Lich for Hire

Chapter 405: Full Retreat

With dawn came daybreak, the promise that righteousness has triumphed over evil, that the world will be bathed once more in light.

Arthur Lyon had not put much into that strike. Yet it split the celestial warrior open with effortless ease.

A celestial warrior composed entirely of holy light should have been able to ignore a wound like that—yet somehow, that one unassuming cut had left a gash that refused to close.

Lomberton Buto's severed form fell into the sea. He could still float, but no matter what he tried, the wound would not heal.

He did not struggle. Instead he looked up at the opponent now drifting in the air above him. "So it's you."

Arthur Lyon did not acknowledge his identity aloud. He reached out through a soul link, which was available to both heroic spirits and the undead.

"Lomberton, it's been a long time."

Lomberton Buto's eyes scattered fine motes of golden light, like tears.

"Arthur, I've been waiting for you in the divine realm for seventeen centuries. I always knew you wouldn't just disappear like that."

"I'm sorry, Lomberton. I failed to protect you all."

Arthur Lyon's body was trembling. Lomberton Buto had been only sixteen when he died. He was a boy who had looked up to Arthur as an older brother. There had been more than a dozen like him, all of them having placed their lives in Arthur Lyon's hands. Only two had survived.

Not all of the fallen had worshipped the Lord of Dawn, nor had all of them found their way into a god's realm. More than a few had been extinguished entirely, their souls dissolved, leaving nothing behind, no trace of their ever having existed.

But that was the cruelty of war. It destroyed the best of the world right before your eyes, and there was nothing you could do to stop it.

"It's all right. We never regretted stepping on the battlefield. We never regretted following you to bring down the tyrant. We—well, never mind. I don't have much time. Arthur, we'll be waiting for you in the divine realm. This time, you can't break your promise again."

Lomberton Buto did not ask why Arthur Lyon was working for a lich. He trusted Arthur unconditionally, the same as he had seventeen centuries before. Whatever had come to pass in the mortal world, so long as Arthur Lyon was here, dawn would not fail to arrive.

Lomberton Buto's form shattered completely, dissolving into ten thousand streams of golden light that rose toward the sky. The celestial warrior had returned, at last, to the divine realm of the Lord of Dawn.

Every last person who witnessed the sight was struck silent.

To most people, strength and weakness were things that could be perceived by sight. If a needle could pierce an elephant's hide, and an elephant could stomp a warrior to death, then that needle should be able to beat the same warrior.

It was simple, intuitive, transitive logic: defeat this person, and all those this person has defeated should pose no problem to you, unless you were careless, or unless the match was fixed.

The Lyon forces, who did not know Arthur Lyon's identity, eyed that single strike that had severed the towering celestial warrior with sheer disbelief.

Every soldier had the same question: how?

On what basis had a paladin who wouldn't even give his name cut down, in one stroke, a celestial warrior summoned by the combined power of an entire legion and seven legends?

With his centuries of experience, Ambrose knew that even a simple Grease spell might send a legendary warrior to his death on the spot. Given an opportune moment, even a novice might best a seasoned veteran.

Ambrose didn't understand just what Arthur had done, either. Holy power had never been his domain, but he could tell that the force behind Arthur Lyon's cut had been weak, several hundred times weaker than the celestial warrior it had destroyed.

Still, his ignorance didn't matter. The Dullahan Gareth, an authority on all martial matters, was right by his side.

And Gareth had watched the fight attentively throughout. When Ambrose asked, he explained, "It's a beautifully subtle technique executed with masterful control of holy light. He didn't cut the celestial warrior's body open. He merely threaded his own holy power into it and disrupted the flow of holy light within it."

A revelation struck Ambrose immediately: it was like jamming a mismatched gear into a machine and letting it tear itself apart, or like his own heavy-handed modifications to the Eternal Hourglass, stuffing it full of extraneous components that only served to damage it.

The principle sounded almost trivial; the execution was anything but. To use your own holy light to interfere with the inner workings of someone else's was the stuff of fantasy.

Take a mage, for example: Ambrose, drawing on the full power of the Golden Throne, could channel devastating spells, but what he could not do was reach his own magic into another mage's body and disrupt their mana from within. That was beyond him, and was several orders of magnitude harder than simply killing the mage outright.

"Arthur Lyon's control over holy light is the finest of any mortal alive," Gareth marveled. "Didn't that strike make it obvious that he's the chosen of the Lord of Dawn? Gods, I'd love to fight him."

