The Olive Branch

Landing carefully in the bottom of the pit to retrieve my swords from where they waited at the very center of the crater, I walk over to the demon who honestly looked to be in the same relative condition as I had left them in.

There were only a few traces about its arms and legs from the previous barrage of chaos lances it had eaten while its skin and scales were all patched up. The only real difference was that its body had paled by a few shades from black to a vaguely noticeable iron gray. It was like a dark and dry polished iron sword with superficial trace amounts of carbon from refinement.

Casually walking over as if all of this had been within my expectations instead of blowing my mind even more than the crater I stood in, I reach out and grasp the demon's closest horn to cast First-Aid. "Wake up, asshole," I say after healing them, erasing the trace physical damages from its previous fights.

Opening his eyes barely more than a slit to glare at me from the corners, the demon commander slowly sits up from its sprawled position before saying, "You lied to me. You were like a fly from the start… were you really so afraid of dying that you became a dragon?"

This was both pleasing and somewhat worrisome. That attack was likened to a dragon, which made me feel pretty awesome. However, I could not use most of my skills for at least a minute after that attack and I doubted dragons would have such restrictions.

What the hell were dragons like?

"Absolutely terrified," I reply shamelessly, corrupting my demon defiling armor to expose my hand and produce some crystallized blood in my palm. "This will help me hold up my end of the bargain. Trade me, power for power."

Simply pinching one of its fingers, the demon holds out their body sized finger to my hand as dark fluid wells up in a droplet as big as my head. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Shut up and look pretty most of the time, other times get angry and smash what I'm angry at, and I'll train you in one of my own physical cultivations," I reply, wondering if I could even turn demons into full on plague creatures to accept the crystalline physique. "I call it the Attrition Physique that I have been trying to train my people in. It is already very similar to your own natural powers."

Honestly, if I tried to roast this guy in Soulfire like I did the other players I doubted I could sustain the magic long enough to have any real effect on him.

The Blood Binding was over with in moments, revealing to me a very unsatisfying secret. The demon did not have set stats, its stats would always be half a time higher than its greatest opponent while in a fight or otherwise half a time higher than the strongest person around. I did not receive any stats from him but instead received a skill called 'Stat Reflect'.

This skill allowed me to equalize my stats with the strongest person around in a fight, which was honestly a little better than having permanent stat increases. Especially here in the dungeon where most demons probably had better stats than me even though I had better effects. Along with the perks of this skill came a cooldown of twenty-four hours.

Aside from Stat Reflect I also gained some affinity with demonic magic and a curse called Damage Aversion. This curse made people feel twenty percent more pain from my attacks as take ten percent more damage. Due to the default sensory level of half-reality, the amp to pain sensory alone was a bane to PVP.

With the Blood Binding complete, I ordered the demon to march back to the cathedral and contemplate its life leading up to this point as it walked. The reason I did this was nothing profound, it was simply because I was too scared to ride on its head back to the cathedral and decided instead to let it cross paths with the other clans.

It would probably only take a few minutes for this demon to actually walk back to the cathedral, but at some point soon the other clans would be on their way back to the cathedral themselves or on their third trip to their outpost after respawning. Getting to see if they had learned their lesson from attacking the skeletons might be beneficial for gaining NPC opinions as well as just plain entertaining.

My own swift flight only took a few dozen flaps before gliding out into the front yard of the cathedral where all of the skeleton NPC and players were gathered and making preparations about the wall, platforms, and towers.

Every single body carried a chaos lance on its back as if they all expected to be under siege at any moment. Honestly, I could not fault them for this. Under the impression that I might have actually sacrificed myself, it was not impossible for the demon commander themselves to unleash an attack like that after sustaining enough of my skills. It was, after all, a combination of my skills that had obviously been blessed by Melpomene.

Considering sounding the alarm for the cathedral's apocalypse just to give them a hard time after the bullying they had made me do, I decide against it this time before saying, "Traytar the Traitor has been tamed!"

[Void-Rex Traytar the Defiler has been Renamed: Traytar the Traitor]

Oh, man, I completely forgot that would happen. A Defiler title was way more intimidating than Traitor!

Despite the long-term repercussion of this witty moment, the response from the players was a collective cheer that was soft in volume due to relief. The skeletons also celebrated this, but they seemed somewhat less enthusiastic. Many of them were looking around at the demons that had already been tamed and were dispersed about the front wall of the cathedral.

A few even gave Cweeper and Hermes a glance. I doubted this was due to their lack of action in the fights and more because of a natural distaste for the demons that had put them in this situation. Not only were they technically dead because of them, they were also brought back to life to fight them.

Suddenly finding themselves on the same side was probably not very likable. However, we already came here with somebody like Zekrom who should prove our ability to use these beings by default. It was probably our overall combat abilities that made them cheer at all.

Landing down in the center of the front yard among the dilapidated garden area where the elites were gathered and processing bulk crystalline materials formed from Zekrom himself into arrows and spears. They had probably thought to take full advantage of the situation by getting signature materials from us. They were not on the level of my own chaos soul 'bone' material but the material from Zekrom was still an upgraded version of the original soul material.

I could just guess from each of the raw demon hide cases set up that they had amassed several thousand arrows through the use of dedicated alchemy.

Finding the head priest ordering the delivery of stock weapons and materials among the defenses from the supply area set up near the clan elites, I pull him to the side toward the clan leaderships and my own party before whistling normally for their attention. Everybody stopped and dropped what they were doing on instinct, probably expecting to experience something bad after the familiar sound.

Once I had everybody's attention, I say, "It's time that we get ready to settle things once and for all. The demons are aware of our every move since outposts ago and it's working to our benefit. If we all make a final bid here and now for the manor, they'll come out to play because things are… complicated for them. We have pretty much everything we need to level anything we need or will have it in just a few hours. Sir, we will need you and your people for staging this final battle," I add to the head priest who suddenly seemed pleased by this.

