"Pipo. Transfer Sadie to this location. I want Victor and his brood staking out the capital city. Tell them to download any and all usable information into Databank for Althea and I to consult during judgement." I ordered aloud, as Spatial Motion launched, taking Althea, Pipo, and I to the location that I'd designated.
Pipo jiggled a bit in response, acknowledging my order.
Using every single soul inside my Demon Lord Seed, I'd chosen to name the entire Tamed Monsters' Initiative, down to the last monster. Some of those, especially the higher-ranked monsters, gained humanoid evolutions from the naming, while others, like Pipo, evolved in different ways. Pipo was originally a C-ranked slime that I'd had special hopes for. I'd wondered if I could mass-produce slimes like Big Bro and I, but apparently that wasn't how evolutions worked. You could 'hope' for something, but you couldn't really 'aim' for it. Instead of gaining a humanoid form, Pipo had turned into something called a Hive Slime. Basically, he could split his body up into as many different 'clones' as he wanted, controlling each and every one separately using his second intrinsic skill, Hive Mind, and even transferring skill effects between clones with an intrinsic that I suspected originated with Champion's Dominion.
Unfortunately, his evolution had come with a few caveats. He didn't have absorb and dissolve, the basic slime-intrinsics anymore, and his magicule count hadn't changed much from his pre-naming days, but he was the best thing ever, in my eyes.
For example, if I cast Spatial Motion directly on Pipo, he could redirect the spell to within five meters of any of his other clones, wherever they may be. All he had to do was ask for the specific location, and I could transfer any of my subordinates anywhere we desired. He could also observe most normal people without being seen, though his subtlety could be better. A skilled observer, Hinata for example, would instantly notice him, even if his clone only barely contained enough magicules to exist.
Granting Pipo a few dozen Spatial Motion castings almost simultaneously with Curiosity, I turned my attention to the target in front of me.
"Althea, what do you think?" I asked idly.
Althea looked around for a moment before answering, "Very… posh. Magnificently expensive." She replied honestly. She was right. We were surrounded on all sides by mansions that rivaled even Tempest's finest engineering.
"...Look a bit further."
"...Disgusting pigs." She said after a moment.
Currently, we were standing right in the center of Farmus's royal capitol, Marrus. In front of us was the royal castle. Honestly, it by itself, while impressive, didn't really compare to the spacious Dwargon royal castle, or the magnificently imposing Englesia royal capitol.
But it was surrounded by beautifully expensive mansions, complete with large, beautiful gardens containing flowers that I'd never seen up close before. It was an incredibly beautiful section of the city.
Unfortunately, though, this was the only part of the city that held any beauty at all. The rest of the city was crowded and dirty, with four-fifths of the city's population living in poorly-made shacks and slums outside the wall that was supposed to protect the city. If the surrounding area wasn't an even plain, where you could see everything for miles in every direction, those people would have to fear massacre at the hands of monsters every single day of their lives. The thought turned my stomach.
Overworking the business sectors and forcing out the poor so that the rich could stuff their fat faces? These people were practically begging for their entire society to be destroyed long before they declared war on Tempest.
Oh, wait. They never actually declared war. They simply attacked.
Perhaps, then, it was time for me to return the favor. Naturally, though, I'd do it far better.
…
"Lord Edward!" One of the Farmus Royal Guard exclaimed, rudely barging into the private chambers of the king's brother.
"Have you forgotten your manners, sir!? Can you not see that I am in the middle of something important? If you do not have a good reason for interrupting my afternoon nap, then I swear, I will have you drawn and quartered before you can utter another word!" Lord Edward shouted.
"Milord, I have been issued orders to immediately get you as far away from the castle as possible. We are under attack!" The soldier explained with a single breath.
"Under attack? Impossible! By whom?!" Edward wondered.
"We don't know, but its strength is beyond our wildest nightmares! It is only a matter of time before it breaks through all of our guards. As the king's eldest brother, it is imperative that you escape right away!"
"Escape!? How dare you! Only a coward flees from a battle inside their own castle!" Edward scoffed at the mere idea, but the royal guard's reply made him falter.
"Sir, I must remind you, the young Edgar is nowhere near ready to lead our nation in the king's absence! It must be you, which means that you must survive this day, at all costs! If we win this battle and lose you, then the fight will be ultimately pointless!"
Edward stroked his chin, deep in thought. If this invader was capable of getting past Farmus's elite royal guards, then it likely had one goal: To destroy Farmus's remaining leaders while the king and his strongest guards were away at war. In other words, all the remaining heads of state, including young Edgar, were likely at risk. Edward had quite a few allies there, people he'd bought off or blackmailed, but if the young Prince Edgar was killed, then his elder brother would have no heir. The benefits of leaving far outweighed the drawbacks. Edward could already taste the throne.
"You have a point. Let's get going, then. We'll use the secret escape tunnels." Edward said after a moment of pondering.
"Your wife is in another wing of the castle, Lord Edward. You must understand, we will not have time to rescue her."
"I will simply find another. Make haste and clear the way for me, my guard."
"Understood, my lord."
…
"My lady, it seems that the king's brother utilized secret tunnels underneath the castle to leave as we were taking our time familiarizing ourselves with the castle's structure." Althea told me as I sat in the king's study in my slime form.
"I know, Althea. I could see it with Universal Detect." I told her. In fact, I'd literally watched him get on a horse and leave. I could probably have Big Bro's Wise One accurately predict the exact location and Spatial Motion coordinates of Edward in real time based on that information, but I wasn't going to bother with that. It wasn't worth the time, because he didn't have allies, and he didn't have a place in this country. Not anymore.
Currently, my flower sprites were scouring every inch of this castle for all of Farmus's records. Business, war, and anything in between. All of that information, concerning the entirety of Farmus as a country, would be downloaded directly into my Database sub-skill, for Althea and I to sort out on our own. Big Bro's skill would normally do this for us, but I didn't want it to pull all of that weight for me while it was still busy calculating billions of other things for the good of everyone else.
'Huh.' Wise One huffed at me, but it was a matter of pride.
Even without using Wise One, though, Curiosity still allowed me to parse through massive amounts of data in seconds. That meant that I'd already managed to find incriminating evidence of dozens of counts of bribery, blackmail, collaboration with Cerberus, and more on Edward and other garbage nobles like him and Earl Migam, who Sadie had already killed on my behalf.
After the evidence was found, we did a few things with it.
First, we tried to find every single involved underling. Even if they were just following orders, it didn't matter to me anymore. They trampled on lives, so they'd die. We'd deal with the rest later.
Once we had immutable proof of every involved party, I'd compile copies of the documents, as well as create a magical tool to record all of the audio and video evidence that we'd gathered during the investigation. All of that information would then be posted, played, or otherwise distributed at all five major Free Guild branches in the five largest cities in Farmus, as proof that every single person we killed had committed some sort of crime.
Quickly, the numbers piled up. From one noble, to a dozen, to over a hundred. Two hundred nobles, from the highest rank to the lowest, and everything in between. The least of these nobles employed around a hundred guards, over fifty percent of whom were actively involved in their crimes. The highest-ranking noble I ordered the death of employed around five thousand guards, two thousand of which were involved enough in the Cerberus human and demi-human trafficking ring that they made the cut, too.
The final death count? 50,000.
And it was only after I ordered the final assassination, two days after Izzy and Sol's deaths, that I finally felt it.
My Demon Lord Seed was awakening. My Harvest Festival had begun.