Chapter 428: Undead Designed for Naval Combat

"Right. The miniaturized jet-propulsion engine works even better underwater than on land. Wood carving takes too long, so I'll commission a simple metal casing. Two jet engines is wasteful though, since one is enough. The thrust is already more than adequate, and there's no need to increase the power. I'll add a vial of air-undead instead... Actually, let's drop the biomimetic shape entirely. Undead are easy to detect regardless."

Ambrose revised the schematic rapidly, and a new version of the unit took shape within minutes.

The result was a form stripped down to its bare essentials: a streamlined body, almost impossible to call a fish, that instead resembled a compact self-propelled torpedo.

Roughly the size of a finger, it boasted a miniature jet-propulsion array, directional control handled by the faint flex of a tail fin, and a hollow nose designed to carry an alchemical explosive or similar payload.

"Alchemical explosives are too expensive," he muttered. "My air-undead formula is better value."

The air undead was a creation from earlier in his career—a colorless, odorless lethal substance made by granting air the "undead" attribute and binding an entirely blank Mimetic Soul to it.

These constructs had no thoughts and no capacity for movement or autonomous action, which made them extremely cheap to produce. The catch was that they had to be kept in sealed containers at all times. Exposure would cause an immediate explosive dispersion into colorless, odorless "undead air."

His tests showed that any living creature that inhaled undead air directly was rapidly consumed by dark energy. The effect was more lethal than any known poison, and more efficient than an alchemical bomb.

Loading the torpedo's nose section with this substance and detonating it on impact would release the poison in an instant burst, inflicting rapid toxicity on the target.

The only problem was that an air undead was fundamentally a gas, and upon detonation, it would form bubbles and rise. How much of it would actually be inhaled by the target underwater?

Ambrose ran the experiment immediately, detonating an air undead in water and counting how many fish died.

The results were unsatisfying.

Air dissolved poorly in seawater. Most of the air undead simply bubbled upward, with only a tiny fraction inhaled in that initial instant. The aquatic toxicity was roughly one-tenth its atmospheric potency—not the instant kill he had designed it for, but still a non-lethal agent capable of inducing respiratory disruption and muscle spasms.

He was mildly disappointed. He had built up a reasonable stockpile of air undead, and it seemed it would be largely going to waste.

"What if I use seawater as the base medium instead—a seawater undead variant?"

He tested the idea. It was viable, but the cost increased substantially.

Each conversion using the God of Alchemy's gold required expenditure proportional to the quality of the material being transformed.

Air was low-density, and filling a glass sphere the size of a fingertip with an air undead cost under one copper. Seawater ran to thirty copper or more per sphere, with additional variation depending on the water's mineral content and composition.

"Thirty copper for the seawater-undead, plus the torpedo casing... That puts each unit above one silver. It's still too high. I need to find savings on the materials side." He decided to reach out to Gustavo Flynn to get the old man to produce the torpedo casings at cost.

Earlier, Ambrose had ordered a batch of components from Flynn for his miniaturized jet-propulsion engine, paying nothing upfront and instead offering Flynn the revised engine schematic as a trade instead.

He didn't have much chance of keeping it secret. A craftsman of Flynn's caliber could have reverse-engineered the design from the components alone with high accuracy. The miniaturized jet engine wasn't a groundbreaking innovation in principle. Ambrose had simply spent a few years inside his private space compressing existing technology into a smaller form factor.

It was valuable, certainly, but not the kind of proprietary knowledge that could be kept under wraps for long. Any skilled practitioner could pull it apart and work out how it functioned.

So Ambrose had simply sold Flynn the schematic and called it even on the components. Now that he had the engines, the logical next step was to sell the torpedo casing design as well, considering it was the less technically complex piece, and have Flynn manufacture a production run in return.

Flynn currently operated more than one alchemical factory. Batch-producing a featureless streamlined metal casing was trivially simple for an operation at that scale. He probably already had tooling for something close to the right shape sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

He worked through the numbers. With that arrangement, the per-unit cost of each undead torpedo fish could be brought down to roughly fifty copper. A million gold would be more than enough to see the entire campaign through.

That was the first undead unit type finalized. He didn't know whether to classify these torpedo fishes as long-ranged weapons or melee explosives, but they would serve their intended purpose either way.

Ambrose moved on to the next two types of undead: a defensive unit and an actual close-combat unit.

