"Time and again, they strike at the edges of our power, always disappearing before we can end them. Like cowards in the dark, stealing from those that they should venerate. How can they attack us, their very defenders? The unshrouded exist by our whim and kindness. This insurrection, the ill-minded 'Revolution' of theirs, must be the work of a foreign power. My fellows have also noted the increased pressure from other nations ever since our ethertech has grown so far beyond their own. Perhaps one of the sad little kings of the Ten Thousand Empires. They only exist because of that insufferable old man, after all.

In my darkest hours, though, I fear one of my fellow Council Seats has done this to undermine me. My own holdings and allied families experience a disproportionate number of attacks. I truly hope it is not so. I would hate to have an open Seat." Excerpt from the private diary of Archon Solarium, Sun Seat of the Central Council, Flame of Authority.

Months passed. Many things happened in that time, but nothing truly revolutionary. The Forged became a powerhouse within weeks of its beginning. The other factions initially tried their best to suppress every member they could. Thankfully, it proved a futile endeavor. Caeden and Lily hadn't dared to imagine how effective the system they set up could be. Since every Forged now knew the true nature of the Academy, they rapidly shifted directions. Many students who hadn't decided how best to use their shrouds explored their options and developed unique fighting styles.

Those who were already decided began rapidly incorporating mnemonics into their established techniques, improving in leaps and bounds. But the most influential thing was the study groups. Every Forged was part of a group varying in size from three to ten that lived at the same Seat and had some similar aspects to their shroud or combat style. They would study and attend classes together, reinforcing each other and refining their own abilities.

They even raised their Invasion Pressure together. Most students before the Forged had no one to train with, or only one or two other people. The wide variety of shrouds in the Forged allowed them to practice against many other invasion styles. Different study groups from the same Seat would often get together and have mock duels as practice. This whole process began creating refined, well-rounded, combat-capable shrouded at a breakneck pace.

They also made an unfortunate discovery. From one of the Sun Seat members, the group learned how all the family shrouded were raising their IP so quickly. The Forged in question had a roommate that had been press-ganged into joining the Solar Radiance. The roommate had been another continental, so they got along well up to that point. Afterward, the newly minted Radiant became withdrawn and distant, constantly not returning to their shared room until late at night.

Once he joined the Forged, the roommate worked up his courage and forced the Radiant to tell him what was going on. It turns out the Solar Radiance, and assumedly the other Seat factions by extension, were recruiting continentals and unaffiliated islanders to use as IP growth resources.

Usually, IP is increased by forcefully pushing your shroud up against another in its metaphysical invasion state. You just ram your shroud into another, pushing as hard as you can. The more often you do this, and the more variety of opponents you have, the faster your IP grows. It's a simple process. They hadn't known that the returns were much higher if you occupied your opponent instead of invading them.

Obviously, none of the family-affiliated shrouded would willingly allow themselves to go through the excruciating pain of occupation, so they forced less fortunate students to take on that burden and called it 'power training.' They were subjecting the Forged's roommate to nightly mental anguish to increase their IP faster. They were essentially torturing him. By this point, everyone had experienced being invaded. The Academy required it as part of the initial Invasion classes. They wanted every student to be able to function through the pain. That didn't mean it hurt less.

The group wasn't sure what to do with that information. They couldn't really do anything to stop it, after all. It's not like they could march into each of the Seats and demand the practice stop. They would be ignored. Worse, the factions might take it as a threat and put even more effort into harassing the Forged. Now that they had a following to worry about, they couldn't be as bold with their actions without thinking about the ramifications.

Ultimately, all they could think of was to spread the word about what was happening among the Forged and encourage their faction members to look out for anyone they knew who might be in a similar situation. The reports they got back were depressing. The same thing was occurring in every Seat among dozens of students.

Deciding enough was enough, Caeden (it was actually Lily, but he was the de facto head of the faction, so he was the one who said it) gave an order to the division leaders. At every opportunity, force duels with other faction students who were being abused. As a condition of their loss, they would have to leave their faction for a period of time. They all lost handily and were forced out of their factions. Most were so grateful for the 'punishment' that they immediately joined the Forged instead. It made them bigger targets for their former faction, but with other Forged and their division leaders as support, they managed to tough it out.

