After nearly twenty minutes of fighting shrouded Ethermen, Lily was starting to develop an immense sense of frustration. What was taking so long?

Between her and Snowball, none of the Ethermen could threaten them. But that was only while she was forcing open her connection to the Ice domain. And that was unsustainable. They’d tested this heightened state in the Forge, and Lily could hold it for over an hour. But that was outside of combat, with her just standing around. And more to the point, the consequences for her after that hour had been…dire.

And that was the problem with actively interfering in her Embodiment was that she’d broken the delicate equilibrium her shroud naturally established in the process. Her body was reinforced and transformed specifically to deal with the pressure of acting as an Aspect of her domain. Flooding herself with a wider connection meant that she was slowly damaging her body, even in its enhanced state.

She was lucky that she had Snowball. As a monster, his body was only physical in the loosest of senses. He could accept a practically infinite amount of energy so long as it was suitably aligned with his Ki. With that in mind, she’d been letting him do most of the work, since he suffered absolutely no backlash from the Ice domain.

But even so, she needed to step in a few times just to prevent Snowball from being blindsided or to deal with attacks he missed. And the strain was adding up. She was not looking forward to the aftermath of this Embodiment once she dropped it. The penalties would be worse than a period of weakness. She was going to be badly hurt unless something changed. Soon.

At this point in the fight, their combined efforts had managed to suppress three Ethermen. Not kill, suppress. Despite being horribly unskilled at using the shrouds they had, the Ethermen reaped the full benefits of a shroud’s tenacious ability to keep its shrouded alive. And that was only further enhanced by their ethertech additions. Since they hadn’t managed to kill one yet, Lily wasn’t even sure it was possible without exhausting every iota of shroud the Etherman had.

And that was not something she could reasonably do. In her Aspect Embodiment, her power output was prodigious, but it was also essentially capped. She was pushing as much power through herself as she could, and it wasn’t enough to kill these Ethermen. At least, not while also avoiding fatal damage from the other five that were still active.

So, the three lumps of flesh, metal, and ether sat at her feet, constantly subjected to a foot thick layer of ice that prevented them from healing, but couldn’t kill them. Snowball bellowed and threw out dense breathblasts of Ki so cold it burned as five Ethermen surrounded him. His fur was starting to singe under the slew of heat-based shrouds flung in his direction.

Then, the lights flickered again. Lily rolled her eyes. She wondered if this was actually the signal she’d been expecting, and the last one was a fluke. That would be bad. And extremely unlucky. Which would also make it appropriate.

Maybe we shouldn’t have had Erik do it. But we needed Asherta to be up above…Lily contemplated as she fired an icicle from Variable Flow that intercepted a spear of molten metal heading for the back of Snowball’s head.

Then, the lights went out entirely. And stayed out. Lily let out a sigh, relaxing.

“Finally.”

{}

“WHAT!” The founder poked at his CV screens intently, trying to restore his view of the two battles going on in his base. But nothing worked. However, the man’s antics weren’t holding much of his attention. Instead, his gaze was still squarely focused on the CV that showed the circumstances outside the island-sized facility.

There, he saw a massive blue-grey dragon breathing out a dense beam of liquid metal all over the energy barrier separating the artificial island from the continent it had landed on. He was so focused because everywhere the dragon breathed, the shield flickered rapidly, losing much of its cohesion. And the more it breathed, the larger that instability grew.

{}

Over twenty minutes ago

Erik wandered through the tunnel, Laekna walking beside him, wrapped in her black chains. “I don’t know why Lily thought it was a good idea for me to do this. I’m not exactly the most knowledgeable on the team.”

“You also aren’t the most eye-catching, Master.” Laekna added helpfully. “Maybe if you could engage this founder in a conversation and taunt him, she would have left the distraction to you. But when Lily and Cat use their Embodiments…”

“Yeah, they’re pretty scary.” He shuddered. “I can’t exactly throw around that kind of big, bombastic power like they can.”

“And my abilities are more useful on this avenue anyway.” Laekna flicked her finger, a wave of chains rattling across the wall and burrowing into every piece of ethertech they found. Once attached, they forced the equipment to maintain its current state. Lily hadn’t been sure how to isolate the surveillance equipment they thought was present, or even confirm that it was present. None of them had the ethertech expertise necessary. But Laekna could force everything to stay still, so any bit of ethertech that could be observing them would just repeat the static image of an empty hallway. Lily had insisted that Laekna didn’t just shut them off, since that could alert the founder just as much as seeing them.

So Erik and Laekna had wandered through the hallways, looking for one particular set of rooms. “Hmm.” Glancing into a room, Erik smiled. “That looks just about right. What do you think?”

Laekna looked around. Her eyes saw much more than his, even covered in black cloth as they were. “...Yes, this energy flow pattern matches those indicated by Lily.”

With a clench of her fist, panels of metal were ripped off the wall by dark chains. Unearth, complex pathways of pipes and nodes of ether were revealed. “Yes, this is exactly the configuration she described. Alright, let’s see if this works.”

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Chains ripped the protective coverings off the whole assembly. Black wires reached out and drew connections between ether nodes that weren’t supposed to exist. There was an ominous buzzing that filled the air, followed by a succession of tiny pops as the ether nodes rapidly failed and transformed into other kinds of ether before shattering.

“Heh, sounds like popcorn popping.” Erik chuckled.

The lights flickered.