Compared to the torpedo fish, both were designed for repeated deployment, closer to regular troops than cannon fodder. He pressed on.

While Ambrose lost himself in the work, the ocean beyond was stirring.

Others were working hard in preparation to occupy the Sea of Volcanoes as well.

Aiolos was now rosy-faced with newfound purpose, hovering above a massive coral formation and delivering a thunderous pre-battle speech to a vast congregation of blank-faced kouto.

At his side stood the lobster-girl Ariel, gazing up at him with unambiguous admiration.

He had, in the end, come around. Blobdilpulp's logic had been persuasive enough: Thanos hadn't objected, which, in Blobdilpulp's framing, amounted to a divine endorsement. Aiolos had easily convinced himself to accept the situation and grandly promised the entire Sea of Volcanoes as his bride-price.

Blobdilpulp had laughed until the cavern shook, and promptly handed him the entire kouto population to command. Her requirements were modest. She didn't ask Aiolos to seize the whole sea; she just needed a foothold.

For a deity who had essentially tricked the son of a storm god into helping her with territorial expansion, she was in a remarkably practical mood. She understood perfectly well that she had exploited a loophole to pull Thanos's son into her service, and that future complications were likely. If Aiolos could simply secure a new breeding ground for the kouto before things fell apart, that was more than sufficient.

Perhaps she had simply gained a moment of clarity in her deranged existence. Whatever the cause, the kouto goddess, at this moment, was operating with startling clarity.

She handed Aiolos a full briefing on the various ocean races and told him to read it before leading the kouto into action.

Aiolos read it with genuine focus. How much of it he actually absorbed was anyone's guess.

But there was no time to worry about that. The shagin had already moved in ahead of them. The ixiray had found a nesting site and begun laying eggs. If the kouto didn't act now, the good territory would be gone in days.

Regardless of how much he had absorbed, his immediate priority was to bite off a piece of ground and hold it.

In the style of Thanos, Aiolos delivered a stirring speech. The enemies ahead, he declared, were nothing but rotting fish and shrimp. He would lead every kouto to victory.

The effect was not quite what he had hoped for. The kouto watched him in near-total silence. A few were picking at their fingernails. Several were using fish bones as toothpicks. A number had simply fallen asleep and weren't listening at all.

Aiolos had never commanded anything remotely like this. Were these creatures mentally deficient? Did they not understand who was in charge?

With ordinary insubordinates, the response was simple enough: drag out a few ringleaders, make examples of them, and the rest fell into line.

But as Aiolos looked around, he realized these weren't insubordinates. They weren't defying him. They were simply like this.

The kouto's cognitive faculties, beyond the basic drives of hunger and rest, amounted to very little. Strip away eating and sleeping, and what remained was a profound preference for lying down and doing nothing. On occasion, in episodes of inexplicable behavior, they might smear sea-mud on their goddess's idol or decorate it with kelp.

Aiolos's speech had simply been too complex. The kouto had not understood a word of it, and so had produced no reaction at all.

He studied them for a moment, then tried again. "If you follow me, there'll be fish to eat! Stay behind, and I'll eat you!"

The effect was immediate. A massive wave of kouto lurched upright. They raised their assortment of oddly-shaped weapons and began shouting in a cacophony of overlapping noise.

"I want to eat! Don't eat me!"

Aiolos surveyed the suddenly-animated mob with deep satisfaction. These were his first troops. They might be stupid, yes, but they were numerous, and no pushover as a collective.

The kouto were deeply unimpressive as individuals, but perhaps that was precisely why they had a natural facility for tapping into the latent power in their bloodline. The proportion of kouto who could cast spells was extraordinarily high, far beyond any other ocean race.

Among the tens of thousands before him, roughly one in ten was a spellcaster. Every other faction fell short in comparison.

Properly directed, this would be a formidable force.

And once Aiolos won his first victory, he could begin capturing other races and absorbing them into an ever-expanding army. He found himself thinking of the future with uncharacteristic optimism.

Joining forces with the kouto goddess had been the right call. In just a few days, he had gone from a lone wanderer to the commander of an army. Give him a few years, and the entire ocean would answer to him.

He looked up through the dark weight of the water above and sent a silent prayer toward Thanos. "Great Father, witness me! I am already in control of much power. One day, I will offer you this entire sea. When that day comes, you will surely be proud of me!"

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