Chapter 36: The Chessboard and Its Pieces

"Squad Seven, cut diagonally to the front right..."

Deep in the Third Layer, Koda held the Abyssal Codex in one hand and sent a new order through the throne.

In his mind, a black-and-red line shifted across the forest.

It showed the squad’s new path.

And it wasn’t the only line. Nineteen more were scattered across the picture in his head.

Each one was a demon squad.

Under his command, they were moving in a pattern no outsider could possibly make sense of, rushing around the forest like headless flies.

"Squad Fifteen, straight ahead, eight hundred meters... Squad Two, turn and run parallel to their flank..."

"Advance. Turn. Fall back..."

At that moment, Koda looked like a madman in the grip of some strange obsession. Muttering order after order, he made his soldiers dance a completely chaotic dance across the forest.

His demons didn’t get a single moment’s rest.

They were deeply unhappy, and furious.

After all, their lord hadn’t given a single order to attack since this began.

Several times, a squad had gotten close to the centaurs. One charge would have closed the gap.

They were slower than the centaurs, and the centaurs could easily have pulled away again, but they were demons, after all.

They weren’t afraid of dying, and they weren’t afraid of sacrifice.

They didn’t care if their comrades fell beside them. They didn’t even care whether they could beat the centaurs on their own.

All they cared about was whether they could make their enemies hurt and die.

Yet Koda’s orders ignored that one desire completely.

With the Heart of the Abyss, he forced every demon down and made them obey.

Every time a squad ran into the centaurs, one or more Imps were left behind as corpses.

Those pointless deaths filled even the demons, creatures with little sense or reason, with anger and resentment.

They were warriors, not game pieces to be shoved around and sent off to die!

However, Koda could already feel his followers’ fury, and he didn’t budge.

At least, that was how it looked.

It seemed as though he didn’t care at all whether any of them died.

But the truth was the exact opposite.

"It’s not that I don’t care..."

Koda’s attention never left the forest.

With a thought, he called up thirty gray points of light, scattered through the picture in his mind.

They were what his demons’ eyes had seen. The gray points sat in clusters of five or six, each cluster close behind a demon squad.

They were the centaur warriors, who had also split into small groups to hunt down his scattered squads!

"On the board called war, every piece matters."

"Because they’re the key to winning. They’re what move the game forward."

Koda spoke calmly, looking over the board in front of him, and his eyes brightened.

"But however important the pieces are, they still matter less than the point of the game."

"Because every piece that gets sacrificed has always been sacrificed for one thing..."

"So that I win!"

"Now!"

At last, the moment he’d been waiting for had come.

Slowly, the black-and-red lines curved into two overlapping circles.

And in the space where the two circles met were the centaur warriors, worn out from chasing demons.

After countless runs through it in his head and hours of thought, Koda had finally found the one chance that would let his weak little demons kill every single centaur.

The moment had arrived.

"All squads..."

Koda smiled as he gave the order.

"Kill the wounded or weakest in your squad and eat them to get your strength back. Then turn around together and move toward the center of the circle. And finally..."

"Kill them all!"

Where the two circles met, Ursok Windstride stared wide-eyed at the scene around him, unable to believe it.

Every centaur warrior he had brought, himself included, had ended up in the middle of a swamp.

"You..."

"Why are all of you here?"

The other centaurs were just as confused.

Every group had gotten there while chasing and shooting down Imps.

From the very beginning, the chase had felt strangely annoying.

Every time they ran into a demon squad, they could usually shoot down one or two Imps. But whenever they tried to keep chasing, another demon squad would always show up in sight.

The new one would always be at just the right distance, not too far and not too close; close enough that a short chase would catch it.

So again and again, the centaurs gave up on the squads that had already gotten farther away and went after the new targets instead.

As time went on, things slowly changed.

By the end, every group of centaurs had followed its own demon squad into the swamp, and all of them had arrived there without realizing it.

They had finally done what they set out to do, killing every demon they were chasing and leaving the bodies scattered across the filthy mud.

But when they looked up, they were stunned to find their group wasn’t the only one there.

Every other warrior from their tribe, every other group, had gathered there too!

That was the real reason behind Ursok’s question.

Why was everyone else here?

"Aaargh!" "Ahhh!" "!!"

Suddenly, a string of different screams broke out behind them.

Mixed in with the Imps’ cries came the laughter, chewing, and panting of countless other demons, all from the edges of the swamp.

Those sounds meant Koda’s orders were being carried out.

For the first time in this long chase, the demons had answered his command quickly and without holding back at all.

As Imp after Imp became food, most of the demons got back the strength they’d slowly burned through during the long chase.

They had eaten, but they weren’t satisfied, so they started moving inward, step by step.

After all, inside this circle of demons, there was plenty more food waiting!

"How is this possible?!"

Ursok twisted his half-man, half-horse body around and stared in horror at the edges of the swamp.

Beside him lay an Imp that had died a while ago.

Yet its mouth seemed frozen in an evil grin, silently mocking the centaurs for their foolishness.

"What just happened?!"

However, even more shocked than Ursok was Mirela, who had come back to her sparrow on a tree branch just in time to watch the second half of this game unfold.