Cat cursed at herself internally as she commanded her Brute to charge forward faster and faster. She couldn't believe she'd sat back and watched as Caeden single-handedly fought a full-grown dragon. Captain Soarise had told them how strong the dragons were, how outclassed they would be. Even from a distance, Cat could tell that the only reason Caeden wasn't instantly squashed or ripped apart was because of how fucked up this dragon's body was.

A small, logical part of her mind reminded her that stepping into that battle wouldn't have helped Caeden. His blows had barely done anything until that final attack, and Cat's specters fell far short of Caeden's raw damage. At most, she might have been able to provide a distraction, but there was an equally good chance that the dragon might have targeted her, and she didn't have anywhere near the speed Caeden could achieve. He would have been forced to step in to defend her and likely died in the attempt.

But that logical response was buried under wave after wave of self-recrimination and abject hopelessness. Once more, she was no help at a critical moment. Her specters had acted as glorified support this entire journey. Never winning a fight, merely holding out until someone stepped in and finished a fight she couldn't handle.

Now Caeden was badly injured, and she didn't know what to do. When the Brute finally reached him, she jumped down to get a better look. It was bad. She had seen the bloody mess even from a distance, but up close only made it worse. His leg had shattered fragments of bone sticking out, and his arm clearly wasn't sitting at the right angle. Blood flowed heavily and freely from both.

Overhead, Caeden's massive quantity of thorns were winking out of existence, which was a very, very bad sign. Shrouds remained active even when their shrouded fell unconscious. It was how Caeden had recovered from his injuries he sustained during the cruiser explosion. If his shrouds stopped working, he was definitely going to die.

Cat had no idea what could possibly stop a shroud. The only answer would be occupation, another shrouded forcefully inserting their shroud into his body, but there was no one else around, and Cat would have felt their shroud at work. She was at a loss for what was going wrong until she leaned down and touched him. Then she felt it.

For the first time in her life, Cat experienced someone else's soul. She could always feel her own; it was the palace her shroud existed, after all. But she had never felt someone else's. Two things became immediately obvious to her. First, her soul was different from Caeden's and likely differed from everyone else's. Second, Caeden's soul was fucked. Like, deeply, deeply injured. That was the entire reason she could feel it.

A person's soul was the seat of their shroud, protected entirely by the force that occupied it. More than that, it didn't really exist in physical space. Sure, it was connected to a person, but it wasn't present in any traditional sense. That separation made it impossible for Cat to feel another's soul because she simply didn't know what she was looking for.

Caeden's situation changed that. His soul had been ripped open by his own shroud, and it was bleeding raw Ki and domain-aligned Sharp Ki into the world. Through that connection to the physical, Cat could finally sense another's soul. The same damage was slowly killing him. Caeden would die in less than an hour from soul shock; his metaphysical existence bled dry as it spilled out into physical reality.

All of this information poured into Cat's head as she experienced her shroud's aura for the first time. It was like a nerve, previously isolated and protected, was finally exposed to the correct stimulation. Cat immediately realized how clumsy and childish her use of her own shroud had been this whole time. Without her aura, she had been using her shroud's manifestations blindfolded with both hands tied behind her back, working with her teeth. No wonder all her specters were so weak. They were completely malformed childish caricatures of what they should be.

It all made some much sense now. Cat's domain was Soul. Of course, her aura sense wouldn't exist in the physical world. Instead, her aura was on the soul plain, the place outside the physical where the soul resided. She had never known because she had no way of knowing what another soul felt like.

Now, her eyes were opened, and the experience was overwhelming. She started weeping, tears streaming endlessly from her eyes. Not out of any emotion, even though there was plenty of that going on right now, but because her body was reacting to the overwhelming experience of awakening to a sense other shrouded had since the moment their soul formed. Her mind just wasn't ready.

But she pushed through. Caeden needed her right now. He was in mortal danger on multiple levels. Both his body and soul were quickly dying, the damage to the other making either's recovery even harder. Cat created several workers, wincing internally over how shit their design was now that she could actually feel them. Nevertheless, they would do just fine for what she needed.

Mentally, Cat directed the workers to lift Caeden carefully. Due to their design, the workers could easily hold Caeden steady even over the uneven and loose footing the sand provided. Cat needed to get Caeden out of the elements as much as possible. The exposure was putting a strain on his already limited resources as Physical Enhancement did all the heavy lifting to heal his broken body. Sand in his wounds wasn't helping anything.

Luckily, the dragon Caeden had just killed had a nice cave that would work for now. The battle, as intense as it had been, hadn't carried that far away from the start. So it was a quick trip into the dark interior of the sandstone edifice that the sapphire dragon was living in. The workers were quick and smooth; they didn't jostle Caeden at all. Cat had them lay Caeden on the smooth stone floor as gently as they could and then dismissed them.

