Needless to say, I didn’t exactly have a good evening after what happened the previous day.

I may or may not have screwed us all. Most likely may have rather than may not have.

Even so, when I woke up on the sixth day, I felt motivated. Inspired.

In a fucked up way, I always felt more anxious when things were going my way. I could never deal with that content feeling where I had to worry about what would go wrong and ruin everything. My life taught me to never trust feeling happy or peaceful with anything. All peaceful happiness ever did was lower my guard and make the inevitable pain even worse.

I needed medication just to live a “normal” life where nothing really went wrong.

What I really thrived in—what I felt really at peace in, was when everything was going to shit.

Even with my old man, I felt more relaxed when I was depressed from his death than I did when everything was fine and happy with him.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I didn’t know.

It also made me realize something. When I was first chosen to represent Hell and had the fate of humanity’s future thrown onto my back, and all I had to do was play out a live-action 4X game, I felt…

Happy.

I felt like I could finally be important—like I could finally be somebody. Even though I felt so nervous that I could throw up, and I ended up going through withdrawal without my medication, there was a part of me who was really enjoying it. Everything seemed awesome. I felt untouchable despite how nervous I was.

It was because of how dream-like the situation was that I felt so nervous. I mean, what was there not to like? I was chosen among billions of humans to represent a godlike being beyond my comprehension in my favorite genre of games, and I was also surrounded by, admittedly, hot demon girls. One of which was clearly into me almost right from the start. Sure, there was a lot of pressure on my shoulders, but that pressure wasn’t what really made me feel sick.

What made me sick was how awesome the situation was.

Deep down, I knew that it wouldn’t last.

And I was right.

Now? Now, on the sixth day, I had nothing but mistakes recently. I lost a unit and had real, living people suffer horrible deaths as a result. They may or may not have been executed upon their return to Hell, too. Then I went and lost the support of our patron, causing us to lose our only way of getting any reinforcements.

Everything went to shit in a single day and the situation felt hopeless with no return from it.

And that was exactly the kind of environment I felt most at ease in.

Rock bottom was a nice place. It meant I couldn’t sink any farther. Beneath me was solid ground and above me was a vast ocean to ascend.

The only direction left to go was up.

Any more shit thrown my way wouldn’t be able to ruin my happiness because I was already up to my neck in shit.

Maybe I was more of an emotional masochist than I realized. I enjoyed being in shit situations. Getting to feel like some inspirational leader, a special chosen among all of humanity, having a hot demon assistant by my side all the time—sure, that was great, but all it did was make me worry about when it would come to an end.

Now that I felt like I lost everything, it made me feel all the more motivated to get it back.

Though, realistically, I would end up feeling nervous and bad again if I did improve our situation and get back on top of things.

But that could be dealt with later.

“C-Clay? Are you awake?” Enna asked from the tent’s entrance, reminding me that I didn’t exactly lose everything.

Guess that’s enough self-analyzing for the morning, I thought before standing up and stretching. “I’m up. You can come in. Everything alright?”

Enna stepped through the tent’s entrance and nodded. “Me and Thad have an idea for how we might grow our population.”

“If you’re asking to be bred, I wouldn’t mind obliging.”

While waiting for Enna to reply, I slipped my shirt on over my head and cracked all the usual bones. My fingers, knuckles, wrists, and neck.

It was only when I was done with my usual morning ritual that I looked over at her and saw her staring at me with a bright red face, her glasses slipping down and almost falling off her nose as her mouth hung wide open. The quivering of her lips made it look like she was trying to stutter something out, but not a single noise escaped her.

“Thanks for giving me such a nice sight first thing in the morning,” I teased. “Today will be a good day.”

It took her another few moments before she could finally, and shakily, reach a hand up to adjust her glasses and say, “Br-bree-breeding wi-will n-not—that—that idea won’t—it would take too-too long to—”

“You’re not saying no.”

Her tail shot straight up behind her as she struggled to remain standing.

“The bed is right there. Nobody will disturb us.”

Steam was about to blow out through her ears if her face turned any redder. At least she managed to say, “I—it’s… i-it’s not like—not like I… notlikeidontwantto—but! We—we have more important things to—to deal with! W-we should… we should… a-another time…”

“I’ll hold you to that. So, what’s this idea you and Thad came up with?”

Enna sighed and pushed her glasses all the way back up, finally starting to calm down. “You… you seem so energetic today. Do you feel better?”

“Not at all. I feel horrible. Like the most useless, shat on human alive.”

“But you sound so… relaxed?”

“Exactly. I prefer it this way. Did some self-reflecting this morning and realized I’m an emotional masochist. The worse I feel and the worse my situation is, the more relaxed I feel. This is what feels most natural to me. It’s like a fucked-up version of Stockholm syndrome. Anyways, that idea?”

“I’m not sure I understand… but I’m happy if you’re feeling better. Anyways… minor factions are our only hope right now. Thad watched some of the previous world-bound games and said that, whenever two regions of matching biomes spawn next to each other, that there’s a chance for a minor faction to live there. Oceans require more than just two in the event of an aquatic minor faction, but that’s beside the point. Our starting region is volcanic. We discovered another volcanic biome adjacent to it to the east. That means there might be a minor faction we haven’t discovered yet. And to the north, we have those adjacent plains regions, so there might be one up there, too.”

“I think I know where this is going. We’ll be able to assimilate a minor faction into our own and basically add their population to ours, and then we’ll get to summon new units of population from them?”

Enna nodded. “Exactly! Every minor faction has their own summoning portal at their base that will summon new units of population. They can either be taken over to summon more of your sponsor’s species, which isn’t possible for us anymore, or they can summon more of the species they originally belong to.”

“I remember reading something about that when everything started happening. The window told us that our species would be used to populate the world as a minor faction. So, in that case, humans are somewhere in this game world as a minor faction.”

Enna nodded again. “As are many other species.”

“And every minor faction is up for grabs to whoever the winner is.”

“Right.”

“In that case, give me your tired and your poor. It’s time for us to go full melting pot.”