Ambrose gave Gareth a look that said, "Don't even think about it." He was never going to allow Gareth to raise a hand against Arthur Lyon, not even in sparring.

Arthur Lyon was a heroic spirit. Every fight drained his soulfire substantially, and Ambrose was the one who had to replenish it. One bout would already incur an exorbitant expense. Fighting someone like Gareth would be equivalent to the cost of a war, and Ambrose would be utterly ruined.

If Gareth needed something to do, he could go pound on the dragons. Leave Arthur Lyon alone!

Out on the open sea, the Lyon forces had no Gareth to explain things to them. Every soldier was stupefied and amazed by the fight.

When Arthur Lyon rose from the water again and hung in the air above them, his voice was unchanged.

"I'll repeat myself. Leave now, and no one will be harmed. If you press on, I can make no guarantees."

His words brought a hot flush of shame to Cyril Roland's face. He had not imagined he could lose so completely. Every scrap of their combined power undone by a single casual stroke... Was this man even stronger than the Silvermoon Knight?

Had it truly come to this? Did he have to concede defeat?

Cyril Roland tightened his grip on his holy sword and rose from the sea, drifting until he stood before Arthur Lyon.

"Who are you? How can I not know anything about a paladin of such power? Are you truly from Lyon? Even if it costs me my life, I have to know."

There was no fear in him. The day he became a paladin, he had made his peace with the possibility of death.

The power of the person before him would not make him flinch. He needed to understand the truth.

Before that celestial warrior had dissolved, he had said, "So it's you."

That warrior had recognized this paladin, which meant he was almost certainly no imposter. He was truly a follower of the Lord of Dawn. Then why? Why would someone like that serve as a lich's enforcer?

Cyril Roland could not bring himself to believe that the Holy Light would favor a paladin in a lich's employ. This struck at the very heart of his faith. He could not die without an answer.

Arthur Lyon hesitated. He had no idea how to respond.

Even seventeen centuries ago, he had never been skilled at conversation. All those centuries locked away in the seal, never speaking to anyone, had dulled his conversational edge further.

The more he said, the more likely he was to be exposed. And the moment his identity came out, Lyon would fracture within days, at which point every neighboring state would seize the opportunity to strike, and thousands of innocents would die because of him.

Arthur Lyon found himself looking up, almost involuntarily, toward the sky shrouded in darkness. If it were that lich up there, he'd have an answer for this in a heartbeat.

Ambrose did not disappoint him. From the sky above came the lich's deeply satisfied laugh.

"You foolish paladins... Do you really think you lost so badly because my servant is more powerful than you? Do you think there exists a paladin stronger than your Silvermoon Knight in this world?"

Cyril Roland frowned. He thought to himself inwardly, "You're telling me, after all that, that the opponent wasn't actually strong?" The lich had to be deliberately humiliating him.

Ambrose, as always, pressed straight on: "Before this battle began, I asked which of us stood on the side of justice. It's clear that my side has won out.

"My servant is formidable, yes, but not so formidable that he alone should be able to crush seven Lyon legends. Don't you understand yet? The Lord of Dawn himself was telling you where justice lies! My servant needed only a single stroke to settle matters, while everything you threw yourselves into building was shattered in an instant.

"The Lord of Dawn stands with me. It is He who tilted the outcome of this battle. In this moment, it is I, a lich, who am the chosen of the Holy Light!"

At those final words, every Lyon soldier's eyes went wide. Even Cyril Roland nearly lost his grip on the Blood of Dawn. The Radiant General pressed a hand to his chest as a crushing breathlessness came over him, darkening the edges of his vision.

This lich, claiming to be the chosen of the Lord of Dawn?

Any other lich saying such a thing would have roused nothing but contempt and a Sacred Slash. But Cyril Roland could muster no argument against Ambrose.

He felt the entire edifice of faith he had built over fifty-some years give way.

If the lich represented righteousness, what did that make him?

His body swayed. A firm hand seized his arm.

"Snap out of it, Cyril!" Lucas's voice broke against his ear like a thunderclap. This was his closest friend, whose voice had steadied him more times than he could count. Reason permeated through the fog in his mind.

Cyril Roland summoned the last of his composure and forced out three words: "All forces, retreat."

It was not that he lacked the courage to raise his sword against the enemy. It was that he no longer knew at whom that sword should be raised. They had to retreat. At minimum, he had to take a step back, clear his head, and think.