Chapter 463: No Longer Human

While Ambrose was off on his underwater adventure with the princess, the rest of the continent had no shortage of drama of its own.

Wars on the mainland seemed to have transformed ever since this lich burst onto the scene.

Lyon, once unstoppable across every front, had finally begun to lose, and each successive defeat was uglier than the last.

The incident with the Lyon emperor crushing his own troops could be set aside; one might charitably say the githarks had simply caught Lyon off guard. But there was no such excuse for what followed, when the orcs began hammering them into the ground without mercy.

This time, the orcs had committed every elite warrior the entire race could muster. The number of legends on the orcish side actually exceeded Lyon's.

Lyon couldn't match that commitment. They had made too many enemies over the years. Not only did their shared border with the orcs require strong defenders, there seemed to be something disquieting occurring in the Emerald Dreamwood, and the druids there might well strike if Lyon dropped its guard.

As for the former territory of the Unholy Kingdom—now the Sea of Volcanoes—it had largely fallen under the control of the undead, who were Lyon's mortal enemies.

After all that fighting, all that expenditure of manpower and resources, Lyon nevertheless found itself surrounded by enemies on every side, as though every prior victory had somehow been an illusion.

And this time, the orcs hadn't simply brought overwhelming high-end combat power to the field. They also demonstrated a level of command they'd never shown before.

There had been a time when ordering a scouting party to shift ten meters to the left was practically a joke told among soldiers, with a punchline about the failures of military bureaucracy.

Conditions on a battlefield shifted by the second. By the time an order reached the front, the situation it had been designed for no longer existed. Commanders, by necessity, had to plan well ahead of events.

Deep knowledge of both the enemy and one's own forces, constant probing, a sequence of attacks and feints designed to herd the enemy into a prepared trap—that was how advantage was won on a battlefield.

The old saying about a battle being decided from a thousand miles away was no joke. It was a genuine requirement for any competent commander.

Angus Watson was widely regarded as the finest young commander of his generation. He wasn't a legend himself, but his command of troops was unmatched in the entire empire.

It had to be said that the former High Inquisitor had a remarkably potent bloodline. His three sons were each gifted in his own way, each exceptional in his own right.

And yet, on the battlefield, Angus Watson had lost to an orc general whose name no one had even heard before.

Watson had correctly anticipated the orcs' direction of attack. He had laid out his traps with precision. He had eliminated every scout the enemy sent ahead of time. All that remained was waiting for the orcs to walk straight into the snare. But somehow, even after stepping directly into the trap, the orcs escaped regardless, as though every last one of them possessed perfect long-range vision, capable of watching the encirclement tighten in real time and finding the weakest point to break through.

If this sort of thing had happened just once or twice, Angus Watson could have chalked it up to luck. But it happened every single time, without exception.

Any Lyon tactic witnessed by a single orc seemed to be visible to the entire army all at once.

And then there was the matter of how those orders were transmitted. The orcs possessed a means of relaying commands faster than even his magic mirrors.

At one point, the orcs had pulled off an absurd tactic during a confrontation over a piece of high ground. It had swung back and forth between orc and Lyon control for an entire day, as though the orcs had precisely calculated the timing of Lyon's every advance and retreat. Every single time, the orcs reached the high ground first, waiting in comfort for the exhausted Lyon soldiers to arrive and striking down hard from an advantageous position, then withdrawing swiftly before the Lyon counterattack.

Just as the Lyon forces began to believe the orcs had truly withdrawn and pushed their main force forward in pursuit, the same orcs would loop back around and strike from behind. They exploited the orcs' natural advantage in mountainous terrain to perfection, catching Lyon off guard every single time. Troops gathering and scattering exactly as needed, forces deployed with almost supernatural precision—every enemy movement was integrated seamlessly into their own command structure.

At first, Angus Watson assumed the orcs' front had to be packed with exceptionally skilled orcish field commanders, each capable of improvising solutions to his tactics on the fly. But eventually he discovered the front consisted entirely of ordinary warriors, the most common breed of orcish raider who knew nothing other than to charge forward with a howl. Expecting troops like that to execute such intricate tactics should have been impossible.

Some mysterious adversary was controlling this entire orcish force, and whoever it was could relay intelligence at a speed that defied belief.

Watson attempted to exploit this by feeding the enemy false information. It worked, briefly, but by the second time he tried it, his opponent had already adapted.

This wasn't merely someone with a fast means of communication. The man behind it was himself an exceptionally gifted commander, capable of adjusting tactics on the fly according to the shifting state of the battlefield.

Worse still, every single orc was willing to follow his command without question.

When warriors as fearless and reckless as the orcs submitted entirely to the direction of one powerful commander, the resulting force was something genuinely terrifying.

