Hekate laughed as she stared up at the sky overhead. Dave, standing next to her, smiled. “What’s so funny boss?”

“Twenty minutes ago I was tired and tapped out on shroud. Now, I feel like I could take out every ship up there on my own.” She rolled her shoulders, feeling a pent up tension that only came with spending too long idle.

Dave laughed. “Yes, Caeden’s Forge is a bit too much of an advantage in a world like this. When a single warrior can swing a whole battlefield, the ability to keep them in peak condition essentially indefinitely is a massive advantage.”

“Yup,” Done stretching, Hekate cracked her knuckles. Feeling her thoughts settle into the right mental space for spellwork, she had one last comment before she started up her chanting. “I’m glad we’re almost done, though. Mostly because I don’t have to hold back at all anymore. And I’m at my absolute best, so I can really show off. I think a few months ago, this would have been everything I ever wanted. Now, it's just a nice bonus. I need to get a hobby.”

“Most Necromancer’s pick up a few side projects to occupy them between wars. Becoming so involved in the energy and Mana of Undeath can sap at one’s will to work. Maybe pick up a game or two. Or find a research topic that fascinates you.” Dave suggested.

Already chanting, Hekate just nodded. Dave knew what he was talking about, and Hekate recognized he was right. Feeling the power flowing through her, the absolute ability to reject the pull of death itself, was intoxicating. It made everything else feel less important. She used to want nothing more than to prove herself. Now, she was more interested in taking a trip to the Necroverse with Dave and seeing what kind of trouble she could stir up. Every day, that urge grew just a little more.

{}

Dave watched his most recent bonded, his undead eyes seeing not her body, but her soul. Never before, in all his undeath, had he ever seen a soul so singularly suited for Necromancy. He had heard Caeden convey the words of a being Dave assumed to be some form of outer god or being of a higher plane. This ‘researcher’. It didn’t surprise him at all that such a being would want to keep these shrouded bottled up in a single universe. The headache and mayhem they could cause outside in the wider Material Plane would be a pain to deal with even for a being of that power.

When he’d first met Hekate, Dave had assumed that this would be like many of his previous bond holders. He’d made dozens of familiar contracts across the breadth of existence, and he’d outlasted all of them. Some Necromancer would pique his interest, and he’d stick around until they finally fucked up and overextended themselves.

It was a common thing. Necromancy was an art for the avaricious. Those truly skilled at it had to have a ravenous desire for something. It was only such a desire that could overcome the natural repulsion that the living felt for the undead. That desire was also almost always their undoing. After all, any desire strong enough to compel you to ignore the natural order of life and death was also strong enough to make you ignore good sense.

Cat felt…different. Her soul was literally built to take on Necromantic Mana. She didn’t experience the same repulsion to undead that other mortals did. After spending so long with her, Dave could say with confidence that she had the drive necessary to become a powerful Necromancer. By most standards, Dave would already consider his boss to be among the upper echelons.

At the same time, Dave could say with equal confidence that Cat was the least greedy necromancer he’d ever met. She had drive, but she also had sense. Her lack of aversion to undead let her accomplish something he’d never seen before. A Necromancer that was comfortable among corpses while remaining perfectly sane.

All of this made Dave feel like he’d finally, after all this time, met a Necromancer he felt he could serve permanently. Never before had he truly had confidence that his bonded could go the distance and reach true immortality. He was looking forward to taking her with him back to the Necroverse and seeing what kind of trouble they could stir up.

It might be the most fun he’d had in a long time.

{}

Lily watched carefully from her position on Sky’s back, looking down at Cat and Dave. The sickly green and black energy of Necromancy was swirling around her friend, so Lily knew she had already started. She was just waiting for the spell to finish.

She and Caeden had spent a few hours with Dave, working out a plan to push them through the remaining ships overhead, all the way up to the flagship. Their main concern was the lack of response they’d received still. The Bladeborne were pushing their ground-to-air assault ever higher, and the Revolution etherships were still turtling and only defending themselves without launching a counteroffensive.

