“I know Caeden sent us up here to deal with the ships, but this is a lot of ships,” Lily muttered to herself, looking up at the armada overhead. The sky above Baserock was practically choked on Revolution warships in all shapes and sizes. It was the oddest and most varied collection of etherships Lily had ever seen.

Many looked like they had been cobbled together from whatever the Revolution could get their hands on, which was probably exactly how they’d been made. No doubt stealing parts from the CA’s shipyards was an easy way to make their own for the Revolution, rather than building from scratch.

But some of the ships, especially the larger ones, looked like more advanced and better-made versions of the same ships the CA produced. Like the designs themselves had been lifted and then improved upon before they made these new ships from the ground up. Seeing this, one thought immediately occurred to Lily.

“The Revolution must have their own shipyard somewhere.” It was the only thing that made sense. Especially once she considered the supermassive flagship, the one all the others surrounded like a defensive blockade. That was, as far as she knew, a unique ship on all the Starry Sea. They had to have their own shipyard to build it.

Something of that size would require custom-built parts; it was not something that could be cobbled together from existing pieces. Seeing the other advanced etherships only solidified what Lily had expected ever since she saw the flagship.

“Plan?” Asherta asked from behind her. They were both on Sky’s back. Lily’s Stellar Roc bonded had grown to her full size. Now that she was fully grown from her time in the Forge, Sky’s wingspan covered hundreds of feet and made her comparable to some of the middling-sized etherships overhead.

“Not much to it.” Lily shrugged, looking at her stoic friend over her shoulder. “We break through the ships overhead, enter the flagship, and destroy or disable the suppression field.”

“So, beat them all up.”

“Exactly.” It wasn’t the most complicated objective.

“Good. Big plans are boring.” Ahserta nodded, glaring at the ships overhead. “Attacks incoming.”

Lily whipped around to see a barrage of projectiles glowing with ether in many colors, from angry flaming reds to icy blues and sickly greens. It seems their approach had finally been noticed by the revolutionaries bombarding the city. Lily’s aura senses showed that they’d made it halfway from the ground to the lowest-hanging ships before they’d been noticed, which she considered to be pretty good.

But now their free ascent was over, and they’d have to start paying for every inch. Luckily, Lily and Asherta had the absolute advantage in aerial combat, as the Revolution was about to learn. The rain of glowing death headed their way never made it. Instead, they were interrupted by a mass of metallic particles filling the air courtesy of Lily’s Cloud splinter.

This cloud was something Lily had spent a long time perfecting. Just dense enough that there were no viable gaps but thin enough not to strain her shroud reserves. The particles were a mix of materials meant to be reactive with a wide variety of ethers and other metals, causing most projectiles to fail. The cloud was also heavy enough to deaden the momentum of most purely physical ranged attacks.

“Ash, if you could counter,” Lily asked, staring at the next wave of attacks coming their way after the first lit up her Anti-Attack Cloud mnemonic in a riot of explosive force and misfiring ether.

Asherta said nothing, instead choosing to crack her knuckles as blue scales began to grow all across her body, expanding to cover her from head to toe. The transformation didn’t stop there, though. It continued with horns sprouting from her head as her face lengthened into a scaly snout and wings began to emerge from her back. Asherta grew a tail as her feet and hands grew razor-sharp claws. Finally, her robes simply vanished, revealing a blue-scaled humanoid dragon.

This more extensive transformation was a product of several unique aspects of Asherta’s existence interacting. When Caeden evolved her shroud, she gained the Hoard domain. It took decades in the Forge for Caeden and Lily to understand just how massive a shift this was for their taciturn friend.

Despite her overwhelming physical capabilities, they figured out that Asherta’s connection to her draconic aspects was incredibly weak compared to its true potential. She was using a fraction of a fraction of the power and abilities she should, by all rights, have access to. They found this out once Asherta started tapping into that untapped potential and scaring the shit out of them.

According to Asherta, who had lived on a dragon-inhabited continent for an amount of time she wouldn’t express, dragons grew in strength in two ways. One, growing older. Age acted as a multiplier to the power of a dragon. The stronger they were to start with, the more age would grow that strength over time.

Because of her Age shroud, Asherta could be, physically, any age she wanted to be. For any normal dragon, this would be a one-way pass to nigh-unlimited power. A dragon with access to Asherta’s shroud could age themselves to the very peak of their power moments before their natural death and stay at that peak forever. Dragons never grew senile or weak in old age; they only got stronger until the moment of their death.

Unfortunately for Asherta, she was missing a crucial aspect of this combination. She lacked the base power most dragons had. Age was a multiplier, after all. If a baby dragon was born with a 1 on a scale, then Asherta was born at 0.00001.

Essentially, increasing her age with her shroud multiplied such a small amount of power that the gains never added up to much. Asherta ran out of shroud before she could gain enough age to appreciate the difference. This left Asherta with access to as little power as possible. There seemed to be a minimum threshold to the amount of her draconic heritage she could access, and she was at that minimum.

