But I can’t just mope here forever.
His friends on the other side were probably laughing riotously at the sight of this kid trying to encourage him.
Get it together, Tafman! he scolded himself. Nothing had been solved, but sobbing into his drink wouldn’t help him find the answers. No one could take his place, so he had no choice but to buck up and get the job done himself.
“Here you are.” The waiter placed a mug in front of him. Tafman gave himself an emotional reset, taking a gulp of the new drink.
“Damn, that stuff’s good!” And this time, it really did taste good. He was finally able to acknowledge that. A smile naturally rose to his face.
He turned to look at Claire. For a moment, their eyes met, but she quickly turned away. She was the type to rarely look others in the eye. Even so, Tafman found her eyes to be quite pretty. They looked like little glass marbles.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah. All thanks to you.”
By the way, Tafman was still regularly eating and drinking on Claire’s dime when they met up at the pub. She always made excuses, like “it’s the demonic kingdom’s money anyway,” or “I couldn’t spend it myself if I wanted to,” so Tafman heartily accepted her generosity. After all, Tafman was as bold and shameless as they came. But when it came to alcohol? He cranked that up to eleven.
“So, how’s the City Guard holding up?”
“Lots of people down in the dumps like me, as you’d expect. Losing seven people out of nowhere was a huge shock...” Though Tafman had perked up considerably, his response was still rather solemn. “People die in battle, everyone knows that. Even though we were ready for that...none of us expected to run into a monster like that.”
The survivors of the warbear encounter along with those who had greeted them upon their return had taken the deaths of the guardsmen just as hard as Tafman had. They had all started to think they had found a peaceful life of sorts, that the real fighting was over.
We can’t start thinking weird...
Tafman thought as he took a swig of Warlito Bimi. They were living peacefully, but they were still at war. Both as people of the autonomous zone, and as people of the Alliance.
“Yeah... No one wants to die,” Claire said, propping her head up on the table as she traced lines in the wood with her finger.
“Right? Though we can’t get stuck on stuff like that.” When push came to shove, Tafman and the City Guard knew their job was to give their lives to protect people like Claire if the situation called for it.
“Aren’t some of the City Guard still out patrolling? How’s that going?”
“Yeah, we’ve sent out some small squads to replace us. From their reports, things sound awful. If those damn demons were gonna conquer the place, the least they could do is clean up,” Tafman snorted, starting to get a little heated. “Once you get a bit out of the city, the towns, villages, and fields are all in ruins. We’ve also got packs of wolves and wild dogs just roaming about. Fiends that usually never leave the forest are waltzing around the fields. We’re hardly in a position to be raising livestock.”
It was no surprise that the flames of war had left nothing but destruction in their wake, but even then things were exceptionally bad.
“In particular, there’s tons of fiends in the west. A bicorn almost killed someone just the other day. Though in the east, the worst they’ve got are wild dogs.”
It was kind of strange. There were just too many fiends around. The former members of the Royal Hunters Battalion were all in agreement, repeatedly saying “it’s unusual for fiends to be around here,” or “these kinds of fiends normally live deep in the forest.”
“Oh? What kind of fiends are you running into?” Claire asked, a curious light in her glassy eyes.
“Well, for starters...” Tafman took another drink before going on to explain and share the reports he had received from the experienced hunters under his command. Details such as the species, sighting locations, and usual habitats of the fiends they were finding. He shared every bit of information he had.
†††
“That’s what he told me.”
“I see.”
In the library of Evaloti Castle, I was holding hands with Claire as she told me the information she had gleaned from the City Guard’s vice captain. No, we weren’t doing anything inappropriate. I was just supplying her with magic. It was a strange feeling, using my own life force to sustain the “life” of my childhood friend.
But anyway...damn, fiends? I didn’t even have to look at a map. When I thought about what resided to the west of the autonomous zone, it was obvious who was responsible for this.
The Izanis family really did it this time. I had heard that the way Deftelos’s territory had been divided had made them quite upset with the Rage family, especially me in particular. So they were getting their revenge by driving the fiends from their territory into ours. Those bastards!
It was a deviously effective method of harassing us. As a hero, the damage done and lives lost among the people of Evaloti was terrible. And as a demon prince, it threw a wrench into my plans for the autonomous zone’s development. I was trying to build up the autonomous zone to produce food for the demonic kingdom as a whole—at least that was what it looked like on the surface. Any attempts to impede my progress were an attack on the kingdom. Though I could outright declare just that, I doubted it would be of any good.
Without any solid evidence, it would be hard to argue since they could just say the fiends naturally fled out of fear of the Izanis family. Should I grab one of their underlings and beat a confession out of him? The effectiveness of that would all depend on how much weight the Demon King put on a confession extracted by torture...er, interrogation.
“We could always use Constraint to forbid them from lying.”
Hmm. That would get a confession without requiring violence. But...
“Of course, forbidding lies would harm you more than anyone.”
Yep. Plus, it would be showing my hand to the other demon heirs. It was really risky. I wasn’t sure this situation demanded such a strong response yet.
Damn, this is a pain in the ass!
I just wanted to beat the crap out of that green-headed bastard and his whole family. But until the succession war started up, the princes and princesses were expressly forbidden from engaging in direct conflict among themselves. Otherwise, the older siblings would go around killing the younger ones while they were still too young to be threats.
I had asked what the punishment was for violating that law, and the results varied. They ranged from receiving a beating from the Demon King at best, to house arrest somewhere in the middle, to being locked in the night elf prison at worst. And that imprisonment would last for decades. With the unnaturally long lifespans of demons, their prison sentences were long to match.