Lenore Wraithwhisper cracked an eye open to a brand new day. It never seemed to become a normal process for her mind to rise through the fog of dreams and find herself once more in the land of the living. Part of that was because she was a raging caffeine addict and until she'd had two or three cups of the stuff (Kelchar, they call it kelchar here, she reminded herself) she was utterly useless. But that really was one the more minor of the motivators for her constant fog. It had been four months, give or take, since her life had gone batshit insane on her and landed her in an alien world where she had assumed the life of someone else entirely. That someone else, Lenore Wraithwhisper, had checked off any number of the standard isekai tropes of what to expect when you find yourself in another world... except for two things.

  She had not, as seemed to be a genre staple, been killed by a runaway truck that in no way had been obeying the rules of the road, endangering any number of pedestrians but only managing to kill her. More importantly, though, it turned out that she wasn't even the summoned hero in this random ass scenario. No, it turned out that the one who had been summoned had been the woman whose life she'd acquired: the REAL Lenore Wraithwhisper. As far as deflating moments go, running across that one had been pretty demoralizing. Still, Len had done fairly well for herself in this new world, all things considered.

  First, she'd managed a decent showing in the tournament she'd found herself competing in immediately upon arrival. Turned out that her body's original owner had done a fair bit of personal conditioning and that, combined with her own experience with martial arts had helped her to take down foes twice her size with... well, not ease exactly, but at least moderate success. That had landed her in hot water, oddly enough, with the man in charge of the tournament, someone she really ought to learn the name of at some point because he'd made it clear that her success was not something he approved of. She'd been saddled with a trio of rejected goblins who'd been intended for execution but given a final chance at survival as her minions. There were strange and disturbing socio-political aspects with that situation that she was doing her best not to think about at the moment but suspected she'd have to come to grips with and possibly tear to shreds at some point or another.

  They had engaged in some light training and team-building exercises in the form of challenging bears to combat and frequent mining work to make ends meet while other combatants had spent time training for the next tournament she'd been forced into: the Grand Proving. It had been less than great for most of it, but Lenore's good friend Kilareth Bloodsipper had lent a hand, providing them with expert crafting knowledge and a great ear to lean on. Len had actually broken down and explained the whole situation to this woman who'd life she'd invaded and, much to her surprise, had been welcomed rather than kicked to the curb. It had been a fairly heartwarming experience and Len now counted Kila as one of her best friends in any world.

  The training hadn't been all sunshine and roses, though, they'd ended up capturing a human warrior, someone bound to some sort of holy caste of knights that had practiced some ancient art that had fascinated Len and driven her to learn it. In a bid for his freedom, the man had agreed to teach her some of it but there had been a catch: it was a sort of bonded magic that relied on a pact with something that, had Len not already been a member of a Demon Army, she would have assumed was demonic in nature. This was where Pitch had entered the picture.

  Pitch was a creature of shadow, generally unknowable, definitely unfriendly, and something of a monster with arrangements that seemed prone to causing her extreme pain over long periods of time. It had taught her a sort of battle meditation that allowed her to link awarenesses with companions she chose, enhancing their combat potential while making her helpless. It also had the unfortunate side effect of leaving her bedridden with debilitating headaches for several days after she used it, but that was a trade-off she’d accepted for the sake of survival and having at least one edge in the Grand Proving.

  That edge had proven desperately needed as she'd made her way through the tournament. The fights had been hard right from the start, but they took a severe turn when they ended up in combat with necromantically animated versions of one of the teams she'd done battle with. She hadn't managed to put all the pieces together, but she had an extreme suspicion that the enemy she'd made at the first Proving was involved. This had forced her to push herself to the limit using that new ability, and she'd barely managed to scrape out what she'd assumed to be a victory but had effectively been a defeat.

  Enter the Demon Lord Astrid. A prickly woman who Len had disliked right away. For whatever reason, Astrid had the absolute adoration of pretty much everyone around her. It was some sort of strange aura that she had that enthralled them and made even the most inane drivel absolute genius in their eyes. It had made Len question her sanity the first time she saw it, but that immunity she had seemed to catch the Demon Lord's attention, as a 'reward' for her modest showing (and the fact that she could be a potential threat in the wrong hands), Len had been assigned to her very own command: Grenus' Hovel.

