Lich for Hire

Tiamat stared at the churning, expanding chaos in shock.

"The chaos realm? How would you dare—no, how is this even possible?!"

It was common knowledge that many planes of existence surrounded the material world, and that the chaos realm was where the gods had banished those races and entities too dangerous to be allowed to remain.

Among those exiled were some of the most powerful demons ever to have invaded the material plane.

Within that realm, time and space were in constant disorder. In theory, no one could fix coordinates to any location within it.

Setting aside for a moment how extraordinarily difficult it would be to exile an entire kingdom, wasn't the lich worried about depositing the Unholy Kingdom right next to those demons? For the tiflings, that would be considerably worse than Hell.

And even ignoring that, the chaos realm was the most barren and desolate place in existence.

Nothing that had been banished there fared well. Most exiled creatures died quickly, their flesh and souls dissolving into the chaos, a fate worse than Hell by most measures.

Before Tiamat could figure out the intricacies of their plan, Sariel spoke up. She wasn't one for scheming. "What are you actually trying to do? Would you really rather kill these tiflings than let their souls fall to Hell?"

"That would be our secret, my lords. I have work to finish. We'll talk again later."

Ambrose rose into the air and positioned himself roughly a hundred meters from Mr. Misfortune. He channeled everything he had into the dice of fate and released them in a torrent, letting them rain down into the chaos realm as though sowing seed into soil.

Moments later, something grew.

Dozens of tentacles, each one larger than a dragon, reached through the void. At the center of the mass, a single black eye opened.

A vast, resonant voice emerged from that eye.

"You actually did it! An entire kingdom—hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land, all of it sent into the chaos realm. You really had the nerve to do it!"

Tiamat and Sariel understood Ambrose's plan at once. This tentacled creature was none other than the former Chairman of Alkhemia, whom this very lich had betrayed and sent into exile.

Somehow, it had not only survived the chaos realm but apparently even learned to thrive in it.

So the lich wasn't sending the tiflings to their deaths. He was sending them to this creature for safekeeping.

How had any of this been arranged?

Neither Tiamat nor Sariel could make sense of it. There were far too many contradictions.

The creature had been betrayed and exiled by the lich. Instead of seeking revenge, it was now cooperating with him. And how had it survived the chaos realm, let alone grown to this extent?

The two of them didn't know the details of how Alkhemia had vanished. They were only aware of a rough outline: that this lich had, once again, manipulated someone and extracted tremendous benefit from the gods in the process.

As for the coordinates, that part didn't surprise Tiamat at all.

A diviner locating a spatial passage was trivially simple. The power of fate was beyond the reach of most gods, which was precisely why Mr. Misfortune had been worth millions of souls in trade.

A pity that the lich, with his counterfeit currency, had forced her to give up Mr. Misfortune's soul.

That said, comparing the two of them, the lich might actually be the more valuable acquisition. He commanded the power of fate and simultaneously possessed the ability to manipulate people and plans in ways that were difficult to categorize. Diviners were rare, but one who combined divination with this degree of cunning was a treasure she had never before encountered.

Both lords of Hell fixed their attention on Ambrose, entertaining the same thought: of reaching through the veil and pulling him directly into Hell, thereby turning him into a puppet. Or a subordinate, at least. With Ambrose working on their behalf, the rate at which mortals fell into Hell would increase tenfold.

But the protagonist of that day was not Ambrose.

This had been Mr. Misfortune's plan from the beginning—not to buy the Unholy Kingdom a few extra days, but to save it outright. Even having exchanged himself to spare part of the nobility, the kingdom had still lost its leadership and fallen into disorder.

His original intention had been to sell his service to the lords of Hell in exchange for protecting the kingdom from descending into Hell entirely.

Then, Ambrose had stepped in and changed the terms of the contract, turning a lifetime of labor into a single task.

This gave the lords of Hell every reason to continue targeting the Unholy Kingdom.

Mr. Misfortune knew the kingdom needed time to recover from the chaos, and neither Lyon nor the lords of Hell were going to give it that time.

