Caeden wheezed. His muscles burned and shook until, finally, one spasmed out of control, and his blows slid out of place. His rhythm staggered and shattered, and he collapsed backward into the chair already placed behind him. It took over a minute for his breathing to come back under control and his heart to stop galloping out of his chest.

He was fully formshifted to golden body, his head nearly brushing the ceiling of the forge. Despite his greatly enhanced strength, speed, and stamina in this form, Zero Hand beat him. He could barely believe it.

“Well, five times in a row isn’t something any unshrouded could ever achieve.” Unc, who had been watching the whole time, slapped a hand on his bare shoulder. Caeden had stripped his robe down to his waist as steam had started pouring off his body after the first attempt. “Now you know why I can only do three in a day. And the last one won’t be anywhere near as good as the first.”

Caeden nodded tiredly, his head rolling on a limp neck. His uncle was a beast of a human being. The idea that anyone could perform the Zero Hand at all without shroud enhancement was astonishing. “I can’t believe anyone can do this without a shroud.” Caeden voiced his thoughts.

“I couldn’t at first.” Unc nodded. “When I started to learn, I made it a fifth of the way through the blows before my arms crapped out, and I could barely breathe. Damn near killed me. My father taught me the motions at a third speed, as we’ve done over the last week. But that doesn’t really prepare you for the real thing.”

Caeden nodded. The motions of the Zero Hand were hard enough. It required supreme control to barely brush the material without truly impacting it and then slide into the next blow smoothly and seamlessly. Learning at a fraction of the speed was the only viable solution. And even then, Caeden was still missing blows or fudging the angles. Some hits were too hard or too soft. The Zero Hand had the smallest margin for error of any of the Hundred Hands. A mistake on one blow would cascade into every one after it, as there was no time to correct yourself.

Of course, that just made it all the more exciting! Even at a sedate pace, even when he missed blows or ruined the pace, he noticed small improvements in his pieces. Of course, that was only when Caeden added in the closing to the opening. The Hundred and First Hand was much simpler for him than the Zero Hand. It was mostly an effort in rote memorization to know what form of the Hand was necessary for the ether and material being forged.

If there was one thing Caeden was confident in, it was his memorization. He absorbed all the patterns as fast as unc could show him. Obviously, a week was not enough time to learn everything, but he had memorized a few major sets, enough for practice.

So with his Hundred and First Hand technique as solid as it needed to be, Caeden focused fully on the Zero Hand. It was only today that Unc had declared his skills sufficient to attempt a couple of full-speed runs at the technique. It had not gone very well.

Looking at it from an objective perspective, Caeden would say his second or third attempt were the best. His first had too many mistakes as he was adjusting to the increased speed. By the fourth, he was wearing down. Repeatedly using the Zero Hand was so overwhelmingly physically taxing that even Physical Enhancement could not entirely keep up with the punishing demands. Caeden was sure that his shroud could do better, enhance him more. But his skills were not enough to draw out its full potential. He had only had Physical Enhancement for a year at this point.

But right now, Caeden was at his limit. He was recovering rapidly under his shroud’s effects, but a break was necessary before he could start again. It was a new and interesting experience, running into a task so overwhelmingly physically taxing that his shroud was not enough to keep up with the strain.

Luckily, other topics had been progressing more smoothly than his training with the opening and closing hands. Caeden hadn’t just been working on them for the last week. His friends continued their training, and Caeden continued his. He was still moving toward increasing Sharp’s integration.

His efforts had borne fruit, and his integration had increased at a steady clip. Even more so once Caeden realized that his efforts with ethersmithing were helping his shroud along. After all, he entered a sort of meditative state when he was forging, and he used Sharp constantly. He was now up to 75%, his original goal before leaving. And they still had a week left.

Erik and Cat continued to become ever more skilled with their shrouds, and Lily was making slow but steady progress with Galaxy ever since the star incident. In addition, they’d spent time as a group, refining team-based combat tactics, something they’d used only occasionally in the past.

More than anything, Unc had been busy. With Caeden’s assistance and input from his team, Unc had set about making Grandmaster-level gear for all of them. A diverse issue, as everyone in the group had greatly divergent fighting styles and used their shrouds in fundamentally different ways. Though it was simplified somewhat for Caeden, as Forged Infinity was more than enough weapon for him.

Not all the planned arms and armor were complete yet, but a few were finished. They worked on Lily’s armor first. Caeden admitted he had some bias on the topic, considering their relationship, but she had nothing but basic armor that Caeden had mass-produced for the Forged up until this point. That lack of protection had haunted him a little while he didn’t know her condition as he and Cat crossed the dragon continent.

Lily’s combat style was more mercurial than any of the others, so making armor for her was a challenge. But Unc, Caeden, and Lily all put their heads together and came up with an answer. It helped that Caeden had been working on this in the back of his mind for months. Unc’s expertise and Lily’s insights into her own fighting style and desired defenses had propelled his churning thoughts into a usable design.

Lily shifted between one of two styles in combat. She was either hiding and inflicting devastating ether poisons with her Cloud shroud, Chillvein, and Frostbreak. Or she was sitting at the back of the attack with Cat, throwing out massive Ice attacks. The addition of Galaxy had only reinforced this position, as her new splinter added to her long-range attack power. So they devised an armor design that worked for both.

