The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan

The Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan

Otherwise known as: My 444th Performance Review.

My journey towards retirement and my goat began with the final completion of my purpose: killing the Hero of Ages.

It was, I'll admit, a rather involved process. After four hundred and forty-four performance reviews—also known as "deaths"—I had finally perfected the optimal workflow. The Hero's party had excellent teamwork, but unfortunately for them, they hadn't updated their playbook for several dozen incarnations. No need to fix a winning strategy, I suppose.

Unfortunately for the current hero, I knew exactly how this would unfold before it even began.

Kael, the latest iteration of the Hero of Ages drew my attention while the rest of his party channeled their magic, reset their skill cooldowns, or otherwise got ready to attack me with their best and greatest attacks. Perfectly by the book.

The Paladin Ashur raised his blessed hammer, divine light crackling along its edges as he prepared to cast Holy Strike. Behind him, I caught a glimpse of their porter—Willem, I think his name was—cowering behind an obsidian pillar. Smart man. He'd survive this encounter, though not in the way he expected.

I was already moving.

This was the four hundred and forty-fourth time I had fought the Hero and his Companions. Four hundred and forty-three times I had watched this variation of this sequence unfold. Ashur almost always opened with Holy Strike—not because it was tactically sound, but because paladins were creatures of rigid faith, and faith demanded certain rituals be observed.

I raised the obsidian shield I'd meticulously paid weapons runners to imbue with divine power and crafted specifically for this moment, taking Ashur’s strike head on. The holy energy struck the divine-forged shield and scattered like light through a prism. Divine power couldn’t penetrate divine objects. Ashur's eyes widened—this wasn't in any of their battle plans. A paladin literally could not conceive of a demon wielding divine relics.

It had taken me thirty-four deaths to learn how to counter that strike, and a further fifty-five to perfect a divine shield I could wield, even it did feel like I was holding liquid fire.

As Ashur overcommitted to his failed attack, my tail whipped around with practiced precision. The bone spikes punched through his blessed plate armor like it was parchment. He crumpled, divine light fading from his eyes.

"Ashur!" The Thief Janus threw her poison vials in a perfect arc—the same arc she'd thrown them four hundred and forty-three times before.

I opened my maw and swallowed the poison whole, feeling it burn pleasantly down my throat. Demons of my caliber didn't just resist poison—we metabolized it, improved it, made it our own. I spat the enhanced toxin back at her in a concentrated stream.

Janus hit the obsidian floor convulsing. Thieves never learned that poisoning a Demon Overlord was an exercise in futility. Archdemons, maybe. Lesser demons, certainly. But never an Overlord. I’d literally never died from a poison attack in all my reincarnations.

From behind his pillar, I heard Willem whimper. Poor fool. He'd only been hired—drafted really at swordpoint— last week to carry supplies. Wrong place, wrong time—or perhaps exactly the right place at exactly the right time, from my perspective.

The Mage Indras stepped back, staff already weaving patterns of elemental lightning. I'd seen this spell exactly four hundred and fifteen times. It had killed me at least sixty-times.

This time, I caught the lightning in my claws.

The raw elemental energy fought against my grip, crackling and sparking, but I held it fast and spun it into a concentrated lance. Indras barely had time to scream a warning before I hurled it at the Healer Gentira.

That trick I'd learned on my four hundred and third death.

Mages were tricky. They didn’t always try the same patterns of attack, so I didn’t have the benefit of consecutive repeated deaths by the same attack to learn from. And when each cycle of death and reincarnation involved usually thirty to forty years, even an immortal’s memory grew fuzzy.

Gentira collapsed as the lightning struck her, her staff of renewal clattering uselessly beside her smoking corpse. I stepped deliberately on the fallen sage's staff, grinding the blessed wood to splinters beneath my booted heel, then pressed my full weight down on her heard for good measure. It popped like an over-ripe melon.

The sound Kael made wasn't quite a roar, wasn't quite a sob. Pure anguish, seasoned with righteous fury. His party—the people he'd loved and protected and led across countless battles—lay dead around my throne room. I wasn’t sure if he was dating the Healer in this incarnation. Human dating rituals were confusing and I’d long given up trying to understand them.

"For Alteria!" he screamed, and I felt the familiar surge of divine power as the Blade of Endings came alive in his hands. Why couldn’t heroes ever come up with better battle cries?

The Sundering. His ultimate technique. The attack that had killed me more times than any other.

Kael became a blur of motion and holy light, the Blade of Endings trailing silver fire as it carved through the air toward my heart. For four hundred and three iterations, I had tried to dodge this strike. Block it. Counter it. Disrupt it.

On thirty different occasions, I managed to kill the Hero before he used his ultimate. Every other time, if he used it, I died. The Sundering always found its mark.

This time, I let it hit me instead of trying to counter.

I angled my body just so, guiding the blade with subtle movements of my claws. The Sundering struck true—but instead of piercing my heart, it slid between my ribs and lodged itself just above my primary core. Agonizing, yes. Fatal? Not quite.

Kael's expression shifted from triumph to confusion as I grabbed the blade with both hands and pulled it deeper into my flesh, dragging him closer.

"Wasn’t sure I’d get it right this time," I said, wrapping my claws around his throat. "Glad I don’t have to die for another try."

He struggled, choking, his blessed gauntlets searing my scales where he clawed at my grip. Behind him, Indras raised his staff but hesitated. Any spell powerful enough to hurt me would incinerate the Hero as well, and they were friends from birth.

I hurled Kael into his last remaining companion, sending them both sprawling. Then, with one savage jerk that tore a scream from my throat, I ripped the Blade of Endings free from my chest.

Demonic blood steamed on the blessed steel as I drove it down through both Hero and Mage, pinning them to the obsidian floor like insects in a collection.

