Lich for Hire

Chapter 402: Who's the Real Villain?

In the Court of the Silver Moon, the elven high council had once again gathered around their magic mirror to watch the broadcast with rapt attention.

When Cyril Roland appeared on screen, the elves responded with a chorus of reactions. Their admiration, astonishment, and quiet murmuring spoke to just how remarkable a figure he was.

The Radiant General was something of a household name in Lyon.

Unlike the Silvermoon Knight, Lyon's Shield, and those veterans of an older generation, Cyril Roland, in his fifties, was in the absolute prime of his power. His battle record might not match the Silvermoon Knight's storied legacy, but everyone knew that the Radiant General had every right to claim the title of the foremost paladin of his generation.

Behind Cyril Roland were the familiar faces of the legends of Lyon. An almost obscenely luxurious team had assembled to deal with a single lich.

Not every elf knew of the Elegiac Society, and not every elf understood the full extent of Ambrose's hand. What they did know was that his most celebrated exploit had been excising the Unholy Kingdom from the world.

That said, rumor had it that another diviner had sacrificed himself to make it possible, and that the lich had simply swooped in to claim the credit.

That was why Ambrose had few backers, but Alderien was one such. The young elven king had believed from the very beginning that Ambrose would not lose.

This lich never moved without certainty. That he had dared to bait the enemies of the entire world into coming to him meant he intended to swallow them whole, bones and all.

Alderien was simply curious how the lich would break this Lyon legion.

Would he call upon the members of the Elegiac Society to strike together, crushing the Lyon forces like a boulder rolling over ants? Or would he unleash some devastating spell, another meteor shower like the one before?

Alderien barely glanced at Cyril Roland. Instead he scanned every corner of the frame for details, searching for the shape of whatever scheme the lich had prepared.

Then Ambrose's voice rang out. "Can you name a single crime I have committed?"

Alderien laughed aloud. Every elf in the room turned to look at their king. Someone couldn't help but ask, "What amuses you, Your Majesty?"

Alderien pressed a hand to his cheek to suppress his smile, then said to the others, "Watch carefully. Not only will this lich kill them, he'll even destroy them morally. From today onward, Lyon will never again be able to claim to stand for righteousness."

The elves exchanged baffled glances. How had His Majesty reached that conclusion? Could a paladin's crusade against the undead somehow put him at a moral disadvantage?

No matter—they didn't need to understand. They only needed to keep watching.

The elves fixed their eyes on the magic mirror. Other audiences across the world were doing the same.

Unlike the elves, who watched with gleeful anticipation, over in Lyon, Cade Watson stared at his own magic mirror with a deeply troubled expression, muttering under his breath, "You fool. Why are you trading words with him?"

Though Cade Watson himself had only encountered the lich briefly, he had heard more than enough stories about him from his own family. His respected father and his gifted younger brother Allen had both been rendered completely helpless against this lich. More devastatingly, he had completely overwhelmed them not in combat but in verbal argument.

Even when facing paladins and priests, this lich somehow managed to seize the moral high ground and lecture at everyone else.

The Radiant General was formidable, yes, but formidable only in battle. Trading words with this lich was a path to ruin.

Lyon and the Court of the Silver Moon were not the sole audience. Far away in the chaos realm, the tiflings watched on; in the Emerald Dreamwood, the druids; in Alkhemia, the new Alchemists' Council. Everyone Ambrose had ever sent a magic mirror to was watching now, watching and waiting for the Lyon forces to suffer the most spectacular humiliation of their lives, broadcast before the entire world.

Ambrose's voice still hung in the air: "State my crimes."

What a simple question! Cyril Roland had presided over the judgment of many undead, legendary liches among them.

The charges against a lich were straightforward enough: they killed for souls, then fashioned them into phylacteries.

But Cyril Roland could not lead with that charge. Marshaling seven legends and an entire legion over something so thin would look absurd.

He needed more. He needed worse.

He found his footing quickly, and his voice rang out across the water. "You conspired with lords of Hell to open an astral passage for githarks and red dragons, inviting foreign invaders to slaughter humanity! Your crimes cannot be forgiven!"

Ambrose let out a laugh. "Slaughtering humans is a crime, you say?"

"Obviously!" Cyril Roland shot back. "Slaughtering humans is the gravest evil imaginable. What do you have to say for yourself?!"

"Then I have a question for you. How did Lyon's forces come to be standing right in front of that astral passage? What reason brought Lyon's soldiers onto land that was never theirs to begin with?!"

Cyril Roland's brow creased. He had no answer.

Lyon had invaded the Unholy Kingdom, and it was precisely during that invasion that the astral passage had opened, inflicting catastrophic losses on the Lyon forces. To explain that sequence of events publicly would be a tangled mess that could take forever to unravel.

Ambrose gave him no chance to dodge. His voice cracked down like a whip: "It was Lyon that invaded the Unholy Kingdom without cause, intent on slaughtering every last tifling. If killing humans is a crime, can the same not be said for killing tiflings? Does killing other races not count?

