Chapter 427: Preparations for War

"What? You want me to lead your war?"

The moment Catherine heard what Ambrose was asking of her, she shook her head and refused on the spot.

This lich wanted her to command a naval war. Catherine could count on one hand the number of times she had even seen the ocean in her life. Having been through real combat before, she knew perfectly well that she had no gift for command. Her teachers had always been too indulgent, letting her coast through her military studies under the comfortable illusion that she was a capable leader.

In reality, she was a novice. Put more than a thousand soldiers under her and she would start to flail.

"You might be a rookie, but I'd be an even worse option." Ambrose sighed. "I have no other options."

He genuinely didn't. If anyone else in the Elegiac Society could do the job, he wouldn't have asked Catherine.

But there truly was no one else he could count on. Gareth, for all his ferocity, had never learned to command troops. While alive, he was a berserker who charged wherever he was pointed, which was precisely how he had ended up getting his head cut off.

Now that he literally had no head, commanding anything was quite out of the question.

As for the other senior members of the Society, including Aige, not a single one had ever received systematic military training. They couldn't have commanded an army if they tried. They probably couldn't even parse the terminology in a battle plan.

The one exception was Black Rose, who had received a foundational education that included military basics when she was alive. But Black Rose could never bring three kingdoms' worth of commanders to heel. She simply didn't have the authority to manage a gathering of proud and difficult warriors.

Then Catherine said, "What about Arthur Lyon? Who could be more qualified as a marshal than the Holy King himself? Arthur was the finest commander of the war that overthrew the tyrant. Not only is he personally formidable, he knows how to lead an army. And his reputation alone..."

Ambrose shook his head. "Forget it. Arthur won't help with this. Ask him to topple a tyrant and he'll charge to the front without a second thought, but this campaign is a war between races fighting over territory. That's not the kind of war Arthur has any interest in. Even if I forced him into it, the results wouldn't be worth it.

"Besides, I don't want his cover blown just yet. And if he's going to appear as someone else, getting those commanders to follow him will take far too long."

Arthur Lyon was a genuinely powerful trump card, but using him properly was restrictive, and Ambrose wasn't going to waste him on anything less than the right moment.

With no substitute in sight, Catherine had no choice but to give in.

Once Ambrose coerced her with the drow as leverage, she was unable to refuse.

"I'd better go read up," Catherine said, and terminated the connection.

Ambrose wasn't worried. Catherine didn't need to be a great military mind. Her greatest asset was simply sitting at the head of the table and smiling once everyone else had argued themselves to a standstill. A single smile from her would bring the room back to order.

He had experienced this unassailable technique firsthand. Short of a chaotic evil demon, no one could resist it. Even the undead, given long enough, would feel their resolve soften.

With that settled, Ambrose turned to Aige. "Now, it's time to address the question of troops. How many members does the Silent Sea Pirate Company have in total? And how many are legends?"

He had operated alongside the Company, but had never learned their precise numbers nor how the forces were organized.

Aige trusted Ambrose completely and held nothing back. "I'm not certain of the exact headcount," she said, "but we have twelve ghost ships in total. Most of them were converted fairly recently and are on the weaker side. The three that have genuine combat power are mine, Phil's Ironspear, and Andil's Parrot. You've met Phil, and Andil is a wraith. Both are legends.

"Beyond the ships, the total number of undead aboard all of them comes to under three thousand, though that number fluctuates. They're composed mostly of wraiths, zombies, and skeletons..."

Aige went through the details methodically. The more Ambrose heard, the more concerned he became.

Aige herself, half a step from godhood, wasn't a problem. Phil he knew to be a formidable fighter, though he was the sort of legend who threw himself into every charge, and those tended to die fastest. Andil he had glimpsed once before, a quiet wraith who seemed to be Phil's exact opposite.

The elite strength wasn't the issue. The real problem was the rank and file.

Three thousand undead, spread across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of sea. What could that possibly accomplish?

This wasn't a game. There was no room for guerrilla tactics. They needed to seize enormous stretches of territory and hold them. With too few numbers, even if the enemy scattered, Aige couldn't occupy enough ground to matter.

