Lich for Hire

Chapter 446: A Match Made in Heaven

At Ambrose's current level of resources, a ninth-tier spell was not particularly meaningful. He could cast Storm of Revenge through gold-fueled means easily enough.

But now that there was a boon from Thanos embedded in his hand, the deity had a ready excuse to involve himself in Ambrose's affairs at any time.

There was nothing to be done about it. The gods didn't require mortal consent to bestow their "gifts." As long as the gift didn't conceal anything harmful, deities were free to distribute their power as they pleased.

When Shara shared knowledge of the Dark Weft with Ambrose, it had contained a locating function, but that couldn't deliberately harm him on its own. When Levitra had forcibly elevated him to a legend and pressed unwanted power over fate back into his hands, she hadn't hidden any trap in it either—only a restriction on what the Loom of Fate could do.

So Ambrose had no particular fear that the lightning branded on his palm would suddenly reduce him to ash.

The problem was that this gift could not be refused.

"Aion really should be stricter about deities going around forcing presents on people," Ambrose thought to himself. A decree forbidding unsolicited divine gifts would be a welcome development. Better yet, strike Thanos dead on the spot and redistribute his domains to Ambrose directly. That would constitute real fairness.

Unfortunately, Aion did not accept suggestions from mortals.

Such was the plight of the common person: voiceless in the face of the divine. The gods sat high above and did exactly as they pleased. If any of them wanted a proper contest, they could come down to the mortal plane and fight him fairly.

Enough brooding. Ambrose shook his head. The practical question was what Thanos intended to do with this leverage.

Thanos was, by all accounts, a deity of tremendous power, who openly advertised the location of his divine realm to the other gods and essentially dared anyone to come pick a fight.

Many, including even the likes of the Lord of Dawn, had tried, but none had managed to pluck so much as a strand of hair from him over the centuries.

More than anything, that served to illustrate just how powerful he was.

A deity's strength came from roughly three sources. First, the power of their divine domain. Second, their divinity. Third, their fundamental nature—the raw substance of what they were before any divine blessing.

Take Tiamat as an example.

Her domain was tied to the chromatic dragons, and she was a racial deity. On a scale of ten, this rated perhaps a six; the dragons were powerful, so the domain had weight. Her divinity? Two at most. Tiamat had never developed deep mastery of her own divine power or particular facility in its application.

But her fundamental nature? Eight, possibly nine. Draconic gods were simply built differently. Even without drawing on divine power, she could crush most weaker deities through sheer physical presence alone.

The Lord of Dawn, by contrast, was a faith-based deity. His domain was light, vast and conceptually potent, worth seven or eight points easily. He was a greater divinity, though Lyon's internal fractures were currently limiting his available faith, so perhaps a six on that scale. His fundamental nature? Tradition held that he had ascended from human mortality. As a baseline human form, there wasn't much to work with there—two points, and that was being generous.

By that rough accounting, Tiamat could go toe-to-toe with the Lord of Dawn in an actual confrontation. The Lord of Dawn probably wouldn't lose, considering his enormous reserves of faith, but it wouldn't be a clean win either.

Now consider Thanos.

His domains were destruction, retribution, and catastrophe. Each of those words was enough to make a deity flinch. In terms of pure combat and destructive potential, he scored a ten, without question.

As a major conceptual deity, even accounting for his volatile temper and general chaos-loving nature, he was at minimum an eight on divinity.

His fundamental nature? Tradition identified him as a primordial titan. He wasn't inferior to the draconic gods in the slightest, and he had the fighting instincts of someone who had never stopped sharpening themselves. Nine, perhaps ten.

These were rough approximations, of course. Real divine conflicts didn't come down to adding up numbers. Even Aion had been stolen from, once. Every deity had their blind spots and their moments of vulnerability. But even when the Goddess of Fate was smiling at Ambrose, he still needed to keep these fundamentals in view.

Thanos was a deity who could end the world on a bad morning. That kind of power meant he had any number of ways to reach into Ambrose's affairs.

Aiolos, for instance, was something Thanos had fashioned on a passing whim.

If he genuinely decided to cause trouble, producing ten Aioloses a day would barely register as effort.

Direct confrontation had a zero percent chance of success. The only path forward was finding a way to satisfy the deity's demand.

So what, precisely, did Thanos want?

Compared to the opaque pronouncements of most divine entities, Thanos was, in a sense, easier to read. From their interaction, it was clear that he was a greedy, easily-bored thrill-seeker who functioned like an overpowered child.

But the demand itself was strange. A wedding?

What did a wedding mean to Thanos? Was he bored of being single? Did he want to crash someone's celebration and steal their bouquet?

Without understanding that, Ambrose had nothing to work with.

In his divine realm, Thanos sat on his throne amidst the ruins, watching Ambrose with keen amusement. That brand in the lich's palm served as a perfect tracking device. He could locate Ambrose at any moment and observe his movements whenever he pleased.

This lich was genuinely interesting, and far more entertaining than that useless Aiolos.

Thanos had phrased his demand deliberately vaguely, like scattering rocks around an anthill to see whether the ants could find their way through a lethal maze.

