Agner
Fate.
The idea that our paths are determined for us from the moment we are born and we cannot stray from them.
For better or for worse, all things are decided by fate.
What a foolish way of thinking.
But while it is not fate per se, there does exist a certain flow of events that cannot be disobeyed.
I have spent my entire life fighting against that current.
Namely, I have been fighting to keep the demon race from hurtling toward destruction in the hopes that some of us might yet survive.
Certainly, I am now one of the eldest veterans among our people, but of course there was once a time when I, too, was young and inexperienced.
Even then, the demon race was already on the verge of extinction.
The everlasting war against the humans was driving us to ruin.
The difference in our populations is simply far too large.
Even if demons have higher stats than humans, this war has continued for so long that even the history books cannot pinpoint when it first began, so it was inevitable that the scales would begin to tip in favor of the race with numbers on its side.
If we continued fighting the humans, our loss was only a matter of time.
In fact, even if we did nothing, the demon race was already beyond the point of recovery.
All we could do was delay the inevitable.
And yet, no one but myself seemed to realize this.
No, perhaps some did realize it and refused to acknowledge the truth.
The future was already set in stone…
But it has still yet to pass.
This tragedy might be inevitable, but it would not happen in our generation.
To most, it must have been easier to simply continue on the same path.
Change is always difficult to accept, no matter the era.
And since the needed changes were based on acknowledging our eventual destruction, it is small wonder that other demons wanted to close their eyes to the truth.
Most of all, the Demon Lord would not allow any such change.
The Demon Lord is a puppet of the system.
A sacrifice, one might even say: a villainous scapegoat who must force the demons to continue fighting the humans.
I do pity those who carry the title of Demon Lord, for they are hated not only by our mortal enemy the humans but even by their fellow demons.
However, the demon race cannot ignore the Demon Lord’s influence, and so it is because of the Demon Lord that the demons are unable to stop the war against the humans.
The fate of the world takes precedence over the fate of the demon race.
I suppose that is only natural.
The world will continue to exist even if demons go extinct, but demons cannot survive without the world itself, so it is obvious which should be prioritized.
It is difficult to accept, as it forces us to walk the path of destruction, but in the grander scheme of things, that is a trifle.
The demons understand that, which is why we have always obeyed the Demon Lord, even if many of us were discontent about it.
We had no other choice.
Even I could only seek to minimize our losses while continuing the war, all the while burying my shameful feelings in my heart.
Was it my fate to simply sit and watch as my race continued marching toward its own destruction?
As I tried to fight against a current that I knew was irresistible, I was filled with anger, grief, and finally resignation.
But that all changed when an unexpected new era dawned: one without a demon lord.
The Demon Lord is the ruler of the demons and, at the same time, a mouthpiece for the system.
It is the Demon Lord’s sole purpose to inform the demons why they must continue to fight against the humans.
The truth is that demons are not simply obeying the powerful influence of the Demon Lord—we are swallowing our bitterness and continuing to fight because we have learned the terrible truth of the system.
Of course, that is only the case for the highest-ranking demons who can have an audience with the Demon Lord.
But that is more than enough.
Even now, I still remember the face of the previous Demon Lord, contorted with madness.
“We must atone…”
The previous Demon Lord repeated this often.
He changed drastically after gaining the title of Demon Lord.
Because of the Taboo Level-10 skill that came along with it, to be precise.
That Demon Lord looked more haggard by the day, sending us into battle and even fighting on the front lines himself, as if desperate to outrun something.
By now, very few people remain who know how gentle that man was before he became an overwhelming and fearsome demon lord.
But watching those changes firsthand made it difficult to write off the truths of the system he told us about as mere ravings of a madman.
Thus, the high-ranking demons obeyed him, and so those below them followed suit.
We had to, even knowing that it would one day mean the annihilation of our race.
That is how things were intended to be.
But then that Demon Lord vanished, and without a mouthpiece for the system leading them, the consciousness of demons began to change.
Many finally realized that we could not afford to keep fighting the humans.
Until then, the madness of the Demon Lord had pushed us into continuing the war, but without him leading us, we regained our senses.
Once there was no longer a demon lord shouting that the world would be in danger if the war did not continue, it was far more logical to worry about the more immediate danger before us than some far-off, hypothetical future.
And so, in an era without a demon lord, we refrained from fighting the humans more than necessary and focused on the recovery of our nation.
