Lich for Hire

Under the dense shroud of holy light, Roger Ángelo would normally have been nearly impossible for Black Rose to sense, but she was holding a lock of his hair.

That link of essence, that thread of mutual resonance, was enough to lock onto him.

Death Gaze was Black Rose's legendary boon. Any living creature she fixed her gaze upon would begin to turn into an undead. No defense nor resistance could be mustered against it.

Strengthened by Shara, the boon was more potent than it had ever been, and took effect rapidly even against a legendary paladin.

Roger Ángelo felt a sharp sting in his fingers. When he raised his right hand, he saw his fingertips crumbling into ash, exactly as the death knights' did.

His fingers were turning undead, and he was standing inside a field of holy light.

And holy light purified the undead, without exception.

The transformation itself was nearly painless. Being purified by holy light was not. The agony of it was comparable to being flayed alive.

It wrenched a cry from a general who had campaigned for decades without flinching.

And it didn't stop. The transformation continued, consuming his entire hand until it was gone.

The priests tried to save their commander, but no divine spell they knew could cleanse a curse like this.

New flesh grew back—undead flesh—and the holy light purified it in turn, forcing Roger Ángelo to endure the same excruciating cycle again.

Ambrose, Black Rose, and Milena stood at a distance and watched the Leonine General die in agony.

Black Rose said to her daughter, "Milena, be ready. The moment this holy light barrier drops, kill whatever Lyon soldiers are left."

Ambrose shook his head. "The barrier won't drop."

Black Rose looked at him. "You mean he'll maintain it and let himself be destroyed rather than lower it?"

Ambrose nodded. "Roger Ángelo was brutal, but he didn't reach the realm of a legend by breaking his oaths. We don't have much time. Once he's gone, Lavarun's reinforcements will arrive. Let's get ready to retreat."

Things unfolded exactly as he predicted. Roger Ángelo screamed and writhed across the ground in agony, but he didn't succumb. Both his arms were gone by now.

Even when the pain drove him to bite through his own teeth, filling his mouth with blood, he did not order the barrier dispelled.

He also did not step outside it. He understood very well that he was already dead. Remaining in the light meant being reduced to ash. Leaving it meant being seized by the liches waiting outside, and perhaps becoming the kind of undead that they could control. That was not how he intended to die.

For three full minutes, Roger Ángelo endured. When the reinforcements from Lavarun finally came into view, his head had fully turned undead. The holy light consumed it, and the ash dispersed. Even his soul was annihilated: holy light did not merely destroy undead bodies. It unmade them entirely in flesh and soul.

Black Rose felt the curse lose effect and smiled coldly. "The Leonine General lives up to his name, I suppose. I had half a mind to hollow him out after death and stuff the old Silvermoon Knight in him instead. That option is gone now."

She turned to Ambrose with something warmer in her expression. "Thank you. I haven't dealt Lyon a blow like this in a long while. That little emperor won't sleep well for months."

"It came about on its own. I wasn't actually trying to predict Roger Ángelo's death. I was looking for a different future, and this wasn't what I intended to find."

Ambrose was, frankly, somewhat exasperated. Even with Roger Ángelo dead, the war would not end. Lyon would still invade the Unholy Kingdom, exactly as the prophecy showed. This had been an accident, not a turning point.

Roger Ángelo had simply been unlucky. He had come with only a handful of his most trusted men, wanting to confront his old friend privately, to pull him back and not to make a spectacle. He hadn't wanted to kill anyone, and he hadn't wanted too many people to know the truth of Lorencos's defection. His personal guard could be trusted to keep quiet.

The other legendary fighters he had left in the city to avoid additional complications.

This might have been the only moment of softness in Roger Ángelo's entire life, and it killed him.

Perhaps the same was true of Lorencos. After a lifetime of compromise, of lying to himself for decades, his one final moment of resolve killed him as well.

Sometimes, Ambrose thought, the Goddess of Fate had a very particular sense of humor.

"Time to go. Lavarun's forces are here, and grieving soldiers are dangerous soldiers. We shouldn't pick a fight with them right now."

Their ambush had been lean by design. Illusions were useful, but they couldn't conceal a large undead army.

Ten death knights and thirty living mercury slimes had held the soldiers off long enough for Ambrose, Black Rose, and Milena to do the job.

The living mercury slimes were all gone. So were all ten death knights. That stung, financially speaking.

Now that Lavarun's army had emerged in force, retreat was the only sensible option.

Black Rose looked mildly disappointed. She would have liked to finish off Roger Ángelo's remaining guard, but it seemed they would live another day.

"What about you?" she asked Ambrose. "Come back to the Umbral Depths with us. We should celebrate properly."

"I'm not done yet. Roger Ángelo was the first half of my plan. Allen is the second."

"Alright. Come whenever you're ready, then. You're always welcome."

