Dave immediately realized that the cloud around the flagship was not, in fact, a cloud. Rather, the raw size of the flagship made everything around it seem smaller by comparison. The ship itself was miles above the Starry Sea, and its overall size was comparable to the island below. Keeping that in mind, it took the War Wight a moment to fully process what he was looking at.

“It’s those Ethermen, thousands of them.” He shook his head. “Boss, we’re going to have to go full throttle on this one.”

Indeed, the cloud was actually a collection of flying humanoid figures riddled with ethertech throughout their partially fleshy bodies. Some of them looked familiar, like the one that Caeden’s team had fought on the dragon continent. Others seemed more heavily armed and armored, like mobile weapons platforms glued onto human frames and set loose. All of them were flooding out of the flagship and diving directly toward Cat’s undead army.

“Say, Dave,” She watched the incoming enemy force calmly. “How much would you want to bet that we can reanimate those things?”

“Uhh,” Dave had to actually think on that one for a moment. He hadn’t gotten that far in his thought process, more focused on how they were going to kill that many in the first place. He knew just how powerful these things could be.

“I mean, that’s what a Necromancer does, right?” Cat asked. “The most dangerous thing about the undead in an open battlefield is their ability to turn their victims into allies.”

Dave felt a brief burst of pride at her statement. He’d done his best to train Cat in the art of necromancy, but she could be an apathetic student at the best of times. There was many a time where he felt like she was humoring him more than anything. It was intensely gratifying to know that at least some of his lessons had gotten through.

“Yes, I think we could. At least, the parts of those things that are still living humans could be reanimated. I’m not sure how that will interact with the ethertech built into their bodies. I’ve seen cyborgs and other technologically augmented people turned into undead, but that wasn’t ethertech.” Dave shrugged. “We’ll just have to try and find out. But that’s not the problem right now. We’ve got a minute at most before they get here, and I think we’re outnumbered.”

It was hard to get a count on the Ethermen descending toward them, but Dave wasn’t confident in them having the numerical advantage. That was a problem. Typically, undead managed to win battles through overwhelming numbers. If they were on the losing side of that metric, they would be fighting an uphill battle.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. Cat’s undead army was of higher quality than basically any other Dave had seen. Her average foot soldier was orders of magnitude better than most lesser undead that would be fielded in the Necroverse. Even there, at the heart of necromancy, most armies were largely composed of basic Zombies and Skeletons attacking with their teeth.

By comparison, every single one of Cat’s soldiers was armed and armored with infused weapons or deathsteel. Either way, they were weapons capable of dealing real damage, even to augmented machine-human hybrids like the Ethermen.

“I’ve got an idea for that.” Cat’s eyes flashed mischievously in a way that Dave found deeply disturbing. “In the meantime; General.” Her tone suddenly shifted. “I charge you with command of all of my forces. Hold the enemy back and prevent them from reaching our base. I’ll work on getting you the forces you need. Just hold them back.”

Dave grinned, feeling the bubbling excitement rising inside his dead and still chest. It had been a while since he last commanded a force this size against such a vast foe. More than that, it would be his first time doing it as a War Wight.

Of course, there was that little fight with the ant using shrouded, but Dave didn’t count that as an actual battle since everyone involved was holding back to obey the rules of the event. More than that, he’d been constraining himself to hide his power back then, when they were still worried about this whole Tournament business.

Now, it was just going to be a no-holds-barred war with him as the lead general. Nothing got his nonexistent blood pumping more than a good massive battlefield chock full of the dead and dying.

Dave saluted crisply before willing his helm and weapons to manifest. “Yes boss! I’ll drive your enemies before you until they’re lamenting their cursed existence. Just keep feeding me warriors and I’ll see it through.”

Cat smirked. “I expect nothing less. To your post, General.”

Dave whipped around, no longer paying Cat any mind. Instead, his attention dived deep into the Death Link. In moments, Dave used his heightened and elevated mental capacity as a War Wight to familiarize himself with every aspect of the forces under his command.

The next moment, commands started flying from him toward the forces he needed mobilized. That meant basically all of them. He immediately sent a few Banshees up toward the descending cloud of Ethermen to get a more accurate enemy count.

At the same time, Dave had the twenty long-range undead the Elder Lich and Dread Lord had created to focus on the incoming enemy and open fire. They had ten Bone Lancers and an equal number of Blight Throwers at their disposal.

The Bone Lancers were inhuman spindly masses of bone that could fire and recall massive spikes across vast distances, hooking enemies and reeling them in like fish to be slaughtered. The Blight Throwers closely resembled a primitive powdered explosive cannon with a round barrel body made of necrotic flesh. But instead of balls of metal, a Blight Thrower fired concentrated masses of Necroflame that would rapidly rot whatever it hit.

Both opened fire, hardly having to aim with the density of the descending enemy. The Bone Lancers were reeling in a new Etherman every second which was swarmed and destroyed by a dedicated team he’d set up to handle exactly that. The Blight Throwers simply melted everything they hit into a rotten mess of wet fleshy bits and rusted metal.

