The Fiend's Creation System

The Humans’ Skepticism

Everyone was silenced by Florence’s thought-provoking words and no one dared to speak out against him. He was the high commander among them for a reason and that was due to his acute thinking and particularity to even the smallest of details.

These traits made him a great commander and because of these traits, Florence was able to come up with this very far-fetched theory just from the information he acquired through the battles they won that things may not be going as well as everyone was made to believe.

The general wasn’t even afraid to admit that he may be wrong too. After all, his speculations weren’t based on facts or positive information about the fiends. He could be wrong or he could be right, but they needed to make a swift decision now.

Should they believe in Florence’s words and the information he’s gathered, or continue pushing forward and hopefully end things with the fiends once and for all? Everyone was thinking hard about his words since they could very well be true. 

They didn’t have any information about the fiends so his speculations, despite being unfavorable for them, were still in their interests. Although the champions may be able to save themselves if the fiends were indeed just toying with them, the rest of the soldiers would be doomed if Florence’s speculations turned out to be true and they hard-headedly continued pushing forward now.

At this point, the army was still only around halfway to the location where the scouts had found the fiends’ supposed base. It wasn’t too late for them to turn back right now because any further, it would be far past the point where retreat could be considered. 

Florence was willing to err on the side of caution than potentially make the decision that could doom them all but although Florence was the commander, he needed the approval of every other commander, in this case, the other champions, to make a decision such as this.

A few began discussing amongst themselves since this was a tough decision to make on their own. They were already halfway to the fiends’ base but now Florence had brought up a concern that may or may not be true.

Lilias and her husband saw that things were getting nowhere so they decided to ask Florence about his opinion on this matter.

“General Florence, since you were the one that brought this concern up for discussion, what's your opinion? What do you think is our best course of action right now?”

The others stopped their discussions and turned to Florence. He was the one that brought up this concern so his opinion mattered the most.

“I think we should err on the side of caution. We have virtually no information about our enemy so if we haphazardly continue this campaign, the outcome might not be in our favor.”

One of the champions that were thinking they should continue the assault quickly voiced his objection, “But we’ve come this far already! We’ve lost one hundred thousand good men and women already. If we turn back now, we’d be wasting their sacrifice!”

Heather quickly spoke up and rebutted the champion’s statement in favor of Florence’s opinion, “Yes...but what happens if we continue and Florence’s concerns turn out to be real? Our lives would still be alright, but the rest of the soldiers would die a dog's death out here. I’m usually never in agreement with Florence, but he’s the sharpest man I know and there’s a reason why everyone here agreed to appoint him as high commander!”

“...”

“Look, the sacrifice of those one hundred thousand soldiers won’t be in vain. At least now we know that the number of fiends is well above one million in total. I say we head back and study our enemy further before launching a second attack. We can also take the chance to send a message back to the alliance members and ask them to dispatch reinforcements!”

Heather’s words were the final nail in the coffin for some of the still hesitating champions that were troubled in which action to choose. Advance or retreat? Heather was usually opposing Florence but this time, even she had to seriously contemplate his concerns and eventually sided with her rival’s opinion.

Although they had wasted this opportunity like the saying goes, better safe than sorry. Right now, they could still turn back and retreat to Redgrove City with the remaining soldiers than risk losing all of them in a humiliating defeat at their enemy’s hands.

“The fiends haven’t deployed any of their champion-level people yet. The church had lost 2 champions at their hands and one of our light alliance’s champions turned coat and decided to side with the enemy. Obviously, this was just in a bid to preserve her life. We can at least deduce that the fiends have a significant number of champions considering that they were able to kill the Holy Light Religion’s Holy Knight and ArchBishop.”

“Mhm, champions from the church are like cockroaches. No matter how many times you hit them, they’ll always be able to heal themselves and get right back onto their feet. The fact that the fiends KILLED two of them...well, I don’t need to say anymore, right folks?” Charlie said this as he eyed everyone present.

The church had petitioned for this attack but they had only contributed priests and paladins, and not a single champion level figure. No matter how they masked it, the church was scared to send any of their champions because they feared losing another one.

There were only a handful of Holy Knights and ArchBishops, losing any more would definitely diminish their influence and power. Some of the champions present began questioning the decision of their rulers in sending them here when the Church who had petitioned for the attack didn’t even send anyone with significant strength.

“The church...they didn’t even send anyone powerful to aid us…not a single Holy Knight or ArchBishop!”

“They’re just a bunch of bumbling old cowards. They lost 2 of their champions and didn’t want to contribute any to the campaign because they’re afraid of losing anymore!”

“...Losing more?”

“...”

“Those bastards, they withheld information from us. There’s no doubt!”

Florence couldn’t understand why most of the champions finally figured this out. He already knew about the church’s motives right from the get-go after he learned about their loss to the fiends and the petition they issued to the Light Alliance.

It was all just a political game and it was no wonder why the Light Alliance people had only dispatched a total of one million soldiers in all when they could have easily dispatched over a hundred million soldiers if they wanted to.

The condition of the soldiers was also not that great. Most of the army’s soldiers were either young and inexperienced or were those that were on the edge of retirement.

“This battle is just a probing one, they didn’t expect us to actually defeat the fiends in one fell swoop. They were going to use this battle against the fiends as a means to procure information about them. 

Most of the champions that were sent here were completely oblivious to this. They only followed orders and didn’t think too deeply about things. If Florence wasn’t a critical thinker himself, he may have led the humans right into the palms of the fiends.

Julius was watching and listening in to their discussion and he began laughing incredulously at the accuracy of their high commander's predictions.

