Caeden huffed as the ships started to turn away. As if he didn’t have enough problems. Dealing with other shrouded from a position of power for the first time revealed how…wrong-headed their thinking was. He hadn’t argued his point, or proven himself to be correct. He’d done the equivalent of flexing his muscles and everyone had just accepted it.

It was such a stark contrast to how he was raised. Out on the continents where shrouded presence was barely felt, the strength of arms only went so far. Those who won arguments with their fists were looked down on. Among shrouded, they were lauded. In fact, strength of arms seemed to be the only argument most would accept.

It just left him feeling hollow. That he numbered among such a society was endlessly aggravating. Especially because others then expected him to fit into those norms. Many times during their exploration of the flagship, Caeden had seen it. The revolutionaries never begged for their lives or tried to reason with him. They just expected violence because he was shrouded. And he’d provided it. He was reminded of that after talking with Xerxes, and it left him feeling unclean.

“Hey, something’s happening.” Erik’s words, ones that Caeden never wanted to hear from his danger-prone teammate, drew him from his thoughts.

“Oh, what is it now?” He whipped around, seeing that Erik was pointing toward the engine room. Indeed, something was happening. A section of the so-far impenetrable wall had peeled back, opening up to reveal a passage deeper in.

Rather than feeling relieved, Caeden had a rapidly growing sense of dread. That room shouldn’t open, not now. Not ever, really. The only reason it would is if its creator was confident there was nothing anyone nearby could do to turn it off.

“Everyone, get ready. I’ve no idea what’s going on, but it can’t be good.”

“Whoever’s operating it could have just noticed that the Revolution has essentially lost. Maybe they’re trying to escape.” Lily reasoned.

“Erik noticed it first.” Caeden replied in lieu of an explanation.

“Ok, that’s fair.” Rather than argue, Lily started creating brilliant light in her hands as the clouds holding everyone up vanished. A black steed, a Nightmare formed underneath Cat and Dave, holding them aloft. A sword appeared under Caeden’s feet, and black chains sprouted from Erik before seemingly hooking into the air around him.

“I’d argue, but that whole thing is starting to feel real dangerous.” Erik sighed.

“The whole engine room?” Caeden confirmed, suddenly even more concerned than he had been a moment ago.

“Yup. And the danger keeps increasing.”

Before Caeden could ask for more details, a dark shape blurred out of the engine room entrance. Rather than head for Caeden or his friends, it was headed for the retreating etherships.

Caeden pulled on Physical Enhancement to increase his senses to their limit, increasing the speed at which his neurons fired and seemingly slowing down everything around him as his perception sped up. Only then could he see the massive Etherman rapidly closing the distance. It was even taller than him in his golden body, over twice as tall, in fact.

Just like the supposedly experimental ethermen that had given Dave, Lily, and Cat so much trouble, this one had no hints of flesh about it, looking completely metallic. Caeden could see heat waves rolling off it. The massive figure was moving so fast that the friction generated by its movement was superheating the air.

Flinging a hand out, Caeden called a wall of blades into existence in front of it, attempting to divert its passage. Attempting, because the Etherman moved with preternatural speed and precision to dodge around the wall. Its turns were sharp, abrupt movements rather than a more natural arc.

Rather than mess around with this thing, Caeden simply created an entire sphere of blades surrounding the thing. No more dodging. This was around the same time that his teammates caught up with the battle. Lily fired a massive beam, though one far less intense than what she’d used against the etherman vessel, right into the middle of Caeden’s blade sphere.

Cat followed up with her staff thrust out, flinging a wide arc of caustic black sludge that would coat everything, reaching even beyond the sphere. Meanwhile, Erik burst forward in his own blur of motion, kicking off black chains with extreme force as they appeared around him, acting as footholds in the air. Dave followed closely behind.

A flash of light bloomed within the sphere before anyone’s attacks could reach, and another sphere, this one composed of white energy, burst out the side of Caeden’s. It knocked his blades out of the way, ignoring the force he infused them with to resist the charge.

Instantly Caeden recognized it as the same energy the experimental Ethermen had used. He began summoning weapons that could counter it, but the massive Etherman had already managed to escape Lily and Cat’s attacks. Meanwhile, Erik and Dave continued to close the distance.

Rather than wait where he was, Caeden charged forward as well, willing the sword beneath him to follow the Etherman. Ignoring them all, the man-shaped machine continued its apparently single-minded charge toward the shrouded Etherships. Unsurprisingly, it was gaining ground at a tremendous rate.

