Ambrose didn't know the limits of Aiolos's regeneration. All he knew was that the ability was absurdly powerful.

He needed to find a solution against it first, or he would just be burning through mana for nothing.

Perfect Shapeshifting was a formidable ninth-tier spell, theoretically capable of permanently transforming his target into a different species. In practice, the transformation was difficult to achieve, because more powerful creatures had correspondingly stronger resistance against it.

Aiolos possessed a divine blessing. Transforming him while he was alive and fighting would be extraordinarily difficult.

That was why Ambrose had killed him first. In the instant during which he was decapitated, his will would be disrupted, making him temporarily more susceptible to magical effects.

Ambrose's plan was successful, and the ninth-tier spell took hold. Aiolos became a crab the size of a fist.

Ambrose hadn't expected things to go this smoothly; designating Aiolos as his bane had likely helped a great deal.

But just as Ambrose reached down to pick up the crab, a powerful current formed around it, hurling both Ambrose and his mount aside.

"Impossible. He kept his abilities even after being shapeshifted?"

Ambrose was at a loss. Aiolos's divine blessing was on another level entirely.

To make things worse, by the time Ambrose had recovered and reoriented himself, the transformed Aiolos had scurried into the midst of the shagin zombies, where they promptly smashed and ate him.

Then, Aiolos regenerated in human form without a scratch.

"How much divine power must that have cost the kouto goddess? She really didn't hold back."

Ambrose stared at the scene with resignation. For the moment, he couldn't think of a reliable counter to Aiolos's regeneration.

Fine. He had no choice but to ignore Aiolos for now.

The kouto whose spells had failed were still alive and screaming. They came crashing toward Ambrose in a melee charge, most having given up on magic entirely and chosen to wave lobster claws in close combat instead.

Ambrose gave Naomi a pat, and she turned and launched herself into the kouto formation.

Aiolos had just finished charging up a powerful spell when Ambrose plunged into the kouto troops. He was forced to dispel his accumulated power. If he'd cast the spell as planned, he would lose most of his own army.

Ambrose showed the kouto no such consideration. His anti-magic blades, spinning like fans, cut a swath through the mob without slowing.

Individual kouto were weak. Without their chaotic spellcasting, they posed no threat to Ambrose whatsoever.

Naomi wove through the press with Ambrose on her back, biting down on kouto whenever they crowded close as she punched cleanly through the formation.

Aiolos pursued them from behind, sending ocean currents at Ambrose from every angle, but his spellwork, however impressive, couldn't match Ambrose's.

Ambrose's mithril armor could pivot in any direction. He simply twisted his upper body and sent frost spells back at him, keeping Aiolos in a constant state of crowd-control with no hope of closing the gap.

Ambrose didn't hesitate. With a single command, all the shagin zombies turned and crashed into the kouto.

If Aiolos couldn't be killed, the kouto were the next logical target.

The shagin zombies were not simple puppets but rather fully autonomous undead, capable of independent action. One order was all they needed. They were individually weak, but that was fine. They didn't fear death.

Shagin fought with claws and fangs, and that remained the case in zombie form.

The kouto, terrified of using their own chaotic magic with Ambrose in the middle of their formation, were stripped of their primary advantage. In a pure melee, the kouto were hopelessly outmatched by shagin.

Though there were more kouto, the battle was entirely one-sided. The kouto were cut down steadily, fell back, then broke entirely.

There was no point reasoning with madmen, nor in expecting them to hold the line. Their thoughts were erratic: when they wanted to rage, they raged; when they felt fear, they ran, without hesitation or shame.

Before long, the kouto had fled completely, leaving only Aiolos still in dogged pursuit.

Ambrose now understood how the kouto had managed to claim so much territory in the Sea of Volcanoes. Aiolos had been taking to the front on their behalf.

An endlessly regenerating warrior was extraordinarily difficult to counter, as Ambrose had found out firsthand. He genuinely had no way to kill the man.