With the Forged established, Lily decided to use their newfound following as an information network. She wanted all the Forged to be on the lookout for Revolution activity on campus. The whole fiasco in the IP rooms had completely slipped Caeden's mind. He remembered the fight afterward and his personal revelation more so.

Despite his new resolve to take action and not just accept the world as an awful place, he wasn't sure he agreed with Lily's desire to dig into whatever the Revolution was doing on campus. Caeden couldn't let go of his old beliefs enough to agree with her. It still seemed overly reckless to him, and he still firmly believed that whatever plan they had would fail. The staff were all overwhelmingly powerful shrouded. What could some unshrouded do?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, however you wanted to look at it, nothing came of Lily's directive. Nothing concrete ever came up. A couple of students noted unshrouded workers around campus acting oddly, but that could be ascribed to paranoia from being told a terrorist organization was in your school.

Caeden wasn't sure how to feel about that. They were obviously here. He wasn't going to pretend they weren't. He believed his own ears; those two men in the IP rooms had been revolutionaries. The fact that not one of over four hundred Forged had seen anything was telling in a way. It either meant that their plan involved very few people and existed on a small scale, meaning it wasn't worth worrying about anyway. Or the more concerning option. Their plan was so well executed they left no traces or so close to completion that they no longer needed to expose themselves. He wasn't sure which was worse.

On a more positive note, the Forged's existence almost universally eliminated Ander as a problem for Lily. It was all thanks to Evelyn. She assigned one of her birds to follow the Meteoris scion everywhere. As she was mentally linked to her creations, she knew where Ander was at all times. Then, with Lily's permission, she formed a mental link to Sky since the Midnight Roc was technically a Raptor. She could communicate to Lily through Sky and let her know whenever Ander tried to approach her. She hadn't seen her brother in months.

While all this was going down, rescuing the press-ganged from the other factions and growing the weaker Forged into competent fighters, while also looking into the Revolution and dodging Ander; Caeden, Lily, Erik, and Cat continued to train themselves hard. All of them rapidly increased their IP and grew even more familiar with mnemonics, among other advancements.

Cat had settled with ten different types of specters for her to use and worked hard on refining those designs, trying her best to maximize shroud efficiency for the costly constructs. At the others' insistence, she finally picked up a weapon, opting to use a staff. It was easy to use with many options for attacking and defending. Though it lacked lethality, it was a good supplement to Cat's fighting style. This way, if someone managed to get past her specters, she could leverage the staff to keep them at a distance.

To that end, and with a more defensive style in mind, Caeden had consulted his uncle and come up with an infusion design that would work well for Cat. Her staff was Wind Willow wood with bands of Cold Steel inlay. She could spin the staff to produce intense gusts of cold wind. These wind blasts were potent, producing winds over a hundred miles per hour. It would stall most attackers and could even be used to deflect projectiles. The cold aspect let the winds influence energy-based attacks more effectively.

Erik had developed both his evasion skills as well as his offensive potential. He still refused to take up a proper weapon but had requested Caeden make him something different. Erik had found a way to stitch portions of his shroud to each other, putting the cloth-like strands under massive tension. He would then release the bindings to produce huge bursts of force. Combined with his refined control, Erik had turned this into a unique martial art.

He would wrap his own limbs in these high-tension strands and use them to explosively increase the force of his punches and kicks. His request to Caeden involved an even more novel application of his newfound ability. Erik had Caeden make him long bands of cloth infused to maximize their rigidity and defensive power. Basically, they were infused to the point where they had the structural integrity and rigidity of steel. That is, unless they were under extreme tension. Then they acted as ordinary cloth once more.

Erik used this unconventional design with his new technique that he dubbed spring stitching and formed a self-made martial art he called The Binding Fist. He would use the wrappings as bracers until within melee range, then place them under tension with his spring stitching to regain their more malleable qualities. He would attack with lightning-quick strikes while allowing the cloth to unspool with his attacks. When the enemy was surrounded in cloth control by Erik's shroud, he would undo the spring stitching, trapping his opponent in a cage of steely bindings.

Lily's efforts were spent heavily on increasing her long-range attacks. Even before they formed the Forged, Lily had been comfortable with her melee capabilities. She continued to work on short and long blades, making sure not to slack on improving her already established skills. However, she also felt her splinters, both Ice and Cloud, had great potential for combat at extreme distances.

