The Ethermen didn’t react to Caeden’s words in the slightest. He wondered whether or not these ones could even understand speech at all. The one Caeden had fought first was designed to infiltrate human society with camouflage and its artificial shield, but these were obviously designed purely for combat. Maybe their maker decided language comprehension was unnecessary.

It didn’t matter to him, not really. Caeden had spoken more for his own benefit than theirs. It was cathartic to finally do something after acting as a glorified hotel and transportation hub as his friends rested in and moved through the Forge. He knew those functions were vital and had helped everyone keep fighting, but they had less visceral satisfaction compared to punching a hole in one of these half-machine warriors.

At this point, the Ethermen directly in front of him were hardly the threat. Only three remained, and one of those was heavily damaged from several attacks he’d landed. Rather, Caeden was more concerned with the larger state of the battlefield. But a quick sweep with his aura found that his concerns were unfounded.

Mel’Zally, with the assistance of the spears he’d provided, had made quick work of her opponent. She could somehow convert the weapons he’d made into flames while preserving their effects. She’d then teleported them inside her domain in a similar technique to the one she’d used to dodge the Etherman’s attacks. The Etherman in question was much less of a threat when five spears suddenly appeared inside its body.

Similarly, Asherta had used her one remaining arm to thoroughly beat her previous opponent into submission, something she did entirely without Caeden’s assistance. The Etherman that had her other arm sticking out of its torso wasn’t in any condition to put up a fight.

Of the Ethermen fighting Dave, one that had been caught in the suicide explosion had converted into the second healer, and before Caeden had started targeting them, the duo had managed to heal most of the damage remaining on their fellows. Once Caeden’s spears started coming down, Dave had started taking his opponents apart.

He was facing the most Ethermen, even more than those targeting Caeden, with six of them after him in total. Of course, four were heavily injured from all the undead detonating, and the other two had been fighting Dave for an extended period. Since one of the injured ones had converted to a healer, he was only facing five in direct combat.

Now that they were dealing with weapons antithetical to the Ethermen, the healers couldn't work fast enough to keep their comrades topped off. This allowed Dave and his storm of weapons to make quick work out of three of his five opponents, leaving diced and mashed masses of metal, ether, and flesh behind.

Caeden had to admit, these Ethermen were durable in a way that the previous army of Ethermen Dave had faced couldn’t match. They might take on damage, but putting one down permanently was orders of magnitude harder than doing so to a shrouded or monster of similar combat prowess.

Once his worries about his friends were put to rest, Caeden turned his focus to the unexpected problem he’d just noticed. Lily’s gravity barrier had finally dropped, and it didn’t reveal the burnt ashes of a ship like Caeden was expecting.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

The ship wasn’t in good shape. A large portion of the bow was missing, and the rest of the sleek paneling had been warped by heat and pressure into twisted mockery of its former perfect symmetry and precision. Most of the lines of ether running across the flying vessel had gone dark, and most of the rest were spitting out minor phenomena as their power leaked into the ambient Ki.

But the ship was still flying.

“This is just ridiculous.” Caeden could only shake his head in disbelief, barely paying attention to the Etherman he tossed aside with a powerful slap from his gauntleted hand, the sword it used to hold buried in the chest of another machine-man as it slowly melted a hole through its torso.

Once more, Caeden was left incredulously surprised at the resilience of this group, crew and ship both. The energy powering them and the materials they were made of held a resistance to damage that surpassed anything he’d ever seen. More than that, their ability to keep operating at near their peak capabilities even after sustaining massive damage was daunting. An enemy that can fight just as hard as ever even after losing most of its limbs and a few pounds of flesh was a hard enemy to beat.

Caeden needn’t have worried. After all, there was one last member of his team that hadn’t entered the fray this entire time. Still being watched over by her summoned Elder Lich and Death King, as well as Snowball and Sky, Cat finally made her presence known.

In the back of his mind, Caeden had assumed that Cat had dropped the spell she was preparing to deal with the enemy ship once Lily triggered her own attack. After all, he hadn’t believed it was possible for anything to survive that blast. He was wrong, and he’d never been more happy to be so.

In dramatic fashion, the sky itself darkened as a heavy presence settled over the entire island. Caeden could feel, deep in his soul, something searching, searching. Finally, it found its target. The ground beneath the Ethermen’s ship bubbled and roiled as a tar-like black goo began to well up from between bits of rubble and debris.

The ship, damaged as it was, still tried to move from over the obvious attack. They didn’t get the chance. Before the vessel got more than an inch, thick bands of black, viscous liquid shot out of the ground with a startling amount of speed and force. They wrapped around the ethership like great, gooey tendrils, holding it in place.

The ground below continued to rumble and buck, as if something large was trying to escape from within. Instead of some monster bursting out, the ground itself fell down, revealing an empty abyss. The tar-like tendrils holding the ethership bubbled and condensed, shrinking from thick columns into robes of dense, hardened material.

Then they pulled.

Caeden watched as the lights left on the ethership flared. He saw it pull up, resisting the black chains even in its broken state. Somehow, the barely operational ship was still strong enough to fight against the spell Cat had spent almost ten minutes casting.

That lasted for a scant few moments as the chains pulled harder and harder, and the ether lights on the ship flared brighter and brighter. Finally, one light sparked before fizzling out. The two lines closest to it flared brighter than ever before exploding with a loud bang. The failures caused a chain reaction that rippled across the vessel until all the remaining ether had shattered and burst.

