Worlds First Demon Lord - Chapter 115 Complaints Of The Demon Lord's Secretary

May 20, 5:55 am, London, England

I need a holiday.

My body is overworked. I can feel the bags under my eyes, the creak in my back. I take micro-naps while typing now; the weird rhythm of typing is like a lullaby to my ears.

The reason I was working so much was because the Demon Lord had decided to isolate himself to “cultivate,” whatever that meant. I had said as much when the Demon Lord had told me, and he’d seemed surprised.

“You’ve never read cultivation novels?” he had asked.

I told him I hadn’t. It was true, after all. I was more into Manga and Korean Webtoons.

He had given me a bunch of novels to read as homework. Most of them were not to my taste, but I could see the appeal. And there were some that were genuinely quite good.

That said, having a bunch of reading to do on top my work – which had doubled since Mr. Demon Lord had gone into “closed door cultivation” – was not giving me much time to myself. As soon as I open my eyes, I’m thinking about all the tasks I need to complete. As soon as my head hits the pillow I dream about every possible outcome of all the storylines.

Today was no exception.

I woke up before my alarm at 6am, took a shower, then started going over where the storylines had gotten. Through breakfast and the drive to work, I went through the superhero storyline.

This was a storyline the Demon Lord had technically abandoned. I knew he still kept an eye on it, but he wasn’t paying as much attention due to the gay nature of the leads. To be frank, I did think the leads were a little over dramatic at times. Gadiel especially.

That said, I did enjoy the romance. It was a bit weirdly paced, but I suppose that could just be because of the untold history between Tarik and Gadiel. If Mr. Demon Lord couldn’t get into it because of the gay, then it was his loss.

On the other hand, setting up the storyline and getting it to move was a pain. Do you know what kind of logistic nightmares Monster Nests are?

First, you have to find a suitable place. Abandoned buildings and stuff would’ve been perfect but nooooooo. Mr. Demon Lord wanted places that were “right under people’s noses.” And that meant in public places that people just naturally avoided.

Do you know how difficult it is to find a place like that? No. Because it’s impossible. Aside from Queanbeyan; that had been surprisingly easy. That place was a ghost town ready to happen. Clearing out the shopping center in order to set up the perception filter had actually been easier in the shopping center there than at the library in the university.

No, I do not have magic; the Demon Lord gave me some items that allowed me to cast some enchantments.

Like the seals he gave me to help erase people’s memories.

Which brings me to the biggest problem in the superhero storyline; clean-up.

And that’s the easy stuff.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep monsters a secret from thousands of university students on campus? How hard it is to keep them away from superhero fights when they are happening? How difficult it is to keep monsters from escaping their Nests and attacking random students?

Impossible. Completely impossible.

The memory seals helped, sure, but they weren’t perfect. And without the Demon Lord’s oversight, it was even worse. Rumors were starting to spread on campus about spirits and monsters fighting each other in the back of the library, of classes and students getting attacked.

But my hands were too full to do much about it. Not with the amount of work I was already doing on cleanup.

In that sense, I would put a lot of the blame on Ai. She was in charge of setting up the scenarios and playing them out, and she had a bit of a flair for the dramatic. And drama costs money. And cleanup.

But if it was just cleanup, I could handle it. If I were to do Ai’s job as well, I wouldn’t have time for the other storylines.

That said, I still needed to keep an eye on the storyline; I had to make sure it wasn’t going too off the rails, after all. After all, we didn’t need an international incident or anything like that.

I finished catching up with the storyline as I entered the building. The bright lights made me blink and frown as my heels clacked against the linoleum floors. I ignored the receptionist’s greeting, and took the coffee my assistant handed me. I took a swing of it, as I entered the private elevator, and made final notes on the superhero storyline.

It looked like the storyline was at a little bit of a halt. Ai was using her puppeteering powers to control a doctor into giving Gadiel a lobotomy, it seemed. Scary stuff. Weird how so many horror elements got into that storyline.

Then again, I suppose that was to be expected when we have a body-hopping spirit that could split itself into three pieces as a villain.

In any case, Gadiel was fighting, but only barely. Most of the fight seemed to get knocked out of him after his parents’ decision to…well.

Ai had somehow managed to convince the hospital that Gadiel was in no shape to make decisions for himself, and had convinced his parents to give Gadiel said lobotomy.

Gadiel must be feeling pretty terrible.

