Dave watched from down below as the new Revolution reinforcements opened fire on his comrades. To say he was surprised wouldn’t have been entirely accurate, but it was close. It had been a long, long time since Dave had been truly surprised by anything. In a combat setting, at least. His evolution had been worldly surprising.

So, despite the sudden rapid increase in the Revolution's overall threat level, Dave could say with confidence that it was within his expectations. What he’d seen so far definitely put this new vessel’s power on the outer edge of his predictions. It was a ship capable of piercing through Lily’s shielding clouds, something he would have put as very unlikely.

But the more dangerous factor here was their response to Mel’s Reactive Shielding. The follow-up attack was nearly perfect to counter the new obstacle they were experiencing, something that suggested a high level of adaptability. Of course, none of his hypotheses had been proven just yet, but the implications remained.

Dave would prefer to face an overwhelmingly powerful enemy rather than an adaptable one any day. Because ultimately, even the most powerful opponent could be planned around with enough time and creative thinking. An adaptive enemy was essentially impossible to completely guarantee victory against, no matter what you did.

Anticipating what was about to happen, Dave dismissed the mid-rank undead from his forces while collapsing the Necroflame Wall above his Cage of Bone. Maintaining it had likely become pointless, and all the Ethermen were already dealt with.

His thinking was proven correct a moment later when the many-faceted shape of Mel’s Reactive Shielding started rapidly diving toward the ground. Lily and Mel no doubt came to the exact same conclusion; neither of them was well-suited to deal with the type of long-distance battle they were currently facing. Rather, they were better served moving the combat zone closer to their allies in case they needed backup.

The newly-arrived ship didn’t leave them alone, to no one’s surprise. There was an argument to be made that preventing Lily and Asherta from destroying etherships was enough to neutralize them as a threat, but Dave doubted that their enemy would fall into that trap. They’d want to immediately end the threat, permanently. No doubt they’d long ago realized that Dave’s group was the only shrouded on the island capable of ignoring the suppression field, a fact that was an imminent threat to the Revolution’s operation here.

Instead of letting them run amok so long as they left the ships alone, the Revolution was going to do their best to end them here and now. A fact made supremely obvious when the new ship chased them toward the surface at a blistering pace. Dave was concerned that his comrades wouldn’t be able to make it in time.

Which meant he had to interfere.

For the first time in a while, Dave tapped into one of his primary abilities as a War Wight. Spirit Walk triggered, his undead form slipping onto the soul plane. Normally, anything physical entering the soul plane was a one-way ticket to being instantly incorporated, but the nature of the magic Dave had used to enter also protected him in the inherently hostile dimension.

The soul plane didn’t like physical material, and the natural laws of the plan would have ripped him apart if they could. This was one of the reasons Spirit Walk was such a rare ability. Traveling the soul plane required a level of power and access to strong concepts to survive.

Of course, that difficulty came with some strengths to match the difficulty in acquisition. For one thing, the lack of physical substance or, indeed, physics in the soul plane meant that distance itself wasn’t really a concept either. So, a single step took Dave from the ground all the way up to several hundred feet in the air, right in front of the descending enemy vessel.

Rather than strike with any real technique or spell, Dave decided to simply flare his inherent mana, slamming it into the ship. Instantly, Necroflame erupted across the bow and started trying to eat into the metal. Dave wasn’t all that surprised when the effect was more visual than anything. The Revolution had ample opportunity to realize that the undead fire was highly effective against their typical materials. They wouldn’t have sent a response ship they didn’t think could withstand the sickly green flame.

That being said, he was still more than a little curious about the metal in question. It held up remarkably well, barely showing even a single spot of rot before Dave’s intuition had him using Spirit Walk to take a step behind the ship. Not a moment too soon, as a dozen of the lasers that had attacked Asherta and Lily slammed into his former position.

Dave genuinely wasn’t sure how his armor would have held up to that much energy but, luckily, he didn’t have to find out. For all that this ship was adaptable, it couldn’t deal with an enemy that vanished without a trace only to appear right behind them.

Another benefit of traveling the soul plane, practically no one could see into that plane.

Deciding to throw out a genuine attempt to damage the ship, Dave pulled a weapon from his Shadow Storage at the same time he Spirit Walked another hundred feet or so up above the ship. He reappeared with a wicked-looking lance in his grasp. Like most of the weapons found in the Necroverse or during his work as a mercenary undead for Necromancers across existence, it was not a nice lance.

The design was overly long and slim, far less bulky than most lances. At that same time, the length of the lance was riddled with barbs and jagged, serrated edges at random spots. Dave knew the weapon had been intended to face massed soldiers on an open field, to be driven through the first rank and on into the second and third behind, the added edges making any wound a devastating bleeder, even for more hearty races that could take a typical through-and-through puncture with relative ease.

