Mel’Zally found the new Ethermen annoyingly tenacious. Her Infernal Incarnation spell transformed her physical body into a manifestation of pure energy, which made dodging the attacks coming her way almost hilariously easy. She was a flickering flame, disappearing and reforming in an instant. The sword and shield-wielding Etherman that had targeted her simply didn’t have the raw agility to keep up.

Normally, that would be the end of it. Her enemy couldn’t hit her, and she could hit them. That was a winning scenario. But this Etherman let her attacks wash against its buckler shield without an ounce of care. It may not be fast enough to catch her, but it was fast with its shield, and Mel hadn’t managed to get around the barrier it presented. And that shield was something else. As far as she could tell, it was the same material as the hull of the ship the Ethermen had arrived on.

So, the battle had quickly devolved into one of attrition. The Etherman’s shield wasn’t completely immune to her attacks, but it was highly resistant. In the same way, it wasn’t taking much effort for Mel to attack and dodge, but she was slowly spending her Infernal Mana. It seemed like their fight would come down to whether Mel ran out of Mana before the Etherman’s shield was destroyed.

Or at least, that’s what would have happened if not for one factor. Mel was paying attention to Dave’s fight against three of the Ethermen. She saw the moment he shifted gears, and how the Ethermen responded in kind. It gave her some insight into the sort of parameters the mostly artificial beings were working under.

They obviously had power to spare, which begged the question. Why were they holding back? With a sample size of three fights to go off of, Mel could only guess. But between how they had reacted to her, Dave, and Asherta, she was fairly confident in her answer. The Ethermen were using the minimum amount of power they could get away with to place themselves on equal footing with their given opponent.

If she took that as true, Mel could only really think of two good reasons for it. One, the Ethermen ran on a finite resource that they wanted to use as little of as possible. Two, the Ethermen grew more and more inefficient as they increased their energy expenditure, meaning that they higher their power output, the less stamina they had in an exponential curve.

Either way, the solution seemed obvious. The Ethermen didn’t want to fight at higher power outputs if they could avoid it. So, the answer was to do exactly that. With that in mind, Mel’Zally made the conscious choice to hold nothing back. Guttural words in Devilish rolled off her tongue, invoking her most potent combat spell, the basis for every victory she’d ever won against a stronger opponent.

“Domain: Infernal Paradise.” A deep red glow began to saturate the broken rubble and crack remains of the streets around her. The color seemed to overpower every other shade as it turned the very air monotone. The exact same thing was happening on a magical level, Infernal Mana overpowering every other esoteric energy in the surroundings until it was the only thing that remained. Even the Ki that perpetually soaked every iota of the Starry Sea was forced out.

The Etherman caught on immediately, its whole body shrouded in a visible shield of pearlescent white energy before the Infernal Mana could reach total saturation. The shield was enough to prevent the spell from driving the power from its body, but Mel could feel the pressure her spell was putting on the artificial warrior.

She didn’t have a single instant to feel smug. The sword extending from the Etherman’s arm began to glow with a similar white energy while the shield folded back into the other arm, only to be replaced by something like a railgun. Mel could barely react fast enough to dematerialize her body before a projectile of raw power blasted through the place where she’d once been. And it wasn’t a fraction of a second later that she had to repeat the process, the Etherman either tracking her teleport or simply having enough raw reaction speed to follow her that fast.

Suddenly, Mel found herself unable to form an attack as the Etherman went berserk, attacking her with a speed and ferocity incomparable to its former pace. She could barely stay ahead of it.

“I really hope I’m right, because it’ll get lucky with one of these shots eventually.” Mel thought to herself nervously, thrown by the magnitude of the Etherman’s speed and power. It had completely abandoned defense in an attempt to crush her as fast as possible. A reaction that fed into her hypothesis. She was almost certain she was right.

Now she just had to survive it.

