Chapter 481: I, The Greatest Proponent of Peace
Chapter 481: I, The Greatest Proponent of Peace
The mindflayer's candor and Ambrose's resulting "courtesy" allowed the negotiation to go particularly smoothly.
Maybe this was simply the payoff of all his prior effort: given Ambrose's newfound status, a lot of hassle easily sorted itself out. People who started worrying about offending him would proactively smooth over small problems on his behalf.
Ambrose had secured both intelligence on enslaving the kouto and also gotten a fairly good read on the orcs' general attitude.
Thus, he floated the idea of a peace negotiation between the two nations.
"Winter's practically here already, and fighting's only going to get harder. Could the orcs work toward peace with Lyon?"
"Peace?"
The mindflayer general's expression flickered with surprise and even delight, but in the end, he just shook his head with a sigh.
"I'm afraid that won't be easy."
"What's so hard about it? World peace happens to be my specialty. I mediated the war between the dwarves and the elves, I stopped a githark invasion, and I even helped the merfolk beat back Demogorgon's lackeys."
Ambrose spread his hands, full of confidence. "I'm the greatest proponent of world peace!"
Urbano Pacheco felt a strange sense of unreality. A mindflayer getting dragged out and put in charge as a general was one thing, but now a lich was out here championing world peace too? The world was changing far too fast. A short-lived species like the mindflayers really couldn't keep up.
"I'd love a ceasefire too, honestly. It's just not possible."
Urbano Pacheco could only explain the situation to Ambrose. The orcs had suffered terribly under Lyon in the past. These days, the largest slave populations within Lyon's borders were either dwarves or orcs, and treated like livestock. After breaching a city, Lyon's forces never bothered extending any rights to the orcs. Anyone fit to be enslaved got sent off as a slave, and anyone who wasn't got killed outright. That was when Allen had first realized that Lyon was in the wrong.
Whole orc families had been wiped out entirely. How exactly were they supposed to let go of that kind of hatred?
It was only thanks to the current commander being a mindflayer—who possessed none of that bone-deep, all-consuming hatred for Lyon—that the orcs could even approach this war with any rationality at all. Any other orc commander wouldn't care how wide the Emerald River was; they'd swim across it themselves just to tear Lyon's people apart.
Urbano Pacheco sighed. "Master Megaman, I understand your reasoning. Fighting on and off, maintaining the status quo—that's the ideal outcome for an arms dealer like yourself. But unfortunately, this peace talk is unlikely to succeed. You don't really understand the state the orcs are in right now. A lot of the time, my psychic link isn't even about issuing orders. Much of what I'm doing is suppressing the orcs' rage. There's no room for negotiation with Lyon as far as they're concerned. Even if I agreed to it, the orc king would take an axe to my head that very same day."
"But the war's already turned into a quagmire. Do the orcs really intend to drag warships onto the Emerald River? Are they prepared to starve half their own population just to keep this war going?"
Ambrose didn't know much about military matters, but he knew that shipbuilding would take a long time, at the very least.
Dragging this out into a war of attrition with Lyon meant the conflict would continue for years at a minimum. The longer this grinding stalemate continued, the more likely the orcs would break. Their nation simply didn't have the capacity to sustain a war at this level of intensity for that long.
"The decisive battle is coming soon. Winter's almost here, and the Emerald River will freeze over. With a bit of magic added on top, it'll turn into solid, unbreakable ice."
"You're willing to say that out loud, so I take it Lyon already knows."
Urbano Pacheco's tentacles crossed over each other, like a man's beard tying itself into knots. "I'd certainly like to keep it secret, but the orcs' grasp of magic is simply too poor. Pulling off large-scale strategic magic like this successfully is hard enough on its own, and keeping it secret on top of that is basically impossible. Lyon's people have known for ages. There's no hiding it from anyone."