"This is fuck up, Cae," Cat murmured, Looking down at her friend's unconscious body. "Do you realize how ironic all this is? I was bitching and moaning to myself this whole time about how useless I am in a straight fight. Then you went and got yourself real fucked up, and now I can use my shroud in ways I never imagined. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Unshrouded gods, this is messed up." She sighed.

Caeden's soul injury had caused part of it to leak into the physical world and awakened Cat's aura. The only reason he got so injured was because Cat couldn't even help him fight. Now, she couldn't even imagine the potential her shroud might reach. All it had taken was her friend's imminent death from an injury that Cat doubted anyone could heal.

"This is so fucked."

{}

A golden opportunity! It had been watching for weeks. A direct take-down was the most viable remaining option for eliminating its target, but that required a careful and exact strategy to ensure a swift and permanent effect. Any sign of its actions could violate the prime directive. Avoiding discovery was the basis of its existence. So it planned very, very carefully.

But now, an even better opportunity arose! It had discarded any plan involving engineering a conflict between the target and the local dragon population after seeing him interact with multiple nests. Any action it took that was severe enough to possibly encourage a fight would be overt enough to cause an unacceptable chance of discovery.

The Creator did not believe in luck, and the Creator's words were absolute, but it could not think of a better term to describe the current circumstances other than immensely lucky. An open conflict with a dragon had left the target near death. Admittedly, his ability to win the fight exceeded its projections for the target's combat capacity, but that was superfluous. This was a golden opportunity!

It could not deviate close enough to the target to assess his recovery chances, so it would have to act now while the target was at his weakest. Any chance of a recovery had to be quashed immediately. Still, a direct assault left too much to chance since the extent of the target's injuries was unknown. So a more indirect attack was still preferable.

With that in mind, it implemented the use of its artificial aura for a singular purpose—monster bait. The Creator had found that monsters were at least somewhat sensitive to shrouded auras and could use them in a similar way to a scent trail, following the aura back to its source. The effective range of the monster's ability to track auras varied, but it was usually limited in scope.

However, the Creator had created a method for using artificial auras, like the one contained within itself, to lay a trail that could be used to effectively direct monsters to a given location. With that in mind, it covered a wide area of the open desert, calling hundreds of monsters to connected paths of aura trails, all leading back to the target's current resting place. Even if the target was not significantly injured, the damage he had sustained would hopefully be enough for the monster hoard to finish him off.

What an excellent opportunity!

{}

"Well, fuck. That's not right either," Cat muttered, hands hovering over Caeden's chest. "C'mon, work with me, you bitch."

Cat was cursing at her own shroud. Shrouds are strange, enigmatic things. They could act as an information source, so long as the shrouded could their aura senses decently well, but would only provide information the shrouded asked for. That had always been Cat's main problem with her shroud. With a domain as esoteric as Soul, she didn't know what to ask her shroud to learn how to use it properly.

Now, she had nearly the opposite problem. Every time she used her aura, an endless flood of information flowed in, too much for her to parse or use. She didn't know how to control the stream because she hadn't grown up with her aura senses active. Even worse, she still didn't know what to do. Her shroud was finally feeding her information, but it's not like her shroud could tell her what to do to get the result she wanted. It simply fed her what was happening and why. Coming up with a solution was on her.

And Cat had picked a difficult task, to begin with. It was her first time using her shroud to its full extent, and she was trying to repair someone's soul. Not that she had that much of a choice. Caeden was dying, and her shroud had been very clear; Caeden had no way of fixing his soul injury on his own. That wasn't something shrouds could normally do.

But Cat was different. She had noticed it the second she first felt Caeden's soul. If she were to describe it, his soul was a little ball of white light about the size of a pea. Attached to the ball were two others, one red and writhing and the other a liquid mix of purple and gold. They fed into his soul, nourishing and growing it. In return, energy flowed out of his little white ball and grew the others in turn—a symbiotic loop.

Cat's soul was completely different. If Caeden's was a little ball, hers was a whole person. Though a tiny one. Relative to her soul, his was the size of a watermelon. But her soul had arms and legs and even hair. And because her soul was a person, she could control it like one. Move the arms and legs, wave her hands and make a fist—all of it.

Which led back around to fixing Caeden's soul. His red ball had stabbed into the white one, punching a hole through it. From there, white and red energy leaked out. Caeden's reservoir of Sharp had overfilled. When more tried to come in from the red ball, it had nowhere to go, so it punched a hole in his soul instead. Or maybe his reservoir spilled out. Cat was only looking at the aftermath, so she was guessing a bit. Either way, The red and white energy, Sharp Ki and Caeden's natural Ki, were now leaking out.

