Erik glared into the air. He had been doing this for almost five minutes now. Erik never did anything for five minutes straight. This might be some kind of record, and that made him nervous. It was to the point where Caeden was getting worried.

"Everything ok?"

"Erik snapped out of his funk, whipping around to look at Caeden before his intense expression collapsed into a lop-sided smile. "Yeah, just got a funny feeling."

"What kind of funny feeling?" Caeden was willing to bet there was more going on than that simple explanation covered.

"Oh, I don't know." Erik sighed. "My defensive sense is acting funny."

Instantly, every hair on Caeden's body stood up. A shiver ran down his spine. "What?"

"Yeah." Erik nodded, not noticing his distress. "Like, it keeps telling me there's danger, but not where? This has never happened before. Usually, when I feel a danger coming on, I get a direction. Lots of times, my aura can tell me exactly what's going on. But this time…nothing. Just a vague sense of danger coming from somewhere."

"Could it be a dragon thing?" Caeden asked. They had passed within the bounds of the continent five minutes ago, the passage marked by a noticeable increase in the ambient temperature. This continent was on the warmer side. They were currently passing over some sparse hilly areas composed mainly of grasslands. The desert that their target was located in was a day away by Caeden's calculations. The dragon's continent was home to a more diverse selection of biomes than the endless valleys and mountains of the last one.

"Nahh." Erik shook his head. "I feel like it's on the ship, not outside. It doesn't feel that distant.

Flaring his awareness, Caeden immediately began running his aura senses over every inch of the vessel. Erik's defensive sense was never wrong. Caeden couldn't even begin to imagine what was setting it off, but he would find it. Letting an unknown danger fester on the ship they planned to spend the next week and a half in was a losing proposition.

His in-depth search covered every inch of the ship in as much detail as possible, scouring every surface and even diving deeper to check underlying structures showed…nothing. He searched and searched again, but nothing seemed out of order. In fact, it was almost aggressively normal. The only thing that wasn't exactly as it should be was a slight variation in the ether engine, but that was normal as well. The engines weren't perfectly exact machines after all. They had relative levels they needed to stay between, not a hard line. Caeden wasn''t exactly an expert, but he could still figure out the tolerances. The engine was still in those limits. It just had a slight excess of ether in one chamber.

"Well, I took a look, and nothing looks out of order. Which honestly makes me feel even worse. You know what, we should talk to the girls." Caeden started to slow the cruiser down. He was not done just because a search turned up nothing. Erik's senses were incredibly refined. More so than any Caeden could imagine. He trusted Erik's defensive sense more than his own eyes.

"Ok, if you think we should." Erik shrugged.

"I don't get why you're not more worried about this." Caeden would have expected Erik to be freaking out about his favorite ability throwing out anomalous readings.

"Ehh, it's a vague sense. It doesn't feel like it's getting worse, either. I'll let you know if that changes."

The ship came to a complete stop, and they both moved downstairs into the rest of the cabin, where Lily and Cat were chatting while Cat sat at the small dining table and Lily rested on Snowball. She seemed to spend more time on the bear than using any other form of seating.

"Hey, Erik's aura is throwing up a danger reading he can't pinpoint. He thinks it's on the ship, but I can't find anything." Caeden started, moving to sit at the table as well. He turned his chair to face between Cat and Lily. Erik moved over to the fridge just past Lily and started digging through it.

"He can't pinpoint it?" Lily leaned forward. Sky hopped into view behind her. Apparently, the Roc had been buried in Snowball's fur practically on top of Lily's head.

"Yeah, it's like an echo, I guess? Or like someone talking to me through a thick door. Kinda muffled. I'm not sure how to put it." Erik explained, coming out of the fridge with a big pack of uncooked bacon.

"Don't eat it like that, you dork." Cat huffed. "That's wasting perfectly good bacon."

"I do what I want." Erik sniffed before shoving a strip into his mouth. Where he immediately choked on it.

"So what are you thinking?" Caeden asked Lily.

"You checked the whole ship?" Her eyes stared into the distance. Caeden guessed she was doing the same thing as him. "I'm not sure about the engine because that's not my forte, but everything else looks fine."

"Huh," Erik said, having cleared his airway. "That's weird."

Everyone immediately turned to look at him.

Erik stared back. "What?"

"You're the one who said something was weird, you tell us." Sometimes Caeden wanted to punch him.

"Oh, well. The danger feels…closer? It's not actually a distance thing, but something changed. No idea why." Erik shrugged.

"How are you so ok with this?" Caeden was stunned.

"Ehh, I'll do something about it when I know what's going on. Until then, it's not really worth worrying about." He ate another slice, chewing slowly as they all watched.

Quickly, Caeden decided to do another scan of the ship and beyond, hoping to find something.

Something is what he found.

