Chapter 492: A Strategy Against the Dragon Tyrant
Chapter 492: A Strategy Against the Dragon Tyrant
It turned out the Dragon Tyrant, as Arthur Lyon remembered him, was unbeatable.
After a full series of parameter enhancements in the dreamscape, Naomi proceeded to thrash Ambrose, Catherine, and Arthur Lyon combined, grinding them into the floor.
They had had forty-seven all-out battles in a row. Naomi won forty.
Ambrose pointed at Arthur Lyon. "Didn't you say you were certain you could win?"
Arthur Lyon said, a little sheepish, "I suppose I had rather good luck back then."
Ambrose was speechless. He'd already bumped Arthur Lyon's parameters past the height of his power, and Naomi's combat instincts and her handling of temporal energy were still nowhere close to the real Dragon Tyrant's.
Even so, the win rate had been pathetic.
What were they even supposed to do?
What made Ambrose even more despairing was exactly what Arthur Lyon had said: bringing in more fighters barely helped. The only person who could meaningfully threaten the dragon was Arthur Lyon. Ten more legends like Ambrose would barely change anything.
Even when Ambrose threw out his Dice of Fate to ensure Catherine's arrow would land, the dragon simply used the power of time to accelerate past that particular "unlucky" moment.
The hit occurred, technically, but it had already been consigned to the past by the time it did so. Ambrose was genuinely amazed. Had Arthur Lyon been exaggerating? Was something this terrifying actually possible to defeat?
The only idea Ambrose could think of was resurrecting his senior, Mr. Misfortune, and having him sacrifice himself again to sever all of the Dragon Tyrant's causal threads to this world. Then, the material plane's full power could be used to drive him out.
But short of Aion's direct intervention, no deity could bring back someone who had vanished from the river of fate. That was the cost of manipulating causality. Even Wish couldn't undo it.
"I wonder how Harvey's been getting along..."
Ambrose briefly considered whether the boy could be made to sacrifice himself, but quickly dropped the idea.
However talented Harvey was, a few months of training couldn't close a gap of several centuries. Even becoming a legend within fifty years would be an impressive feat.
"There's got to be something. I refuse to accept that there isn't."
Ambrose made a sweeping gesture. An army of the undead materialized around him in dense rows.
Over a hundred Blacktide-class warships, two thousand undead mechs of various configurations, tens of thousands of unmanned drones, and a Grunt army numbering in the millions...
Naomi, still cheerfully soaring overhead, had been enjoying herself enormously. Never in her life would she have been this powerful, but the dreamscape was making it all possible. But at the sight of the densely packed mechanized undead horde spreading out below her, Naomi nearly dropped out of the sky in shock.
Arthur Lyon stared at the spectacle. "Isn't this a bit excessive?!"
Ambrose humphed. "I don't believe the dragon has infinite power. I'm an undead, and undead tactics mean overwhelming numbers. Naomi, one more round. If you can't take it, just surrender. There's no shame in it."
With a thought, the monstrous undead army surged toward the dragon in a suicidal charge.
Naomi jolted, and immediately cast Haste on herself to flee.
The temporal distortion field flickered rapidly as Naomi blipped through the undead ranks like a ghost, threading through the press of bodies at impossible angles.
She could fight back, but she didn't dare stop moving.
There were simply too many of them. The attacks were too densely packed. She faced a saturating barrage every second, enough to burn through her external temporal defenses in moments.
The instant she spent even a fraction of her attention on a counterattack, she'd take hundreds of hits.
Even so, Ambrose's undead army eventually wore itself out trying to catch her.
The dragon needed to expend energy, but so did the undead.
The Blacktide-class ships didn't have infinite ammo. The mechs burned through their mana reserves. After a long battle, Naomi had outlasted the entire million-strong army by doing nothing but evading. She staggered out exhausted by the end—but still standing, barely.
The power of time could handle crowds, but Ambrose's crowds were simply too large. The drain on Naomi had been enormous.
Catherine was about to say something consoling when she saw Ambrose practically dancing with excitement.
"It works! The Dragon Tyrant is vulnerable to overwhelming numbers!"
Catherine said, "You threw a million troops at a single target. Who wouldn't be vulnerable?"
Even a minor deity would have been reduced to running from a force that large, let alone a mortal.
From Catherine's perspective, though, this tactic was meaningless.
The Dragon Tyrant wasn't stupid. Ambrose's million-strong army had materialized out of nowhere just now. In a real battle, the dragon would never let himself be surrounded like that.