"You know, Hero," I said conversationally, watching the light fade from Kael's eyes, "I'll see you again soon enough. Your Divine One always brings you back."

I looked around at the carnage, already planning. "But this time will be different. You’ll never find me again."

For the next few minutes, I rearranged the bodies to suggest a more even battle. I scorched the walls with my breath, shattered a few pillars with my tail, scattered debris that suggested a truly cataclysmic confrontation. To be honest, I hadn't been challenged this time. It had gotten easier with each cycle.

With one casual swipe of my tail, I knocked a chunk of obsidian into Willem's head. The porter crumpled without a sound, unconscious but breathing. Perfect. I took care not to damage his face.

Finally, I was satisfied with my artistry.

Now came the difficult part.

I began to weave a spell of my own creation—a bastardization of divine and demonic magic that had taken me the last seventeen deaths to perfect. For four millennia, I had died to holy power and been reborn in hellfire. I had felt both energies tear through my essence, learned their fundamental natures through pain and repetition.

Divine magic sought to purify, to separate, to return things to their intended state. Demonic magic sought to corrupt, to merge, to transform things into something new and terrible.

Only someone who had been unmade by both forces, over and over, could understand how to weave them together.

The spell began as a whisper in languages that predated human speech. Divine light spiraled around my claws, silver and pure, while hellfire wreathed my horns in crimson tongues. The two energies fought each other, seeking to annihilate their opposite, but I held them in perfect tension.

Pain lanced through my essence as I began the transfer. Not the clean agony of a sword through the heart or the righteous burn of holy fire—this was the pain of existence itself being questioned.

My soul stretched like molten metal being hammered into a new shape. Each memory, each fragment of consciousness fought the compression into mortal flesh.

I turned my attention to Willem's unconscious form. Such a small vessel for something that had terrorized kingdoms. His mind lay open before me like a simple book—memories of turnip farming, of saving copper coins for a milk goat he'd planned to name Bessie, of a mother who'd died of plague when he was twelve.

Simple sorrows, simple joys. A life measured in seasons and harvests rather than centuries and conquests.

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

Willem had never wanted to hurt anyone. In forty-three years of existence, his greatest act of violence had been wringing a chicken's neck for Sunday dinner at his father’s command—and he'd cried afterward. Cried over a chicken. He dreamed of nothing grander than a small plot of earth where things could grow instead of die, where he could create instead of destroy.

I nearly chose someone else. Anyone else. What kind of cosmic destroyer reduced himself to inhabiting a man whose greatest ambition was owning livestock?

But that was exactly the point, wasn't it? No one would ever suspect Willem the Porter of being anything more than Willem the Porter. His very mediocrity was the perfect disguise.

And after four hundred and forty-four lifetimes of cosmic significance, of bearing the weight of prophecy and divine purpose…

Mediocrity was exactly what I wanted.

My essence compressed, my vast consciousness folding in on itself like origami made of starlight and shadow. Centuries of tactical knowledge, eons of magical theory, the weight of cosmic purpose—all of it crushed into the shape of a mortal mind.

The process felt like trying to pour an ocean into a teacup, but Willem's simple desires was like a lodestone, and I used it to draw the disparate pieces of my being into alignment. Even as I was doing so, I was slightly impressed that even such insignificant thigns held such importance to this limited creature.

Garden. Home. Goat. Peace.

The thoughts repeated like a mantra as my demonic form began to collapse. I felt my physical body slump against the throne, scales already dulling as my essence abandoned it.

For one terrifying moment, I existed in both vessels simultaneously—looking at myself through my own fading eyes while experiencing Willem's first breath as something infinitely more than human.

Then it was over.

One moment I was Galornus Prime, looking at Willem the porter. The next, I was looking through Willem's eyes, staring at the corpse of the demon overlord, magnificent even in death.

His body—my body now—convulsed as it expanded to accommodate what I was. Muscles strengthened without growing larger. Bones hardened while remaining the same size. His mind bloomed with new capacity, room for memories that spanned millennia, space for magical knowledge that could reshape reality.

In a moment of spontaneity, I kept a kernel of Willem's essential nature and memories unchanged and locked it in a tiny fragment. The part of him that loved growing things, that wanted nothing more than to tend a garden and perhaps own a goat—that stayed pure and untouched in a corner of my mind. I figured that it might be useful as a reference point when I went out into the world as a common nobody.

When the transformation completed, I pushed myself up on unfamiliar human hands and surveyed my masterwork with satisfaction. The scene told a clear story: the Hero and his party had defeated Galornus Prime, Demon Overlord of Alteria, and perished in the process. A mutual destruction that ended the age of war.

Only Willem the Porter had survived, unconscious in the corner with a massive bruise on his head.

I flexed my new fingers, marveling at their smallness, their calluses from honest work. I could still level mountains if I chose. I could still command legions of the damned. But for the first time in centuries, I found myself genuinely curious about what turnips tasted like when you grew them yourself.

It was merely intellectual curiosity, of course. Nothing more.

When the first human soldiers burst into the throne room an hour later, that's exactly what they found. The dead Demon Overlord, and a pathetic porter unconscious in a corner.

Word went out that very night, and all Alteria celebrated. Galornus Prime the demon overlord was dead. The war was over.

Willem, the humble porter conscripted to carry the Hero's supplies, was sent on his way with a bag of gold for his service. The Kings of Men were certain they would never see or hear from him again, and felt magnanimous that they hadn't killed him outright for failing to give them a proper account of the Hero’s final battle.

It was an act of mercy they would come to regret.

But I didn't think about any of that as I whistled a happy tune on the road home, debating whether the first animal for my farm should be a sheep or a goat like Willem dreamed. After four hundred and forty-three lifetimes of war, I had finally found a way to win.

Not through conquest.

Through retirement.