RD 4 Ch 31

As a group, we strode into a fortress filled with Simone's Russian and Chinese recruits as well as the locals from Kazakhstan. It looked more like some plantation that had been rapidly fortified with makeshift walls, slammed together by superhuman strength and no knowledge of engineering.

The familiarity made me smile.

It was expanding daily, we’d come into conflict repeatedly with the surrounding population and the growing number of people turning into Feudal Lords.

At this point, anything that wasn’t a major city had completely lost all national infrastructure and while those would take longer to go down, it was just a matter of time. They were too population dense, without outlying farmland producing for them people would eventually starve if they stayed.

No one thinks about how much farmland is needed to sustain each person until the food starts to run dry and then that number is far larger than anyone expects.

As we walked through, Winnie and her sect watched soldiers and Mul Branova as they gleefully shoved each other's hands into the fire pit. Meanwhile, others held stopwatches, trying to see who could endure the longest.

Simone's brow pinched ever so slightly, her focus shifting to something in the middle distance as she inspected the troops.

I had forced the issue and allowed anyone to join. We needed numbers, but that didn’t stop the Mul Branova from becoming their own unit, clearly elevated above the rest.

“They haven’t made much progress.” Simone grumbled. “Are you even working them Gloria?” Simone spoke louder.

Our group had turned more than a few heads. Me, Simone, Nyx and Merlin walking with Winnie and most of her sect. Some had stayed behind to continue it, but Winnie had enough loyalty that her anger had become the rest of her sect’s.

"Oh, they're plenty hungry for power," Gloria chuckled at Simone, greeting our group as she walked out of the main castle. "You just might not see it because you haven't been out there while Bran's been taking you to collect people left and right."

Gloria stepped up to Winnie. "Pleasure to meet you. We can take you to join the rest if you'd like." She held out a hand to Winnie, who took it curiously.

"The rest? Don't tell me you have a dozen of these artifacts laying around." Winnie held up the bracelet on her wrist.

"Oh, I made that," I replied. That hadn’t been part of the pitch.

Winnie’s eyes flashed with surprise. "Wait, you made this?" Winnie paused, her words catching in her throat. "That means you already knew about my curse before we met.” She turned to me as if demanding an explanation.

“As I said, Winnie. We're old friends now. Sorry we don't have time to reminisce. I needed to find people who are motivated and strong enough to start fighting back." I answered.

As we continued through the fortress, we saw all manner of people working on building out our information collection. Some were gifted with skills that allowed them to move quickly or unseen, while others were able to process large quantities of information. Between those two and what still remained of the digital age, we were doing our best to compile what we could for the oncoming war.

Winnie paused, glancing at a map that was being updated by hand in real time by a woman who seemed to be talking to the falcon on her shoulder. Winnie squinted again, inspecting. "That's a very interesting collection of skills. Where'd you find her? I'd maybe like to get one myself.”

I chuckled. "She only had two out of the three herself. We had a skill book for the third. I think I would have spent much longer looking for one with all three. Demons are much better for skill book drops."

Our words must have caught the woman’s attention because she flinched and turned, seeing me. She bowed so low that she knocked the falcon off her shoulder. 

"Lord Bran, it's wonderful that you're back." The woman answered.

"At ease," I said. "I think you're upsetting your pet." 

Only then did she realize that she'd disturbed the falcon. She stood back up straight and beckoned it to her shoulder. 

"The Far Speech ability you gave me has been wonderful," she said quickly.

"Then continue to put it to use.” I flashed her a smile and kept moving.

We were getting closer to our destination. Winnie's curiosity with the woman who could speak and hear through animals, as well as control a small swarm of pigeons, was understandable.

The armies we were forming could only act as fast as communication could travel. This meant some of my first priorities were making sure that as digital communication became scarcer, we had our own ways of staying in contact and scouting ahead. 

The woman with the falcon wasn't technically a member of the Mul Branova, with the class, as Simone would have liked. However, I had gotten Simone to expand her recruiting to include those with incredibly valuable skill sets as long as they fit the other requirements.

