Their progress through the lower reaches of the tunnel system continued on in a similar fashion. They didn't encounter any more Hairy Holes as the monster was solitary and relatively rare. They came across many others, though. Blood Bats and their cousins, Stone Bats, were common in the large caverns that rivaled the size of the Academy campus. These monsters formed large swarms and could attack from range with manifestations of their named element.

There was an open debate in the team as to which was worse, blood needles falling from the sky or fist-sized chunks of granite raining down. One was gross and painful, while the other was painful and painful. The argument raged on as they sprinted through the deadly hailstorm of attacks. Considering Caeden put up Forged Infinity in form 271, a giant umbrella shield, they passed through the attacks in relative safety and comfort.

In fact, in most caverns, they rode one of Cat's spectral Brutes, which had enough room on its broad, wagon-like back for all of them and remained covered by Caeden's umbrella shield. Cat even designed a version she called the Passenger Brute that had seats made of the same pale, ghostly substance all her specters were formed from. Since the material took on any quality she designed it for, from flesh to metal to fur, the seats were extremely comfortable and expansive, like a luxury recliner.

So that's how they traveled. On the back of a gorilla-wagon in fluffy chairs made out of ghost-stuff under a purple and gold umbrella that was also most likely the single most powerful weapon in existence while bats shot blood and rocks at them. It was all extremely surreal whenever Caeden thought about where his life had gone. He used to just be a blacksmith that made plow heads. Sure, they were magic plow heads, but compared to what he was doing now, that was tame and mundane.

Nevermind the fact that they were in the bottom of a mountain, where they had managed to fall while fighting shadow monsters as their teacher held up said mountain with swords. His life had become incredibly strange. Not that long ago, he knew very little about shrouds, despite having one himself. Now he was the strongest of his generation, and best friends with the daughter of one of the most eminent shrouded families in his country.

Now they were hunting down the source of ominous glowing orange energy that was slowly infecting the rocks around them, flowing like the blood of the mountain itself, in the vague hope that it might help them escape this underground prison. What if they didn't succeed, or the answers they found had nothing to do with a way out? It all felt a little futile.

A soft finger poked into his cheek and stirred him from his thoughts. "You're getting that broody look on your face again." Lily warned, giving him a meaningful look. After his pledge to kick his inherent negativity not long after they first met, his best friend had acted as a check to keep those thoughts in line. It was hard to kick the habit in spite of his genuine desire to be a more positive person.

"Yeah," Caeden admitted unashamedly. At first he had been reluctant to admit whenever he felt himself falling into that old mindset, feeling like it was a personal failure. After months of talking it out, Caeden had come to understand that the pessimistic point of view would likely never leave him, at least not entirely. The important part was owning up to it, and correcting it whenever possible. "I was just thinking about where I used to be. This all feels like a bit much for a blacksmith from the middle of nowhere."

Lily lightly slapped his shoulder in a gentle rebuke. They were sitting side by side at the back of the Passenger Brute. "You're forgetting that you're a dual-shrouded with the only shrouded weapon in the whole Starry Sea, with four kick-ass companions who are pretty strong in their own right."

Caeden nodded, acknowledging her point. That was the problem with pessimism; it tended to make you forget all the positives staring you in the face. Literally, since Lily was looking right at him. Pessimistic thinking also often failed to acknowledge the help of others as valid or real in any meaningful way.

No one ever stood alone. The most powerful shrouded in the world was not omnipotent. Failing to see how powerful his friends were was a mistake Caeden hoped he never made. Every one of them was powerful in their own right, and he could rely on them, just like they relied on him.

"Now, we're coming up on the next tunnel, I think." Lily looked ahead, toward the rapidly approaching wall of the cavern. "You good?"

"Yeah, you always set me straight." Caeden laughed.

Lily shot him a brilliant, warm smile. She had been doing that a lot more lately. Smiling in general, but also smiling at him. It was nice. So he smiled back. For her to be able to smile like that, in this situation, showed just how far they had come from the malnourished, timid woman he had met on an ethership dock seven months ago.

"Alright you two, it's time to head in." Cat butted in from one of the seats in front of them. She gestured toward the entrance they had reached. It was almost funny to Caeden that the only reason they could see down here was because of the glow from the lines they were ostensibly trying to destroy. Otherwise, these underground passages would be blacker than his skin.

