-Demon King’s POV-
This one….
No, I am the demon king.
Demon King Gullgald de aru.
I am the most powerful and the one who holds the highest position in the Demon King’s Kingdom.
Fufufufu.
Though I’m no match for my wife and daughter.
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Now, the purpose of this parade.
There were three of them.
The first one was to bait those who were acting unpleasantly in the villages and cities where teleportation gates had been set up.
Those who are malicious will be caught.
There will be no point if they escape to the royal capital or Shashaato City.
Therefore, we planned to use the parade as a decoy and catch them by surprise.
The parade was also a convenient front in evacuating those who shouldn’t be injured.
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The second was to unify the will of the current nobles of the Demon King’s Kingdom.
As the monarch of the kingdom, I do not intend to invade the human kingdoms any further.
It is enough to maintain the status quo.
That is what I have been doing for the past few years.
However, there are a good number of nobles who disapprove of this.
They want us to destroy the human kingdoms.
In the capital, about half the population shares that opinion. However, in places that are away from the capital, such radical opinions are stronger.
We want to do something about these opinions and bring them together in the direction of maintaining the status quo.
Of course, I do not think that this parade will solve everything.
However, I would like to use this parade to sway the opinions on everyone in the royal capital toward maintaining the status quo.
In order to do so, power must be seen.
Fortunately, my position as the demon king allows me to do whatever I want no matter how barbaric it is.
Obey my opinion.
If you do, I promise you prosperity.
To make everyone see it, I decided to throw a parade that is basically a show of force.
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Third was to deal with human kingdoms.
Even if we are not willing to go to war, if they think otherwise, a war will still happen.
We have to fight to protect ourselves.
A dumbass situation.
Therefore, we want to show our power and make them think that there is nothing but defeat if they dare to do it.
And that war only occurs when you lack understanding on the other party.
If you understand the other party is, they will not dare start a war.
Until now, the Demon King’s Kingdom has never had any flattering diplomatic relations with human kingdoms.
It’s not the fault of the minister of foreign affairs, Beezel.
No matter who holds that position, no one would be able to achieve any better results than what Beezel achieved.
In any case, the other parties are the human kingdoms who are so hostile toward us that we can’t understand why they were doing it just because we are demons.
However, in the past few years, the winds have been changing.
A number of emissaries have come from human countries wishing to establish diplomatic relations.
A pleasing development.
And I would like to show them the state of the current Demon King’s Kingdom and tell them that there is no need to be so fearful.
These are the three purposes of the parade.
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However, I was quite concerned about whether to include the Big Tree Village in the parade or not given the three objectives.
For my part, I think it would be best to leave Big Tree Village alone.
Even if they volunteer, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have them join the parade.
However, Tiselle insisted that we add them to the list.
There are two reasons why Tiselle wants to include Big Tree Village in the parade.
One is to make the residents of the kingdom aware of inferno wolves, demon spiders, and others.
In order to not make the people of the kingdom feel anxiety, I asked them to make sure that the inferno wolves and demon spiders of Big Tree Village to not leave the forest of death.
However, because of this, we can’t use inferno wolves and demon spiders as a defensive force outside the forest of death.
Considering village chief, he’ll probably find it inconvenient if he could not use them when he wants to go to a new place in the future.
As for my consideration, though I think we can have sufficient and even excessive force even without the inferno wolves and demon spiders, as a father, I would prefer seeing them in public for my daughter’s safety.
The main reason I agreed.
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Another reason why Tiselle wants to add Big Tree Village in the parade is the Garret Kingdom.
The Garret Kingdom had long been hostile to the Demon King’s Kingdom but in recent years, it has been shifted to a more friendly attitude.
So, we were thinking of having a truce or peace between the Demon King’s Kingdom and the human kingdoms……
That’s when Garret Kingdom was divided.
The reason for the divide was the difference in stance against the annexation to the Demon King’s Kingdom…..it’s not hard to understand the reason.
The only thing I would like to see is a unification of will within the country before annexing them.
Honestly speaking, it is a nuisance.