{}

Dave deflected another nearly impossible fast spear thrust, the tip of the weapon barely more than a streak of pearlescent light heading for his helm. At the same time, a set of flying swords dueled with the sword Etherman, over a dozen blades acting together to put enough pressure on the machine-man to hold it back.

Thrusting back with his own spear, Dave tsked as yet another autonomous shield flew in the way, deflecting his blow enough to stop the spear Etherman from being impaled. Ever since Dave had stepped up his attacks, the only thing that had kept the two offensive Ethermen from dying was the dedicated and constant defense of the shield-wielder. Every time he was close, it interrupted with a perfectly timed block.

That frustration extended to even the myriad weapons he was constantly throwing at the shield user itself. Juxtaposed against the relatively incompetent attackers, the defensive Etherman was a savant. It was an odd sensation, one Dave had experienced few times before, even in his extremely long undeath. As a Death Knight, a matchup like this, where neither side could truly injure the other, was rare. He would have guessed that it would be even stranger as a War Wight.

That was the first thing that had clued him into the Ethermen’s strategy. The balance of power necessary to reach a combat rhythm like this was almost impossible to find naturally. In almost any fight, one side would gain an edge or enter the fight from a superior position. Riding a combat knife’s edge like this was insane. So, he reasoned that it had to be artificial. The Ethermen were deliberately keeping their power down.

Dave found that slightly demeaning, considering his strength. Then again, he was holding back too, so it was hardly fair. Even after he’d unleashed his full undeath aura, Dave still hadn’t used any magic during this fight, nor had he activated any of the dozens of enchantments on the artifact weapons he was using. This fight was pure martial skill so far.

That changed the moment Mel shifted the momentum of her own battle. He was, of course, familiar with her Infernal Paradise domain and Dave immediately recognized that she’d caught onto the same oddity he had. The response from her Etherman was telling. It went absolutely insane, attacking with the ferocity and force of a starving animal fighting for a side of beef.

Naturally, Dave was curious to see if he could get the same reaction. Plus, he was genuinely excited to see how he matched up against these advanced Ethermen going all out. It was time to bring forth everything he had to offer. More than he’d ever dared to use before. Because Dave wasn’t actually sure what he was capable of anymore.

“Undead Vitality”

“Necroflame Lifeblood”

“Vengeful Shroud”

“Heart of Decay”

“Lifeburner”

“Rotten Ruin”

“Necrotic Enhancement: Armament X47”

“Life-eating Edge X47”

…

On and on it went as Dave flooded himself and his weapons with every enhancement spell he knew. Unsurprisingly, there were many, many ways to increase the strength of an undead. And Dave knew almost all of them. He’d even made a few in his time. Fighting against more powerful opponents as a Death Knight had made him look into every bit of self-enhancement magic he could find, hoping to get an edge.

All that study, even into spells that he couldn’t use as a lowly Death Knight, was paying dividends right now. Dave was suddenly orders of magnitude stronger and sturdier, his aura even more decaying. Every wound he took would shower the attacker with sticky Necroflame infused blood and inflict them with powerful retributive curses. All his weapons gained an edge of refined, nearly solid Necroflame and had magic that would let some of their damage pass all defenses to directly attack the motive force powering his opponents, even machine creatures like the Ethermen.

This, plus a dozen other spells that made him faster, more resistant to external energy, and generally just better. Instantly, Dave’s already formidable abilities skyrocketed into a new dimension. He was processing his surroundings so fast that the spear heading toward his helm appeared to be moving at a quarter its previous speed. A casual flick of his wrist deflected the spear wide and Dave followed it up with a lightning-fast thrust. He was moving so much faster that the Etherman didn’t even react as the spear tip rapidly approached its chest plate.

So Dave was more than a little surprised when a shield interposed itself between his spear and the Etherman. Its speed somehow yet still faster than even his enhancements could match. Dave was blown away. The Ethermen had taken a moment to power up before, even if it had been only a matter of seconds. How had the shield Etherman managed to increase its speed so drastically in a fraction of a second?