But there were two ways for dragons to gain strength and increase their natural abilities. Previously, Asherta never had a chance to use the second. Dragons could get stronger by collecting magical materials like the kind that Caeden used in ethersmithing and imprinting them with the dragon’s natural magic.

Asherta couldn’t use this method before for two reasons. Both were consequences of her half-human nature. First, she lacked the natural ability to imprint. It was a draconic trait she simply didn’t have, like her lack of a breath weapon. The addition of her new splinter solved that problem.

A hoard could be many things, but in draconic terms, it was the collection of imprinted materials a dragon gathered to increase their natural abilities. Asherta used it in that context. She created a dimensional subspace similar to Cat’s Shadow Storage spell in which to store her Hoard, something her new domain did easily. Anything that entered the space, her shroud magically imprinted for her, bridging the missing gap between Asherta and her draconic aspects.

But that only solved the first problem; the second still remained. Dragons could only imprint on materials that matched their magical affinity. For a normal dragon, this was something they sensed inherently. Even if they couldn’t, their breath weapon would be a telling indicator of their affinity. If a dragon breathed fire, it had a fire affinity. If it breathed poison, poison affinity. It wasn’t complicated.

Asherta was in the unfortunate position of lacking both a telling breath weapon and the ability to sense her affinity. Sometimes the color of scales could be a tell, but Asherta’s were a beautiful shade of blue. A lovely color, but one that left a multitude of options for her affinity. Luckily, she had access to the Forge and, with it, an infinite supply of any material she could dream of and the time to test them all.

Ultimately, it took a truly spectacular amount of time and dedication to find Asherta’s affinity. It was none of the obvious ones, like ice or water. But they found it eventually, and Caeden’s ability to produce an infinite amount of anything meant that Asherta’s Hoard was stocked to the brim instantly.

Consequently, the half-dragon's power exploded. Her transformation abilities reached a new level, and the changes didn’t stop there. Lily watched as her friend doubled in height while remaining bipedal. Her wingspan expanded to match, and her claws were now as long as Lily’s forearm.

Without hesitation, Asherta spread her wings, letting the air catch them and rip her off Sky’s back. She fell for only a moment before a massive beat carried her up. Without a passenger riding her back, Asherta had more mobility and maneuverability than Sky, and she rapidly spiraled upward toward the Revolution ships.

To their credit, the revolutionaries manning the gun batteries overhead recognized the threat Asherta posed. Many switched focus, easing up the pressure on Lily and Sky while they tried to drop the shimmering blue dragon out of the sky.

Asherta tucked and rolled, dipped and dove, while Lily did her best to run interference. More Anti-Attack Clouds formed, blocking shots aimed at Asherta. At the same time, they cut off line of sight, allowing the nimble flier to weave into unexpected positions and advance upward even faster.

They continued this block-and-dodge combo higher and higher, both using the split pressure created by the revolutionaries dividing their fire to move faster than they ever could have together. Asherta ascended far faster than Sky could, outpacing Lily and her bonded to reach the lowest ships first.

While Sky still had quite a distance to go, Asherta began her attack. If these etherships had been the same ones used by the CA, the half-dragon’s claws would have started taking chunks out of the sides with ease. Etherships, especially those built for war, were heavily reinforced with high-quality ether, but they weren’t designed to withstand the concentrated efforts of a dragon.

However, these weren’t CA etherships. These were heavily upgraded ships in the Revolution’s ultimate fleet meant to destroy an island containing a collection of some of the most powerful shrouded in the Starry Sea. They were several steps and a hundred years beyond the Central Authority’s designs.

Asherta didn’t even lay a claw on the first ship she reached. Instead, a dozen feet out from the hull, Asherta slammed into an invisible energy field that stopped her considerable armored bulk dead in the air. Considering she was, in fact, in the middle of the air, Asherta started falling. She tried to dig both her fore and hind claws into the bubble, but it was a totally frictionless surface. Instead, she had to drop away and build up speed to circle back around again.

Lily had wondered what these ships’ defenses would be, and she had been worried it might be something on this level. The amount of force that the shield just nullified was significant. Asherta was no slouch in the damage department, especially in her new form.

Worse, the Revolution showed an uncharacteristic and unappreciated level of caution and foresight. Normally, that shield and any other could simply be bypassed with her shroud’s aura. It would have made sense for the Revolution to lack any defense against it. They were flying with a flagship using a suppression field, after all. They shouldn’t have to worry about auras.

Unfortunately, someone in the Revolution either expected a shrouded to find a way to counter the suppression, or they were just paranoid because every ship had the same false aura that revolutionaries had to protect themselves in these sorts of circumstances. Lily couldn't just reach through the ship and freeze its engine solid. The only way these ships were going down was by getting through its defenses and taking them down as an unshrouded would. Direct physical attacks.

Fortunately, neither Asherta nor Lily was short of physical might.

The half-dragon circled for another run as Lily continued to block everything she could. This time, Asherta didn’t even bother trying to test her talons against the barrier. Instead, she maneuvered over the top of the ship, carefully keeping outside the invisible bubble blocking her off.

Then, she opened her jaws, and molten metal poured out.