I opened the door to a large common room. Over a dozen high-level individuals were sitting around. Antonio shot to his feet and appeared before me in a sweeping bow. 

"Lord Bran, your knight greets you." He stated.

"At ease, Antonio. I don't need the formalities." I waved it away, but nodded to him as he rose.

"You perhaps do not like them, but you do need them, Lord Bran. Otherwise, how are people going to treat you with the respect you deserve?" He asked joining me and my group at the front of the room. I’d had him watching over the guests.

Even then he wasn’t strong enough to restrain them should they really cause a stink.

I snorted. "Usually, the first time they see me swing my sword, I get all the respect I could ever need." My gaze raked over the motley group in front of me.

"This is him?" a wiry man in dire need of a shave with an eyepatch over one of his eyes spat on the floor as he tried to inspect me.

I dismissed the inspection without even giving him an ounce of my attention. "Thank you all for coming," I said, stepping more firmly into the room. "All of you are probably still curious as to why you're here."

"Something to do with the Demon Lord, I imagine," Winnie said, taking her seat and giving off a frosty air.

No one approached her, which was good because she was the most powerful of the batch. Though more than a few of them had odd abilities that could defy a simple comparison of stats.

"What you may not understand is that this demon invasion of our world is coordinated." I said to the confused faces after Winnie’s comment.

Those words caused several of their expressions to shift drastically. 

"You're telling me there's an ugly bastard behind all of this?" Rogers, the man with the eyepatch, leaned forward as he licked his lips. 

"That's exactly what I'm saying. And in order to do something about him, I need more than an organization. I need generals," I said, looking over each one of them. 

The bald man in rags sitting in the corner laughed out loud, nearly falling out of his chair as he spilled a jug of alcohol so strong the people near him winced. The chair leg that the alcohol touched began to disintegrate, melting into a puddle as yellow gas billowed up from it.

The lady closest to him jumped to her feet, and drew a metal fan to keep the gas away from her face. "What the fuck are you drinking, you crazy old kook?" The woman exclaimed. “You’d put him in charge of other people?”

I stared at the monk with a smile. "Calm down now, you all. There's no need to get at each other's throats. What I need from each one of you is not necessarily the ability to lead an army. What I need from each of you is the ability to deal with someone of similar strength to yourself."

Those words caused the room that was beginning to grow rowdy to sober. 

"You mean there are demons as strong as us?" Winnie asked. 

"As strong as you? Only a few," I said.

Winnie was incredibly strong, my current self was not her match. It wasn’t uncommon for the sects to each possess a talent or two on the level of the Clan Elders. She was once the shining star of the Heavenly Fist Sect, the number one sect in the world.

If she had been involved at all in the first demon war, perhaps my past life would have ended up differently. The Demon Lord cursed her to either get her to get her out of the way. I can only imagine the headache that would have come if Winnie had allowed herself to become possessed or otherwise controlled by one of the demon lords and his generals. 

"What I need from all of you is to be the elite, to be the generals in name. I'm sure I can either pair you with someone with enough sense to lead an army of people or be happy to help you learn to do it yourself. But in the present world, personal power is your key to authority. I need each of you to lend that to someone so that we can start moving forces to fight back.” I told them.

"And your promise to supply more booze?" the monk asked, tipping back the gourd he had been drinking from. He had spilled some, only to drain the last of it in his mouth and wipe it away with the back of his arm. 

"I'll give you as much booze as you can get, old monk. And to make it even better, I have plenty of poison, so you can mix it up just how you like it." I grinned.

The monk let out a cackle. "You might have to get me someone who can ferry my drunk ass around, but if you get me where I'm supposed to be, sure, I guess someone can rely on my authority to order the troops around."

He wasn’t really as bad as he seemed, but a monk who moved away from the world was filled with more cynicism than poisoned booze, which was saying something.

I gave him a nod of thanks for being the first to concede, only for my eyes to rake across the room.

