Chapter 423: Experts in Every Trade

Aiolos knew Ariel only by her face. And the upper half of the creature before him was a perfect match, every detail aligned with the young woman he remembered.

Not only that, she was wearing what looked like heavy articulated shell-armor across her upper body. Aiolos was fairly certain the Ariel he'd met had been wearing armor of some kind too. Add a warhammer to the picture and it would have been perfect.

But... was this truly his Ariel?

The kouto goddess extended one half-tentacle appendage and rested it on the lobster-girl's head, then turned to Aiolos. "You see? Your Ariel is right here. So just who did your so-called friend find?"

Aiolos's brow furrowed. Was the lich truly deceiving him? Had it all been a lie?

No. Something was wrong. Something didn't add up.

His instincts told him that everything about today was off. He just couldn't identify exactly where.

Blobdilpulp wasn't interested in waiting for him to work it out. She seized his arm with one claw and demanded, "This is your Ariel. Can you prove she isn't?"

Aiolos strained against her grip, but the currents that normally came to him instantly were sluggish and unresponsive, and his body alone wasn't strong enough to overpower a goddess.

"I will ask the great Thanos to confirm this," Aiolos said, his voice taut. "Let go of me!"

"Stop struggling. The only domain Thanos holds over the ocean is the maelstrom. He may be powerful, but this is the ocean, my domain! I am the goddess of the ocean!"

In an outright confrontation, Blobdilpulp would certainly lose to Thanos—but she was, after all, one of the ocean deities. Blocking the blessings Thanos had bestowed on Aiolos was well within her ability.

Seeing that the situation was deteriorating fast, Aiolos called out to his father inwardly.

The prayers of the children of divinity could reach their progenitors' ears directly. Thanos could even see the expression on Aiolos's face at that moment.

But in that ruined divine realm of his, Thanos simply spat out coldly, "What useless trash."

He had been watching Aiolos's every move—not with a father's concern, but with the detached scrutiny of the Lord of Storms observing the behavior of mortals from on high.

Even with his bloodline flowing through the boy's veins, Aiolos was ultimately little more than a toy Thanos had fashioned on a whim, much as he had once divided his divine power and given it to the lich Valarun years ago.

It was pure entertainment, nothing more.

Valarun was just a toy into whom Thanos had invested a trifling bit of power.

It was a pity that Valarun had ultimately broken under the weight of it, and chosen to flee.

Aiolos was proving even more of a disappointment. He hadn't provided even a fraction of the amusement Thanos had hoped for.

And so Thanos watched Aiolos struggle, utterly unmoved. That, in itself, was the most merciful response available to him. If he chose to act, it would be to punish his immortal son with endless lightning—to make him understand, through his suffering, exactly how deeply he had disappointed his father.

Thanos was a deity who viewed all living things as insects, without exception. If Aion would only permit it, he would not hesitate to turn lightning into boiling water and flood the entire material plane, just to see which unusually resilient "ants" could swim through it—and then clap his hands in delight and bestow gifts on the survivors.

So Thanos simply watched as Aiolos prayed in growing desperation, and gave him nothing.

If his son couldn't extract himself from a predicament this trivial, he would never become the kind of "hero" Thanos had in mind, and then this story would become very dull indeed.

As for the kouto goddess's behavior, Thanos saw no reason to intervene there either.

From the beginning, granting Aiolos power over the ocean had been a deliberate choice, a lure to draw out the ocean deities, a test to see whether his son could navigate the divine world the way the lich did: playing them off one another, and perhaps even tricking one or two out of their domains. That would have drawn a genuine laugh from Thanos, and he would have brought Aiolos home to praise him properly.

But at this point... the boy clearly wasn't up to it.

With no response coming from Thanos, and Blobdilpulp relentlessly pressuring him on the fact that her creation was Ariel he sought—that Thanos's silence was as good as confirmation—Aiolos's expression grew slowly unfocused.

The goddess's steady insistence was working on him. By the time he looked at the half-human, half-lobster "Ariel" again, his eyes had softened.

"If he never figures it out, he'll be a fool his entire life." Thanos closed his eyes and severed his connection to Aiolos. When he opened them again, he chose to scry on Ambrose.

Unlike Aion, the other gods were not omniscient. Thanos had been able to locate Ambrose because Ambrose was carrying the sea-conch Aiolos had given him. It had been imbued with Aiolos's power, and through that power, with Thanos's divine energy.

It had become, in effect, a minor divine artifact. It wasn't particularly useful for anything, but would certainly serve as a homing beacon.

At that moment, Ambrose was coordinating the Silent Sea Pirate Company crews to scout the terrain of the Sea of Volcanoes, while staying in close contact with the merfolk high priestess to track the movements of the various oceanic factions.

There were many races eyeing the new sea, far more than the ixiray alone.

The weaker tribes could be ignored for now. Any group that couldn't produce even a single legendary-tier combatant was just scavenging for scraps; once the dust settled, they would fall in line behind whoever won.