Urbano Pacheco felt genuinely helpless about the whole situation. Going by typical mindflayer habits, he should have quietly reshaped his host body, waited until reaching maturity, then slipped away to find some remote, obscure village to settle in. There, he would hypnotize a handful of orcs through psychic control, implant them with tadpoles, and breed a new generation of mindflayers.
Then, once he grew old himself, he'd have the young ones scatter and go into hiding again, living out their lives in this simple, safe manner.
Perhaps, someday, when mindflayers from other planes returned in force, his kind could finally board their conch-shell warships and make a return to their glorious empires of yore.
But as things stood now, Urbano Pacheco had been exposed, seized by the orcs, and turned into nothing more than a war machine. He was bound to the orcs now. Shared glory might not be guaranteed, but shared ruin certainly was.
If he hadn't been forced into it, he wouldn't have cared whether humans and orcs fought each other at all.
What made things even worse was that the orcs, overall, simply weren't as strong as Lyon. The orcs' position in the current war might look decent on the surface, but the moment Lyon finally got fed up and pulled troops back from its other borders to reinforce this front, they would be utterly crushed.
Urbano Pacheco understood perfectly well that the best possible outcome of this war was for the orcs to lose, while still dealing Lyon a heavy enough blow that Lyon would be stretched too thin and slide into decline as a result.
Privately, he suspected the orcs probably wouldn't live to see the day Lyon actually collapsed. If some brilliant, capable leader emerged partway through to turn Lyon's fortunes around, then the orcs really would be left to die clad in nothing but grief and bitter resentment.
Centuries of accumulated population and national strength simply couldn't vanish in such a short span of time.
The mindflayer shared the same view as Ambrose: a behemoth like Lyon couldn't be smashed apart by outside force alone. It could only be brought down by waiting for it to fracture from within.
The trouble was, the orcs couldn't accept waiting. They were desperate to smash Lyon to pieces right then and there, but their urgency only served to hammer Lyon into a single solid, unified slab of steel.
Urbano Pacheco wanted out of this war too, but he genuinely had no say in the matter.
Perhaps that was exactly why Urbano Pacheco had been so candid with Ambrose. The mindflayer might well be hoping Ambrose could introduce some kind of variable into a war that was otherwise destined to end in defeat.
Still, peace talks were simply impossible. The orcs would never accept negotiating with Lyon's people.
Not until Lyon's blood filled the Emerald River would the orcs ever stop.
This was the inevitable outcome of extreme racial and religious ideology. Once Lyon put that banner on display, everyone else had no choice but to fight back with something equally extreme.
If you're already discriminating against my race, wouldn't I lose out by not doing the same?
If you're already enslaving us in religious fanaticism, wouldn't refusing to match that fanaticism just mean waiting around to die?!
Ambrose was starting to understand why Arthur Lyon had treated even the dragons as equals. Perhaps he'd already seen the dangers of extremism back then and had tried his hardest to prevent exactly this kind of outcome. He just hadn't expected the momentum of old habits to be quite this powerful; a single Arthur Lyon alone was nowhere near enough to turn that tide.
In other words, the orcs really were now locked into a fight to the death with Lyon, no matter the cost.
Having confirmed this much, Ambrose dropped the idea of hosting a peace summit between the two nations.
Many assumed incorrectly that the "fight to the death" mentality came from some momentary surge of passion. But the reality of warfare was relentless: the fighting occurred day in, day out; people died every single day, hour, second. A war wasn't just about the initial screaming rush when the horns of war sounded.
Over the course of an extended war, fighters would be constantly bombarded with information: the situation on the various fronts, the war as a whole, and the comrades that were dying all around them.
Such conditions could quench even the fiercest blaze of passion for warfare.
So what gave the orcs the motivation to keep fighting? It was no less than a deep-rooted desire for vengeance, vengeance for one's family, vengeance for one's nation.
Lyon and the orcs were exactly alike in this regard. It wasn't a matter of who was right or wrong. This war hadn't started on impulse. It was the eruption of grievances that had been building up for years.
