"So." Caeden looked around at his friends. They had all swam to the shore of the underground lake they had fallen into after their rough and tumble journey through the depths of a mountain. The shore itself was more rock than sand and heavily sloped. The area was lit by the orange glow coming from strange veins of raw energy that had leaked into the cavern that held this underground lake only moments after they fell here.

"So what?" Cat grouched. She was doing her best to wring out portions of her Academy robe, going so far as to loosen and lower the upper portion. Taking it off and wringing out the sleeves, she seemed completely unconcerned about anyone seeing her undergarments or the large amount of tan skin she was now showing.

"Ah…" Caeden shook his head. Cat was Cat. She did what she wanted, and woe to the person who told her no. If she wanted to dry off, she would dry off, and none of them were going to stop her. He decided to focus on the task at hand. "Before we go venturing off into the unknown depths of a mountain that just nearly collapsed, I think we need to have a little strategy meeting."

Lily nodded, "Yes. We do. That was awful."

"What was awful?" Erik jumped in. "It's not like we knew that collapse would happen."

"It's not about the collapse." Lily explained, "it's about the fight with the Ash Reapers. That went horribly wrong, and we weren't ready for it."

Caeden nodded gravely. They had been blind-sided by a monster incompatible with most of their combat force. Everyone had been injured, some worse than others, by the Reaper claws. Erik had healed them all on the way down, but if the fight had continued uninterrupted, they could have been much worse off. Only Cat had proven effective until Erik jumped in. Which was a problem in and of itself.

"Erik, what did you do at the end there?"

"Oh!" His head snapped up, smile beaming brightly, "I've been practicing my martial arts, and Blaine helped me understand how to do it better." Erik's goofy expression shifted, taking on the seriousness Caeden normally associated with Erik when he was discussing medicine.

"So, martial arts are different from normal combat forms when it comes to shrouded. Unshrouded treat martial arts as a discipline or a certain set of techniques that fit within a specific mentality. That's not what it is with shrouded. For us, a martial art is when we combine our shroud into our movements, blending motions with shroud. It's like mnemonics except on a whole new level, where the mnemonic is part of the attack."

"Yeah, we all know that part," Caeden stated impatiently. They were covering old ground here.

"I know. I'm establishing a context here," Erik waved off Caeden's annoyance. "The whole point I'm getting to is this. Every shrouded has to make their own martial art because everyone has a different shroud. I've been doing that. My Binding Fist has been working out well so far, but I felt like I was lacking some specific component. So I asked Blaine."

"And now we're back to the beginning of this spiel." Cat huffed, still upset over getting soaked. Erik shot her a dirty look, to which Cat raised her hands in surrender.

"What he told me was that shrouds rely heavily on what our mental image is for creating a martial technique. Or any mnemonic, really. But the whole point is, the stronger and more powerful the mental image, the more powerful the technique will be. One of the tricks a lot of martial artists use is drawing inspiration from concepts that the shrouded personally consider powerful. It could be anything, depending on your domain. Someone with a fire-based shroud might be personally impressed with volcanos and create martial techniques that mimic that explosive power."

"So that's what you did?"

"Yup. Except I chose a story. That's pretty common, from what Blaine says. Stories have a lot of characters that feel strong."

"Oh!" Caeden sat up straight. "I knew that sounded familiar. That was a passage from The Brave Mouse, wasn't it?"

Erik clapped his hands. "Yup!"

"Is this one of those continental monster story things?" Lily looked back and forth between them, trying to establish context.

"Yes." Caeden nodded. "The Brave Mouse is actually an anthology of stories. It describes a mouse having a series of encounters with progressively more dangerous monsters and defeating them all with simple tricks. The one Erik used was the third monster, I think?" He looked at Erik for confirmation.

"Exactly! The Brave Mouse was one of my favorite series as a kid. Using it for inspiration seemed like an easy choice. It worked out so well, too. That was pretty awesome, right?"

"Yeah," Caeden said slowly. "But how did that work? Your strings were just passing through them all earlier."

"Oh, I used Ki!" Erik laughed.

"What?!" Caeden and Lily shouted at the same time.

"Yeah! I got far enough in my understanding of binding weapons and fists to start making Ki before we left school. I'm in the KI Manipulation stage now." Erik crossed his arms, looking immensely smug. "You guys are taking way too long to figure it out. I think you might just be bad."

Caeden shook his head while Lily covered her face with her hands. They both looked at each other at the same time, thinking the same thing. Of course, Erik is a prodigy.

"So," Caeden finally circled around to the point he had wanted to make, doing his best to ignore Erik's general absurdity. "What you're saying is, you had a method to deal with the monsters that were threatening to overwhelm us and knew that using Ki would be effective against them but decided not to tell us so you could do a big reveal. Is that about right?"

"Aaahh." Erik's expression shifted to realization, then shame and guilt. He rubbed the back of his head. "Oh."

Caeden punched him in the arm, hard. "Yeah, 'oh' you dumbass. This is a serious mission, so no showboating. I know that's a favorite of yours, but maybe hold back in life and death situations, ok?"

"Yeah, that's fair." Erik nodded.

"Which leads into what we actually needed to talk about." Lily jumped in. "We did terribly against the Ash Reapers. Wherever we are now, we're likely to encounter many more of them. If these are natural caves, the monster content down here would have had centuries to grow endlessly. We need to do better, or we aren't making it out of here at all."

"Ah," Erik raised his hand like a child waiting to be allowed to speak

"Yes?"

"I'm not exactly the smart one, but couldn't we just go back up the way we came down? I know the glowy orange whatever is probably bad, but if we can't handle it, isn't it better to go back?"

