Year 206

Lumoof announced their plan to return to the others, and strangely, they asked to watch his return. We consented, since, well, there’s no real risk. It’s not as if they could replicate it anyway.

Or maybe they could if they had some kind of hero artifact with spell-copying abilities, but I highly doubt it.

In any case, trying to get Stella to open a portal where we want her to is actually quite hard. One of the methods we found to help Stella ‘find’ where to place the portal, was to connect her to me, and via [dream academy], share Lumoof’s location to her. It enabled highly accurate portals, across worlds, but only around individuals I could sense, like Lumoof and the Valthorns. It’s also slow, because the process of sharing the location took a while.

She described that each world was centered around the planet’s core. Not the star or the sun, but the planetary core. So, a portal’s position was calculated relative to the core, and the core itself has a bubble that protects it from portals or any spells.

Anyway, the portal of void opened in the chambers. Everyone gasped as they saw a portal materialise out of nowhere. The heroes were busy hunting demons, and they didn’t come.

From what we understood, they were about level 100 now, it took a while for them to regain their pace. They’ve been asleep and weak for so long, that even though they wanted to fight the demons as a result of their compulsion, their body struggled.

“Will you be back?” One of the dwarven strategists asked.

“With the heroes back in action... maybe not. Unless the heroes need our help to take on the demon king.”

“They did say they would appreciate the help...”

“Then I’ll see what I can do. But for now, duties back home require my urgent attention.” Lumoof gave everyone watching a wave, and they stepped through it.

***

“Lady Lausanne, free to talk?” Prabu and Ken approached her one day after her class at the Valtrian Academy. Lausanne’s role in the Valthorns had declined significantly, and she had quite fully transitioned to the role of an administrator and trainer, a bit like what Jura did for her.

“Ah. Yes.” They met at one of the many cafes along the streets of Freshka. “Is this confidential?”

“Quite.”

Lausanne nodded, and took out one of the standard privacy artifacts given to all Valthorns. It created a small bubble of magic around them that blocked sound. But it didn’t block me. Because a little bit of my roots were inside the bubble.

“We’re thinking of pitching an idea to Aeon and Stella, and we want your thoughts on what do you think Aeon will think?”

Lausanne laughed. Lausanne, Laufen and Yvon are all sought after, even as their roles have changed. They were the go-to-persons for the pre-pitch assessment. Essentially, the equivalent of having someone who had a lot of experience looking through their resume. “Yes. That’s what I do in my spare time these days. So. Hit me with it.”

Ken coughed. “We’re thinking that Aeon should start the equivalent of the multiverse League of Heroes.”

Lausanne stared, and then coughed. “Sorry I don’t understand.”

Ken paused as he realised Lausanne may not comprehend references. “So. Each habited, civilised world has their own heroes, and frequently, we are all stuck trying to fight each demon king by ourselves.”

Lausanne caught on immediately. “But Aeon can consolidate all the power, so that you can hit the demons with the power of heroes from multiple worlds.”

Ken smacked the table. “Exactly! That’s what we want to pitch. This combined force can also function as a reclamation force, to retake worlds lost to the demons.”

Prabu added. “Each demon king’s powerset is tailored differently, and the heroes’, each of us have a different power meant to counter our generation’s demon king. So our response to different types of demon kings are essentially less effective because our matchup sucks. But, if we get other heroes who are meant for different types of demon king, we could cover up for our shortfall.”

“Yes. Stella currently needs void mana for her portals, which meant us heroes can’t use her methods. But Aeon’s clone-body teleportation doesn’t need void mana, which meant heroes could move through it. Aeon can essentially be the tree that links all the heroes together.”

Lausanne nodded. “I think Aeon would be keen to listen, but it does require friendly heroes. Heroes that can play by Aeon’s rules. There are risks to it, I’m sure you are aware that Aeon’s naturally cautious with you guys, due to the powers you all have.”

Prabu nodded.

“Aeon’s actions are also often misunderstood, as his perspective is very broadly zoomed out. Aeon is probably not keen to play coordinator for heroes, so one of you must be willing to step up for that.”

Prabu nodded and looked at Ken. “Actually I have just the candidate. The guy who’s superpower is his knowledge of tropes.”

“Fuck that.” Ken looked back at Prabu.

“Lausanne has a point, it’s your idea. You have to manage it. You can’t just propose ideas and expect others to run it for you.” Prabu responded.

“What if these other heroes try to kill me?” Ken said. “I’m powerless!”

