It took nearly a week to reach the mountains, much slower than Caeden had hoped. Most of that was due to the frequent stops they had to make. The hatchling, who Caeden still had not named, was constantly hungry. He didn't experience any noticeable growth that Caeden could see, but he ate ten to twenty times his body weight in monsters every day. Admittedly, that wasn't much weight considering how small he was, but the stops to hunt monsters were adding up timewise.

"He really is a hungry little thing." Cat sighed, watching as the hatchling dug into another slowly discorporating corpse. "I never would have guessed how often he would eat."

"Yeah, same here." Caeden sighed as well, letting the thorns he had created dissipate. "That lime-colored dragon wasn't kidding. His appetite went from nothing to massive in less than a day."

After the baby half-dragon had consumed a seemingly tiny chunk of Salderian's tail; one that barely left a dent in that giant mass but was easily ten or twenty times the size of the little creature, he had kept up that pace for the rest of the week and showed no signs of stopping. In fact, he ate more of the lesser monsters Caeden was currently feeding him than what he had torn out of the much more powerful monster's tail.

"You seriously need to give him a name, though," Cat added as they watched from their seats on the Passenger Brute.

"Ugh, I know!" Caeden threw his hands in the air helplessly. "But every time I come up with something that seems suitable, he rejects it. He's surprisingly picky."

"Oh, I'm sure you're just bad at picking names." Cat laughed, leaning back into her seat. "Watch; I'll try." She stared at the hatchling for a while before speaking. "How about…Reshiram?'

The half-dragon looked up from its meal to stare at her before spitting a chunk of discorporating meat at her face. There wasn't near enough force behind the action for the wet mass to actually hit Cat as high up as she was, but the message was clear.

"Really? Oh, come on! How about…Zecrom? Haxorus? Rayquaza? Zygarde?" Cat rattled off, each name getting a firm negative from the small dragon.

"What's up with those names?" Caeden asked. "You came up with them pretty easily."

"Oh, they're all from a game that's popular on the islands with little kids and some adults. There are a bunch of dragons in the game, so I thought he might like some of the names. Apparently not." Cat shrugged. "Oh well, not my problem. Have fun naming him."

Caeden couldn't help but laugh at her casual dismissal. "What kind of game is that, some kind of card game?"

"Actually, yeah, they turned it into a card game. But the original game was designed by an Otherworlder for use on CVs. It's kinda a new thing called ether games because you have to use ethertech to play them. I think that all started up only a few years ago." Cat explained.

"Oh? An Otherworlder made it?" Caeden was intrigued. Otherworlders were famous. Once every hundred or so years, a child would be born with knowledge from a past life in another universe completely different from their own. The whole concept fascinated Caeden. Several childhood stories from back home focused on an unshrouded Otherworlder that would fight monsters with knowledge from their past lives.

"Yup. Apparently, they had something like ethertech in his past life, and he spent thirty years working with a group of technicians to reproduce the stuff from his memories. Kinda cheating if you ask me. He made a bunch of money stealing ideas from someone else in his previous universe." Cat huffed.

"I think being an Otherworlder would be really cool." Caeden looked into the distance wistfully. "Having knowledge from somewhere completely different than the Starry Sea… Wouldn't that be incredible?"

"Ehh." Cat waved her hand. "I hear a lot of them die really fast. Apparently, living a second life makes people think they're immortal or something like that. I guess they pick fights they have no chance of winning and get squashed. Or the CA locks them in a bunker and juices them for knowledge before crushing them. Sounds like it would suck."

Caeden frowned. "Yeah, I guess. Especially if you're unshrouded, like the majority of humans. No one is going to listen to you even if you lived another life already."

"Exactly!" Cat clapped, pointing at Caeden for emphasis. "At that point, I think the CA qualifies you as too dangerous to live. An Outworlder is a destabilizing element, and the Council hates instability."

"Feels like they should do more about the Revolution if they hate instability so much," Caeden muttered.

"Not really." Cat shrugged. "For all that they get talked about, the Revolution hasn't done much to affect the CA on a major scale. Sure, they've killed some people but shrouded and unshrouded die all the time. They only ever attack the dregs that get sent out to the continents. You know, the kind of shrouded that never apply themselves at the Academy and never even reached Nascent Shroud. Basically, people no one cared about anyway. It's not surprising that the Council doesn't care. The Revolution has never proven they can be anything more than a minor inconvenience. They're much more concerned with the regularly scheduled wars with the Fire King and the Ten-thousand Empires."

"Well, when you put it like that…" Caeden acknowledged her point. As much as the Revolution had affected his life personally, they hadn't done much in the grand scheme of things. The only shrouded they ever killed were people so weak that the military wouldn't take them because they would be a liability. In the CA's eyes, that was basically the same thing as an unshrouded.

They lapsed into silence as the hatchling finished off his fourth meal of the day. They were only a day out from the mountains separating the jungle from the desert they were heading to. From there, it would likely take them another two or three weeks to reach the structure at the far side of the continent.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Of course, that number depended on how many nests they passed by. It seemed they had developed a reputation among the dragons over the last week. The first nest must have communicated with the others in the jungle, spreading the word about them. Since then, any nest they passed by had welcomed them to a certain extent. But most had a request to go with their passage.

The second nest they encountered had let them know in no uncertain terms that the reigning council of dragon elders would be much less willing to tolerate their presence on the continent than most average dragons were. Then they asked Caeden and Cat to clear the surrounding jungle of all monsters. The implied threat was obvious.

