Should I or shouldn’t I? After giving it some thought, I finally decided to go in the end. Putting aside all the other considerations, losing that much potential fodder wasn’t something I could ignore. If I were to allow Violet Snow to have her way, all the Abaddon Rodents would be slaughtered and I would have to find another fodder race and that, was just a bother. Better to capture them now and be done with it. Finding a new target takes effort after all.
“Dearest, I heard that white puppy sent some news back.”Ever since that inexplicable engagement, Numila stuck to me like glue. Having just received that report myself, it didn’t take long before she came visiting after receiving news of the report herself. “Are you leaving to help her?”
“Julia, you should go have a rest too.” Ever since I had Julia help me with the crafting, our weapon production rate improved decently. Each day, we managed to craft over a hundred weapons.
Seeing that Numila was here, she might as well take a break now while I handled this. Pulling Numila out of the crafting area, “I expected hardly any resistance on the lizardman front. Since you’re back already and since Violet Snow seemed to have run into some problem, I think we should pay her front a visit. Those rats are numerous, just capturing half of them alive would basically solve our fodder problem.”
“So we’re going to battle then?” Being a battle enthusiast, her eyes immediately perked up as she heard that. “Dearest, when do we leave to help? Those lizards were just too weak, all we had to do was toss a couple of javelins and they just gave in…”
Well, it’s not like those lizardmen are idiots either. With no way to fly, why would they even take you head on. Besides, with that puppet ruler, Westley, as a mediator, I bet a majority of those lizardmen still thought that Habona was some reinforcement he brought in to contest the clan’s leadership.
Truth be told, the defensive quality of their scales weren’t that bad. Had it not been for gravity boosting the penetration of those sharpened bone javelins, those shoddy weapons probably wouldn’t be able to penetrate their scales even if you stabbed them till their tips wore out.
Thus, Violet Snow’s engagement with the ratmen was the true test of my air force. Furthermore, that was also the first time I deployed my hellhound cavalry. From the report I got, their performance wasn’t that bad either and there weren’t too many casualties.
Seeing that Violet Snow tossed the question back to me, naturally, I would pick the choice that benefited me the most.
“Ready your kinsharpies, we’re setting off tomorrow to aid Violet Snow.”
“Alright, Dearest’s the best, this one just knew that you would bring her along with you!” Grabbing my face, she firmly kissed me before running off giggling. Seeing as we were about to head for war, she naturally had a lot of preparation to do.
Such an anxious girl.
Originally, I only intended to bring her along while getting my bodyguard team leaders, No.3 and Big 4 to come along. However, Mimiya ended up tagging along out of boredom. On the other hand, her brother Xixidi didn’t seem all that eager to fight.
Once I left, the daily operations of our base would be temporarily left to Julia who in all honesty was probably a better manager than me. She was an extremely capable lust demon and even though her combat strength was kind of lacklustre, her managerial capabilities more than made up for it. Unlike her, I was a deadbeat with zero leadership experience. From kindergarten all the way to college, I never even got the chance to be a team leader let alone a class leader.
With the army gathered and ready to depart, the rest of the devils in the base came over to send us off. For the foot soldier section of this expedition, I brought along 2000 harpies and 300 guardsmen. At the same time, I had Numila, Mimiya, Vick, No.3 and Big 4 to accompany me as well.
Speaking of which, Vick and Mimiya seemed to be getting along pretty well. In fact, these two potatoes seemed to had been made for each other, after all, every potato needed an accompaniment. However, at least these two potatoes knew to behave around me and were currently standing quietly behind me though, who knew if they were making faces behind me.
“Julia, while I’m gone, all the matters in the base will be handled by you. Just make sure nothing major happens and don’t overwork yourself.”
Other than this lust demon, there really wasn’t anyone else dependable amongst my subordinates. Before knowing me, she already had experience managing over 2000 devils. Seeing as Mo En was basically a henpecked husband and didn’t care about such matters, she handled all the matters back then as well.
“Don’t worry, your Highness, I’ll handle everything well in your absence. I guarantee the plan will proceed smoothly.” Giving a stealthy kick to her husband, “You’ll help me as well, right Dearest?”
“…” Initially, Mo En was standing in a daze beside her wife when she suddenly kicked him. Not being able to react in time, the potato groggily answered, drool still dripping from his mouth, “Mhm mhm, the souls were delicious…”
“Dearest!” Seeing her husband act so out of line, her inner tigress immediately reared its head.
Throwing a vicious glare at her dunce of a husband, she said nothing but gave him the “you know what’s going to happen” look.