It was only now that said ships appeared to notice their tail. And, to Caeden’s horror, but not surprise, most of them stopped. Of course they did. Here was an easy target for their rage. And Caeden had no doubt that almost none of them had truly internalized just how vulnerable they were while in the suppression field. No matter that they had likely seen their fellows die, they had spent hundreds or thousands of years feeling invincible. That was a hard habit to break, especially in the heat of battle.

And it cost them. Caeden formed several other barriers in the way, including a massive sword several hundred feet long that acted as a literal wall, but all of them were dodged. The diversions barely slowed down the Etherman, and any time it was totally imprisoned, it simply busted through with its energy shield. Those cost it scant moments, and Caeden was losing far more shroud than he thought was worth it for how much time it cost the Etherman.

All that meant was that he couldn’t stop the massive ethertech creation before it reached the first ship. And the ship didn’t stop it either. In fact, the white shield surrounding the Etherman plowed through the vessel with hardly a hitch in its motion. Through his aura, Caeden felt several shrouded die as their bodies were caught between the Etherman and the ship’s hull. With their aura senses sealed, they’d had no warning to even infuse themselves before they died.

The crippled ship started to fall almost instantly, the flight ether broken in the impact. But the Etherman wasn’t done. The shield around it dropped, and it extended long black, metallic fingers toward several shrouded standing on the deck. Beams of black and brown energy fired out of each finger tip. When they struck, the shrouded seemed fine. That was until their bodies started turning grey.

Caeden could practically feel it as their shrouds tried to fight whatever was affecting them, but it seemed it was futile. Once the grey covered their whole bodies, they collapsed, dead. And the next set of beams were already firing. But Caeden and his team hadn’t been idle.

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Dark chains reached out, pulling the targeted people out of the path of the beams. Dave was suddenly standing on the deck, weapons lashing out toward the Etherman with arcs of green-black magic. And Caeden, having used the intervening time to study the beam with his investigative sense, pulled sharply-edged shields from the Forge, Father having just made them based off what he’d learned.

The shields caught the beams and crumpled to dust, but not before firing them straight back. Caeden had underestimated the sheer amount of energy the black and brown light contained. His next bladed shields would be better. More than that, the Etherman had to deal with the cutting arcs of Necromantic Mana heading his way, and his targets weren’t in a position to be hit anymore.

Apparently realizing this, the Etherman didn’t stick around to deal with the attacks, nor the suddenly much more well-protected ship. Instead, it ran away, heading toward yet another vessel. Caeden and company immediately gave chase. The ship’s inhabitants would fall, but they would eventually fall out of the suppression field. From there, they could make it back to Baserock on their own.

Before it could reach the next ship, the Etherman had to deal with the literal army of Wraiths Cat had summoned against it. They cast undead magics of their own, raining dark curses and spells of pestilence and rot on the Etherman. It weathered the onslaught, seemingly unconcerned and unaffected.

Caeden wondered how long that would last. After all, it may appear entirely mechanical, but all Ethermen had a human at their core. That core was now inflicted with a dozen different ailments and maladies. He didn’t doubt that the massive ethertech creation had methods of sustaining its more vulnerable fleshy core, but could it withstand so much?

Either way, those attacks didn’t slow it. Caeden could see Lily, waiting overhead with a ball of starlight in her hands. She just needed the Etherman to pause for a moment, and she could obliterate it. But she needed that opening. And that was where Caeden, Erik, and Dave had to step in.

Erik was, unsurprisingly, the first one to reach the Etherman. He pushed his Binding empowered jumps hard enough that Caeden heard the bones in his legs crack, even with them being reinforced. A burst of yellow and green Healing shroud fixed that problem, and propelled him forward fast enough to intercept.

Erik slammed bodily, into the Etherman’s back. Black chains bound him to the metallic surface as he drew back his fists for a devastating blow. That was when two portions of the Etherman to either side of him stuck out, and ran a current of electricity between them several hundred times more powerful than what was needed to kill a bear. A literal arc of lightning jumped through Erik’s body.

Of course, he had Healing running, so the attack only made him pause. But that was enough time for a metal hand to grip his body. It tried to pull him off, but Erik’s entire lower half was bound to the Etherman. Recognizing that, it simply pulled harder. A moment later, Erik’s upper half was flying through the air, a new set of legs growing even as he tumbled.

Dave arrived not a moment after Erik was unceremoniously removed. He was much more prepared with his offense, a spear soaked in oily black liquid that flared with sickly green energy plunged toward the Etherman even as he appeared. It was stopped by a paper thin layer of white shielding that showed up only when the spear struck.

A moment later, a fist half the size of his body was heading for Dave’s face. He disappeared, but that didn’t stop the mass of metal from connecting. And another of their group was sent flying. And the Etherman still hadn’t slowed down.

