Lich for Hire

Chapter 378: I've Stripped the Dragon Graveyard Clean

A skeleton in a cloak had appeared. Just the upper half of its body was visible above the skyline, but it was already tall enough to dwarf anything else in the air.

A single rib would have been larger than a full-grown dragon. It stood like death made manifest. The moment it appeared, every githark in the vicinity felt the sensation spread through them like a cold current through deep water. The red dragons above managed to keep their wings moving, but only barely, the rhythm of their flight slowing and stuttering.

The vast skeletal figure extended its right hand toward the githarks. One finger rose, slowly.

Then it came down. The air itself rippled—no, not air, but space.

The moment that finger descended, space itself fractured. What poured out of the crack was not light or sound but dark energy, dark energy of a density and scale that had never been meant to exist in the mortal world.

When Ambrose had detonated the skeletal body he had specially cultivated, the dark energy that surged out had transformed into venomous bugs that turned the magical automata all around him into scrap metal. The same sort of thing was happening here, but on a far grander scale.

The dark energy took form as it spread: not deliberate form, but the kind it naturally produced upon reaching a critical threshold, manifesting the shapes of the most brutal things that have ever been imagined.

Horrors with too many heads and too many limbs, tendrils coated in barbs, mouths made entirely of flame and teeth—everything humanity had ever described as monstrous was given momentary shape and hurled outward in a wave.

The black tide swept forth in every direction. It didn't distinguish between sky and sea. Both were engulfed simultaneously, the dark energy saturating the air above and the water below in the same moment. The wave rolled outward for more than fifteen kilometers before it began to thin.

In a fan-shaped region of fifteen kilometers around the direction of that pointing finger, every living thing died. Not weakened, not injured—dead, instantly and completely, down to the smallest shrimp in the shallows.

The black tide came quickly and receded as quickly. By the time the sky and sea returned to their normal colors, nothing remained alive in the air except Gareth and Alabastra.

Dark energy on that scale was something only the undead could survive. The githarks, the astral dragons, and the dragon-riders were all gone, already sinking into the ocean and decomposing rapidly. By the time anything could have been retrieved, the bodies were already in an advanced state of decay.

Gareth scratched the back of his helmet, staring at the empty sky. "Did the Dragon Graveyard have a defense mechanism like that? How did I not know about it?"

Alabastra was equally baffled. "I didn't know either. What just happened?"

Gareth laughed. "What do you think? That's obviously my bro's work."

He had complete faith in Ambrose. Anything inexplicable that happened in this world was, in his experience, very likely that lich's doing.

The lich could even exile an entire kingdom; something like this was hardly surprising.

But couldn't he have given a little advance warning?

The sheer concentration of dark energy had damaged Gareth's armor to the point where it was little more than scrap metal. The suit had taken him several centuries of continuous enhancement to bring to its current level, with layers of high-tier magical reinforcement accumulated over centuries.

The undead could make use of dark energy, but dark energy at that intensity was a different matter. It damaged everything indiscriminately.

Gareth smiled wryly, though there was nothing he could complain about. He had been reckless. Thinking back on it now, he could see exactly what had been happening: the githarks' real target had never been him, but rather Alabastra. He didn't want to think about what might have happened to her during those moments while he was banished and unable to do anything about it. If she had been seriously hurt...

Ambrose had saved something more precious to him than his own life.

Equipment could be reforged. Another few centuries was nothing.

As the two of them drifted back toward the island, they spotted a figure moving fast across the water's surface below, collecting bodies. The githark corpses and the red dragon remains were disappearing into Ambrose's personal storage space one after another.

His personal space, roughly the size of a castle, had always been comfortable in scale. But the moment two red dragon bodies went in, it became noticeably less so. Ambrose simply cast a spell and converted the remainder into skeletons on the spot.

The astral dragons lurched upright, decayed flesh moving on dark energy alone, and swam for the island. They climbed ashore and collapsed immediately.

These were emergency constructs, barely animated and with no combat capacity. They were mobile only in the most technical sense.

The githark bodies followed, emerging from the water and walking up the beach in a shuffling mass.

By the time he finished, Ambrose was genuinely tired.

That many bodies, that many dragons—manipulating them all using raw dark energy without additional support was not a comfortable experience.

There had been a moment where he'd nearly summoned the Golden Throne to augment his reserves, but he ultimately decided against it. Spending extra time was far more acceptable to him than spending significant quantities of gold.

Aige had helped considerably. The ghost ship made several passes through the surrounding water and brought in more remains: not just githarks, but also the oceanic creatures that had also died in the blast, especially the ixiray. Those were creatures with demonic bloodlines, and their remains were worth more than most of the githark bodies.

"I still don't understand how they tamed the ixiray," Ambrose said. "Those are pets of the demon prince Demogorgon."

He glanced at the beach covered in bounty, so excited he could barely clack his jaw shut. He was about to make a staggering profit.

Gareth descended and landed beside him. "Never mind the ixiray. What did you just do? The Dragon Graveyard doesn't have access to power like that."

