Chapter 457: The Start of a Grand Venture

The greatest obstacle to any undertaking was not difficulty, but rather the absence of direction.

Once Ambrose figured out what he was working towards, all he had to do was resolve the difficulties that lay before him. Ambrose immediately relayed his needs to the Unholy Kingdom, asking them to keep an eye out for any sign of mindflayers in the chaos realm.

The Unholy Kingdom depended entirely on Ambrose as their link to the world they had left behind, and they were in no position to be negligent. They assured him they would render all possible aid and notify him the moment any relevant information surfaced.

He had barely finished that exchange when Heki Stone sent him a private message. [Human-Hater: Friend, where are you? I've got something that needs your attention.]

Ambrose was mildly puzzled. Heki had just said he couldn't be of any help. What was he suddenly sniffing around for?

[Megaman Tiga: What do you want?]

[Human-Hater: Earlier, you said you were going to abduct the kouto goddess and deliver her to Thanos. Are you serious?]

[Megaman Tiga: Of course. What's it to you?]

[Human-Hater: I want to stay by your side and witness everything firsthand. Whether it succeeds or fails, this will be a grand undertaking worthy of the annals of history. I'm a historian. I want to see it with my own eyes.]

Ambrose hadn't anticipated such a reason, but he didn't particularly mind. If the dwarf wanted to watch, so be it.

[Megaman Tiga: I won't provide any meals or cover your expenses, but you can come if you want.]

[Human-Hater: Do you gnaw on your own bones every day because you're terrified of losing even a scrap of rotten flesh? Is there no limit to how stingy you can get?!]

[Megaman Tiga: Come or don't—it's your choice. Not charging you anything is already doing you a favor. Otherwise, I'll just record everything on a memory crystal and find someone else to write the book. That'd probably earn me more anyway.]

The moment Ambrose sent that message, he immediately reached for a memory crystal and tucked it somewhere within easy reach.

The dwarven vampire had genuinely given him an idea. Using a recording crystal was absolutely viable, and he had every confidence the resulting record would fetch an astronomical price at auction.

He could always give Heki Stone a small discount at the bidding. That would be more than fair.

Heki Stone arrived quickly, stepping through a teleportation array to Ambrose's side, still trailed by the orc slave he had recently acquired.

Whatever Heki Stone had done to the man, the orc who had once regarded Ambrose with intense hatred now wore a thoroughly blank expression. He followed dutifully at Heki Stone's heel, arms laden with the historian's various belongings.

Ambrose didn't spare the orc a second glance. He turned to Heki Stone and asked, "Are you really going to follow me around? Do all you history types have to be this much trouble?"

Heki Stone was wrapped head to toe in a voluminous robe. Airborne, he floated nearly half a head taller than Ambrose. He looked down at Ambrose, scoffing. "What would you know about history? History must be witnessed firsthand. Who knows how you'd exaggerate about this afterward?"

"Slander!" Ambrose shot back. "You're a historian coming to document your subject with a predetermined bias. Can anything you write even be called history?"

"No matter, I'm not the only one with a pen name. I've got one specifically for popular fiction. Have you read Goblin Guards of the Lyon Harem? I wrote that. It spent three consecutive years as the bestselling serial in a Legendary Spellcraft periodical. If I hadn't gone on hiatus, it'd have been five."

Heki Stone puffed up his chest with unmistakable pride. Ambrose was genuinely taken aback.

Heki was the author of Goblin Guards of the Lyon Harem? Even Ambrose had to admit that was rather impressive. There had been a stretch where he himself had lost sleep keeping up with new installments.

Though, now that he thought about it, Heki Stone had evidently channeled every last drop of his resentment toward Lyon directly onto the page. The royal family's portrayal in that book had been spectacularly unflattering.

"Wait, are you saying you came here specifically to write gossip about me?! That's completely unacceptable. You'll be paying extra for that—half the royalties once it's published, at minimum!"

Ambrose was genuinely indignant. If the man had come to sing his praises, fine. But gossip demanded serious additional compensation.

"Pay for what?" Heki Stone retorted, equally heated. "When did I say I was writing gossip about you? You're a lich who gnaws on his own bones—what's there to sensationalize? Who would read it? There's nothing to embellish!"

The two of them wrangled over royalties for a considerable while, until Isabel appeared carrying a large kettle of plain hot water for Ambrose's guest.

This was very much in keeping with Ambrose's approach to hospitality. Vampire or not, plain hot water was what you got.

Heki Stone took a sip and immediately spat it back into the cup. The insufferably miserly lich couldn't spare him a drop of fresh blood, even with all these lovely young women in his castle.

But for the sake of his magnum opus, Heki Stone resolved not to hold it against him. "What's your current situation?"

Ambrose had lost interest in the argument as well. The dwarven vampire seemed to harbor some particular prejudice against liches, and clearly had no intention of writing anything lurid, so Ambrose would let him do as he pleased.