Black Rose felt a little disappointed by his refusal, but it gratified her to see him hard at work trying to take down Lyon.

Black Rose and Milena left for the Umbral Depths. Ambrose gathered the bodies of Lorencos and Allen's fallen companions and flew in the direction in which Allen had retreated.

After about ten kilometers, he found Allen in a mountainside cave, eyes red and swollen.

Ambrose set the bodies down in front of him. "Do you know Resurrection?"

Allen shook his head. "No, but even if I did, it probably wouldn't work. Their souls... they're probably in the Lord of Dawn's divine realm by now."

Ambrose let out a quiet laugh. "That's not necessarily true. I've never heard of a deathbed epiphany being enough to get you into heaven."

"It will be," Allen said, his voice steady. "Because their sins weren't entirely their own. The real problem is the empire. For years we've twisted faith into something it was never meant to be. Lorencos, Alfredo, the others—they were only people who had been led astray."

Ambrose gave him a surprised look. "I was going to try to console you. It seems I don't need to."

"I don't have the right to succumb to despair. This is all my fault. They died because of what happened on my watch. I have to shoulder their hopes and dreams now. I don't have time to blame myself." Allen's red eyes found Ambrose's. "But I do have one question. Was all of this your design? Did you plan it?"

Ambrose's appearance at his side had been too convenient. So had the ambush on Lorencos. Then, the moment Allen moved to save the others, Ambrose had sprung his own ambush on Roger Ángelo.

Taken together, it looked as if Ambrose had planned everything in advance. Allen had even begun to suspect that Lorencos's location had deliberately been leaked by Ambrose.

If that were true, Allen would have no choice but to draw his sword.

"If I said yes, you'd come at me right now. Didn't you just mention how much responsibility you're shouldering?" Ambrose said.

Allen's gaze didn't waver. "I don't know if I can stay calm if I'm looking at the culprit for these deaths, so you had better give me the real answer."

"Fine. Taunting someone who's already angry isn't much fun anyway, and I don't enjoy pointless cruelty. The truth is, I wasn't trying to divine anything connected to you. The future I was looking for was something else entirely. Fate didn't want me to see what was under her skirt, so she gave me a shoe to the face instead.

"Allen, believe it or not, I never intended to use you as bait. To be blunt, you're not quite important enough for that yet. Think carefully about what you need to do now. Don't let them die for nothing."

Allen let out a slow breath. This time, he chose to believe the lich.

What Ambrose had said was true. He wasn't powerful enough to be worth taking advantage of yet.

"Then what were you trying to divine? Did you see something about this war?"

"Not clearly. I know Lyon's invasion won't be stopped by anything that's happened today. But I can't divine anything about how this war ends. Fate won't let me look. What I do know is that an old friend of mine may be about to die."

Allen heard the heaviness of Ambrose's voice. "Can the undead... feel things like that?"

Ambrose spread his hands. "Who knows. Maybe I haven't been a lich long enough. A few decades isn't much time to wash away several centuries of memory. The closer the friend in life, the harder it is to stay detached in death. This whole venture is going to end up costing me far more than it earns."

Allen glanced back at Alfredo, still standing exactly where he had been, vacant-eyed and motionless, as though he had fallen dead on the spot.

"Master Megaman, could I ask you to take Alfredo somewhere safe?"

Ambrose nodded. He could always put the boy in the extradimensional space and freeze him there. At least that wouldn't cost him food.

But at the sound of Allen's words, Alfredo raised his head. "No," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

He lurched to his feet and seized Allen by the collar, his voice cracking. "Allen, my father is dead. He could have lived. Why did he choose to die? Tell me why!"

"Because he wanted to save more people. Not just you—not just Lyon's citizens. Even the Leonine General. He wanted his death to make more people see the truth of what the empire has become. That's what I believe, Alfredo."

"Is that worth more than his own life?! He abandoned me for that?!"

Alfredo finally broke. Tears ran down his face, parting the dried blood. He wept like the child which, in most of the ways that mattered, he still was.

Allen let him clutch onto his collar and cry. When the worst of it had passed, he said quietly, "There's no way to measure the worth of conviction, Alfredo. I don't know how your father weighed things, but I know what he did. Now, there's only one question: do you walk the same road he chose, or do you want to leave all of this behind?"

Alfredo was silent for a long time.

Then, a warm radiance began to emanate from somewhere inside him. The holy light that had been snuffed out returned to him, steady and luminous, as though it had simply been waiting for his resolve.

Alfredo raised his head, eyes still red. "I'll go with you. I won't let my father's sacrifice mean nothing. If the empire is the problem, then let's fix it together."

Ambrose watched the two of them, and thought, without quite meaning to, "Senior, Allen and Alfredo have both let go of the past. But what about you? Are you still bound by the weight of all those years?