Chapter 438: Aiolos Again

The Sea of Volcanoes wasn't going to fall in a day or two. Dozens of resource-rich zones had to be taken one at a time and held against counterattack.

Ambrose had originally planned to secure one zone, use it to test a methodical step-by-step approach, and build up from there.

But the undead forces had performed so far beyond expectations that his ambitions had expanded. The shagin had simply broken and fled without even the Silent Sea Pirate Company getting involved.

The feeling was intoxicating. Ambrose decided to take on the ixiray as well.

The ixiray required higher water temperatures for egg incubation, which kept them close to the still-cooling submarine mountain ranges. One of their habitats was a short distance from Ambrose's newly claimed territory, less than two hundred kilometers away. Shagin hunting parties occasionally crossed paths with them in the area, though both sides seemed content to observe an unspoken truce. Nobody wanted a fight when there was still unclaimed ground to occupy.

It made sense. The Sea of Volcanoes was vast. Why exhaust yourself fighting when you could stake out as much empty territory first, then settle old scores at leisure?

Only a lich with the ambition to own the entire stretch of the sea would choose to start the fighting early. Ambrose intended to churn these waters thoroughly.

And the ixiray made an excellent starting point.

Not only were they conveniently close, attacking them was also the best way to demonstrate good faith to the merfolk and earn what Ambrose actually wanted: people.

Ezdolo's merfolk were, by a considerable margin, the most widely distributed and numerically dominant race in the sea, owing to Ezdolo's benevolence and the merfolk's innate gift for spellcasting. Combined with their affiliated race, the roca, they commanded the largest population of any faction in the ocean.

And where there were large gatherings of people, there were inevitably criminals.

The merfolk were a gentle and kind-natured people. Their most severe punishment was slitting a convict's fin, a mark indicating that the individual was no longer under the associated merfolk tribe's protection, and then casting them out. A disgraced merfolk was quickly seized by other races to be eaten or subjected to something worse.

Even this comparatively mild punishment was considered too harsh by some within the tribe.

This was because merfolk criminals were rarely genuine villains. A large portion of their so-called crimes amounted to being unable to maintain abstinence.

Ezdolo was a goddess of absolute neutrality, and her merfolk followers observed a correspondingly detailed code of conduct. The most prominent of these principles was temperance.

Not wasting food was the baseline. Pursuing excessive flavor, too, was another matter.

Using an entire cow only for its tongue, as some humans did, was unacceptable. Spending still more on spices and garnishes to make that tongue more palatable was outright sacrilege to merfolk eyes.

There was an almost ascetic quality to merfolk life. Personal desires had to be suppressed across the board.

Their standard was simple. Health was sufficient; pleasure was unnecessary.

This applied to everything: clothing, food, shelter, and travel. There was to be no excessive luxury, no indulgence, and no surrendering to strong desires or extreme emotions. Their aim was to remain in a state of quiet contentment. That was the merfolk attitude toward life, or rather, their code for it.

But every rule had exceptions.

Even Lyon had a few non-believers. The merfolk were no different.

There were always some who grew tired of the bland sameness of their existence, and who wanted richer flavors, distant adventures, the freedom to rage and laugh without restraint, vivid scales and extravagant jewelry, or even something as simple as not suppressing the most basic desire to bear children.

Merfolk who were simply unable to accept a temperate life were typically branded as criminals. And so the tribe's punishment for them was exile: if you cannot accept life here, go and find the life you want elsewhere.

The problem was that solitary merfolk rarely survived.

The merfolk's strength came from their numbers and their collective cooperation. Stripped of those, individual merfolk were quite vulnerable. A lone one might be bullied by even a passing kouto.

So the exiled generally died in misery, which the tribe found deeply uncomfortable.

After all, these were still kin. Watching them perish was painful. But allowing them to remain and corrode the tribe's faith and customs was also not an option.

This dilemma was where Ambrose saw an opportunity. He was willing to take in these "merfolk criminals" and let them live on his territory.

Working for a lich could reasonably be considered punishment. All Ambrose needed to promise was that he wouldn't slaughter them.

Both sides found this agreeable, but the arrangement required Ambrose to demonstrate good faith first.

The ixiray were his best opening move. He needed to kill a significant number of them to prove his strength, to prove he had the power to protect those outcast merfolk.

And a surprise attack was the obvious first step.

Military planning was not his forte, so Ambrose put forward the suggestion and left the final decision to Angus Watson and the other commanders.

After a brief few minutes of discussion, they reached unanimous agreement.

The main reason was simple: this undead force was extraordinary, and all of them were still enjoying the experience of commanding a war from across a thousand kilometers. Another engagement was more than welcome.

Angus Watson could barely contain his own excitement. Combat where casualties were just numbers on a screen—where he felt no hesitation, no reluctance, no instinct to spare his troops—was a completely different experience from anything he had known. The less emotionally weighted the losses felt, the more freely and precisely his command could flow.

Ambrose acted immediately. He notified Aige, sent the Silent Sea Pirate Company into motion at full speed to seize the nearby ixiray territory, and had pearl dew distributed from the merfolk supply to the Company's senior members.

One sea-conch's worth of pearl dew provided roughly ten minutes of soul protection against the ixiray's poison, though the actual duration depended on the concentration of toxin in the water.

If the ixiray toxin was concentrated enough, the protection would be overwhelmed and would require immediate replenishment.

