Chapter 459: The Sea of Storms

After the crushing defeat Ambrose had dealt them, the surviving githarks had fled astride their ixiray.

A rough estimate put the survivors at perhaps two or three thousand.

Ambrose had always been curious about how the githarks had ever managed to come to terms with the ixiray. Tiamat's relationship with Demogorgon could hardly be called friendly: the two of them were more likely to come to blows on sight than anything else.

That the two species could cooperate at all left Ambrose genuinely impressed.

Ariel piloted the Greywater, tracing the route the githarks were believed to have taken in their flight. The Greywater was considerably smaller than the Blacktide, and accordingly carried none of the combat drones the larger vessel did. It was far less versatile than its predecessor.

Still, that had its advantages. After several rounds of refinement, the Greywater was now capable of short bursts of supersonic flight.

When the full force of acceleration hit, only the three legends aboard remained conscious. Every sailor Ariel had brought along blacked out instantly, and didn't begin to come around until the Greywater slowed back to normal cruising speed.

"What terrifying velocity," Ariel said to Ambrose, still visibly shaken. "Who on any battlefield could possibly catch something moving like that?"

As a battle-hardened general in her own right, Ariel had understood the danger of an airborne warship the moment she'd first laid eyes on one. But evidently, her experience only scratched the surface.

Ambrose preened. "When it comes to flight speed, my products are unparalleled. I have a monopoly on the technology, unmatched anywhere else in the world. But don't worry, Your Highness. Supersonic flight craft will eventually become part of the Ragetide Kingdom's own arsenal. This ship, in particular, will be something your people can have for their own."

Ariel understood that this last remark wasn't really directed at her, but rather for the sailors she'd brought along.

The old sailors hadn't voiced any complaints aloud, but several clearly harbored some quiet resistance to the vessel.

Perhaps, in their minds, a true ship was something that cut through waves on the open water. This flying thing wasn't really a "ship" at all.

That subtle resistance was making it difficult for them to focus on their work.

Ambrose had seen plenty of human nature in his time, and recognizing this particular pattern was no challenge. The older a man got, the more skilled he became, and the more deeply he came to trust in his own expertise—and his psyche grew correspondingly dependent on that hard-won mastery as a kind of personal bedrock.

When men like that encountered a new technology capable of rendering their own hard-earned mastery obsolete, the majority would react with some degree of resistance. The foundation they had relied on for so long was about to be smashed to pieces, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Some people would channel that helplessness into motivation, throwing themselves into learning the new skill out of fear of being left behind. Others would let the feeling curdle into quiet sabotage, refusing outright to accept anything new.

Knowing perfectly well that the reaction was unreasonable, yet utterly unable to master it—that was simply human nature.

Ambrose could tell that at least a third of this crew of sailors fell into the latter category, and he had no time to coax them through it gently. The simplest solution would have to do: a show of dominance.

Let them experience the supersonic flight firsthand, shatter their stubbornness to pieces, and then inform them that this was something the Ragetide Kingdom itself would soon be able to wield. Any reasonable person ought to come around after that.

And if even that failed, Ambrose wouldn't mind simply throwing the holdouts overboard rather than let them slow him down.

Ariel had a fairly good guess as to what Ambrose was up to. Otherwise he'd never have gone for the supersonic flight, which he knew could be risky. She had originally intended to address the sailors' resistance through other means, but it seemed the lich's approach was considerably blunter—and, admittedly, considerably more effective.

Disciplining a few stubborn subordinates was hardly worth dwelling on. What concerned Ariel far more was whether Ambrose's claim was true.

Could the Ragetide Kingdom genuinely field supersonic vessels of its own?

If the kingdom possessed enough of them, dominance on the continent would no longer be out of reach. The people of Lyon would amount to nothing. They would have no choice but to take the beating.

Anyone with even a passing understanding of military strategy knew exactly what that kind of absolute air superiority represented. At the most basic level, it meant an overwhelming advantage in intelligence.

Send out a fleet of warships to patrol the skies, and you'd be able to see every move on the ground. If you knew all your enemy's plans before the fighting started, how could you possibly lose the fight?

During a siege, you could simply drop munitions from above—even mere rocks would do. Over time, no defensive ward would last, to say nothing of the morale within the besieged city. Taking the punishment day after day with no way to strike back would eventually grind a population down until it collapsed from within.

Choosing to partner with this lich had been an extraordinarily wise decision for the Ragetide Kingdom. At the very least, when it came to military strength, the kingdom no longer had to worry about being left behind by the times.

With these matters of state turning over in her mind, Ariel called the sailors back and reminded them to get to work.

This time, whatever reservations lingered in their hearts, none of the sailors dared show it openly. They took up their charts and began cross-referencing positions, directing the Greywater toward the nearest island for inspection.

Despite their lapses, this crew's professionalism was genuinely impressive.

