Chapter 432: The War Begins

The dream exercises continued for a long time until the sustained strain began to take a toll on everyone's minds. They withdrew from the shared dream one by one.

Running exercises inside a dream was efficient, yes, but carrying those memories and sensations back into waking life took a toll on the soul.

They had endured hundreds of engagements, an extraordinary feat of endurance. Most of them would need another half-day of sleep just to recover properly once they woke.

Over the course of those sessions, though, each of the three kingdoms' commanders had settled into a distinct personal style.

Angus Watson left the deepest impression on Ambrose.

The man had a genuine gift for command. He grasped the capabilities of new unit types faster than anyone else, and he deployed them with a precision and creativity that no one else matched.

Though a paladin, by the end, his command of the undead forces had surpassed Ambrose's own.

The reason Ambrose had designed his undead units to be so autonomous in the first place was simply that he had no tactical instincts to speak of. Flanking maneuvers, feints, envelopments—he understood the words but nothing more. His approach to combat was to find the enemy, then throw everything he had at them.

Angus Watson had shown him that commanding the undead could be an art form. With the Grunt Type Is alone, Angus had developed several distinct tactical formations: one for dispersed targets, one for concentrated spellcasting groups, and one for heavily armored melee units.

Even the three tiflings had to respect him. They had lost completely to those formations of his.

Angus Watson was the real thing. He wasn't someone who could plan on paper but folded under pressure—he was demonstrably, genuinely skilled at command.

One thing continued to sit uneasily with Ambrose, though. Angus Watson had publicly broken with his family over Allen's being branded as a traitor. And now, without apparent explanation, all three brothers were here together. Was family loyalty really enough to account for that kind of reversal?

Over several centuries, Ambrose had watched more family ruptures than he could count. People turned on their own for money, for power, for love, or for reasons so petty they barely deserved a name. Almost anything could become justification for raising a hand against someone who shared your blood.

It wasn't his problem to solve. He left Allen to sort out his own household. He just hoped Angus Watson was sharp enough not to cause trouble during the campaign, because if he did, Ambrose would engineer a suitably grim fate for him without hesitation.

The sessions continued. Every two days or so, Ambrose gathered the commanders for another round in the dream. Initially, the high priestess participated as well, but after Angus Watson's forces defeated her merfolk contingent, she gracefully withdrew from the training exercises and returned to her own duties.

Ambrose remained genuinely grateful. What the merfolk had contributed already was far more than he had any right to expect.

In parallel, he was tracking developments in the Sea of Volcanoes with close attention.

The new sea had been anything but quiet. Every day brought fresh reports of different races clashing over territory, which changed hands multiple times between dawn and dusk. But as the days went by, each of the major factions had carved out stable zones.

The terrain of the Sea of Volcanoes was intricate. Three submarine mountain ranges formed from solidified volcanic lava divided the sea into sections, arranged roughly like three parallel strokes.

When the Unholy Kingdom was excised and sent away to the chaos realm, the surface soil was removed with it. Countless volcanoes that had been held in check began erupting freely. The resulting lava flows cooled into those ranges, acting as natural dividers.

The bare lava formations were inhospitable, and no marine life had yet colonized the rock, so no race had attempted to establish themselves on the ranges themselves.

The spaces between the ranges were another matter. Among those gaps, eighty-three distinct zones had been identified as capable of supporting marine life: submarine trenches, cave systems, flooded subterranean chambers, and similar formations. All of them had the look of places where coral and kelp would take root easily, where fish populations would establish themselves, where a community could be fed and sustained.

Eighty-three was a lower bound. There were additional areas that could support life, though with greater difficulty.

Ambrose studied the latest territorial map. "Thirteen zones for the shagin—that makes sense. Twenty-odd for the ixiray, sure. But how did those foolish kouto end up with more than thirty?"

The kouto's unpredictable spellcasting defied conventional assessment. You never knew whether the next cast would produce a charged lobster-claw strike, a full ice storm, or a Finger of Death, nor whether that Finger of Death would kill its target or the kouto who cast it.

No rational combatant wanted to engage them, but their randomness made them equally incapable of holding ground reliably. Stability was fundamental to territorial defense. By any reasonable calculation, the kouto shouldn't have been able to secure more than a handful of valuable zones.

