Chapter 439: A Bane in More Than Name

Ambrose had Aiolos's head in his grip, but a severed head and a split chest were hardly serious injuries to him.

What Ambrose hadn't anticipated was that Aiolos would simply grow a new head from the stump of his neck. The one in Ambrose's hand dissolved into seawater.

Just how did his body work? He seemed able to convert freely between flesh and water.

As long as the tides didn't still, so too would he never die...

Freed from Ambrose's grip, Aiolos wasted no time. He didn't know how Ambrose had suddenly encased himself in armor, but he wasn't afraid of him.

He had armor of his own, too.

A luminous shell materialized around him, jointed like a lobster's carapace. Aiolos launched himself at Ambrose again on a surge of seawater.

His trident met Ambrose's anti-magic blade in a flurry of exchanges, both combatants moving with a speed that seemed to belie their aquatic environment.

Ambrose was genuinely surprised. Aiolos had gotten significantly stronger in just a few days. The lobster shell wasn't just armor. It appeared to enhance his physical capabilities as well, and his attack speed was noticeably faster than before.

A master warrior could swing a two-handed broadsword so precisely it could neuter a mosquito. Ambrose felt as if Aiolos were approaching that level. The trident was heavy and fierce, yet impossibly swift. It broke through Ambrose's anti-magic guard several times, leaving a trail of gouges across the mithril armor.

That trident had to be magically enhanced. Nothing else could leave marks on mithril.

And that lobster-shaped magical armor... this young man was unmistakably the chosen of the kouto goddess.

Ambrose swept both arms upward to block the trident's downward slash. The force sent visible shockwaves rippling outward through the water.

During the brief deadlock, Ambrose spoke again. "Aiolos, I'll fight you all day if you want, but give me a good reason first. What exactly did I deceive you about?"

"I wanted to find Ariel," Aiolos snarled, "and you led me to that fake merfolk imposter. You were blocking me from finding the real one. Weren't you deceiving me?"

As he roared, a torrent erupted from the trident, driving Ambrose's body hard into the seafloor.

The sudden waterspout slammed Ambrose into the silt. An instant later, Aiolos was above him, trident driving down toward his chest.

The tip scraped across the mithril surface and buried itself in the sediment instead, leaving minimal damage. Ambrose's anti-magic blades, however, found their mark again, punching through Aiolos's chest.

Aiolos stared down at the wound in disbelief. The magical carapace around him was harder than steel. How had these two unimpressive-looking short blades cut through it like soft cheese?

This time, Ambrose didn't try to split him open. He locked both arms around Aiolos's body in a firm hold and said, "Aiolos, you say I deceived you and stopped you from finding Ariel. Are you even thinking straight? From the very beginning, I asked whether you knew anything about her beyond her name. You said you didn't.

"I told you right then that the name Ariel is common throughout the sea. Without more to go on, there's no way to identify who you're looking for. I had no idea who your Ariel was. How could I stop you from finding someone I didn't even know?"

Aiolos spat blood. The feral rage in his expression flickered as a moment of uncertainty broke through.

Something about this didn't add up. The lich's argument had a certain logic to it.

But the kouto goddess had told him that the lich was deceiving him, that the lich had always been blocking him from finding Ariel.

Ambrose noticed the shift and released him. "Aiolos, I don't know what's happened to you these past few days, but calm down and think. When you first told me you were looking for Ariel, I told you that having her name alone wouldn't be enough. Then I heard that the merfolk high priestess was named Ariel, so I brought you to see her, to find out if she was who you were looking for—"

"She wasn't!" Aiolos coughed out blood and surged with agitation. "That wasn't the right Ariel. She's not a mermaid!"

Ambrose roared back just as forcefully, "Then the only way to know that was to meet her! How else would you confirm it? Do you think I'm the Goddess of Fate, that I can conjure your answer from nothing? Did I ever say that woman was definitely the one you were looking for? I asked you repeatedly whether you could confirm her identity by something other than her face, and you said you couldn't. I never told you she was the one. I told you to verify it! Just how did I deceive you?!"

Aiolos froze again. Nothing Ambrose had said was wrong. There was no deception from any angle.

"Could I have made a mistake...?"

That thought barely had time to form before a voice rasped at the edges of his mind, manic and disjointed: "Don't listen to him. He's still lying. From the very beginning, he knew who your Ariel was. He's been leading you in circles deliberately. Don't believe me? Ask him if he knows someone named Ariel!"

Aiolos narrowed his eyes. "When I first told you I was looking for Ariel, did you already know where she was? You knew an Ariel at the time, didn't you?"

Ambrose didn't answer. Something was wrong with Aiolos's mind.

