Chapter 469: Recalling the Past

Having secured what he'd come for, Ambrose had no intention of lingering in this barren place any longer.

He looked over the githarks, briefly weighing whether to simply kill the lot of them outright. But on reflection, what would slaughtering this group of githarks actually gain him?

This entire expedition, aside from the intelligence he'd come for, had run wildly over budget on every other front. He'd walked away with a divine spell as a reward, sure, but one he couldn't actually use anytime soon. It would require considerable time and material investment before it had any chance of turning into something valuable.

In other words, this trip had been a net loss.

That was a fact Ambrose found genuinely hard to swallow. He needed to find some way to claw the loss back elsewhere, or the feeling would gnaw at him like ants crawling under his skin until he'd made the gold back somehow.

He studied the githarks until their heads practically morphed into the shape of gold coins in his mind's eye. "Life here must be rough for you, isn't it? Githarks may have considerable resilience, but a diet of nothing but fish surely isn't enough to keep your combat readiness up, and the food supply here is already stretched to its absolute limit just supporting your current numbers, isn't it?"

The githark leader narrowed his eyes, unable to work out what these three wanted.

They'd gone through enormous trouble tracking him down to a place like this, only to ask a question about mindflayers. That made no sense by any reasonable measure.

If the fallen githarks scattered across the ground hadn't merely been unconscious, the two sides likely wouldn't have managed this calm a conversation at all.

So was this necromancer calling himself Kul'Thezad finally about to reveal his actual purpose?

"What exactly are you trying to say? We githarks don't care for roundabout talk. Whatever it is, just say it plainly."

Ambrose dropped all pretense of courtesy. "What exactly do your people have left to be proud of, besides your aggression and raw combat strength? A race as thoroughly militarized as yours, sitting here not fighting anyone, is frankly a waste.

"I have connections. I can arrange for you to take part in a war as mercenaries. In exchange, you'll receive food, weapons, alchemical potions, and other supplies. And as a show of good faith, I'll personally help you move freely in and out of this lightning-shrouded place."

This sea was sealed off by storms on every side, and the only way out was through the seafloor. But the underwater labyrinth was crawling with sea beasts, and any single trip in or out could easily mean serious casualties.

Ambrose, blessed as he was by Thanos, could move through these waters freely. Bringing the githarks out would pose no difficulty whatsoever.

The offer immediately set the githarks alight with excitement.

They were simply not a race built for quiet, settled lives. They were raiders from the astral plane by nature. They had moved from plane to plane, having learned from the mindflayers how to plunder and enslave whatever intelligent life they found, draining each world dry before discarding it entirely.

Even after they suffered catastrophic losses, violence still ran through every fiber of a githark's being.

They would inevitably leave this place to throw themselves back into combat sooner or later. If they could come and go freely, this arena could serve as their perfect secret base of operations in the meantime.

"You really have a way to move freely in and out?"

"Of course. You can test it whenever you like. As it happens, Lyon and the orcs are currently at war. There should be plenty of opportunity for githarks to make themselves useful there. You already have a grudge against Lyon. This way, you'd get paid and can even borrow the orcs' strength to settle that score. Sounds like a fairly good deal for you, doesn't it?"

Ambrose's original plan had been to assemble a force of heroic spirits and deploy them as mercenaries on the battlefield, raking in serious war profits.

This wasn't so different. The githarks, as it happened, were also exceptionally high-quality mercenaries. Used properly, this band of toads could serve as a complete substitute for the heroic-spirit army he'd originally envisioned—and with the added benefit of skipping all the ongoing maintenance headaches, since the githarks could take care of themselves.

Ambrose spent a considerable while negotiating with the githark leader, then took him below the surface personally to prove he could disperse the marine beasts as promised. By the end, the two sides had reached a preliminary understanding of cooperation.

Ambrose left behind a magic mirror as a means of contact, then departed from the terrifying sea with Ariel and Arthur in tow.

The whole way back, Ambrose was still mentally calculating exactly what cut he should take as the middleman in all this.

"Githarks have an absolutely terrible reputation. Vouching for them personally is worth at least a seventy percent cut, surely. Otherwise, I'm doing all this work for nothing..."

So absorbed was Ambrose in his accounting that he failed to notice Ariel watching him the entire way.

For Ariel, that inexplicable sense of déjà vu had only grown stronger.

"There's something so strange about this lich. The way he lies so effortlessly... Why does he remind me so much of Monge Greywater?" she murmured to herself.

"Am I imagining things...?"

Ariel couldn't be certain, because the more she actually compared the two, the fewer concrete similarities she could find.

Their tone and manners of speech entirely different, as was their verbiage. Monge Greywater had often invoked proverbs unique to the Ragetide Kingdom to drive home a point.

This lich did nothing of the sort. His accent sounded more like someone from the mainland, and his mannerisms felt more like a scholar's than a general's.

And yet she couldn't shake the feeling that the two of them were alike somehow. Two brothers raised apart, with entirely different habits and ways of living, nonetheless carried some unmistakable family resemblance; this felt the same way to her.

The absence of a smoking gun didn't mean her suspicions went away. Ariel had no proof, only a gut instinct that something here didn't add up.

So when the two of them returned to the Greywater, Ariel couldn't help asking, "Master Megaman, do you have any siblings? Or perhaps other blood relatives?"

