Chapter 7: All I have to do is get a hit

    For a long time, I had believed I had no luck.

　I thought that my summoning luck was the worst.

　I thought that even if I continued summoning for the rest of my life, all I would get would be Slime.

　I can no longer remember the number of times I have summoned.

　Somewhere along the line, summoning partially became an end in and of itself.

　The anticipation of random summoning was accompanied by a strong sense of euphoria as I placed the magic stones in the array.

　My fingers trembled as I placed the stones, and a great surge of pleasure rushed through my brain as I recited the spell.

　This had partly become a form of entertainment for me.

　Which was why I should be able to give up on it. I thought I could give up on it.

　If nothing but Slime would ever appear, I could already predict the result.

　I looked at the small Demon I had just summoned standing shakily at my feet, and I was certain I had heard the voice of God.

　I just had not summoned enough times yet so far — I would be rewarded if I persisted.

　I needed to summon more, even more... I needed to summon with a passion as fierce as the flames of hell!

　It would come. The next time, it would come. No, even if it did not appear the very next time, I was certain that I would get the Dragon I had always yearned for in the near future.

　It was coming. I would end up a clown if I gave up now after coming so far. In contrast, if I finally summoned a Dragon, it would not matter at all that I had only been summoning Slimes so far. That's what I thought.

　I had to push forwards. For the sake of the all the magic stones I had wasted. And also for the sake of all the Slimes I had continued to synthesise.

　―― I wanted to summon.

　The heavens burned and the earth rumbled. In a dying country, under a moonless night, I made up my mind to summon.

　Even if only for a minute more, a second longer, just one more time... I wanted to summon as many times I could in the time remaining.

　At last the odds have begun to converge. If I could continue to summon, who cared if the world falls into ruin?

§§§

　I left my wife in our home and joined the battle at the frontlines.

　What I wanted was a Dragon, not a Slime. Not because Dragons were strong though, but because they were rare. I wanted to summon a rare.

　I was simply a Mage Summoner. Moreover, unusually, I wasn't attached to the military. So I was not interested in the fighting capabilities of my vassals.

　I had always been either busy doing business or summoning. Winning the grand martial tournament had been purely due to fixing the matches. However, that did not mean that my vassals were weak.

　Summoning magic was the art of using magic stones as a medium to summon energy from another world, which would then be shaped into the resulting vassals. By no means were Dragons or Slimes being extracted directly from another world.

　Therefore, going by this theory, the difference between a Dragon and a Slime was all in the amount of energy drawn in by a magic stone during summoning. If there was a substantially large amount of energy, you get a powerful Dragon, and if you only pulled in a little, you get the weakest Slime.

　By that logic, my Slime, which had gone through innumerable rounds of synthesis, combining the energy of tens of thousands of Slime, could not be weak.

　With permission from the king, I headed to the front lines with Dark Matter. The enemy army was bewildered by the sudden appearance of this incomprehensible creature that did not look like a Slime.

　We had to win.

　The opponent was the Allied Army, which had a greater number of troops to begin with.

　My cousin with his powerful dragon was also with them. I wasn't planning to go easy on my cousin just because he was family, but this was not a battle situation that could be overturned by one or two Slimes. In any case, I had more Slimes than I could count, and a Mage Summoner could control their vassals even if they were not present at the same location.

　I wanted to summon. That was the only desire left smouldering in me. I didn't need courage. Fear and morality no longer meant anything to me. I had been summoning all this while. To continue summoning, I would even become a demon or an asura.

　If I did nothing, we would be destroyed. If we were to be destroyed anyway, I might as well try something and then be destroyed.

　Victory would be difficult, but it would be easy enough to mess up the front lines.

********

　The war had gone from a one-sided massacre to an unfathomable hell-scape.

　While the enemy troops were still struggling with Dark Matter, I systematically synthesised one-fifth of the Slimes I had stockpiled into various types of poisonous Slimes and sent them onwards. Every so often, some of the poisonous Slimes were launched through a cannon to fall from the sky like rain, poisoning a wide swathe of land and bringing down both friend and foe alike. The poisonous Slimes invaded the air, the earth, and the water, rendering the strongest armour and shields useless. I had used every type of poisonous Slime I knew of, so it would be difficult to establish a cure in the short term. When it came to Slime, I was unbeatable.

　I synthesised another one-fifth of my Slime stockpile into countless Perfect Slimes and secretly spread Legal Slime Solution throughout our army. Fear and pain had no effect on an army ruled by pleasure substances — this army of living dead threw the battlefield into chaos.