"Poet suggested that the chaos realm, the gods' dumping ground, might harbor mindflayers. I've already asked the tiflings to search for them, though I have no idea how long that will take."

Under normal circumstances, Gary Watts, who could repeatedly cast Wish, should be able to locate someone without too much difficulty, but that depended on whether he was willing to expend the necessary resources to do so. Casting Wish consumed material resources, and he doubted there was much of that left in the chaos realm.

"Of course, I'm not putting all my hopes on the tiflings. You say mindflayers are extinct, but what if a small number went into hiding? I've read that mindflayers have fairly long lifespans. They can survive in even the harshest environments for over a century, and they need only one brain per month to sustain themselves. That's a remarkably modest requirement. It's not implausible that a few stragglers might have survived."

Rather than bristling at the challenge to his expertise, Heki Stone considered Ambrose's proposal thoughtfully.

"That's not without merit, actually. The githarks were also slaves of the mindflayer empire. Their rebellion was what brought the empire on the material plane crashing down, but only after a prolonged struggle. It's possible that some mindflayers may have survived. Finding them, however, will be extremely difficult. Their ability to disguise themselves is formidable, and their method of reproduction is particularly insidious."

Mindflayers reproduced by implanting a tadpole into the body of an intelligent creature. As the tadpole matured, it would consume the host's brain and replace it entirely. By the time the tadpole reached full maturity, the host was gone, entirely transformed into a mindflayer.

Whatever race the host had originally belonged to, the conversion was total: the octopus-headed form was universal, and no memory or appearance of the original being was retained.

In the mindflayer's view, presumably, their own kind was the only truly perfected form of life. Every other race, even dragons, represented lesser creatures riddled with fundamental flaws.

A mindflayer tadpole's incubation period could last as long as ten years. Mindflayers were also highly adept at psychic magic, making it trivially easy for them to mentally dominate a crowd of ordinary people as cover. Staying hidden was simple for them.

"I could try a divination, though I have a sense it won't yield much."

All experienced diviners developed an instinct before attempting a reading, a kind of intimation from the Goddess of Fate herself. Ignoring a bad feeling and forcing a reading purely to ease one's anxiety was the surest way to get a negative result thrown in your face.

That was why Ambrose preferred to gather intelligence the slow way rather than resort to that kind of shortcut.

"I've heard you diviners have all sorts of restrictions and taboos," Heki Stone muttered. "I genuinely cannot see the point of the ability."

As he said this, he produced a small notebook and curled back one corner of his robe to free his quill, then began scratching away at the page. "Even for one to whom blasphemy has become second nature, the difficulties now before Megaman Tiga gave him cause to furrow his brow in earnest. He gazed at the yellowed scrolls before him, tapping his temple at intervals, as though engaged in fierce internal debate with the sea of knowledge within..."

Ambrose had no idea what Heki Stone was writing. He returned to the question of how to locate mindflayers somewhere on the continent.

After a long pause, he asked, "You mentioned earlier that the githarks overthrew the mindflayer empire?"

Heki Stone didn't look up, continuing to write with great deliberation. "Even Master Megaman Tiga had problems he could not solve on his own. In the end, he had no choice but to turn to his most perspicacious, most learned mentor, the greatest historian of the age, Heki Stone, for guidance..."

He finished the sentence before lifting his head. "What did you say?"

"I asked about the fall of the mindflayer empire. You said the githarks overthrew them?"

Heki Stone explained, "There are multiple accounts of the empire's collapse. The githark rebellion is one of them, but there are also theories of internal power struggles and fragmentation, and another involving a large-scale viral outbreak. As for the githarks specifically, that's where they got their name. A figure called Gith was the hero who liberated all of his people, and the race was named in his honor. The githarks have been hunting mindflayers across countless planes ever since. They are the finest mindflayer hunters in existence."

Ambrose nodded. Another thread to pull on, then.

Heki Stone continued at a furious pace. "Guided by the counsel of his mentor Heki Stone, Megaman Tiga was like a man who had found a star to steer by in the vast dark of night. Heki Stone's wisdom, transcending time itself, had brought him the thread he needed—the githarks."

"I could speak with the githarks," Ambrose said, half to himself.

Compared to chasing down mindflayers, for which he had no leads whatsoever, the githarks were considerably easier to locate. There were still several thousand of them alive, and there weren't many locales in which they could live. A few inquiries would be enough.

"You want to go talk to the githarks?" Heki Stone said, with evident mockery. "Talk about what? You just slaughtered several thousand of their kin. The githarks have the longest memories of any race. Show your face, and they'll fight you to the death."

Ambrose smiled. "There's no deal that can't be negotiated."

"Alright, then. Bring me back some githark girls. Their blood is quite agreeable."

Heki Stone wrote this down immediately after speaking. "Heki Stone's gentle words of caution went unheeded by Megaman Tiga, who remained committed to extracting the information he wanted by the most ruthless means available. Heki Stone could only feign interest in acquiring prisoners, in hopes of sparing at least a handful of githark lives."

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