“I think Lily is using the Forge.” Dave looked up at the sky, watching another ship slip down, wrapped inside a mass of dark stone.

“Obviously,” His Mistress snorted. “How else would she be hiding all those ships she’s dumping? Never mind how much shroud she’s using. She has to be dipping into the Forge basically constantly to be able to pull off something like that. Creating that much stuff is more than she’s capable of all in one shot.”

“I’m still getting used to the limits of shrouds,” Dave admitted, rubbing the back of his bald, pale head in embarrassment. He was supposed to be the tactical master here. He’d spent eons learning about all kinds of magics across the spans of existence, but he’d had trouble grasping the bounds of shrouds. Something about them simply didn’t mix with all of his previous understanding of magic.

Still, he was embarrassed that it had taken this long for him to catch on to what Lily was doing if his boss was treating it like something obvious. Then again, she was a native. Dave had noticed that this whole aura concept they used could subconsciously gather a ridiculous amount of information for them. Most likely Cat had felt Lily using and refilling her shroud over and over again without even realizing it.

“Well, Lily has cleared out a decent area for us to work with here. How long until the long-range undead are put together?” Cat wasn’t watching the skies. Her focus was centered fully on her army. They hadn’t been idle as Lily and Asherta work above.

As soon as the Revolution armada shifted from all-out assault to recovery and consolidation, Cat and Dave had sprung into action. His boss had pulled out all the stops, summoning two high-rank undead and an army of ten thousand other undead, a thousand of which were mid-rank.

Normally, the Summon Grand Undead Army spell would have summoned a third high-rank undead to act as a general. But Cat had Dave. Instead of bringing a second general into the mix, Cat had modified the spell to tie into Dave instead, making him acting general. It cut way down on the spell’s mana cost.

Even better, after he’d transformed during the Bind Familiar spell Cat had cast on him, Dave was a War Wight, a pinnacle-rank undead. He was, by far, the strongest undead here. That made it relatively simple to get everyone moving immediately.

At times like this, Dave couldn’t help but reflect on how much easier his life would have been if he’d been made like this. He’d suffered no end of inconvenience and annoyance in his younger days as a Death Knight.

Undead with a sapient consciousness had an inherent sense of hierarchy based on their rank. To be fair, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, that hierarchy actually reflected the power an undead held. A mid-rank undead could almost never hope to challenge a high-rank undead. In fact, undead of a higher rank were also almost always smarter than their mid-rank fellows. A side effect of a more sound soul.

Dave just so happened to be one of those exceptions. He’d trained and trained and trained for ages to gain enough knowledge and comrades to overcome even a pinnacle-rank undead. Even as a Death Knight. But that didn’t automatically make other undead respect him. That was something only rank could do. More often than not, most undead assumed he was some kind of huckster, an imposter pretending at valor and strength.

There was a time that he embraced that notion, even if it made doing his job harder. For a long time, he had just wanted to disappear into the background, something that being a Death Knight made easy. He let others stand out and let everyone around him think he was some sort of sycophant hanging onto their coattails.

Then he started his summoning tower. He wanted to travel beyond the Necroverse, see more realities beyond his home. At that point, his underwhelming strength at the very bottom of mid-rank was no longer an asset. Undead just naturally had less respect for him, even his own employees.

Now, that was no longer an issue. Whenever he’d led a force this size before, Dave had always felt a certain level of friction through the Death Link. It was something he’d learned to work around, an annoyance he’d learned to live with.

That friction was completely gone, vanished like smoke. Ten thousand undead sensed his position through the Death Link and simply fell in line. It was natural for them to obey a pinnacle-rank undead, especially a Spirit of War like him. Now, he was made to lead armies so vast they boggled the mind.

Compared to that potential, this force of ten thousand was tiny. Indeed, compared to the armada overhead, this force wasn’t nearly large enough. But that was where the Elder Lich and Dread Lord came in. Both of these high-rank undead were notable for their capacity to produce quality lesser-rank undead by the thousands.

The Elder Lich was a skeleton wrapped in a high-quality robe artifact of white fabric and gold thread. The look didn’t really match the normal undead aesthetic, but Dave wasn’t about to critique his taste. The Dread Lord was somehow worse, being a hulking mass of flesh that didn’t rot only because of the massive quantities of Necrotic Mana coursing through his empty veins. He wore only a loincloth and a few plates of deathsteel placed along his arms and torso.

Both were churning out new undead at an absurd pace. Despite their best efforts, most of the people their forces had found so far were dead. Many were mangled collections of flesh rent asunder by the cavalcade of force raining from the sky. Dave couldn’t help but once more be happy he was an undead, as seeing this level of carnage would likely scar most mortals.

Instead of letting all those dead bodies go to waste, his boss had brought in two experts at turning a loose collection of flesh and bone into a soldier ready to fight until it passed on. The pair worked well together. This particular Elder Lich had a special fondness for Skeletons, and the Dread Lord was more interested in creating fleshy Abominations.

