With most of the dwarves now gone, Shasta has a lot more free time. She acted as the liaison between the refugee dwarves and our country, as well as their de facto leader, meaning she previously was quite busy. Now though, I had the opportunity to talk with her more casually about a few questions that I''d thought of in the past month related to demon behavior.
Based on everything I''d heard second hand, it seems like the dwarves, humans, and elves had done some study of demons, even gaining a rudimentary understanding of our language. So, given how our society in Kembora is an outlier because of our origins, getting an outsider''s opinion on how demons normally behave should give me potential insights into more baseline behaviors of different kinds of demons, and might give me insight into ways to better orient our population growth.
Unfortunately, she didn''t have any direct data on hand, but she could share a bunch of stories of adventurers and soldiers who had fought against demons in one context or another. While there are some minor differences between stories, I did get some pretty decent data. There are three overarching contexts that the anecdotes take place in. One is the context of initial landings of demons at the beginning of an invasion. The second is large scale combat during the middle of an invasion. The final context is between invasions, because it takes quite a bit of time to uproot and remove all the demons that invaded.
During initial landings, things are chaotic. Due to the demons generally arriving in long canoes, they''re hard to spot from a distance, and they generally arrive spread out over a few hundred miles of coast, all arriving within a few days of each other. All those stories portray demons as absolutely ravenous monsters that devour everything that moves and is alive, even their own on occasion.
Based on what Zaka had told me of his journey here, cannibalism is very common among demons, and when starved, they get quite aggressive. By the time they arrive, quite a few have usually died and been eaten. So, while it''s not surprising, I also couldn''t gleam much new info from any of those stories.
The next set of anecdotes focused on combat from the war. It seems that some time after arriving and gorging themselves, the demons organize and usually stake a claim, taking over the emptied towns and building rudimentary defenses. Usually, they organize around a handful of powerful demons, and will even overwhelm local defenses in small cities, organizing themselves into a makeshift kingdom. Depending on the initial invasion size, they tend to either hole up and grow their numbers quickly, or expand rapidly and claim even more territory.
As for how Zaka or myself would measure up to these ''powerful demons'', we''d be called them, but we aren''t anywhere near the power of the actual demon lord, at least not individually. We''re somewhere near the power of a demon who would rule over a large town, or perhaps a small city during an invasion. Most of the individual anecdotes came from the last invasion, though some date back hundreds of years. I trust the newer ones far more than the older ones, since oral tradition tends to exaggerate over time.
As such, other than the last invasion, with Gokura, I didn''t trust any of the descriptions of the ''demon lords''. Gokura''s description as a demon towering three times the height of a man, with two pairs of arms with three fingers to each hand, and who could throw boulders hundreds of yards, already sounded something like an exaggeration, but I could imagine it being real. Perhaps it''s something above an ogre or a troll?
The main piece of info on demon behavior that I could gleam from war stories was that while most weaker demons seem to serve more powerful demons, it also was rare that you''d ever see a lot of powerful demons in one place. For a large army to be seen, it usually needed an incredibly powerful demon on top. In fact, it seems that most of the historic demon lord defeats from their oral tradition claim that victory was assured when the lord fell in battle, and the demon armies would scatter. The remnants could take anywhere from a few months to a few years to clean up, but the tipping point was always that the most powerful demon died.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Hearing that, I''m glad that Zaka, Zeb, and I have all been dedicating adequate time to focusing on leveling. Thinking back to our own society, we put down an insurrection when a second hobgoblin rose in power to the point where they matched Zaka. Perhaps I should have Zaka focus on training even more than he currently does, for the sake of keeping things in order. I really don''t want to think about what kind of uprising would occur if all the fisherdemons suddenly became more powerful than us.
Or perhaps I should do a show of military force through technology to keep them in line. I don''t know if their obedience is actually instinctual or not, but we actually do have the ability to develop some absolutely devastating weapons right now, which would probably keep anyone from trying anything funny. I''ve already been thinking over a weapon to potentially slay leviathans. If we were close to a dying leviathan, I''m almost certain we''d each max out our levels in a single day. In fact, if we killed a leviathan at sea, we''d potentially all drown because everyone on the ship would feel the same exhaustion related to reaching max level at the same time.
As for the weapon, it''s actually a straightforward application of existing technologies we''ve made. Grow a moderately large silver doped fluorite crystal, then encase it in a lead artillery shell. Then, all you need to do is fire it into a leviathan, and wait a few days. If you can manage to do that, I''m almost certain the beast would die to radiation poisoning. Based on everything I know, I bet that magical healing would probably make things worse, since you''d be applying mana near the crystal, increasing the amount of radiation released. Of course, the carcass would be completely ruined, and you''d essentially be dropping nuclear waste in the ocean afterwards.
The last context that the anecdotes fall in, between invasions, gave me some better insights. After a demon invasion, inevitably, there are stragglers who survive in remote areas. The three main continents are all fairly well populated, but there are still some moderately sized forests, or remote valleys where demons can hide. Anywhere like that can take months to years to find and properly remove the demons. Usually, after the majority of the demons are eradicated, there will be word every so often of a goblin village that has been found, that needs to be eradicated.
In those villages, there are always one to three hobgoblins, a few dozen goblins, and a dozen or so cages full of imps. Sometimes, there will be other villages nearby with similar numbers. There are rumors that in the distant past, demons had a decent foothold on the human continent, in their largest forest, and a demon lord native to the human continent attacked from the forest, without invading from the sea. I don''t know how much I trust that story, but it''s at least interesting.
Mainly though, it''s interesting to hear that these villages seem to keep imps in cages, and that there might be a few of them within a moderately small area. Whether that means that we might be so lucky as to get more imp summoners if we settle a little further from the city is hard to say. Perhaps they also had limiting summoning capabilities, and the cages were a way to move imps from the summoner to the new villages.
Shasta did make a point that there were some differences between the way our goblins behave, and the way that other adventurers have described them though. According to her, it''s something like the tone of their obedience. Most other goblins seem to obey more from fear, rather than from respect for power. Which is why they''ve been able to capture and study them. Higher demons, however, usually resist to the end, preferring to die in combat rather than be captured. Those that are captured rarely ever give any info, claiming it''d be dishonorable.
Our goblins, by comparison, seem to have more of a respect based obedience. I''ll have to keep an eye on how our new goblins from our summoning experiment behave for more insights. My current hypothesis is that the imp stage for demons is something like an aggressive toddler stage where a lot of their temperament gets set. In this hypothesis, the fight pits instill a sense of respect for other demons who survived the pits, and an admiration for those more powerful than themselves, the cages instill fear of their superiors, and the rooms we set up seem to drive some amount of entitlement. Though the natural tendency in general seems to be obedience, at least in goblins, since that is the baseline in all the imps that evolved within a day''s time from summoning. Though that does bring up biological questions as to why demons evolved to have a variable length imp stage to begin with that would influence their personality so heavily...