Lich for Hire

Chapter 385: Spellcasting in Overdrive

High in the air, Rades rode his red dragon with one hand pressed against his chest.

Blood dripped from the wound there: a cut courtesy of Gareth. The strike had punched through two dragons and several githark dragon-riders before its remaining force broke through his magical shielding and drove clean through him.

Fortunately for Rades, it had missed his heart. Even githark mages had exceptional physical resilience, and Rades had survived, badly wounded but still able to retreat on his dragon.

Rades was the commander of this invasion, and the campaign had been his to lead.

If he were to flee, this battle would be lost.

But he didn't think it was his fault, and neither, he suspected, did anyone else among the githarks.

The plan wasn't supposed to go like this.

The original design was simple: arrive, fight a portion of the local human forces, and claim a substantial kingdom as territory.

The githarks would establish themselves, multiply at scale, expand their control of the plane, and eventually harvest its resources for transport back to the astral plane. It was standard procedure. Rades had run this operation on other planes many times.

The Dragon Queen had guaranteed it would go exactly this way. They had collaborated on several campaigns before, and Rades had no reason to doubt her.

But things had gone wrong from the very beginning.

The humans in white had been dramatically stronger than projected, and the githarks had taken significant losses—painful, but still acceptable. Claiming sufficient territory would allow them to restore what had been lost to battle.

But each event in the chain that followed grew ever more unreasonable.

An entire kingdom's worth of land had simply... vanished. The territory that should have been their base had been replaced by open ocean, the city and all its resources gone with it.

The Dragon Queen, apparently as surprised as anyone, had gone silent for several days before issuing new instructions: find this world's dragon clans, overseas.

They had hoped for powerful allies. The dragon clans they found were in worse shape than the githarks. Practically every dragon showed signs of malnourishment.

Things had proceeded from there. Integrating the dragon clans, establishing a forward base—the githarks had been doing fine until the Dullahan appeared.

Their famed dragon-riders might as well have been children against this Dullahan.

Taken completely by surprise, the astral dragons and githarks had been taken apart instantly.

The overseas dragon clans, who had agreed to cooperate, took one look at what Gareth could do and immediately began hedging their position.

Rades had come close to ordering all the overseas dragons killed and seizing their islands outright.

In the end, he could only depend on himself.

He had spent the next stretch swallowing his pride, gathering intelligence on the Dullahan, managing the settlement of his people in unfamiliar ocean territory, and making cautious overtures to neighboring factions.

This was humiliation by githark standards. On every other plane they had ever touched, githarks were conquerors. He had never needed to be this careful. But Rades was a legendary mage, and he had more than enough intelligence to assess the situation. It was clear that patience was required Eventually, once the githarks had established a functional base, Rades found his first reliable ally: the ixiray.

Their demonic bloodline suited the githarks perfectly. Demons thrived in chaos, and the githarks desperately needed help extending their reach across the ocean.

Things had begun moving again. Rades had also developed a specific approach to neutralize the Dullahan.

The plan had seemed solid. When the lord of the Dragon Graveyard left, an opportunity presented itself exactly as anticipated.

Rades had considered the plan flawless, requiring only competent execution. But what met the githarks was not news of victory, but rather a rampaging Dullahan.

Rades had come up with more measures against him, but to no avail.

When fighting alongside Alabastra, Gareth had operated at perhaps ten percent capacity. The remainder of his attention was constantly occupied by her safety, and he subconsciously used himself like a shield for her.

This time, Gareth's mount was his eight-legged horse, not his wife. It was a fearsome mount and partner on the battlefield, requiring none of his attention and none of his restraint.

Gareth, thus empowered, seemed like a different being entirely. The headless figure somehow seemed to have hundreds of eyes that could sense the shape of every attack from every direction simultaneously and select the optimal response for each with a speed that no ranger could match.

Multiple volleys of chain-cast fireballs swallowed him whole, but he came out through the smoke without even slowing. He cut down a dozen githarks in a single arc.

He could identify the precise weakest point in saturating fire in the moment it took to blink, drive his blade through it like threading a needle, and be through the other side before the volley was even over.

And when he committed to a charge, his chain-blade became something closer to a reaper's scythe. One sweep could cut through bodies en masse—and not just the bodies, either. Whatever the purple-black flame touched burned the soul, along with the flesh, to a crisp.

No formation survived contact with him. Ground forces couldn't organize at all, and a single charge of his scattered hundreds.

Rades had tried everything he could conceive of to stop him, and when he finally attempted to leverage the red dragons' air superiority, the sky had morphed.