Ambrose didn't see any reason to be secretive. "I discharged the accumulated divine power of the Dragon Graveyard all at once. Your father-in-law knows absolutely nothing about necromancy. No wonder the success rate for the bone dragon transformation was that low.

The dark energy channeled through the Graveyard's conceptual framework was inherently more powerful than ordinary mortal energy. It was the kind of thing that wasn't supposed to exist at the scale Sephris had accumulated. But Sephris had never studied death magic, and his use of those reserves over the centuries had been, from Ambrose's professional perspective, deeply wasteful.

Once the dice of fate had cleared a path for him, he had found the true core of the Dragon Graveyard: the ring resting on its altar, the gift from the Elegiac Society's president to Sephris all those centuries ago. It was an artifact that clearly exceeded Ambrose's current ability to fully understand.

But the knowledge Leyla had shared made the difference. With it, he had been able to control the ring and the magical array covering the entire island—still imperfectly, but with astonishing results.

What he had tried to cast was a single Finger of Death, scaled to the Graveyard's accumulated reserves. Instead, the power had immediately exceeded his capacity to control. The spell had collapsed, and the dark energy had been discharged through the giant figure he had shaped.

"I genuinely intended to leave some in reserve," Ambrose admitted. "You still need the power to convert more bone dragons. But I couldn't control it at that scale. It simply wasn't something I could control once I set things in motion."

He was being honest. He had been strained to his absolute limit, at least without the power of the Golden Throne.

And he certainly had no intention to spend his own gold to conserve the Graveyard's reserves.

Not a chance!

The complete discharge had knocked the Dragon Graveyard's magical array into a state of instability. Worse, since Ambrose had not taken the ring off after using it, the Island of Eternal Rest itself was now under considerable strain. The Graveyard's protections might fail entirely before long, exposing it to anyone who came looking.

That was, technically, not his problem.

Gareth waved the matter off. "Forget it. Alabastra is worth more than all that." He reached out and pulled Ambrose into a hug that nearly compromised the structural integrity of his mithril body.

"Bro, I owe you my life. No, two lives. My blade is yours, whenever you need it."

Ambrose barely extracted himself from the hug. Gareth was a menace—he had warped Ambrose's mithril frame enough that it'd cost him several gold coins to repair the damage.

Alabastra sincerely thanked him as well. She hadn't been through many engagements of that scale, but she clearly understood how close things had come. If Ambrose hadn't taken action when he did, she wouldn't have been walking away quite so simply.

"Don't thank me yet," Ambrose said. "The most important matter is still unresolved. We don't know where Sephris is. The githarks attacked the Graveyard directly. That means they've decided the pretense is over. And what about the living dragon clans? Were they accomplices, or has something happened to them too?"

Yes, those questions were surely more important than the ring that controlled the Dragon Graveyard.

Alabastra's composure collapsed immediately. "Right, Father! We need to search the other dragon islands immediately!"

Gareth steadied her with a few words, then looked at Ambrose. "You've already figured something out, haven't you, bro?"

Ambrose smiled and produced a fragment of a soul.

"This is a githark soul. Judging by the soul's stability, it must have belonged to a high-caliber mage, possibly a legend. Unfortunately for him, he clearly hasn't seen power at a divine scale before. If he'd run off earlier, he might have made it."

The blast had been too intense for most souls to survive. He had hoped the red dragon souls might have held together—dragons were resilient, even in death—but not one of them had made it. They had dispersed completely.

The soul Ambrose was holding onto, on the other hand, had somehow managed to preserve itself through the initial wave.

It was genuinely remarkable: if left alone, it would have absorbed the ambient dark energy and eventually developed into a powerful wraith or lich. There was real potential here.

Regrettably, he needed the soul's memories more than the soul itself.

He unraveled it. The remaining memories came out in threads, and Ambrose spent several hours combing through them carefully. When he looked up, he said, "Good news: your father is safe for now. Another githark unit lured him to a different location. He hasn't been controlled. With some luck, he should be back within a few hours."

Alabastra and Gareth had barely exhaled before he continued, "The problem isn't resolved, though. The githarks attacking the Graveyard directly means they've abandoned any pretense of cooperation. The soul was too fragmented for me to get all the details. I saw a large altar being constructed on one of the dragon islands, but I couldn't determine what it's for.

"Whatever it is, it's connected to the githarks' plan, and the bone dragons are almost certainly intended as a sacrifice. Why else would they commit elite forces to attacking the Graveyard specifically?"

Ambrose stood, crushed the last of the soul's threads between his fingers, and looked at Gareth with complete composure. "These githarks really don't value their lives. Gareth, are you still up for a fight?"

The blackflame blade reappeared in Gareth's hand. "Those superficial injuries I took earlier don't mean a thing. I'm fully recovered. Let's finish this—we'll kill all of them this time."

Aige smiled at Ambrose. "I promised to show you what I can do, and I haven't had the chance yet. This will be a good opportunity. I'll bring you all to find the githarks, and I'll call my crew together while we're at it. They've been idle for far too long."

Ambrose nodded. Not everyone was assembled, but half the Elegiac Society was present.

The githarks were done for.

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