The one-eyed man stood up. "Bullshit, I'm not fighting anyone else's battle." He stepped up to me and jabbed a single finger into the center of my chest. "Now you hear me--" 

I grabbed his wrist before he could even react and twisted it down, forcing his body to follow, until his face was nearly kissing my boot. "You're going to have to speak up if you want me to hear you from down there," I said calmly, while giving him a glare that made him visibly shake from fear. 

"What I meant to say was sign me up," he said, and I let go of his wrist, only for him to snap backwards. He grabbed his wrist and checked to make sure it was still fully functional.

Rogers might lean into the pirate captain aesthetic that his class had given him with his changed eye, but he wasn’t actually that tough.

My actions caught the attention of the rest of the room. While none of them could inspect me, they could certainly inspect the man I had just forced down to the ground. And with that, the rest of their complaints died on their lips. 

"Wonderful. From henceforth, you will be known as Humanity's Twelve Generals. I look forward to working with each one of you." I gestured to Gloria and gave her a slight nod.

She stepped out of the room for only a second before the door opened up. 

Eleven older men and one woman, dressed in fairly simple adventurer gear, entered. They gave off a stern discipline that told the world they were anything but simple. 

"These twelve have actual experience in leading people to war. I hope each of you can find one to your liking and establish a healthy cooperation." I gestured to the new entrants.

I had been busy scouring the world for people of power that hadn't participated in the first demon war. 

Thus Gloria had gone off with Circe and strong-armed more than a few governments into handing over their top brass, or finding those who had recently retired. After running them through enough instances that they wouldn't die at the first stiff breeze, as well as informing them of their new longevity, they were more than happy to commit to the new cause.

"Winnie, a special one has been prepared for you." I gestured to the side at a rough-looking German woman who marched forward, her shoulders squared and her head proud before she stood in front of Winnie. 

"Pleasure to meet you. I'm General Knallhart." The woman said. 

"Pleasure." Winnie extended a soft hand, giving me another one of her overly curious glances. Winnie didn’t play well with the boys and it was harder than I’d like to admit to find a female general.

I nodded to each of them as the tepid welcome did little to dissuade the military leaders, who began actively speaking to a number of my new generals, trying to get a feel for which ones would work best for them.

I stepped back and turned away, only for Gloria and Simone to follow me. 

"Do you really think it's okay to leave them all?" Nyx asked. "There's a lot of big personalities in there." 

"They'll figure it out." Gloria waved a hand. "Besides, if any of the generals piss off the… generals" she hesitated, "which ones are the real generals?”

“The ones with the experience, our former military leaders, will function as advisors. I think the ones with the actual power are worth being called generals." I answered.

"Right. Then if the advisors piss off the generals, we can always find new advisors." Gloria corrected herself on the nomenclature. 

"The biggest problem is going to be getting enough forces to support them." I said. "Any headway on countries willing to give us their military?" 

All three of them shook their heads. "I was hoping some of our new advisors might be able to help in that regard, but ultimately, the second they joined us, their countries turned their backs on them.” Simone said, shaking her head. "That makes no sense to me, because all of those countries are practically defunct now anyway."

She had checked out the communication systems in place. Any countries of reasonable size had completely collapsed into their smaller units. Even that was tenuous at best. Power would determine who ruled and politicians didn’t turn out to be the strongest initiated.

"Transportation and communication," I said, as if quoting something. I was remembering a lesson from my past life, though it wasn't even one from the Demon Wars.

In fact, it was a lesson I had once heard about Rome in school, or perhaps read about Rome in a book. The only reason they were as successful as they were was because they made crowned roads to simplify travel. That invention and expense to build them everywhere on the country's part was often hailed as the single reason the Roman Empire had been able to spread as far as it had under singular leadership.

"While we don't have the manpower yet," I advised, "As modern systems continue to collapse, we should start to build our little fiefdoms up around a road system. This only gets more complicated when it needs to be a road that can handle a wandering monster scrabbling over it. Even something like a hoof from a deranged monster could blow chunks out of an asphalt road."

“Understood.” Gloria nodded. “We already have the hub and spoke model for Vein City, perhaps we can repeat that here?”