Following the example of the shaman, one by one the Hornies fell to their knees and clasped their hands. The king was no exception. I could hear a murmur behind me. The Skhites, like me, were dumbstruck at the submission of the Hornies.

I had had enough of the show. I decided that the shaman was a crazy freak. And the Hornies, including their king, were all idiots for taking his words seriously.

“Look,” I said to the Hornies, “we have no idea what you are doing. My people are starving. They need to collect food from the forest. They are thirsty because our water has run out. All this because you lay siege to us. And now that we come out of the village because we are choiceless, you act oddly. You are insulting us. Tell us what exactly you want, or else… we are going to attack you. We might have no strength in us, but what little we have we are going to use to end your lives. We are going to kill as many of you as we can before we ourselves perish at your hands.”

“Please no!” the shaman wailed, “Please no! There shall be no killing anymore! If you want to attack the Hornies, you can. But no Hornie shall fight back. We are your eternal servants from now on, very much like the Skhites. Yes, we came here with selfish reasons. But we also feared the Skhites possessed something so powerful that they could pose a threat to us in the future. It was I who sensed the presence of the power. I thought the power came from an object. But I got it all wrong. I thought I was a master of the magical arts, but I am not. I did not know that a new powerful king has come, one who is fated not only to be the king of the Skhites but of all the Eviluns that roam the land of Dharti. I am the one who is truly guilty for all the deaths that have occurred on both sides. If only I had used my powers with more skill, not a single Evilun would have perished. And I am going to pay for my blunder. I am going to pay for it with my life!”

A knife materialized in the Shaman’s hands from nowhere. And this knife he plunged into his heart. He did not even let out a cry, though his face convulsed with pain, his eyes fixated on me the entire duration of his silent torture. The king of the Hornies scurried to the Shaman, and in his last moments the Shaman muttered some words to the king of the Hornies. The King nodded, his eyes reddening, the shaman no doubt being a longtime companion and advisor of his. The Shaman became still. He looked as bizarre in his death as he had in life, his hands still gripping the hilt of the knife plunged into his chest.

The King of the Hornies approached me, his figure hunched in grief over the loss of the Shaman. I just observed him. I did not know what to say, for what was transpiring was beyond my comprehension.

“We made a mistake in attacking you,” the King of the Hornies said, his head lowered. “We the Hornies want you to be our king—”

“What garbage are you talking about?” a Skhite barked from behind me, while others voiced their agreement. “Vicky is our king.”

“Let him speak,” I said, more out of pity for the king than anything.

“Thank you, Lord,” the King of the Hornies said, “We the Hornies need you to lead us. We are not asking that you leave the Skhites, but we just want you to accept us as your servants. Be our leader, just as you are of them. You are the true king of all Eviluns. We realized that what we did was very wrong. While we cannot bring back the Skhites that passed away as a result of our fallacy, we can supply the village with all the food and water that the Skhites might need. And if you cannot forgive us for what we have done, then we the Hornies are ready to slice our throats in an act of self punishment.”

Saying so, the king took out a pen knife and brought it near his throat. The rest of the Hornies brought whatever weapons they had, be it knives, swords or even spears and arrows to their throats, ready to kill themselves.

“Yeah do it!” some of the Skhites said angrily from behind me. “Kill yourselves!”

The king took his knife closer to his throat. All he was waiting for was a word from me.

I sighed. Darn it. I had thought the crown would be heavy. But seeing the baffling way that the Hornies were behaving, I wondered if my crown had doubled its weight.

“Wait,” I said to the King. “Just wait. Go back to your men and wait there. I want to have a few words with my people.”

The king mechanically turned around and marched away to where his men were standing. My eyes went to the shaman lying dead and I winced. Leaving the others at the entrances, I departed to my chamber with my ministers. I took Orka’s parents along too. Referring to everyone's viewpoint was important.

“Let them kill themselves, “one minister said hotly. “What’s wrong with that?”

“They are ready to bring us food and water,” I pointed out. “We can get that from the forest ourselves, but that will take time. We are already weak enough, and it’s hard for me to imagine Skhites hunting animals or climbing trees to gather fruits. The children are going to die if we do not feed them.” The pitfalls of the Skhites’ non-agrarian society were quite exposed now.