It didn’t take long for the Ethermen to catch on and spread out, lowering the number of them the long-range undead were taking out with each shot. But the damage was already done. Dave had one of the Ethermen captured by the Bone Lancers thrown through the Entrance Blade to give the Bladeborne a chance to take one apart.

That alone would hopefully bring dividends to this battle as it continued. Dave was sure that the force they were dealing with now wasn’t all the Ethermen on that flagship. It was massive beyond belief with more than enough room to hold several times the number of enemies currently coming their way. They’d need a better counter once whoever was running the show up above realized that the force they’d sent out wouldn’t be enough.

The incoming army didn’t make it to the surface intact, and not only due to the undead’s efforts. Lily and Asherta, along with Sky, were also in the swarm’s path. Dave watched on as a number of them were shredded by bursts of ice, rock, molten metal, dragon claws, and a burning stream of light that Sky shot from her beak.

It was a stark difference between the wholesale slaughter going on above and the desperate battle their whole team had with a single Etherman. It was perhaps the most illuminating indicator of just how much everyone had grown in power during their stay in the Forge.

Attacks that before would have bounced off the Ethermen’s resilient energy shields and metal armor instead tore through those defenses with a fury and speed that was almost unbelievable. But despite that deadly difference, the portion of their team flying above was too busy dealing with the etherships to spare much more than a cursory effort at thinning the herd.

Equally unfortunate was Dave’s knowledge that his own army wouldn’t be nearly as effective on the Ethermen. He had no doubt that he would likely lose three to five undead for every Etherman they took out, and that was with him and several other stronger mid-rank undead bringing up the curve.

Of course, none of that mattered if the enemy was allowed to simply attack from overhead. No doubt whoever was commanding these Etherman had likely expected them to simply rain down on the undead from above with little in the way of recourse for the ground-based army.

Unfortunately for them, this was not Dave’s first time facing a foe composed entirely of aerial units. It was extremely rare among undead; a whole unit of them was essentially unheard of in the Necroverse. But Dave had traveled far and wide. He’d experienced more kinds of fights than anyone from this single universe could dream of.

There were a couple necromancy spells that worked as effective anti-air barriers. In previous instances, Dave had to rely on another undead spellcaster or whatever Necromancer summoned him to do the actual spellwork. Death Knights had a limited capacity for magic. But now that he was a War Wight, those spells were well within his grasp.

Raising a hand overhead, Dave began chanting rapidly and quietly. No one in this universe should have any knowledge of spellcasting, but their mnemonic concept was close enough that loud and obvious chanting could make him a target. He didn’t need to deal with that.

Rather than just one spell, Dave was actually stacking two on top of each other. There were a wide variety of shielding spells in the necromancy school of magic, much like any fully fleshed out and studied field. Of course, it wasn’t the best branch for making shields, but it could do the work just fine with a little creativity.

Dae hadn’t failed to notice that the Ethermen were surprisingly vulnerable to concentrated Necroflame, and he planned to utilize that knowledge with his first barrier. Finishing the long chant, sickly green fire flowed out of Dave’s upraised hand like a flood, flowing up over twenty feet into the sky before spreading out to blanket the army in a ceiling of burning emerald.

“Wall of Rot.” Dave finished the chant. Technically, this spell had been designed to form a vertical barricade and act more as a trap. It could be set to trigger under certain conditions and would remain active for a considerable amount of time. He’d placed it over them because the positioning of the spell was mutable. Wall of Rot’s main downside was that the wall itself was physically permeable. If something could resist the effects of the wall, they could pass right through.

That was where his second spell came in. This one was actually less complex and thus took far less time to chant. Moments later, Dave finished. “Cage of Bone.” Rising up on four sides and surrounding the entire undead army, a wall of bones burst from the earth and rubble to form a dome overhead, stopping just beneath the Wall of Rot.

Cage of Bone was an interesting spell. It had been designed as a torture confinement and isolation device and actually tapped into the concepts of Despair and Isolation. That gave the spell one strange but extremely useful property. The more ground the spell covered, the stronger it got.

Dave wasn’t a spell scholar, but his understanding was that because Isolation was part of the spell, the more that was included inside it, the more the spell worked to separate what it contained from the outside world. It was supposed to be a trade-off. How comfortable were you willing to let your prisoner be to make sure they were trapped?

Either way, it had become a staple of Dave’s defensive measures ever since he figured out that it could act as an excellent funneling tool. He’d used it many times in a variety of scenarios. Effectively, his army was now protected from a highly mobile enemy in all directions but one. At the same time, he’d turned their preferred direction of approach into a dangerous deathtrap.

Normally, cutting off your line of sight to the enemy was a bad idea, but Dave was undead. He was tapped into the Death Link and could watch the approaching enemy through the eyes of his Banshee scouts.

“They’re turning,” He messaged the entire army through the Link. “Front lines, prepare for contact.”