He got his answer a moment later when his artifact spear contacted the shield and just kept going, passing through the metal like it was wet paper in front of a cannonball. It literally disintegrated in front of the destructive power his spear was coated in. The shields had to work on some kind of reflexive reaction, not conscious intervention by the Ethermen.

Despite his enhanced speed, the Etherman still managed to lunge backward enough to avoid being impaled on Dave’s spear. Instead, it just received a vicious hole on its chest plate going several inches deep and exposing some of the internal workings. But he didn’t managed to get all the way through or damage whatever power source was running these Etheremen.

To their credit, the Ethermen reacted with even more ferocity than Dave expected. All three facing him surged with white light that burned from the gaps in their armor and coated the edges of their weapons and shields. The dual-sword Etherman opened ports along its sides, revealing four more arms with blades of their own, giving it three swords to a side, six total. The spear Etherman collapsed its weapon and swapped it for a long-barreled railgun and something that Dave feared might be a grenade launcher.

The shield Etherman was the most drastic change, its shields flying to surround it in layers of plating that rapidly ocellated around it, creating a multi-layered barrier. Bolts of white energy surged between the shields before sparking off and jumping to the injured formerly spear-wielding Etherman. When the bolts struck, the hole in its chest visibly shrunk. A defensive juggernaut healer, a melee fighter, and a ranged attacker. This was the formation arrayed against Dave.

Rather than let them set the pace, he Spirit Walked in front of the ranged Etherman, spear already thrusting forward as half his flaying armaments harried the healer. If he could keep it occupied, then he could destroy the other two before they could do anything.

Or rather, that was his plan. Instead, Dave was surprised to find two swords heading for his sides even as he appeared from the soul plane. The melee Etherman had closed the distance nearly as fast as he had, just on raw speed. It had also managed to predict exactly where he’d appear, something Dave wasn’t expecting at all.

Deciding to adjust to the new circumstances rather than lean into his previous plan, Dave dismissed his spear and shield, instead choosing two hand axes from his arsenal. Jets of Necroflame produced by one of his many enhancement spells boosted his movements to shift his footing and block the two swords. Of course, that left four more that followed up the attack. But Dave already knew that. He needed to test a hypothesis.

The swords slammed into him, two at his shoulders, seemingly trying to sever his arms. The other two headed for his hips, trying to take out his legs. The Etherman wanted to amputate all four of his limbs in one move. The swords, coated in white power, cut through his armor with a notable amount of difficulty, though they made it through. They carved through his flesh, down to his bones, where they were stopped dead.

The moment they stopped, the Etherman was hit by no less than four different retributive spells causing its metal body to start smoking and warping under the invasive, malignant energy. The four blades in Dave’s body soaked in his caustic, enhanced undead blood, rapidly rusting and warping even worse than the rest of the Etherman.

Faster than DEave could even follow, the Etherman disengaged, using an actual teleport to disappear in a flash of white and reappear next to the healer. But Dave had not been idle while it struck him. It left behind two severed arms that fell to the ground in front of Dave, cut from it courtesy of his axes.

As white bolts of healing energy so dense they rendered the melee Etherman nearly invisible struck it, Dave knew he’d been right. The sword-wielding one had sacrificed nearly all its defensive capabilities for overwhelming speed. Its attack power had even fallen a bit from before. But it had managed to surpass even Dave’s Spirit Walking, so that loss hadn’t been for nothing.

This was also the moment that the ranged Etherman behind Dave decided to remind him it was present with a burst of burning white energy that slammed into his back, throwing him forward as he tucked and rolled into a Spirit Walk that took him after the melee Etherman. Only for Dave’s axe chop to bounce off a shield sent by the healer. Apparently, it could still do that.

“Well, this got significantly more dangerous.” Dave mused as he received another series of cuts, simultaneously soaking the melee fighter in retributive damage. “I wonder how long they can keep this up. Because I can’t keep these spells going forever.”