Chapter 64

  ‘Alright, listen up! Your general told you who and what I am, so I’m not going to waste time on that.’ I began my speech, looking at the twenty or so demon captains Riaret had assembled. ‘I’ll tell you this though: we have a war on our hands, and the real fight is just starting. I won’t insult you by asking whether or not you’re ready and eager to spill minotaur blood; I know you all are. We are the Fourth Ring, and if any idiot from any other ring thinks they can just barge in here and take what’s ours, then we shall show them that they’ve never been more wrong in their entire, wretched lives. Carry out the orders of your general! Fight like you have never fought before! Give me and the Ring all you have and all you are, and soon the minotaur king himself will regret he had ever set foot in our part of Hell, and he will pay with his life for his insolence and stupidity. That is all.’

  It was a short but good speech in my opinion, and the high-level captains had listened without interrupting me, only their occasional nods had told me that I had their approval — whether it was genuine or by their general’s order, I didn’t know and for now I didn’t care. Riaret dismissed her captains, and they left without a word, and now we were on our way to the walls.

  ‘That went well,’ I said as I followed my freshly appointed general up the stairs to the battlements from where I could have a better look at the enemy positions.

  ‘Of course it did,’ she said, and while I couldn’t see her face, I was absolutely sure she was smirking. ‘If I order my soldiers to fight and die, then that’s what they’ll do. If I order them to shut up and listen to a creature of the Surface World, then that’s what they’ll do. If I order them to …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I get the picture.’ I stopped her before I’d end up with a never-ending litany of how good, well-trained and well-disciplined her army was — which was true, from what I’d seen so far, and I had no complaints. But we had work to do. ‘How long before your captains round up the crafters I need?’ I asked.

  ‘An hour,’ she answered.

  We made it up to the battlements, just the two of us, as my squad had stayed behind at the base of the wall at her insistence. The sixty or so metres long stretch between the western gate and the nearest bastion-like watchtower had at least a hundred long-range fighters stationed on it — mages and archers with a few melee-type warriors mixed in with spears or axes, ready for anything. They seemed well organised, bored, and mildly intrigued by the strange looking creature accompanying Riaret, but they all seemed to know better than to make a fuss about it in the presence of their boss. Plus, I was sure that the captains had passed on the details of the recent developments by now, so they knew who I was.

  ‘Here we are, Hyde, look all you want,’ Riaret said as we arrived at the section of the wall closest to the gate. ‘The camps here are larger, same as at the other gates. Twice as many soldiers and lookouts on the berms at all times. They’d be ready to receive and repel any attack before we could even fully open the gate.’

  ‘Have you tried to break out before?’ I asked.

  ‘Once, in the early days, through two gates simultaneously,’ she growled angrily. ‘I had 25,000 soldiers. Now I have less than half of that. That’s why I haven’t tried that again, although it had become tempting over the past few days.’

  Hm. What a waste of life and resources; an almost catastrophic loss, but at least she had learned a lesson. Better late than never.

  ‘Have they tried to take the city after?’ I asked.

  ‘Three times,’ she said. ‘They must have thought we were weakened to the point they could. Well, we weren’t and they couldn’t. I’ve been waiting for them to try again, but the filthy bastards decided to just sit tight in their camps.’

  ‘You don’t like sitting around and doing nothing, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  I knew that feeling; despite what any recruiter would claim with great enthusiasm, half of my life as a soldier in the Allied Systems Army had been sitting around and doing nothing in garrisons or troop transports to the point even the most redundant drills and exercises had become welcome occurrences. I had longed for deployments and action during those boring times, just as I had longed for the boring times during deployments. Ah, that was then, this was now.

  I supposed Riaret had good enough control over her own impulses after all, evidenced by the fact she was walking beside me as opposed to lying dead on a lost battlefield — she could have attempted another breakout, and given her natural temperament, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Master of herself first, of others second; she might have learned that from Tarashak.

  It had also crossed my mind that it hadn’t been chance or accident that her son, Reinos, had been serving in Tarashak’s army before his appointment as a general. Riaret was clearly unhappy about him being a mage rather than a warrior, but despite that, sending him to a mage dominated army might have been her way of helping him. If that was true — and I couldn’t say with any certainty that it was — then demon women had at least a little bit of the nurturing, motherly instinct in them that humans had. It had been becoming harder and harder to see demons as alien, otherworldly, hellish monstrosities; with every passing day I was becoming more and more convinced that they were just powerful and scary-looking people going about their lives the best they could. We were more alike than we were different. Maybe even the minotaurs — well, perhaps I’d have some time to investigate that theory after we killed them all.