Obviously, no one suit of armor could cover two divergent fighting styles. At least, not as well as a different suit for each. But many shrouded fought in a similar fashion, and there were thousands of years of ethersmiths before Caeden to draw from. In his research, a design came up. Domain adaptive armor.

It was a type of armor that drew from the domain of the shrouded wearing it to reinforce itself and mimicked some properties of the domain. There were downsides. The armor couldn’t act to shore up the shrouded’s weaknesses. When wearing domain adaptive armor, Lily’s Ice shroud and its weakness to fire and heat couldn’t be mitigated like it would if she wore earth or water attribute armor.

But, in Lily’s case, the positives outweighed the negatives. It was a design made specifically for those who fought with multiple splinters that drastically altered their fighting style with each domain, exactly as Lily did. Even better, between him and Unc, they had managed to modify the design so that it would incorporate into Lily’s formshifts.

As far as the forging itself went, the fact that the armor was relatively element neutral was a boon. After all, he had a giant stockpile of dragon bones. Dragon bones, unlike their scales, were element neutral. The scales mimicked the elements of the dragon that wore them, but the bones were all the same.

It made them excellent base materials, as elements could be added on top, or excluded, as they had with Lily’s armor. With Unc as the primary ethersmith and Caeden acting as his assistant, the domain adaptive armor they produced was a true masterpiece. The base form was a set of white bone greaves, bazubands, breastplate, and a circlet. All connected through ether and coming from the bones of the same dragon.

Testing it out, Lily found that the base form shifted with her domains as intended. It was triggered whenever she manifested a certain amount of shroud from any one splinter. Cloud transformed the armor into a set of cloth and leather armor with a hood and cloak in a soft, mottled grey and white. Galaxy created a set of black full-plate with a complete face guard. Ice was a middle ground. It had a partial helmet and leather reinforced with strips of bone that resembled glacial ice.

Unc and Caeden forged new Chillvein and Frostbreak gloves, now at a Grandmaster level. The ether poison they infused into Lily’s ice was even more potent. The gloves were threaded with slivers of bone and blended into her armor, though not as well as the rest.

Cat was an entirely different story. She was a consummate backliner, throwing out bursts of Necroflame and summoning undead. But her difficulties arose from her domain itself. A magic shroud like Necromancy operated off of Mana, not the Ki that other shrouds used.

Caeden had learned from the researcher that ether was essentially solidified Ki. He had worried that armor of weapons made with it would only limit Cat’s abilities as the two energies interacted. Luckily, they had an expert to bring in on the issue.

Dave was a wellspring of knowledge. Apparently, his home universe had a method of rapidly conveying vast quantities of information, so he simply hopped back over to collect some knowledge and came back with that and some materials. The Necroverse he came from overflowed with Necromancers, and knowledge about their tools and weapons was common. Unc and Caeden took the information and material and added their own Starry Sea bent to them.

Working with Deathsteel was different. Caeden was careful to use no shroud, and they worked it with Necroflame rather than their normal forge fire. Dave was kind enough to supply the fire, and his control over it was excellent.

Some experimenting went into their efforts, but the end result was just as magnificent as Lily’s armor and gloves. A five-and-a-half foot long staff of Deathsteel embedded with scales from a death dragon acted as Cat’s weapon. Caeden and Unc managed to find a ratio and positioning of scales that allowed the death Ki to interact with the Necromantic Mana. It cut down on ambient Ki interference for Cat’s spells, allowing them to be more stable and efficient.

Her armor was a cloak and robe set woven from the cured hide of a Funeral Hound and lined with feathers from a Death Bird. Both were natural inhabitants of the Necroverse and steeped in Necromantic Mana. They wear solid protection, especially with the small, strategically placed plates of Deathsteel set at key locations.

Erik’s set was a return to standard practice. He was still mainly a martial artist, so a loose robe with the strongest defenses Caeden and Unc could manage without limiting mobility was the best they could do. It wasn’t exactly an innovation on the same level as Cat’s and Lily’s, but it was supremely made and functional.

His weapon choice was more interesting, as it was something Erik had dreamed up himself. He wanted a set of chain whips. But more than that, he wanted them to also double as projectiles, though he offered up no idea as to how that would work.

Much research had gone into it, but Unc and Caeden felt they had a solution. Both whips would have to be controlled through and bound to Erik’s Binding shroud, which he was perfectly happy with. They wrapped around his forearms and could be easily controlled at his whim. But the interesting part came from their second effect.

When strapped around his arms, the individual links would detach from each other and instead connect to bazubands that formed the second part of the weapon. Erik could will each link to fire off as a projectile, and every link was individually infused with its own element, creating a wide variety of attacks. Erik was ecstatic with the end result and finally had a weapon added to his arsenal beyond the half-assed cloth binding Caeden had made for him.

Asherta was the most difficult of them all. After hours of debate and back-and-forth arguments, Unc finally threw his hands up in the air. “Eh, she’s strong and can cover herself in dragon scales. We’ll give her a big stick and call it a day.”

So that’s how Asherta ended up with a club twice as thick as her leg and as long as she was tall when she took her adult form.

And she loved it.