The variation in the engine had grown explosively since he had last checked. Rapidly assessing the damage, Caeden figured out what was going on. The chamber gathering excess ether had a slight deformation that slowed the ether flow, but only when the cruiser was at a complete stop. The fault caused ether to collect where it shouldn't, preventing the proper flow. The problem started out small but increased exponentially as more ether gathered. In fact, the chamber was about to reach critical capacity.

Alarmed, Caeden immediately began using Sharp to activate the safety parameters. It would kill the engine, but Caeden could deal with that over it melting into slag. The flow stopped, and Caeden let out a sigh of relief. He had no idea how such a fault had formed. Every piece of an ether engine was precision cast to obvious flow problems like this. In fact, it should have never gotten this far, as there were several safety measures in place to divert excess ether.

Suddenly getting a bad feeling, Caeden carefully checked the safety mechanism attached to that chamber. It had a tiny hole in it. Since the system was pressure operated, that hole caused it to fail. Then Caeden noticed something else. They weren't falling. The engine was off, so they should be falling. There was a secondary flight crystal on a vessel this large that was dedicated to stopping the ship from reaching terminal velocity, but he had fully expected to fall to the continent below. There, he could use the spare parts in the cargo hold to do some repairs.

But the ship wasn't falling. Checking the engine, Caeden saw that a critical fault had developed behind the clogged chamber where another safety system had just barely failed. Every fault was so tiny, so insignificant, that they were beneath notice. Together, the engine was rapidly turning itself into a bomb.

Normally the system was designed to fail in such a way that it turned the engine inert. But the safety relief for one chamber had been bent so that the overflow moved into another chamber, something that should never happen. Upon seeing it, Caeden became certain, they had been sabotaged. Everything else could have been an improbable series of unfortunate coincidences. This required a piece of metal to be bent and stretched, piercing into another chamber. It couldn't happen by accident.

But he had no time to be worrying about that now. The engine was seconds from going off, and Caeden couldn't stop it. His attempt to prevent that engine from melting down had actually made things worse. And it seemed the saboteur had predicted that. He had moments, seconds to act before the cruiser was blown apart.

"Brace!" Caeden shouted, his body already formshifting without conscious thought. Then he ran into a dilemma. What to do next. He was facing equidistant between Cat and Lily. He could only get to one of them before the engine failed. Every cell in his body wanted to dive for Lily and protect her, but he knew that was the wrong move. Out of everyone here, she was the most likely to survive the explosion. Her Ice and Cloud were perfect for protecting herself and then making it safely to the ground.

Meanwhile, Cat was guaranteed to die. She couldn't use infusion, so she would bear the explosion like a normal human. Mainly by splattering into a wet mess by shrapnel before being flash-fried in the blast itself. But he could protect her. So the decision was made. Caeden dived for Cat, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her into his chest. For her part, Cat let it happen, balling up into a fetal position. At the same time, Caeden pulled out Forged Infinity and rapidly moved it through the base forms and up to the double digits. Now, Cat was sandwiched between Caeden's formshifted chest and a great shield.

If he had the time, Caeden would have lamented the loss of the triple-digit forms. The shield ball the team had used to survive their plummet through Black Reach would have been perfect right now. However, he was gratified to notice, with the sliver of attention he could spare, that Lily had wrapped herself, Erik, and her bonded in a cocoon of ice reinforced by Erik's shroud.

All told, this wasn't that bad. The ship was lost, which was going to be rough. But Caeden knew that if they got to the structure, someone would come to pick them up eventually. They would fall separately, but meeting back up would be easy on the ground, with Caeden's aura range being several miles. Surviving the fall was going to be the worst part.

He watched as the engine went critical, ether that was never supposed to make contact mixing and melting through one chamber only to encounter more ether in another. The rampant combinations spiraled out of control until Caeden couldn't even guess what type of ether it was that finally exploded. Perhaps the mixing itself was so volatile that it exploded anyway, regardless of type.

Metal crumpled, and the six-foot-long flight ether shattered, then his senses whited out. Caeden tucked himself around Cat, taking on a similar pose. He double-checked to ensure she wasn't exposed from any angle, using Sharp to plug the gaps. Even a sliver of space could be enough to let in searing hot air and shrapnel. Caeden didn't want to reach the ground only to find himself cradling a corpse.

Then the destruction reached them, and Caeden's world went white. His body became a projectile, hurling through the walls and out into the open air as chunks of burning hot half-molten metal pelted him. A clump the size of a dog slammed into his back, right on the spine, and Caeden let out a pained grunt. Both he and the debris were going somewhere around Mach 2. Despite all his infused, formshift bulk, those hits still hurt.

Then things got worse. The armory that Cat had brought along, swept up in the explosion, started to rain down on him. Purpose-built weapons propelled at supersonic speed hammered into every inch of his body and rattled his shield as he tumbled through the air. Internally cursing his lack of time, Caeden did something he would have done from the start had he had a moment to think.