Without its ether working, the ship plummeted into the abyss Cat’s spell had created, vanishing into the dark like an arrow from a bow, the chains dragging it down with all the force they’d used to prevent the powerful vessel from flying off. With its target caught, the abyss snapped shut. More disturbingly, the disturbed debris and rubble peeled back, shifting into their former positions. Settling, it was as if the spell had never happened.

“Ha! Suck it you stupid robot assholes!” Cat popped out of her hiding hole, throwing obscene gestures in the general direction of the former ship. “Ugh, so fucking stupid.”

Caeden watched as his girlfriend’s best friend had what appeared to be some sort of tantrum, kicking the ground and muttered promises of extreme violence into the air. He had no idea what was going on. It seemed like Cat was pissed at the Ethermen rather than happy with her victory, though there were notes of that as well.

“Uh, what’s wrong?”

“Seriously?” Cat whipped around to stare at him incredulously. “Don’t you know what those assholes did?”

“Not…Really?” Caeden shrugged. Sure, the Ethermen had been there to kill them. But they hadn’t actually succeeded. For all their efforts, no one had even really been hurt except for Asherta. The Ethermen had been extremely dangerous, but they hadn’t accomplished anything.

“Rrraaugh!” Cat made a noise of wordless disgust and anger. “My army, Caeden! I lost my whole damn army to those pieces of crap! Now I have to start all over again!”

“Ooooh!” Caeden nodded in understanding. He’d forgotten about Cat’s army. After all, they hadn’t done much to stop these Ethermen in the same way that the Ethermen hadn’t done much to his team. “Well, I think I have some good news.”

“Yeah?” Cat glared at him.

“Yup.”

“Well?! Are you going to spit it out?”

“I’m pretty sure that was the Revolution’s last card to play. They literally portalled those Ethermen in, which means they weren’t supposed to be part of this assault. If they’re doing that, it means they have zero confidence in beating us with what they’ve already got.” Caeden smiled.

“So?”

“So,” Caeden chuckled. “You can go buck wild. They can’t stop us any more, at least not beyond what they’ve already shown us. And since we already handled that…”

“Ok, that’s pretty nice.” Cat grumbled, crossing her arms and staring at the ground.

“Yup, it’s a little more than ‘pretty nice’.” Caeden nodded. “It means we’ve seen the worst they’ve got, and we were better. So the rest of this should just be clean up.”

“Unless they’ve got even more bullshit hiding beyond that portal.” Cat grumped, seemingly determined to remain angry.

“Pretty sure they would have used it by now, especially after seeing how we chewed through their super fancy toys.” Caeden laughed, waving his hand at the scattered remains of the Ethermen that were left from everyone’s fighting.

“I don’t know, that giant ship seems like it’ll still be a problem. I can’t imagine how many people and weapons are on that thing. They could take us down with sheer volume.” Cat argued, glaring at the floating island-sized vessel in question.

“You let me and Lily worry about the skies. Your job is to clear the island. We’ll keep the ships off your back.” Caeden promised.

“Ok, whatever.” Cat threw up her hands, finally relenting. “Dave! Get your ass over here, I need to summon another army!”

She marched off like a woman on a mission, Caeden almost felt bad for any revolutionaries that tried to get in her way. But he didn’t have the time nor inclination to watch Cat go to work. He had a promise to keep after all. And he didn’t want to find out what a Necromancer that could open a sucking abyss from under the ground could do to him when she was grumpy.

He’d seen what Necroflame did to people. It wasn’t pretty.

Rather, he focused his attention back on the Forge. Lily was currently talking with Father about the next stage of their plans. Father had, of course, kept Lily updated on everything going on outside the Forge even while he was making weapons for Caeden to use. With the time dilation, he had more than enough downtime in between forgings.

“It’ll be easier than you think.” Lily was saying. Caeden started paying attention to his alternate consciousness’s conversation with his girlfriend part way through.

“I’m not debating how easy it will be, I just don’t know about throwing around our biggest hidden weapons like that. These new Ethermen are head and shoulders above what we’ve seen before, especially when it comes to their resilience. We don’t know how many more of those the Revolution could theoretically throw at us.” Father countered.

“If they were going to use more, they would have already. As soon as Dave wasted five of them with that Necroflame suicide explosion they should have sent more. They especially should have sent more once three of them started fighting Dave at once and they weren’t winning.” Lily sighed. “I’m not saying we should throw everything at them. The Revolution as a whole has proven to be far too adaptable to not hold something back until we’re sure we’ve finished them for good. But we can certainly let loose a little more. Nothing here is a threat to us, and me and Asherta taking out ships one at a time is just too slow.”

“I’ll admit, we should pick up the pace somehow,” Father nodded. “At this rate, it could take several days to clear out the entire fleet. And that doesn’t even include dealing with the flagship. That massive thing is going to be difficult to take down, I can tell just by looking at it.”

“Exactly! We’re trying to mitigate casualties here. The more time we spend on clearing safe zones is more people dying that we could have saved. If the Revolution does develop countermeasures, we can just make some of our own right back. After all, we have way more time than them.” Lily stared at Father with a determined look on her face. “We can handle this just fine.”

“Okay, okay!” Father threw his hands in the air. “You win, as usual. I follow your reasoning and I can’t think of anything other than this to deal with the fleet efficiently. So, I guess we’re doing it.”

“Great! Now let me out of here already. It’s been more than long enough to get the Incarnation up again.” Lily waited expectantly, hands on hips.

Not a moment later she was pulled by an unseen force through an Exit Blade beside her that hadn’t been there before. Once through, she stepped out of an Entrance Blade Caeden had formed right next to himself.

“Thank you.” She smiled at Caeden. “Now, let's knock that fleet out of the sky.”