It had planned and planned for weeks. Ideas were scrapped and reworked as it carefully observed the target's combat capabilities and habits. It was only once they had entered the desert region of this continent that it felt like it had struck upon a winning idea.
The target seemed to have a slightly scientific bent to his combat activities. It had noted on several occasions that the target would test and refine new and old techniques during a fight. He seemed to constantly seek improvement instead of relying on tried and tested methods.
Prudent, perhaps, if one found their strength lacking. But it also meant that the target's newest technique was undoubtedly their favorite one to employ. While he had a selection of tried and tested techniques that showed up regularly if ever pushed he always defaulted to trying something new. So, it decided to push him.
Small blasts of thermal energy were easy to produce from some of its onboard weaponry. Attacks threatening enough to require some kind of response but not enough to arouse genuine alarm. Add in heavy cloaking using its artificial aura and the high speeds it could produce through its flight crystals, and the target would have a limited set of possible responses.
This plan still contained an unfortunate amount of risk. It had to balance its attacks on a knife's edge of danger. Too little, and the target wouldn't respond. Too much, and the target might start improving, as he commonly did in response to greater threats.
That element was the true difficulty in handling this target. He had a propensity to begin using untested, wildly improvised attacks whenever he was pushed to a limit. Such attacks were inherently a gamble and would be unwelcome to a more conservative shrouded. Any new plan could undoubtedly backfire. However, that element of unpredictability made planning a clean kill difficult.
Now, it was thrust into unfavorable circumstances. The thought of attempting to break through the dome had occurred to it, but that was an unknown quantity. At the very least, fleeing would leave it vulnerable to further scrutiny, possibly weakening any future position. And that didn't account for the possibility of sustaining damage heavy enough to impair its functions.
So it chose to adopt the already prepared strategy, even if it still contained some elements of chance. It's speed and concealment both played into the target's strategies. In these situations, he universally decided to take on the bulkier, slower form that had heightened damage resistance and regeneration.
The main weakness of that form was an inability to dodge effectively. The target seemed cognizant of that, as he universally used his faster form more often. He seemed to follow the most common logic of the time; dodging an attack was more efficient than taking it head-on. It took a specific type of attack to make the brute force turtle approach worthwhile.
Despite many concerns and the unideal circumstances, it had completed the first part of it's plan perfectly. Now, the next part. It had been charging up a maximum output thermal blast. One strong enough to completely overwhelm the target's defenses and regeneration. It might not kill the target outright, but it would severely injure him.
Then the real fight would begin.
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Caeden saw the attack coming. Just a moment before it triggered, he saw it. Immediately, desperately, he attempted to shift Forged Infinity over to a great shield. It was too late. Despite slamming his will into the weapon and pouring energy into it, there was only so fast it could change shape.
He didn't even have time to fully raise his arms.
A dense beam of raw heat baked the sand into glass and ripped apart his Balde Storm before slamming into him. His whole body began to cook. He could feel his skin burn and flake, peeling off. There was no flame, only heat. He didn't burn; he cooked. Like a turkey in the oven, he was baked like a holiday dinner.
His eyes began to boil in their sockets. Knowing losing his eyes would end this fight instantly, Caeden pushed as much Physical Enhancement as he could manage into his sockets, keeping them together. He kept raising his arms, even through the blast. Forged Infinity kept expanding.
After only a brief moment, his face was protected from the direct attack. The ambient temperature was still several times higher than an oven, pushing thousands of degrees in heat. His shield was blocking much of it, but not nearly as much as Caeden would have liked. Of course, he would have preferred not being turned into an overcooked side of beef in the first place, but not having his eyes boil in their sockets like eggs on a skillet was a close second.
His face and a portion of his upper torso were protected, but the rest of Caeden was left exposed. It wasn't going so well. His right side handled it better, but his left still had injuries along both his limbs, and the damage was an easy path for the heat to slip in. Caeden couldn't reinforce damaged sections as heavily as healthy and whole tissue.
Sections boiled and burned before shriveling up as all the water inside evaporated. Every step of the process was excruciatingly painful. Caeden wondered if being cooked alive was worse than death by fire. Not that he was willing to test it, but it was an interesting question.
Caeden was momentarily thrilled he had left the hatchling in Cat's care, as the little guy probably wouldn't have survived this. He was barely remaining conscious through the pain by distracting himself with inane crap, but it was a close thing. Black spots developed in the portions of his vision that still worked after the damage his eyes had suffered.
The blast finally ended. Caeden's enhanced perception of time, coupled with his desperation, had made the experience feel like an hour, but it lasted less than two minutes. In the end, Caeden was lucky he had made it out with as little damage as he had. His arm block and the shield had protected his head, heart, and lungs from the brunt of the attack, while his Defense Form meant the rest of him was only up to second-degree burns over every inch of his body.
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That didn't exactly apply to his left arm and leg. Those had been thoroughly roasted with much less protection. He could barely move either, and he couldn't even feel his hand or foot. At all. His eyes were still messed up, so he used his aura to inspect both appendages. Both were grey-black, shriveled husks. He wouldn't be using either any time soon. In fact, he wasn't sure Physical Enhancement could fix either of them. So much of the flesh had flaked off after all the moisture left. He was lucky the temperature wasn't high enough to melt his bones.