  I drew my rifle from my back. The visual feed from the scope appeared on my NeuroHUD display, and I levelled the weapon and aimed it at the nearest enemy camp, zooming in an out to get a better idea of what it contained, what kind of forces they could muster on short notice. Camp Rubicon — the one we’d had to cross to get into the city — was at the south and it wasn’t directly in front of a city gate, so it had been smaller than the one I was looking at now. Hm. This large camp blocking our exit on the western side should also have a name … let’s see … Camp Colosseum! Sounded fine, since I’d already had an ancient Roman theme going, and I doubted the demons would object.

  I turned my attention to the surrounding terrain. Orroth was in the middle of a huge, shallow crater, somewhere between eight and ten kilometres across. According to my map of the place — which I had also brought up to my NeuroHUD display — the crater was completely surrounded by the Wilds except to the west, where a hundred-metre-long section of the edge was free of the dangerous woods. It was kind of a passage, a path through the Wilds, a clear and easily traversable connection to the vast plains of the Fourth Ring.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  For small groups of demons it was possible, sometimes even preferable, to travel through the Wilds to reach their destinations quickly. For crowds numbering in their thousands, the plains stretching between the forested areas were the way to go, which was exactly how Reinos was making his way here with his army and the civilians of Garoshek. And that particular stretch of the crater’s edge, that path, would be Reinos’ way in. It was also the only way out for us if we wanted to evacuate and leave as an army instead of dispersing into the Wilds in small groups. Interesting. That clear stretch was an important objective that had to be secured and held, and not only for the duration of our breakout and evacuation, but even after it to prevent any pursuit by the minotaurs. Someone was going to have to take on the thankless task of serving as rear guard.

  ‘What are you doing? What’s this thing?’ Riaret asked, leaning in to have a closer look at my gun.

  ‘It’s my rifle. JTEC S80. Old tech but reliable. Marines have newer ones these days,’ I mumbled absent mindedly as I zoomed in on the trenches and berms of Camp Colosseum some three hundred and fifty metres from the gate — an ideal distance for my future catapults. The defensive emplacements had indeed been set up to be able to stop anything coming out of the gates. Shame. They had to burn.

  ‘I didn’t understand any of that, Hyde. Can you talk normally? Like a demon?’ Riaret grunted at me. ‘Also, your armour is strangely elaborate. Never seen any like this. Crafters must be really good up in the Surface World.’

  ‘Where I come from, crafters work on a scale I don’t think you can imagine,’ I said to her, realising that she was actually expecting answers from me.

  ‘Yeah? So, what’s that “trifle” thing do? Is it a tool? A weapon?’

  ‘It’s an assault rifle, Riaret, a rifle!’ I grunted back at her. ‘It’s a weapon. And a good one at that. And it does some other things, too.’

  ‘Show me then!’ she demanded.

  Huh! It seemed the brash and volatile general and dear mother of Reinos was also the curious type. Who would have thought? But I wasn’t going to start wasting ammunition just to demonstrate to her the achievements of the Allied Systems military-industrial complex. However, as I hadn’t seen binoculars, spyglasses or anything of the like since I’d arrived in Hell, I supposed I could let her peek through the scope so she could enjoy the wonders of optical and digital zoom functions and thermal imaging. The scope in its current configuration was feeding the optical data to my NeuroHUD directly, so it didn’t have the eyepiece on. I summoned it from my storage — which Mickey either approved or protested with the loud “meow” reverberating in my soul — and I attached the piece to the scope, Riaret watching the procedure like a hawk, along with the few archers loitering at a safe distance from us.

  ‘Okay, hold the rifle like this, point it at what you want to see and look into it here. See these two buttons? Zoom in and zoom out. Which means … well, you’ll see,’ I instructed and showed her what to do. She leaned her inordinately large halberd against the parapet, and I handed her the gun.