The real competition were the factions with a genuine claim to controlling the new sea, and they numbered five: the merfolk, the ixiray, the shagin, the kouto, and the nagas.

The merfolk were already Ambrose's allies. They weren't particularly interested in expanding into new territory, and their priority was ensuring the ixiray never grew powerful enough to become a catastrophe. The ixiray had demonic blood, and would be able to summon a projection of Demogorgon himself if their population grew large enough.

If the Demon Prince manifested in the ocean, there was likely no force on earth that could stop him.

The ocean gods could intervene, but the cost would be severe. Demogorgon would get exactly what he wanted—chaos and slaughter—while the ocean pantheon bled itself half-dry fighting off his projection.

For the demons, that would be a decisive victory. For everyone else, it would be a catastrophe.

So when Ambrose had signaled to the merfolk that he, too, harbored a grudge against the ixiray, the high priestess had welcomed him as an ally on the spot.

The shagin and the kouto needed little analysis. The shagin worshipped the Deep Queen Umbori, also known as the Harridan Queen.

More importantly, Umbori claimed to be a goddess of the sea, yet she was not counted among the ocean deities, because she had joined Thanos's Furies, making her a nominal ally of the Lord of Storms.

The relationship between members of that pantheon was not particularly warm, and Umbori and Thanos were no exception. They were bound by common temperament, both of them being prone to violent fits and destructive impulses, rather than any real affinity.

And so the shagin who followed Umbori were, predictably, savage and prone to violence as well. New seas meant new hunting grounds, and the shagin had no intention of passing that up.

According to the merfolk's intelligence, tens of thousands of elite shagin had already entered the Sea of Volcanoes and were actively scouting for habitable zones. Once they were established, they would use Umbori's divine power to breed great sharks, filling the surrounding waters with an edge of predatory menace.

The kouto required even less thought: they were stupid, clumsy, numerically overwhelming, and capable of absolutely anything. Ambrose didn't bother trying to predict their movements. There was no point.

As for the ixiray, those creatures shared the characteristic vitality of abyssal demons. They were individually short-lived but extraordinarily resilient, breeding quickly, maturing rapidly, and possessing powerful regenerative abilities. According to merfolk reports, the ixiray had already claimed several submarine trenches in the Sea of Volcanoes and were breeding at full capacity.

They had no natural predators in this new sea, which meant they would hatch new ixiray at maximum speed. They had to be dealt with immediately. Give them a few more days, and the entire Sea of Volcanoes would belong to them.

The last faction, the nagas, was the one Ambrose genuinely wasn't sure how to handle.

From what he understood, the nagas worshipped the Triple Goddess Sejanustas, a lawful good deity. Her followers naturally mirrored her inclinations, ordering their behavior according to her teachings. In principle, nagas were a benevolent people.

The one complication was that the Triple Goddess had a connection to the draconic lineage.

According to the texts of primordial creation, the first dragon in all the planes was Asgralas, the creator-deity of all dragonkind, the Nine-Faced Dragon God, the shaper of many planes. This being went by another name as well: Eo.

The pronunciation was similar to Aion, and this entity's powers bore a resemblance to Aion's own: in certain planes, Eo's authority reportedly exceeded even Aion's.

Of course, much of that was information disseminated by the dragons themselves, and Ambrose had no way of verifying any of it. Aion had never troubled himself to respond to such claims.

At any rate, the Nine-Faced Dragon God had created dragonkind and had brought forth the draconic pantheon and scaled kindred as children or aspects of himself. Among them was the Naga Queen, the Triple Goddess herself, thereby bound to the dragons by ties that defied easy description.

Given the current intelligence, the draconic pantheon were still locked into their wager with the Lord of Dawn, and so could not act directly. But the Naga Queen was, strictly speaking, not part of the draconic pantheon proper. So what was her view of what had happened to the overseas dragons?

Ambrose had just finished thoroughly thrashing them, effectively turning the entire lot into livestock under his personal management.

Would the Naga Queen take offense to that?

Lawful good or not, even a benevolent deity could fall into a fit of rage.

Thanos, watching from his divine realm, knew exactly what Ambrose was puzzling over. The Lord of Storms rubbed his hands together, lightning crackling between his palms, barely able to contain himself.

That lich commanded enormous power. Would he go straight to war with the nagas? "Start a fight!" he roared. "It's time the ocean got interesting!"

Ambrose, meanwhile, was bent over a rough chart of the sea, drawing lines and scribbling notes, logging the intelligence on every major faction in the ocean. When the chart was as complete as he could make it, he opened his magic mirror and transmitted the contents to a handful of "friends."

The retired Elven King of the Court of the Silver Moon, the retired High Inquisitor of the Lyon Empire, the exiled, retired President of the Alchemists' Council, currently marooned in the chaos realm...

They were all retired, they were all old, and between them, they had access to more military expertise than most standing armies. Ambrose had a clear-eyed assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses. When it came to warfare, he was an absolute amateur.

If that was the case, the sensible thing was to let professionals draft the plan. Whichever proposal he chose, the winning advisor could look forward to a preferential rate on commissions in the future.

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