“…” Realizing that he was in trouble, he immediately got to his knees and hugged her thighs as he pleaded, “Noo…I still want to sleep on the bed tonight…you promised me already…you can’t just go back on your words like that…”
“Idiot! Who told you to talk about that!”
“But I really want to sleep on the bed…”
“Idiot, how could you talk about such things right now…”
“But I really don’t want to sleep on the floor…”
“Shut up!”
“Woo woo…”
“Ahahahah…more more…”
Behind me, I could already hear the gloating giggles of Mimiya. As for Xixidi, he didn’t seem to mind at all that his grandfather was currently embarrassing himself in public and was instead busy smacking his lips while gleefully hugging a piece of meat, a silly looking smile crossed his lips as he did so.
Sigh, looking at that family of clowns, Julia didn’t seem all that reliable all of a sudden.
“Alright, while I’m not here, make sure to pay more attention, Julia. Make sure nothing goes wrong.” With that potato of a teammate, Mo En, by her side, it looks like I really had to lower the difficulty of this task.
“If anything difficult crops up, just put it aside for now and wait till I get back. I’ll leave the devil egg in your care as well, make sure to feed it souls constantly.”
“Understood, your Highness.”
Other than that, there was basically nothing else for me to worry about. Training the troops in the nest was handled by One-eye while management was handled by Julia. Security’s Mo En…there shouldn’t be any issue there, right?
Just as I turned around to leave, One-eye took the lead in taking a half kneel and chanted, “May the Master forever fly the flag of victory!”
“May the Master forever fly the flag of victory!” Nine-finger and his cronies immediately kneeled as well and chanted like they were offering a prayer.
Having lost the initiative in his bootlicking, No.5 immediately noticed his failure as a professional bootlicker and promptly chimed in to prove his existence: “Ah…the Master is invincible, may the Master rule the world for a thousand seasons!”
“…” His bootlicking left me speechless as always but when did One-eye learn to do so as well? I honestly didn’t expect that from him. Good, good, this kid has potential.
In order to speed up our progress, I had the harpy witches carry the devils. As for me, Numila was naturally the one who carried me. These harpies had an astonishing speed and carrying capacity. Even with a devil weighing them down on one claw, their speed didn’t drop that much.
In this manner, we rushed to the edge of the ratmen’s territory in just four days. As for why I knew that this was their territory, that’s because I could smell them even this high up.
“Send out the scouts, since there’s traces of ratmen activity here, Violet Snow shouldn’t be that far off either.”
“Alright.” Numila immediately turned to her subordinates and ordered them to search around the vicinity. Roughly ten minutes later, we got our first report. In the distance, I spotted a lone harpy closing in on our location to report her findings.
After waiting for the majority of the scouts to return, Numila then turned to me to deliver the collated information.
“Dearest, this one’s kinsharpies reported that they found no trace of battle nearby however there were traces of the other races left behind. Even though it was faint, we can confirm that it belonged to Elena’s clan. If you require us to track them down, we can follow this scent trail.”
In this bony prison, there were undead cleaners who cleaned up the battlefields and repaired the maze in general. Even if the walls were to get damaged somehow, the cleaners would automatically come to repair them after leaving them alone for a while. In other words, it wasn’t strange at all that they found no traces of battle.
Thankfully, the harpies had an impressive tracking ability that could pick up such faint clues.
“Follow them, hopefully everything’s still well at Violet Snow’s front.”
“Mhm.”
With that, the order was given by Numila to set off in pursuit. The harpies picked up a devil as before and took to the air. As for me, I was pressed tightly against a couple of dangerous weapons.
That…that Numila truly has a lot of meat packed up here…
Following the scent trail, we flew for another two more days before encountering Violet Snow. When we found them, they were already in the midst of surrounding a group of rodents and slaughtering them. Judging from the corpses strewn all over, these rats really stood no chance against them.
Of the dead bodies I could see, none of them were devils, let alone hellhounds, medusas or harpies.
The majority of the rat corpses were peppered with bone javelins that were barely visible from a distance due to their short length. Compared to the hardy scales of the lizardmen, their defensive strength was notably lacking. Thus, it didn’t take much for the airborne javelineers to skewer them.
If the javelin hit a fatal spot, a couple of them were even able to kill off a rodent on the spot. Let’s not forget that I gave each of these harpies four javelins and that some of these javelins could still be reused…
At the end of the day, the ratmen’s biggest weakness was that they had no ranged capabilities and neither were they able to fly…in other words, they were nothing more than a bunch of furry target dummies that moved…suddenly, this whole air force thing seemed so busted.
