Mike and Lucy
Jack remade many parts of the rank 9 dream world and went in one more time.
...
In doing the dream world, he cannot use supernatural abilities to help him complete the task. For example, he can use them to clean up his room, but he cannot heal himself after an injury.
Technically, any use of supernatural power lowers the Dao collection of the dream world, but there is a spectrum; actions that affect the outcome damage the Dao collection much worse.
It's all because of the peculiarity of his technique; his technique is quite OP. It can improve a rank 9 dream world to rank 13! It's overpowered because he got it from Rachel and only slightly changed its surface.
It can be improved past rank 11 into rank 12 without issue, as Rachel controls all universal laws; the most difficult part about rank 12 and 13 is the universal law, which is no issue for Rachel.
Even as Jack changes the difficulty of the dream world, the core of the technique remains unchanged.
Rachel is at a much higher level than him; no matter what he does, any deviation from Rachel's design would be a downgrade; anything he can think of, Rachel already considered and rejected.
Masteries work this way; there is no improvement a master can do that can improve the work of a grandmaster; in Jack's case, the difference is even more pronounced, with Rachel having supreme grandmaster in many daos.
Jack now has only one quasi-supreme grandmaster in blood dao, and nothing more. Reaching supreme grandmaster is no easy task; even, reaching quasi-supreme grandmaster in only a trillion years shows Jack's outstanding talent.
Most immortals take longer than a trillion years to reach quasi-supreme grandmaster.
...
Jack changed some small details this round, but these small details greatly lowered the difficulty of completing the task.
He gave himself two loyal subordinates, both as strong as himself.
One is Mike, the archer, and the other is Lucy, the assassin.
Mike and Lucy are pinnacle humans, meaning the highest a mortal human can reach without stepping into the supernatural.
He designed the archer helper as a man because in this traditional setting world, women are discriminated against in many regards and thus restricted in many places. For example, he cannot expect his future soldiers to obey a woman as a commander. It is wrong, of course, but history is like this, full of unfair things.
On the other hand, he chose his assassin as a beautiful woman; she can remain under the radar. Who expects a soft and beautiful woman to turn out to be an assassin? If anyone sees her, they think she is some lover.
These two people can have tremendous effects, as they are perfect in their craft.
He also gave himself and his two subordinates good weapons and equipment; for example, Lucy got standard assassin equipment: smoke bombs, poisoned arrows, short knives, etc.
He changed some small details in other places, but his two new subordinates were the biggest changes.
With this setting, he officially launched the 3rd round.
…
Looking around the cave, Jack took a deep breath; this time, he didn't break the cave with energy.
"Let's go down!" he said to Lucy and Mike.
Lucy and Mike, one wearing black, the other in pure white, nodded.
Jack specifically designed them this way and gave them an interesting background.
Mike looked like a young, scholarly man with a clean-shaven face, though with good physical fitness, brown eyes, and almost shining white skin; he wore a white robe and looked like a kind and compassionate guy, the kind of person who looked too soft to harm a fly.
His sister, Lucy, was the opposite; she had a sharp face, with very red lips, and white skin, though, not to the level of Mike, who was practically shining white; in general, she was beautiful from the perspective of most people, but her beauty was, how to say it, how one may think of a prostitute; she didn't look like a pure beauty.
In some novels, they design female 'leads' who wait patiently and loyally for thousands of years for the male protagonist to visit once in a while; they usually have no character and are described as Jade beauties, etc. Lucy was the polar opposite of those female leads.
She liked annoying Mike and messing around in ways that others find troubling.
In front of Jack, though, both were quite respectful; if he weren't present, they might have already been fighting.
...
The three climbed down the mountain and reached the village reception room.
The red-headed woman arrived after a few minutes, opened the door, bowed, and said, "Young masters, please follow me! Village Chief-Sama is looking for you!"
Jack nodded and started walking, Mike and Lucy following behind.
...
"Jack-dono, Mike-san, and Lucy-san, please leave here as soon as possible! Kampaku's minions are on the way here. We cannot guarantee your safety in this village!" he said with great concern visible in his voice.
He would willingly die for Hero-sama; his only worry is being unable to protect him. This is the backstory Jack wrote for him.
'He was very impressed by Hero's deeds and is determined to protect him, even if it costs his life; his loyalty for Hero is without boundary and eternal' was written into his setting. In this setting, he would never betray Jack, no matter what; most villagers also have these kinds of backstories, although their loyalty isn't as strong as that of the village chief.
For this reason, the village chief is actually an important person for the future; Jack can completely trust him and give him important missions.
He also designed the village chief to be very competent, so after killing Kampaku and becoming the new Kampaku, he may appoint the village chief as the prime minister.