“That could be your advantage, really. It’s because you’re now outside this whole setup that you could be the manager!” Lausanne answered and Prabu nodded along. “I do think it is a worthwhile setup, and could serve to bring all these worlds closer.”

“...I’ll need to think about it.” Ken wasn’t keen on it.

But I quite liked the idea of a combined hero-force, but that essentially meant I had to invest my tree of clones in both Threeworlds and this Mountainous World.

I liked that I had one tree on the moon, another on the demon world, and another one on the remnant cometworld drifting through the vast void sea. They felt strange and unique enough to deserve one of my clones.

***

Back home, the pathway to the next demon world was getting quite clear in our sky, and Stella was a little... excited. I wasn’t sure whether Alka’s research craze was spreading, or she was really thrilled by the prospects of visiting another world with the rift gate, instead of her own powers.

The rift gates were tweaked to enable almost anyone to use it. At least, in theory, I should be able to dump an entire army of Valthorns on the demon worlds without the need to deploy my clone.

The army was tense, and we gathered what was nothing less than an invasion force, really. What the demons did to us, we would go full reverse uno and invade them first.

Our first victory condition was simple. Capture or destroy the rift gates, so that we can stop their ability to send mobs across the stars. It was the military equivalent of destroying their landing ships and aircrafts.

Our second victory condition, which was not so critical, was attempt to defeat the demon king on their homeworld. This would require deployment of my clone, since only through the clone, I could send the heroes. But we had a debate whether to deploy my clone or not. My clone would significantly add combat strength to the demon world, but I wasn’t sure whether I could sustain battle on two demon worlds simultaneously.

Not yet, not until the mana from the parasite world recovered.

My team commented that if I was not there, then it makes this battle far more risky. They did not have an exit plan. It’s only this portal, and what if the demons interrupt it?

For those with my Court of the Deitree familiars, I could even summon them directly. But that was a very small contingent.

A point which I agreed with. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to invest my clone on this other world. I was torn between deploying it on the two worlds, or invading this world directly. Honestly, we also didn’t know for sure whether that ‘deep hole to the core’ and the ‘tower of void mana’ was something common across all the demon worlds.

As it is, Alka planned on the assumption that these towers were universal, that the mechanism of creating demon kings and the process of sending them across the stars were largely identical. Even if it didn’t work out, there were ways to abuse a star mana bomb, and the technological knowledge from developing such weapons were useful.

Anyway, in the end, we decided that my clone would be deployed at the last minute, once we confirmed that it’s possible to assault the demon king. We would choose a better location this time. Ideally next to the tower of void and next to the deep hole.

If all goes well, then the heroes would join us for the battle against the demon king. If not, they would stay back on our world and watch the chaos unfurled.

All this knowledge was gradually uploaded to my tree of knowledge, the Registree. It’s been growing since I got it almost sixty years ago.

The hope was that through knowledge accumulation, even if we lose Alka, we didn’t have to start from scratch.

That’s the hope.

The good thing was, the Registree isn’t a limited tree. Just a special type that I could make more of, so I made some extra copies on the moon. I couldn’t place it in the Cometworld shard because there’s no space.

In any case, deployment of my clone was optional. The team, naturally, had so many questions about an assault, and they raised good questions.

“How do we find the rift gates?” We couldn’t just blindly attack. They could be located all over the world of the demons, and there’s no way we could hit all of them without proper intelligence. Especially since we’re holding off my clone deployment until much later. That meant my own vision was out of the picture.

“What if it’s not hospitable on the other side and we die immediately when we reach?” That’s also a possibility, but should not be difficult to solve. My familiars could create a small bubble of atmosphere with some mana-drain, essentially living astronaut suits.

On the rift gates, Stella thus started work on some kind of item that detects other rift gates, by tapping into their void mana signature. Essentially, she made a compass that leads to the nearest strongest source of void mana.

That was the best we could do at the moment. I would like to have a global view of the demon world, but that would be impossible without some kind of satellite constellation to map the demon world.

It’s not like the habited worlds where there are existing maps to use.

The skepticism and worry among the general forces were quite high, especially since I wasn’t taking the field myself with my trees.

But with all four of my domain holders taking the field, it shouldn’t be a problem. At least Roon and Johann should be able to provide significant intelligence data before a full fledged assault.

***

Horns and Hytreerion fought many battles on the demonworld. The boundaries of places controlled by my trees and those controlled by the demons fluctuate a lot, as beetles and demons met on the battlefield. I controlled an area on the demonworld that was slightly larger than the size of the Central Continent, and it was at the edges, where my ‘influence’ was weak that we saw all these changing borders.