But there was good news too.

The nagas, the faction Ambrose had been most anxious about, had not entered the Sea of Volcanoes at all. They appeared to be more interested in claiming the territory the shagin had vacated, and were quietly consolidating the areas the shagin had abandoned.

That was ideal. The nagas carried draconic heritage. Unless absolutely necessary, Ambrose wanted nothing to do with any race associated with dragons.

At the next shared dream session, Ambrose distributed the updated map to everyone present. All eighty-three zones were numbered and annotated with their key characteristics.

The rest was up to them.

The first to speak was a female elf from Alderien's delegation, and the only woman commander in the room. Throughout the exercises, she had displayed an exceptionally refined tactical style, with a strong preference for unconventional approaches and surprise attacks. She executed them beautifully. Even Angus Watson had lost to her more than once.

"My recommendation," said the elf Tanis, "is to begin with the zones not yet claimed by major sea factions. These positions will offer weaker resistance, giving us a stable rear area to build from for subsequent operations."

Ambrose found that reasonable, but Angus Watson immediately disagreed. "That serves no purpose. We're commanding undead forces. We don't need a rear area. Ocean races require territory because they need food and time to recover from injuries. The undead need neither. We should be focusing on inflicting maximum damage as efficiently as possible."

Ambrose found that equally reasonable. Undead genuinely didn't need supply lines. Their logistics were founded on taking resources from the enemy.

Then, the young tifling who called himself Landless spoke up, directly challenging Angus Watson's position with thinly veiled contempt. "Lyon's idea of strategy is to charge forward and call it thinking. Undead might not need logistics, but what is our actual objective?

"Master Megaman intends to govern this sea, not merely exist in it. That means ruling the smaller ocean races and bringing the weaker ones under control. If all we do is fight, and we exhaust our forces doing it, where does the manpower come from to capture and secure those weaker races afterward?"

Angus Watson looked unimpressed. "That presupposes I can't defeat the major factions while preserving the majority of our forces. I'm confident I can. Consolidating thereafter will be straightforward."

"So says the colonizer."

"A dog that ran from its own kingdom with its tail between its legs wouldn't understand what strength looks like."

"That empire of yours is so strong it let its own emperor butcher tens of thousands of its people. Does that make you proud?"

"Still fewer than the dead from your banishment. Your earthquake alone killed hundreds of thousands. And I imagine the chaos realm has finished the rest off by now."

"You Lyon dog! I demand a duel!"

"Gladly. Not in a dream, though. Pity you won't ever be able to come back to the real world and fight me in person."

......

The argument collapsed into a brawl. Ambrose rubbed his jaw with the patience of a lich who had been through this several times already.

This exact scene had played out before. In previous sessions, the tifling-Lyon rivalry had escalated to personal duels on multiple occasions.

The dream had considerable freedom, but Ambrose had restricted their power of imagination. These tiflings couldn't simply will themselves into the image of Aion and crush the Watson brothers with a fingertip. They were constrained to their real physical parameters.

As a result, in a direct confrontation, the tiflings were hopelessly outmatched. Allen alone could handle all three of them simultaneously. They knew this, but they picked a fight anyway.

It was the nature of hot-blooded youth. Ambrose didn't intervene.

Instead, he deployed his final contingency.

Catherine stepped into the dream. The moment the elven queen appeared, every man in the room subconsciously straightened their clothing.

It couldn't be helped. The elven queen was simply that radiant. Even in a dream, Catherine drew every eye in the space.

"Gentlemen," Catherine said. "This is not the time for arguments. This is a rare opportunity, a chance to explore a form of warfare none of you have encountered before, without any personal risk. Please honor that. Don't waste this time on brawling that accomplishes nothing."

One sentence from Catherine was worth a hundred from Ambrose. Everyone stopped; no one said another word.

Catherine gave a satisfied nod and reached her decision. "Having considered everyone's proposals, I believe Angus Watson's recommendation is the more appropriate course. For our first engagement, we need to establish confidence. We should select a strong faction as our target. Angus Watson, who would you choose?"

Angus Watson had been ready for exactly this question. "The shagin, no doubt about it."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.