Chapter 435: Modern Warfare

Three airships came in over a stretch of open sea, one large and two smaller.

Ambrose stood at the prow, looking out across the unbroken surface. He raised one hand in a signal to his back.

Hares and Hastin immediately understood what he wanted. They worked the controls, and the lower bays of all three ships swung open. A rain of tiny dark objects fell toward the water below.

These were all Grunt Type I undead, fresh from the factory and released directly into the sea.

Ambrose's skull twitched. He had just dropped three million gold coins into the ocean.

Not all of it—not even most of it—came from production costs. As it turned out, shipping via teleportation array was the expensive part.

There was nothing to be done about it. His long-distance transport routes weren't fully established yet, and getting this campaign launched meant paying the premium for spatial transfer. War needed gold.

Painful as it was, he let it go. Who could win a war without funding?

The first wave of Grunt Type Is entered the water. Under Ambrose's direction, they dispersed and began mapping the sea around them.

Naval warfare was three-dimensional, and control of the terrain was everything. The ocean factions always fought as close to the surface as possible, reducing the angles of attack they needed to defend against, and let them take advantage of gravity to assist their own strikes.

But no matter how close they came to the surface, they were still underwater. Almost no ocean race could fly.

Ambrose was entirely different. His airships floated above the ocean.

That was his advantage. Whatever happened below, Ambrose could pull back at any moment. A hundred meters of open air between him and the sea surface was an uncrossable barrier for anything living in the ocean.

Hastin reported, "Master, the Grunt Type Is have been deployed. No enemy contact yet."

Ambrose nodded. "Begin deploying the observation pods and the Guardians."

The airship bays opened again. A dozen small submersibles were dropped into the water, followed by a dozen skeletal creatures shaped like enormous octopuses.

As these entered the sea, more than a dozen feeds opened simultaneously on Ambrose's magic mirror, a combination of real-time communication channels and live imagery from the depths below.

Ambrose spoke into the mirror. "Angus Watson, you're commanding this engagement. Are you aware of the objective?"

On the other side, Angus Watson straightened his collar and said with calm confidence, "Leave it to me. We will not fail."

His attention moved immediately to the underwater feeds on the mirror.

These came from the fifteen submersibles Ambrose had just deployed, each fitted with a different-format magic mirror, controllable by voice command, and equipped with adjustable crystal lenses capable of varying magnification.

Managing fifteen simultaneous camera feeds was no easy feat. Ambrose certainly couldn't, and neither could Angus Watson. He could only handle nine; the remaining six were divided between the others.

The tiflings took two, the elves took two, and the remaining pair went to the brothers Allen and Cade.

Ambrose sensed the Grunt Type Is assembling into their assigned formations around the submersibles and advancing toward the target zone.

They were approaching shagin territory, a stretch of sea at a comfortable temperature, positioned at a confluence of ocean currents that delivered steady oxygen, food, and excellent light levels. Fine habitat conditions all around.

The shagin had seen the value of this location immediately. Their presence extended across an eighty-kilometer radius.

This was Ambrose's first target. Displacing the shagin here would put him in a position to threaten both the neighboring kouto and the ixiray.

He had no objection to fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. More dead enemies meant greater advantage for the undead.

The Grunt formation entered stealth mode as it advanced. It wasn't long before the first shagin came into view.

Ambrose had deployed from directly above the target zone, neatly bypassing the shagin's outer perimeter. When the Grunt formation closed in, many of the shagin had no idea anything was approaching.

They had simply never seen anything like this before. Despite a lifetime spent in the ocean, not one of them had ever encountered finger-sized fish like these.

The moment the formation accelerated, tens of thousands of jet trails cut white lines through the water. The shagin began to scream.

"Allen, bring your forces around from the south. Cut off their retreat and slow their call for reinforcements as much as possible."

"Cade, dive toward the seafloor, push through their formation, and don't give them room to pull back and regroup."

"You two tifling idiots, stop rushing for kills. I didn't order a charge. Pull your forces back right now. Are you blind? Enemies are coming from the south. Do you want to be encircled?"

"As for our elven friends, you can operate freely, but don't go too deep. Shagin reinforcements will arrive soon. If we haven't finished here by then, I'll need you to delay them."

......

Angus Watson issued his commands steadily, constantly adjusting the position and zoom of each submersible feed. He had run this scenario hundreds of times in the dream, but reality was a different matter entirely.

He had never commanded a battle like this before. Thousands of kilometers away from the fighting, sitting at home, directing forces to destroy an enemy through a mirror... Was this even war? It felt more like orchestrated slaughter.

In conventional warfare, a commander who wanted full situational awareness after the opening moments was at an enormous disadvantage. You needed high ground and open sightlines, and even then you only saw a fraction of the battlefield.

In practice, most battles were planned in full before the first blow was struck, and then simply executed. The ability to adapt in real time was the exception, not the rule.

It was beyond difficult to issue a new order in the heat of battle. By the time the frontline troops reacted, the situation might have changed entirely.

Only Lyon's most elite paladin legions had the cohesion for genuine real-time response, and even then, they were working from instinct and experience within their own field of vision, not from a view of the whole.

But Angus Watson had a feed of the entire battlefield. Every feed was rendered simultaneously on his mirror. It was like pushing pieces across a map in real time.