Kampaku is almost the prime minister himself, but not quite so. In practice, Kampaku has all the power, so it's not unreasonable for him to appoint someone as prime minister to take care of unimportant affairs. He still calls the shots on important affairs but delegates implementing them to the prime minister, etc.; it can allow him to focus his attention on more important matters.
Theoretically, this is the rationale for having prime ministers; after all, kings cannot waste all their time on implementing their vision; too many times, however, they abandoned their roles entirely, only thinking of their worldly enjoyment and delegating everything to ministers.
"Gather everyone! We are going to fight them head-on!" Jack said said.
"But, Hero-sama! Us villagers are unskilled in the ways of fighting! Please, for the sake of safety, move out of the village; we can fight them on our own; we cannot risk your life!" he said.
"Do as I said!" Jack raised his voice slightly.
The village chief bit his lips, bowed, and left. The red-headed girl also followed, while looking at Mike weirdly.
It might be because Jack was a bit lazy and directly took the facial complexes of the village chief and copied them to create Mike; they look like twins now, with only hair color slightly different. Of course, this similarity isn't that noticeable because the Village Chief is much older-looking than Mike.
…
Soon, all nearby able-bodied villagers gathered.
This time, Jack ordered them to gather women as well, as he needed as many people as possible.
In one-on-one battles, women are generally weaker than men. It's quite easy to find physically weaker men or physically strong women, but on average, on the aggregate, it's undeniable that men are more physically powerful.
As already explained many times before, including women in medieval armies, where people fight using swords, is actually very unwise. Men and women living in a camp together can cause all kinds of trouble; even if one wants to segregate them, that would drive up the cost.
And, for medieval countries, which always had a high death rate of children due to all kinds of diseases and also high childbirth mortality, the death of women in battles can greatly damage their future population growth.
Technically, even 1 man can impregnate 100 women; in a theoretical population, where there are 100 men and 100 women, a medieval ruler can keep 1 man and send 99 to go to war while at the same time preserving the population growth of the next generation.
Of course, that is just theory, as it's very likely that many of those women would be unwilling to have children with that one man; unless one wants to force them, the population growth of the next generation would be damaged anyway, but not to the extent that the death of women would damage it.
In modern armies, the calculations are different. Physical fitness is no longer the determining factor, as anyone can shoot a gun or become a jet pilot. In addition to that, in modern times, having one partner is much more common.
In medieval times, nobles could have multiple concubines, so one man could have many women; that is mostly not true in modern times. So, in modern times, the death of men would have around the same effect on population growth as the death of women; it would leave a lot of women without partners and childless.
The calculation of Jack was different, though.
In this situation, he is looking at things not from the perspective of a king, but from the perspective of someone who doesn't care about the future of the village. He doesn't care if women's deaths would doom the future of this village; he only needs to use them once, and after this, he doesn't need these villagers anymore.
He may at most take a few talented villagers, along with, of course, the village chief, and travel the world.
The world thinks of him as a hero because he wrote it into the script; in fact, he is no less evil than Kampaku. If one looks carefully into his many atrocities in more than a trillion years, the evil Kampaku would at 'best' look like a newbie in comparison.
He wrote in the script that this is a war of hero and demon king, a war of good and evil, but both sides are evil.
That is true in most conflicts; both sides commit evil, and after a while, determining who is good and who is evil depends purely on perspective.
X attacks Y and wipes out a few cities; then, a hundred years later, Y attacks X and kills and tortures many people of Y; the conflict goes on for 1000 years; the two sides become blood enemies, but no one can anymore objectively determine who is at fault. True, X was the one who started it all, but that doesn't justify Y attacking X a hundred years later for crimes committed on their ancestor a century ago.
If you are on the side of X country, you most likely blame Y for the war, while if you are on the side of Y, you most likely blame X; the war goes on forever unless both sides forget the past and don't talk about it.
That's why remembering the past and teaching it to the young is not always good; sometimes, one must set the past aside and move on. If one looks into the past, all kinds of people and countries have done terrible things to each other; if one tries to avenge the evil of the past, the entire universe goes up in flames.
In general, revenge is a stupid thing; two wrongs don't make a right.
A punishment for revenge is not right; in Jack's view, rehabilitation and deterrence are the only two legitimate reasons for a punishment. The death penalty can be justified only if it deters future evil from happening; if it's for revenge, it would not be justified.
Those are Jack's views on the mortal world; of course, he doesn't pay much attention to it as an immortal.
...
Soon, over 400 men and women gathered.
Jack gave those with the strongest physics the best weapons, while he gave only farming tools and wooden sticks to the weaker ones.
If the numbers are enough, even physically weak people who have sticks can defeat trained ninjas.
After organizing them as much as time allowed, he gave Lucy a secret task and started marching to the gate to confront Kuro.