Ambrose froze for a moment, uncertain why Ariel would ask such a thing.

The question itself was simple enough to answer.

"I'm honestly not entirely sure myself. I've lived for several centuries, after all, and I had a handful of romantic entanglements before becoming a lich, so I can't say for certain whether I have any blood descendants out there. As for siblings, though, no, I don't believe I have any. What prompted that question, Your Highness?"

Ariel looked slightly embarrassed—prying into someone's personal life like this was hardly polite—but she answered honestly anyway. "I once knew a friend. He doesn't resemble you in any particular way, and yet I find myself feeling that the two of you are somehow alike. I genuinely can't explain why, which is why I asked. I apologize for the intrusion."

Ambrose's soulfire flickered somewhere deep within him.

Was Ariel actually getting suspicious? Ambrose was certain that his performance as Monge Greywater had been flawless.

He'd worn enough disguises by now that every single one received his full, meticulous attention to detail, with every aspect carefully tailored to fit the persona. That was precisely how he'd once managed to bring an entire noble orc family to total ruin without raising a single suspicion.

So Ambrose remained thoroughly confident that nothing about his current self carried any lingering trace of Monge Greywater. As for the supposed notion that "clever men were alike," it was true that most intelligent people did share certain traits, such as speaking with precision and cutting straight to the chase. But that was simply a common trait of intelligence, and certainly nothing that could function as actual evidence.

How, exactly, had Ariel managed to connect the dots?

Ambrose didn't dare make a fuss over it. He settled instead for a carefully neutral tone. "Ah, as for that friend Your Highness mentioned... Would that be General Monge Greywater? I've heard of his considerable accomplishments. You even named this ship after him, Your Highness. You really are someone who holds onto the past."

Ariel spoke slowly as she considered her memories. "Actually, the two of us only truly knew each other for a few days. At first, I thought he was nothing more than a flattering man without much substance. Later, I realized he was the only person who truly understood me..."

She recounted, slowly, the story of how the two of them had first come to know each other.

The Ragetide Kingdom, shaped so deeply by its devotion to the Lord of Storms, had a leadership composed almost entirely of battle-obsessed zealots. Worse still, they were zealots with absolutely no self-awareness.

Reckless militarism was the kingdom's single greatest failing, made all the more dangerous by the fact that every neighbor nearby was an opponent they couldn't afford to provoke.

Ariel had grown up immersed in that environment, and yet she had been the very first person in the entire kingdom to recognize the problem for what it was.

But even as the princess, she had been met with skepticism and resistance from everyone around her.

You want peace? How will you ever face the Lord of Storms with that attitude?

A coward who scrapes by through compromise—how could someone like that ever inherit this kingdom?

On the matter of the Silent Sea Pirate Company, Ariel and her father had clashed bitterly, more than once. Even her own father failed to understand her. Ariel had felt utterly, crushingly alone.

Monge Greywater had been the very first person to stand with her.

And not merely that. He had pushed through against the weight of the entire kingdom's resistance and actually made the impossible happen. Ariel had watched the whole thing unfold firsthand as this man helped her realize a dream she'd never truly believed could come true.

The kingdom no longer had to keep feeding bodies into a war it couldn't win. There was no longer any need to mobilize the entire population against an undead horde fighting to the death. The people of the Ragetide Kingdom could finally live in peace for a while, no longer forced to wonder whether they would starve.

Ariel couldn't fully put words to what she'd felt in that moment. Beyond the shock and gratitude, there had been something else too, something harder to name.

But then, with no warning at all, Monge Greywater had simply died, leaving nothing behind but a pile of ash.

Ariel had searched desperately for an explanation, but it had all come to nothing in the end.

The full weight of the kingdom had fallen onto her shoulders alone, because she and Monge Greywater had been the only two who'd ever firmly committed to a path of cooperation. With him gone, Ariel had no choice but to carry the burden forward by herself.

What followed was an unrelenting flood of work that numbed everything else. For a long stretch of time, Ariel forgot about Monge Greywater entirely—and forgot, in some sense, about herself as well.

But whenever she finally had a quiet moment to herself, those few brief days they'd shared would surface again, vivid as ever.

Now, with Ambrose asking about those days directly, Ariel found herself almost on the verge of tears, though she hadn't cried since she was four years old.

Heki Stone, who had been lounging idly somewhere aboard the airship the entire time, seized the moment immediately, his quill flying once more. "The princess spoke in a hushed voice, pouring out boundless longing. Her eyes shimmered with the light of memory, as though she could reach back through the mists of time to touch those warm, fleeting moments once more. In this instant she was no princess at all—only a young woman lost in the joy and sorrow of days gone by. A pity, then, that she had no way of knowing the cold-hearted lich before her was the very same traveler from her past, that beneath that rigid skeletal frame, his soulfire may once have stirred for her, however briefly..."

Ambrose looked at Ariel's reddening eyes with no small amount of awkwardness. Had he actually hurt her, somehow? They'd only spent a handful of days together. How could she still feel such longing? This princess had probably never had a single romantic relationship in her entire life. Her resistance in this particular department must have been practically negative.

This couldn't continue. Ariel's intuition was getting genuinely alarming, and he needed to redirect her attention immediately.

Ambrose continued, "Your Highness, you mentioned earlier that General Monge Greywater left behind nothing but ashes and a final message, that he claimed he would eventually return?"