DE Vol. 1 pt. 68

Year 1, Day 24 pt. 2

Was I nervous? Of course. There was a ton riding on the conversation I was about to have with the Viking Elves’ leader. But no matter how nervous I was, I needed to keep it together. There were too many people depending on me. Too much at stake.

Even if my goal was something as ridiculous sounding as “troll the enemy leader into surrendering,” the potential outcomes and what they meant for us were anything but ridiculous.

That was why I had to give it my best.

It was strange. In order to do my best, I had to treat it like it was a game rather than a serious, diplomatic meeting. It was because of how serious it was that it needed to be treated properly like a game, because that was how my opponent was viewing it. Treating it like a serious matter wasn’t going to have the same effect on somebody who was treating it like a game. If I wanted to trick somebody thinking of everything as a game, then I needed to treat it like a game as well.

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. But, something that helped me really focus on that way of thinking was the success I already had by doing so. We only won that battle for the settlement because we treated it like a game. If I didn’t exploit the fact that everything was a “game,” we would have lost.

A real battle would have seen the defenders defend their settlement to the last. They wouldn’t have simply lost as soon as a timer stopped ticking down. They had us surrounded and could have wiped us out with ease if only they had more time.

I needed to continue exploiting just how much of a game our situation was if I wanted us to ultimately win.

If anything, it was stupid of me to ever treat it as anything but.

That was why, with my resolve settled, I took a deep breath and called up the Viking Elves at the Council Pavilion.

A few moments later and the same, smug Viking Elf from before who represented them popped up for us to see.

Tolith Firson.

Though, he looked significantly less smug than before. If anything, he almost looked anxious. Tired, even.

That meant I already won.

“Morning, Toth,” I said. “Sleep well?”

“Have you called to mock me?” Toth replied, showing me his good old frown.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I have no in such infantile behavior.” He reached forward to drop the connection on his end, but I interrupted him before he could do that.

“Surrender,” I said—no, I ordered. “You might care about honorable warfare and all that, but, as you saw, I don’t give a shit. I only care about winning. I don’t care about giving you a fair fight or anything idiotic like that. Either you surrender, or you get destroyed.”

“Why would you even bother giving us a choice? You have us surrounded with greater numbers, do you not? There is no reason for an enemy in your position to try talking us into surrendering… unless…”

“Unless we can’t actually win. Ding, ding. Good job.”

Both Toth and everybody around me looked equally shocked that I would actually admit to that, but it was all part of the plan.

“Each one of those armies you can see is just a single unit each. Figured I’d make them look bigger than they are just to scare you, and it worked,” I admitted.

“You—what if we would have attacked one?” Toth asked.

“Well, then you would have found out the truth sooner than you are. Pretty simple.”

Toth looked absolutely bewildered by my confessions. “Why—why would you bother telling me any of this?”

“Because we’re in trouble if you don’t surrender. You see, I wasn’t aware that there was a soft cap to settlements. Since we captured your settlement, we have four in total now, so now we’re getting some major happiness debuffs. I need you to surrender so that we can focus on that instead of this war, especially since you’re probably going to kick our ass if you actually try counterattacking now.”

The more I talked, the more shocked everybody on both sides looked.

When I looked over my shoulder, Thad in particular looked like he was on the verge of dying where he stood, too shocked to even make any noise as he stared with a dumbfounded, depressed expression.

Poor man must have thought we were going to get wiped out and that I was throwing away all of our victories for nothing.

“So, please surrender,” I said. “I’ll even ask extra nicely if you want me to. Pretty please surrender with a cherry on top.”

“Would—would you be silent for one second?!” Toth shouted at me.

Yeah. I won. “Alright. It’s been a second. Can I continue talking now? Or would you rather me stay silent for another second? Here, I’ll give you another second.” One second later. “Alright, I’m—”

“Enough! Just—silence!” He had no idea how to deal with me.

He had no idea how to deal with somebody intentionally being as annoying as possible.

And if there was one thing that us Americans were good at, it was annoying the absolute fuck out of everybody else. “Just surrender. I want to go back to bed. I can’t sleep if I know that you might attack us at any moment.”

No matter how long Toth took to think about what I was saying, his expression never changed from one of pure confusion. He just could not figure out what he was supposed to think or say. All he could do was shout at me to be quiet as he tried to figure out what was going on.

“Something wrong, Tothy?” I asked. “Your shoulders hurt? I could give you a massage if you want one. I’ve always been told that I’m pretty good at giving massages. I could even—oh, wait.” I pulled up the status window on my end of things. Since that used a different window than the one we were communicating through, it was simple to use both at once, and I made sure to keep it positioned so that its back would be facing the communication screen. All I had to do then was smile and move the Volcanic Predator armies closer to his border, leaving them directly adjacent to it. Well, they were on their way to it, at least.

And he would see that as he pulled up his own map to take a look at it. “What are you doing?! You—you said that—”

“Don’t worry, my memory is good enough that you don’t have to remind me of what I said. By the way, could you hurry up and surrender?”

“Why would you ask me to surrender after what you said?! And why would you move your armies closer if you want us to surrender?! These are not the actions of a man who wants to stop fighting!”

“No, but they are the actions of a man who wants to screw with you before we attack you.”

“Then this is all a trick?!”

“I don’t know, is it? I can’t keep track of what’s a lie and what isn’t anymore. All I know is that either you’re going to surrender, or we’re going to suicide ourselves against your defenses.”

“That makes no sense!”

“And?”

He fell silent again.

That time, I didn’t interrupt him to annoy him. I waited for him to speak up himself.