He and Lily would be able to navigate just fine with their auras, but Cat and Erik either couldn't use investigative sense or were just awful at it.

"Yeah, yeah. We noticed." Caeden acknowledged, getting ready to collapse Forged Infinity. He would only do so at the last moment, seeing as the bats were still attacking them.

"Ok, I just wanted to make sure since you two were making gaga eyes at each other," Cat smirked.

"Haha." Caeden rolled his eyes. It wasn't the first joke Cat or Erik had made about them. It was a bit ironic that both of them talked about having a friend of the alternate gender like it was physically impossible while being best friends themselves. Then again, they phrased it as heterosexual friends, which Cat distinctly wasn't. So the context was admittedly a bit different.

Lily shot an icicle at Cat, who yelped in surprise and ducked behind her seat to avoid Lily's wrath. Caeden couldn't help but laugh. "Nice one." He turned to Lily.

She wasn't laughing. Instead, she looked genuinely upset. So much so that her face was flush with anger. "Something wrong?"

Her eyes darted to him before bouncing off and back to Cat's seat. "Nope, all good. She's just being annoying."

Caeden nodded. "Yup. Nothing new, though. It's just Cat."

Lily nodded slowly. "Right. It's just Cat."

She didn't sound like she believed it.

Any desire Caeden had to dig into her response died when the Passenger Brute collapsed into nothingness as Cat released the construct. It was go time, and he wouldn't be falling on his ass again. It was embarrassing enough the first time.

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Dropping down through the rapidly disappearing specter, Caeden landed feet first. It was only a ten-foot drop, which was hardly anything at all. Everyone had been infusing their bodies near constantly down here, and this time was no exception, so he was currently much stronger, faster, and more durable than a normal human.

There were multiple reasons they were all infused, with the notable exception of Cat. She still couldn't use the four basic abilities of shrouds. After several days down here, the temperature in the tunnels had started to spike. It was nearing 80 degrees (AN: Fahrenheit, 26 Celsius sorry I'm a filthy American) by their lake. The farther into the tunnels they went, the farther the temperature climbed. Caeden's aura showed that they were currently at a scorching 120 degrees (49 C) in this cavern.

The increased temperature was almost certainly related to the orange energy, as it contained heat and fire energy. Using infusion for physical enhancement allowed them to resist the negative effects of such high temperatures on their bodies. Cat was just toughing it out. Though she had commented that she much preferred this to being cold. Her combat style didn't require much physical exertion from her, so the heat wasn't nearly as bad as it would be for them with all the running, jumping, and moving theft did in combat.

Additionally, physical enhancement was much less shroud-intensive than formshifting. Their shrouds didn't manifest, their appearances didn't change. They just became slightly enhanced from a base human in every way, the level of enhancement dependent on the amount of shroud they invested. So they just kept physical enhancement infusion going constantly.

This was not something they could have done even a few months ago. As they trained and their IP increased, raising their shroud reserves, their regeneration rate increased as well. According to their teachers, shroud regeneration increased in lockstep with your overall reserves. Basically, the amount of shroud they gained back was a fixed percentage of their total.

One teacher explained it like this. "Think of your shroud like a reservoir. Every shrouded starts out with a tiny puddle's worth of water in that reservoir. Subsequently, the water feeding into it is a tiny little trickle, barely anything at all. As your IP grows, you dig a bigger reservoir until you have a whole lake. In that process, you also widen the stream feeding the lake until it's a river. If the puddle would have been filled by its little trickle in five minutes, your river will fill your lake in five minutes. It's the same amount of time, but the amount of water moved is incomparably different."

Their level of regeneration had reached the point where they could have a low level of infusion running constantly without their reserves dropping at all. In fact, they gained more moment to moment than they lost. It got Caeden thinking about where they were versus where they could end up. Everyone on his team was around 10,000 IP. What could they do at 1,000,000? Caeden could stay formshifted in golden body indefinitely at that level. It was a daunting thought.

Entering the next tunnel, they noticed an immediate difference. The temperature increased explosively, shooting toward the 200 (93 C) degree mark. Cat let out a wheezing breath, the sudden increase too much for her. Caeden could only imagine. Breathing must feel like inhaling air straight from a furnace.

"Are you ok?"

Cat wobbled before sitting down on the smooth black stone of the tunnel floor. "I-I need to…I need to fix this. This is too damn hot, and it's only going to get worse. Give me a minute."

