Chapter 445: Thanos's Blessing

Aiolos had promised Thanos he would never reveal his origin.

He had just broken that promise.

Breaking a divine contract gave Thanos grounds to act. He could now punish Aiolos directly, and be entirely within Aion's rules in doing so.

But rather than turning his attention to Aiolos, who lay prostrate on the ground, the furious Thanos projected a crackling arc of lightning directly before Ambrose.

"Lich," Thanos said, "I've long wanted to meet you, but not under such unsuitable circumstances."

Ambrose didn't dare show disrespect to a deity of such strength. He said, with all the courtesy he could muster, "Mighty Lord of Storms, I am but a mortal. Under no circumstances would meeting with you be unsuitable for me."

Thanos's incipient anger cleared. He laughed. "Hah! The rumors don't lie. That silver tongue of yours must have received a divine blessing somewhere along the way."

"If it pleases the gods, then I am surely making good use of the blessing that has been given to me."

"Please me?" Thanos's tone turned contemptuous. "You've done more harm to the gods than good. Lich, I'm not Shara, and I'm not Loss. My wrath is approved by Aion, which means I have considerably more freedom to act than either of them."

That wasn't an empty boast. Thanos was the head of the Furies. An alliance of that kind required influence that only real power could sustain.

Deities could have special dispensation. Despite Shara's transgressions, she had only received light punishment. Thanos might even be able to argue that "slaughtering mortals is wrong, but killing just one mortal doesn't constitute a slaughter."

Of course, that was only a guess on Ambrose's part. He preferred to think Aion wasn't quite that arbitrary.

But whatever the exact bounds of Thanos's authority, his volatility was known to the whole world. Gambling on whether he would actually act was not a wager Ambrose intended to make.

So he could only explain, "Lord of Storms, your wisdom surely encompasses the full context of what transpired. I am not the kind of mortal who will suffer without resisting. When deities move against me, I can only defend myself. If I lacked even that much courage, I would have died on the road long ago."

Thanos gave a booming laugh. "Exactly right. I've looked into your history. You've never lacked for courage. That, I find genuinely admirable." His tone shifted toward contempt again. "Unlike certain worthless creatures who collapse after their first real setback."

The last words were directed, unmistakably, toward the figure still prostrate on the floor.

Ambrose offered no defense of Aiolos. Instead, he asked with genuine curiosity, "Great deity, was your original plan truly to have him marry Princess Ariel?"

"That was the intention," Thanos said. "But this worthless creature is no longer fit to marry my most devoted believer."

"Might you not simply have issued a divine commandment?"

Despite everything Aiolos had been through, he still hadn't even met the real Ariel. Thanos had to have done this on purpose.

"Where would the fun be in that?"

Such a command would have been trivially simple—and trivially boring.

Thanos had wanted to cultivate a hero. He had wanted to watch an epic unfold. Instead, Aiolos didn't behave like a storybook hero at all.

He had given Aiolos the gift of immortality so that Aiolos could fail, pick himself up, and try again and again, until something worth watching emerged. What he had gotten instead was this. Thanos had half a mind to simply consume Aiolos and be done with it.

Ambrose reflected that the histories had clearly undersold Thanos. He wasn't just volatile and short-tempered, but also a chaos-loving child with terrible taste in hobbies. Ambrose's intelligence had finally gotten the better of him. Aiolos hadn't been lying from the beginning.

Then Thanos said without warning, "Since I've answered your question, it's my turn to ask one."

"Of course. What would you like to know?" Being in Thanos's sights was not a comfortable feeling.

"You could have demanded far more from that fool just now. From what I've heard of you, shouldn't you have been squeezing every advantage out of him? You asked him one question and agreed to help just like that. Tell me, what was the trap in that question of yours?"

Thanos looked at him with gleeful expectation, as though he had decided that every word Ambrose spoke must contain a dozen layers of scheming.

Ambrose explained with some awkwardness: "There's no trap. I only wanted to confirm something I'd been wondering about. I had previously assumed Aiolos was the kouto goddess's chosen, but when I saw him again, I realized I was wrong. I simply wanted to confirm that."

"That's all?" Thanos sounded very disappointed. "I expected something more interesting."

Ambrose suppressed the urge to petition Aion directly for an intervention, and continued, "For a great deity, perhaps what is unknown represents only the pleasure of surprise. For a diviner like me, the unknown tends to be linked to survival. This trivial confirmation, for me, is an answer to a great many questions at once, and well worth its value.

"Besides, if I wanted Aiolos to work for me, threatening him at this moment would be exactly the wrong approach."

Thanos's interest sharpened visibly. "Oh? Tell me why."

Ambrose resigned himself to satisfying this divine child's curiosity. "I've spent several centuries as an adventurer. I've known all kinds of people—those who run purely on self-interest, and those who are driven by emotions.

"Gustavo Flynn is the former. He's ambitious. Pure emotion is just seasoning for him. With someone like that, the only language that matters is how the profit gets divided, so if it were him, I would absolutely squeeze everything I could right now, because if I miss that window of opportunity, it's gone.

"But Aiolos is entirely different. He gave up so much for a creature the kouto goddess fabricated. He came here and put aside all dignity to beg. Someone like that is moved by sentiment, not by interest. If I buy his gratitude with a transaction, he'll repay the debt, and that'll be the end of it. But if I simply help him, with no conditions attached, then he'll spend the rest of his life trying to find ways to pay me back.

"Calculated that way, binding Aiolos with sentiment is a far better return than any deal I could extract right now."

The laughter that erupted from Thanos caused even Ambrose's soul to tremble.

"Haha! Marvelous. He's been stripped clean and still feels grateful. No wonder they say you can scheme against the gods themselves." He turned toward Aiolos. "Did you hear that, you worthless thing? Do you understand now what kind of man you're dealing with? Do you still want to ask him for help?"