The air around him warped and roiled from the residual heat, and he was standing on a path of molten glass rapidly cooling into a smooth, slippery surface. Continuing to feel around with his shroud, Caeden looked for the assassin. He found nothing. The massive attack had breached their concealment sense, but once it was over, they dropped back into stealth.
It only took a moment for Caeden's eyes to fully recover, considering the amount of shroud he was pushing into the process. During that time, he kept behind his shield, unwilling to make any moves without his sight. With his shroud blinded, his eyes were his only real early warning system. Even if the assassin could fool them as well.
Finally looking around, Caeden found the view exactly as his aurora had shown, with one exception. The heavily robed figure stood in the same position they had first appeared in. Massive rents of visible heat wafted off them. Caeden couldn't sense the runoff any more than he could sense the figure. His best guess was that that attack had some kind of aftereffect to it. A price to balance out the power. As Blaine had told them when they were first learning mnemonics, adding conditions to a mnemonic could let you increase the power, though that was an advanced technique they hadn't reached yet.
It made sense for an assassin to have a powerful but costly move. A perfect attack in the case of discovery. In most situations, Caeden was sure they would use it to guarantee the target died even if they were exposed and killed. But that was just his guess. A move that forced you to stay in place after it fired seemed a bit suboptimal for an assassin, but Caeden wasn't an assassin. Plus, he didn't really have time to worry about this.
Before Caeden could muster up the mental acuity to call on Sharp and his mass of thorns while also ignoring the pain and holding his body together with Physical Enhancement, the heat waves stopped, and the assassin started moving. It was an instant switch. He flung an arm out, and a blur of red-hot metal stretched across the distance between them.
Caeden could do nothing about it. He was still far too injured, far too exhausted from the effort of keeping himself alive. He needed time. Several minutes at least, to get himself in anything close to fighting shape. But the assassin had only needed to recover from using their attack. They were still fresh and ready. This was a bad match from the start.
Until a figure interposed itself in between Caeden and the assassin. A flick of the wrist and the metal was smacked aside with casual skill. Instead of spinning off, the flung weapon retracted back to the assassin, revealing itself to be a whip-blade. Segments of metal connected by an adjustable string to form a sword. It was somewhat popular among metal-controlling shrouded, as it gave them an easily controlled, versatile weapon with both range and melee capabilities.
Caeden was confused. He had assumed that the assassin had a heat-based shroud from their previous attacks, but this weapon denoted a different domain entirely. What was going on?
The figure in between them interrupted his thoughts, raising their own weapon and confronting the assassin. Giving them a proper look, Caeden thought he was seeing Cat's Death Knight, but he looked completely different.
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Hekate was several feet behind and to the side of Caeden when the assassin showed themself. She had no time to react before they fired the heat beam, most of her attention consumed with maintaining her half-assed, roughshod spell. Inescapable Death wasn't based on any of her Soul mnemonics, and it wasn't like anything she had made before. Someday, it would be a powerful containment and counter-attack spell. But right now, it was more like a wall of paper painted to look like stone. All appearance and no substance. This was the best she could put together in less than a day.
Hekate might not have had time to react, but the same wasn't true for her Death Knight. He scooped her up along with the hatchling she was holding and jumped away with a burst of Necroflame to boost his leap. They made it clear just before the beam slammed into Caeden.
"Thanks." She nodded to the massive knight as he set her down. He had dropped his axe to move her out of the way. Hekate looked worriedly at the glassed sand and Caeden figure melting in the middle of it. The air warped under the heat so severely that she could only see his figure. All the detail was lost in the visual noise. She frowned. Hekate was done sitting on the sidelines while her friends took the real hits.
"Hey, are you still up to form that familiar contract?" She turned to her knight. She still wasn't hundred percent comfortable with it, but Caeden's life was more important than her weird problems with getting things she wanted. The now axeless axe knight nodded emphatically while giving her a thumbs up.
"I can't summon anything else while holding this dome together, but that binding ritual is simpler. It'll make you stronger, right?" There was no point if it wouldn't help him. The knight wobbled his hand before pointing at her and shrugging. Hekate took that to mean it would depend on her. "Fine. This dome isn't pulling much power; it's just eating at my concentration. I'm going to dump as much Mana into the spell as I can, so be ready for that." She warned.
The knight just nodded, clapping his hands and rubbing them together in anticipation. He didn't seem worried in the slightest. Hekate just shrugged. If he was confident in handling a couple of thousand IP worth of power, then she wasn't going to argue.
"Ok, here goes…" Hekate split her attention as best she could, forming the Bind Familiar spell with the axe knight as the focus. It was simpler than any other spell she had used short of forming a handful of Necroflame.
Mana symbols of green flame began to form into a ring surrounding the knight, floating in the air and slowly sinking into his body. Hekate felt the bond between them growing stronger. She began pouring massive amounts of Mana into the spell, as much as it could take.
More rings of symbols formed, two, then four, then eight, then more. It kept increasing as she flooded the spell with raw power. Each ring formed and then sunk into the axe knight's body in an ever-increasing cascade of while symbols and green flame.
Finally, Hekate cut off the flow of power, and the rings stopped forming. She felt the connection between them finalize. The knight was now her bound familiar.
Then the changes started.