Instead of letting her newly formed forces languish without proper protection, this was where Cat had decided to tap into the Forge. Dave was unbelievably jealous of his boss for having access to something like the Blade Forge, and nothing showed off why more than the sight unfolding before his eyes.

A small Entrance Blade sat next to the Elder Lich as it worked. From it spewed an endless stream of weapons and armor of every description, all of which went into the Undead Soldiers the Lich was making. Instead of basic Skeletons, Cat would have a force of armed and armored undead ready for combat. In fact, the added armor would increase every aspect of the lesser undead, making them all smarter, faster, and stronger.

Similarly, the Dread Lord was digging handfuls of weapons and armor and shoving them into the mass of flesh he was sculpting into Abominations. Now, instead of hulking walls of muscles and skin, they would also have slabs of steel and claws of magical metal built into their bodies.

But none of this had anything to do with his Mistress’s question. She’d asked how the long-range units were coming along. Cat wasn’t content to let Lily and Asherta have all the fun with the armada hovering overhead. She’d commanded her high-rank undead to set aside the best materials to make some stronger mid-rank undead designed to deal with the ships far above.

“We only have twenty so far. The only corpses of sufficient quality are the shrouded, and not many of them died. Most of the corpses the search and rescue teams have recovered are unshrouded.” Dave explained. Indeed, the unshrouded outnumber the shrouded one hundred to one in the first place. Their lack of inherent defenses had left them particularly vulnerable to the initial barrage and subsequent bombardment. Among the rubble, their bodies were by far the most common.

“Hmm,” Cat gazed along the broken terrain her forces were picking over. In the absence of an enemy, the extra forces she’d summoned had been set to reinforce the initial group. That meant even more undead sifting through the rubble and guarding those they pulled out as they were escorted toward the arena Caeden had claimed as their base.

“It’s bothering you as well, then,” Dave nodded. He could feel it through their familiar bond. His boss was unsettled, and he knew why.

‘They aren’t doing anything.” Cat voiced what they’d both been thinking.

“Yes,” Dave nodded. They’d expected that, after a literal army appeared right beneath them, the Revolution ships would start panicking or counterattacking. Or at least doing something. Their most likely goal was to kill the entire island. An army would definitely get in the way of that.

More than those paltry facts, the existence of Cat’s forces indicated that there was still shrouded that could use their aura despite the suppression field. That alone should have at least a few ships rushing to strike them down. Really, they’d expected some kind of overt response long before the barrage ended.

Instead, the Revolution forces had only reacted to Lily and Asherta, a direct assault. They’d ignored Cat’s army, even though their efforts clearly ran against the Revolution’s goals. That, tactically, made no sense. Yes, Lily and Asherta had tied up the focus of the etherships directly over their heads, but that didn’t stop other ships from farther out from moving in to attack them.

“There is no way they haven’t noticed us. The fact that they’re doing nothing about it is…Not good.” Cat sighed. “They have to be planning something. Do you think they’re waiting for the others to take out Lily and Asherta?”

“Could be.” Dave nodded. That had been his first assumption. “They aren’t on a timer; we are. The longer we take, the more people die. Meanwhile, that only plays to their benefit. They might remain passive purely because they feel they don’t actually have to do anything in the first place. But I find that unlikely.”

“Why’s that?”

“Simple,” Dave waved his hand overhead. “The fight with Lily’s group. They aren’t really doing anything about her either.”

“They’re pretty clearly attacking her.” Cat raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, but how much? There is literally only one threat to them right now, and that’s her and Asherta. No one else can even reach them. And yet only the etherships directly around her are actually engaging. When they ran out of munitions, the flagship only sent enough reinforcements to replace those already in combat.”

“So, what? The rest of the fleet is busy achieving their actual objective. Diverting all their attention to Lily is counterproductive.” Cat shrugged. “They aren’t here to fight Lily in the first place.”

“Under normal circumstances, maybe.” Dave acknowledged. “But boss, they have all the time in the world. So long as that suppression field is up, no one is leaving this island. They could fully stop their bombardment, and nothing would change. They literally have!”

He gestured toward the ships above, all of whom were recovering for their next barrage. “So it’s not like they feel some sort of need to constantly continue their attack. Why wouldn’t they completely focus on the only people actively threatening them? If I had their resources, I would have stopped the bombardment and turned all that firepower to drowning out that one threat until it was buried in the rumble so far it would never see the light again.”

“So they’re planning something.”

“Yes.”

“I already said that.”

Dave sighed. “Yes, boss. Good job.”

“Oh, hush. I figured it out based on the lack of pushback we were getting down here. They have no reason to give us free rein, same as Lily. It’s obvious that they just aren’t worried about us for some reason.” Cat frowned. “It’ll be soon. They probably expect us to get cocky and start to relax. That would be a normal shrouded response.”

“Yeah, I think it’s already started.” Dave stared up at the flagship. Or, more accurately, the dark cloud currently forming around it. “We’ve got incoming!”