Chapter 464: Why Is He In Your Possession

The continent was in upheaval. The Lyon emperor's reversal of time, saving twenty thousand people from certain death, sent Lyon's morale soaring to unprecedented heights.

Several counterattacks against the orcs followed. Lyon failed to reclaim the lost city, but it nonetheless came away with a genuinely impressive victory, losing one legendary paladin in exchange for two legendary orcs.

Angus Watson would never have employed such pyrrhic tactics under ordinary circumstances. But the situation had changed, and he had no choice but to take a gamble.

Though the fighting was brutal, Lyon ultimately forced the orcs to abandon their plan to cross the river.

The two sides settled back into a grinding stalemate. With the Emerald River constraining both forces' mobility, the orcs' uncanny tactics temporarily lost their edge.

Well-equipped, and with morale running high, Lyon naturally regained the advantage, though they lacked the strength to actually retake lost ground for the moment. While Angus Watson devoted himself fully to fortifying the defensive line, he simultaneously began digging into every scrap of intelligence on the orcs he could find.

He needed to identify the figure controlling the entire orc army.

Defeating this adversary on the battlefield directly had proven nearly impossible, but the battlefield wasn't the only front available to him.

Angus Watson had even submitted a formal petition to the emperor, requesting an exception be made to bring that lich in for assistance.

The orcs' ability to coordinate their entire army instantaneously rested on one underlying advantage: their adversary could effortlessly monitor the entire battlefield in real time.

How were they managing that?

The answer turned out to be remarkably simple: they had commissioned a handful of unarmed airships purely for reconnaissance and staffed them with orc observers.

Barring poor weather, nothing on the battlefield could escape their sight.

And even though the Lyon forces had identified those small black specks in the sky as orcish scouts, there was nothing they could do about it.

Lyon didn't lack the ability to fly. They simply couldn't catch up.

Featherfall topped out at thirty or forty kilometers an hour. It could hardly keep up with airships.

Having experienced countless simulated battles via shared dreamlink, Angus Watson understood all too well just how formidable the lich's weapons of war truly were.

Even with their most determined efforts at imitation, the technological gap in alchemy remained simply too vast to close.

Take the miniaturized jet engines they'd quietly acquired at enormous expense: not a single artificer in the entire Lyon Empire had managed to replicate them. The design itself wasn't impossible to reproduce, but the failure rate was unacceptably high. No one could guarantee the things wouldn't malfunction mid-flight.

And a malfunction would almost surely mean death.

Plenty of Lyon soldiers were willing to die for their country, but that didn't mean their lives could be thrown away so casually.

In Angus Watson's view, all they really needed to purchase were the jet engines themselves. There was no need to touch any of the undead war machinery that came with them.

The lich used undead to control his warships, but Lyon could simply use living crew instead, provided they maintained basic safety standards. Angus Watson had already studied these weapons closely enough that he believed he could personally train a dedicated airborne unit to counter the orcs.

The trouble was that the lich's identity remained an extraordinarily sensitive subject, and with the emperor currently forced into seclusion to recover, would the empire even approve such a petition?

But the only alternative to the lich was the dwarves, and there was no chance the dwarves would sell jet engines to Lyon. If anything, they'd be delighted to see Lyon lose further, then march to war themselves for revenge.

What Angus Watson didn't yet know was that, even if Lyon were to approve potential cooperation with Ambrose, finding the lich himself would prove no easy task for the time being.

Ambrose had only just emerged from an underwater labyrinth, having crossed an exterior ring of whirlpools and endless lightning to reach the true heart of the Sea of Storms.

At the labyrinth's exit stood a badly corroded stairway. He and Ariel climbed the stairs, though by now it was more of a sloped ramp, all the way up to the surface of the ocean.

Directly ahead stood an enormous archway built from stacked stone. Though it had evidently stood for countless years, it showed remarkably little wear.

The air was thick with the smell of ozone, strong enough that Ariel couldn't help covering her nose.

Unpleasant as it was, breathing it posed no real problem.

Ambrose, naturally, was unaffected, but his attention was entirely fixed on the massive stone archway before him. Something about it tugged at his memory, as though he'd seen something just like it before.