  Unfortunately for her, the Hovel was a neglected outpost that essentially served as a final punishment for anyone that offended the command structure enough to be disposed of, but not quite enough to be worthy of a proper execution. It was a sort of slow death in obscurity that resulted in most of those sent to it either wandering off to the woods to die alone or just wasting away at a dying camp relying on the two or three people actually willing to do any work for the sake of everyone's survival. It was a sentence clearly intended to do away with Len and she'd been rather pissed at it.

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  That being said, back when she'd been a human, Lenore had been a very particular type of stubborn. Anyone who insisted she couldn't do a thing would invariably piss her off enough to burst through whatever barriers were in front of her and get her to do exactly what they claimed couldn't be done. It had been a slow process to work everything into order, forcing the camp to respect her authority had been particularly difficult given the fact that they were used to not having to do a damn thing. Thankfully, with a combination of goblin-related punishments, a former hobby in gardening, and some basic understanding of greenhouse construction (not to mention one very handy banished glassblower), and a general unwillingness to give up under the pressure of constant grief had gotten her to a point where she'd almost thought she'd had things under control.

  That, of course, was when life had thrown yet another curveball in the form of Keseryn. Kes was a human girl who'd attacked Len on a mission of revenge, hell-bent on ending Len's life for ordering her people to kill Kes' parents. This had all been news to Len, since she really wasn't in the business of random slaughter of civilians, regardless of what the title of the army she was affiliated with. This, in turn, had led her to the discovery that two of her number had gone rogue. They had been the hunters of the Hovel, not really going out of their way to support the place but often as not doing the bare minimum to keep people alive and bellies full once in a while. As it happened, a decent amount of the 'hunting' they did was just a matter of pillaging from banished survivors from the local human clan known as the Kelvach. They had decided that they were done serving the Hovel and had holed up in the house that had belonged to Kes' parents.

  Len had not taken the news of the insubordination well. The traitors had likely expected her to kill off the human girl, which wouldn't really have been in character for Lenore, who instead had taken the girl alive, then not so gently encouraged her to lead the way to her house so she could visit proper judgment on the pair. While Len would've been willing to hear them out if they'd had anything resembling a decent explanation, the results had been self-evident even without the pair almost immediately attacking her and her entourage. Things had escalated rather bloodily from there, forcing Len to kill one, and maim the other, effecting her own banishment on the woman.

  Naturally, rather than being able to relax after that series of events, Len had only found herself in more grief as the fallout from that little event had landed. It wasn't generally preferred for a Demon Lord commander to kill her subordinates for the sake of humans, but she'd mostly managed to smooth that over but Astrid, who'd been communicating Len with a magic parchment that allowed pretty much instantaneous contact via writing, had insisted on expanding Len's resources in response to a new threat that had entered the region: the Orc commander Claymar. Claymar was still a relative unknown to Len, but he'd been disrespectful enough to Astrid that the Demon Lord had been annoyed and wanted to see Len take a more active role in the subjugation of the territory.

  Fortunately for Len, she'd found a chink in the armor of the Kelvach tribe. Well, not so much a chink as an outright traitor who had a loophole for her and a way to challenge the Head. One of the trading allies she'd made, Balar Hammerfist, had a desperate need for a new leader. The Head of their clan, had been slowly destroying every aspect of their society that was in any way an inconvenience to him, banishing more and more warriors and politicians through an abuse of their martial challenge system that served as a final judgment route for all their disputes. This had led the clan to be stretched ever thinner with few hearty warriors and fewer still who weren't exclusively sworn to his defense. It was a situation that Claymar had been encouraging with an advisor that he'd sent named Cassius.

  Len, however, had skipped over all of that. Instead of dealing with bloody warfare that would've cost any number of lives, resources, and taken far too long for her patience. She had, with Balar's help, managed to trick the arrogant Head into challenging HER directly. He'd further miscalculated by making Balar, a man who lived up to his name, her first opponent. Len had also secured the aid of a skilled assassin who'd rescued Balar's captive family members and thus been able to get the man to throw the fight and lead to direct combat with the Head.

  That fight had been one of the toughest in her life, costing her several broken ribs and a bit of head trauma. Still, with a little skill and a lot of luck, she'd managed to come out ahead and claim the leadership position of the entire clan in one fell swoop. A master stroke if she did say so herself, all that was left was figuring out how to hold onto it now that, if her scouts were correct, Claymar had decided to wage direct warfare on her.