Video games were almost as fun as I remembered them to be, and sharing them with Mia was amazing. Granted, our minds and bodies trivialized most of them, but it was more about having fun together than actually playing.
All fun things must come to an end eventually, however. That day, the end came in the form of a very grumpy demon making a mental call.
"Mia? Hayden? Where are you two?"
"Uhhh, just… taking a bit of time to ourselves," I hedged, ignoring Mia's giggling.
"We are in the middle of an initiation invasion, and you two are 'spending quality time together'?" Glaustro growled, making me flush when I caught the implication.
"…Yes?" It was certainly easier to let him believe that than to explain what was really happening.
"Just… get out here. It's about time for us to put on a show of force."
I grumbled a tiny bit, but I dropped the controller and stretched. Then I scooped up Mia once more, letting the noise barrier I'd put up fall away as I launched us into the night sky.
The city was, predictably, in upheaval.
Recruits were milling all over the place. Trampling corpses, fleeing from robots, fighting robots, killing, dying, and all of that good stuff.
"There you are," Glaustro's voice rumbled.
I turned to watch my colonel as he flew to meet us high above the city. Stopping a few feet away, he struggled to hover in place, occasionally flapping his wings too hard and letting them jerk him about, or almost dropping out of the sky when he flapped them too weakly.
It was hilarious, and it thoroughly ruined the 'dark lord' vibes he was going for with all the recruit intimidation. It was a good thing he could cloak himself so well.
"Yep yep," I replied. "Us! We! Anyway, I was curious… did you forget to mention the whole 'soul count recruitment' thing?"
"Of course I didn't," Glaustro protested, looking more than a little put out. "I saved it for when the berserk rage faded and they began to relax a little. Did you not hear my proclamation?"
I frowned, thinking back. The massive skyscraper had briefly vibrated like an earthquake was happening… or, I suppose, like it was exposed to the hollering of an overdramatic colonel. Unfortunately…
"Yeah, no. I put up a noise barrier. We didn't want to get distracted."
"Distracted? We are in the middle of an invasion!"
I just looked at him, unimpressed, until he huffed and looked away.
"Very well," he growled. "It doesn't matter. I will do as we discussed. Are you sure you can follow up the way we planned?"
"Of course, I'm sure." I even had some extra mana crystals and other stuff prepped, just in case.
"Then I want you to prepare. It's almost dawn."
I glanced at the horizon, cringing when I realized how much time Mia and I had spent playing video games.
Glaustro's voice rang out over the city as he dropped his cloaking spell and focused extra hard on steady flight.
"Well done, all of you who still stand! All of you who still strive! All of you who have secured the souls you'll need to meet the bare minimum of challenges set before you! If you have no dreams, no desires, no ambition, then you may stop here. For I declare this battle… our victory!"
I began letting my own mana build up into a perfect bead of crystal above my head, relying on Mia to conceal it. I just kept packing mana in, forcing it to gather into such a tight ball inside the bead that it was making the physical item shake, rattle, and threaten to burst.
Meanwhile, with a twist of his mana, Glaustro activated the massive working some of our people had been establishing all over the city.
The entire working rumbled for a moment. Then spears and tendrils of earth shot forth, pulverizing and slicing through every last remaining enemy who stood before our recruits. One of the truly massive tendrils lashed out with such force that it went straight through one of the skyscrapers. I winced as the building toppled over slowly, squashing everything in its way and claiming the lives of local and recruit alike.
Glaustro didn't look like he cared, but I saw the small tic in the corner of his eye.
Finally, still remaining silent, I unleashed my part of the performance.
The ball of crystal shot up far above our heads, shone like the rising sun, and then promptly detonated. Countless flakes of crystal drifted down over the city and altered every surface they touched. Jagged crystalline growths sprouted all over the place, causing the city to glitter like some monument to wealth and excess.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Then Glaustro began to chant. The property damage no longer felt all that relevant as the entire city rippled, space and time alike going all wonky.
My colonel's voice rose higher and higher. As it reached fever pitch, reality itself bowed to it. A massive obelisk materialized in the heart of the city, displacing and destroying a building as it did so. The spatial changes that swept out from it claimed buildings, altered them, and gave them new inhabitants.
All of a sudden, the dead city of humans transformed into a city of demons. Even from how high up I was, picking out the awe on the faces of the recruits was easy enough.
Plus, as a nice bonus, my crystal makeover had stuck. The city still glittered, giving it an odd charm that I dare say it hadn't possessed before.
"Good work." Glaustro veiled himself and turned towards us, exhaustion lining every inch of his face. "That went about as well as we could have hoped."
"Really? What are the casualties like?"
"All of the imps, as expected. Past that… about three-quarters of our soldiers made it through. Remarkable, really. But the locals… they didn't seem very ready to fight back. I know you said this was a zone of conflict and struggle. If that's what this place is like, then what will happen when we attack peaceful cities? An unrepentant slaughter with no one to fight back?"