　When the king found out, he was appalled, but all I cared about was getting through this situation so I could summon. The allied forces also learned of the spread of the Legal Slime Solution through our forces, and they fully realised the horrors of this mysterious ingredient.

　Meanwhile, I also ordered all the pet Slimes I had exported to the other countries to cause as much destruction as they could. The enemy countries were investing a lot of effort into this war front. This was a weakness to exploit.

　Since a great number of Slimes had been exported, the damage was considerable. When the enemy troops caught wind of the horrific incidents occurring back in their respective homelands, their faces paled and their morale dropped drastically. As some abandoned the battle lines to return home to their country, the frontlines were thrown into further turmoil, and the chain of command was completely disrupted. No country had taken any precaution against Slimes, which they had considered harmless up till now.

　Dark Matter, who had been fighting at the front lines all this while, was killed in action. I synthesised another one-fifth of my stockpile Slimes to create several new Dark Matters.

　―― We had to win.

　The death toll far exceeded initial expectations. What had seemed to be a one-sided war turned into a full-blown mud fight{i.e. a hard and dirty battle}. The battle raged for far longer than 3 days... it showed no signs of ending in a month or even in 3 months. It was now clear to everyone that the damage and losses would be too great regardless of the outcome. However, it was no longer possible to retreat.

　Most of my country's army fell to enemy attacks, the poison of the poisonous Slime, and the drug of the Perfect Slime. However, the Allied forces suffered much more. It was like a plague. It was like an endless sea of Slime. The poisonous Slime turned the land into a barren wasteland where no plants or trees could grow.

　We had to win. I just wanted to summon.

　While my Slimes were rampaging, I continued to summon with the magic stones I had stored in my inventory. Being wartime, magic stone mining was on hiatus, but there was still plenty of magic stones stocked up so there was no lack for summoning.

　As usual, all I got were Slimes, but this no longer dampened my spirits. I knew that something other than Slimes would come eventually. Thus, I continued to summon. My naive wife, who knew very little about what was going on with the war, watched me with concern.

　My father-in-law, the king, had passed away under the stress of the long war. All the princes had already been killed in the war effort as well, so I became the king by succession. However, the title no longer held any meaning. The once abundant land had already been contaminated with poison and could not be restored to its original state even if peace was achieved. I announced that the folly of the Allied forces was to blame for our plight, and declared that we would fight to the bitter end.

　Everyone was exhausted. Still, I did not stop.

　Everyone was struggling desperately. All I did was issue orders, which, ironically, was consistent with the acknowledged tactical strengths of Mage Summoners.

　Eventually, the Allied forces sent a messenger to parley. I refused and drove the messenger away with the threat of Legal Slime Solution addiction.

　With the end of the war, my country would be devastated. We had no allies. The end of the war would also mean the end of the country. My country was already dead. I knew that once I stopped, I would never be able to stand up again. The only way left was victory. I was out of manpower to command, but I still had poisonous Slimes, Perfect Slimes, and Dark Matters in stock. I had discovered an efficient way to synthesise poisonous Slimes and Dark Matters, and I wrote it down into a book.

　Before long, 70% of my country's population was dead, and most of the Allied forces were no longer able to fight. The once fertile land was filled with corpses.

　The war had died down. The number of casualties greatly exceeded that of any war that had ever been fought, and the survivors were mostly left in a useless state.

　Just as the war was about to come to a spontaneous end, I was visited by a messenger.

　It was not a messenger from the Allied forces, but a messenger from the demon race, the natural enemy of humankind.

　I was being recruited by the king of the demon race, who was known as the Demon King, because of my personality and my ability to control Slimes.

　The messenger from the Demon King called me an atrocity with no regard for the lives of my own kind, but I did not agree.

　I just had to win. I had to win, because the next summon, or the very next summon, could be the one. I had to hit a big one for the sake of all those who had been sacrificed. Inadvertently, I had stacked a mountain of corpses and constructed a river of blood. There was no turning back.

　There was no future, whether this war continued on as it was or ended here and now.

　On the conditions that all the remaining magic stones in the world would be mine and that the lives of the few remaining citizens of my country would be saved, I became a subordinate of the Demon King.

　From that moment on, I went from being a Slime Master to one of the leaders of the Demon King's army, the Lord of Slime.

---

Previous: Chapter 6: Too much greed.
Next: Chapter 8: May you have a wonderful summoning!

Back to Index