Everyone had agreed that the Revolution couldn’t possibly be out of means to attack, so that meant they were holding back for some reason. At this point, it didn’t really matter what that reason was. The truth of the matter was that, if they couldn’t draw out the Revolution’s remaining strength, the team would have to face it themselves behind enemy lines and possibly inside the flagship itself.

That was a concern as well. The flagship was absurdly massive. Its internal defenses would dwarf that of anything they’d seen up to this point. After all, it contained the suppression field generator and the ether engine sustaining it. It was literally the single most critically important asset for the Revolution currently in the battlefield. They’d have to be both insane and stupid to not place their strongest defenses there.

Worse, they had no information on the flagship’s defenses. Erik’s brother had provided a wealth of information, most of it useless. He’d been in charge of the setup for this battle, not the assault itself. That made the vast majority of his information worthless the moment the attack began. He’d known nothing about the actual capabilities of the etherships involved or the flagship itself, beyond a few small facts, like the number of ships that had been sent or the overall size of the flagship. He’d needed to know those things for planning purposes, everything else had been compartmentalized, and Travis wasn’t on the need to know list.

It left them with a gap in their plan. They couldn’t make one for what happened once they reached the flagship beyond ‘do the best we can’. With that in mind, their goal for everything before that point became getting to the flagship as fast as possible while using as little resources as possible.

Obviously they could just return the Forge if anyone started running out of shroud, but even with the time dilation, recovering from total depletion still took time. Plus, to access the Forge meant that Caeden had to give up using Blade Forge combatively, which was a major loss.

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Mana surged around Cat as Lily watched. The energy became so dense that she couldn't see through it. Cat disappeared into the swirling mass before it burst apart in a pulse that swept across the entire island.

“There she goes. Are you ready?” Lily asked Asherta. She grunted and nodded in response before stepping off of Sky’s back and falling toward the ground. “Here we go.”

Before Asherta could reach the ground, a wave of darkness swept over it, obscuring the surface of the whole island in a sea of black. A moment later and that darkness turned into a swarm of ragged shapes rapidly rising into the air. A storm of shadows ascending into the sky.

Lily didn’t understand all the idiosyncrasies of Necromancy, but she didn’t have to. The basics were more than enough to get her by for now. Necromancers drew power from death and converted it into a force to defy death, at least partly. That meant that, most of the time, their power was commensurate to the amount of death around them.

Despite their efforts to the contrary, Lily knew that a lot of death had happened on Baserock within the last day. That fact alone was enough to give Cat some seriously scary potential. But Cat wasn’t most Necromancers. She’d avoided using the ambient death to power any of her spells up to this point, relying solely on her own power. Dave had suggested this, instead leaving the environmental power as a backup for any unforeseen situations.

That mentality was left behind now that they were planning to end the fight immediately. That was why Cat had used a large portion of the death energy to power her spell. A spell reinforced by that energy, because Cat was using it to directly reanimate the people whose deaths had supplied that energy. A spell further reinforced because she was raising them to strike at those that had killed them in the first place.

Under those circumstances, the resistance most souls put up to being used in necromancy essentially disappeared. That meant Cat’s spell was many times more efficient than normal. Cat and Dave reinforced and capitalized on that advantage by baking a clause into the spell that the souls they’d raised would be freed once they destroyed their murderers.

That was how Cat, in a single spell, raised several million pissed off Shades bent on bringing down every Revolution ship flying overhead. The undead spirits lacked much physical mass, but they could slip right through the energy barriers around the etherships. From there, they could possess a living host and wreak havoc on every one of those ships.

It wouldn’t last long. The undead had a finite amount of energy, and they couldn’t overwhelm most human wills. They were weak. But they would cause mass chaos and confusion while they lasted. Just enough time for Asherta to do her job.

The rising surge of Shades blotted out the sky. Lily couldn’t see anything overhead as soon as they passed her by. And that meant the Revolution couldn’t see anything below either. Following behind the Shades, Lily saw a massive winged creature glowing a blueish silver. Asherta was using the undead as cover. She hadn’t actually had to jump off Sky at all, that was her own choice.

