Caeden ran across the battlefield, wielding his blade two-handed and swinging as fast as he could, throwing out Blade Wave after Blade Wave and blasting giant arcs of Sharp across the battlefield with impunity. He wasn’t anywhere near as fast as he had been when using Physical Enhancement, but he was equally untouchable by virtue of how many wide area attacks he was throwing out every second.

Despite that, and him flooding his formshift with more Sharp to further enhance his body, he was still building shroud instead of losing it. He felt the pressure mounting, nearing some critical level where the reserve built into his soul would break. He didn’t know what would happen then, but he wasn’t willing to find out.

Around him, the jungle clearing became saturated with the discoporating corpses of monsters and the deep grooves his Blade Waves carved into the earth as many of his attacks came out at an angle. Dozens of monsters fell to every swing, and the tide of pseudo-dragons was slowing. Caeden hoped that they would stop coming soon, especially the airborne monsters. Then he could drop all the thorns and maybe start getting a better handle on his overloading shroud.

But before that could happen, something shifted inside his Sharp reserve. The total amount of shroud contained within surpassed his ability to quantify, but he was guess it was close to fifty times his natural limit. Much of his attention had shifted to merely keeping the energy compressed to stave off the rupture he could feel building up.

Now, at the very center of his reserve, he could feel his shroud ongoing some form of shift. It was still Sharp and still very much under his command and control, but it changed. In fact, it was an identical shift he felt wherever he charged the Rose Cannon to its maximum extent. The Crimson energy thickened and darkened to a bloody purplish-red, like an angry bruise.

Immediately, the pressure inside him almost doubled, and Caeden felt his soul nearly burst under the pressure. Desperately, Caeden grabbed a hold of the new energy. Letting go of his Odachi with his left hand, he slammed the three fingers it had into the earth and ejected the changed shroud into the soil in thick bands of purple-red.

Coming out around him, an explosive wave of similarly colored spikes erupted from the ground and eviscerated every monster even remotely near him. They towered a dozen feet tall and nearly two feet thick with perfectly smooth edges so sharp they cut the air as they emerged, creating small shockwaves. The attack was orders of magnitude more powerful than that amount of shroud would normally produce.

But Caeden didn’t have time to process this, as he was still moments from disaster. Another chink of shroud looked like it was about to undergo the same process that had just happened, once more placing him moments from destruction.

Desperately searching for an answer, Caeden’s subconscious stepped in. Every moment of every day for the past six months, Caeden had changed Forged Infinity whenever his shrouds reached their natural capacity. He had trained himself to do this without a thought. Now, he amped that process up to the max, flooding his shrouded weapon with wave after wave of Sharp as fast as the unique weapon could take it.

Power expenditure at maximum capacity. The voice of Forged Infinity whispered in his mind. Transferring to higher density power draw to match influx-ERROR. System fault! Internal damage interference. Switching to externalized energy to preserve system integrity.

With that, the power from Caeden began flooding into the blade of Forged Infinity’s current form at an even faster pace, matching and then exceeding the amount pouring into his reserves from all the thorns. Caeden was finally losing shroud.

As that happened, the Odachi’s blade transitioned from the crimson color of Sharp to the purple-red bruise color of the transformed shroud, starting at the hilt and flowing up the blade. On a hunch, Caeden swung the blade one-handed, and the Odachi projected an energy wave all on its own. This one carried the same color as the changed shroud and traveled ten times faster than any Blade Wave before it.

Surprisingly, this wave was more stable than the overloaded mnemonic-created ones he had been throwing out. It didn’t detonate but instead continued across the clearing and into the forest, cutting everything in its path. If he had a moment to think, Caeden would have been stunned at the vast difference in raw power.

But even this wasn’t enough. Caeden was losing shroud now, but at an infinitesimal pace, and the pressure on his reserve was starting to strain his concentration. His will has been wrapped around every ounce of shroud in his soul for several minutes now, and he was mentally exhausted. Even now, his focus would occasionally slip off a small portion of the energy he was holding back, and it would bulge painfully against the limits of his reserve before he could reign it back in.