"And that's a bad thing? I remind you we are here to conquer this place," I teased, even if a little more seriousness slipped into my voice than I intended.
"I know that!" he shot back. "However, just as important is our assignment to give the recruits experience. To show them what it means to be a demon. I'm worried they'll turn out a little too… soft."
"Well, if that happens, Torment will eat them alive. And things will go back to what they should be," I groused, then shook my head.
I didn't blame Glaustro or disagree with him, really. I even supported the theatrics we'd just carried out. The recruits needed to be in awe of us. Of Glaustro! That way, they'd at least have a goal to pursue. A goal that might seem unreachable, yes, but a goal nonetheless.
If we just left them to their own devices, it was entirely possible that they would neglect to pursue ascension until they felt the effects of age and got a fire lit under their asses. To circumvent that, we instilled in them a solid fear for their own survival, and we also offered them a shining beacon of demonic power in the form of Glaustro.
This wasn't something we'd read in any guidebook, of course. It was directly derived from our own experiences with Naberius. Looking back, I could spot the same manipulation techniques in the general's treatment of my own first invasion forces, but that didn't mean I held a grudge against him. In a very real way, I was thankful for the subtle encouragement.
It sure was hard to fake that level of power and influence, though. Exhausting too, judging from Glaustro's state. I'd ended up sucking down over three dozen mana crystals just to carry out my part, so I was definitely feeling the sting of our performance.
Unfortunately, it wasn't quite time for us to rest.
I sighed as I looked around. "Now what? We got the first city. Our recruits have been bloodied. And the world still doesn't know about us. The problem is… this really was a medium-to-small city, Glaustro. Not even top ten of this world. Not even close."
Our problem was simple: manpower. I had no clue if Naberius had written extensively about 'high population density' worlds or not, but since we couldn't read his booklet, it was kind of useless to speculate. Conquering this Earth was going to be a pain.
"We'll follow your suggestion first." Glaustro frowned at the horizon. "They can't be allowed to unleash weapons of mass destruction on us. Forget having to resurrect. I'm not explaining to the general how I managed to ruin a whole ass productive world."
There, again, was the main issue. We wanted the world. The locals wanted to defend it. They had a 'game over' button. We didn't.
On strength alone, we could sweep through them with or without the recruits supporting us. But stopping them before it was too late? Not my wheelhouse.
Thankfully, Glaustro was as willing as ever to listen to suggestions. That meant we'd be forming an assassination court for the sole purpose of killing anyone with nuke codes. If we couldn't destroy their ability to ever activate those stupid things altogether, I was willing to settle for delaying the nuclear fallout.
Especially because of all the rumors I'd heard about what tended to happen on worlds corrupted in such a manner.
Because of course, across countless worlds and cultures, there had been some people smart enough to make nukes and stupid enough to unleash them. That meant we had plenty of data to back up the literal and metaphorical fallout of such scenario, however rarely demons ran into it.
And it wasn't pretty.
Nuclear fires and decisive loss of life appealed to eldritch life forms stuck living between the stars. Irradiate an entire world until extreme mutations start to happen, and you'd have a 'Hunger of The Void' coming to take a bite out of, well, everything.
No one really knew why. We just knew it was annoying. It would force us to either sacrifice what was left of the world to the Abyss all fast-like, or call in a ton of reinforcements to hold back the horrors properly.
Seeing as eldritch creatures were also one of the few races that could seriously mess up a demon, I wasn't keen to deal with them. Particularly so soon after the angels.
I made sure to let Glaustro know that, too.
"Just… shut up." He glared at me. "Start thinking about how we're going to win. We simply don't have the numbers. Heavy local recruitment? From what I've absorbed from their souls, the locals might be highly receptive to the idea. Plenty of them certainly invoke the Abyss frequently enough, even if they refer to it as 'hell.'"
"That could work," I said, and I meant it. "Offer them a reasonable salary and some basic human rights, and they'd probably switch sides in a heartbeat."
I thought back to the memories I had stolen. So many of those souls had ended up in my way simply from a lack of any other option. Without the skills to be researchers or enforcers, they were reduced to signing up as the cheapest possible labor, or as guinea pigs. They had no other value to the megacorps.
So, yeah, the idea of spitting in the eye of all those corpos appealed to me, both to make our job easier and to prove a point.
I grinned, all teeth. "I'll start looking into what I can do myself. A little rebelliousness and rabble-rousing never hurt anyone."
Glaustro returned my grin with profound amusement, before gruffly nodding and descending upon the city to partake of its offering while he still could.
The city was ours. The hour was won. Sure, it kind of felt like a hollow victory compared to the amount of work waiting for us, but damn it, it was still our victory. Besides, as I considered our new plans, I couldn't deny a certain sense of anticipation.
Glaustro hadn't really worded it that way, but he'd effectively given Mia and me free rein to do 'whatever it took' to secure our victory. Like, say, visiting nice cafés and indulging a bit while inciting insurrections.
I'm just saying, not all rebellions have to be born in stuffy basements. And who would tempt the locals into acting out, if not literal demons?