The main positive here was that Caeden's Physical Enhancement reservoir was fine. That shroud remained unaffected by the damage to his other shroud and his soul. That was also likely the only reason he wasn't already dead. For any other single-shrouded, a hole in their soul with injuries like his would have led to immediate death, as the only thing currently holding Caeden together was his shroud. Physical Enhancement was keeping him alive.

But that didn't fix the underlying problem. The rate that Caeden was losing Ki was faster than what his shroud was pulling in, so eventually, he would run dry. From what information Cat could gather, that was fatal. His body would just stop working. Without a soul to pilot it, the body would cease to function, and he would die.

So she was trying to fix it. It wasn't working. Yet. She was clumsily fumbling with her soul, poking and prodding at his and trying to stop the leak. Putting her soul hands over the gap had successfully stopped the Ki loss, but the underlying injury wasn't going to heal on its own. So now she was trying everything she could think of to patch the gap. With each failed attempt, the results let her learn a little bit more about souls and brought her a little bit closer to the right solution.

Finally, finally, something worked. Cat had tried to block the gap or attach a new bit of soul to Caeden's, but all of those attempts had ended in failure. One of those attempts had included severing the hand of her own soul, which had been extremely painful. Every time, Caeden's soul had rejected the foreign material and attacked it, like white blood cells attacking a virus. But from that, she had learned to regenerate her own soul.

That had at least proved that his soul could be fixed. She just needed a way to get what worked for her to work for him. So this time, she stuck her soul's hair into the gap. Funnily enough, unlike real hair, she had complete motor control over her soul's hair. Those fine strands went deep, connecting to various parts of Caeden's soul. From there, Cat essentially hijacked Caeden's soul.

It felt super icky and probably illegal in some way. She basically puppeted Caeden's soul. Her soul was so much more developed, so much more capable that it was like lying to a child. His soul just went along with it. But it did let her force Caeden's soul to copy her own process for healing its damage. She started from the inside, fixing his Sharp reserve. Then, she repaired everything else that had broken. It turns out a soul has organs of its own, much like a person. Several of Caeden's had been damaged when his reservoir ruptured.

Last, she sealed the skin. After that process began, Cat slowly and carefully removed her soul-hair from Caeden's soul. The surface sealed up right behind her. As far as she could tell, he was healthy and whole once more. However, the damage had left his soul weak and recovering. He would feel lethargic and have greater difficulty using his shrouds for several days.

"Whew! That was fucking awful." Cat wiped the sweat from her brow. Then she felt a little tongue licking her hand. "Shit! You scared me, little buddy!" Cat jumped. Caeden's hatchling was staring at her with curious eyes.

That was something else she had found in Caeden's soul while fixing him up. The hatchling's bond was in there. She had brushed it, feeling the emotions coming through for a brief second. "Are you worried about the big lug? Everything's just fine, cutey. He'll be back up in no time." She stroked his scaly head, comforting the baby dragon.

It had taken her hours to finally fix Caeden's soul. And hours before that to find the solution in the first place. In that time, Caeden's arm and leg were looking better. Though he was now missing a portion of his foot and a chunk of his lower leg muscle. It had been ripped out by the dragon's teeth. Luckily, his arm didn't look to be missing any flesh, so Caeden should be able to recover that on his own. But his leg was crippled until they could get back to a healer.

Cat sat back against the cool stone with a sigh. "I really hope I never have to do that again. It sucked." The onslaught of new information from her awakened aura, and the mental strain of performing soul surgery caught up with her. Her eye drifted closed.

"Cat. Cat. Cat!"

"Whuh!" Cat shot up into wakefulness.

"Cat, we have a problem." A weak voice spoke from next to her.

"Oh, shit! Caeden, you're up!" She looked him over. His injuries were even farther along than before, though he wasn't fully healed yet.

"Thanks to you." He smiled weakly.

"O-oh. You noticed that?" Cat asked.

Caeden chuckled. "You were in my soul, so yeah. But that's not the point. We're in trouble."

"What are you talking about?" What else could possibly go wrong? Cat immediately scolded herself for thinking that. It just invited trouble.

"I can feel them. Hundreds of monsters are coming here. We have about ten minutes." Caeden sighed.

"Oh. Oh, shit." Cat's tan skin paled.

"Yeah." Caeden nodded.

"I can handle it." Cat nodded.

"No," Caeden told her. "You can't."

"Hey, I can use my shroud way better now! You have no idea what I can do!" Cat protested.

"I don't." Caeden acknowledged. "Do you?"

That stumped her. "Weeeell."

"Exactly. You're betting on a losing battle there, Cat. You really are. We have no options." He raised his hand, purple and gold coalescing on the back until it resolved into a golden throne padded in purple cushions.

"We need to evolve your shroud."