To that end, she had already picked up archery after their first ranking day. It hadn't been a focus for her after they were taken as direct disciples of Swordmaster Blaine. Lily had placed most of her focus on getting her sword skills up to basic competency. After a couple of months of intensive training, she had reached that point. She wasn't on par with someone like Demaro, who had previous training and dedicated most of his time to the blade, but she was certainly good enough to leverage her domains effectively in melee.

With that in mind, she put more focus into pursuing archery. With her skill in investigative aura sense, she had an inherently high degree of accuracy. It only took Lily a month to achieve basic competency. Lily decided to expand her mnemonic portfolio with more long-range options, adding to her archery skills.

She now had the ability to actively switch between archery and swords, long-range and melee as the situation dictated. In general, her fighting style was all about evasion and landing single hits with a high impact. Her infused gloves let every sword strike be more effective than it had any right to be, and Caeden worked to make a bow of comparable value. Unfortunately, after several iterations, Caeden hadn't struck upon a design that Lily found suited her. They kept trying, though.

This all circled around to Caeden himself. He wanted to solidify what he had already managed before the Forged began. Some of the mnemonics he had built were unrefined, but he felt they represented what he wanted well. So he started from scratch. It turned out you could remove a mnemonic from your shroud. You performed the technique, then stopped your shroud from completing the manifestation tied to the mnemonic. For example, Caeden would say 'thorn' and trigger the mnemonic but force his shroud not to form the rose-like construct. Then that mnemonic no longer worked until he went through the effort of repeating it with a trigger technique again. Going through the process of repeating forming a thorn over and over while saying 'thorn' until his shroud could do it based on the word alone.

Caeden rebuilt both his thorns and the spikes of Sharp he created from the ground up, doing away with his old designs. These two, thorns and spikes, formed the basis for all his other mnemonics. Both had been created on a whim, without any real thought or effort put into their effectiveness at a base level. Caeden spent time observing both and found several flaws in his haphazardly created constructs.

So he broke the mnemonics that created them, incidentally breaking all the mnemonics built off them, and started over. He spent days refining his thorns and spikes, making dozens of iterations and testing them in various ways, trying to maximize his designs for the constructs, wanting to make them the very best he was capable of.

They were the basis for everything he wanted to do, and if his base was unstable, the other mnemonics he built on top would be fundamentally worse than their true potential. He spent months on this alone. After he was finally satisfied, and with both his thorns and spikes much improved, he remade all his other mnemonics on top, improving each of them in turn.

Caeden and Lily continued their Ki Creation training. They were growing, able to form larger and larger amounts of Ki with less effort. Neither was proficient enough to use it as anything other than a limited mix-up in combat, or to overcome an elemental disadvantage in Lily's case. Still, Blaine was pleased with their consistent improvement. Caeden continued working with all his weapons, from daggers to swords. It was slow progress, but practicing all of them simultaneously had benefits. His basics were excellent since many principles for each weapon were universally applicable.

One thing all of them pursued was incarnation and embodiment. They had added meditation to their end-of-the-day exercises. Alongside sparring and IP training, they would all sit down and manifest their shrouds as either aura or infusion, attempting to reach the level of understanding Blaine had described. Caeden could genuinely feel the progress with Sharp. After several months of daily meditation, he felt he understood his shroud as an aura much better. However, there was something in the way of him reaching incarnation, and he could sense a wall along that path, barring him from completion.

Infusing Sharp was new to him, and the progress on that front was slower. It was blazingly fast compared to Physical Enhancement on either front. Caeden could barely manage to get Physical Enhancement to form any aura at all, and his lack of control made understanding its infusion glacial in pace. He had little doubt he would reach his embodiment with Sharp long before Physical Enhancement, despite the former being an aura shroud.

All this training, meditating, and managing the Forged made time fly by until they reached the middle of the school year. Six months ago, they had arrived at the Central Academy. Those months completely changed each of them. Each was incomparably stronger than before. Caeden was trying to change his outlook on life, and Lily had undergone a physical and mental transformation out from under the thumb of her family.

The school decided to commemorate the halfway mark of the first year with a special ranking day. Unlike the typical ranking day that involved every student, this one would be between only twenty-five. Specifically, five students from each faction, chosen by the leader of each faction. More than that, the Academy was hosting this fight in an actual arena on school grounds and inviting citizens of Central City to watch the fights unfold. It was going to be a true spectacle. A battle between the best of the best.

The Forged were ready.