Lich for Hire

Despite the minor complication named Aiolos, Ambrose's plans were proceeding well enough.

The undead army's combat capabilities had been tested in battle and had no equal. With the dwarven kingdom's alchemical production infrastructure engaged, Ambrose could build up troops rapidly at minimal cost.

As long as no Arthur Lyon emerged from among the ocean races, Ambrose expected he would eventually control the entire Sea of Volcanoes. With steady progress and patient expansion, achieving his goal was only a matter of time.

This meant that the next priority was development.

What Ambrose had prepared for Aige was a population drawn from the merfolk's exiled criminals. The gravest offense among this group was probably sneaking a taste of Ezdolo's ritual offerings.

As for covertly producing little merfolk children during the off-season, that hardly counted as a crime to Ambrose.

The merfolk lifestyle was difficult to understand for those who weren't devout to Ezdolo.

Still, perhaps the merfolk's position as the ocean's dominant power was a result of exactly this kind of disciplined, self-restrained way of life. Ambrose decided not to judge.

The point was that these "merfolk criminals" needed appropriate living conditions, and their untethered faith would serve as the raw material for Aige's ascension.

He had to admit that Ezdolo had been reasonably magnanimous. She had not moved to stop the merfolk from disposing of their criminals this way. She truly was a neutral deity: even opposed to a shift in the balance of power, she would not deny living creatures their chance at survival. If Ezdolo had simply had the criminals executed, Ambrose would have needed a different approach entirely.

Absolute neutrality began to seem to Ambrose less like a stance and more like Aion's own faction. Ezdolo and Aion operated so similarly. Everything had to be by the rules. If you followed the rules, anything was permissible; if you didn't, nothing was.

Preparing a habitat suitable for merfolk meant understanding what merfolk actually needed.

Merfolk preferred labyrinthine coral reefs with a disorderly but precise arrangement of caverns and passages, a complexity that looked chaotic but had an underlying logic to it.

Ambrose had no way to cultivate extensive coral reefs rapidly, but he could carve out an environment of appropriate complexity.

And he didn't have to come up with the design himself, either. The merfolk were more than willing to prepare schematics of what they needed, which Ambrose merely had to copy.

With enough gold, Terraform would reshape the zone according to his specifications.

Gold poured into the Golden Throne. The seafloor began to change.

Rocky formations rose from the seabed, shaped like coral structures. More stone grew from them in branching tendrils, forming vast lattices that climbed toward the surface.

Dozens of what seemed like rolled-up stone nets raised themselves to enclose and shadow the two zones Ambrose had secured, creating an incomparably complex maze.

The stone lattice allowed ocean currents to pass through freely without disrupting the interior water flow, but it presented an enormous obstacle to hostile intrusion. Any kouto of insufficient intelligence who wandered in would trap themselves in the winding rock labyrinth without a chance of finding the way back out.

So long as the enemy didn't simply demolish their way in wall by wall, this maze would hold off significant numbers.

The inspiration had come from an old film Ambrose had once watched about tunnel warfare. Making full use of such terrain would require time and effort, but the inhabitants would manage.

The lattice continued growing upward, breaking through the surface and forming a dozen irregular patches of elevated land suspended above the waterline.

Not islands, but more like platforms, raised up above the sea on the stone framework below.

The platforms weren't large. Combined, they amounted to perhaps a small town's worth of area. But they were a last resort: if some catastrophic threat reached the seafloor inhabitants, they could retreat to these elevated platforms and wait out the danger.

There was something almost comic about a stretch of dry land as the ultimate refuge for ocean races, but that was the practical reality.

Ambrose couldn't monitor this sea indefinitely. Once Aige ascended to godhood, she wouldn't be in a position to intervene directly in mortal affairs with any ease. In the end, these people would have to look after themselves.

The platforms were his way of giving them a buffer, and time enough for reinforcements to arrive if the worst happened.

With all that in place, Ambrose used the ring to absorb the remaining dark energy lingering in the water, which made the cleanup far easier than it would have been.

He then dismissed the shagin and kouto zombies into his storage as reserve forces and raw materials to be held until needed.

And with that, the zones were ready for settlement.

But that wasn't Ambrose's concern any longer. He had laid the foundation; the rest of the work would now be the Silent Sea Pirate Company's.

After all, Aige was the one who needed to become a god. It made sense for her to handle the incoming settlers personally, both to manage the transition and to receive the faith that would begin flowing from them.

