After the third village, a few things became abundantly clear to me.

Namely, even with all my effort and recent improvements, I shouldn’t have been able to claim thirty-three souls in three villages. In fact, none of the humans in the army, infected by the Abyss or not, should have been able to claim a single soul.

The demons were sandbagging.

Just before the third attack, one of the more successful human recruits let her success get to her head. She became confident enough to try and turn her charms on an actual demon. The woman was pretty in a stark, I’m-a-recruit-in-a-demonic-army kind of way. Her features were devoid of any fat and she had plenty of muscles, if that sort of thing appealed to demons.

While the tall demoness looked amused enough at the start, she soon grew tired of rejecting the human’s advances. After her patience wore out, she turned the human’s head into a bloody mist with a single swipe.

Now, I could have been wrong. But from experience, random peasants in the middle of nowhere didn’t measure up to the recruits of a demonic army. Ergo, if the nice demoness who should definitely not be hit on could reduce one of those recruits to a grisly shower of gore in less than a second, she could do the same to a villager any day of the week.

I only had to watch the demons move over the rough terrain to know that their running speed was being woefully underutilized too. All the humans were struggling, but the demons just loped along casually, with seemingly no effort. Hell, that insane sergeant of ours flitted back and forth around us like a hyperactive kid. She was at top speed constantly, and I never saw her break a sweat.

All these ‘subtle’ clues eventually made me realize the truth. We were being humored. The only question that remained was why. I knew for a fact that demons desired souls more than we humans ever could. For us, souls were currency we could use to climb higher and climb faster. For demons, souls were everything.

But if I needed a hundred souls just to move a sword from ‘trash’ to the ‘damaged’ tier, then how many souls would a solid demonic blade actually cost?

It was this realization that finally showed me why the demons were willing to let us do our thing while they watched.

It wasn’t worth it.

A single demon could wipe out an entire village of several hundred people, and they still might not get enough souls for a minor equipment upgrade.

I had to be sneaky about it, but thanks to Sergeant Wilhelmina’s reign of terror, demons were growing fairly tolerant towards the humans in their midst. That meant they were more willing to talk. It didn’t take me too long to pin down a human-looking demon who actually engaged in casual conversation when approached politely.

He didn’t look old, but then again, none of the demons did. He had off-pink skin and very short horns, with no other inhuman features to speak of. He never introduced himself, but what he did share with me was his pay.

Every demon in the legion was paid four thousand souls a month, and granted marching ‘rations’ of one thousand souls a month. So yes, going all out to wring a measly couple dozen villager souls was not particularly appealing to them.

I wasn’t complaining. Their indifference to the villages gave the rest of us a chance. Still, the realization confirmed my worst fears. The number of souls it would take to advance into a demon and gain a semblance of safety was astronomical.

The solution, at first glance, seemed to be as obvious as my problem. All I had to do was wait for major battles, like my very first one. But if things were as simple as that, I would have been one happy camper. Unfortunately, minimal further reflection told me I was an idiot.

It boiled down to a simple question: How many souls did I manage to collect on my own in the fighting? The answer was discouraging. Now, I couldn’t recall everything with perfect clarity, but before the all-out slaughter fest among nominal allies, I had barely twenty-something souls, if that.

It was only through the murder of my fellow recruits that I swiftly accrued enough souls to fuel my learning of two invaluable skills and upgrade my sword. A sudden chill took me at the realization. I had to fight down the urge to stare at the soldiers who surrounded me during the endless march. I did take more than a few furtive glances though.

Most of them were human.

How many would put two and two together and arrive at murder as their only path to success, like I had? How many were planning to stab a sword into my back the first chance they got?

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t like my chances much.

With great grace and subtlety, I’m sure, I allowed myself to fall back a little, almost to the edge of the ‘marching’ troops. At this point, we were barely plodding forward with everyone tired and exhausted. Our nonexistent formation would have gotten us shot in a regular army.

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I was trying to fake extra exhaustion while looking for a nice strategic position I could take up, when a second round of chills kissed its way down my back.

While the middle of the formation was full of tired, dead-eyed men and women entirely done with marching, the edges were ripe with tension and suspicion. Everyone here kept themselves as far away from the rest as they could. I could swear the demons were watching us with amusement and derision, like they were expecting trouble to erupt at any moment.

They probably were.

It probably would.

I picked up my pace again, my mind spinning.

Okay. So, obviously, I wasn’t the only one to work out the problem.