"That's not really a viable option," Lily explained. "We have no idea what the conditions are like in that tunnel, except we know from personal experience that it is unstable. Only me and Caeden had a flight method that would be viable in the tight confines of that tunnel; Cat's spectral pegasus wouldn't be able to do it. That means us carrying you up, which isn't ideal in the best of circumstances. We're better off finding a more reliable path upward."

"Ok, if you say so."

"Now, back to our problems. We all made mistakes in that fight. Cat had the least issues, while most of mine and Caeden's were tactical. We jointly took responsibility for running this team and we failed." Caeden nodded in agreement. "So we're going to have to take a better look at how we want to handle fights going forward. I think we've been too loose with our plans."

Caeden and Lily had set out plans before they landed on the continent for how their group would deal with various types of monsters. Now, after experiencing the Plague Rats, Rockadillos, and Ash Reapers, those plans were beginning to feel either unnecessary or completely ineffective. So they deconstructed those plans and went back to the basics.

Their efforts were handicapped by a lack of knowledge. Group tactics were not a part of their curriculum until the second year. None of them knew what they were doing outside of some vague concepts. They didn't let it stop them. Besides the lack of knowledge, the big issue was diversity, both on their end and on the monsters.

Shrouded were inherently capable of performing a wide variety of combat rolls because of how much a shroud could do. Similarly, monsters had a vast difference in the dangers they offered. They needed to choose how they wanted to fight to use their shrouds more effectively in a team dynamic. This subsequently meant limiting how they used their shrouds, as any shroud could fulfill any roll if it was used creatively enough.

Luckily, they all had distinct fighting styles with only some overlap. Obviously, all of them were damage dealers in some capacity, but they did their damage in different ways.

Lily was all about precise strikes from stealth that had lasting effects. She was the hardest of the group to pin down with her concealment sense, fog, and intangible formshift. She supplemented primarily melee-focused stealth attacks with long-range icicle barrages for some attack diversity, and her growing skill with the bow was leading her to an even longer range option for when close-up attacks weren't viable. Her main weakness was a lack of durability in a fighting style that put her directly in danger if her stealth and evasion ever failed.

Erik's style primarily focused on battlefield control. He was stunningly good at judging the appropriate moment to strike and could do so with devastating force. His ability to run interference and limit his enemies allowed him great freedom to pick the perfect moment to lay down some of the highest single-attack damage on the team. Only Caeden's Rose Cannon or triple-digit Forged Infinity transformations could compete.

More than that, Erik acted as an evasion tank. Someone who denied enemies the opportunity to attack others by making himself the target, then evading their attacks. His own abilities made him nearly as hard to hit as Lily, but with a style that revolved around deflection and dodging rather than concealment and intangibility. Combined with his excellent healing capabilities, Erik had composed a skillset that was highly timing oriented, from binding to dodging to healing to massively damaging attacks. His abilities lived or died on applying the right skill at the right moment.

Conversely, Cat was all about resource management and shroud conservation. Her Soul Shroud was esoteric and not easily defined, with a massive gulf between its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, her specters granted her the widest amount of power and utility of the entire group, even outstripping Caeden and his dual shrouds. They somehow gained memories and skills commensurate with their intended purpose in ways that outstripped Cat's own knowledge. Her soldiers were blooded veterans that knew how to fight and did so with years of experience. Her archers were masters of the bow in ways Cat couldn't even dream of replicating.

On the other hand, Cat lacked the benefits most shrouded liberally enjoyed. Her Soul shroud offered her none of the ubiquitous elements that others used. She had neither aura nor infusion, incapable of assessing her surroundings, concealing her presence, or manipulating the world around her through aura manifestation. She could not enhance her body or formshift to mitigate damage and give her body magical properties. This made her far more vulnerable than anyone else while also bringing the single most useful and impactful skillset onto the team.

Lastly, there was Caeden. He was in the most unique position on the team, even compared to Cat's strange shroud. Not only was he dual shrouded, not only was he the only one with a nascent shroud, not only was he the only one with a shrouded weapon, but he was in the uniquely disadvantageous position of only having one of those shrouds for roughly six months now. He had a massive skill and familiarity gap between his two shrouds. Sharp, he was vastly more familiar and comfortable with, using it in complex and intricate strategies and forming complex, layered mnemonics. He used Physical Enhancement to hit things harder.

This dichotomy in his understanding and capabilities had created an equally large dichotomy in his fighting style. Half the time, he was content to sit back and attack with Sharp constructs from a distance. Other times he felt the need to maximize the use of Physical Enhancements, overwhelming physical superiority, and the unique nature of his transforming weapon in close quarters combat.

Ultimately this resulted in a versatile combat style that shifted with the needs of the moment, allowing him to be effective from melee to long range and shift between the two easily and freely. His excellent defenses from both Forged Infinity and Physical Enhancement meant he was hard to injure and even harder to take down permanently. He could sit still and absorb hits his other teammates couldn't dream of.

The other side of that versatility and general immunity was a large helping of chronic indecision. The multiple weapon options of Forged Infinity made melee a guessing game of trying to decide on the right tool for a given situation whenever he didn't pull on its intelligence for help. Deciding when and how to use the slew of abilities he had was a constant limiting factor that had him always looking for the best option, and his defenses engendered even greater passivity.

Discussing all of this led the team to their main problem. The group had been focusing their growth and advancement around their individual needs. Obviously, the Academy was expecting that of them. Group training wouldn't begin until their second year. However, it had led to their current situation. They were stuck with monsters they likely couldn't beat as individuals without the skills to operate as a group.

So they got down to planning.