“Sweet-”

Then they stabilized. The failed sections were bypassed as the power continued to flow. “Well, shit. Can you rip that you out?” Erik asked, looking at the offending pipe that now hummed with power. It had been completely inert before, causing Laekna to ignore it when she’d torn apart others.\

Chains reached out, but they melted on contact with the pipe. “It doesn’t seem so. It’s the same situation as the rest of the pipes. The ether transformers split the flow so the intensity is lower. Now that the flow is bypassing the transformer, it’s too powerful for my chains to affect. The ambient Ki thrown off by that pipe can stop basically anything from directly damaging it. Asherta could siphon off that power with Mithril, but now…”

“Ugh,” Erik rolled his eyes. “Ok, I guess we have to find another one and remember to destroy the bypass lines this time.”

Twenty minutes later.

“Well, that was surprisingly annoying.” Erik flicked his newly-restored hand. An Etherman’s roughly dismantled frame sat in front of him. Lumps of flesh bulged through the metal in disturbing lumps.

“What did you expect to happen when you overstimulate cellular growth like that? It was never going to be a clean kill.” Laekna huffed. “And we should have guessed that there would be an Etherman here. As if our destruction of the last ether transformer would go unnoticed.”

“Yeah, but it did kinda backfire. I was about to walk past the room until this idiot attacked us, after all.” Erik laughed.

“A fair point.” Laekna nodded while she continued to disassemble the protective measures on the transformer in the ceiling.

“Did you remove the-”

“Bypass? Of course. I’d not miss it a second time.” Laekna admonished. “Really, I’m not nearly so forgetful as you, Master.”

“True, true.” Erik took the comment in stride. Really, his Incarnations were much more reliable than he was half the time. In fact, he had a sneaking suspicion that the only reason Lily had left this task to him was because of Laekna.

Black wires reached out again, and the transformer failed once more. But this time, the lights didn’t just flicker. They went out entirely.

“Woo!” Erik clapped his hands. “Finally! Now we can have some fun.”

Laekna smiled as she discorporated. Her Master was entirely too energetic sometimes.

{}

Caeden huffed through a dozen mouths. The rest, however, were far less winded. This being his first time truly fighting in his Physical Enhancement Embodiment, Caeden was finding out a lot as he went. One was that having so many heads made his recovery unrelentingly fast, mentally and physically. After all, as a monster he wasn’t breathing oxygen. He was absorbing vast quantities of ambient Ki to sustain himself. And fifty mouths can breath a lot.

He’d also found that hecatoncheires were terrifying. The pile of mutilated monsters around him was a testament to that fact. Each had been devastatingly strong in their own right. Some had defenses he was sure he’d have normally found almost impassible without the maximum extent of golden body and a weapon from the Forge specifically designed to bypass them.

And some were strong enough that the mere presence of their blows would have been enough to shatter his best defenses. The raw mass behind these massive beasts meant that his normal abilities were left woefully inadequate. After all, the best sword he could make wasn’t very effective if the blade was too short to even pierce their skin.

But they had all fallen. Even when they recognised the threat of his presence and started working together, they hadn’t been enough. When Caeden held a dozen spears tall enough to qualify as a skyscraper, and swords that outmatched the length of every ethership the CA had ever produced, there was little they could do. When he had the strength and sight and endurance to wield all these weapons with an unparalleled level of coordination and force, they fell like wheat before a scythe.

Ultimately, defeating them all had only taken so long because there were so many. Wherever the founder had taken his island facility, it was deeper into the continents that Caeden thought that anyone had ever traveled. Even one of these monsters would have been enough to bring down a Family head to deal with it. The people like Lily’s father that could destroy whole islands.

Seeing so many in one place could only mean that they were far beyond the territory of human habitation. This was monster territory, and deep within it for this many monsters to form at this level of power.

Returning his focus to the current situation, Caeden didn’t even have to turn to see where his focus lay. It was still odd to him, having a completely perfect view of every inch of his surroundings without having to adjust his body.

The gaze of one of his heads landed on the island, where he saw an Embodiment dragon Asherta disabling large sections of the energy bubble that blocked him from following his friends inside. He smiled with a dozen mouths. It seemed that their plan had worked.

Caeden and Lily had not been idle for the last two weeks it had taken them to travel to the artificial island. With access to the Forge, that two weeks might as well have been an eternity. And they had a pile of founder-designed etherships to look through, along with the remains of the flagship. And considering their destination, they studied.

Of course, they didn’t do it alone. A whole team of Bladeborne worked with them. Despite that, and the vast amount of time they had, the whole team could only marvel at the founder’s genius. Whatever else could be said about the man, he was a true savant with ethertech. They only managed to decipher some of his workings.

Part of the problem was the damage the ships had sustained. And another part was that all the more normal etherships were far less advanced than the flagship had been. And they had cut that one apart, so it was hardly in the best shape.

Despite that, they’d managed to discover some design commonalities. One of which was a series of nodes that regulated the energy systems of the ships. And they’d figured that, if the ships were set up that way, the founder’s hiding place would likely be similar. After all, why change a good idea?

So they went to work figuring out how to sabotage the crap out of it. Because disrupting the nodes would weaken entire sections of the ship’s defenses. The energy shield, even the false aura. But figuring out how to shut it down entirely was an endeavor. There were many, many safety measures and protections that prevented the casual destruction of one of these nodes. Even beyond that, there were contingencies that meant, unless the node was shut down in a very specific way, it could actually self-regulate and restart.

But it seemed that their plans had come to fruition, because Asherta was rapidly disabling a big chunk of the shield, and Caeden’s Blade Forge aura senses indicated that the false aura over this portion of the island was falling apart.

Feeling within the ship, Caeden carefully aimed a dozen weapons, and thrust. The shield shattered, and metal was rent apart.