The ground Commander had to pull in some of the tech specialist, but he got them to piece together one long movie of what Private Costan had done. He even had little mood lightening things edited in, like an arrow popping up with a ding and pausing it temporarily to label Costan occasionally. Then there was the occasional voiceover or narration to offer comedic relief. He sent it to high command as evidence and possible promotional material.

The techies managed to get almost a full account of what happened, and with some help from the Navy, it started from the Emperor Karcos sideways stating about leading from the front and him leaving the conference. It showed him dropping into a bomber that destroyed a mech, the sniping, the brutal march to the front, and the "heroic" attack that allowed them to finish breaking through. They did edit it down to three hours of absolute mayhem, but added a mini map to show the where and kept the time stamps.

Piecing together and editing the "best action movie of season" took two days. The blood rain only lasted two hours, and Private Costan was still missing. They slapped Missing In Action on his file and reasoned that he would probably turn up somewhere, eventually.

It was showed to every Marine when they came back to base camp or the medical camp. Captain Cankar got ahold of it and forwarded copies to all of the "guests", including the prisoners. Emperor Karcos was shocked and scared looking from it, while K.A.R. actively cheered at certain points. Yidas was mortified, having to verify with Captain Cankar that it was Costan and not the War Shaman.

In actuality, Costan had came back around on a mountain of bones and twisted Grequenok war machines. He was descending the mountain as the blood came down in a torrent. Hardly able to see anything, he didn't know what was falling through the atmosphere. A cargo vehicle of unknown make or origin crushed his exhausted body against the mountain.

Costan did not expect to suddenly die, but he had been in a war zone; so he should have. The figures standing on large columns looked down on him with disdain, each standing tall and entirely foreign to him. They didn't have fur, spare some hair on their heads, then he looked around and witnessed the usual Nekogian pantheon near a Greq deity.

They all mostly ignored his presence while they discussed what to do with Costan. They, the foreign gods, needed to send a hero to deal with some supposedly world ending evil, but got stuck in a debate. They sent him to hell to atone for the Grequenok death toll and, more importantly, Nihil's suicide. They had mistimed the deployment of the entity they called "Truck Kun" and got Costan by accident, but intended not to waste the resources garnered.

Costan was stripped of his belongings and sent to one of the many hells, where he spent two million years local time. He clawed his way to the top of the demon hierarchy, but was summoned by the gods only one year into his regime. He was angry beyond all emotion, having learned all of the languages there and killed or eaten anything in his way, only for assholes to take everything from him again. They even took his hell iron armor, he wanted it back, he spent decades getting the soul diamonds and blood gold to make unbreakable.

The gods began to speak about some important child in need of protection, but Costan cut them off with an accusation in Enfrit, which made them all very angry. He changed to the Korean language and readdress them.

"You didn't want me to learn Enfrit? You shouldn't have sent me there. You behave like my life is a joke to you, commanding respect from me while showing none will get you nowhere."

"Insolent mortal," one began before a Nekogian god interrupted.

"He is an immortal, and if you note the empty column, he is the embodiment of the nothing at the end."

"It matters not, he will go and protect the princess."

Costan cut in again with a snobby English, "You, sending a prince to save a princess. How novel. How naive."

They didn't bother with him any further and sent him away, where he fell from a divine portal on the ceiling of a royal elven nursery. Knowing that no fall could actually kill him anymore, he loosened all his muscles and hit the floor with a flump sound. Most parents would have been alarmed at what fell into the nursery, but the wounded mother was not. Her prayers had been answered.

The sounds of battle raged from outside of the door, as it rattled and banged from something trying to enter. The door was barricaded with a sturdy looking wardrobe. The portal popped open again briefly to disgorge Costan's belongings and disappear again. Costan surveyed his surroundings, only for the portal to reappear for a goddess to strike him in the face with a bundle of books. He opened one book and, contrary to how books are supposed to work, was given the equivalent of a sucker punch to the brain.

The knowledge that had just invaded him was mostly how to care for an Elf infant until weening. He immediately changed the child and gave it a bottle, then sought to aid the adult. The arrow head that was protruding from her back was missing pieces, no doubt designed to shear off inside the body, and the smell. Whoever shot her used an arrow covered in feces or something more sinister.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He rummaged through his belongings for something to use to help her. From the color and smell of the blood, he guessed that she couldn't have too different of physiology. He took out what meager "medical" supplies he had and got to work. The lady panicked for a few moments until she realized that he was preparing a needle and a strange thread along side of the knife and a gag.