He strode quickly up to the arch and ran a hand across the rough, gray-black surface, then tried to scrape a sample loose with his fingers to examine more closely. The material proved astonishingly hard, and he couldn't leave so much as a mark on it.

Ariel approached out of curiosity. "Master Megaman, have you discovered something?"

Ambrose considered for a moment before answering. "I've seen this material somewhere else before. It's built from corpses and was processed through some specialized method."

The composition of this archway bore a striking resemblance to the lost civilization Ambrose had once encountered deep beneath the desert.

Both were constructed from the remains of some unidentified creature and processed through unknown means, from a material so dense that even Catherine's arrows could only leave a faint scratch. That alone spoke to its toughness.

Ambrose had never imagined he would encounter the same material here.

Did that mean this Arena of Storms had originally been built by that same lost civilization buried beneath the desert?

A vague theory was coming together in his head. Perhaps the ancient giants had been Thanos's faithful, and had raised magnificent cities and this very Arena of Storms in his honor. Then, for reasons unknown, they had vanished entirely.

Perhaps some specialized plague had wiped them out. Perhaps they'd encountered an even more powerful race and been annihilated. Or, most plausible of all, perhaps they had offended Thanos somehow, and been destroyed as punishment.

Eventually, the land they had inhabited was swallowed by the sea, and after that, the sea itself became a desert, burying their entire civilization deep underground.

For a deity, such a thing was entirely within the realm of possibility.

What exactly had Thanos brought him here for?

Was it nothing more than a passing whim, a desire to watch mortals fight one another for entertainment?

The minds of gods were never easy to fathom, especially one as capricious as Thanos. But that hardly mattered right now. Ambrose's only real interest was in capturing those ancient heroic spirits.

"If this Arena of Storms is connected to the giant civilization, then the heroic spirits here are likely giants as well."

Giant heroic spirits were an excellent prize, especially ones that had lingered for this many years. Spirits with that kind of resilience, processed even minimally, would make for top-tier undead, with real potential to ascend to legendary tier.

If he could collect a few thousand spirits of that caliber, he could assemble the single most powerful undead army in existence, one capable of charging into battle even when bathed in holy light. Lyon's paladin legions would be nothing in comparison. If they dared sortie out of Lyon, his force would simply grind them to dust.

A few thousand was probably too much to ask for. He would settle for two thousand.

After a moment's thought, Ambrose opened up his extradimensional space and summoned Arthur Lyon, who had been sitting idle for some time.

Arthur Lyon was still in full-body mechanical armor, with his hourglass artifact mounted at its core. The entire suit functioned as an extension of the artifact itself, granting him free movement.

But Arthur seemed to have settled into the habit of staying cooped up in one place, doing little more than chatting occasionally with the old elven king via magic mirror and catching up on current events. Nothing else really held his interest these days.

When he was summoned out by Ambrose, Arthur Lyon frowned. "Do you need me to deal with more paladins?"

If he'd had any choice in the matter, Arthur genuinely would have preferred not to clash with the younger generation. There was something deeply uncomfortable about it, quite like an adult bullying children, made worse by the fact that his opponents never held back. Holding back himself had become a genuine hassle.

Ambrose shook his head and explained the situation.

"Arthur, it's time you stretched your legs a bit. I want to claim some giant heroic spirits, and there's no one better suited to help me than you. Who knows? Once I've gathered them all up, they might even make for decent company."

Hearing that he didn't have to fight any paladins, Arthur perked up immediately.

This world still felt entirely foreign to him—but a group of giant heroic spirits, older even than himself? That would be a worthwhile sight to see. He wanted to stretch his legs too.

"I should mention I burned through quite a lot of reserves last time," Arthur said, somewhat awkwardly.

The one real drawback of being a heroic spirit was that every action drew entirely on his own stored power, and that power was extraordinarily difficult to replenish.

Ambrose hadn't gotten around to "recharging" him since that last battle.

"Don't worry. Even an emperor knows better than to send a hungry soldier into battle. I understand that much."