"Defense-hurk…from." He grunted out through the onslaught. His body expanded again, forming additional layers of protective flesh. Purple started to overwhelm the gold across his limbs and torso. The whole time the transformation took place, Caeden was careful to maintain his seal around Cat. He could feel the searing temperatures of the air around him, and one gap was all it would take for a stray sliver of ejected metal to end his friend.

He did all this while tumbling blindly through the air. His head was tucked into his arms, so his regular sight was utterly dark. An unforeseen side effect of the ether meltdown was that all the ambient ether in the air interfered with his aura. A rare phenomenon Caeden had forgotten about as it only occurred when large amounts of different ether types interacted. A single kind of ether wouldn't do the same thing.

After a few seconds, Caeden felt that they had nearly made it. He was still being pelted, but he expected the worst part to be when he was inside the ship. As if to prove him wrong, something massive and heavy slammed into the back of his head, making his thoughts stutter. Before he could recover, a sharp pain dug deep into his side, coming up against his spine and nearly going through it. Instantly, Caeden's entire lower half was lit up in endless agony.

Combined with the severe concussion, the spinal injury managed to overwhelm even Caeden's massive resilience, and he began to pass out. His last thoughts were scattered, torn between worrying about the other half of his team and confusion over why he felt like he was speeding up.

Then everything faded to black.

{}

It watched. It watched for hours. The small metal tool, only the size of a pen, flew behind the target's ship. A drone, the Creator called it. The name was modeled after the workers of a bee hive. Through the drone, it could view its target from great distances. Another creation that no shrouded had ever seen. And an excellent means to ensure its duty was fulfilled.

The likelihood of the target or another shrouded onboard noticing the faults it had crafted into the engine was low, and the chance that they managed to fix it was infinitesimal. It had crafted contingencies into its sabotage. Any attempt to resolve the apparent problem would only make things worse as the inbuilt safety systems worked against them. It would take a genius ether technician to unravel the web of failure it had created once the ship was in motion.

But it watched anyway. The Creator had not made it a creature of vague possibility and chance. No, it would see the target's smoking corpse, or it would fly after the vessel itself to confirm the completion of its mission. Nothing could be left to chance. The first and most vital of the Creator's many lessons. Chance was for fools and failures. The intelligent created contingencies. And it always strived to be intelligent.

When the vessel encountered a dragon, it wondered briefly if it was about to incidentally cause a national crisis. A dragon dying in an explosion aboard a shrouded ethership would have the dragons in an uproar, their considerable might wielded in rage. It was concerned for a moment, as it did not know if this would interrupt the Creator's plans or further them. Such uncertainty was disconcerting.

But it needn't have contemplated such problems. The dragon did not remain nearly long enough for its sabotage to trigger. The cruiser continued, reaching landfall. This was expected. It had no reason to believe the target would stop long enough over the Starry Sea for the meltdown to occur. But it had not expected the ethership to stop for seemingly no reason over the outskirts of the continent.

Of course, this eventually resulted in the intended explosion. Each step in its sabotage would result in a different variety. It could tell that someone had caught on, reaching the third of twenty stages necessary to fix the damage it had caused. A novice, then. No one of actual knowledge

It saw the ship buckle and break as the wild storm of unregulated ether reactions ripped it apart. Lights in several spectrums burst out from the wreckage to form a kaleidoscope of unbridled power. Unfortunately, two shapes emerged from that multicolored explosion, which meant its job was not done. A ball of gold and purple holding a shield and a sphere of ice coated in layers of white string.

Knowing that the purple and gold figure was the target, it focused on that. The ice ball could safely be dismissed. So it focused on the target, watching shrapnel belt him continuously. It was not overly concerned that the target had survived. It had hoped for a swift resolution to this task, but shrouded could be annoyingly sturdy. Fortunately, the target was on a dragon continent. He would not be receiving backup, and the angry dragons drawn by the explosion would likely end his life.

So it was with stunned disbelief that it watched as two pieces of shrapnel stuck the target in the head and lower back. He saw the target go limp and assumed he had passed out. It had thought this was a positive outcome until the target started speeding up. To the degree that he was rapidly leaving the drone behind.

This was both confusing and upsetting. It needed to bear witness to the target's death, and confirm the mission's completion. To lose sight of the target was unacceptable. The last the drone caught of the unconscious but still accelerating figure was the spontaneous appearance of several ghostly white figures with green flames around their bodies moving over the target's body.

If it could have sighed, it would have. This was not an ideal outcome. Rising from its folded position in the Turtle Fortress cargo hold, it reaffirmed the hologram covering its true appearance. Walking swiftly, it passed several shrouded on the way to the deck. None gave its projected human guise a second glance. After all, there were several hundred people on board. No one was familiar with everyone else.

Reaching the deck, it moved to an isolated position and waited until no one was observing it. Then, it simultaneously flung itself over the side while changing its false aura to null, blending into the background. After it had dropped several hundred feet, it dropped the hologram and activated the flight crystals embedded in what had once been feet. With a boom, it launched off in the direction of the dragon continent.

If its drone could not observe the target, it would have to go itself.