Ambrose said, "No. Knowing it works is what matters. Knowing it works means we've found the right approach. Against the Dragon Tyrant, the answer is saturating fire and attrition. It's the most direct approach there is. As for how we lure him in, isn't the upcoming summit the perfect opportunity?"
"Are you planning to set up a million-strong army at the summit venue? You spent that long building one Blacktide, and it's already been destroyed. Don't even think about a hundred Blacktides, or several thousand mithril mechs. You probably couldn't assemble a force like that in several centuries."
Catherine knew Ambrose's financial situation fairly well from the close trading ties between the elves and his operations. The Blacktide still hadn't been rebuilt. A hundred Blacktides, and thousands of mithril mechs—that was a dream that might not even be achievable in Ambrose's lifetime.
"No, no! When I say I've found the problem, I don't mean I have all these troops. I mean I've figured out what type of attack actually works. Look at that last battle. A lot of what we threw at the dragon was wasted effort. The power of time might look as if it works against any attack, but the exertion on Naomi's end varies quite significantly. First, mass area-of-effect attacks like Storm of Revenge have vanishingly small impact on the Dragon Tyrant.
"Against these attacks, the Dragon Tyrant uses the power of time on itself to speed it up or skip forward in time. I'll explain with raw data..."
Ambrose's arms traced arcs in the air as he sketched out a table. He pointed at the data. "We know that the Dragon Tyrant's power over time can affect any material item or energy, save for Arthur's Sacred Slash. I'll let the Dragon Tyrant's default energy consumption against mass area-of-effect attacks be 100 units of energy.
"Against ranged attacks, even a small Fireball that I lob at it, the Dragon Tyrant will surely need to expend at least 1 unit of energy per attack to disrupt it. The ratio isn't going to be precise, but you get the rough idea.
"Casting Storm of Revenge costs many times more energy than casting a hundred Fireballs, but a hundred Fireballs consumes as much of the Dragon Tyrant's energy as a single Storm of Revenge. Do you get what I'm saying?"
Neither Catherine nor Arthur Lyon were fools. They quickly grasped Ambrose's point: the most effective attacks against the Dragon Tyrant were low-cost single-target spells in bulk.
Ambrose was very relieved he didn't have to explain further. Though Catherine had a limited grasp on mortal psychology, her fundamentals were very strong. Ambrose continued, "Many of the attacks I tried out just now were useless."
Ambrose made a sweeping gesture. Every large warship vanished, because the warships relied primarily on magitech cannons. A cannonball and a thrown rock had roughly the same effect on the dragon, but the difference in production cost was staggering.
The mechs went next. Despite the dragon's enormous size, trying to hit him in close combat with mithril mechs was futile. No matter how many close-combat mechs there were, the dragon's energy expenditure in dodging them remained largely constant while the mechs burned through far more.
The Grunt infantry were largely unnecessary too, for the same reason, though their poison gas did have some use, so he kept a portion of them.
Ambrose began reconfiguring his army from the ground up, piece by piece, until he finally had something new.
The core was a massive swarm of micro-drones, armed primarily with rapid-fire ranged cannons. Each shot did little damage, but was just enough to register as a threat to the dragon.
A small contingent of Grunts served as expendable troops, their kamikaze poison-cloud detonations being useful for restricting the dragon's movement range.
This time, Ambrose didn't put the exhausted Naomi back in as the target. He simply generated a simulated time dragon directly.
It wasn't as nimble as Naomi, so Ambrose added an energy cap to keep things fair.
The battle began again. Ambrose's newly configured undead army opened fire in a continuous torrent.
The dragon, true to form, was already warping time at range to throw off the projectiles. Shot after shot streamed past without making contact.
But that was only the beginning.
After about a minute, the dragon started taking hits. Its energy recovery couldn't keep pace with the drain. No matter how the time dragon shifted its approach, as long as the drone barrage continued, the enormous energy expenditure eventually ground the dragon to death.
This time around, the dragon's energy was depleted dozens of times faster than before, but the cost of fielding this new undead army was several times lower than the previous configuration.
Ambrose paused the simulation—guns blazing, bullet trails filling the air like a storm—and pointed at the storm of projectiles for Catherine and Arthur Lyon's benefit. "Low-cost and low-damage units generating a dense barrage of ranged fire is the most efficient drain tool there is! Even the Dragon Tyrant can't deflect every raindrop in a rainstorm!"
Arthur Lyon marveled. "If we'd had something like this back then, there would have been far fewer casualties."
Back in that war, they'd fought with swords and staves. They'd never had anything like rapid-fire weapons. With rifles like these, the other dragons, too, would have been easily shredded.