He needed all of this energy gone, and he needed that to happen right now. But he was out of options. He had fired off every ability he had, used every mnemonic that could help bleed some of this overflowing power, and Forged Infinity was taking as much shroud from him as it could. He was officially out of tricks, and his willpower was breaking down under the constant pressure. Physically, he hadn’t taken a single hit this entire fight. Mentally, he felt like he hadn’t slept for days while doing complex math equations and juggling very sharp swords.

ROOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

A roar sounded out from the far side of the clearing, on the other side of the plateau nest. At the same moment, the bulk of the remaining monsters turned and fled with their tails between their legs like wolves before a lion. They recognized the sound of a superior predator and ran away. As they left, Caeden heard a cry of despair arise from within the nest.

“False King.”

“Ancient Monster.”

“Original Curse.”

“Salderian.”

“Salderian.”

“Salderian.”

Whatever had made that sound was obviously known to the dragons, and they held a deep fear of it. To Caeden, it was an immense relief. So much so that his control nearly slipped as he felt some of the stress fade away.

Because this ‘Salderian’ had scared away all the flying pseudo-dragons. Which meant all those thorns that were close to killing him no longer needed to exist. But he had one more use for them.

With a thought, Caeden sent the massive force of thorns higher into the sky, hovering far above the plateau and clearing the airspace. Then, he launched a arm-thick beam of SHarp from his hand toward the topmost lip of the nest’s flat rocky peak. Yanking back hard, Caeden used the manifestation to fling himself through the air onto the top of the nest. Once he was there, he saw what had caused so much despair.

A gargantuan false dragon, bigger by an order of magnitude than anything Caeden had slain thus far. It was of a similar size to the nest itself, literally a rocky edifice moving and snarling as it approached, fire in its pitiless black eyes. The monster was muscles stacked on muscles and almost bipedal. It had one set for fore and hind legs, each of which had the muscle density of a bodybuilder that had eaten a slightly less muscular bodybuilder for protein. Basically, this monster was jacked.

The whole false-dragon was covered in alternating stripes of black and green scales in a pattern that resembled a tiger. Its forelegs bore some resemblance to a gorilla, with five-clawed fingers and its weight resting on its knuckles. The hind legs were closer to the digitigrade structure of a wolf’s paws. Its head was squat, and it had no neck to speak of, the face following the fore legs in resembling a scaled gorilla with a broad flat nose and wide features.

Two massive rams horns spiraled out of its temples and stayed nearly perpendicular with its head. The monster had no wings to speak of, but its tail trailed off into the jungle behind it, disappearing into the trees and underbrush. Standing out more than all of that, though, was the power that radiated off its body in a way Caeden had never seen before. This monster was over 100,000 IP.

All of this, Caeden took in for only a brief instant because he had much more pressing concerns than the physical features of his target. Normally, he might have been intimidated by a creature with ten times his IP, but that amount seemed laughable in the face of how much shroud Caeden was desperately trying to contain.

ROOOOOAAAAAA!!!

The monster let output another deafening roar, strings of thick spittle the width of Caeden’s arm flying from its wide-open jaws that revealed fangs so large Caeden could have dug holes in them large enough to house his whole body. It took a step forward into the clearing, fore-knuckles slamming into the ground with enough force to crack the earth.

“Lock.” Tens of thousands of thorns accelerated, all the sharpness they generated no longer flowing to Caeden but instead reinforcing the constructs themselves. After a long moment, they stopped, locking into place. Caeden took a moment to appreciate that there was no longer an endless amount of shroud flooding his reserve.

Salderian took another step, its massive body moving most of the way into the clearing, though its tail still vanished deep into the jungle, longer than Caeden could see. It looked down, its gaze focusing on some point in the middle of the nest. No doubt that was the location of the female dragon currently in heat. The monster didn’t even look at Caeden. His pathetic 10,000 IP probably didn’t register as a threat.

“Release.”

In a wave, thousands of thorns inverted, turning into foot-long spikes as they rocketed through the air. Before it could react, the false-dragon called Salderian staggered under hundreds of spikes traveling at barely subsonic speeds slamming into every inch of its massive form.

Roaaragharagh?!

Instead of the anger and hatred contained in its previous bellows, the monster sounded confused and upset. It readied one massive arm to shield its face as more released thorns continued to rain down on it, cracking its scales and digging into the exposed flesh. As the onslaught continued, Salderian huddled into itself like a frightened animal, trying to hide as best its oversized body could from the relentless attacks.

