Jerome, Krystyna, and their pack of fresh gnolls rushed in with a fury. The capital gnolls had been winning, slowly wearing down and pushing back the contingent Jerome had previously led, but the reinforcements had surprise, a flanking position, and full HP and SP bars.

Krystyna leapt into combat, picking off enemy gnolls with ease. Jerome joined in but was careful to stick to the places where he wouldn’t be accidentally set upon by his own forces.

In the heat of the battle it was a mixed blessing to go without an armband; it took a bit longer for enemy gnolls to recognize he was a threat, but he also sometimes absorbed attacks from his own army. The only way he got away with it was because he could verify his identity, either by transforming or inviting them to look at his stats. And if he did absorb some hits, healing was easy.

When that force was wiped out they took the fight to the gate.

That one was a bit harder, and they took losses as death rained down from above.

“The gate is the problem,” said Teddy. “Those spearmen can hurl weapons at us, but it’s hard to throw spears back up at them. They have mages, but you are the only one of us with damaging magic.”

That was indeed a problem. They could try and absorb losses until the guardians ran out of spears, but that would damage their ability to assault the palace. The gate was just about as difficult to attack from the inside as the outside… at least directly. “Take twenty gnolls and have them climb the walls farther out. Ten to each side. Then they’ll be able to rush gnolls on top of the gate.”

“Climb the walls?” asked Teddy. “Like a tree?”

Right. Teddy had amazing instincts and was already a fairly high level, but he’d literally been born last week. “Yep, like a tree. Every surface here except external walls is climbable by gnolls.”

He grinned. “I’ll make it happen.”

Jerome decided to start the slaughter early, to distract them from the greater threat that was coming. He hid behind a building with only his face showing and channeled Crystal Overload. A gnoll started shaking, worrying the gnolls beside it… but it didn’t die. They must be using a healer.

At least that healer would be kept busy, and the others would be looking for the magic attacker and not the gnolls coming in on their flanks. Jerome channeled until he ran out of magic, then switched forms and began again.

He noticed something that broke his concentration: glistening liquid flowed through the air. Where had that come from? He traced one end to a pile of broken beer bottles that some of his gnolls were throwing through the door of a bar. The stream went past Krystyna and then up, gaining height until it was over the gate. The targeting was somewhat crude, but it managed to hit several of the defending gnolls right in the eyes.

Krystyna raised a fist in victory. She’d found a use for a useless move.

The blinded, distracted capital gnolls fell quickly to the twenty gnolls Teddy had sent up to the walls. Their forces from outside broke through the gates, the city now completely breached.

“We won!” exclaimed Teddy.

“Not quite yet. The King is in a guarded palace, and we have yet to fight their strongest mage.”

“Then lead us to victory.”

Gladly.

Jerome climbed on top of a nearby building, switched the form of one of his gnolls (with an armband) and addressed his troops.

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“We’ve won a great victory,” he yelled, “but it is not yet complete.”

His voice barely carried and the gnolls ignored him. Instead of following they scattered through the city, looting and pillaging in celebration. A gnoll ran into a nearby shop and dragged out its owner, beating it and eventually killing it.

Jerome ran over to stop it. “The shopkeepers are fine! Unless they try to fight, then—”

“They are an enemy tribe,” said a nearby gnoll who’d been watching the scene with pleasure. “They must die.”

“I’m your tribe leader! You have to listen to me!”

“If you want to save our enemies, you are not my leader.”

All around, his gnolls — or the gnolls that were previously under his command — carried on the slaughter. A gnoll would enter a home, then exit five minutes later covered in blood.

He should’ve seen this coming.

Too late now.

At least he could justify it a little bit. All of these gnolls that were being killed had been complicit in the torture and murder of human beings. Once that strain of anti-human gnoll had been eliminated then they’d be able to live in peace.

After the entire population of the capital had been wiped out, they’d listen to him again… right?

The entire population. That was a lot of gnolls. Even if they’d been complicit in the torture of humans, even if they would respawn, Jerome didn’t relish the idea. Respawning without the ceremony meant that their memories would be wiped, their skills removed, and their level set to 1, and so even though the body came back it was effectively the same thing as murder.

Krystyna was frantically trying to stop some gnolls from looting a general store.

The gnolls pushed past her. She could have stopped them, but that would have involved violence against their own tribe, and who knew what would happen then. They didn’t have any true power as leaders, it seemed, and if you attacked a member of your own tribe did you get kicked out?

“They don’t listen to you either?”

Krystyna grimaced. “They just want to kill the enemy tribes.”

“They’re gnolls. The surprise isn’t that they’re slaughtering each other now. The surprise is that Katani kept an entire city of them together for so long.”

“But he’s a tyrant! I came here fighting tyrants, and I will continue to do so.”

“Even if that leads to genocide?”

“They’ll come back,” she said defiantly.

“And then what? We were doing badly enough with just two hundred in our tribe. What happens when we absorb the entire city?”

She turned away. “Don’t we have a king to kill?”

Suddenly he wasn’t so sure. “Let’s rescue the humans first and get them outside the city. I don’t trust our gnolls to not slaughter them.”

“Fine.”

Chaos spread throughout the city. Most of the capital gnolls left were unarmed, civilians. They’d specialized to a far greater degree than the outlying tribes and thus had a far larger non-combat population. While they’d had walls that had been fine, but now that the walls had been breached it was a disaster for the nascent civilization.

He made it to the prison, where he broke a hole in the wall and destroyed the prison cells.

“Come with me,” he said. “You’ll be free soon.”

They were scared at first because of his gnoll form, but eventually they followed. He led them to the hole he’d made in the back wall and shooed them through.

“Wait for me. I might come as a gnoll or as a human, but look at my skills and remember: I’m the one with a bunch of unique ones. Or a woman with Recoil Burst might come, she’ll help too. Anyone else: if they get too close, kill them.”

“How?”

“With…” Jerome remembered that they didn’t have any developed combat abilities due to all the sitting in prison. And now he’d taken them out and exposed them to the universe. At least before they’d been hidden in a stone cell. What happened if a hunting party ran across them? Or one of ‘his’ gnolls out for blood? “Start practicing with play combat,” he said, “and try not to get killed before I come back.”

Nervousness settled into him as an aching sensation in his stomach. He closed up the wall behind the humans, separating them from the bulk of the murderous gnolls, but that did no good for the relatively innocent denizens of this city.

If these buildings weren’t stone, they’d be on fire right now.

What had he done?