Better assemble my team and discuss this later on.
So I instructed Gabil to return to his research in the cave. Vester was putting in a full effort down there at the moment, but we still didn’t have a large enough team. Losing Gabil’s crew must have been a major blow to their progress.
“Right. I shall be off, then!”
“Yep. We will also consider your reward at our next conference, so I’d like to have you in attendance.”
“Yes, my lord!”
Pride filled Gabil’s face as he flew off. He must’ve just remembered that I appointed him to Tempest leadership earlier.
A month had passed since Walpurgis, and with all the new people, things were running at a fever pitch around town. In the midst of it, Geld finally Spatial Motioned back. It was the first time I had seen him in a while, and he looked pretty beat-up.
“I…it’s good to see you again, Geld.”
He heaved a sigh at my pensive greeting. “I have to say, Sir Rimuru, I look up to you more than ever now.”
“Whoa! Where’d that come from?”
There was no doubting the respect in his voice as he turned his weary eyes to me. I hadn’t done anything of note recently, so I had no idea what he was talking about. What happened to him in the space of a few weeks?
“Well…”
The story Geld had for me was a classic tale of incompetence among new hires. He had organized the prisoners into groups, deploying them to this or that allied force. That much went well. After that, he commended these troops in the midst of their surveying and land-clearing work…but certain problems quickly made themselves known.
High orcs had no problem using Thought Communication to chat with one another, working as a team even in silence, but we’d need a different plan with the mix of magic-born involved here. Verbal instructions couldn’t be understood—and besides, a lot of the main staff, Geld included, weren’t that great at making themselves clear. It’s one thing to be capable of something, but quite another to explain it clearly and lucidly to others. Lots of artisans like him faced the same problem.
This meant that as ruthlessly efficient as Geld and his team were, things fell apart when anyone else got involved. The results were boundlessly frustrating to him. The magic-born weren’t great fans of being ordered around, either, so even if you carefully showed them what to do in person, many of them weren’t interested in meekly copying your actions. Those that were, as Geld put it, still weren’t up to his grade of quality. I could see that. More people didn’t always mean better work. Put together a crowd of idiots, and all you had was a mob on your hands. That was why education was so important.
“Show them, convince them, let them try, and praise them—only then will a man be moved.”
That’s a quote from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, and it’s something that I think anyone in a leadership position needs to take to heart. It expertly encapsulates the difficulties of leading and instructing people, and it also shows that people find real pride and meaning in their work only when recognized by others.
Listening to Geld’s grumbling reminded me of the more painful moments of my office job, in my previous life. Work staff who never listened to you, people down the ladder who tried hiding their mistakes, bosses who attempted to push the blame on someone else. It wasn’t wine and roses for me back then, either. A lot of good memories, too, but get me started on the bad ones, and I could go all night.
And whenever I had it really rough:
“All right, Geld! Let’s have a drink!”
I slapped him on the shoulder. Rewarding the staff for hard work was part of any boss’s job, and one way to do that was to let them vent their grievances and work out everything in their system. I needed to pay special attention to Geld, given how much responsibility he felt for his work—and so we drank the night away, while Geld aired out all his pains and concerns and I carefully listened.
I planned to assemble the leadership for a conference the next morning—but before that, I called Hakuro over for a private chat, contacting him via Thought Communication the previous night. I traveled to his quarters at sunrise.
“Sir Rimuru,” he greeted me, almost choked with emotion, “coming over personally to see me…” He didn’t look as tired as Geld.
“Sorry to put you through all this grueling work.”
“Oh, not at all, not at all. We’ve sifted through the prisoners now, so my job is almost done. I have to say, though, Geld has it far worse. I finished transferring leadership over last night, so there’s no need for me to go back over there, at least.”
“Geld… Yeah, sounds like he had it tough. After I contacted you yesterday, he and I drank for a while, and it sounds like he’s got a lot on his mind, you know? Like, up to now he’s been able to just shut off his brain and focus on his work, but directing prisoners on the job site was a huge challenge for him.”
“Indeed. He would have it easier if he was willing to compromise on matters, but he was always far too serious-minded for that.”
As Hakuro explained, it would’ve been easy to use force to corral this motley band of magic-born, coercing them into following commands. But if you do that, you can’t expect a top-quality job to result from it. You’d have to settle here and there, and as an artisan, those results wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Geld.
“I have something else to report to you, Sir Rimuru…”
But to Hakuro, that was Geld’s problem. He turned back toward me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Clayman, as you know, ruled over what was called the Puppet Nation of Dhistav, a land where the majority of people are in the slave class. These are entirely dark elves, no other species, and well over a thousand of them were tasked with maintaining and managing the castle grounds alone.”
“Right. So?”
“Well…as they described it to me, Dhistav used to be home to a kingdom of elves…”
Elves? The denizens of the Sorcerous Dynasty of Thalion descended from elves, too, didn’t they? Is there a common ancestor here? Maybe not—we’re talking pretty well out of the way, geography-wise.
“…and remarkably enough, some elven ruins remain in the land. The dark elves described themselves as keepers of their graves.”
“Oh?”
Grave tenders? Over what sort of graves? Elves had life expectancies of who knows how long, besides.
“So you’re saying there are these well-guarded, untouched ruins from an ancient kingdom just lying around?”
This was big news to me. Ruins like these were dotted all over the world, often raided by the hunter-gatherer adventurers who made treasure hunting their line of work. Most of them didn’t have a very good time at it. Only a precious few ruins had been discovered at all, and those that we
re had already been picked clean a while ago. But if there was a brand-new cache of ruins to explore and exploit…
“Hakuro, I’m classifying this discovery a state secret. Don’t tell anyone about this for the time being—not until I go there and survey things for myself.”
“Yes, my lord,” he said quietly, nodding. He must’ve understood how vital this could potentially be.
If I had to guess, Clayman derived much of his riches from the things discovered in these sites. He had to. That would explain all the Artifacts and magic items Geld told me they recovered. But does that mean we should just…you know, take them over?
I decided to hold off on judgment for now. The secret seemed to be safe with the dark elves; word wouldn’t get out unless we wanted it to. This was demon lord territory, forbidden lands that no adventurers dared to approach. Better to go slowly on these ancient ruins—trying to overextend ourselves to all of them at once was too likely to backfire.
Everyone was now seated at our main meeting hall. I surveyed them all from my specially made slime seat.
“Um, right. Hello, everyone. As some of you already know, I have been promoted to demon lord!”
“““Congratulations!!”””
They all shouted their tidings to me, happy and excited whether they knew or not. I was just as happy. I had safely weathered a major storm.
“It was a long journey, indeed, yes,” Rigurd observed, “but we have finally made it.” Uh, Rigurd, it hasn’t even been two years since we met, right?
Rigur, meanwhile, was crying like a baby. “Truly astounding! Seeing our leader become a demon lord fills me with so much emotion…”
Shion sneered at the crowd like this was all inevitably going to happen. “It is the start of a new era for Sir Rimuru!”
Though, really, it was an emotional time for me, too. The only problem left was essentially the Western Holy Church. If I could handle them, it’d be easy street on the way to creating the ideal environment I’m looking for.