Their taciturn teammate was flexing both her shroud and natural draconic abilities to their limit. Caeden had filled her Hoard with as much Mithril as it could hold. From there, Asherta aged herself to the limits of her lifespan with Age. She had minutes to live unless she reversed it. But that also maximized the power of her draconic features.

Asherta had turned fully into a dragon. Not a trace of humanity remained. With a full Hoard reinforcing her dragon half and as powerful as she could get, Asherta was effectively immune to magic or Ki and she could take a massive amount of physical punishment before a single scale cracked. Obviously, she couldn’t maintain that level of output for very long. She was about to die of old age after all.

But a few minutes was enough to follow the Shades up through the etherships overhead, passing more and more of them before anyone even noticed the massive glowing dragon flying a straight path toward their flagship. Those that did notice threw everything they had at her, which was no small amount of fire. But Asherta weathered it all with nothing more than a damaged scale or two, even as she started to reach the heaviest and largest etherships nearest to the flagship.

The Shades continued to distract the majority of ships, causing crewmates to turn against each other and instilling a sense of mass paranoia in the entire armada. Meanwhile, Lily and Sky flew through the path created in Asherta’s wake. Everyone was focused on the flashy glowing dragon, not whatever was behind it.

Right behind her was Noodle in a form half the size of the one he’d used to take out the battleship. On his back was Caeden, Erik, Cat, and Dave. Caeden had been waiting on the ground to pick Cat and Dave up once her spell was done.

Of course, Neither of them was entirely ignored. Shots were fired at both of the groups in Asherta’s wake. Lily handled the scattered fire easily through a combination of Sky’s light-speed dodges and ice walls she made in midair. Noodle was defended by a series of lashing black chains that slapped down any attack that got even close, never missing a single bullet. Once again, Lily could only shake her head in amazement at how effective Erik’s defensive sense was.

The flagship loomed ever larger in her vision as Lily watched Asherta break free, rising above the last line of etherships. The whole flight, heading directly up and bypassing everything in between, had taken mere minutes. The Revolution hardly had time to process what was happening and respond. In spite of that, several scarily big weapon emplacements on the surface of the flagship turned in Asherta’s direction. And they still had one last hurdle to overcome.

The energy barrier surrounding the flagship was so thick and powerful that it was slightly visible even sitting idle. It warped the air, creating a slight distortion similar to a heat haze. Asherta slammed into it at full speed, the glow of her body increasing at a frightening pace until Lily couldn’t even look at her.

Lily knew that her friend was tapping into her nature as a Mithril Dragon, taking in all the energy from the shield that she was absorbing and pumping it back into her body, further increasing her draconic strength. That feedback loop spiraled out of control as more and more power coursed through Asherta’s body.

It came to a head when the barrier started turning a bright blue and Asherta started to reach the limit of how much power her body could hold, in spite of all the reinforcements on it. At that point she opened her maw, a light even brighter than the barrier or her body sitting within.

In a single blast, Asherta expelled everything she had, pushing out every ounce of energy into a lance of mithril so hot it was pure plasma. Despite the change in its state of matter, the mithril hadn’t lost an ounce of its magical properties. In fact, the increased heat only made it more effective. It punched through the shield like it wasn’t there, leaving a hole the size of Asherta open maw.

The lance continued on, slamming into the side of the flagship and starting to drill a hole into it. But Lily was more focused on Asherta, who’d reached her limit with that attack. Her body was rapidly shifting back to human form as she used the last dregs of her shroud to shift her age slightly backwards and remove the looming threat of death. At the same time, she started to fall.

Caeden was ready for this, an Entrance Blade appearing beneath her and letting her drop safely into the Forge. At the same time, Lily stepped off Sky’s back and onto a cloud while her bonded monster shrunk down to the size of a sparrow. The rest of her teammates stepped onto clouds of their own as Noodle lost most of his size too. In single file, Lily moved their clouds through the human sized gap Asherta had made in the shield. A gap that was starting to repair itself and close even as she maneuvered Dave through.

“Well,” Erik clapped his hands, rubbing them together eagerly. “We made it. Time to make some trouble.”

The shield closed behind them.