Even so, at this stage, the fighting between Lyon and the orcs remained roughly even. Lyon's losses weren't yet catastrophic.

The true problem was that the people of Lyon simply could not stomach defeat of any kind. They had always been invincible. But suddenly, somehow, they were being pushed around by orcs.

Public opinion began turning against Angus Watson, not least because his family situation was uncomfortably sensitive.

His father, who had resigned from the post of High Inquisitor; his younger brother, suspected of fomenting division... Taken together, that information seemed to paint an unflattering picture of Angus Watson.

Was Angus Watson deliberately losing?

The rumor spread quickly enough that Lyon was forced into an emergency change of command.

And that change was precisely what triggered a real disaster.

Watson, at least, had been able to trade blows on roughly even terms. But the moment a new commander took over, the orcs immediately detected the shift in command and launched a string of consecutive night raids.

A feint could become a full assault in an instant. A full charge could collapse into a feint just as quickly. A retreat could become a rout—and the moment you pursued what looked like a rout, you might discover that you had walked straight into an ambush.

This almost surreal style of command left the new Lyon commander completely at a loss. None of it conformed to anything he had spent half his life learning about leading troops.

The result, within just a few days, was a catastrophic and humiliating defeat for Lyon.

The people of Lyon had grown accustomed to relying on the strength of their paladin legions, known to be fearless, unyielding, and capable of turning even the most hopeless situation around.

This new commander, following old habits, deployed the paladin legions in a moment of crisis, hoping to engineer exactly that kind of reversal.

Under ordinary circumstances, it would have worked. Lyon's history was full of victories won against overwhelming numbers, courtesy of the paladin legions' reputation alone.

But this time, the outcome was entirely different.

Lyon's paladins were fearless in the face of death—as were the orcs, who came howling for vengeance, fully prepared to fight to the last.

Both sides fielded elite forces willing to fight to the last. The only difference was tactics, and there, the enemy had the clear advantage. The outcome was predictable.

An entire paladin legion was wiped out. Two thousand paladins and three hundred priests died on the field. A border city fell. Twenty thousand Lyon civilians were taken captive by the orcs.

Angus Watson had lost battle after battle, but he had never once lost an entire city outright.

After this defeat, every citizen of Lyon understood that Angus Watson hadn't been losing on purpose. This new enemy was simply terrifyingly strong.

The Lyon emperor convened a full assembly, took all responsibility for what had happened, formally exonerated Angus Watson of the slanderous rumors directed at him, and granted him the highest possible authority over military affairs with only one condition attached: not another inch of Lyon territory could be lost.

Thrust into this crisis, Angus Watson could only do his utmost to rebuild what remained of his forces.

He hauled every magic mirror he could lay hands on up to the frontlines. While the orcs were still riding high on their recent victory and somewhat less vigilant than usual, he managed to wipe out two isolated orc detachments that had overextended themselves. It was enough to barely hold the line against further incursion.

After that, Watson used the terrain of the Emerald River to block the orcs' momentum entirely.

The Emerald River was over three hundred meters wide, and the second-largest river in Lyon territory. Any further orcish advance would require crossing it.

Lyon defended the crossing with everything they had. For the moment, the orcs had no way through.

The orcs did have ships—their kingdom, after all, bordered the ocean—but seafaring vessels couldn't navigate a river, and there was no practical way to transport those ships overland to the Emerald River.

So the orcs turned to other methods.

They began trading Lyon lives for Lyon ships.

After overrunning the border city, rather than carry out mass slaughter as usual, they had rounded up the survivors and herded them, alive, to the riverbank in full view of the Lyon forces, using the civilians' lives as leverage.

This, too, was a first in Lyon's history.

In the past, those who wronged Lyon would be hunted down no matter how far they fled. The dwarves' only offense had been some petty cheating in border trade, yet it had set off a chain of wars that ultimately cost the dwarves half their desert territory.

Now, for the first time, it was Lyon's turn to be pressed.

Nearly twenty thousand Lyon lives were at stake. Could Lyon afford to save them? Doing so meant handing the orcs exactly the leverage they needed to continue the invasion.

Lyon couldn't afford to deliberate for long, because the orcs had already begun killing their hostages. One person per day, man or woman, child or elderly, would be executed in plain view across the river, in front of every Lyon soldier.

Lyon was truly in dire straits now.

Just as Angus Watson was about to buckle under the full weight of this pressure, the Lyon emperor issued a direct decree: no compromise of any kind would be made with the orcs.

That order placed the emperor squarely in the eye of the storm, but it also took every ounce of pressure off Angus Watson's shoulders. Public anger turned instead toward the emperor's perceived cruelty, and the political situation grew volatile once again.