I very nearly allowed myself to curse, and loudly at that. Without meaning to, I had fallen into an easy sort of confidence. After all, I had been thrust into a dangerous environment with almost no preparation, and despite that, I had survived and thrived. Hadn’t I? I was one of the most successful recruits, I just knew it. Besides, I didn’t see any other humans lugging around weapons that could be marked down as legacies items.

But all my success wouldn’t matter if I let overconfidence blind me to the true danger.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one who’d figured things out. Of course, I wasn’t the only person with a brain in the middle of a band of hardened survivors. Sure, many recruits had gotten lucky, and some had squeaked by thanks only to a few basic fighting skills. But assuming they were all dumb, and I was the only intelligent person around?

That would get me killed, and quickly.

My first order of business that day was figuring out what part of the formation to stick to. I didn’t need it to be pleasant, but I definitely wanted to minimize the chances of anyone getting a bit too stabby in my vicinity.

That took me closer to the demons. Sure, they were dangerously powerful and probably in a bad mood. But even the most murder-y of my fellow humans would be less likely to start something so close to our demon betters.

Luckily, the human-ish demon I was trying to get on better terms with was at the very edge of the demonic ranks. I had no trouble moving towards him gradually. Before long, I was running right by his side.

The demon gave me an odd look when he realized it, then eventually smirked and looked away. I wasn’t one hundred percent certain that was a good sign, but at least he didn’t vaporize me on the spot. I let out an audible sigh of relief.

The next item on my agenda was, of course, securing some way to advance.

The demons wouldn’t sandbag forever. The next time we came across a larger population center, they would probably swarm it and reap as many souls as they could. A couple of souls per village might not be worth a demon’s time, but what if they could each walk away with a couple hundred? Even in comparison to their salary, that was a tempting prospect. And I wasn’t foolish enough to assume I could beat a demon at the soul-reaping game. This left me with the unpleasant task of finding alternate ways to improve my fortunes.

In other words, figuring out which of the non-demon recruits I could safely kill.

At first, I contented myself with keeping an eye on the rest of my fellow humans. Or rather, fellow mortals. Various non-human races were a minority in our ranks, but still present.

I assumed they’d die just like the rest of us though.

After several days of observation and two more villages, I settled on several potential targets. My yield from the two villages was a grand total of fourteen souls. Nice, but not enough.

Then, to my great excitement, news from our crazed sergeant began filtering through the ranks. We would arrive at our first city in four days. Even better, we would pass through one more village on the way.

Once my surly pink demonic ‘friend’ confirmed this information, I made my final preparations.

I sifted through potential targets, finally settling on a pair of humans who liked to move together. The two men weren’t the best of friends, but they clearly knew each other and were willing to cooperate. Fortunately for my purposes, while they kept an eye out for each other on the road, they tended to separate when looting villages.

Best of all, none of the other ‘wised up’ human recruits seemed to be paying any attention to this pair.

As we descended on the final village, I hung back just enough to be close behind my targets. I watched carefully when they broke up to start busting down doors, gauging whether anyone else was following them.

No one was.

Victim number one broke through into his first house, laughing and jeering as he went about his bloody business. I slipped in after him.

A male villager was bleeding out on the floor already, having tried to protect his family. A woman was there too, on the ground but alive, frantically trying to crawl closer to her two children.

My fellow soldier kicked her away and loomed menacingly over the boy and girl.

“Stay still, you little rats. I’m in a hurry here, and they’re not going to wait for me to show your mother what a real man’s like if this takes too long,” he chuckled. Then he brought down his sword.

The man’s cruelty settled what little doubt I still had.

My sword was already in my hands, and the creep was preoccupied, reveling in his own horrific deeds. That made it easy for me to position myself just right, sidle up to him, and swing with both arms.

The blade bit into the side of his neck and seamlessly slid out the other with nary a whisper. As his head rolled and he erupted into ash, I quietly gave thanks to Hayden’s mother.

Soul crystals erupted from his bag, spilling all over the floor. My avarice erupted even more violently as I gazed at them. The precious objects glinted enchantingly, faces pressing against their facets.

The woman whimpered behind me. Whirling around, I saw such devastating loss and grief on her face that I briefly faltered.

My sword found its mark a moment later. It was mercy. One of the other soldiers would have found her. And with what had just happened, a quick end was probably the best outcome she would get.

I collected the souls in a hurry, then snuck over to the other house. What I found there was equally repulsive, but it helped me get the drop on the second recruit.

Just like that, I had killed two people within the army I now served.

When we emerged from the village some time later, no one mentioned that we were missing a few men. Maybe no one noticed. I thought I saw gloating expressions on some demon faces, but that didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that I was now 257 souls richer.