Lich for Hire

Chapter 344: Allen's Speech

The invasion of the Unholy Kingdom by Lyon was something much of the continent had long anticipated. What no one had anticipated was how strange the war would actually turn out to be.

First, the Draconic Armaments had demonstrated their terrifying power on the battlefield, erasing a large number of Hellgates as though they had never existed.

Everyone expected the Unholy Kingdom to respond immediately, either activating the remaining Hellgates and forcing mutual destruction, or surrendering outright to avoid pointless casualties.

Neither happened. The remaining Hellgates stayed closed. The Unholy Council issued no surrender. They issued nothing at all—not a single order to the front lines.

That left every observer thoroughly confused.

Those who dug for answers found only one: something had gone catastrophically wrong in the capital of the Unholy Kingdom.

A great fire had consumed half the capital in flames. As countless people cried out from within, the earth split open in a vast fissure. From that fissure emerged creatures of Hell, who dragged the souls of the dying down into its depths.

It sounded like a tall tale, but report after report confirmed the same story. The capital of the Unholy Kingdom had been destroyed in fire. Smaller blazes had broken out across the country.

All thirteen Impure, along with the key members of their families, had perished in the flames and descended to Hell.

Lyon received this news precisely on the third day after their emperor's proclamation, the deadline he had asserted for Lyon's next offensive.

All that remained was to dismantle the rest of the Hellgates, break the now-leaderless tifling forces, and claim the kingdom.

The young emperor was delighted. He hadn't expected his personal command of the campaign to go this smoothly. He immediately delivered a speech.

The speech itself left something to be desired: he was too agitated, his enunciation unclear, his voice not sufficiently projected. But the speech's content, at least, was stirring enough. The tiflings had descended to Hell. This was the punishment of the Lord of Dawn, visited upon all who stood against Lyon. Every enemy that defied them would meet the same fate.

No matter how thin and wavering the young emperor's voice was, the facts were undeniable.

Their forces hadn't even properly engaged the enemy yet, but the entire ruling class of the Unholy Kingdom had already been wiped out. If that wasn't a divine miracle, what was?

Lyon's soldiers were roaring with enthusiasm, ready to sweep through the Unholy Kingdom, when a different voice cut through the noise from outside the walls.

"This is an unjust war!"

That voice, in contrast, was youthful, clarion, and resolute. The Lyon soldiers listening to their emperor's speech stopped dead.

The emperor's response was immediate fury. "Who said that?! Find him and bring him to me!"

The guards rushed to find the offender, only to quickly discover that the voice was coming from the sky.

A man was hovering above Lavarun and using a voice amplification spell to broadcast across the entire city. What he was saying was nothing short of treasonous.

The speaker was challenging the legitimacy of the war. He was listing Lyon's war crimes, year by year. He was denouncing the empire's increasingly fanatical religious extremism.

The young emperor listened with his teeth grinding together. This was sedition.

The content was bad enough, but, more infuriatingly, the unknown speaker was a far better orator than he was. Even from a distance, every word was crisp and clear, perfectly calculated to rouse the captive audience to action.

"Shoot him down!" the emperor ordered.

"Your Majesty," a guard reported, "he's too high up. He's beyond the range of magical attacks."

"Useless, all of you! I'll handle it myself!"

He tugged at the necklace of crimson roses from his chest and rose into the air.

Once more, he transformed into a massive time dragon and launched himself skyward.

As his wings beat down, a storm of dust and gravel swept across the ground. The Lyon soldiers below had to shield their eyes.

The dragon climbed. Dragon eyes could resolve detail at great distances, and the emperor picked out the face immediately.

"Allen Watson! So it's you, you traitor!"

He opened his jaws and unleashed a breath of temporal energy.

A torrent of silver particles surged outward, meant to engulf Allen entirely. A direct hit would reduce him to a pile of dried bones in an instant, as if he had been dead for centuries.

But just before it reached him, a thunderous hum erupted from Allen's back. He shot upward at a speed that defied any explanation, leaving the dragonbreath to disperse harmlessly in the air below him.

The emperor blinked. How could Allen possibly move that fast?

The emperor was no warrior, but he knew basic facts about magic. Flight spells had a maximum speed in the range of about seventy kilometers per hour. Allen had just moved several times faster than that, fast enough to outrun a dragon's breath.

How could that be?

Allen himself was equally startled by what he had just done. "This jetpack is extraordinary," he thought. "That lich has really outdone himself."

The jetpack had been delivered by Ambrose shortly after their last meeting, along with a note claiming that Allen would find it useful.

