Lich for Hire

Chapter 386: Tiamat's Plan

Meteor Shower was classified as a ninth-tier spell, and for good reason: it was extraordinarily difficult to cast, and its accuracy was notoriously poor. Under normal conditions, Ambrose could only manage four meteors at a time even with the Golden Throne's support.

But four hundred had just fallen simultaneously.

The sight was something between an artillery barrage and the end of the world.

Rades had never seen anything like it. He threw every defensive spell he had onto himself in rapid succession and urged his dragon sideways.

Meteor Shower was famous for missing.

Even with this many projectiles filling the sky, the coverage area was correspondingly vast. There would be gaps between impacts, and plenty of room to maneuver. He could get through this.

He had barely finished shouting the order to scatter when a meteor took his dragon directly in the skull.

The impact shattered a horn and caved in the cranium. The dragon went limp and began dropping toward the ocean.

Rades cast Flight on himself and Featherfall on the dragon. The creature was tough enough to survive one meteor strike. If it hit the water gently, it might regain consciousness, but a hard impact on top of existing damage was another matter.

He found himself thinking that his luck was genuinely terrible. Meteor Shower's hit rate was abysmal, yet somehow one had found his specific dragon's head. Then he looked around. All twenty red dragons had been hit. Every single one.

How was that even possible?

Had there even been twenty people killed by Meteor Shower in the annals of history?

Worse still, the ixiray cavalry had been hit too. Meteors had raised walls of water, created whirlpools, and dragged mounted githarks down into deep water. Across the entire formation, the hundreds of meteors had fallen—and Rades, scanning the field, could not find a single one that had missed.

This was no ordinary Meteor Shower!

By the time he realized that something was wrong, it was already too late. Something surfaced in his memory—Tiamat explaining the disappearance of the Unholy Kingdom and mentioning a name.

Megaman Tiga, a lich and a legendary-rank diviner.

Rades's stomach dropped. How had he ended up in front of that particular lich? Liches all looked the same. He had seen a skull and thought nothing of it.

It was too late now. The monstrous spell had torn through the githark forces. Most of the red dragons were down, and an unknown number of githarks were dead. The ixiray cavalry had lost the majority of its strength to the water or direct impact.

A hundred thousand had set out from the astral plane. A few thousand remained.

What kind of plane was this?

He fixed Ambrose with the most concentrated look of hatred he could manage, memorized his appearance, and ordered through clenched teeth, "Retreat. All forces, full retreat!"

The dragons' survival was no longer his concern. The githarks, at the very least, had to survive.

The surviving githarks needed no encouragement. They had watched meteors fall with perfect accuracy across an entire formation. Nowhere in their experience of other planes had they ever encountered anything like this. They ran.

Ambrose made no move to pursue them, because Rades wasn't running. He was flying toward Ambrose.

His casting range wasn't enough to reach Ambrose from a safe distance, so he had to close in. Rades had already accepted that he was finished. What remained was buying time for his people with whatever he had left.

It was absurd that a legendary mage was voluntarily closing in on his opponent, and Rades knew it. The entire campaign had been one absurdity after another: a sequence of encounters that felt less like bad luck and more like falling into carefully positioned traps.

Ambrose watched the githark approach with mild curiosity. White hair aside, the creature was indistinguishable from any other githark. He had the usual upturned nose, heavily patterned skin, and the general appearance of an agitated toad.

But what Rades's face conveyed right now was not ugliness but fervor, the willingness to spend what remained of his life for a rearguard action.

The moment he got in range, Rades committed everything to the attack.

Clouds boiled across the sky. Lightning danced. Acid mist spread in all directions. Hail followed. The ninth-tier Storm of Revenge began to manifest, conjuring extreme natural forces in sequence: acid, thunder, ice, all converging into one great disaster.

And this was no ordinary Storm of Revenge, either. As the clouds gathered, an enormous figure wreathed in lightning appeared in the air. His eyes filled entirely with white electricity. Even through the blinding light, Ambrose could feel the weight of that gaze.

This was not an impression or an echo, but rather the Lord of Storms Thanos himself.

Ambrose blinked. The sheer presumption of what he was seeing took a moment to process. A githark, summoning a projection of Thanos? The githarks had a unified faith of their own. He didn't know the specifics of their deity, but it certainly was not the Lord of Storms.

How had Rades gained access to a divine projection?