He coaxed her to lay on her other side before removing the foreign object with enough speed as to be called brutal. His actions were anything but brutal, but to anyone else it would have looked that way. To her, it felt that way; he did just cut her open, break off the shaft, yank out the arrow, and root around her insides to pull out the barbs that broke off, washing everything down with something that burned like hellfire.

With the barbs removed, her magic started to return to her. She knew that the poison wouldn't allow her to recover until it was cured, but this would at least give her another day or two. She watched as the black furred thing dodge a few arrows from the window, then throw something out of it while shouting something in a strange tongue. Maybe it was an incantation for a magical device...

The house shook with the loud bang from outside. Her eyes widened at the window, now painting with the foul blood of the gnolls. The barking laughter stopped, but they still were banging at the door. She watched as he picked up on odd looking hilt and put something on the end of it. It sounded like multiple bowstrings being broken in succession, and there were loud yelps of pain from the other side of the door that now sported bolt sized holes in it. The wall also had holes in it.

She watched as he picked up something else and moved the wardrobe. He exited the room and closed the door before many very loud bangs started to ring out. She just sat there, resting and hoping that it would all be over soon, maybe her husband will still be alive. She nodded off and woke up in the inn of a nearby town.

She was hoping that it had all been a dream, but then felt the pain of the wound. The inn keeper quickly showed up with water and food for her, telling her that the priest would be over soon to cure her. She checked to see if her appraising eye still worked by checking the door. She accidentally appraised her savior as he came in and was struck by the wall of text with notes from the divines.

Former Emperor of the Hells stuck out alongside things like Prince of the Nekogian Empire and War Shaman. She shook it off with the line "childcare expert". She quickly appraised her daughter, that was in the hands of that hulking monarch of hell. Her daughter, Princess Tantasa, was perfectly healthy and happy, but had a strange note of "increased growth expectancy."

She was curious about it, but had no way of translating between them. She recovered with a simple spell from the priest. The same priest also shot Costan in the ass with a blessed crossbow bolt. The priest concluded that he wasn't a tiger demon because he would have instantly died from it, nor was he a were tiger because the attack wasn't magical and the bolt wasn't silver but still wounded him.

Costan had come to terms with the fact that he was a glorified nanny. He explored the books and other gifts of the gods over time. He had been giving some cryptic sounding things like the tribute box, where things offered as tribute to him could be retrieved. It disturbed him, but only lightly, to be able to pull out chunks of demon flesh and hell iron in unending amounts.

The item box was a different sort of disturbing to begin with. It was listed as an unending storage space that keeps whatever in exactly the same state as it entered. It was somehow completely full of childcare products like formula, diapers, clothes of various sizes, children's books and toys. It was so full that nothing else could fit in it, despite it being "unendingly large."

As he weened the child, the formula was replaced with baby food, and eventually healthy snacks and a little bit of empty space. He had to use that space to stash the toddler and her mother on a few occasions. One time some slavers thought that they would be a good target. They attempted an ambush, but only found a very big, very angry swordsman that killed the twelve of them.

Costan spent seven hundred years guarding and helping raise the princess, who picked up some of the Nekogian language. She was taller than normal elves, and stronger, but otherwise normal when she went off to the Adventures College.

He finally had a good grasp on the "common" language, which was more like a pile of unsorted scrap from multiple languages ranging from phonetic ones to what could be described as a none Newtonian existence. How do you describe the phonetic gr!x? He got fluent in Elvish and half mastered Dragon before getting that common was just a linguistics landfill. Dwarf hammer talk was easier, even though it was mostly expletives with various arrangements and annunciations. English wasn't nearly as bad as Common.

Throughout the misadventures with raising the princess, he found the leveling system to be annoying. Most people on the world never used it because they were commoners who would likely never see the first level. The place had it's quirks and he was level fifteen by the time the young miss was off to college, he made sure that she was level three before that. Her mother left to inform the Elven Court about everything after seeing her daughter off to college, leaving Costan to his own devices in the city.

This was not the best idea, because someone tried to pickpocket him at the docks. He was asked to join the guard after he destroyed one of the cities five major crime syndicates. He refused and found hell iron to be over valued by mages to fight demons and other extra plainer things, earning the nickname Hell's Merchant and the criminals called him the Black Tiger. Then a plague started and he ended up in the thick of everything after an attack on the College.

The Princess was okay and teamed up with him to look for the stuff to make the cure for the plague, they were successful but it turned into one ordeal after another until genocided a once extinct species that was planning on destroying the world. The princess made it out of the other side of the escape portal just fine, but Costan got dumped in front of the gods again.