  The rifle’s safety and fire control was linked to my NeuroHUD, so even if she had known how the weapon worked, she couldn’t have fired it. Still, had I done this with a civilian anywhere in Allied Systems space, it would have resulted in a disciplinary procedure. But having spent a month and a half in Hell — almost two months, actually — I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Army had no jurisdiction here. And here in the Fourth Ring, as the ruling demon lord, I could do whatever I wanted if my own strength was enough for it. And within reason, of course.

  Riaret craned her neck and moved about a bit to find a position to hold the unfamiliar weapon and to look through the scope comfortably. And the moment she did, she gasped.

  ‘What in all the curses is this?’ She whispered as she pulled away from the scope to look at the camps in the distance with her own eyes, then through the scope again.

  The software was still feeding the visuals from the scope to my NeuroHUD, so I saw what she saw. She pressed the main zoom-in button, and she gasped again as a couple of the minotaur sentries sitting on the berms in front of the camp grew larger and larger through the lenses. Her finger shifted to the zoom-out button, pressed it, and she grunted with delight as her view widened. It was a strange sight; a demon woman clad in plate armour and standing at over two metres tall, playing and giggling with the zoom buttons like a kid with a new toy.

  Riaret flinched and pulled her head away from the scope as I switched it to infrared thermal with a command through my NeuroHUD.

  ‘What happened? What’s this now?’ she asked, looking at me with wide eyes.

  ‘Look again!’ I told her. She did so, and I explained. ‘It’s showing you heat. If I’m in a place where I can’t see properly, you know, too dark or too smoky, it can show me where the enemies are by the heat of their bodies.’

  ‘Is this what heat looks like?’ she wondered out loud.

  ‘Well, it’s what it looks like through the scope.’

  She considered it for a few more moments, then looked at me again.

  ‘You said this is a weapon. How do you kill with it? It’s not sharp at all.’

  I really, really didn’t want to waste ammunition, but Riaret the Severing Strike was looking at me with so much expectation and curiosity that I found it hard to resist. Perhaps I should be a good demon lord and indulge my subordinates every once in a while. Just this once. Just one round. For the greater good. And to impress her a little.

  ‘Alright, have you got a target? Something you don’t mind if I poke a hole into?’

  She immediately barked a few orders at the loitering archers, and within a minute they brought a long, thick plank made of the familiar black wood from the Wilds, and on it hung a piece of armour, a breastplate that had no doubt belonged to a minotaur once upon a time. I instructed them to take it to the other end of this section of the battlements and erect it there. In another couple of minutes, the makeshift target dummy was leaning against the wall of the bastion-like tower, ready to be shot at.

  ‘I see. This is a ranged weapon,’ Riaret noted accurately.

  ‘It is indeed,’ I said. ‘Get your soldiers to stick close to the parapets and out of my line of sight to the target.’

  A few more orders later I was looking at the plank and the minotaur breastplate through the scope of my gun, a mere 50 metres from me, the targeting reticule dead center on it. I was used to shooting at targets hundreds of metres away, so this was nothing difficult.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked.

  ‘Why are you asking me? Do it already!’ she groaned with impatient exasperation.

  Alright, one Hell-Mana infused armour piercing flechette to go. I pulled the trigger; boom! Riaret stood still while a couple of soldiers I could see flinched as the single round hit the target instantly, the fiery trail of the projectile hanging in the air for a few seconds, showing the exact way the round had traveled.

  ‘Shall we have a look?’ I inquired as I put the rifle back into its slot on my back.

  She nodded, and we walked over to the bastion to take a look at the target. Riaret examined the result carefully; the round had gone through the metal plates leaving clean holes, splintered the wooden plank, and even tore a chunk out of the stone wall of the bastion behind it. 8.3 mm armour piercing flechettes were no joke. If she liked this, she’d love my sentry turret. Once she was satisfied, the general of the Deathbringers looked at me with an expression on her face that led me to believe she was re-evaluating some of her opinions of me — hopefully for the better.

  ‘Are you thinking that in a close-up fight you may be able to best me and kill me, but at a distance I could kill you in the blink of an eye?’ I asked, having an inkling about what might have been going through her mind.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘Well, let’s not test that theory.

  ‘Right. Let’s not.’ She agreed, then changed the topic. ‘Ah. The crafters are coming. Let’s see how they’ll take the news that their new lord wants bloody catapults of all things.’