The pearl dew supply was limited. Only the Silent Sea Pirate Company's senior members would receive any.

But with the Grunt formation bearing the brunt of the fighting ahead, the Company's veterans only needed to handle the elite ixiray. Ambrose estimated that his supply of pearl dew would suffice.

The fighting itself was not Ambrose's concern; that, he left to people who knew what they were doing. His task was battlefield cleanup.

The shagin had left over ten thousand bodies scattered across the sea, all valuable material from an undead perspective. The damaged Grunt Type Is needed to be recovered as well.

Doing it all himself was impossible.

Ambrose dropped from the Blacktide's open bay directly into the ocean and let himself sink toward the seafloor. He raised his right hand toward several shagin bodies lying before him.

Darkness seeped from his finger-joints like ink: dark energy refined to its peak, moving almost as if it were alive. It split into dozens of fine threads.

The threads wound themselves precisely around the dead shagin, and their bodies stirred.

Within seconds, each had been converted into undead. They were simple zombies, but the black threads continued reaching outward like tentacles, seizing corpse after corpse and converting them in turn.

"This ring really is a divine artifact."

Ambrose had no rapid undead conversion technique of his own. Without the ring, he could convert a few dozen corpses at once into temporary puppets, not true undead with independent existences.

But the ring recovered from the Dragon Graveyard could accomplish such a feat. It condensed pure dark energy, comparable to Black Rose's Death Gaze, and converted corpses into genuine undead in a fraction of the usual time.

The one difference was that Black Rose's technique worked on living targets as well. The ring had not yet revealed any ability that outrageous.

Even so, it was remarkable enough. The conversion rate was extraordinary. As Ambrose drifted through the battlefield, all the shagin bodies rose in his wake as zombies and were immediately commanded to collect the damaged Grunt Type Is scattered across the seafloor.

And the collection protocol itself was straightforward. If they had no pockets, they would store the Grunts in their stomachs. If their stomachs were too decayed, they would store them in their chests. And if even their chests were too decayed, they'd use their arms and thighs.

With the zombies' help, the cleanup was accomplished quickly.

Damaged Grunt Type Is were bundled up and sent to the alchemical workshop for basic repairs, after which new Mimetic Souls would be pressed back in. The tens of thousands of shagin zombies were put straight to work reshaping the territory.

Shagin were an energetic, open-water species. Merfolk preferred quieter conditions with complex terrain and dense coral formations to shelter in.

Ambrose had no time to cultivate real coral. He used bone coral as a substitute.

Several Guardian-type undead were directed to begin firing bone-proliferation virus projectiles across the seafloor as a pale forest of bone coral began to grow.

The material was only usable by the undead: the concentrated dark energy that permeated undead bodies was precisely what suppressed the virus's continued proliferation, preventing the growth from spiraling out of control once the coral reached the desired density.

Under Ambrose's direction, the zombies worked steadily. Before long, the territory had been transformed into a desolate, eerie underwater forest of white bone.

It wasn't particularly beautiful, but the terrain was dense and complicated, and well-suited as a defensible stronghold in these chaotic conditions and difficult to assault from any direction.

Beyond that, Ambrose was considering using Terraform to modify the geography more substantially, perhaps by creating a great ring of rock encircling the zone and leaving only a few narrow channels for ocean currents to pass through. Attackers would have almost no viable approach into the territory, making future defenses trivial.

But that could wait. His own ignorance of the ocean made him cautious. Careless modification could turn a resource-rich zone into a wasteland; it was better to leave detailed reshaping to the merfolk exiles once they arrived. They would know what the environment actually needed.

He was deep in his work when he suddenly looked up into the surrounding water.

A vast group of powerful vital signatures was approaching, and tens of thousands of them at that.

The one in the lead was traveling at exceptional speed.

Ambrose had just registered the incoming threat when the figure at the head of the group came into clear view.

He blinked. "Aiolos? What are you doing here?"

Aiolos recognized him too, but he met Ambrose with neither a smile nor open arms. He raised the trident in his hand and bellowed in fury, "So it's you, you deceiver! Time to die!"

The seawater around Aiolos twisted into a vortex and surged toward Ambrose.

Ambrose paused for a moment. His expression went cold.

He didn't like to deceive fools, but that didn't mean he was going to let Aiolos take advantage of him.

The Golden Throne materialized at his call. Vast magical power erupted outward, shaping into a violent Ice Storm that crashed into Aiolos's vortex. The seawater froze solid. The currents stilled, no longer answering to Aiolos's will.

Aiolos didn't care. He kicked off the frozen surface and launched himself directly at Ambrose, driving his trident at Ambrose's skull.

Ambrose gave a dry laugh and shifted. Silvery-white armor fortified his skeleton.

This was his newest mithril body, designated Deep Diver. The outer shell was a product of the Unholy Kingdom's finest craftsmanship. Ambrose had personally modified the interior for deep-sea operation.

Even a lich could swim.

The thrusters at his back provided tremendous force, allowing him to match Aiolos in speed. The two collided with a crash that rang through the water. Aiolos's trident snapped in two. Ambrose's mithril blades, one extending from each forearm, drove through the young man's throat and chest simultaneously.

With a sharp yank across both arms, the blades bit deep into Aiolos's chest and neck.

Ambrose grabbed him by the head. "I know you can't die. Now, calm down." He looked at the young man steadily. "You called me a deceiver, my friend. When have I ever deceived you?"

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