The dragon, who still hadn't given them his name, seemed blindsided by Caeden's words. He didn't move for nearly a minute afterward, merely staring as Cat sent out several assassin specters into the surrounding jungle to give advance warning of the incoming dragon monsters.
Meanwhile, the dragon nest had stirred into action. The female dragon's pheromones were a signal of battle to these people. They knew what was coming. In fact, all of them would have grown up with this situation as a fact of life, considering the Treaty of Scales was over 50,000 years old at this point. No dragon alive today would know how they lived before except through the stories of their parents and elders.
Caeden contemplated that for the long minutes he waited for the monsters to come. In fact, he thought about a lot of things. It was not lost on him that he was essentially falling back into the same exact situation he had landed in on the last continent. He was defending an objective against a wave of monsters to prevent a tragedy. It also wasn't lost on him that some of the people he was defending would probably hate him regardless of his actions.
After all, both the dragons and the unshrouded had ample reason to hate him on principle alone. He couldn't even blame them. One act of good could not outweigh decades, centuries of wrongs. In their situation, he likely would have felt the same. Indeed, the only reason he had for protecting them was the nebulous idea that it was 'the right thing to do which was flimsy at the best of times.
From a practical perspective, this was pointless. Even more so than stopping the Magma Titan had been. At least then, he was preventing something that was decades in the making. The Heartstone would be inactive for centuries, millennia to come. What he was stopping now was a regular occurrence for these people. He couldn't stay here and continually protect them. This exact situation would unfold in a few days or so when he left. Ultimately, his actions were pointless from a big-picture perspective.
But something about that thought struck him as wrong. Was it ok to let someone suffer in front of him simply because their pain was inevitable? And what kind of way to live was that? After all, by that logic, one could justify never helping anyone or doing anything. Everyone eventually dies, so any act of kindness will inevitably fade into oblivion.
Caeden shook his head. This had been his thinking back before he met Lily. It was also a fragile mentality. The first opportunity he had to live up to that mentality, he had decided to protect Lily from her brother. According to his own thinking, he should have left her alone. But that's not what he had done. Instead, he had jumped in because he couldn't help but think about how disappointed Unc would be if he had seen him stand by.
And that was the crux of it. For one to never help another, you had to care about no one at all. If you cared about a single person other than yourself, hells, even if you cared about yourself, you could have empathy for the people around you. He would have to be a supreme narcissist or a sociopath to be able to watch others suffer and not want to help.
It might have been different if he wasn't as strong as he was. He would never expect the weak or infirm to lay down their lives to assist someone in mortal danger. But he was strong. He had been blessed with powers above and beyond his peers. What did he have them for if not to help others? What was the point, otherwise?
He could have hoarded his power, hiding it away greedily and lording it over the less fortunate. But that felt like an incredibly lonely path to walk. Caeden had spent three years living like a hermit, sequestered away in a small village in the middle of nowhere. He had thought that was for the best, knowing that shrouded made the unshrouded uncomfortable more often than not. And he didn't want to live around a bunch of people that were nervous he might kill them.
Hiding away hadn't been the solution either. He had been deeply, overwhelmingly lonely during those years. He convinced himself that it was the best life he could manage, but that had been a lie. The truth was, having people to care about was scary. They could be taken away from you in an instant, and you could never get them back. But having people you cared about was what made life worth living.
Which led back around to Caeden's attempts to change his perspective. He cared about Lily, and Lily was the kind of person that helped people. She didn't have some deep motivation or personal conviction. She just helped where she could because it was the right thing to do. It came naturally to her.
Caeden respected her immensely for that. For most people, being kind or going out of your way for another was a calculated choice. It was natural to weigh the benefits and disbenefits of helping someone else before you took action. People wanted to protect themselves first. But Lily wasn't like that. She lacked the natural self-defense mechanism that made her think twice before jumping into someone else's problems.
Some might see that as naive, but Caeden found that hard to believe. After all, he knew that Lily was fully aware of the horrors humans were capable of. She wasn't blind. Yet she still chose to try for something better. And he found that endlessly admirable. In fact, Caeden was sure that was where his deeper feelings for Lily had started. He could look at her, and it made him want to be a better person.
So he tried to change. Starting with the Forged. Caeden could unequivocally call that a success. So many students at the Central Academy were better off for his direct intervention. But after that…everything had been a mixed bag.
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His fight with the top five members of Solar Radiance had nearly killed him. The same happened in his fight with Victor. Both had been his attempts to step up and put himself in harm's way for others. But he had overestimated himself or underestimated his opponents. Either way, nearly dying was a bad outcome. The only positive was that he managed to knock Lily out of her funk and convince her to rely on him more.
