Murphy smoothly got what he wanted.
Just as he'd expected, it hadn't been difficult at all.
Although the gnoll warlords entrenched in the Andmar Hills were still growing stronger by the day, Murphy was also uniting his own forces, and he didn't think he was without a chance.
Gnolls were excellent individual fighters. As supernatural creatures, they also had better physical attributes than humans. But even in Transia, where order was lacking, they couldn't run rampant.
Their barbaric nature meant that their walnut-sized brains struggled to think about anything complicated beyond "eating meat," "eating more meat," "mating," and "mating more."
Their civilization was still in a fairly primitive state.
Although some gnolls had awakened and begun moving toward civilization, as a whole, the species could still be called "utter savages."
Their numbers were an advantage, but their lack of organization was a fatal weakness that came with it. Before the gnolls surpassed an insurmountable threshold in numbers, there were plenty of ways to deal with them.
Murphy didn't consider vampires or the other civilizations on this continent particularly advanced, either. But against the barbaric races of the wilderness, the organizational capabilities of a "higher civilization" already amounted to "dimensional suppression."
For that matter, no matter how clear the gnolls' advantage had been in the early stages of the first four Black Calamities, they had collapsed suddenly in the later stages every time. Did the gnoll leaders not know what the problem was?
No!
They knew better than anyone. They simply had no way to make effective adjustments. That was all.
Even the King of Bonechewer couldn't manage it.
As Murphy considered the strategy and tactics for what came next, he decided not to pile more pressure on his adorable little players, fresh from battle, for the next couple of days.