Even if the zombies surged forward to restrain him and create an opening, he would simply come back after Ambrose killed him once.

"Damn it. I refuse to believe there's no counter to him."

Ambrose turned. "Come on then," he called out to Aiolos. "Just the two of us, a duel to the death!"

Aiolos shot back scornfully, "Who was it who spent that whole fight running?"

"Stop using your regeneration!" Ambrose said through clenched teeth. That blessing was outrageously unfair.

"Stop using your magic!" Aiolos retorted.

"Fine," Ambrose said without hesitation.

The anti-magic blades in his hands began spinning like turbines.

He didn't exclusively rely on magic. With his dice of fate and mithril armor alone, he could dominate Aiolos in close combat.

"You can't use those blades either!" Aiolos continued. "There's something wrong with them!"

His magical carapace had been useless against those two weapons. They seemed to carry a powerful anti-magic effect.

Ambrose smiled and put the blades away.

Instead, he produced a large metal staff shaped like a long-handled warhammer. In his other hand appeared a strange short-barreled firearm of uncertain function.

Aiolos went silent. The lich had a truly unreasonable variety of tools.

He thought for a moment, then demanded, "Fight me in your original skeleton form if you dare!"

Ambrose didn't respond. Aiolos might not have grown smarter, but he'd certainly grown more shameless.

Ambrose mounted Naomi and charged. His plan was to suppress Aiolos, then find a way to shove him into his extradimensional space while he was on the verge of death.

The temporal stasis within would render even an infinitely regenerating target completely immobile.

It was the only counter he had come up with.

It was risky, but really might work. Aiolos fought recklessly thanks to his immortality. He went all-in at every exchange, and was full of openings.

But just as Ambrose was beginning his charge, Aiolos appeared to receive some kind of message. His expression shifted, and he began retreating through the water.

He fixed Ambrose with a hateful glare, then fled with a current at his back.

Ambrose didn't pursue him. Naomi was fast, but not fast enough to catch Aiolos.

He watched the water currents diminish into the distance and muttered internally, "That deranged goddess!"

Ambrose assumed the kouto goddess had sent Aiolos a warning. What else would have made him suddenly turn tail?

He was half right. Someone had called Aiolos back, but it wasn't Blobdilpulp.

The kouto goddess was erratic, but Ambrose's extradimensional space fell outside the scope of her domain of madness. She had no idea what it contained or what it could do.

The one who had recalled Aiolos was his wife, the lobster-girl Ariel.

Ambrose's sudden engagement had scattered the shagin in all directions and drawn Aiolos in, hoping to capitalize on the chaos. Instead, Aiolos had lost a significant portion of his forces.

Meanwhile, another group of opportunists had moved in.

A fresh wave of shagin was now attacking the kouto's own territory. Ariel had blown his sea-conch and called out for him.

Nothing mattered more than his wife. Aiolos had no choice but to disengage and go see what was happening.

With his departure, Ambrose returned to battlefield cleanup.

The kouto, like the shagin before them, were refined into zombies. By the time the fighting was over, there were a few hundred less shagin zombies, but a few thousand more kouto ones instead.

The longer undead warfare continued, the larger the undead army grew.

By the time Ambrose finished clearing the field, Aige and the others had returned from their own engagement.

The campaign against the ixiray had been a complete success. With pearl dew suppressing the ixiray's poison, the Silent Sea Pirate Company had been more than capable of handling the opposition on their own, even before factoring in the undead army's support.

The ixiray had abandoned their unhatched eggs and over ten thousand bodies as they fled, whereas Ambrose's losses amounted to a portion of the Grunt cannon fodder. A brilliant victory, by any measure.

Despite having secured two zones in rapid succession, Ambrose had no time to savor his success. He convened an immediate war council with the Elegiac Society.

The engagement with Aiolos had been recorded in full. When he played it back, the reaction was universal shock.

An opponent who flatly could not be killed, with considerable individual combat ability to boot… How were they supposed to fight that?

