PROLOGUE
Otherwise Known As: My
444th Performance Review
My journey toward retirement and my goat began with the glorious completion of my purpose: killing the Hero of Ages.
It was, I’ll admit, a rather involved process. After four hundred and forty- three performance reviews—well, deaths—I had finally perfected the optimal workflow. The hero’s party had excellent teamwork, but 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. I’d fought so many different heroes and their parties that I knew every possible combination of attack and defense they could think of. It didn’t mean I could always avoid them; it just meant I was very rarely surprised. And never more than once. They never remembered the past. I always did.
After all, it wouldn’t be interesting if the hero always won. I started outnumbered but retained my memories. The hero never remembered but always had companions and the support of mortals. It was the only way to keep the eternal conflict balanced. This was the rule of the game.
Read More . . .
When destroying the world and killing the hero grows boring, what's a Demon Overlord to do but quit while he's ahead? Begin the conquest of ordinary life today!
Galornus Prime was the Scourge of Nations, Ender of Hope, and Master of the Cardinal Sins. He had done everything worth doing. Some of it more than once. His retirement plan was perfect: get a goat, farm quietly, and avoid accidentally conquering anything. Evil never sleeps . . . but it does plant turnips.
What the plan didn't include is soul-crushing town halls, after-school combat lessons with children, and a war with perhaps his most worthy nemesis yet: the rose-growing, seventy-three year-old widow next door.
When corrupt officials and greedy merchants threaten his infuriatingly loveable neighbours, Galornus faces his greatest challenge yet: saving his village without revealing he's the very monster parents invoke to make children eat their vegetables.
