n the cold, oppressive silence of his throne room, Demon King Xylos re-watched the scrying logs of the "Battle of the Picket Fence" for the tenth time. Malakor and the Arch-Sorcerer stood beside him, their expressions a mixture of terror and awe.
Xylos did not see a hundred idiots being pacified by a magical fence. His mind, sharpened by centuries of paranoia and warfare, saw something infinitely more sophisticated and terrifying.
"He did not destroy them," Xylos said, his voice a low, analytical rumble. He was no longer angry. The problem had gone so far beyond anger that it had looped back around to a state of pure, cold fascination. "He did not repel them. He repurposed them. He took an army fueled by fanatical rage—our chosen weapon of chaos—and in a single moment, he transformed it into a gathering of docile art critics."
The Arch-Sorcerer shuddered. "It is a form of mind control, my King. A weapon of psychic dominance beyond our imagining."
"No," Xylos corrected him, his crimson eyes gleaming with a new, horrifying understanding. "It is far more insidious than that. Mind control can be fought. Psychic shields can be erected. This... this was not an attack on their minds. It was an attack on their purpose."
He paced before the scrying pool, his claws clicking on the obsidian floor. "We have been thinking like warriors. Like conquerors. We send force, he negates it. We send chaos, he pacifies it. We have been trying to defeat his shield. But we never stopped to ask... what is the nature of his sword?"
He stopped and pointed a claw at the image of the placid knights admiring the fence.
"That. That is his sword," Xylos declared. "His ultimate weapon is not negation or destruction. It is... overwhelming, aggressive, weaponized niceness."
Malakor, who had personally experienced the "mundane pity" of the Librarian, felt a jolt of recognition. It was a terrifyingly accurate assessment.
"Think about it," Xylos continued, his mind weaving the disparate facts into a cohesive, terrifying theory. "He converts his most dangerous enemies into his most devoted followers. The assassin Seraphina. The Grand Marshal Dros. Now, these heretic knights... they will not return to their master Vorlagos as defeated soldiers. They will return as unwilling missionaries of the Fence's calming gospel. They have been inoculated with his philosophy."
He was beginning to see the Librarian's grand strategy. It was not conquest. It was assimilation. It was a slow, creeping spiritual infection that neutralized threats not by killing them, but by making them no longer want to be threats.
"He's not building an empire of land," Xylos whispered, his voice filled with a newfound, almost academic respect for his foe. "He's building an empire of contentment. And our methods—war, chaos, rage, ambition—are the very diseases for which he offers the cure. How can you fight a man whose greatest weapon is making his enemies too happy to fight him?"
This was a paradigm of conflict he had never encountered. It was unbeatable through conventional means. Therefore, he had to stop thinking conventionally.
His first plan, Subtlety, had failed.
His second plan, Brute Force, had failed.
His third plan, Funding Chaos, had failed.
Now, it was time for the fourth plan. A plan so counter-intuitive, so profoundly demonic in its reverse-psychology, that no one, not the Librarian and certainly not the Empire, would ever see it coming.
"If we cannot defeat him with our strengths," Xylos declared, a mad gleam in his eyes, "then we will defeat him... with our weakness."
He turned to Malakor. "Your report spoke of the 'pity' he showed you. He dismissed you because he saw you as a simple, unenlightened being. The knights were 'pacified' because their aggression made them a simple problem to solve. He responds to simplicity with simple, overwhelming solutions."
"So, what is the one thing he would not know how to respond to?" he posed to his advisors.
The Arch-Sorcerer was lost. "An even greater power, my King?"
"No!" Xylos scoffed. "A greater problem. Something that cannot be solved with a negation field or a calming aura. Something that his very nature, this weaponized kindness, is fundamentally unequipped to handle."
He looked at the trembling, still-broken form of Malakor, his finest spy who had been reduced to a babbling mess. An idea sparked.
"We will not send him an enemy," Xylos said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "We will not send him a threat. We will send him... a victim."
Malakor and the Sorcerer stared at him.
"We will find the most pathetic, sniveling, genuinely wretched soul in all of Mordus," Xylos explained, the diabolical genius of the plan unfolding in his mind. "Not a spy in disguise. A real, bona fide loser. A demon who is terrible at being a demon. A failure who is constantly bullied, downtrodden, and genuinely miserable. We will beat him, torture him just enough to make his misery palpable, and then we will tear open a portal and dump him on the Librarian's doorstep."
He began to cackle, a low, rumbling sound that made the very stones of the citadel vibrate.
"What will the God of Kindness do then?" he crowed. "He cannot negate a victim. He cannot pacify someone who is already the furthest thing from aggressive. His every instinct, his entire arsenal of weaponized empathy, will compel him to help this pathetic creature. To comfort it. To heal it."
"And that," Xylos hissed, his eyes burning with triumph, "will be our true infiltration."
"The creature will not be our agent," he continued. "It will be our sensor. While the Librarian is busy with his grand project of 'fixing' our miserable little offering, its demonic nature, however weak, will be inside his sanctum. It will passively absorb data. Its own misery will be a constant, low-level dissonance inside his field of harmony. It won't be an attack. It will be a spiritual virus. A slow, creeping infection of sadness that, hopefully, will introduce a flaw into his perfect system of contentment."
"And when he has finally 'healed' it, when he thinks he has converted another lost soul... we will have it come home. Not as an agent who has turned, but as a patient who has been discharged. And its every memory, every observation, will be ours to dissect."
It was his most insidious plan yet. He would use the Librarian's own greatest weapon—his compassion—against him. He would turn the sanctum from a fortress into a hospital, and his chosen agent would not be a saboteur, but a patient. The perfect Trojan Horse, not filled with soldiers, but with sadness.
"Find me the most useless demon in all of Mordus!" Xylos roared to his guards. "Our greatest victory will be born from our most spectacular failure!"
The age of misunderstanding was about to enter a new, deeply pathetic, and profoundly manipulative phase.