Ambrose produced an enormous quantity of bone and corpse material, all gathered during his recent campaign on the seafloor, and converted the whole batch into artificial soul fragments. He let Arthur feast to his heart's content.

Under normal circumstances, this material would have fetched a considerable price at market, but Ambrose couldn't afford to worry about waste right now.

This place held not only giant heroic spirits but also several thousand githarks. Having recently drawn heavily on the power of the Golden Throne, Ambrose was currently at his weakest.

With only Ariel at his side, that simply wasn't enough of a safety margin, so bringing out his strongest available combatant, Arthur, was the obvious move.

Ariel herself had been quietly watching the proceedings. Though she initially assumed that Arthur was simply the mech's name, as the conversation continued, something began to feel distinctly off.

She couldn't help asking Ambrose: "Is this... a paladin? A captured Lyon paladin?"

Ambrose shook his head. "Hardly a captive. This, Your Highness, is the heroic spirit of Arthur Lyon, the legendary holy king himself."

"What holy king?" Ariel froze for a moment. Then, her beautiful eyes went wide with shock. "Arthur Lyon? The Arthur Lyon? That... that..."

It was the first time Ambrose had ever seen Ariel stammer like this, repeating "that" several times without managing to finish a single complete sentence.

It wasn't entirely surprising. Even though the Ragetide Kingdom and the Lyon Empire were bitter enemies, even though her people had been driven from the mainland by Lyon itself, none of that diminished the reverence they held for Arthur Lyon specifically.

The slaying of the Dragon Tyrant and the liberation of the entire world were accomplishments grand enough to make Arthur Lyon an idol to virtually everyone, regardless of allegiance.

What was more, by the time Arthur Lyon had died, the people who would become the Ragetide Kingdom's ancestors were still living on the mainland, long before any religious conflict. Whatever grudge existed had nothing to do with the holy king.

Arthur Lyon, for his part, looked supremely uncomfortable. This was exactly why he avoided going out in public.

He considered himself nothing more than someone guarding a draconic artifact. The legendary feats that "he" had accomplished after leaving part of his soul behind—slaying the dragon, founding the empire—had nothing to do with him at all.

And yet here he was, with random strangers falling over themselves in worship, leaving him with the distinct sensation of having stolen someone else's glory. What made it worse was that the whole situation was far too complicated to explain on the spot.

Arthur could only shoot Ambrose a pleading look. Ambrose, well accustomed to his conundrum by now, gave Ariel the abbreviated version of the holy king's true history in just a few sentences. Partway through the explanation, however, Arthur couldn't resist chiming in unprompted, "And the moment I finally broke free of my seal, a ghost ship of all things came along and rammed straight into me."

Ariel's brow furrowed at that. She was deep in thought.

A moment later, her eyes widened with realization. "Rammed by a ghost ship? Were you sealed somewhere within the Ragetide Kingdom?"

"That's right," Arthur confirmed. "Though when I was sealed, that place was still nothing but an uninhabited island."

Ambrose genuinely wanted to clap a hand over Arthur's mouth. Why did this man talk so much? Wasn't chatting with the old elven king enough for him?!

Back when Ambrose had impersonated Monge Greywater, he had located the legendary hourglass sealed somewhere within the Ragetide Kingdom. He'd convinced the kingdom's people to clear the area within a ten-kilometer radius, then worked together with Aige to subdue Arthur Lyon's heroic spirit.

From Ariel's perspective, the story had unfolded quite differently. She had been led to believe that the Ragetide Kingdom harbored an artifact with powerful anti-undead properties, and the captain of the Silent Sea Pirate Company had personally come ashore to retrieve it. Because that artifact happened to be of great use to this particular, formidably powerful undead, she had agreed to the partnership with the Ragetide Kingdom in exchange.

The pieces were now falling into place for Ariel, and her voice rose with excitement. "So that battle back then was your fight against the captain of the Silent Sea pirates! I've always regretted not having witnessed it myself... Wait. If she was the one who claimed your heroic spirit—"

Ariel turned to look directly at Ambrose. "Master Megaman, how exactly did His Majesty's heroic spirit end up in your possession?"

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