But Catherine spotted the problem immediately. "A real fight won't be that simple. For one thing, the dragon won't just stand there. It'll actively attack back, and your undead troops will start taking losses. For another, you assumed you had infinite ammunition. And you've removed range limits entirely—do you really think these weapons can fire accurately at a target thousands of meters in the air? And finally, your hit rate is absurd. You can't field that many sharpshooters in reality."
Catherine was an expert in archery. Ambrose's undead marksmen in that exercise had been shooting at a standard no elf army could match. That density of ranged fire wasn't achievable in practice.
Ambrose acknowledged every point, but rather than being discouraged, he said confidently, "Every one of those problems can be addressed. The dragon can counterattack, yes, but we can coordinate a layered defense. Do you think we have no mages and priests? They can't fight the dragon directly, but surely they can manage sustained defensive support?
"Second, ammunition is a real constraint, yes, but even at reduced fire rate, we'd still drain the dragon far faster than with any other strategy. And that's assuming it's purely defensively. The moment the Dragon Tyrant chooses to counterattack, it'll burn through energy even more quickly. As for the altitude problem, we'd need to find a way to limit how high the dragon can fly. I don't have a clean solution for that yet, but it's solvable.
"And finally, manpower. It's true I can't produce that many expert marksmen on my own. Even using Mimetic Soul to create them in bulk, I'd only be able to make souls that know how to aim and pull a trigger at a beginner's level. But there are plenty of expert elven marksmen, and marksmen of all races besides. These rifles aren't restricted to the undead."
Ambrose alone couldn't field an army of skeleton riflemen at that scale, but what about elves, dwarves, orcs, druids, and the Ragetide Kingdom combined? There were more than enough skilled marksmen around.
Catherine said immediately, "You will not drag the elves into this!"
Ambrose just smiled. "What do you mean, 'drag the elves into this'? Once I confirm that the dragon has truly revived, can the elves honestly afford to stay out of it? The dragons didn't leave the elves alone back in the day out of benevolence, you know.
"And even if they held off back then, your previous elven king took part in Arthur Lyon's rebellion. Do you think the Dragon Tyrant will ignore that?"
Catherine had no answer to that remark.
It was true. The elves were already completely entangled.
"But our mana addiction problem!"
That was what worried Catherine most. The majority of the elves' able-bodied population had contracted mana addiction. Breaking the seals and having them fight would accelerate their deterioration. And resealing them after the fact wasn't an option, either. The seals were like major surgery. Even elves could only survive a few rounds of open-chest surgery before it simply killed them.
"I understand. Mana addiction is a serious problem, but I should be able to solve it."
This made Catherine freeze. "Were you lying to me before? Did you have a solution all along?"
The seals only managed the elves' symptoms. It kept them functional enough to survive, but couldn't cure them outright. And now this lich was saying he could?
Catherine felt a sharp, cold sting of betrayal.
Ambrose looked entirely unbothered. "Hardly. I have always dealt in good faith. The seals I gave you were the best solution I had at that time. I held nothing back. Shara had only given me partial knowledge of the dark Weft, and gleaning enough information to make the seals already pushed me to the limit."
"Then how can you solve the problem now? Don't tell me you've had some sudden research breakthrough!"
Catherine stared at his face. If he didn't give her a real answer, she genuinely would not trust a single word this lich said ever again.
Ambrose's reply, however, left her at a complete loss.
"I haven't made a breakthrough. I simply have the feeling that I'm about to receive the entirety of the knowledge that composes the dark Weft. Trust me. A diviner's intuition is never wrong. When that happens, I'll be able to find a permanent solution."
"How can that be possible?" Catherine demanded flatly. "After everything you've put Shara through, she'd never hand you the dark Weft. And you can't exactly abduct her the way you did the kouto goddess. Even Selene couldn't pull Shara out of her divine realm. A mortal has no chance."
She had a point. That was impossible.
The kouto goddess's situation had involved a flaw baked into her very nature, a racial trauma Ambrose had found and exploited. Shara had no such weakness. No one was going to lure her out of her divine realm, and what Selene herself couldn't manage, a mortal couldn't even dream of.
But Ambrose remained entirely confident. "Trust my instincts. I am favored by Fate. Even if this turns out to be a trap the Goddess of Fate herself laid for me, everything I foresee comes to pass."
Whatever anyone else believed, Ambrose trusted his own premonitions without reservation.
The only question was, was this really a gift the Goddess of Fate had thrown his way? Because if not, why on earth would Shara hand over the dark Weft?