“How’re we supposed to get in now? Ash didn’t get all the way through the hull,” Erik asked, looking around like he was waiting for the answer to appear.

“We have to cut the rest of the way through.” Caeden said, looking at the portion of hull that Asheta’s final breath attack had made. It had melted several feet into the ship, leaving behind a layer of rapidly cooling Mithril in the gap it had made. Rivulets of slag flowed down from the gap.

“That’s gonna be a pain.” Cat sighed. “Did you see that breath? It was a laser of Mithril. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that would have killed me. I can’t imagine how durable this thing is to only have that punch a hole a few feet deep into it.”

“You’re right. It’s not going to be easy. And we can expect some kind of response shortly.” Caeden nodded. They’d only gotten the reprieve to talk because they were inside the flagship’s shield. Several other etherships had continued to fire at them even after they’d passed through the hole Asherta made, but they weren’t getting anywhere close to overwhelming the energy barrier.

It was intimidating and impressive. The construction and power of the flagship was clearly a cut above every other ship present. It wasn’t at the same level as the Etherman crewed ship that had nearly dismantled their assault group, the one Erik’s brother had told them was an experimental vessel. But the technological gap between those Ethermen and the average ethership in the air right now was vast. The flagship fit somewhere in between, closer to the Ethermen than not.

Caeden was starting to pick up the pattern here. The more advanced the ethertech involved, the more important it was to this Founder. He had no doubt that if they sought out the best tech on the ship, they’d find wherever the Entrance Blade was stashed. Caeden was also glad that they didn’t have to resort to something that slow and error prone, since he could still feel where it was.

Having already dismissed his Incarnation after letting Asherta fall into the Forge, Caeden created a flying sword next to the cloud he was standing on, stepping over to it and flying up to the ship right below the hole. There were still partially molten bits of the flagship slowly rolling down the side. Caeden had to pull on Physical Enhancement to bear the heat.

Finding a larger dollop of molten material, Caeden created a knife in his hand and stabbed it into the glob. This knife was infused to take on the properties of whatever it cut. It was a one time use ability, but useful in many circumstances.

Like now. Caeden couldn’t move things in and out of the Forge unless they were blades he’d created or the molten firmament the Blade Forge was made of. His Incarnation removed that limitation, allowing him to freely move anything in and out of the Forge at will. Shrouded could resist the transfer, but nothing else could.

The Entrance Blade wasn’t technically necessary after the first time when it allowed Caeden to escape his accidental imprisonment in his own shroud. The Entrance Blade had actually forcefully awakened his Incarnation, as it was an artificial means to do what his Forged Throne did naturally.

All of which was only true with the Forge in its initial state. Presently, the Entrance Blades were necessary for moving living things in and out of the Forge. If Caeden just shoved someone through with Forged Throne, the time dilation would shred their existence apart during the transfer. The Entrance Blades in the Starry Sea and the Exit Blades in the Blade Forge negated the impact of the time dilation.

This didn’t apply to inanimate materials, though. With Forged Throne, Caeden could have dropped the molten bit of ship into the Forge at will. In fact, one of the plans he, Dave, and Lily had come up with involved Caeden attempting to move the entire Flagship into the Forge in its entirety. An idea that was dropped immediately. The flagship, like the rest of the etherships, was protected by an artificial aura that prevented Caeden from willing it into the Forge. Besides that, it was just too large. Caeden could only move things within the range of his aura, and the ship was larger than his range.

So, Caeden could have used his Incarnation. But doing so left him vulnerable. Despite its benefits, the Forged Throne was still an Incarnation. It took away Caeden’s ability to manipulate his shroud. He could move things in and out of the Forge, and that was it. He couldn’t make things with Blade Forge or otherwise use aura manipulation or infusion. Instead, he used the knife.

Once it had absorbed the properties of the material, Caeden sent the knife to Father in the Forge to analyze. Once he started getting some of that data, Caeden couldn’t help but whistle. The hull was made of a polymer composed of several different magical and mundane materials combined expertly. Caeden had discovered several similar polymers during his long time in the Forge.

This one had excellent energy transference properties as well as being especially durable to blunt deformation. However, it had a significant weakness to single-point damage, like sharp edges. That’s why it had held up so well to Asherta’s breath. The polymer’s properties actually made it similar to Mithril, though it didn’t absorb energy so much as disperse it.

Either way, that let it diffuse the heat of the plasmic breath. Meanwhile, the size of the beam had made most of the non-thermal damage one big blunt attack. Looking at the impact point, Caeden could tell that the physical impact of the beam had done basically nothing to the hull. The only reason it was damaged was because the sheer quantity of heat in the Mithril breath had overwhelmed the material’s dispersion rate.

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Fortunately, Caeden had an easy solution to this problem. He created five single-edged blades without hilts or crossguards. They were infused, but only with ether that reinforced their durability and cutting power. With a mental gesture, Caeden sent the blades slicing through the hull. Their edges were incredibly sharp, so much so that an uninfused blade of the same thickness would have shattered or warped upon contact with almost anything.

They carved through the hull’s polymer like soft, wet clay. In moments, chunks of polymer were falling off the ship as Caeden controlled the blades to cut a path for them to enter. He made rapid progress for several feet before something significantly more cut-resistant blocked him from taking another chunk.

