My performance on the Proving Grounds taught me several important things.

First, demons absolutely hated being forced to step up and deal with a ‘mere mortal.’ My opponent put me down quickly and brutally. The only reason I was up and moving an hour later, rather than dead, was the mercy of Graighast.

Despite my humiliation of his troops, the demon commander was apparently impressed enough by my performance that he had ordered his healer to tend me. I thanked the brown-skinned healer demon profusely, but he barely acknowledged my words, let alone respond.

The second thing I learned was that putting on a show and ‘earning honor’ for your betters was enough to make demons tolerate you, and maybe even like you a little. As long as I’d been in this troop, the demons had contented themselves with not eviscerating me. After my display in the Proving Grounds, I received a ton of vicious smiles and more than one pat on my back.

Even the demon who’d crisped my arms congratulated me. “Now I’m glad I didn’t burn you alive!” he exclaimed boisterously, a large smile on his face. “Good thing too because I was tempted.”

I awkwardly assured him that I was very grateful for his mercy.

Bronwynn still steered clear of me. In the off moments, I noted with amusement and some curiosity that he watched my entire interaction with the flame-throwing demon from a distance. When the pyromaniac walked away, the friendly demon tracked his form with narrowed eyes.

Finally, and most importantly, Glaustro didn’t seem to recognize me from the incident at the Apple Infernal check-in desk. Maybe he had terrible short-term memory. Maybe all humans looked the same to him. Regardless, when I finally woke up and made it back to my troop, he gave me a look of, dare I say it, approval. I might even have glimpsed a twinkle in his eye, though it was too brief to be certain.

He certainly had cause to be in a good mood. After my defeat launched the fully demonic part of the conflict, our troop’s luck held. Wilhelmina was absolutely a shit commander, but she didn’t tolerate weakness in her troops. She had personally tested the demons who ended up under her command, weeding out those ‘unworthy of serving her.’ This meant that our side of the demon conflict was, on average, more powerful than Graighast’s forces.

It was close, but when the final demon fell, it was Glaustro’s soldier who stood panting in the ring.

That made all the difference for our commander. Instead of a surly, snarling mess, we suddenly had a leader who practically grinned while giving us orders. Well, his brow was unfurled and the corner of his lips were ticked up. By demon standards, he might as well have broken out in a joyful dance.

Oddly enough, Graighast didn’t take his loss as badly as I expected him to. He was a little more officious and stiff when addressing his troops, but that was it. In fact, when Glaustro wasn’t looking, I could have sworn I saw Graighast smile at his brother.

Complicated infernal family dynamics aside, the resolution of tension between the sergeants also meant relative peace for the troops. I spotted people from both sides mingling. Some even broke off in pairs, vanishing mysteriously into a tent for a while. No one seemed to care when such things happened, so I had to assume that demonic army culture didn’t have particularly rigid rules when it came to interpersonal relationships.

The harmony between troops also meant that both sides could now focus more completely on our mission.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Wilhelmina’s stunt had shifted the invasion from a blitz against unprepared enemies to something like a proper battle. I say ‘like’ a proper battle because in spite of their better intelligence, there wasn’t much the locals could do. A wave of death was approaching on demonic wings. Even if they brought their full might to bear, the locals couldn’t stop the tide.

They could, however, delay it.

Or try to.

Demons didn’t need traditional food and drink to sustain themselves. Mortals did, of course, but there weren’t enough of us in the army to put a strain on logistics. We didn’t have enough for a feast, but we had more than enough rations to meet our needs.

So when we started to come across scorched fields and villages, the commanders were disappointed, but not dismayed. We just pressed on.

Quite frankly, the humans were doing a disservice to themselves. Their decision to torch every source of food in the stretches between cities would have done wonders against a traditional invasion force, but it didn’t even slow us down. It actually made marching easier, since the fires had eliminated obstacles like crops or tall grass.

The ash did get tiresome quickly though. The army’s tramping feet kicked it all up into the air, where it hung in a noxious cloud. After ten minutes of choking on the stuff, I dug out one of my few spare shirts and cut it into a makeshift bandana I could use for some protection. This helped even out my breathing, but it couldn’t keep the ash from sticking to every single part of me.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

All this devastation, and for what?

All in all, I was sick and tired of trudging through the wake of these pointless fires by the time we came across our first town. My mood didn’t get much better with that discovery, and neither did our commanders’.

The town was gutted.

From what traces we could find, it was abandoned a couple of days before we reached it. Tracks led away from the gates and into the heart of the kingdom in droves. Every home left behind was stripped bare. Every shop was empty.

And in the center of the town, where some kind of market once stood, were the remains of a massive bonfire.

In one final ‘fuck you’ display, the citizens, likely encouraged by whoever had been sent to facilitate the retreat, had burned everything they couldn’t bring with them. I felt no small amount of disgust as I spotted a caramelized patch of ground where either pure sugar or some kind of very sweet fruit had been cooked into a crisp.