He enjoyed this kind of game. He was powerful enough that he rarely needed to think hard about anything anymore, so he let mortals use their cleverness to amuse him. It was a perfectly satisfactory diversion.

"Just what will this lich do?"

Under Thanos's expectant gaze, Ambrose did something straightforward: he contacted the God of Alchemy.

He no longer had his divine coin, but communicating with the God of Alchemy no longer required it. Every magic mirror was connected to the God of Alchemy's divine realm. Ambrose picked one up and dialed.

The prerequisite, of course, was that the God of Alchemy was willing to answer. Not everyone had that kind of relationship with him.

The God of Alchemy appeared holding something that looked like a hammer but was made entirely of brilliantly faceted crystal, a cluster of instruments Ambrose couldn't identify arrayed before him. He appeared to be in the middle of an experiment.

He glanced up while fitting pieces together. "Didn't I already send you your cut? You're not calling to audit my accounts, are you?"

Ambrose had, in fact, briefly considered whether the God of Alchemy had skimmed even more gold from Flynn. But that wasn't the priority right now.

"The Lord of Storms has taken an interest in me." He raised his palm to show the brand.

The God of Alchemy's hands jerked. The crystal hammer slipped from his grip, hit the table, and detonated in a cascade of blinding light that reduced everything on the table's surface to cinders.

The God of Alchemy waved the smoke aside, laid a hand flat on the table, and everything restored itself. Every component, every instrument, was exactly as it had been, the crystal hammer included.

Being the God of Alchemy meant he had the ability to perfectly rewind any stage of any experiment. Still, he was clearly shaken.

"How did you manage to provoke Thanos?" he asked in exasperation. "I thought you had a good relationship with his follower. You know I only possess intermediate divinity. I genuinely cannot stand up to Thanos."

Was there anyone among the gods willing to say they could withstand this violent and powerful deity? Even if the God of Alchemy ascended to greater divinity, he would absolutely still lose to Thanos. It wasn't a fight worth contemplating.

"Don't be so pessimistic. It's supposed to be a blessing. He's granted me one free daily use of Storm of Revenge."

"You were my student," the God of Alchemy said dryly. "I know exactly what you're like. If this were purely a good thing, would you be calling me about it?"

"You wound me," Ambrose said. "Haven't I been filling your divine coffers this whole time? You know you can feel me doing it. How can you say I've never given you anything?"

With the Blacktide appearing on more and more battlefields, with the clients for Ambrose's necro-alchemy multiplying, the world at large had developed a dramatically new conception of what alchemy was capable of.

Add the magic mirrors, which had allowed some of the most powerful figures in every kingdom to witness Ambrose's influence, and the result was an ongoing surge in the God of Alchemy's divine power.

He had long since recovered from his earlier weakness. He was growing still. Ascending to greater divinity was a matter of time.

All of this, by any accounting, was Ambrose's doing.

The two of them had always had a tendency to underestimate each other's contributions aloud, while quietly working hard for each other's benefit. They were bound by the same thread of fate. When one prospered, so would the other; when one was hurt, so was the other.

"I'm not trying to dodge the issue," the God of Alchemy said, sighing. "But do you have any idea how powerful Thanos actually is? Why in the world did you get mixed up with him?"

"I didn't go looking for trouble." Ambrose explained everything, then asked, "I just want whatever intelligence you have on the Lord of Storms. I don't think this is really about getting Ariel married off. I need to understand what he actually wants."

Predicting the divine through divination was impossible, since deities were shielded from his sight. That meant he had to ask someone who knew.

He had expected the God of Alchemy to hedge or deflect. Instead, the answer came to him immediately. "The Lord of Storms is simply in love with watching people struggle to survive. The wedding isn't the point—the point is the choices mortals make when disaster falls on them. What he loves is a great epic. The courage of mortals. The tears of joy that follow suffering endured and overcome. And then he bestows glory on the survivors."

In his ruined divine realm, Thanos burst into laughter, delighted. "This tiny little God of Alchemy actually understands me reasonably well. Yes, that's exactly it, though it's getting a bit formulaic. I've watched so many standard heroes' epics that I could recite them all. How many of them would hold a candle to Arthur Lyon at his finest?"

He pulled his gaze back. The lich had figured out what to do. If he kept watching, he'd spoil the ending for himself, and then the story would be no fun at all.

"Don't disappoint me, mortal, or I will be very unhappy. Hahaha!"

Thanos's voice rolled through his divine realm, resolving into a thousand peals of thunder. His believers, scattered throughout the ruins, fell to their knees and began to sing.

As Thanos's attention withdrew, the God of Alchemy murmured, "He's pulled back now. That lunatic's idea of entertainment is watching mortals struggle and scream, like pouring boiling water on an anthill. Never mind a wedding. What I think he wants to see is one man trying to navigate a situation with multiple women simultaneously, and then dying horribly at the moment everything seems to have worked out—with maximum suffering for all parties involved, and the protagonist looking absolutely wretched at the end.

"If you can put on a show like that, you might just satisfy him."

Ambrose: "..."

What an absolute lunatic.

The Lord of Storms and the kouto goddess were genuinely made for each other.