Ambrose suppressed a sigh. Thanos was wasting no time to stir the pot, poking at wounds and practically engineering a reason for Aiolos to refuse him. This deity wanted to watch someone break.

But what happened next surprised even Thanos. "If he can save my Ariel," Aiolos said, "nothing else matters. Father, since the moment I came into this world, everyone has deceived me. The first person who deceived me cut off my head. The second was a goddess who fractured my mind. But this friend of mine has always acted openly, and never once deceived me."

Thanos sounded more amused than anything else. "Idiot, do you still not understand? He's using sentiment to deceive you—to make you feel grateful and obligated!"

Aiolos frowned. "If he helps me save Ariel, I should be grateful to him. Is that deception?"

Ambrose felt a moment of rare, genuine warmth.

The first time they had met, they had fought, but the moment the misunderstanding was cleared up, Aiolos had let it go completely. He had been a fool, but a principled one.

Even after everything that had happened, it seemed Aiolos had never lost that quality. Was this truly Thanos's son?

Thanos himself seemed taken aback. He hadn't expected such an answer. He was quiet for a moment, uncertain whether to be angry or impressed. He had been ready to obliterate Aiolos, but now this worthless creature seemed at least marginally more interesting than before.

"You intend to help him?" Thanos asked Ambrose.

"As you've seen," Ambrose replied, "I'm in the process of using sentiment to bind him into working for me, so naturally I have to help him. Though if you find this arrangement objectionable, I'll naturally defer to you."

Thanos considered it for a long moment. "Fine. Help him if you want. I'm curious enough to keep watching the story of this worthless creature."

With Thanos's approval secured, Ambrose moved without delay.

He examined Aiolos's soul carefully, and then set to work.

Soul repair was his area of expertise. Mending what had been broken was not particularly difficult. What genuinely astonished him was that Aiolos had managed to tear his own soul apart in the first place. The willpower that required was extraordinary.

The procedure went smoothly. In under three hours, Aiolos's missing arm had grown back.

The lobster-girl Ariel regained her senses as well. With a sharp cry of joy, she threw herself into Aiolos's arms.

"Be careful," Ambrose warned. "Both your souls are severely weakened. Rest and avoid dwelling on the past. You should make a full recovery within a month. There may be some partial memory loss, an unavoidable side effect that I cannot correct. But it shouldn't interfere with your life going forward."

Aiolos was in the middle of pouring out his gratitude when Thanos cut him off and sent him away.

Only Ambrose and the crackling lightning remained within Ambrose's extradimensional space.

"You tampered with things just now, didn't you." It wasn't a question. "That fraud's soul had already ceased to exist entirely."

Ambrose let out a quiet breath. "As expected, there's no deceiving a great deity. Yes. Aiolos's soul can regenerate, but hers cannot. Before they reached me, the instability from the spiritual tear had already triggered multiple cycles of death and rebirth. That portion of the soul belonging to Ariel had already completely dissolved, and what remained was simply Aiolos's fragment occupying an empty shell."

"And so," Thanos continued, "you read the memories from Aiolos's soul, used them to construct a new soul modeled after those memories, and placed it into the girl's body. You didn't save Aiolos's beloved. You did exactly what Blobdilpulp did—you created a false beloved to deceive him."

"Yes," Ambrose said. "That is entirely accurate."

And he had not simply fabricated a blank Mimetic Soul—that would have created an undead. Instead he had followed the method he used to create living mercury constructs: crafting a "living" soul capable of seamlessly merging with the lobster-girl's body.

"Why?" Thanos asked, with genuine curiosity. "Simply to keep the fool feeling grateful to you? Afraid his goodwill might depreciate?"

"Exactly as you said," Ambrose replied.

"Hah! Liar!" Thanos said, with satisfaction. "I might not be skilled at detecting lies, but this one is embarrassingly transparent."

"You've misunderstood me."

Ambrose was about to explain when Thanos dismissed it with a wave. "Never mind. It makes no difference to me. Today, you've shown me something genuinely entertaining. I'll let Aiolos live. Deceive him however you like. The only thing is, he's disqualified himself from marrying the real Ariel now.

"Lich, you disrupted my plan. You owe me one glorious wedding. Have you thought about how you intend to pay that debt?"

Ambrose blinked. What on earth did any of this have to do with him? Thanos's shamelessness was staggering.

But Thanos gave him no opening. "Bear this in mind: I expect debts to me to be repaid without exception. Otherwise, I might decide not to allow the Ragetide Kingdom to serve as your alchemical factory."

"Wait, I don't understand. How exactly am I supposed to repay you with a wedding?"

Thanos laughed like a child who had just thrown a stone through someone else's window and was very pleased about it. "You're clever enough to work it out. Whatever you do, don't bore me. I've waited a very long time to find something worth watching, and I have zero interest in being disappointed.

"If you do well, I'll reward you, and I assure you I will be considerably less stingy than the God of Alchemy. As a small gift in recognition of today's entertainment, I grant you one free daily use of Storm of Revenge."

The golden arc of lightning sank into Ambrose's palm, searing itself into the flesh like a brand. Even through the sensation, Ambrose could feel the violent, barely-contained force of electricity within it.

The ninth-tier Storm of Revenge had perhaps inferior single-target damage compared to Meteor Shower, but was overwhelmingly superior as an area-of-effect spell. Storm of Revenge combined acid rain, chain lightning, gale winds, and hailstorms into a single sustained catastrophic event over an enormous range. It would flatten an unfortified city without breaking a sweat.

But Ambrose stared at his palm without enthusiasm.

A wedding? What was he supposed to do?

Was he supposed to persuade the kouto goddess to marry Thanos? A marriage between two lunatics...

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