"Will we need the other clans for this?" Donna asks, recovering the fastest from their shock or potentially benefiting from the adrenaline. "If we're bringing the civilians with us, numbers matter."

"Sir, how would you feel about using the newcomers as cannon fodder?" I ask of the head priest even while he was still thoughtfully handling the naked chaos lance he carried.

Distracted already by whatever his previous thoughts had been, the head priest merely waves the hand he had been gripping his lance with before saying, "Let them fight for us. We have seen their abilities and they will make sufficient sacrifices. With these weapons, some may even survive the front lines."

"I appreciate your forgiveness, sir," I say respectfully, working out the math on what kind of supplies to give them so that their players break the bank in experience and loot gain. In exchange for so many arrow or spear parts they would have to give us half of the material bodies from the demons they killed. As well, we had to find a way to make it so that only they were the ones doing the fighting.

This was easily resolved through some heavy bullying and crafting, but I still felt somehow bad for not only taking so long to let them stick their foot in the door but also letting them do so at all. Probably because I had pissed off a lot of clans already who were probably waiting outside or even currently attacking the territory at this moment. I needed more allies.

I ended up leaving the stock question to Little Thirteen and Mistress to decide how to supply and use the other clans at my non-negotiable price. As for how to make them fight alone, that was fairly easy but overall insanely costly. The first thing we needed to do was break the seal on one of my newest secrets.

Ten minutes after coming to terms in the front yard, the clan leaderships were all gathered in the bottom of the dry pond breaking down divine rocks in a carefully condensed mana field under Zekrom's control. Due to the fact that we wanted to find a way to continue abusing the pond, we were only breaking down the rocks from the very top of the inside bed of the pond.

Even from those positions, each rock contained no less than ten divine crystals and released insane amounts of mana in the air. Since there were already nearly a thousand rocks gathered, we acquired thousands of divine crystals for enchanting accessories. These accessories, of course, were going to be simple rings made from chaos soul material.

I spent the next hour after collecting the crystals producing and enchanting a single ring for every player in our alliance with Flash Step. Thanks to the materials and perks used to make them, the Flash Step enchantments could not only reach distances of sixty yards However, I still made five more rings for every player in the alliance. These players, if they had the know-how, could go on to create more powerful accessories with their five remaining crystals. If not, they could hold on to the or sell them.

For my team, I crafted and enchanted five more rings with stat enhancements. Each stat was increased by a whopping thirty-two points, increasing at least one of each person's stats by over a hundred points across three rings. I, of course, chose which stat to raise for each of their builds and the other two rings were left up to them.

For the most part, though, nobody's ring bonuses actually changed except to go up in value.

My own rings had switched off entirely, giving me lowering my luck bonuses by a great deal while raising my Endurance and Willpower both by sixty-four points. My actual physical and magical parameters were already fairly high at eleven-fifty-five and seven-fifty respectively, so they only went up into the next hundred if they were lucky. However, the hundred-plus HP bonus and slight regen bonus would be useful just for raising the effectiveness of my buffs a bit.

The remaining two rings were still divine flash skills, but I decided to splurge on crafting extra accessory pieces for myself and the others. For them I remade the original Rainbow Bangles with increased stat values of twenty-five apiece. Then I gave them all enough crystals to supply a simply crown band, two earrings, and a three-piece mesh coif of link-like crystalline pieces as underarmor neck protection.

I had no idea what the others were using for the accessories, but each of my earrings carried two crystals that gave me five overall uses of sixty-yard Flash Step and the other earring an increase of fifty Strength. For my coif, though, I made each crystal an increase of twenty-five Endurance apiece. Since the cost of two stats on the same piece had already been reduced by a lot from thirty-two to twenty-five apiece the addition of a third enchantment did not cost anything.

The previous pristine crystal enchantments had only gone down in smaller increments for each stone added, but the boost of seventy-five new points in the previously empty bonus pool was good all the way around. As for my crown, there was a simple triangle of wisp shaped divine crystals on the front of the band that overall raised my Willpower by seventy-five. Coupled with the previous boost from my rings, I had given myself a fairly decent boost to my mana recovery rates.

By the time we were done working in the pond, the actual leadership and I left our parties of elites behind to continue farming the upper rocks from the pond. It had already been a long time since both Traytar and the other clans had returned to the cathedral. Both parties seemed to be making camp outside of the cathedral's walls, one party unable to enter because of their relationship with skeletons and the other's a lack of orders to actually come in.

Now, we made out way to the gates while the skeletons ordered ahead to open them just as we were exiting the front of the building. At that time, we would have had everybody's attentions on us without a doubt and we did. When we came out, all of the players had come in closer from their freshly set up camps and even Traytar was on his feet and craning his neck to look down on us.

"Go inside and report to the back," I say to Traytar after lightly patting Mr. Thirteen on the shoulder. "You'll find an armored ghoul there condensing divine energy. Learn from him with the others. Dismissed."

As Traytar stepped over my small group and made his way smoothly but hastily through the yard and around the cathedral, Little Thirteen stepped forward and raised a hand toward the other two clans. Small groups from either of the outside clans came forward a few seconds later, revealing the leaders and their trusted.

Even though they now outnumbered us by a few people, which could have been seen as taking an aggressive stance, Little Thirteen says calmly and almost cheerfully, "The controlling skeletons are unhappy with some of our progresses in the quest to liberate their souls and break a divine curse on the land. Sadly, we set the bar too high for you guys. Because of this, they're preemptively staging a final assault effort. They want your clans to lead the ranks and hold us in reserve."

*