Rogle Melgypeth, the strongest Rag Demon in the Demon King's army and the Demon King’s right-hand demon, was worried.

  “My lord, the Humans have somehow gotten the Dwarves involved. We’re being attacked from all land-bound fronts. Additionally, if the dealings with the Human’s heroes and Mermaids are going as well as our spies say, we may be faced on all fronts.”

  The Demon King stood still, just looking out of the manor's window. “We just need three more years; we’re so close.” He said while grasping the air like it was the future he saw in his dreams, but just like his future, it fled his grasp.

  “What about the nurseries? How have they been doing?” The Demon King inquired.

  “Not well; I, Q, and M have all been slain, along with their guardian. Three of our strongest, gone. Now the heroes are marching on J, N and R,” Rogle responded.

  The Demon King slumped and fell down, a chair forming from his shadow. “Have the biomancers found a way to increase our sentience from birth? If we could just prove that we won’t be the mindless beasts they see us as, maybe we’ll be able to carve a spot for ourselves, and not be exterminated like the beasts they see us as.” The Demon King whispered the last part as he put his face in hands. He immediately looked back up, faster than Rogle could see, when Rogle spoke.

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  “Maybe my lord; reports say that the Eyes in R has shown signs of grouping together, intelligent mana manipulation, and, most importantly, self control. Despite being the smallest nursery, normally taking less than five hours for the weak to feed the strong's intellect, it has been over a day and only a bit over half of them have died, and the rate of deaths is falling.”

  The Demon King, regal bearing completely gone, almost begged his question. “What changed? How did we do it?” The Demon King’s face fell. “Do we even know?”

  Rogle hurried to assure his lord “Yes my lord, we do. We fed The Seer a Hero before it laid its eggs.”

  The Demon King’s face went through a range of emotions, before settling on disgust. “So in order to prove and create our civility, we have to have non-murderous offspring. In order to have non-murderous offspring, we need to murder and eat Heroes. How… amusing. We can say: ‘hey, we’re totally not murderous, but could you feed us your strongest protectors?’ Have we tried other strong creatures? Does a dragon, phoenix, or eldritch flesh work?” As the Demon King spoke the shadows intensified before leaving a scaled tail, half-frozen phoenix head, and still beating grey heart.

  “No my lord, we haven’t. I’ll try the samples on nurseries on K, G and O.” Rogle responded while his rags shot out and wrapped around each of the samples, before retracting them into his central mass of rags.