"I used to think we had too many people," Aige said with a resigned note in her voice. "I never imagined needing to hold a sea this vast. We need a few dozen times more forces..."

"Don't worry," Ambrose said. "We have time, and we're undead. Running out of cannon fodder isn't something we need to fear."

"You're planning to manufacture the undead at scale? The cost would be enormous," Aige said.

Summoning skeletons was a basic necromantic spell known to any high-tier undead, common enough to seem trivial. But it was far from trivial to cast at scale.

Five skeletons could be conjured with a snap of the fingers. Fifty required real effort. Five hundred typically needed the support of a magical array.

But five thousand? Fifty thousand?

Those numbers could only be accumulated gradually over time. Achieving them quickly was virtually impossible: the amount of mana each spellcaster had was finite.

The minimum requirement was at least a hundred thousand basic undead, just to have a credible claim to entering the war. And to genuinely secure the Sea of Volcanoes? A million would be needed, at least.

This wasn't land. There were no mountain passes to hold, no chokepoints where you could block a road.

Water was everywhere, and it flowed everywhere. Drawing a defensive line the way you would on land was simply impossible. The ocean had its own environment entirely, and it demanded tactics built for that environment. Their numbers were nowhere near sufficient.

"I'm well aware of the limitations of mass undead summoning," Ambrose said, with a note of confidence. "But we don't necessarily need to summon that many skeletons. Lady Aige, I once published a paper on variant skeleton forms—aberrant skeletons of various configurations. Their defining characteristic is efficiency."

A trace of satisfaction crept into his voice. This was work he was genuinely proud of. No other undead in existence understood how to conserve materials and minimize mana expenditure the way he did.

Aige had never seen any of Ambrose's "creations" and assumed he meant alchemical golems. She winced inwardly at the imagined cost.

She had already made up her mind that, if she truly became a god someday, she would find a way to repay all of this.

"Alright. Everyone, get to work," Ambrose said. "Lady Aige, the Silent Sea Pirate Company is our most critical asset. Make sure you know exactly what every member can contribute before the fighting starts. I'll be stepping away for a while to produce the necessarycannon fodder."

With that, he disappeared into his extradimensional space.

At a rate of one day outside to one year inside, he got to work.

Before producing undead at scale, he needed appropriate designs.

Fortunately, he had spent time on this problem before setting out to sea, and had already sketched out several candidate approaches.

He spread a stack of parchment sheets across the table and began examining each design carefully.

The drawings depicted various ocean-creature-shaped undead: assemblages of bone shaped into forms that were part fish, part mechanical horror.

Ambrose's Mimetic Soul meant he could reshape undead freely, sculpting compatible souls from scratch with just his bare hands.

Others couldn't do this. The reason most summoned skeletons defaulted to bipedal humanoid forms was simple: living human souls were built for human bodies. Reshaping them was possible, but at enormous cost in time and effort alike.

Ambrose rubbed his jaw and muttered to himself: "Low cost, fast to produce... That will require specialization."

He pulled three sheets from the pile and bent over them, quill in hand, making revision after revision.

Time moved quickly while he was engrossed in work.

By the time Ambrose had finalized the designs for three undead unit types, nearly three months had passed inside his extradimensional space.

"Time to test things out."

He summoned a dozen Mage Hands, which began ferrying materials to him in a steady stream. Within a minute, a small wooden fish sat on the table before him.

It was rough, like a handmade child's toy, but its tail that swayed back and forth conveyed a peculiar vitality.

He dropped the wooden fish into a tank of water, then added a live fish.

For a while, the two coexisted peacefully. At a casual glance, an onlooker might simply think the wooden fish was uglier than average. Nothing else seemed out of place.

Then Ambrose snapped his fingers.

The wooden fish turned its head and began moving toward the live fish, slowly at first, almost as if it were drifting. But when Ambrose issued a second command, two jets of turbulent force erupted from its body and drove it forward at tremendous speed.

There was a dull, wet impact. The wooden fish punched clean through the live fish's body and cracked a wide section of the tank wall.

Ambrose froze time immediately and picked up the wooden fish to examine it.

The wood, predictably, had not survived the force of its own impact. Most of it had shattered, exposing the compact web of magical arrays within.

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