“This man! He’s good, he’s really good! If they don’t turn back now, I’d be reeling them in like fishes!”

Julius stood up from his throne and walked out of the great hall.

“King Julius, where are you going?” Bael asked.

Julius turned to Bael and said, “We can’t have our prey getaway now can we?”

“...?”

“I’m going to have a small chat with them.”

“What?”

Julius left behind those words before walking out and quickly exiting the castle. He arrived outside and quickly took to the skies. Every aerial fiend and dark fiend followed after him while the ground fiends began moving to keep up with him from the ground.

A large sea of fiends moved together in waves from the skies and the earth. They moved in the direction of the human army while following Julius’s lead. 

Julius’s fiend spawners had been working overtime and it all culminated in this large sea of fiends that were of various types. The large majority of Julius’s army was still just homunculi while the rest were a mix of the new types and the evolved ones.

A small part of the army was made up of Julius’s dark fiends and in this campaign, he decided to bring all of his hero units, including the newly created mage-type hero unit Julius created using ArchBishop Torres’s body.

Since the new hero unit had a powerful body as its base, it was able to turn out like Sammael who kept around 80 percent of his abilities while also gaining even more power by becoming a fiend.

The only setback was the fact that it couldn’t inherit Torres’s consciousness. The ArchBishop, despite having already died, had a strong will. When he was revived as a fiend, Torres knew that something was wrong and immediately destroyed his own soul before he was completely ensnared within the fiends’ collective consciousness.

The man would rather die than serve as Julius’s pawn after being resurrected and given a second chance. Thanks to this, Julius wasn’t able to completely preserve the new hero unit’s abilities but it didn’t matter.

The body was still of high quality and using light-elemental magic wasn’t really what he was looking for when he created this magic-type hero unit. The new unit’s name was Tallos and he was a fast learner. 

In just the short time it had after spawning, it had managed to learn advanced magic spells for the 4 basic elements as well as intermediate hexes for dark magic. The new soul that Julius and the system implanted into the body to replace Torres’s soul was in a sense much better than the previous one.

Torres cultivated magic and thus had a powerful soul, it was hard for Julius to convert such a being in a short period of time unless he transformed him into a dark fiend as he did with Sammael.

However, the system warned him against creating a second dark fiend at this moment because of the imbalance it would create. In the end, however, everything worked out just fine and he acquired another strong unit at his disposal.

With Eisha and Aria focusing on raising their levels to catch up with Sammael and Tallos, Julius now had 4 champion-level fiends in his ranks―5 including him. Eisha and Aria were still low-level champions but with their cheat-like growth, they’d be able to climb the ranks quite soon.

At the very least, they would be able to hold their own against the low-ranked human champions that were dispatched in the campaign against them. Tallos had to start anew with his abilities so he was only a mid-level champion while Sammael was definitely ranked near the top among the champion-level characters of this world.

Previously, in his human state, Sammael would probably be at General Florence’s level at most, but thanks to his rebirth as a fiend, he was able to break through his physical limitations and develop even further.

Even now, Sammael was still getting stronger. Now Julius...he was powerful but not to the extent that he could contend with Dark Fiend Sammael. In his entire army, Sammael was the strongest while he was probably third after Tallos.

However, he didn’t worry about being outnumbered by the human champions that were within the ranks of the human army that was now trying to retreat. Champions were indeed very powerful super people, but even they would be overwhelmed by the sheer force of numbers.

Unless they were a god, champions, no matter how powerful they may be, could still be brought down if the number of bodies thrown at them was high enough. This was what Julius was banking on in this confrontation.

His fiends and the humans that would soon turn into fiends… he was going to make up for his lack of strength with numbers and even if he couldn’t kill the champions at the higher end of the spectrum, at the very least, he wanted to push them out of his territory while giving them a lesson that they would never forget.

*****

Back at the humans’ side, everyone had come to a unanimous decision. The army was going to retreat. Florence’s concerns were just speculations but if they turned out to be real, then it would spell trouble for everyone here.

They had already done a good job by defeating one million fiends at the cost of only one hundred thousand soldiers so this was already a victory in their books. Also, after taking a look at the condition of their army, Florence and the other nations’ commanders noticed that their troops were all quite fatigued from the continuous days of battles and marching.

They weren’t even able to live off the land since the Shifting Hallows were originally barren and the new changes that happened to the area appeared to be even worse than before.

It was either now or never so the commanders chose now to retreat. They couldn’t face the fiends with an exhausted army. The priests and paladins were also quite spent from continuously using their healing spells and [Purification] spells to keep the air free from the red miasma.

If they wanted to completely defeat the fiends, they needed to do it with a much larger army. They had greatly underestimated the fiends and their numbers. There was no way an army of barely a million could defeat the fiends who, by Florence’s predictions, had maybe five times their numbers at the minimum.

Florence had the army turn around and were now marching back in the direction of the Redgrove Forest. They were moving rather slowly without any of them knowing that the fiends were hot on their trails.

Julius needed at least a day of nonstop marching due to his large numbers to catch up to the humans who were still far away. If the human army didn’t take breaks every now and then, it might have taken Julius even longer to catch up to them.

He didn’t think that one of the people in their ranks was smart enough to deduce his numbers and come to a conclusion that he was only playing with them and sending his fiends out on suicide missions to thin out their numbers before the final showdown at the mock sanctum.

“A critical thinking strategist… I want that man!” Julius’s eyes glinted greedily when he thought of this.

“It’d be a waste to have such a talent remain with the enemy. I’ll make sure to turn you into a fiend!”