“So you are saying you want to become their king?” another minister interrogated me.

“Do I want to become their king?” I said. “No. But perhaps doing so will save a few Skhite children from dying.”

“I don’t think there is anything wrong in you becoming the king of the Hornies,” Oraka’s father said, and his wife agreed with a nod. “It won’t be very different from us conquering them. The Hornies shall serve the Skhites from now on.”

“So we will be their masters?” the ministers asked.

“We will definitely be in a position to exert our will on them if we want to,” Lelok said. “Not that we should misuse it. They are after all fellow eviluns.”

This new perspective changed the opinion of the flock of ministers. While I did not want any race of monsters to serve another for all eternity, I decided that for the time being accepting leadership of the Hornies would be the wisest decision I could make.

But at the same time, I felt an uneasy feeling in my heart. Little did I know then that it would trouble me for days to come. The late shaman’s words that I was fated to be king of all eviluns stuck to my mind. A part of me did not want that to happen. I did not want to be the leader of all the evil elements in Dharti. One or two monster clans was manageable. Even though eviluns had been far nicer to me than players, they were savages at heart. The Hornies had already displayed this core brutishness by waging war with the Skhites.

From what I understood reflecting on the behavior of the shaman, through his magical capabilities he had somehow sensed that I was with the Skhites, but he had erred in believing that I was some object instead of a person. And partly out of fear, and partly out of fancying possession of the powerful object, the shaman had convinced the Hornie king to launch an offensive on the Skhite village.

The game world of Dharti, just like it had provided me the ability to see stats, had also for some reason made the eviluns regard me with an unbelievable degree of importance. I found this creepy at best. What if tomorrow many more monster clans showed up and pleaded with me to be their leader?

It was after a few hours after I had agreed to be the king of the Hornies that I received a new notification.

Congratulations!

You have leveled up!

You are now not only the king of the Skhites but also of the Hornies!

Well done! You receive the ability to transform into a Hornie! However this transformation would consume your mana, so use it wisely! You can also merge with Hornies and use their additional strength during combat!

I found this new upgrade to my abilities a little underwhelming. Perhaps because I was never keen on becoming the king of the Hornies to begin with.

In the next few days that followed, the dead bodies that were kept in the cold chamber in the Forbidden Tunnels were taken out and given proper burials in the forest. Normality returned to the village at last after a long time. The Hornies kept visiting me though.

They wanted me to go and see the place where they lived. I was their ruler, and they wanted me to fix the small problems they faced. I kept on delaying them, and would send my ministers instead to deal with all matters in whatever way they saw right. The Skhite ministers had little interest in solving problems for the horned monsters who had killed so many Skhites mercilessly. The result was that Hornie problems were left largely unattended.

Apparently, the shaman had been the one who had really looked after the Hornies, and with his demise, the Hornies’ troubles escalated in number. Their management of daily tasks was especially poor. They kept quarreling amongst themselves which didn’t help at all.

The king of the Hornies was an inept one. He created more complications than solutions. He admitted this himself one day while in my chamber.

“Who made you king?” I asked him.

He avoided eye contact with me.

“We Hornies elect Kings based on blood line. I was the only child of my parents.”

“That shaman of yours,” I said and observed that the king pursed his lips trying to suppress his emotions at the mention of his beloved mentor, “how long had he been with you?”

“Since my birth,” the king replied. “He was the chief advisor to my parents, and my grandparents and to all the previous rulers of the Hornies.”

“Seems like he lived long,” I said.

“He was an immortal,” the king replied. “The only person that could kill him was himself.”

“He shouldn’t have killed himself.”

“He was responsible for so many deaths. He felt guilty. He couldn’t forgive himself.”

The Hornie king was going red in the face and his eyes were brimming. I sighed. I would have to take care not to mention the shaman in his presence, or he would burst into tears. He might not be a very competent king, but I did not want to hurt his sentiments all the same. The king departed with a glum face, requesting me to visit the Hornies soon. I promised I would.

***