Not for the first time, Caeden cursed the artificial aura covering the ship. He couldn’t tell what he’d hit, only that his blades couldn’t get through it. He had to float his sword into the narrow hallway he’d created in the hull until he saw the crystalline material blocking his carving tools.

“What is it?” Lily asked, following behind him.

“No idea yet.” Caeden shrugged. He tapped a finger against the slightly opaque and blueish substance. It didn’t sound like a metal or animal-based material. Which was what he would have guessed anyway, but appearances could be deceiving.

“Well, it looks like a type of crystal. Hit it with a little plasma burst?” Caeden asked. Most crystals would actually burn at high enough temperatures. If this extra hull layer was designed to stop anything that could get through the polymer, it might not be able to hold up to something that the polymer would block. And as Asherta had proven, the outer hull could take a lot of heat.

Lily stepped off her cloud onto Caeden’s flying sword, gripping his arm to stabilize herself. She flexed her fingers in a pattern before snapping them, causing a small and bright white ball to form above her hand. With a flick of her wrist she sent it flying at the crystal.

It made contact, hitting the blueish surface and seemingly sticking. Caeden and Lily looked on in confusion as nothing happened for a long moment. Then the crystal around the plasma ball started rapidly brightening and changing color, turning an angry red.

Caeden’s eyes widened. He didn’t need his aura senses to know bad news when he saw it. Without hesitating he pulled as much Physical Enhancement as he could while wrapping himself around Lily. Then he wrapped them both in a layer of molten material from the Forge. In fact, he went a step further and flooded the entire space he’d made in the hull with the stuff.

It all started rapidly cooling as the polymer leeched its heat, but that only lasted a moment when a burst of force crumpled the material outward, picking up Caeden and throwing him out of the ship. A moment later he slammed into the inside of the energy barrier.

Luckily, that was all that happened. Caeden unwrapped himself from around Lily, reheating and dismissing the remaining substance he’d been covered in. It was actually more of the polymer the hull was made of. Now that he’d had Father analyze it, the Blade Forge could reproduce the polymer as a raw material, just like anything else.

“Well, that was kinda surprising.” Caeden laughed with relief.

“Dang, seems like a pretty dumb idea to have something that blows up that easy all over your ship.” Erik shook his head. He had chains wrapped around himself and Cat. Both of them were several feet further from the hole than where Caeden had last seen them. No doubt Erik’s defensive sense had warned him before the crystal had blown.

“Not really,” Lily brushed her robe off. “It’s surrounded at all times by an energy dispersing polymer. The rest of the hull is one big security feature for that crystal. I bet you that we aren’t going to find much damage at all to the rest of the hull in there.”

Sure enough, the hull around and behind the crystal was unaffected. Cleverly, the crystals also weren’t a single uniform layer around the hull. Rather, they were panels set at the same depth in the polymer, but separated from each other by a half a foot with polymer in between. It was too little space for most things to pass through, but had enough polymer in between for the detonation of one crystal panel to trigger another. Caeden had realized it because the panels were ten foot squares, while the section he’d been carving out was only about six feet tall and three wide.

“Yo, can you finish your little tunneling project?” Erik yelled into the hole, which was over a dozen feet deep at this point. “We’ve got incoming. I think someone finally told them we were here.”

“I think we’re almost somewhere. Can you handle it?” Caeden asked as his blades cut out another section of polymer and Lily floated out of the tunnel on a cloud.

“I mean, yeah I guess.”

Caeden refocused his attention, digging into the polymer even faster. They found a second crystal plate that Caeden covered almost entirely with molten polymer. Then they let it cool before Lily struck the tiny exposed portion with plasma. It exploded, but the detonation was almost entirely swallowed by the polymer, and Caeden simply stood in front of what little force escaped.

They immediately went back to removing more polymer as both Caeden and Lily could hear fighting going on outside the tunnel. At one point, an Etherman with half an arm missing managed to crawl in before dark chains wrapped around one of its feet and ripped it out of the hull.

“Sorry, that one got away from me! Are you guys almost done?” Erik yelled in.

“I hope so!” Caeden yelled back.

“Why did they make the hull so thick?” Lily asked. They were well over twenty feet in at this point.

Just then, one of Caeden’s blades struck something that was not polymer and not crystal. A screech of metal tearing accompanied the contact. Quickly, Caeden ripped his other blades through the same space, revealing a dark and open space beyond.

“Get in here, we made it!” He yelled out. Not a moment later Cat, Dave, and Erik sped down the tunnel as Caeden and Lily stepped into the room they’d found. Following behind them was a flood of Ethermen. “Lil, if you don’t mind.”

A beam of plasma as thick as Caeden’s palm flew past him, burning Ethermen and shoving them out of the tunnel. Caeden didn’t let the moment pass, flooding the space with molten polymer and sealing them inside the ship.

“Yay! We made it inside.” Erik cheered sarcastically. “Where the heck are we?”

“No idea, but we better figure it out fast, because we’re officially on enemy territory.” Caeden looked at the rapidly cooling wall. “And we’ve got no easy way out.”