For once, time was on my side.
That was more than enough to bathe my half-broken glimmer of hope in a fresh wave of light.
Better yet, the next Demon Lord was almost certainly going to be yours truly.
With the Demon Lord missing, and knowing that I was the likely successor, we could focus on healing the demon race for two generations and improve our survivability a great deal.
Even still, it was simply delaying the inevitable.
And there was also the fearful possibility that I might change as my predecessor did once I became Demon Lord.
But I prepared for that possibility by instructing my trusted aides to lock me away and continue working toward the revival of our race if I was to drastically change. I even prepared a cell for my own confinement.
I wanted to be ready for every possibility.
But then I was stymied by a shock I could never have predicted.
If that alone was the issue, then I could simply call it a miscalculation, not a shock.
The system’s method of choosing a Demon Lord is unclear.
I was considered by many the most qualified, but that did not mean there were no other worthy candidates. Balto, for example, could have been a possibility.
But the Demon Lord who was selected was no one I had imagined.
In fact, it was no one I even knew of at all.
No, that is false. I had heard of them.
As a character in fairy tales, that is.
The most ancient Divine Beast who served the goddess: that is our current Demon Lord, Lady Ariel.
She was the stuff of legends, someone whose very existence I doubted.
Even if she once had, it seemed all the more impossible that she could have survived until modern times.
In fact, she has the appearance of a young girl, so who would believe her when she suddenly appeared calling herself the Demon Lord?
To be completely honest, my first reaction was one more of confusion than disbelief.
This unfamiliar child visited out of nowhere, declaring that she’d become the Demon Lord and even going so far as to claim that she was actually the Divine Beast from the legends? How absurd.
But she must have predicted that reaction, for she presented me with an Appraisal Stone and demanded that I Appraise her.
When I saw the results, I could no longer doubt her claims.
Her stats, all around 90,000 or above.
Her enormous list of various powerful skills.
They say that anyone whose stats surpass 1,000 is already in the realm of legends.
Only the smallest percentage of humans ever reach that mark, and even demons cannot do so easily, though our stats are naturally higher.
There have been a handful of exceptions, mostly heroes and demon lords, who achieved twice or possibly even three times that amount.
But I had never seen or even heard of anyone with five-digit numbers, let alone six.
Her number of skills, too, was several times that of any ordinary soldier.
But more frightening than even the number was the quality.
The higher a skill level grows, the harder it becomes to level it up further.
It can take half a lifetime of training to raise a single skill to its maximum level. Without natural talent, many people cannot manage it even once.
And there are some skills that are considered impossible to bring to the maximum, even if one does have the talent for it.
Yet, the number of skills she had at their highest level was unthinkable.
I was stunned.
I have never doubted my eyes so much as I did that day.
Nor have I ever felt such despair.
I did my best to predict and prepare for every possibility in my efforts to heal our race.
But Lady Ariel being appointed Demon Lord was beyond anything I could have imagined.
I had just begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But then I was plunged into the depths of darkness by Lady Ariel’s declaration of all-out war against the humans.
Past Demon Lords may have been the system’s scapegoat, but they still defended the existence of the demon race to the end.
But Lady Ariel had no qualms about tossing all that aside.
Lady Ariel was the Demon Lord, without a shadow of a doubt.
And to me, she was also the bringer of despair.
Her sheer individual strength makes her undoubtedly the strongest being in the world.
The only beings who could hope to stand against her would be administrators or the likes of Potimas.
With that awesome power, she threatens to chase us demons to our final end.
If that is not true despair, then what is?
We cannot deny her, lest she turn her fangs on us instead.
Lady Ariel would not hesitate to do so.
From the moment Lady Ariel became the Demon Lord, there were only two options left.
It had to be one or the other: wage all-out war against the humans as Lady Ariel demands or attempt to fight the Demon Lord herself.
I chose the latter.
Let me be frank: That was a mistake.
Who would I prefer to face: Lady Ariel or the entirety of humanity?
At a glance, some might assume that defeating one individual must surely be easier than taking on an entire race.
But no. That is undoubtedly wrong.
A demon lord or hero can easily take on an army alone.
That is what it means to have exponentially higher stats.
And Lady Ariel’s stats are easily ten times that of any other demon lord or hero.
An army? That would be nothing to her.
She could very likely destroy the entire world all on her own.
