Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? Volume Chapter 0

The Great Human-Demon War.

Battles between humans and demons have been going on for centuries, but only one clash is known as the Great Human-Demon War.

There’s no need to be a scholar of history to know how unique this battle was.

Humans and demons, each fighting for the very survival of their respective races. It is small wonder that this alone is worthy of being called a Great War.

Many details are unclear, as few extant records remain due to the subsequent chaos, but it is widely accepted that each side mobilized forces numbering in the seven digits.

Some theories even suggest that the total number of people involved in the conflict reached eight digits.

The biggest battle in recent memory until then was the Tragedy of Zatona, and even then, the combined numbers of both the Ohts Alliance and the Sariella Army totaled less than six digits. Sariella was a powerful nation and fielded a formidable military. To challenge them, their neighboring rivals formed a coalition and mustered a massive army.

Considering their populations at the time, it’s clear this would have been considered a relatively large-scale battle.

And yet, the Great War easily dwarfs it in scope.

In spite of all this, the Great Human-Demon War lasted a surprisingly short time.

Given the number of soldiers mobilized, it would be natural to expect the fighting to go on for many months, perhaps even years.

In reality, it lasted a few scant days.

Again, due to the lack of surviving documents, the precise number of days is unclear; however, historians agree that the Great War ended after ten days at the most.

A conflict of such enormous scale ended almost as soon as it had started.

But what is truly terrifying about the Great Human-Demon War is not its scale or its brevity.

It is the percentage of casualties.

The precise number is once again unknown, due to the dearth of explicit figures, but the most commonly accepted theory is that at least half of each side’s numbers was killed.

And that is the minimum.

Extrapolating from the surviving demon population after the war’s conclusion, it’s safe to say that at least that many were killed in battle.

Some scholars even propose that it may have been as high as 70 or 80 percent.

In other words, out of a seven-digit number of participants, no less than half died in the span of just a few days.

This is clear evidence of the sheer ferocity that characterizes the Great Human-Demon War.

Of the few remaining documents from the time, the words recorded in one soldier’s diary have become quite famous. Most will have heard this somewhere before:

“All hope is lost. What remains is only despair.”