The endless expanse of lightning closed in on Ambrose's position, forming a spherical cage of pure destruction a hundred meters across.

Every element of the spell collapsed into a single unified force: obliteration.

Matter itself ceased to exist inside the sphere. By the time the lightning finally subsided, the air had been left riddled with cracks that snapped shut with a concussive boom.

What had been inside was gone. There were no remains nor ashes left behind.

Rades stared at the empty sky, his face pale.

He had invoked his legendary boon, the ability to select one spell per day and imbue it with a special effect.

The invisible web spell that had evaded undead perception, for instance, had been designed by him and distributed to the other githark mages for use against Gareth. That spell had expired once the day was up.

And the stronger the base spell, the greater the cost of the enhancement. Rades had spent his boon on the ninth-tier Storm of Revenge and elevated it to a divine spell, one sufficient to manifest a projection of Thanos.

That single cast had hollowed him out completely. His soul had taken catastrophic damage alongside his reserves.

He was dying, he knew. But the lich's body had been destroyed in the blast as well. By the time he could reconstitute himself, the rest of the githarks would be long gone.

That was something. Not enough to balance the ledger of a campaign this disastrous, but it was something.

He was closing his eyes when Ambrose rose from below, caught him by the collar with Mage Hand, and methodically applied several dozen sealing spells across his body.

Rades's eyes flew open. He coughed out blood. "Impossible! Thanos's power can annihilate everything!"

Ambrose smiled and said nothing.

Rades's Storm of Revenge had been elevated to a divine spell through his legendary boon. But Leyla's True Illusion was a divine spell as well.

From the beginning, Ambrose had remained out of sight as he controlled a remote illusion of himself on the island.

An illusion capable of deceiving deities was more than adequate to fool Rades, and even the divine projection that he had conjured with all the power and none of the consciousness of Thanos.

He was grateful, on reflection, for his own caution. Otherwise, his mithril body would have been done for.

Rades died bleeding, wide-eyed, and baffled.

His death wasn't entirely meaningless. Ambrose collected his body and what remained of his soul, satisfied.

The fleeing githarks weren't worth the chase. They had nothing of value, and there were only a few thousand of them left.

He returned to the island.

From outside, the island looked like nothing more than a wisp of fog over a flat rock. Inside, tens of thousands of wraiths were operating as a vast distributed power source for a magical array of considerable scale.

The Golden Throne alone was not what had produced the hundredfold Meteor Shower. That had required the array, the wraiths, and the exceptional ring he had liberated from the Dragon Graveyard.

In his extradimensional space, Ambrose had spent considerable time working out the ring's actual function. It converted dark energy into a force multiplier, allowing him to control far more power than he would normally be able to handle.

Without any of the three factors, casting that Hundredfold Meteor Shower would be have been impossible.

He handed the body to Black Rose and sat down with Rades's soul to begin the extraction. The man had been the commander of the invasion. He would have known Tiamat's plan in full, and his memories would contain everything relevant.

Valuable though a legendary mage's soul was, Ambrose began to take it apart immediately.

Several hours later, he sat back from the completed extraction and exhaled.

"It actually would have worked," he murmured. "Soul transference. What an elegant solution. A shame it didn't matter, in the end. Tiamat, this is what comes of crossing me."

Tiamat's plan had been straightforward in principle. The mechanism was a devil's ritual to swap the souls of the overseas dragons and the red dragons of the astral plane.

Arthur Lyon's covenant bound the specific clans that had committed the original crimes. Astral dragons were categorically outside its scope. Crucially, the covenant's authors had been careful not to overreach: if every species with a trace of dragon blood were included, the list would encompass half the continent.

The relevant question was whether the covenant would bind a hybrid. The answer appeared to be no: an astral dragon's body with a native dragon's soul was beyond the covenant's scope. Similarly, a native dragon's body with an astral dragon's soul would be recognized as a hybrid and exempted from the prohibition as well.

Either combination could cross back to the continent. A hundred dragons would suddenly be free from their thousand-year exile.

The Unholy Kingdom's land, the githarks' numbers, and the dragons' power... The result would have been a faction capable of genuinely contending for continental dominance.

Unfortunately, Ambrose had ruined everything.

Ambrose tucked away the extracted threads of memory with quiet satisfaction and thought to himself, "I wonder what the people watching the live feed made of all that."