Caeden and Lily looked at each other before mutually shrugging. They had no idea what Cat was going to do, but if she thought she had a solution to her problem, they could make time. It wasn't like they were on any kind of schedule.

So Cat stayed on the ground, her face scrunched up in concentration as her shroud flickered around her in wisps and streaks of pale white with small bursts of green fire. Caeden sidled up to Lily as they watched the surroundings. The various bat monsters had stopped attacking them the second they entered the tunnel, but something else could come up on them at any time.

"We have to be getting close. We've gone what, twenty miles? The temperature went up with relative consistency and suddenly spikes? That's not coincidence."

She nodded. "I agree. There's no way it's unrelated now. Did you check the energy veins? The flow we've been tracking is much more intense here. I think this tunnel is the limit of some critical threshold. Whatever is going on, it's happening more from this point forward."

"I'm worried," Caeden admitted. "The temperature increase is bad. To be able to heat this entire underground network to this degree? That's a lot of energy. Stupid amounts of it. This place should be pretty cold, especially considering the overall temperatures on the continent. I think we might be walking into a situation we just aren't equipped to handle. This feels more and more like something that's way past our level of power."

"Are you thinking it's another shrouded? An enemy nation? They would be very, very far from home." Lily pointed out. The continent they were on was smack in the middle of the Central Authorities territory.

Caeden shook his head, contemplating, "No. They sent us here specifically to avoid shit like that. The CA would come out looking real stupid if they sent a bunch of students to an enemy-occupied continent, and it would be insane to think someone could infiltrate this deep without getting noticed. The nations have been at war for centuries, and this would be unprecedented, right?" He asked the history buff.

"Oh yeah, by a wide margin. This is deep in CA control. They would have to be blind and deaf to not notice an enemy agent getting this far. But if it's not that, what are you thinking? Who else could…Oh!" Lily's eyes widened.

Caeden nodded. "Economic sabotage. No doubt the family running this mountain has some opponents. The level of wealth we saw in town was way higher than we could have ever guessed. If even the unshrouded are raking in the cash to that level, I can't imagine what the owners are pulling in. This has to be incredibly profitable for them. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole situation was an effort to destroy the mines, even bring down Black Reach itself. You said your dad killed entire islands for similar reasons. It's not much of a stretch."

Lily sighed. "I can't believe I didn't see it sooner. I should have figured it out before you."

Caeden shrugged. "It's not surprising that you didn't want to consider the option. I think it was a bit too close to home, yeah?"

Lily's eyes snapped around as she gave him an appraising look. "That's… That's probably right. You've got me figured out, haven't you?"

Caeden laughed. "I don't know about that. I just get you, a little bit. Would be hard not to, considering how much time we spend talking and generally just being around each other. I know that you've got me figured out. Probably better than I'll ever get you."

They talked for hours, every day for six months straight. Caeden was confident that Lily was the person he had spent the most time with in his entire life, outside his adoptive parents and his uncle. He would feel pretty dumb if he didn't at least understand her a little.

"That's fair, I guess." Lily smiled.

"Got it!" Cat exclaimed.

They both turned to look at her, only to be surprised. Cat was cloaked in a swirling mass of pale white with small spots of green fire flickering in it, coalesced into the shape of a hooded cape. Caeden could immediately tell with a casual use of aura sense that this was a specter, not just Cat manifesting her shroud.

"What is that?"

Cat laughed. "I have been so, so underusing my shroud. I made a specter that's basically a piece of equipment. This spectral Cloak will offer limited defense while it regulates my surroundings. I would be fine if the temperature quadrupled. More than that, it could drop down far below freezing. Hell, I can breathe underwater with this on. Pretty cool, right?"

Erik groaned. "Was that a pun? Puns are the butt of humor, you know? You should be ashamed."

Cat's smile went feral. "Oh, can't sweat it? You know what they say, if it's too hot, get out of the kitchen. Maybe my humor is too spicy for you."

Several objects were immediately thrown in Cat's general direction at the terrible and frankly poorly executed puns. She wasn't even good at it. Much to everyone's surprise, the objects impacted her Cloak and dropped to the ground, having done nothing to Cat herself.

Caeden shook his head. "Let's go."

"Yup." Cat cheered. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire!"

Everyone groaned.