Storm winds came from nowhere. Endless dark cloud rolled in and covered the astral dragons from above. A rotting miasma settled over them, their scales steaming as the dragons cried out. The area of effect was far too large for any single caster.

Rades had looked frantically for the source and found it at sea: five ghost ships had surfaced, and the great mass of wraiths circling their sails had combined to cast the effect across the horizon.

Aige's Silent Sea Pirate Company had arrived.

Rades recognized a lost battle when he was in one. He ordered immediate retreat, left tens of thousands of githarks to cover the withdrawal, and departed with the ixiray cavalry and the dragon-riders.

As he descended to an altitude from which he could issue orders, Gareth's eight-legged horse leapt upward. The Dullahan tossed his blade forth.

That one strike had nearly taken Rades' life.

The githark forces had been severely diminished in the aftermath of the battle. The isiray cavalry numbered just over ten thousand; twenty-two astral dragons remained.

And all that in only a few days. The root cause was simple: every preparation they had made had gone off-course.

It felt as if some unseen hand were plucking at the strings of fate to compose a dirge specifically for the githark invasion.

Then, just as Rades thought things could not possibly get worse, a small figure appeared directly in their path.

Before he could make out who it was, a blinding, golden radiance erupted from the figure, sharp enough to sting Rades's eyes and force them shut.

His red dragon slowed, alert, as fire built up in its throat.

Rades felt his opponent lock onto him, holding him fixed in his awareness.

As a legendary mage, he understood exactly what that meant. Any significant movement on his part would bring a high-powered spell down on him instantly.

But his opponent's range was absurd.

The standard range for spellcasting was perhaps forty to fifty meters. Strong mages and certain bloodline casters could extend this, but a hundred meters was already an exceptional ceiling. The reason ranged spells could still affect ground targets from altitude was simply that the trajectory compensated for the increased range: their accuracy might suffer, but impact was still possible.

Rades was being targeted from over five hundred meters away, a distance from which even arrows were unreliable. No mage could cast at a range of five hundred meters. It wasn't possible.

And yet the sense of threat didn't diminish. Rades found he genuinely couldn't bring himself to move.

On the island below, Ambrose sat in his Golden Throne and maintained his lock.

Take a standard mage's casting range as ten meters, and the legendary threshold as a hundred. Ambrose, half-baked legend that he was, possessed a casting range of perhaps eighty meters. With the Golden Throne augmenting him, however, his effective casting range could extend to five or six hundred meters. If he were willing to spend gold freely, it could go higher still.

The numbers were approximate, of course. Raw casting range didn't translate cleanly to combat effectiveness. But the practical result was that Ambrose operated outside normal parameters, and a range of several hundred meters for chain-cast spells was well within his reach.

The white-haired githark at the front was almost certainly their commander. The first enemy group to arrive, and their leader was already within reach. How convenient.

The magic mirrors were activated. The other mirror-holders were presumably watching a live feed.

For the sake of business, he couldn't afford to mess up here.

Ambrose dropped his pleasant merchant persona entirely and addressed the githark formation with pomp and gravity. "Invaders from the astral plane? I didn't expect you to join the festivities. An entire army just to kill me—I'm genuinely flattered."

Rades stared at him, baffled. What was this creature even saying?

He moved a fraction closer and clearly saw Ambrose's skull.

A lich? What was a lich doing blocking their path?

Rades spent a moment making sense of the situation. He eventually looked down at the island beneath the lich, roughly the size of a large table.

Surely the lich didn't think they were after his territory. Githarks didn't bother with scraps. That patch of rock was barely enough to stand on. Who would want it?

They were a civilization of conquerors subjected to a series of catastrophic setbacks. Now a single lich was standing in their path, apparently defending a piece of rock.

Rades looked carefully in every direction and confirmed there were no significant forces in hiding, only a mild undead presence on the island itself. "Idiot," Rades said. "Undead are what I despise most. You dare provoke me?"

Why not take the opportunity to let out some steam?

He was in the process of ordering his forces to tear the lich apart when Ambrose called out, "Hold on. Are you really going to make me your enemy? I have never once started a conflict. I've always been forced to act in self-defense."

Rades paused. Was this lich backing down? He had jumped out to block them; was he now backing down?

He was done with this conversation. "Scatter his bones. Burn his island!"

The red dragons screamed and charged. Ambrose sighed, loudly enough for everyone to hear, "You brought this on yourselves."

He raised his right hand. The sky went white.

Rades looked up: his staff fell from his grip. Aion above, what was that?!

Hundreds of meteors rained from the sky, covering the entire githark formation.

The first Overdrive spell that Ambrose had prepared took effect: Hundredfold Meteor Shower.