…

Well, if he managed to get out of this, then he was more of a hero than I expected. After the whole “bullying another kid for being gay to hide his own homosexuality” thing he had going, I had kinda stopped seeing him as a good guy.

Either way, Mr. Demon Lord would be happy.

I signed off on Ai’s plans, and went on to the next storyline. I felt the elevator move upwards.

Sakura. Aaaah, my little baby Sakura.

I couldn’t help but feel proud at how far my baby had come. She had uncovered so much, and much faster than I had expected.

The elevator bell rang, and I walked out into my office, still looking at my phone. My assistant rushed out beside me, and set herself up at her own desk. I slowly made my way to my own desk.

So, Sakura knew about the overall direction Neurix was going in. She knew basically what the plan was, and how they were trying to do it. She knew the major players in Neurix, and what they did. And she knew of the various crimes that were being committed.

However.

She didn’t know how high it went up. She didn’t know where the funding was coming from. And she didn’t know why this was all happening.

This, all coupled with her nobody status, left her quite lacking as a journalist. I understood why she was heading towards her mother; it would be the easiest way to gain a name.

But she still had a lot to learn.

I sat down at my desk, and sighed with contentment. I almost grinned before reminding myself of my character sheet. Cool, calm, collected. I’ve been doing this for a while. No need to break character just yet.

Honestly, Sakura was such a lucky find. With her backstory and current situation, I had seen potential. To think it would come to fruition like this.

Now all I needed to do was make sure she blossomed into a beautiful flower. And that meant keeping the pests away.

I gave a call to Jason, and assigned him some meaningless task. I did say it was a personal favor though, and that I would reward him handsomely for it. I had just the meaningless promotion set aside for this.

With him out of the way, I would be better able to focus on the people around Sakura. I looked up Misao Watanabe’s magazine: Fallen Star.

Hmmmmm…

Misao wanted Sakura to intern at Fallen Star. I could understand why; she wanted to see what Sakura was made of.

However, the person she assigned her to was not going to bring out the full potential of this arc. In order to do that, I would need Sakura to be assigned to…

…

Well. Wasn’t that a nice coincidence.

Mr. Katsuo Tadano.

Perfect.

Now all that was left for him to replace whoever Misao had assigned to Sakura. That shouldn’t be too difficult; an illness here, a whisper there, and Misao should have come up with the idea of re-assigning Sakura to Mr. Tadano herself.

But before I could get to work on that, my phone buzzed.

I blinked, looking at the text that had just arrived.

Demon Lord: One week.

That was all.

For a moment, I didn’t know what he meant. Then I realized.

He was coming back in one week.

He wanted a full update on that day.

On everything.

I bit my lip, suddenly going over everything I had to do. Superhero, done. Thriller, done.

Gamer…

I switched over to the feel for the gamer storyline. I watched Irade, a weird feeling settling in my stomach.

There was potential here.

There was a lot of potential here.

If I was honest, Irade was probably the best protagonist we had. And it was highly likely that we wouldn’t get another chance as perfect as this one.

But…

I sighed. It was always like this.

It was taking longer and longer for me to make decisions regarding her storyline. My head knew that the best way to make her stronger was to give her more hardships.

But every time I took something away from her, I would in turn cut a piece of my soul away.

It hurt to put such a young, powerless girl in so much pain. It hurt to hurt her.

Was it too much? Was I causing her too much pain?

I turned around and looked at the city below me. I could understand why the Demon Lord liked the view; there was something calming about looking down at the millions of people below, ants under my towering height.

Watching the city move along below, unaware of my machinations always cleared my head. It reminded me that I too, was a part of this system of this world.

My actions had consequences on all of them.

What impact did I want to have on the world?

I turned back to Irade. I wanted her to get stronger. I wanted her to reach her potential, to see what she could do.

But she wasn’t ready.

Not yet.

I made a decision, and confirmed it. Then, I looked back down at the Demon Lord’s text.

One week.

I stood up, and turned to face the window, hands clasped behind my back.

“Leave me,” I told my secretary without turning.

I could imagine her surprised face, but she didn’t say anything as she shuffled away. Once the elevator doors closed, I let out a deep, heavy sigh.

I feel like I’m juggling a bunch of sticks with spinning plates on them. Keeping the plates spinning on the sticks all at once would be a tough task itself, but while juggling them?

I took off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes. I was sure that something was slipping through the cracks. Something or someone was probably escaping my attention, and I was too tired to see it.

What was I missing?

What mistakes had I made?

What could I do right now, in this period of time?

Think, think, think…