Allen had understood the implication immediately. Ambrose was trying to keep him alive.

He and Alfredo had spent the past few days looking for people willing to join their cause, and found essentially none.

Two people couldn't stop a war. So Allen had decided to have Alfredo lay low while he took the risk himself.

The jetpack had arrived at exactly the right moment. It gave him a real chance of surviving what was to come.

Allen was no longer the callow youth of before. He had lived through war and survived that which should have killed him. He could now immediately appreciate what this device meant in practical terms.

Nothing in the world could fly this fast. On a paladin, it might be wasted. Most paladins fought in close quarters. But for a ranger, or even a mage?

An aerial attacker that couldn't be caught was frightening to face.

The problem was the physics of it all.

That sudden acceleration had sent a sharp pain through Allen's shoulders. A few more such bursts, and he would genuinely injure himself.

A typical ranger or mage might not even survive one such burst: the force would shatter bones outright. Even if the pack were mounted on a set of heavy armor, the acceleration would reverse the user's blood flow. Anyone without an exceptional constitution would black out instantly.

The more he thought about it, the more he suspected such jetpacks were ideal for none other than the undead.

The image of tens of thousands of undead soldiers strapped with jetpacks, raining attacks down on ground forces from up high, was a nightmare to contemplate.

"Fortunately," Allen reflected, "that lich doesn't seem to be entirely without conscience."

His mind was wandering, but his mouth was not. While dodging the time dragon's attacks, he kept speaking, kept pressing his case, kept stirring up dissonance from the crowd below.

It didn't matter how many of them believed him today. Every word was a spark, and perhaps some of those sparks might catch on fire, somewhere in the crowd below.

The young emperor chased after him relentlessly.

But no matter how hard he beat his wings, he just couldn't close the distance.

He was just slightly too slow, forced to inhale the faint burnt smell of compressed air that the jetpack left in its wake. Dragon senses were far sharper than human ones, and the smell was maddening.

He wanted nothing more than to rewind Allen into a pile of bones, but he had to lock onto a target to do so. Against something this small, moving so erratically at extreme speeds, the emperor's perception simply wasn't up to the task.

After all, he was still just an untrained, physically weak man who happened to be in control of a dragon's body. The body was powerful, but he couldn't use it effectively.

So he could only watch as Allen kept speaking, listing the crimes Lyon had committed over the years—crimes that traced back, in nearly every case, to the royal family itself.

Every loyalist general was a fervent believer. Roger Ángelo was the prime example. Men like him had committed serious atrocities more times than could be counted, with massacres of other races being a routine occurrence.

These were documented crimes. Everyone had known, but everyone had looked away. But as Allen read them aloud one by one, some of the soldiers below began to fall silent.

Not everyone could make peace with the slaughter of women and children. Quite a few of these soldiers had been quietly criticized themselves for demonstrating "insufficient zeal" to the cause.

A prayer offered without total concentration, slow recruitment numbers, training that looked halfhearted, because apparently breaking bones didn't count as effort... Everyone else had nobly donated their wages to the Lord of Dawn's temple; what gave you the right to spend yours on new clothes?

These were things every person in the crowd had experienced. Allen described them exactly as they were. And he named the source: the royal family, who pushed Lyon's faith toward greater extremity with every passing year. It publicly rewarded those who gave without any limit, and turned the population against anyone who dared think for themselves.

There were stories of men who had donated gold meant for their family's medical care, letting relatives die, and been personally received by the royal family and honored before the nation, thereby pressuring their neighbors to do the same.

The Tribunal would intervene when it learned of such cases, but was often far too late. And no one could criticize the royal family for it, because they acted in the name of faith, which meant any opposition was heresy.

Fanaticism was corrupting what faith was supposed to be, turning beauty into ugliness, glory into atrocity. Lyon's deep reserves were the only reason it had survived its own excesses this long.

But even those reserves had a limit.

When Allen first started speaking, the furious soldiers had been ready to tear him apart if only they could reach him. But as he went on, as he described things they had seen with their own eyes, the anger began to morph.

Heads once held high began to droop, as though the sun above had become something they couldn't quite look at directly.

No one in Lavarun would say a single word in Allen's defense. No one would answer his call openly. The war would continue regardless.

But every person in that city now knew one thing: someone had decided Lyon was on the wrong path, and had chosen a different one.

The emperor chased him until it was clear he would not catch up. In the end, he could only return dissatisfied to Lavarun.

He had no interest in Allen anymore. He had a kingdom to take. "Full advance!" he shouted. "We take the Unholy Kingdom today!"

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