The orcs, for their part, showed no restraint either. They had no intention of feeding twenty thousand mouths for nothing. They killed every last captive and threw the bodies into the Emerald River.

The water ran red almost instantly, the bodies drifting downstream until the Lyon forces had recovered every single one from the banks.

The sight of twenty thousand Lyon natives dead left the people of Lyon weeping, utterly powerless to do anything about it.

They hated the orcs for their brutality, but they hated their own emperor in equal measure.

Soldiers dying to defend their homeland was one thing, but the emperor had bought peace with the lives of ordinary civilians instead.

The resentment, however, didn't last long.

Once all the corpses had been recovered from the river, the Lyon emperor appeared in the form of a time dragon and unleashed power that bordered on the divine: he reversed the flow of time itself, and brought all twenty thousand of them back to life.

The sight left everyone present utterly speechless.

How could a mere mortal perform such a feat?

No wonder the emperor had refused to compromise. He'd had a way to save them all along. Now this was a ruler with true foresight. This was the man destined to lead the people of Lyon.

The same public fury that had burned against the emperor only moments before turned into worship.

But only the common people were joyful. Anyone who actually understood what had just happened was deeply worried about the emperor's condition.

Time carried weight. The same span of years didn't weigh the same on every subject. Reversing a thousand years' worth of life for a stone was trivial. Reversing a thousand years' worth of life for Arthur Lyon might well be impossible even for a god.

Making everyone in the capital one year younger would have been simple enough. But restoring twenty thousand people from death back to life meant restoring their very souls: souls that had ascended to a divine realm, souls that had descended to Hell, souls that had simply dissolved into nothing. Every one of them had to be pulled back and made whole again. The cumulative weight of that undertaking was staggering.

The greater the disruption caused by reversing time, the greater the burden that fell on the wielder.

Every time the emperor activated the Draconic Armaments, there was a price to pay. If there weren't, why not simply transform into the Dragon Tyrant himself and turn every orc on the battlefield into an infant on the spot?

And exactly as everyone privately suspected, the Lyon emperor never appeared in public again after reviving those twenty thousand souls. He remained sequestered in the palace, "recovering."

But contrary to what outsiders imagined, the emperor was not lying weak and feeble in bed.

Quite the opposite: he was in a state of utter frenzy, hammering relentlessly at the walls and floor of his chamber. His body had begun merging steadily with the Draconic Armaments. The young emperor, Percival Lyon, now wielded power of staggering magnitude. Every blow he threw was enough to shatter solid stone.

Unfortunately, none of it accomplished anything.

A searing agony was spreading through him, a pain rooted in his very soul, with no possible medicine or treatment.

"Damn you! You lied to me! I'm dying! This pain is going to kill me!"

Percival Lyon's face was a mass of bulging veins as he roared in fury.

In his mind, another voice answered, "Calm yourself, my emperor. I am suffering the very same soul-tearing agony as you. And I told you exactly this would happen, from the start. We have not yet mastered the full power of the time dragon in its prime, and side effects were inevitable. But for the sake of your reputation, this price is worth paying. Step by step, you are climbing toward a height even greater than Arthur Lyon ever reached."

"I don't care! I'd rather have let those twenty thousand die than endure this agony! I'm going to kill you! You liar!"

"Bear with it. Just bear with it, and your soul will heal in time."

"I can't bear it! Didn't you say your own soul was damaged too? Then why aren't you in agony?!"

"A dragon's soul is far more resilient than a human's. Furthermore, I carry the memories of the Dragon Tyrant himself, which gives me considerably stronger willpower. If you truly cannot endure this, I can offer you a method to transform your soul, one that would ease the pain significantly."

"Tell me! Tell me right now!"

Despite already having reduced the room to rubble, Percival Lyon remained plagued by a searing pain in his head that showed no sign of letting up. At this point, he would have eaten excrement and drunk urine if someone had promised it would dull the pain.

"This method has consequences. Don't say I didn't warn you in advance."

Atros's tone shifted, though Percival Lyon was far too consumed by his agony to notice. He writhed on the floor.

"What consequences?! Just tell me! I can't take this anymore!"

Atros said gravely, "With this method, your soul will gradually transform into a dragon's soul. When that happens, you will no longer be human."

"That doesn't matter! I don't want to be human anymore!"

As Percival Lyon roared those words, a strange energy fused itself into his soul, and the searing pain vanished almost instantly.

But along with it came a flood of memories that were not his own.

When Percival Lyon finally rose from the floor, his right eye had changed. No longer a human blue, it was now the vertical golden slit of a dragon's pupil.

The young emperor let out a satisfied sigh. "Finally, no more putting up with that pathetic weakling. Arthur, I'll be coming for you soon. Wait right there with that lich."

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