And Ambrose's undead were more responsive than any elite human unit he had ever worked with.

Paladins had emotions; the undead did not. A paladin commander couldn't order a suicide charge in good conscience. The cost in people was too high to contemplate, even for a decisive victory. But these were Grunt Type Is.

Ambrose himself had named them grunts. No one was going to mourn a grunt.

Under Angus Watson's direction, the undead moved like a perfectly coordinated school of fish, cutting the shagin formation apart and consuming it from all sides. The several thousand shagin defenders collapsed in morale within minutes, breaking in every direction without coherent purpose.

Given what had happened, Angus Watson reached a quick conclusion: these were not the shagin's main force.

Even by the standards of an all-warrior species, there were meaningful differences in quality. The ones before him had poor weapons and, more tellingly, no great sharks. Great sharks were a standard military unit for any shagin combat force.

He showed no mercy regardless. Lyon's military tradition being what it was, in Angus Watson's eyes, non-human races were not measured by the same standards as humans.

The Grunt formation moved again, killing with methodical efficiency. Blood and toxin spread through the water as shagin bodies settled across the sea floor.

Approximately three thousand shagin had been killed, eight thousand Grunt Type Is lost, and one submersible destroyed. Angus Watson was satisfied. He had expected worse.

The Grunt Type I was a consumable, comparable to an enchanted arrow. Three arrows on average per kill was, in battlefield terms, a remarkable rate of effectiveness.

The Grunt formation's individual hit rate wasn't actually that high. Even with built-in auto-targeting, a single attack connected less than ten percent of the time. But each unit could accelerate up to eight times before expending its fuel, and every miss was followed by another attempt.

Furthermore, the necrotic poison had a kill radius exceeding five meters even on a near miss, with a wider non-lethal zone of paralysis and convulsions, enough to remove a target from the fighting without a direct hit.

The heavy losses came from the initial barrage, which had been rather wasteful.

Multiple Grunt Type Is had struck the same target repeatedly while adjacent targets went unengaged.

An intelligent commander could not micromanage the trajectory of every individual unit, and the units themselves, having limited processing capacity, couldn't always self-correct.

As for the lost submersible, the submersibles were considerably larger than the Grunt Type Is and were spread across the entire engagement area. The shagin noticed them almost immediately; it hardly took a strategist to identify the large, visible objects as the important assets.

A small group of shagin had made a desperate charge at the submersibles, striking seven of them.

Six had been defended successfully by the Guardian-type undead surrounding them: skeletal octopus-shaped constructs with eighteen tentacles, their sole offensive ability a continuous stream of bone-splinter projectiles loaded with bone-proliferation virus, courtesy of Alkhemia.

Any shagin struck immediately began sprouting dense bone-white coral formations that locked their bodies rigid, immobilizing them until blood loss and suffocation finished the job.

The Guardians were very short-ranged units in the ocean. Viscosity made them unusable as conventional ranged support, but they boasted exceptional melee defense. The bone-proliferation virus didn't even need a direct hit. Even depleted projectiles drifting in the water could grow, forming barrier-walls of white coral that could seal off entire sections of the sea.

The one lost submersible was simply bad luck. One of the charging shagin happened to be a spellcaster.

A Chain Lightning strike got through, damaging the hull and electrocuting several of the undead controlling the unit's internal systems. Without operators, it lost functionality and sank.

Ambrose saw the damage report and winced.

Every loss could be measured in gold. The Grunt Type Is delivered their toxin on impact like a bee sting—and, just like bees, they generally died as a result.

Recovery would only be possible after the battle, when their bodies could be collected and new Mimetic Souls pressed back into them.

Eight thousand lost in one engagement was an acceptable casualty rate, he knew, but still.

"That's it. I'm not looking anymore. This is yours to manage." Ambrose said, and closed every battlefield feed on his mirror.

Watching his gold vanish was bad for the soul.

Instead, Ambrose connected to a different channel and reached out to an old acquaintance.

The unsmiling face of Gustavo Flynn appeared on the mirror. "Flynn," Ambrose said cheerfully. "You saw the result just now. Are you satisfied?"

Flynn replied coldly, "It was adequate."

Ambrose laughed. "Adequate! You call that adequate? From where I'm standing, that's unprecedented. Have you ever seen weapons perform like that? Have you ever seen enemies killed at that efficiency? I trust you have no further objections to my proposal?"

Flynn wanted to curse. Ambrose's products might have performed well, but so what?

Flynn wouldn't care, if not for Ambrose's mention of cooperation. "You would genuinely give me the designs for those units, and market them under my name?"

Ambrose shook his head. "Not under your name, but under the God of Alchemy brand. You can join my brand as a partner and the public face of these undead unit lines. You may not have manufactured the undead themselves, but the majority of the components inside them come from your facilities. Wouldn't that be extraordinary advertising on its own?

"Think about it. Your Alchemists' Council is being re-established, and this is exactly the moment when you need visibility. I'm handing you the biggest promotional campaign of the age and all but guaranteeing that you'll be backlogged with orders for decades. In return, all I'm asking is that you cover my shipping costs. A trivial concession for you, wouldn't you say?"

Ambrose delivered this with his characteristic easy good humor. Someone always had to pay for a war, but it didn't have to be him.

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