[Human-Hater: How do you manage to attract this kind of freak every single time?]

Heki Stone twisted the knife. Opportunities like this didn't come around often enough to waste.

[Master Megaman: This counts as a freak to you? You need to broaden your horizons. I've swindled an Archduchess of Hell. Two goddesses have taken divine punishment on my account. You already knew that.]

[Human-Hater: *******!]

Heki Stone nearly cracked his fangs. He had walked right into Ambrose's verbal traps again.

[Dullahan's Crown: I'd actually enjoy testing myself against him. Underwater isn't great for me, though. I don't swim well.]

[Mute: We should have dealt with him before. If I absorb his body and soul directly, I might be able to disrupt his regeneration ability.]

Ambrose grimaced. [Megaman Tiga: That wouldn't work. Aiolos carries a potent divine blessing, and we all know what that means. This regeneration operates at the level of universal law. Mortal power can't override that. You haven't become a true deity yet. The odds of breaking a regeneration effect like his are negligible.]

Ambrose had certainly considered using Finger of Death to obliterate Aiolos's soul, but he seemed to exist in a persistent state. No matter how he died, no matter which part of him was destroyed, his regeneration dispelled all status effects on revival.

Ambrose had used Perfect Shapeshifting to permanently turn him into a crab, but Aiolos had come back from death in his original form, without any lingering effect whatsoever.

[Mute: So your extradimensional space's temporal stasis is our only real counter?]

Ambrose shook his head. [Megaman Tiga: I can't be certain. It's only a hypothesis. If even that doesn't work…]

Aiolos's ability was genuinely unreasonable, but Ambrose had identified one weakness.

His power was fixed. Across every encounter, Ambrose had felt Aiolos getting stronger, but only in tactical skill. Each resurrection brought him back to the same level of power. He just grew more proficient in how he used it.

It was a small comfort, but comfort nonetheless. If the man could regenerate endlessly and continue growing stronger on top of it, he would rule the ocean in a few years and the world shortly after.

The problem, then, was not how to kill Aiolos. It was how to contain him.

After lengthy discussion, several proposals emerged.

The first was Ambrose's extradimensional space. Temporal stasis to neutralize the target was a strong approach. Setting an appropriate trap and luring Aiolos in should be manageable, given his intelligence.

The second came from Black Rose: she proposed that most of Aiolos's power was oceanic in nature, and luring him onto land might deprive him of that foundation. Whether it affected his regeneration was uncertain, but his combat effectiveness would drop sharply, and containment would be far simpler.

It wasn't a bad idea. Without ocean water, the vast majority of Aiolos's abilities were gone. He'd barely be stronger than an ordinary person.

The final proposal, and the most reliable, was to petition a deity to strip Aiolos of his endless regeneration.

The restriction here was one of jurisdiction. Only a deity with a domain relevant to the specific blessing could revoke it. The God of Alchemy could hardly revoke an ocean-based divine blessing.

Ezdolo was an obvious candidate. That goddess could almost certainly revoke the blessing without difficulty, but given that Aige had just refused Ezdolo's overtures, expecting her cooperation seemed optimistic.

[Megaman Tiga: Let's not rely on petitioning a deity. We've spent all this time working in this sea precisely to ascend through our own efforts. That was the whole point.]

[Black Rose: Then what's your plan?]

Ambrose sighed and wrote in the Necromantic Codex, [Megaman Tiga: We'll try everything, of course. I'll even use Terraform and my power of divination to weave a future of captivity for this young man.]

Terraform, a spell capable of permanently altering terrain and climate, would let him connect the two zones he currently held and reshape them according to his design in order to construct a trap tailored specifically for Aiolos.

It was a demanding spell, but Gustavo Flynn had already begun using the God of Alchemy's coin at scale, and Ambrose was already receiving his thirty percent cut from the God of Alchemy.

Once he had Aiolos in hand, he intended to extract an enormous sum from that deranged goddess. He would pull every lobster antenna off her head if he could.

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