It took a special kind of malicious desperation to destroy every last trace of your resources just to deny your enemies the chance to use them. Furthermore, a total retreat like this one would result in cities bursting to the brim with refugees. With most of their supplies burned, what kind of life could they hope to have, even if they somehow survived?

But my mocking thoughts were swamped in guilt when I reflected on the reality facing these people. They weren’t just running away from another conquering army. They were running away from a demonic invasion. Were they so wrong to think that taking their chances with starvation was a reasonably preferable option? Could I even argue that survival under the rule of demons was any better?

Faced with the prospect of slavery in a demonic regime, I’d definitely choose death.

Our march through the ruined countryside wasn’t solely marked by frustration. Now that my troop was under a new commander, and with things relatively calm between Glaustro and Graighast, I could cautiously claim that things were getting better. In fact, in a rare and shocking display of compassion, Glaustro even directed several of his demons to train the mortal troops.

The training took place every night, after we were done marching for the day. It was exhausting. It was grueling. And it always left me desperate for a bath when the best I could hope for was a wipe-down, and that was only if there happened to be a source of water nearby.

Yet, in spite of all this, it was helping.

The demons reluctantly explained a mana technique that bore some resemblance to my body strengthening technique. It relied on running mana throughout our bodies in a specific form and at a specific frequency, which was very tricky to learn. First, I had to figure out how to make mana vibrate at all, and then adjust that manipulation of ambient mana until it matched our tutors’ vibration.

Once we got that part down, we had to replicate the process within our own bodies, which upped the difficulty considerably. To be honest, I spent the first fifteen minutes on my side, throwing up violently. Even with two previous mana techniques, my body really hated mana vibrating inside of it. Only when I got significantly closer to the right frequency did the discomfort begin to ease.

I was the second-fastest mortal to stop losing their lunch. The only one who beat me out was an oni. Well, I didn’t know if she was an oni, exactly, but she was blue-skinned with stubby little horns, and wasn’t a demon. It was as good a designation as any. She was also magnificently gifted at manipulating her mana, and only threw up once before she got the hang of the process.

But the suffering we went through was worth it.

The effect of the altered mana both stressed and healed our muscles, with an emphasis on the healing. This meant we could push ourselves far past our normal breaking point during the training, and then be back on our feet hale and hearty by the next morning.

All the mortals quickly shed any last trace of fat. We put on muscles at a rate not even steroids could match up to back in my original world. More importantly, the technique made it easy to shrug off the wear of a long day’s brisk march, which allowed our commanders to push us further and more recklessly than ever.

As I moved, I couldn’t help but marvel at my new body. It hadn’t been very long since my arrival in this body and already, I was leagues ahead of a normal human. I was forging myself into something new, something better. Every exhausting, burning bit of progress pushed me that much further.

Oh, I wasn’t quite at the point where I could tank bullets and walk away with nary a bruise. But if I kept things up, I’d eventually hit that point. The prospect almost made up for all the fear and emotional anguish of being in a literal demonic army.

Almost.

Bronwynn wasn’t one of our trainers, but I did notice something curious about these tutor demons when I had enough energy to take a closer look at them. Their features were more… subdued, compared to the rest of the infernal troops. Their skin wasn’t so starkly inhuman, just a few shades off, and their horns weren’t as prominent. By and large, they didn’t have many inhuman features at all. One of them had a tail, and one had webbed fingers, but that was it.

I came to strongly suspect that their reluctance and reticence when dealing with us had nothing to do with typical demonic hatred of mortals, and all to do with the fact that we reminded them of the status they had overcome. It couldn’t be easy, living as an ascended demon in an army that considered mortals to be basically useless.

A small, naïve part of me thought my performance on the Proving Grounds would elevate the status of all mortals in the troop, but that was only partly correct. I was now treated better, and it was unlikely that I’d get killed out of hand by one of my demonic comrades if they were having a bad day. The rest of the mortal troops? Not so much. They were still treated with the same quiet disdain or disregard, and it didn’t take a social genius to note that some of them resented me for it.

Could they have earned the same respect? Could they have lasted against Graighast’s mortal troops? They probably didn’t know. But because of me, they would never get to find out, and that stung.

It didn’t seem to help that their current training was all thanks to me. If anything, those who still struggled with the mana manipulation requirements only resented me even more. It left me feeling… bitter, and exhausted.

I didn’t want to make friends, not really. But it still hurt that I didn’t even have the chance to try.

As such, when we finally saw the silhouette of walls in the distance, I was relieved. After two and a half weeks of marching, training, and dealing with the quiet hostility of people who should theoretically have my back, I’d finally get to earn some souls again.

That hope lasted until we got close enough to spot the shimmering dome of mana that stretched over the whole city.

Whatever challenges we had overcome before and however weak the demons made their enemies out to be, I was suddenly quite certain that we were in for a rather grueling fight.