The Aiolos he had known was simple, but rational enough in his own way. What he was seeing now had a feverish, erratic quality to it, like the kouto goddess herself.

Ambrose extended his perception and carefully examined Aiolos's mental state. He found the problem quickly.

A strange magical force on Aiolos's forehead was sending thorns burrowing into his mind.

"Crown of Madness? No—this is far stronger."

Crown of Madness was a run-of-the-mill second-tier spell, and not technically demanding. Its effect was simply to drive a target into a frenzy of indiscriminate aggression against everything nearby.

But Ambrose had never heard of Crown of Madness persisting through death and rebirth, and Aiolos's condition wasn't indiscriminate aggression. It was more like logical confusion, with an undercurrent of barely suppressed rage.

"Aiolos, what happened to you? Tell me. I may be able to help."

Even a divine curse could be dispelled.

But Aiolos wasn't listening. He raised his trident again. "You knew an Ariel. You didn't tell me about her!"

"I told you, I knew several people named Ariel! How was I supposed to know which one of them was the one you were looking for?"

Aiolos shook his head with a frantic, repetitive motion, muttering in a loop, "No, you're still lying to me. I know it. You've been using me from the start."

By then, Ambrose had confirmed that the young man had lost the capacity for coherent thought. The kouto goddess was the obvious culprit. Talking was pointless.

And while the two of them had been fighting and arguing, the kouto that had followed Aiolos into the area had arrived in force. The dim-witted creatures were already chanting, causing hundreds of points of magical light to bloom throughout the deep water.

Ambrose exhaled. Crazy opponents were always the most difficult for him to deal with.

"Last chance, Aiolos. Are you going to calm down and talk, or not?"

A flicker of conflict crossed Aiolos's contorted face. It lasted a moment before it was engulfed by madness.

"Liar! You deserve to die! This sea is my gift to the great Thanos, and you—you will be my trophy!"

Ambrose shook his head slowly. So that was how it was going to be.

"Very well," he said. He raised his blade and declared, "I name you, Aiolos, bewitched fool, ingrate, and wrongdoer, as my bane. My enmity shall endure unto death."

The declaration was far more theatrical than Ambrose's usual style, but it wasn't for show. It was a ritual.

This was part of a ranger's skillset: the ability to designate a bane, thereby enhancing all skills across the board against such a target.

Ambrose's attacks would be more accurate and deal more damage; the bane's would deal less.

It was the reason rangers were both praised and criticized. They were formidable against their bane, and decidedly underwhelming against anyone else.

Ambrose was declaring a bane for the first time. The moment the words left him, he felt a power he couldn't quite name flooding through his body. Aiolos's silhouette sharpened in his vision, every detail clarified as if by contrast.

He had learned all these ranger abilities through Catherine, and he rarely practiced them himself.

Still, a legendary bane was a potent boon. Ambrose felt as if he'd be able to pummel Aiolos at will.

With a wave of his hand, a spatial rift opened up. A young woman stepped through.

"Naomi," Ambrose said. "It's been a while since we've fought side by side."

Naomi smiled and shifted. She became an enormous shark.

Ambrose vaulted onto her back. A ranger was never far from his animal companion, and Naomi shared his enhancements against his bane as well.

As Ambrose mounted the great shark, the kouto cast their spells. Thousands of incantations came flying at him.

The magic began changing erratically the moment it left the kouto's hands.

A Frost Ray became a Fireball mid-flight, then detonated in the water and caused its caster to somersault. A Human Stasis transformed into Chain Lightning. The kouto's aim had gone wide, and the resulting spell tore bloody chunks out of the allied kouto nearby. A kouto attempting a mass buff somehow produced a toxic cloud instead, staining the surrounding water a sickly green.

The kouto themselves couldn't guarantee that their magic wouldn't mutate. Whether the result would be an inspired breakthrough or self-inflicted catastrophe, even the kouto goddess herself couldn't tell in advance.

But Ambrose could.

The kouto were merely a crowd of fools against a diviner.

Ambrose's dice of fate had blanketed the entire battlefield. Every kouto channeling a spell was doomed to produce a negative result.

Their thousands of incantations resulted in a few hundred casualties from friendly fire alone.

Even Aiolos stared for a moment. He had fought alongside the kouto in many engagements. Their chaotic spellcasting was erratic, but in sufficient quantity, a few spells always found their mark. How had every single one failed?

While he was distracted, Ambrose and Naomi assaulted him. Ambrose's anti-magic blade swept across Aiolos's neck and beheaded him.

During that instant of decapitation, Ambrose summoned his Golden Throne and unleashed a ninth-tier spell, Perfect Shapeshifting.

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