Even if the demon race was to somehow combine forces with humanity and challenge her, I cannot imagine how we would win.
If fighting Lady Ariel is the alternative, one would have better odds against all of humanity.
I understood that, and yet, I still made the wrong move.
I had no choice but to do so.
Even if we did defeat humanity, the demon race will eventually be destroyed as long as Lady Ariel is still the Demon Lord.
And this is no distant fate for future generations to fret over but a tragedy very much close at hand.
I continued to fight the current, trying to put off the destruction of demonkind by any means necessary.
That dark fate, which I once assumed would never occur in my lifetime, was now looming closer than ever before.
I could not accept that. To do otherwise would be to admit everything I have done in my life has been for naught.
Rationally, I knew it was ill-advised, but this was a matter beyond reason.
My situation was rapidly approaching checkmate.
I had to do something to try to avoid it, even if I knew it was the wrong move.
And as I expected, it did not end well.
My last-ditch scheme naturally ended in failure.
In fact, it was even worse than I could have predicted.
I worked to form a rebel army with the former Seventh Army Commander Warkis at the head, and I even involved Potimas, the contact who I thought had the best chance of dealing with Ariel.
My intention was to pit them against each other, but the rebel army was crushed before it could even be fully assembled, and Potimas withdrew before making any major contribution.
Far from fighting each other, Lady Ariel did not take a single step outside her castle.
She had no need to.
My plan failed to defeat Lady Ariel—it did not even move her one iota.
Worse yet, she knew that I was behind the rebel army and Potimas’s involvement.
With that, the only remaining path forward was to defeat the humans.
It was a small mercy that I was not killed on the spot.
…Though I am tempted to ask if that was truly a mercy?
As long as I am alive, I can do everything within my power to delay the demise of demonkind.
But that has become harder to accomplish than it ever was before.
As long as Lady Ariel is in charge, our extinction cannot be avoided.
Lady Ariel has lived since ancient times and is likely to survive far into the distant future.
And this nigh-immortal being continues to force the demon race into war.
Unavoidable destruction.
I could not stop it; I am not strong enough.
Is there any point in continuing to struggle, knowing that anything I try to do will end in vain?
Would it not have been a better end to be executed on the spot, my defeat made final?
There is no point in wondering.
I am alive.
My only option is to continue doing what I think is best.
Change becomes increasingly difficult with age.
Ultimately, I am sure I will simply go on fighting in vain against the current until I die.
There will be no glorious end awaiting me.
Better, then, to crawl onward through the mud, gnashing my teeth until my very last breath.
“……”
A certain man stands glowering at the fort in the distance.
“Calm down, Bloe.”
“I am calm, dammit.”
Despite his response, Bloe is tapping his foot impatiently.
No one could mistake this for a sign of composure.
“A foul mood will not improve our position. As a general, part of your job is to set a calm example for your subordinates. Look around you. Are your soldiers not worried enough as it is?”
Bloe scans the expressions of his men.
Clearly, his restlessness is only exacerbating their anxiety.
A leader’s state is reflected in his followers.
It is important to maintain a composed attitude and expression at all times.
“…My bad.”
Realizing his anxiety is having a negative effect on his soldiers, Bloe apologizes awkwardly.
“Well. It’s not as if your troops on the front line can see your pitiful state anyway.”
“Urgh!”
Bloe snarls to hide his shame.
Bloe’s Seventh Army and my First Army are currently attacking Fort Kusorion: a notably impregnable fortress anchoring humanity’s main line of defense and occupying a strategically crucial position as well.
Its importance is plain to see, considering how we are attacking with two armies, while all the other border forts have been assigned to one army each.
However, only the Seventh Army is actually attacking at the moment.
In a reckless manner that simply invites casualties, no less.
Of course, there will be a great deal of losses to our side following our current strategy.
Fort Kusorion is not the sort of place that can be conquered in one day. It has fended off demon invasions for many years, gaining countless expansions and improved fortifications along the way.
Conquering such a bastion would normally require several times their number, and even then, the fighting would carry on for months or even years.
But of course, the demon race does not have the population to field that large of an invasion force, and our advantage in stats does little in the face of an array of impenetrable walls.
And we are hardly in any position to commit to a years-long battle.
We have some supplies from subjecting our populace to high war taxation, but the humans undoubtedly have far more to spare, and our ability to produce more supplies is greatly limited.