Of course, the brutal shape wasn’t much use against a target of metal and crystal like the enemy ship, but that wasn’t why he was using this particular weapon. No, he was using it because it was cursed. It had slain so many in such cruel fashion that their resentment and hatred had leaked into the formerly non-magical lance. Now, anyone struck by the lance would experience the pain and suffering of all its former victims.

Dave had found out long ago that the effect, interestingly enough, also worked on undead, who couldn’t normally feel pain at all. Later experiments had revealed that the curse extended to many beings that normally couldn’t feel pain. Elementals, automata, even sentient or sapient weapons. It was a persistent and potent curse.

With that in mind, Dave wondered. How would it affect a mere sophisticated tool? Like the ship.

Dave fell, holding tight to the cursed lance, making sure it was aimed center mass. As of yet, the ship hadn’t noticed him, no doubt still confused by what was essentially teleportation. At the last moment before he struck, the ship shifted, no doubt belatedly trying to get out of the way. He struck the energy shield and passed right through, the curse-enhanced penetrating power of the lance laughing in the face of such half-hearted defense.

If Dave had to guess, he was pretty sure the shields had been running at minimum power to divert more energy to those devastating weapons. The crew had likely thought they’d have time to react to an incoming attack and raise the shields. Something he’d disproved twice, first by Spirit Walking inside the bubble, and the second time by having a weapon that was especially good at piercing defenses.

The lance slammed into the metal and scraped along the surface, barely leaving a scratch. For whatever their energy shielding lacked, this ship had several times the material durability of the other ships in the air. But that scratch alone should have been enough to inflict the curse. However, Dave wasn’t waiting around to find out. Another Spirit Walk put him in the sky overhead once more.

Dave wasn’t exactly surprised when the ship showed no signs of the curse taking hold. It had been a long shot and more of a test of the ship’s capabilities. Dave had seen vessels with more than enough sentience for the lance’s curse to take hold, and the adaptability it’d displayed made him worried for a moment. Now he could confirm that the ship wasn’t AI or Magisoul controlled, which was a relief.

What happened next brought a healthy dose of that worry back.

The ship exploded in a wave of discordant energy only moments after Dave had landed his attack. Just looking at it with his undead vision, the War Wight wasn’t sure what it would have done to him had he still been on the ship. Immediately after, another energy barrier sprang up, but this one was so dense it was actually visible, leaving a slightly blue opaqueness in the air around the ship.

Again, Dave found the adaptability concerning. If he hadn’t just confirmed the ship itself wasn’t sapient, he would have guessed that. As it was, now he was left with few viable explanations for such a fast and accurate response. Namely, a computationally capable but separate pilot. Namely, an Etherman. Flesh-based lifeforms generally lack the mental capabilities to handle the level of variance the ship was showing, especially in such a small time frame.

Dave had to, for the first time since coming to the Starry Sea, consider that he had to take this fight seriously. His first response was immediately obvious.

Dave took a step through the soul plane, ending up back on the ground and inside his Cage of Bone, where he found Lily, Mel, Sky, and an injured Asherta. After all, his whole reason for heading up to the ship was to stall them long enough for his comrades to reach the ground. Which he did with time to spare. He only had to stop them for a moment with how fast both Sky and the ship had been moving.

“Well, that was informative.” Dave smiled widely, enjoying the sudden escalation. “The new ship might actually be able to give me a good fight.”

“What did you figure out?” Lily asked, ignoring his words.

“It’s almost certainly manned by Ethermen, ones significantly more advanced than what we’ve faced so far. The ship is highly adaptive, no doubt in response to shrouded and their widely variable skill sets. I’m only extrapolating, but I’m guessing the crew has a similar level of adaptability. This smacks of an experimental setup tailored to dealing with shrouded.”

“That was my guess as well.” Lily nodded. “But the fact that they can deal with you and Mel’Zally indicates that they aren’t focused around disrupting Ki.”

“No, whoever is designing all this went broader than that.” Dave shook his head, the edge of a thought catching him. “I say it's a force built to deal with shrouded, but that might not be correct. In fact, taken in a vacuum, this feels more like an exploratory force. Not particularly powerful in any given direction outside of dealing massive amounts of neutral damage. I only thought shrouded given the context, but that can’t be true.”

“How so?” Mel jumped in.

“Because the same person that made the Ethermen is the one who made the suppression field,” Lily explained. “He has shown knowledge and capability in interfering with Ki directly. If that ship was designed to deal with shrouded, I’d expect them to lean into that.”

“So it’s about the boss, and it’s about me.” Dave sighed. “The enemy knows we have a magic shrouded with access to places outside the Starry Sea, and they incorporated that into their plans.”

“Has to be.” Lily glared up through the bone ceiling overhead. “I would love to know how far their information goes.”

“Well, all of this needs to be set aside because they’re about to come and get us,” Dave said, looking through the senses of a Banshee watching the ship. It had come down to just a couple hundred feet off the ground and hovered there for a few minutes. Now, a hatch had opened in the seemingly seamless surface as figures emerged.

“We need to figure out how to take them down.”