Horns actually got destroyed a few times, but he was able to eject his artificial soul before destruction, and then redeployed him in new bodies. It’s a modification we made to his physical form, as he was really quite fragile when faced with demon champions that popped out with sufficient regularity.

My new treechikomas were busy too, gathering more samples throughout the land.

It was a large place, even if most of it was empty, and it would take years to completely build a database of the magical energies and data of the land.

I could, in theory, deploy my lab-trees everywhere, but because such lab trees actually consume mana, I would just make the mana-problem on the parasite world worse, and that would increase how long it took to regenerate my beetles.

I could wait decades for the mana of this world to recover, but I also didn’t want to wait that long.

In theory, if I could gain the mana of the Threeworlds and the Mountainworld, it’s possible for it to spend more of that mana here.

Looking at it that way, it sure seems like my moonbase and my Cometworld deployment had a ‘mana-opportunity-cost’. I lose the mana that could be generated by having a clone on these normal worlds, in exchange for the novelty and exploratory aspects of the Cometworld, where I could travel to other worlds and see those other places, and for the security of the Moonbase.

Our treechikomas did find some good hints though. There were certain rocks with metallic ores that seemed to retain a kind of mana layer, but that didn’t help us much in terms of identification of dates.

Our digs into the underground also didn’t reveal much.

I also started to wonder about the system again. There was a missing piece in the game. Something obvious that I wasn’t seeing or realising.

So, I took some time to do a bit more thinking and tried to understand what was the demon’s win condition. Let’s say the demon king won, the demon king defeated the heroes, and the heroes no longer came to the world.

Was that it, and they won? The world would automagically turn into a demon world? Essentially, that question could be explained as, what made a demon world... a demon world? Why did a normal world, perfectly able to spawn regular stuff before this, stopped creating the normal monsters and stuff, and started spawning demons?

The only one who saw a world lose was Snek. Lilies didn’t actually go through the full ‘loss’.

“I don’t really know?” Snek answered. “We lost our world to the demons, but we were so afraid that we spent our times running and hiding.”

“Wait wait wait. Do you know what happened to the demon king?”

“Not really. It was... there?” Snek answered. “But honestly we were just trying to survive in the underground tunnels that no one checked.”

“But do you have any idea whether the demon king left?”

“...maybe? We’re not sure, but I think it probably didn’t, because the world started to produce demons, and probably other demon kings too. But we were too far from such places to actually know.”

“Wait.” I had an epiphany then.

If the demon king sent to invade other worlds were products of existing demon kings, then didn’t that mean there should, in theory, be at least one demon king still on the parasite world somewhere, playing the role of the ‘Queen’ or a ‘Hatchery’?

Maybe the demon king is just a massive [forest rod] that captured the Core?

This absolutely clicked. No. It explained how such a massive tunnel to the core was created. The demon king that won dug towards the core, and captured the core. Through that process, the world’s natural spawning mechanism was ‘converted’ to produce demons.

Each demon king was a massive colonization mothership too. But... how?

That also meant that somewhere in the core of the parasite world, was a demon king. Perhaps no longer a ‘demon king’ because it has been deployed to control the core of the world.

If this was the case, I needed to send the heroes to the parasite world, and attack the core.

Free the core from the control of the demons, and that would greatly change the balance of power of our world. Maybe this would also significantly improve the natural mana recovery, and also get access to the core’s mana.

Of course, I then submitted this theory to my domain holders and the other senior leaders.

“Doesn’t that just mean that demons that won essentially start digging downwards?” Lumoof speculated. “But that doesn’t happen, isn’t it?”

Edna, who was also present. “Are you suggesting an attack on the parasite world? Aeon, with all due respect, we have no ability to attack two worlds at the same time.”

“I am aware.”

Actually, this cycled back to the Mountainworld again.

The demon king was not moving.

Was it digging all this time?

“So we have three ways of checking. One, we send the heroes to the parasite demonworld, and attack the hole to the core. Two, we go back to the Mountainworld and figure out what the demon king is doing underground. If your theory is right, it should be attempting to reach the core.” Edna repeated. “Three, we also have the riftgate to this new world. If we do fight the demon king on this new world, and our initial conjectures are proven correct, the heroes and us could mount an assault on the core of this new demonworld and see whether there’s one there.”

Three priorities, and I had to decide which one to pursue.

I was keen on the riftgates, so that was a clear yes.

But this would mean all my domain holders would be deployed there, in order to achieve my intended objective of denying the next attack. My seed would also be there for a while, at least, until the battle’s over and everyone is safe back home.

Ken’s League of heroes would have to wait until this is over.