Chapter 431: Grunt Type I

The black mass of the kouto army surged into the gloomy trench in a chaotic, disorganized flood.

The merfolk forces waiting in position opened up immediately with Magic Missiles, Frost Blasts, and Chain Lightning, tearing through the kouto and sending them reeling in all directions.

Despite walking into an ambush, the kouto soaked up the punishment with surprising resilience. The same spells that would have reduced a shagin to fragments left the kouto injured but alive and moving.

And the moment the kouto took damage, they started screaming. A cacophony of bizarre, piercing shrieks erupted from their enormous heads. The noise was more than just unpleasant. Merfolk spellcasters across the line found their casting rhythm disrupted, their spells sliding out of sync.

The kouto had no formation, no coherent plan of attack. What they did have was an enormous density of bloodline spellcasters.

Eldritch Blasts bestowed by their deranged goddess kept detonating across the battlefield, each causing a surge of wild magic.

The effects were entirely unpredictable: one strike might polymorph a target into a small animal, the next might freeze them solid, the third could apply a healing effect or a buff. These surges were equally capable of landing on the kouto themselves.

The kouto were stupid and chaotic.

Their goddess had been born from kouto madness and in turn had poured more madness back into them. There was a kind of terrible symmetry to it.

In an earlier simulation, the elf-commanded merfolk had been on the verge of winning—only for an unreasonable large-scale charm effect to sweep the field, turning a large portion of the roca contingent against their own side. The tide was reversed entirely.

The kouto suffered heavy losses, but they won anyway.

Their victories made no sense, just like their losses.

After that battle, the high priestess offered the elves a piece of advice: "Never engage the kouto in a direct confrontation. You will never understand how you lost."

By the end of the session, all three kingdoms—Lyon, the Court of the Silver Moon, and the Unholy Kingdom—had taken their turns. Without exception, every single one of them had been defeated. Out of twenty-eight engagements, the high priestess had won every single one, demonstrating again and again precisely how merciless the ocean could be.

The proud, experienced commanders were humbled.

Deep-sea warfare was genuinely unlike anything they had encountered. They had known the ocean and the land were different, but not to such a fundamental extent. Almost every rule they had built their careers on needed to be rethought from the ground up.

After several rounds, they were visibly changed. Their understanding of the ocean had deepened considerably, and they were leaning forward with eagerness for more when Ambrose turned to the high priestess and said, "You've worked hard enough. That's enough for today's session. Please go and rest. If you'd like, feel free to explore the dream. You can conjure anything you'd enjoy. The space is yours."

The high priestess had been about to say she could continue, but then she thought about how many days she had gone without proper sleep. The dream was remarkable. She might as well take the opportunity to experience it properly, since another chance like this was far from guaranteed.

She withdrew with her subordinates, but Ambrose didn't dismiss the commanders. Instead, he turned to them with a pleasant expression. "Now, friends, let's move on to the second phase of today's exercise."

Puzzlement crossed every face. This lich had no experience himself. With the merfolk advisor gone, what was he going to do?

Ambrose had anticipated the look. "I know what you're thinking. Don't worry. I'm not an amateur trying to teach professionals. I've already recorded the details of every engagement. I'll continue simulating from where we left off. The only difference is the units you'll be working with."

He waved a hand. A water-droplet-shaped object appeared before the group, roughly the size of a finger.

"What is that?" Alderien asked, eyeing it with faint unease. He could detect undead emanations from it.

"A somewhat unusual skeleton," Ambrose replied.

Alderien raised an eyebrow. "Your skeletons are made of metal?"

"Which one of us is the lich?" Ambrose replied without hesitation. "Which one of us knows skeletons best?"

Alderien shut his mouth. Trading barbs with this lich was a fool's errand. He had only himself to blame for the attempt.

Ambrose demonstrated the torpedo's movement. Its jet-propelled acceleration was startling, and fast enough to visibly unsettle the entire room.

"This is an aberrant skeleton designed for ranged application. Since the cost is relatively low, I've decided to call it Grunt Type I. It's a consumable. Think of it as an arrow."