And while we demons have enlisted far too much of our population to be sustainable as it is, the humans could easily call for aid from other countries and get any amount of reinforcements.
In short, we have no chance of winning a drawn-out battle.
Hence this short-term strategy.
However, our reckless attack is meeting with considerable resistance, and the Seventh Army’s losses are already heavy.
Their role is not to clear a path for us with a suicide attack.
No, the Seventh Army’s purpose is to serve as bait to draw out the enemy.
They will sustain heavy losses but will extract a price from the enemy.
Meanwhile, the First Army will reserve its strength until this fierce battle winds down.
My heart goes out to the Seventh Army for their sacrifice, but we have no other choice.
Bloe knows all this, too, which is why he is reluctantly going along with this strategy in spite of the cost.
The Seventh Army, after all, is composed of soldiers who were involved in the earlier rebellion.
Since the plot was discovered and crushed long before it could be put into action, they never actually got the chance to rebel. A minor quibble, but as a result, their leader, Warkis, was executed, while the soldiers were not punished.
…At least, not officially.
You can guess how the Seventh Army is truly being treated by the fact that they’ve been thrust onto the front lines as bait.
Essentially, these would-be rebel soldiers are the living dead, mere sacrificial pawns.
By entrusting them to Bloe, who has always opposed Lady Ariel, she has gathered all her dissenters in one unit.
Since Warkis and Nereo were executed, and I have expressed my submission to Lady Ariel, it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that to rebel against Lady Ariel is a fool’s errand.
Anyone who failed to understand that is now under Bloe’s command.
This is all very deliberate.
Whether Bloe tries to lead them into a rebellion or is forced to bow to Lady Ariel, she comes out on top regardless.
If they rebel, she can crush them as an example and use them to replenish the system’s energy; if they bend the knee, they will simply be crushed in battle instead.
So far, Bloe has been made to keep them all in check, wrangling them into an army just to sacrifice them here.
He is certainly a skilled leader.
But Bloe is too emotional and has been too open in his defiance of Lady Ariel.
It is both tragic and fitting that his idiocy has been used against him, forcing him to lead an army of sacrificial pawns.
But even backed into a corner and given such harrowing tasks, Bloe has continued to lead the Seventh Army with resolve.
He is a determined man and a passionate one.
Which is why he fears for the sacrificial Seventh Army from the bottom of his heart, mourns their deaths, and roils with anger and anxiety.
Hoping that they will draw out the enemy as quickly as possible.
“Bloe. It looks like they took the bait.”
And so I update him as soon as I notice.
“!”
“Get ready.”
Bloe looks up quickly, and I give him a fast order.
Their goal has been accomplished.
But that was only the first step.
We succeeded in luring out the enemy only at great loss to the Seventh Army.
And the real battle begins now.
We must defeat the enemy we’ve drawn into the open, or we cannot win.
“The hero’s arrived.”
The hero: humanity’s greatest hope.
We must strike him down here and crush the humans’ morale.
I could not defeat Lady Ariel, the Demon Lord.
And now I must make yet another risky wager.
But I have no choice but to gamble, even if the odds are stacked against me.
Just like Bloe, I am heading toward a disaster of my own making.
FORT KUSORION BATTLE THE KEY POINTS!
Welcome back to White Explains It All!
The Colonel and Deadbeat are attacking a fort surrounded by…nothing!
What? There’s gotta be something, you say?
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
The fact that there’s nothing is what’s so special about it!
A flat field with no special features means that it’s easy for troops to march through here.
Any spot easy for a big army to punch through is an important one!
For the human side, it’s a place where they have to hold the line no matter what. Otherwise, a whole army could waltz right on in.
They’ve gotta defend this place to the death, whatever happens to the other forts.
That’s Fort Kusorion in a nutshell!
Which is why we sent two whole armies to conquer this very important fort.
Same goes for the other side—it looks like the humans committed way more people to protecting this one.
On top of that, they’ve got their strongest fighting force of all at this fort: the hero.
So in one corner we’ve got the Colonel, who’s the strongest of all the regular demons, and in the other is the hero, the symbol of hope for humanity.
Talk about a big showdown.
You could even say that this battle will decide the outcome of the war.
Even I’m on the edge of my seat over here!
…Man, this fort’s got a pretty stupid-sounding name, though, huh?
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