The only answer was to remove it from reach entirely.

Ambrose had suggested the chaos realm. He had contacts there.

After hearing Ambrose describe it, Mr. Misfortune had agreed it was the right choice. Then came the matter of actually reaching Gary Watts.

That part hadn't been overly complicated. Ambrose had taken a magic mirror, opened a tiny passage, and dropped it through, along with a handful of dice of fate. A few days later, the mirror had drifted to the ruins of Alkhemia.

The magic mirror's communication system worked across planes. After all, its hub was housed in the God of Alchemy's divine realm, itself another plane to begin with. The connection carried no delay even at that distance.

When Gary Watts heard that Ambrose intended to dump an entire kingdom—with tens of millions of people—into the chaos realm, he was speechless for a long moment.

Ambrose had said he would visit from time to time, and intended to collaborate more heavily, but Gary Watts hadn't expected anything like this. To think Ambrose was already sending him a kingdom!

Fortunately, Gary Watts knew Ambrose well. The lich was cunning, but he meant what he said. However much he was hiding by omission, if he said he was sending him a kingdom, he would.

Gary Watts immediately confirmed that space was not a problem.

He had reclaimed several territories already, which had been filled with a varied assortment of species. Tiflings would only make the ecosystem more interesting.

In exchange for their faith, he would shelter all of them and let them live in peace within the chaos realm. Whatever they needed that wasn't there, he would send his tentacles to collect from elsewhere.

The chaos realm wasn't actually deficient in resources. The problem was that each pocket of it drifted independently, cut off from every other pocket, so the creatures within them starved in isolation. Gary Watts, with tentacles that could move freely through the chaos, was the apex predator of this realm and its only hunter.

Mr. Misfortune had ultimately agreed. The plan was sound, and now was the moment to execute it.

With Gary Watts's assistance, the chaos realm continued to spread and expand until it blotted out the sky. The effect startled both the githarks and Lyon's soldiers still locked in combat below. Lyon's forces went pale. They were barely holding off one army to begin with.

Within that darkened sky of chaos, Mr. Misfortune stood alone, blazing with a light that drew every eye.

For the first time, the threads of fate were visible to everyone. The entire sky became a dense weave of lines stretching in every direction, reaching far beyond what any eye could follow.

Ambrose had completed his part. He drifted back and watched. The exile of an entire kingdom was an event that happened perhaps once in ten thousand years, the kind that ended up in history books, the kind that became legend. In a few years, he would write an autobiography. This chapter alone could probably be published separately and sold at a premium.

Tiamat and Sariel appeared at his side again. Tiamat couldn't contain herself. "Even granting that you can open a passage into the chaos realm and have someone waiting inside, how will you actually get the Unholy Kingdom through? Spatial passages have hard limits. You can't swallow a kingdom whole."

It was one of Aion's oldest rules. Spatial passages could not be used to carve up the world.

Ambrose's own extradimensional space was no exception: you could enter and exit, but you couldn't use it to cut things in half. Closing a passage on someone mid-transit didn't bisect them. Rather, it either refused to close or ejected the traveler. There were no exceptions.

The passage into the chaos realm worked the same way. It could be opened, but it couldn't devour a tifling kingdom like a creature swallowing its prey.

This time, Ambrose didn't deflect. He watched Mr. Misfortune, now wrapped in threads of fate, and explained, "We can't cut the Unholy Kingdom into pieces and use earth magic to ferry them through. That'd require transporting hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land. But what we can do is make this world push the kingdom out on its own."

"How could a mortal possibly manage that?"

"By severing the kingdom's ties to the material world. Once every connection is cut, this land becomes foreign matter, like a kidney stone or a pathogen. It's something the world itself needs to expel. That's what he's doing now: cutting the threads, one by one, with everything he has. His strength, his flesh, his soul."

Mr. Misfortune's body was coming apart. He looked like cracked glass. Fracture lines spread across him in every direction. Before him, the threads of fate snapped in cascading waves, one after another after another.