Still, this wasn't a major problem for Ambrose. He had only been looking for an excuse to stir things up in the first place. If peace talks wouldn't work, he'd just switch to a different angle.
He mulled it over for a moment. "If the orcs hate Lyon that much, and Lyon hates the orcs just as much, why not settle it with a duel before the real fighting starts? The orc king against the emperor of Lyon. Do you think the orcs would go for that?"
Urbano Pacheco froze for a moment. "Master Megaman, weren't you just talking about peace a second ago...?"
That certainly wasn't how this lich had been framing things earlier. He had brought up his role in mediating the dwarf-elf war, and even claimed that no one understood world peace better than he did.
"A duel serves world peace just as well! If the emperor dies in the fight, the war's probably over right then and there. Win or lose, everyone gets some closure, and a lot fewer people end up dead either way. Isn't that a win for everyone involved?"
It sounded reasonable enough on the surface, but that kind of rhetoric didn't really land with a mindflayer.
Mindflayers had a peculiar way of passing down their racial heritage: the moment their metamorphosis was complete, they reached full maturity instantly. Everything they needed to know would simply surface in their mind. In other words, every single mindflayer was both mentally formidable and, in a sense, a seasoned veteran from birth.
Everything one generation had ever experienced would be distilled and passed straight down to the next, which meant there were essentially no fools among mindflayers. The kind of rhetoric Ambrose was using might work on simpletons, but it simply wasn't enough to fool a mindflayer.
This lich was clearly up to something, but Urbano Pacheco couldn't figure out exactly what.
Rumor had it that this lich was extremely greedy for gold. Was he egging the two kings into a duel just to... sell tickets?
As absurd as that idea sounded, it seemed to be the only explanation that actually made sense. It surely couldn't really be for world peace.
"That's not a bad suggestion, Master Megaman. The orc king would probably relish the chance to publicly cut down the emperor of Lyon. But how can you guarantee Lyon's side would agree to it? Their emperor doesn't exactly strike me as some valiant warrior."
From where Urbano Pacheco stood, the more variables that entered the battlefield, the better. The orcs currently looked to have the upper hand, but there was no real chance of them actually defeating Lyon outright. More variables meant a better chance he himself would survive.
"Don't worry. The emperor of Lyon isn't nearly as hopeless as people think he is."
To most people, transforming into a dragon and accidentally crushing his own people was the emperor of Lyon's greatest disgrace. Nobody thought an emperor like that belonged anywhere near a battlefield.
Even though the emperor had shown some improvement since then, that improvement was generally chalked up to cleverness, not courage.
Only Ambrose knew that, if it actually came down to a duel, this orc king would get beaten so badly by the "Emperor of Lyon" that even his own mother wouldn't recognize him.
But that, too, worked in Ambrose's favor. Once everyone witnessed the Dragon Tyrant's revival firsthand, the next step would be for every race to band together and gang up on the dragon. If everything went smoothly, every single problem could potentially be solved in a single day.
Urbano Pacheco said thoughtfully, "I'll do my best to talk the orc king into it, but I can't guarantee he'll actually agree."
"This war is one the orcs are guaranteed to lose. A duel is their only real shot at turning defeat into victory. The orc king sounds like someone who values honor above almost everything, and you've got your psychic influence on top of that. If even all of that combined can't convince the orc king to accept a duel, then I can only assume your orc king is secretly a goblin in disguise."
Urbano Pacheco chuckled. That point actually made some sense.
But even if the orc king accepted, which was likely, all this rested on one condition: that Ambrose could actually arrange for the emperor of Lyon to participate in the duel in the first place.
On what grounds would he do so?
As the lich himself had pointed out, the orcs were doomed to failure. This was exactly why they needed to gamble everything on one bold move. But Lyon had no such need.
Who in their right mind would willingly give up a clear advantage for what could very well amount to suicide?