The remaining military campaigns were much the same. Ambrose was no military expert. Between Aige and Catherine managing operations, and the assembled commanders doing their work, continued expansion was simply a matter of keeping the undead supply lines running.

What Ambrose intended to deal with personally was Aiolos. An unkillable madman roaming free was a genuine threat to his plans. It was time to deploy the Loom of Fate.

He had always been cautious about the Loom. It was a powerful boon, but one he never used carelessly.

The Goddess of Fate had an unpredictable sense of humor. Every time he drew on her power, he was gambling that her gaze would fall warmly on him, that her leg would not catch him in a sweeping kick. The ideal outcome was her noticing nothing at all and letting him do as he pleased.

The Loom of Fate was considerably more powerful than his dice of fate, which meant it was correspondingly more likely to draw her attention. Whether that meant favorable or unfavorable odds depended entirely on her mood. If she happened to be in one of her darker moods when Ambrose reached out, the consequences might well be severe.

Caution was mandatory, but that didn't mean he would leave a powerful ability unused indefinitely. Ambrose judged that now was the right moment. He was dealing with a creature who had received a divine blessing and could not be killed. That seemed sufficient justification for using the Loom without it constituting an unfair advantage.

Countless dice of fate condensed around him and were cast into the void, each a building block of fate. Ambrose's first attempt was to directly weave a future of Aiolos's death.

Unfortunately for him, his dice shattered mid-cast. The fragments that remained showed only the smallest possible rolls.

Ambrose noted the result with quiet understanding, but didn't interrupt the ritual. "If it failed, then there is no possibility of death in his future. Forcing it is impossible..."

It was the same principle as when Mr. Misfortune had made his choice to sacrifice himself. Once that future had been fixed, Ambrose's Loom couldn't alter it. The Goddess of Fate had already determined that outcome, and no one's will could override it. Forcing the spell would only result in failure.

Perhaps Aiolos was being watched over by a deity, or perhaps his future was already locked onto a specific outcome that precluded direct death. Either way, killing him outright was not on the table.

"If I can't kill him directly... I'll try something more interesting."

Ambrose settled for a different approach. He remembered the thorn-like magical force he had detected burrowing into Aiolos's mind, something stronger than Crown of Madness, continuously disrupting his consciousness and preventing rational thought. It was almost certainly a mental shackle placed by the kouto goddess.

He wanted to try lifting it. If it could be removed, and Aiolos could be made to turn against the kouto goddess himself, that would be far more entertaining.

But could such divine shackles be undone?

He tried it without much hope. Unexpectedly, the dice began rolling high numbers in rapid succession.

"This high a success rate? Does this mean that the madness wasn't imposed by the kouto goddess directly...?"

Ambrose felt a jolt of understanding. Deities couldn't impose punishments directly on mortals without following certain rules and paying certain costs. It was probably beyond the kouto goddess to apply the enhanced Crown of Madness personally to Aiolos.

"She must have given the ability to a believer, and that believer then cast the mental shackle on Aiolos. That keeps the goddess one step removed from direct intervention, sidestepping Aion's rules to some degree... But that leaves an opening for me, too."

The Goddess of Fate seemed to wink at him. The fate of Aiolos's liberation from his mental shackle was already being woven.

Liberation, betrayal, a turn of fate, and then a headlong fall into the trap Ambrose had prepared.

That was the future Ambrose had arranged for him.

The last die fell. Fate was set and made irreversible.

Ambrose exhaled deeply. The spell had gone more smoothly than expected. Now he only had to wait. Everything would unfold as fate had arranged.

He just hoped it wouldn't take too long.

Three days later, the merfolk began sending their exiles over, but there was still no word about Aiolos. The wait was testing Ambrose's patience.

Just as Ambrose was about to send a scout into kouto territory, news of exceptional importance arrived.

The orcs had launched a full-scale counterattack on Lyon.

Lyon had occupied a gateway city in the orcish highlands, and the orcs had now retaken it. More than that, they appeared intent on invading Lyon's home territory.

Exactly as the God of Alchemy had said, a divine war had been unleashed. Every deity associated with conflict would move.

The orcish patron deity, Grush, held the domain of conquest.

With Lyon in internal disarray, an orcish offensive was entirely predictable, but to retake the city in a single push? Just how much had the orcish deities invested in this?

Ambrose rubbed his jaw. "It seems it's time to profit from war. The world knows that holy light counters undead, but my undead army might still find some leverage over Lyon in its current state."