He conjured a shagin, then drove a Grunt Type I into it. The impact punched straight through the shagin's body. The collision fractured the torpedo's nose section slightly, releasing the seawater-undead payload directly into the wound.

A shagin that would normally have kept fighting after taking a wound began writhing in agony almost instantly. Within seconds, it was dead.

The assembled commanders couldn't evaluate much from a single kill. But when Ambrose waved his hand and summoned thousands upon thousands of Grunt Type Is, every face in the room changed.

They had finally registered the two key words Ambrose had used earlier: "skeleton" and "cheap."

For a lich, those two descriptors meant it could be mass-produced with ease.

In other words, this weapon, which was capable of killing a shagin outright, could genuinely be deployed the way you deployed arrows.

Angus Watson was the first to speak. "Do these require any training to use? Can anyone use them?"

"None," Ambrose said. "They're fully autonomous. And because they're fundamentally undead, they track life signatures, which means they're unaffected by lighting conditions or most environmental factors. Give them a general directive and a direction, and they'll hunt down any target in their path automatically.

"The precision is limited. Speed was my design priority, which means that their turning radius is restricted. The auto-tracking is better than nothing, but only just. In large enough numbers, though, the effect is substantial."

Ambrose was still delivering this self-satisfied summary when he noticed the expression on the Watson brothers' faces had gone quite grim.

All three of them had arrived at the same realization: these Grunt Type Is were obviously not purpose-built for underwater combat alone.

Allen had personally experienced Ambrose's jet-pack. This was built on identical principles. If Ambrose deployed these undead units in quantity on land, Lyon would be facing something it had no answer for.

Ambrose made no comment. He had hoped they would reach exactly this conclusion. Combined with his record of repelling Lyon's seven legends without losing his composure, they should now have a very clear picture of whom they could not afford to provoke.

"Right. I have several more unit types waiting for you. Who wants to try the Grunt Type I in a live exercise first?"

Three tifling hands shot up simultaneously.

Nothing pleased them more than watching Lyon squirm. The expressions on the Watson brothers' faces were a gift to behold.

Ambrose, happy to watch the chaos unfold, set the Watson brothers to building a defensive line while the tiflings took command of the Grunt Type I assault.

Whether the brothers had been rattled off their game, or whether the Grunt Type Is were simply that effective, the battle was completely one-sided.

The deployed merfolk and roca had no meaningful counter to a weapon that size. Ambrose had finished the units with a coating that blended seamlessly into the darkness of the deep ocean. At low speed, visual identification was essentially impossible.

Only the jet trail gave away the attack, and by then it was too late.

Most of the defending merfolk and roca only processed what had hit them after impact. The auto-targeting made the units devastatingly easy to use: a general command and a direction, and they would hunt independently.

Faced with a weapon they couldn't stop, the merfolk defensive line shattered on first contact. Occasional wide-area spells from the merfolk managed to destroy some of the incoming Grunts, but that only made things worse, because a destroyed Grunt bled its seawater-undead payload directly into the surrounding water, and the dark energy didn't dissipate just because the container was gone.

The water itself became lethally toxic, and merfolk and roca, dependent on water to breathe, had no escape from it.

The tiflings laughed openly at the Lyon brothers' defeat. The Watson brothers' expressions made the moment even better for them.

But Ambrose cut it short. "Both sides, swap. Let's move quickly: that was only the first new undead type. We have more to cover and the clock is running."

On his word, the commanders from all three kingdoms straightened up, and the tension in the room grew considerably.

Every one of them had arrived at the same realization. The ocean battle they were preparing for was, in a sense, someone else's problem—ocean races lost much of their effectiveness the moment they came ashore, and most of them couldn't stand on land at all.

But these undead units Ambrose had shown them... Everyone in the room understood that a lich could deploy these weapons on land without modification.

They needed to understand these things as thoroughly as possible, right now, right there. If they ever encountered Grunt Type Is in a real confrontation, ignorance would mean death.

Every commander in the room sharpened their focus and gave the exercise their full attention.

Ambrose was pleased. By the time the real campaign began, these people would be ready.

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