And when he did finally speak up again, he looked me straight in the eyes with a tired smile. “So, that’s it. This is the same tactic you used during the battle.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Tell me, what is your name again?”

“Clay.”

“Clay, leader of the independent faction. I must say… I did not expect to encounter an opponent such as you, especially this early in the game. An enemy such as you… I cannot imagine anybody more infuriating to match against at the start.”

“It’s in my blood to be infuriating.”

“I can tell.”

Another screen popped up a moment later, and it was a screen that did not offer surrender, but that offered a white peace where the status quo would remain as it was. He could keep his remaining territory, we would keep the settlement we claimed, and there would be a forced peace for the next fifteen days.

“This is what you were hoping for, isn’t it?” Toth asked me.

I accepted the peace offer before saying anything else. “It is. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“Now that it is over, would you tell me just which of your words were true?”

I explained our situation in full honesty. I told him that we really were over our settlement limit, that I was going to dissolve the settlement we captured to get its territory under Mount Hound’s instead, and that all the armies near his border consisted of only a single unit each.

And at the end of it all, he laughed.

“How did you know your plan would work?” Toth asked after calming down.

“You’re too serious,” I answered. “Figured it would be too easy to confuse you, especially when you expect your enemy to be honest and honorable in a game. I mean, come on. Really? Have you never played a strategy game before? That cheesy tactic I used never should have worked during that battle.”

It was because he wasn’t treating our game like an actual game that we won, and why he didn’t expect me to fuck with him like it was an actual game when it came to peace talks. He was a serious, honorable man.

And being honorable didn’t win wars.

Of course, one could argue that their tactic of hiding in the forest wasn’t exactly honorable, but I could see how it was by their standards. They were a people who were all about survival. They were even willing to submit to any stronger power who could prove that they would better be able to protect them. By fighting in the forest, hiding among the trees before we ever had a chance to see them, they maximized the safety of their people. Waiting in their camp for us to approach would have resulted in more of our troops breaking through to charge them and kill them.

They wanted to minimize losses every bit as much as we did, and that was without us having our backs against the wall due to being an independent faction.

“I can respect your determination to keep your people alive,” I said. “Hopefully, we can figure something out and work together. But if not, I wouldn’t mind having you as an enemy again.”

“You are foolish if you think we would work together with you, but I would not refuse having you as our opponent once more,” Toth replied.

And with that, the call ended.

I turned around to look at everybody and saw that they looked even more confused than before.

“What’s with the faces? We won,” I announced. “You should be happy and cheering.”

“That… what… what happened?” Thad asked.

“We won.”

“But… how?”

“By confusion. All I had to do was confuse him so much that he couldn’t possibly make a decision about what to do aside from choose to simply not play at all. If they want to fight us, fifteen days is more than enough time for them to gather more information, build up their forces, and prepare to wipe us out. Buying them fifteen days to prepare and gather intel is the objectively superior choice over something like potentially losing their capital at the start of the game still. It’ll also give him some time to think up some strategies for how to deal with our bullshit.”

Enna perked up a little and said, “I—I think I understand. You confused him to the point that the only decision he felt he could soundly make was to surrender. Anything else became too risky.”

“Right. Imagine that somebody has a bowl of chocolate. They know where it came from. They know it’s safe to eat. Then you give them two more bowls of chocolate and tell them that each of your bowls may or may not have poison in them. Obviously, they’re going to stick with their own, safe bowl of chocolate.”

“That… was… quite… the comparison.”

“It was stupid, but it gets the point across. Wait, a better example would have been to say that they start off with three bowls of chocolate, but then you throw poisoned chocolate into two of the three bowls and mix it up. So then they only have one safe bowl that they know isn’t poisoned at all.”

“Clay… I think you’re confusing them even more.”

“Alright, I’ve done enough confusing of people, so I’ll show them some mercy and shut up.”

“So… now what? How do we proceed from here?”

“No idea yet. Everything depended on the outcome of that call, so I didn’t bother thinking about what might come afterward. Now, we should probably get as much done as possible while we have guaranteed peace. That’s fifteen days to build up our settlements or to recruit even more units. And realistically, they won’t attack after fifteen days are up. They’ll probably recruit some more units and work on their defenses, but they won’t be able to defeat us on their own. With three, temporarily four, settlements, they just can’t out-produce us. They’re at our mercy.”

Thad spoke up to ask, “Then we should crush them as soon as the fifteen days are up, shouldn’t we?”

“We could, but I think we might be able to make them work for us.”

“And how is that going to happen?”

“It’s in the blood of every American to turn even our worst enemies into our greatest allies.”

Thad shook his head and waved his hands at me. “I need to go take a nap. This is too much for me.”

“Rest well, Thad.”

He grumbled and waved his hand over his shoulder as he walked off.

Enna then asked, “Did you really know that was going to work from the beginning?”

“Not at all,” I answered. “You see, there’s a joke about us Americans. If we don’t know what we’re doing, then the enemy can’t anticipate our future actions. Practicing chaos is how you win while keeping the enemy constantly on their toes.”

Enna sighed before looking up at me with a smile. “You sound like you’re in a good mood.”

“I am. This is probably the best I’ve felt since all of this started. Now that I know treating this all like an actual game is going to be our route to victory… our situation feels a lot more hopeful now. I feel like winning, or at least staying in this until the endgame, is going to be a piece of cake.”

Admittedly, though, the endgame was where I always struggled.

But that just meant I needed to try harder than ever before to secure our victory, and I had every intention of doing so.