But those paled in comparison to his failure on the last continent. Trying to deal with the Heartstone was irresponsible and stupid. He had overcorrected in his attempt to do good and pushed both himself and his team past their limits. Only Erik's timely ascension to Nascent Shroud had saved them from gruesome deaths.
And that was the problem. He was trying to push the limit of what he could do to be a positive influence in the world, but he was new to it. Caeden had a hard time judging what was an appropriate risk and what would get him or his friends killed because his default response was to not even bother interfering. But sometimes, that natural instinct was right. He just couldn't judge when that was true or when he was falling back into old habits.
So here he was again, trying to help. Would this be another time he overestimated himself, or would he actually do something good without putting himself and Cat on the edge of death? He had no idea. But more than ever before, stepping aside felt wrong.
He felt no personal responsibility for the absurd horrors the Central Authority and the Central Council had thrust upon the dragons. He had his own bone to pick with everyone even remotely in charge of the CA for many reasons, not the least of which being his uncle's continued bedridden state.
But he was also self-aware enough to acknowledge that he was currently benefiting from the resources and nigh-universal control the CA held over its lands. He had made weapons and armor with ether mined by unshrouded on continents that no doubt used to belong to dragons. He did not cause the problem, but he was benefiting from its outcome. To say otherwise would be to ignore the facts.
So when he was presented with a clear opportunity to at least lessen these people's suffering, he had to take it. He didn't want to be the kind of person that could just walk away, knowing what was about to happen here. If he couldn't be sure that it was right to fight, he could at least be sure he was fighting for the right reasons.
"They're coming. Five minutes out." Cat told him. She had spent the last few minutes as he contemplated creating a literal army of specters. Once again, they had only spectral weapons instead of the much more effective infused gear that Caeden had made for them. All those weapons would be back at the wreckage of the cruiser if any had even survived.
"Ok. I'll need you to run defense. Just keep them out of the nest. I'll deal with the biggest ones as fast as I can before mopping up the small fry. Just bulwark for a while." Caeden told her. In this moment, he was lucky Cat was the one with him. If anyone could hold a set point, it was Cat.
She could only create about a hundred specters at a time before her shroud ran out, but they cost a fraction of that initial investment to maintain. All she had to do was let her reserves refill, and she could form another hundred. Given enough time to repeat that process, Cat could maintain roughly five hundred specters without losing more on upkeep than she could regenerate.
Unlike with the Heartstone, Cat had enough time to set up completely. Arrayed around the nest was a literal army of specters in tight defensive formations. It would take a lot to get past her amassed forces. That gave Caeden the freedom to do what he did best and take the fight to them. He was most effective in a melee, and this situation let him force the monsters to confront him on his own terms.
With that in mind, he did his own setup. His time contemplating had not gone to waste. He had been continuously using Rose Garden over and over, creating ever-mounting numbers of thorns that crowded the skies. If the monsters mimicked dragons, many would likely come by air. Caeden had enough time and forewarning to choke the sky with razor-sharp constructs. Thousands of thorns flooded the air of the jungle clearing, ready to defend the nest.
For Caeden himself, he was mainly focused on fast, efficient kills. He would be relying on Sharp to deal the most damage, as he had a practically infinite supply of it. Physical Enhancement would cover his defense and movement to conserve shroud. To that end, he activated a few mnemonics on top of his near-endless thorns.
"Speed form. Bramble. Limit Acceleration." Each mnemonic activated in sequence, the first taking his enhanced formshifted bulk and slimming it down into a runner's physique as the gold coloration overtook the purple across his body. Bramble caused crimson spikes and arcs of Sharp to protrude all over his body, turning every surface into a weapon. Finally, Limit Acceleration was a modified version of an old mnemonic.
The original had occupied the same space as two other mnemonics, Harden and Break. Together with Acceleration, those three had been enhancements on his Defense, Strength, and Speed forms, respectively. Each one granted a momentary but significant boost to their respective forms at the cost of damaging his body from the rebound. The newly created Limit Acceleration was a gentler version of the previous one.
Instead of letting him reach speeds beyond the sound barrier for a split second, it improved his speed by a less significant measure for a longer period of time, and he could cancel the effect at will. That way, it was less damaging to his body. The old mnemonic still remained in his repertoire for dire situations.
Using Speed form would allow him to maximize the benefit of working in such a large, wide-open clearing. Furthermore, Caeden transformed Forged Infinity into its dual daggers, form 031. His other options were 004, the spear, or 006, the axe. But neither of them was as well suited for raw speed, and the hit-and-run tactic Caeden planned to deploy. Plus, he was looking forward to using his newly formed and as-yet untested martial arts in this fight. And the techniques centered around Forged Infinity's dagger transformations were specifically speed-related.
Cat signaled him that the attack was imminent. All his preparations were done. He was ready.
"They'll be here in 3…2…1…"