Lich for Hire

The original plan had been simple: deliver a rousing speech, then march on the Unholy Kingdom. Allen had disrupted the ceremony, and the emperor had failed to catch him. With no way to silence the dissenting voice, the only option was to redirect everyone's attention.

Allen's speech had shaken more than a few soldiers, but not enough to make them act against the crown—not yet, not this quickly.

The gates of Lavarun swung open. The army moved out, advancing steadily in the direction of the Unholy Kingdom.

Allen watched from above, still wanting to press on, when Ambrose appeared beside him without warning and made him jump.

"Can you please stop appearing out of nowhere?" Allen snapped. "You could give me a heart attack."

Ambrose paid him no mind. He planted himself squarely in Allen's path and said, with great solemnity: "Go throw your life away if you want. Just give me the jetpack first. That thing is expensive, and you can't afford to replace it."

Allen: "..."

Ambrose noted his reluctant expression and continued, "Don't be impatient. This war isn't as straightforward as it looks from here. Go back. Do what you need to do. Leave this battlefield to me."

"Leave it to you?"

Allen looked at him with genuine puzzlement. When had this lich become so selfless? Was he taking on Lyon's entire army for a kingdom full of tiflings?

Ambrose didn't explain. "Even if you don't trust me, at least hand over the jetpack. I really don't care what happens to you after that."

Despite his hesitation, Allen ultimately chose to believe the lich.

The lich had a habit of lying by omission, but what he did say, he generally delivered on.

The first time they met, Ambrose had demanded five thousand gold for Allen to cast Detect Evil on him. When Allen paid up, the lich had acceded, without even trying to hide his true nature.

If he said there was a way out of this war, then there might well be. He would likely end up making a handsome profit in the process, but as long as the war was stopped, that was a price Allen was willing to let him collect.

"Stay back when it starts. Get well clear of the battlefield."

Ambrose vanished before Allen could reply.

But Allen didn't leave. He pulled back from the front but stayed within sight, wanting to see for himself what Ambrose's plan looked like.

Ambrose, meanwhile, fell in behind Lyon's army, concealed beneath an illusion so thorough that even the time dragon overhead failed to detect him.

The force numbered just over a hundred thousand, stretched into a long column. Lyon had no concept of cannon fodder. Every soldier was a fervent believer, which meant their vanguard was a full cavalry formation of paladins. Behind them came the priest corps, then the mixed combined-arms units: fighters, archers, and mages all represented. It was a comprehensive fighting force.

Lyon's standard approach on an open battlefield was to have the priest corps mass-buff the paladins, then send the cavalry crashing through the enemy line. The mixed units would mop up what was left. On open ground, Lyon was essentially unbeatable. Against Blackgate, this army would break through in short order.

The time dragon cleared Hellgates as they advanced. The army crossed the border without incident and pressed into the Unholy Kingdom.

Within Blackgate, the tifling soldiers had drawn together and gone quiet. There was barely a weapon raised among them. If Lyon had simply sent someone forward to accept a surrender rather than charging in with full force, the city might well have capitulated on the spot.

High above, hidden together by the illusion, Ambrose and Mr. Misfortune looked down at the scene below.

Mr. Misfortune said quietly, "Lyon truly is the strongest empire on the continent. A hundred thousand soldiers, and this is only a fifth of their full strength."

"A fifth, and with their emperor leading in person. There'll be no shortage of legendary-tier fighters in that column."

"That makes it even more hopeless. Even with the Hellgates still intact, the Unholy Kingdom couldn't have held."

"Well, we were never planning to hold them off with Hellgates, were we?"

When the time dragon had first begun destroying the Hellgates, Tiamat's contract had activated. The thirteen Impure and their bloodline descendants had fallen to Hell, along with the one million and six hundred thousand soul-coins that Ambrose had sold them.

Predictably, Tiamat and Sariel had confiscated every last coin the moment the tiflings arrived. The nobles who had paid so dearly for them found themselves screaming in hellfire with nothing to show for the investment.

Once they had been made sufficiently wretched, they too would probably be processed into soul-coins.

However, Tiamat had been furious even after seizing the coins, and had demanded harsher punishment as a result.

The tiflings had arrived with every soul-coin accounted for. In fact, there were extra.

She had expected some attrition. During inspection, a few coins might be damaged. During the inevitable squabbling, some might be lost. And even if none were lost naturally, Tiamat had planned to arrange a certain amount of "accidental damage" once the tiflings were in Hell.

A few hundred or a few thousand coins gone missing in transit would be entirely plausible. If Ambrose failed to fulfill the contract, she would gain leverage over the lich.