Despite all that, it wasn’t taking much damage. Caeden recognized that the monster was frightened because it was so massive and powerful it had likely never experienced an attack that could hurt it like this, and the unrelenting nature of the attack was scary to its primitive intelligence. But it was a 100,000 IP monster. Caeden’s storm of thorns wasn’t going to be enough to put it down just like that.

In fact, Caeden doubted he had anything he could do that would kill the massive monster, short of a Rose Cannon charged with all the thorns he was currently firing. Something he doubted he could control in his current mentally fatigued state, and it would take several minutes to charge if he even wanted to attempt it.

Still, Caeden was not going to sit idly by. He would try his utmost to finish this. Which meant mustering the strongest attack he was currently capable of. Only one thing came to mind. To that end, Caeden flicked his wrist and clicked several buttons on Forged Infinity as he let his Sharp formshift collapse.

Over the last few minutes, nearly half of his Physical Enhancement reserves had returned. One of the many benefits of being dual-shrouded. He could rely on one while the other had time to restore itself. Now, as Forged infinity changed to form 081, a simple, double-edge straight sword three feet in length, Caeden poured every ounce of both his shrouds into the blade.

Along the way, he forged paths of both Sharp and Physical Enhancement that wound from his chest, through his heart and lungs, extending out into his limbs, and through his hands up into Forged Infinity. He stood, sword gripped in both hands with his right foot extended forward, sword-point facing directly at Salderian.

“King Lion looked across the battlefield at his emperor’s ancient foe. His body was ragged and covered in many wounds from his grand combat. Behind him lay the beaten, battle-weary forms of his fellow Kings. Only he stood between his emperor’s vital task and the one who would thwart it.” Caeden intoned, his voice as stable as the rock beneath his feet, despite his weary mind. This was it. The strongest technique currently in his Dragon Saga Arts.

“Indeed, King Lion was also near collapse, for none of his brethren had fought as hard or as long as he. But he stood still, undaunted. Toward the final foe, he said only this. ‘None shall approach my emperor to my last breath.’ And he raised his sword, forcing the last of his will into a final attack.”

The power of all of Caeden’s shroud hummed and burned through every inch of his body before pouring into his shrouded weapon. The blade itself had gained the same dark red-purple of the Odachi, but it fused seamlessly with the regal purple and gold of his Physical Enhancement shroud.

By this point, Caeden’s thorns had run their course, buying him enough time to prepare this final technique. But now Salderian was unhindered, and the gigantic monster turned its burning eyes toward Caeden. Not the nest beneath him, but Caeden himself. Apparently, the monster was aware enough to recognize the source of its pain.

But Caeden was nearly done.

“Dragon Saga Arts, Eighty-Eighth Technique.” He raised his arms high, blade against his cheek, following his gaze to the monster’s heart. It shimmered and glowed with the shroud flowing through it, more power than Caeden had ever placed in any single attack. All the strength he could currently muster and more.

In that same moment, as Caeden’s attack was a single instant from completion, he saw a flicker of movement from behind the mountainous false-dragon. Its tail, the mass extending far into the jungle behind it, had moved with absurd speed. The end came flying out of the distance, hundreds of feet behind the monster and directly toward Caeden. Desperately, he forced himself to shift the destination of his technique to the only place that could save him.

{King Lion’s Roar}

A golden lion head with a purple and red mane launched from Caeden’s sword, taking all of his built-up shroud with it. The manifestation opened its mouth in a silent roar as it flashed across the distance before slamming into Caeden’s new target.

The lion’s jaws slammed home around the base of Salderian’s tail. In an instant, it ripped completely through the limb and dragged the long appendage back away from Caeden. The false dragon’s attack never reached him. Instead, it reeled back in pain. Monsters might not be truly living creatures, but the loss of its tail had certainly hurt the giant.

Uaaaaooa!

It let out a moan of pain and loss, much quieter than its rage-filled roars. The pseudo-dragon’s gaze moved between Caeden and the base of its tail before it seemed to come to a decision.

The monster turned back into the forest and ran away.

“Well,” Caeden sighed, dropping down to lay on his back. His mind was a swirling mess of much that could barely think. “That was something. I guess.”

Then he passed out.