I suppose they are worrying for my sake, but… I dunno…
“Benimaru, can you think of any rival forces who might try to interfere with us at this point?”
“None, sir. If anyone was foolish enough to try, I would twist their heads off with my bare hands.”
Glad to hear.
Diablo seemed to be doing well over in the Western Nations. Rescuing the journalists’ lives let him proceed with his plan, even if it had involved a bit of extra force. It wouldn’t be long, he said, before reports would go around about Yohm being crowned the new king—and the smaller nations surrounding Farmus would pitch in to support this.
Assuming all went to plan, the only individual nation who could possibly try to tangle with us was Englesia. With Luminus giving us a hundred-year truce, the Western Nations were as good as ours, really. The same was true of the demon lords. Me killing Clayman was one stellar performance. If we spread rumors that I lost despite looking perfectly healthy to everyone, I’m not sure people would believe them. If anything, they might grow more careful dealing with me, fearing a trap or something.
“You sound pretty confident,” Hinata said. “Well, in that case, I don’t have any objection. If anything, I’ll be glad to take advantage of it.”
“Yeah! Let’s take this opportunity to announce to the world that the Tempestians aren’t evil at all!”
“Very true. Everyone here’s so nice to us! It’s so hard to believe they were all goblins and orcs not long ago.”
“There had been some internal debate over whether demi-humans counted as monsters or not…but nowadays, I think that’s far too narrow a view to take. It’s just prejudice talking.”
“You said it. Demi-humans are a formidable foe against humans, but dwarves, at least, are certainly human. If we started calling them monsters, then it’d be impossible to tell spirits apart from monsters, either.”
Ogres and lizardmen had normally been treated as demi-humans up to now, too, but thanks to their hostility against humankind, they had been branded as monsters. Oni and dragonewts—the next evolution up from each respective race—were treated not as monsters, but as local gods. All that really mattered, in the end, was whether you were friend or foe to humankind—and that meant it was hard to interpret Luminist doctrine as a carte-blanche condemnation of all monsters.
“Well,” I said, “we have formal relations with the Dwarven Kingdom. Why don’t we mix King Gazel into this and sign a hundred-year friendship treaty? If we can get him to guarantee that we won’t attack people, that ought to change a few minds, right?”
Hinata thoughtfully nodded, reaching her own conclusions in her mind. “Yes… If we can just build a little trust, that would make it easier to convince people. Plus, with things as they are, it’s probably about time to purge all the people who were poisoned by the Clergy.”
The Western Holy Church was hardly a monolith. No large organization is. And with Hinata putting it in such cold, blunt terms, all opposition was silenced. I guess she wanted to use this chance to lay all the guilt on the Seven Days Clergy—kind of dirty, I thought, but that was a Lubelius issue. Certainly nothing I had a right to comment on. We then began to work out some of the smaller details.
For our future interactions, it was agreed that Arnaud and Bacchus would stay here in Tempest. They’d go back home to prepare first, then return with a few civil bureaucrats in tow. I was planning to build a Luminist church in town in the meantime for their use, and I didn’t see it taking any longer than a couple weeks. Maybe we’d start to see some Luminists around here once we were done.
I was honestly a little anxious about allowing full freedom of religion, but…ahhh, I’m sure we’d figure it out. Monsters, frankly, are atheists. There was no such thing as a single god that was widely recognized by everyone across the world. My conventional wisdom from my own planet didn’t apply, really. There was religion, yes, but it was usually more like paying your respects to the local deity than anything very fervent—and these deities could quite literally help you out if you prayed to them, because, like, they were right there. The Dragon Faithful’s relationship with Milim is a prime example.
Along those lines, Luminism was really nothing more than the biggest player in an extremely crowded arena full of religions like that. The Crusaders served as Luminus’s servants, protecting the weak and earning new adherents to the faith. So if you look at it that way, I could see a church in Tempest as a kind of center for Western Holy Church–style support of the vulnerable. You gotta help out your neighbor and all that, although I doubt they could offer much help to us. It’d at least mean we could fight alongside paladins if some kind of threat appeared.
There was no real reason not to take this opportunity. We’d keep close tabs on the local church, of course, but I figured we could grant them a certain amount of freedom. That was the common ground we found.
That was the end of the tough stuff. We had a deal with Luminus, more or less, and we had managed to get Lubelius to recognize us as a legitimate nation. That was more than enough compensation—now, if we could just keep interacting and getting along, it’d be perfect. I’d like to use our century-long time limit to build a deeper understanding of each other, and that meant we’d be interacting regularly with the Crusaders.
The first effort along those lines involved providing skills and tech to each other. The battle earlier had smashed up a lot of the paladins’ weapons, so they needed someone to repair them. We offered our skills in response, but that was kind of a front—what we really wanted to do was see what their weapons were capable