Instead, there were more coins than agreed.

That insufferable lich had anticipated her every move.

Sariel, having heard about it, had come by specifically to mock her. "You were the one warning me not to trust him, that he was endlessly cunning. Then you tried to outwit him anyway."

"No harm in trying," Tiamat had replied. "We still came out ahead by a hundred thousand coins."

Ambrose had fulfilled half his contract. The other half would take place now.

As Lyon's army crossed the border, the empty ground ahead began to waver like a mirage. The illusion dissolved, and a group of ten thousand strange figures in black robes appeared directly in the army's path.

Every one of them had a shaved head. Their faces were covered in fresh red cuts, self-inflicted wounds that were still bleeding, with daggers clutched in their hands.

The sudden appearance of this group gave Lyon's soldiers momentary pause, because the figures looked like they were from some kind of evil cult.

This was proof, as far as the soldiers were concerned, that the tiflings had truly fallen. After all, who else would collude with cultists and heretics?

No one in Lyon's ranks was frightened. The priest corps began casting enhancement spells, and three thousand of the paladin cavalry peeled off and charged directly at the cultists.

At the head of the charge, the foremost paladin raised his shield. Holy light condensed across its surface and expanded into a massive barrier of radiance, large enough to cover the entire formation behind him.

Ambrose didn't recognize the man, but the ability told him everything he needed to know. This was a legendary paladin with a legendary boon almost perfectly designed for leading charges. A barrier of holy light that could absorb nearly any spell would be devastatingly effective against the kind of dark magic a cult would employ.

The cultists, however, did not attack. Instead, they screamed with fervor and ran directly at the charging cavalry, daggers raised—though at themselves rather than at the enemy.

Human bodies could not withstand the impact of a cavalry charge. The cultists were hurled aside, trampled, and broken. A single pass left more than half of them dead or ruined.

Yet not one of the survivors hesitated. They scrambled upright and threw themselves at the cavalry again.

None of the paladins faltered. They reformed their formation and charged again, again, and again, hammering through the crowd.

After four passes, every cultist had been reduced to pulp. Their daggers had barely scratched the paladins' armor.

The soldiers had no time to register the victory before the bodies began to move.

Blood, fragments of bone, shredded organs—the cultists' viscera began to rise from the ground, drifting upward, assembling into a vast and intricate formation above the battlefield.

Recognizing the danger, the priests immediately began casting, trying to dispel the formation before it could be completed.

But every spell failed. Every single one, without exception, as if someone had reached into the fabric of events and snipped every thread that had had a chance of success.

Several soldiers looked up instinctively toward the time dragon. Surely this was the moment for the emperor to act.

But the young emperor hesitated.

The power in the Draconic Armaments was running low.

Inside the dragon's body, the emperor could feel the blood-red roses on his necklace fading. More than half had already turned silvery-white. When the last of the crimson drained away, the transformation would end.

He had cleared Hellgates all along the march and burned through more than half the armament's stored energy.

He had expected his army to handle the rest, only for an unusual event to occur.

He wasn't stupid. He could see the formation was dangerous, and that destroying it now was the right call. But if he spent the last of the armament's power here and something else were to go wrong, who would protect him?

If he did nothing, his army would absorb whatever the formation unleashed. He could maintain his dragon form and escape if necessary. But if he spent the power now, with nothing in reserve, there could be no guarantees.

He was, after all, a puppet who had spent his entire life performing for an audience, wielding only borrowed power. When he was faced with genuine danger, all his courage evaporated.

While the emperor sat paralyzed with indecision, the formation in the sky completed.

Crimson light blazed across the heavens. The sky looked as though it was being torn open.

Space fractured. Howling gales poured through the cracks, throwing the battlefield into chaos. Dust and debris swept across the field in every direction.

Those in the know realized what they were looking at: the formation had produced a massive spatial passage, nearly a whole kilometer across. What lay on the other side was still unknown.

A blood sacrifice of ten thousand lives had been spent to tear open this passage. Whatever came through would not be an easy foe.

It should have been destroyed before it was finished, but now, it was far too late.

The passage had barely stabilized when a massive head forced its way through.

A red dragon, enormous and savage, pushed through the opening and out into the sky above the battlefield. Then another. Then more, one after another, pouring through in a continuous stream until half the sky was blotted out by scaled wings.

The thunder of their combined roar rolled across the field and shook the earth below. In that moment, the soldiers of Lyon remembered something they had long since stopped believing they needed to fear: dragons.