Ambrose couldn't perceive anything distinctive about this stretch of ocean at all, yet the sailors could pinpoint their exact position with precision, and their heading corrected for even the smallest margins of error.

Before long, the Greywater had passed over half a dozen islands.

But they found no trace of the githarks.

After half a day spent crisscrossing the waters, they had searched every habitable islet in the region, but turned up nothing. There wasn't so much as a sign that the githarks had ever passed through.

Ambrose found this almost impossible to believe. Had the githarks all died out entirely? Or had they retreated back to the astral plane?

Unfortunately, that wasn't a question he could put to Tiamat. Setting aside whether the Dragon Queen would even agree to see him, simply handing her this kind of leverage would invariably cost him another round of negotiations.

It looked like he'd have to pay for the information, after all.

Just as Ambrose was preparing to turn back, Ariel spoke up suddenly. "Master Megaman, I have a theory. We're not far from the Sea of Storms. It's entirely possible the githarks fled into that dangerous region."

The Sea of Storms, the same waters the Lyon fleet had once entered?

During the previous Lyon incursion, Ariel had used pirates as cannon fodder to force the Lyon fleet into that perpetually storm-wracked sea, home to the most powerful sea monsters in existence and forbidden territory to any living being.

And yet the people of Lyon had not only made it through the Sea of Storms successfully, they had even emerged with an enormous octopus in tow, looking for all the world like a band of heroes who'd picked up a pet monster on their way to slay the demon king.

A pity, then, that Ambrose had cleaned them all up in the end regardless.

Now that Ariel had brought up the Sea of Storms, Ambrose decided it was worth a closer look.

"What exactly is the situation with this Sea of Storms? When the Lyon fleet went through, nothing seemed to happen to them," Ambrose said.

Ariel looked faintly embarrassed. She hadn't expected the Lyon forces to prove quite so capable. A single ordinary storm should have torn their ships apart, and yet they had sailed through that stormbound sea without incident and emerged unscathed.

"I can't explain how the Lyon fleet got through safely, but the Sea of Storms is the greatest forbidden zone in this entire ocean. Storms rage there year-round, the lightning never ceases, and countless deep-sea leviathans nest within it. Even we from the Ragetide Kingdom don't dare approach. But that hostile environment also conceals many undiscovered islands. If the githark managed to overcome the conditions there, sustaining a population of a few thousand should be entirely feasible."

Since Ariel had said as much, Ambrose naturally wanted to see it for himself.

Lightning that never ceased was no real concern: the Greywater could simply fly above the cloud layer and remain unaffected. A quick survey shouldn't pose any difficulty.

It was only once they reached the region that Ambrose understood exactly why it was called forbidden territory.

He had imagined "lightning that never ceases" to mean bolts striking every few seconds, snaking across the sky, but the reality was entirely different. The lightning fell like rain.

From a distance, the lightning seemed to come down in sheets, leaving streaks of fire across the churning surface of the sea. It was, quite literally, setting the ocean ablaze.

This wasn't thunder and lightning in any conventional sense—it was lightning woven into a barrier, a wall of force that sealed off the entire region completely.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. The closer one drew to the area, the more violent the surface became. It was dotted with whirlpools of every size, an environment that looked utterly impassable for any vessel. Even the Blacktide, built entirely of metal, would have been torn to shreds the moment it was thrown in.

If even the exterior of the sea alone looked like the end of the world, what horrors could possibly lie within?

"Is it actually possible for anyone to survive in conditions like this?"

Surely even the githarks weren't invincible. Anyone entering this place would die almost instantly!

"But the githarks can ride the ixiray, can't they? If they traveled along the seafloor, they might be able to bypass the lightning and the whirlpools on the surface entirely. I've never personally been inside the Sea of Storms myself, and it's possible there really is a more hospitable environment within. That said, this is only conjecture on my part. I'll leave the decision of how to proceed to you, Master Megaman."

Ariel had only come along as a guide. Whether to venture into a place this terrifying was a decision that ultimately belonged to Ambrose.

Without hesitation, Ambrose said, "If we're going in, the Greywater certainly isn't the way to do it."

The essence of Ambrose's necro-alchemy was transforming an entire warship into a metal undead, with every critical system governed by specially crafted artificial souls.

These souls carried minimal defensive capacity. If the Greywater were thrown directly into that lightning, the souls powering it from within would likely be shaken apart or electrocuted outright in short order, leaving the ship a total wreck.

Ambrose studied the cloud layer above and concluded that the Greywater likely couldn't even climb above it in the first place. These storm clouds sat at an unnatural altitude. They were clearly not a natural phenomenon and were well above the ship's operational ceiling.

"In that case, should we turn back?" Ariel asked.

Ambrose shook his head. "Turning back isn't an option either. If this is genuinely our last lead, I need to go in and see for myself, or I'll never let this go. If the surface route is impassable, we can simply do as the githark do, and go in through the seafloor."

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