That was when Caeden stepped in. Erik and Dave’s attacks had done little to slow the Etherman, but they had taken its focus. And that gave him the opportunity to slip a small nail into its path. One that’s sole function was to disrupt the white energy the Etherman used for defense. The Etherman’s own absurd speed ensured that the nail dug into the metallic surface, causing the white shield to flare into existence, just as when Dave had struck it. But this time, it also flickered and shifted.

With that interference, Caeden created another sphere of blades, spears with spiral-shaped heads. With a flex of his will, the spear heads began to spin. Then, all of them shot toward the Etherman at the same time.

Recognizing the sudden danger, the Etherman paused in the air. Ports along its arms opened, and suddenly a storm of gale-force winds surrounded it. The wind wasn’t enough to stop the spears completely, but it did push them of course, causing many to run into each other.

But that pause was enough. A beam of light as thick as a fist slammed into the center of the Etherman in the midst of its gale. The blinding brightness combined with the false shroud of the Etherman stopped everyone from seeing the results for a moment, but when it faded, the Etherman was still there. Two smaller, human-sized hands were sticking out of its chest, and one gripped Caeden’s nail. It had managed to recover its shield a scant instant before Lily’s attack landed.

But it wasn’t unscathed. The shield hadn’t been strong enough to block all of Lily’s attack, and a portion of metal on its back, almost dead center, was blackened and warped. It didn’t wait for them to respond, charging off toward the shrouded etherships once more.

What followed was a game of moments. The Etherman was obviously powerful, but Caeden could tell that they outmatched it in combat by a fair margin. It never dealt any significant damage to any of them, and Caeden could also tell that it was trying. If its objective had been to fight or kill them, it would have lost in an embarrassingly short amount of time.

But it wasn’t trying to fight them. It was trying to kill as many shrouded as possible. And it was succeeding.

There were too many ships, too many people to defend. And the Etherman had a seemingly bottomless pit of tricks to pull out to evade their attempts to trap it or circumvent any defenses they raised. The shrouded etherships refused to leave, all of them seemingly bound to the idea that this was their chance to redeem the embarrassment of the Revolution assault and restore their precious egos.

More and more died. But Caeden and his team were not idle. They scored more hits, each one a sliver more damaging than the last. Though it seemed to have far more ethertech packed into its frame than any Etherman they’d encountered before, its self-repair functions did not stand up to the experimental group Caeden had devastated.

Bit by bit, they chipped it down with little difficulty, but immense frustration. They couldn’t seem to stop the Etherman no matter what they did, but it was absolutely losing. Just not fast enough to prevent more from dying.

Erik’s fists put foot-deep dents into the exterior armor even as it fired bullets through a deck of shrouded. Dave severed three fingers on one hand while the other launched a rocket that blew up half a ship. Caeden slammed a glowing axe into its shoulder, nearly taking an arm off as its chest shot a beam as thick as his head through three vessels.

Finally, Lily ended it. Erik had managed to catch both of its legs in air Binding had turned as hard as the strongest infused metals, while Wraiths and an Elder Lich soaked the Etherman’s sensor array in sticky tar-like magics that destroyed its sight.

Lily surrounded the enter Etherman in a sphere of ice dozens of feet thick, hardened to the maximum extent she could take it. Caeden jammed several blades into the surface that hardened the ice ball even further. Then in a little cavity next to the Etherman, Lily created a ball of gasses and metals.

Then the entire thing exploded. A white-hot fireball consumed the ice in an instant, and Caeden felt the shields he’d prepared start to fail under the intensity of the blaze. Lily’s chemical reaction bomb left nothing but metal bits and ash behind when it finally stopped.

“Well, that was exciting. When can we fight more of those?” Erik asked.

“Shut up, Erik!” The reply came from five different directions as the rest of the team, including Asherta, who’d hung back for her own safety, made their displeasure known.

Too late, apparently. Just as soon as Erik spoke, Everyone felt the suppression field drop. Whipping around to look toward the engine room, Caeden saw another black shape emerge from the still-open entrance. But this one didn’t head in their direction.

Instead, it was carrying three things. A massive pillar, even taller than it was, that Caeden assumed to be the suppression field generator. A seemingly empty cage. And his missing Entrance Blade. The moment he looked at the new Etherman, it stopped in the middle of the air. Then, it waved. Right at him.

A small ripple of gold formed behind it, resolving into a portal. The Etherman stepped through, and before anyone could react, it was gone.

“Erik, why did you have to open your mouth?” Cat complained in the shocked silence that followed.