Moreover, if we accept the annexation, the Demon King’s Kingdom will gain an enclave.
And we can’t leave it defenseless just because it’s an enclave.
In order to protect the enclave, the Demon King’s Kingdom will have more fronts to maintain.
Such an enclave is unnecessary.
In short, I don’t want it.
However, not taking the hands of those who say that they are surrendering to us would either mean “We have no intention of sparing them” or “We are planning to attack them”.
And other countries will take it as “even if we surrender, they will not take us seriously”.
As a result, the war will get worse.
We can’t say we will not accept them.
Hence, we didn’t say anything for now.
I don’t if that’s okay but that’s how politics works.
Maa, we can’t leave them unanswered too long, but we can at least buy time.
In the meantime, we will take action.
Ideally, I would like Garret Kingdom to unite and become Garret Kingdom once again and become a vassal of the Demon King’s Kingdom, not annexed.
Then, the Demon King’s Kingdom would assist the new Garret Kingdom and have it deal with human kingdoms instead of us.
I know this is only the ideal situation but if we don’t seek the ideal situation, there will be no result.
We’ve been asked to do the impossible so this is the least we can do.
I know that things will not turn out to be the ideal situation we want.
In any case, we bought time by not responding to the Garret Kingdom.
Now that we have done so, we need to give the Garret Kingdom hope.
We don’t want them to think that “not willing to answer” = “hostility”.
And to show them that “hope”, the angels will participate in the parade.
“Are we going to be annexed?”, “Are we already on the way to being annexed?” are what we want the Garret Kingdom to think.
Since that is the purpose, we could have just approached the angels alone about participating but….
If we did that, we would owe the angels.
That’s not good.
I’m not talking about owing the angels but ignoring village chief.
If we are going to owe anyone a debt, it should be to village chief, not the angels.
Tiselle agrees so we have to include Big Tree Village in the parade.
Incidentally, Tiselle has already spoken to the chief of the angels so we are coordinating to make it so that village chief is the one who participated in the parade and not the angels.
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With these three in mind and two objectives of Tiselle, we decided to hold a parade in the kingdom and have Big Tree Village participate in it.
The short period of time between the decision and execution of the plan caused a lot of trouble for the civil servants.
To be honest, parade is the last resort.
We never had any problem with the march we do in the military and Big Tree Village has a parade every year.
However, a parade in a big city alone is a pain in the a*s let alone this one.
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Now, let’s talk about the parade…..
The first day, from Village Five to Shashaato City.
In Shashaato City, some commotion already happened including the manner check by Dors-dono’s group and some sort of flying bone or something but we managed to get through it.
It didn’t help that the schedule was adjusted on the second day.
On the 3rd day, we ran from Shashaato City to the royal capital.
Originally, our goal was to catch suspicious people around but in fact, we had already achieved our objective during the dry run.
The suspicious demons, mistakenly believing that they were being attacked, started escaping when they saw the impure dragons Ojess, Haifrigta, and Kihatroy, and the ten inferno wolves that participated in the dry run.
I thought they were too braindead since they were even making things difficult for us while being so close to the royal capital but it seems like they were just some small fries from the royal capital.
They are those who are said to have escaped during the clean up operation in the royal capital…..we did that to ensure that Alfred and the others will be safe once they start attending the noble academy.
That clean up operation.
I wonder if it wasn’t very effective because rag tag bastards and assassins showed up after that, but I guess it did have an effect.
Well, in any case, one of my objectives has been accomplished.
Yes, it’s been accomplished.
I think it is safe to say that this parade is successful.
A goal was accomplished even before the parade started but that is a trivial matter.
Umu, the parade was a success!
The last day of the parade.
I thought so as I looked at the royal capital, which for some reason, had become a war zone.
I know, I know.
I’m escaping from reality.
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The “war zone” here is not a human kingdom invasion but a conflict between the defenders of the royal capital(the three impure dragons plus the 1st and 2nd legion who are not participating in the parade) and the angels and inferno wolves who are in the parade.
As for why, read it in the next chapter.
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