"How many orcs has the Lyon Empire killed over the years? How many dwarves? How many tiflings? Where did your Leonine General earn his name and reputation? Shall I lay out the evidence? I may be a lich, but the blood on my hands is a fraction of that man's."

Ambrose did not pause for a response. The sky filled with visions: scene after scene of breathtaking atrocity, images of slaughter committed against other peoples. The executioners in every frame wore Lyon colors.

The tendons in Cyril Roland's sword hand stood out, not only because Ambrose had silenced him, but because he hadn't known. Had that damned butcher not even spared the children?

Cyril Roland and the Leonine General moved in different circles. The latter was a regional commander holding distant territories; Cyril Roland led something closer to a special operations force. Their paths had never crossed in any meaningful way. At most, he had caught secondhand reports of the other man's campaigns.

This was the first time he had ever seen a "heretic purge."

How could that man do something so savage and still call himself a paladin?

While Cyril Roland's composure cracked, a fellow paladin stepped up beside him and said quietly, "Roland, don't fall for it! This is illusion magic!"

Cyril Roland shuddered, cold sweat breaking at his temple.

Right. These were illusions conjured by the lich. He couldn't determine their veracity, and neither could he afford to let them shake him.

He drew a slow breath. "Thank you, Lucas."

Lucas was another legendary paladin—Cyril Roland's old partner, and always the calmest in any situation.

"Don't walk into the lich's trap," Lucas said. "He's distorting reality. We didn't come here to debate him."

Cyril Roland gave a single nod and finally drew the holy sword from his hip.

The Holy King's blade, anointed with the blood of the Lord of Dawn, was a divine artifact of the highest order in both historical significance and sheer power.

Cyril Roland raised the blade high and roared, "Lich, this kind of slander means nothing. All that Lyon does stands under the watching eye of the Lord of Dawn. We need no judgment from a creature of evil like you!"

The radiance blazed. A billion shards of golden light condensed into a single sweeping edge and hurled itself at the colossal skull hanging in the sky.

Holy light and dark magic collided. The visions shattered into fragments. The smoke-wrought skull exploded into dust. The blow punched a vast and gaping hole clean through the dark canopy overhead.

The holy sword's power was absolute.

The Lyon soldiers roared with one voice, resolute in their vow to destroy the lich. Their warship pressed onward.

The dark canopy slowly sealed itself shut and gathered once more into the shape of that great skull. Ambrose's voice returned from the sky above.

"Stung by your hypocrisy, are you? Won't you even ask me where the evidence came from before decrying it as a forgery? Is this the so-called justice of Lyon? Very well. Deny the massacre if you like, but this—this you cannot explain away."

The sky filled with new visions: a battlefield where githarks and Lyon soldiers clashed, and then the enormous time dragon descending from the heavens, its bulk crushing a great swathe of Lyon troops in blind, panicked chaos.

At the sight of it, the soldiers on the warships fell silent.

Most of them had heard that Lyon's campaign had ended in failure, but none of them had ever seen footage of it. The official dispatches had been vague—something about the Emperor taking to the field for the first time and making a mistake that led to the defeat.

Cyril Roland had never imagined that the emperor himself had been the one to crush a swath of his own soldiers.

Ambrose's voice came again: "Look well, people of Lyon. The one who killed the most humans was not the githark. It was your own emperor. The Unholy Kingdom was invaded without cause: they had no choice but to summon the githarks and the red dragon legions to defend themselves. They were protecting their own country and nothing more. Once I sent the Unholy Kingdom on its way, I dealt with the githark problem myself."

The vision shifted: Ambrose's meteor shower, obliterating the githark army in a cascade of falling fire.

This time, even the unflappable Lucas had nothing to say.

The sheer scale of those hundreds of meteors was terrifying. Had every one of them struck this ship instead, no one aboard could have survived.

They had arrived furious, primed for righteous reckoning, but with each successive revelation, the Lyon forces were left reeling.

Who, exactly, was the true villain here?

Ambrose never gave his opponents time to collect themselves. He asked them one final question. "I could have turned that meteor shower on you. But unlike Lyon, I am a reasonable entity. Cyril Roland, you are the Radiant General of Lyon. Is your Holy Light truly as righteous as you believe it to be?"

Cyril Roland's grip tightened on his holy sword. He raised his voice to the skull looming in the high sky. "I have lived my entire life without shame before the Holy Light!"

His blade had only ever cut down the undead. He had never slaughtered the innocent. On that, Cyril Roland's conscience was clear.

Then a shaft of holy light pierced the dark canopy, and a figure robed in silvery-white descended from above.

Ambrose's laughter rang across the sky once more, his voice laced with mockery. "Cyril Roland, do you then dare to pit your holy light against a paladin sworn to my service? Let us see, then, who truly represents righteousness."