So every nest had offered to not say anything to the relevant authorities so long as all the monsters nearby magically vanished. Honestly, Caeden couldn't even muster up the effort to feel mad about it. The dragons were holding their lives for ransom, but they did so to prevent atrocities they had lived with for thousands of years. If Caeden were in their same situation, he would be just as desperate to grab hold of any promise of relief.

It might have been different if the local monsters were any kind of threat. But since they had been over-engineered to specifically threaten and resist dragons, the monsters were much weaker than their IP would indicate. Caeden had no trouble dealing with all of them in short order.

He likened it to someone threatening to kill you if you didn't take out their trash. The trash was highly poisonous to them but did nothing to him. The threat was obviously unappreciated, but Caeden could hardly blame them, considering their own inability to handle the issue and the relative ease with which he could throw it out. It left him feeling strange about the whole situation. The threats never felt real because what they asked in return was always so easily accomplished.

Plus, the dragons were grateful when they completed the task. The same uncomfortable suspicion that characterized their last interaction with the lime-green dragon was always present. They couldn't help but acknowledge the service Cat and Caeden had performed, but the intense hatred for shrouded made them almost unwilling to recognize the help for what it was. On some level, they must feel that acknowledging Caeden's actions somehow made the shrouded's previous actions less horrific or that it all was somehow ok.

Caeden was aware that his killing of a few hundred monsters would not and could not make up for what had been done to dragonkind, so he never pushed them. It was just a shitty situation all around. Caeden had never done anything wrong to a dragon in his life, so from his perspective the hatred of the dragons was technically unfounded, based only on his shroud. But from the dragon's perspective, they had a distrust of shrouded beaten into them by the very continent they lived on for highly legitimate reasons. So no one was happy, and everyone was much more comfortable when Cat and Caeden left as quickly as they arrived.

Overall, Caeden came away from every interaction impressed with the dragon's honor. Surprising, considering every nest started by threatening his life. But in the end, he left unharmed with some token of gratitude and a promise that the local dragons would conveniently forget he had ever been there. A promise they all seemed to keep because no one had come looking for them in a whole week.

Honestly, Caeden had expected the very first nest they helped, the one where he encountered Salderian, to turn around and call down the dragon's version of a military on him. He would bet that if it were a human village encountering a known criminal, they would report him in a heartbeat, no matter what promises were made or what hello the criminal rendered.

But instead, he was slowly compiling a growing selection of exceedingly rare magical materials. Shed dragon scales, horns, and bones from the long-deceased, things that would normally be almost impossible to obtain. Caeden had been surprised about the dragon's willingness to use pieces of their dead as rewards for him, but apparently, dragons had no reverence for corpses. It wasn't a part of their beliefs. In fact, dead bodies were considered unclean and thrown out of the nests entirely.

So now there was a second Brute moving through the last legs of the jungle with the Passenger Brute, loaded with materials Caeden was desperate to get a chance to work with. If only he had some ether, he could jury-rig a forge and make some unique equipment. It would at least be a boon to Cat, who was struggling to do anything more than act as a support this whole trip.

That wasn't to say Cat wasn't contributing. She had the most versatility of anyone on the team by far. Scouting, transport, defense, cooking, cleaning, and night watch all were handled by her specters. Their trip would have been both slower and more uncomfortable without her. But Caeden could tell that Cat's lack of contribution to direct combat was starting to weigh on her.

So Caeden hoped they encountered a nest willing to pay in ether just to get Cat out of the funk she would fall into whenever he wasn't looking. She acted nonchalant in conversation, but he caught her staring off into the distance with a look of defeat more often than not. Like right now. It was disheartening to see his friend so downtrodden.

Unfortunately, Caeden's relationship with Cat wasn't that close. They trusted each other, of course. But they didn't have a level of emotional trust that would let him broach the topic easily. So he left it alone. The best he could do was distract her so that she didn't get stuck in that negative headspace.

"Well, it looks like he's done," Caeden noted, watching the hatchling wiggle out of the giant vine-like dragon-monster it had eaten its way through. "Ready to move on? I think we might hit the mountains tonight."

Cat jolted, her face falling back into a casual smile, any signs of distress vanishing. If this was the first time Caeden had noticed, he might have wondered if he imagined the sad, pained look she wore only a moment ago. "Yup! Unless the little stinker decides he needs another midday buffet. Otherwise, we're on track to hit the foothills before the end of the day!"

The hatchling scampered up the Passenger Brute's leg in response to a command Caeden pushed through their bond. Once again, they were off, tearing through the forest at maximum speed.

{}

It had watched for a week now. The flight and stealth capabilities built into its body by the Creator were more than enough to elude detection by the target. That week had proven informative. Its first assessment, the most optimistic one, had hypothesized that the target had survived its sabotage of the cruiser through sheer blind luck. Such things were possible. Shrouded were hearty and durable by nature.

That was swiftly and firmly disproven. The target was powerful. Far more so than his age and lack of experience would indicate. Dual-shrouded were in a league of their own, but the Creator had imparted it with generations of combat data gathered by its predecessors. Even taking the target's two shrouds into account, he was a skilled and proficient fighter. The use of martial arts was proof enough of that.

This new reassessment of the target's overall power had led to the last week of careful observation. A new attack strategy needed to be developed, one specifically suited to the target's individual capabilities instead of a generic attack like the cruiser explosion. It would need to nullify the target's most prominent strategies if it was to complete the kill mission while maintaining the prime directive of absolute secrecy.

So it had watched and waited. After the failure with the ethership sabotage, it had discarded any plans for a fast kill. This was going to be a time-consuming assignment if it wanted to do it right. But that was fine. It would be perfect in its work so that it could further prove the Creator's brilliance in its design.

It would wait, no matter how long it took.