The next floor up was completely different from the previous one. It was obvious from the start that they hadn’t found a stairwell per se, but a single flight. Both Caeden and Lily rolled their eyes at the inefficient design of separating the stairs from each other on every floor, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.

In that regard, the design of the ship was likely doing exactly what it was designed to. Stopping intruders from progressing quickly and confusing them with a nonsense layout. It was also obvious from their previous explorations on the storage floor that the ship’s levels were actually sectioned off. The area they’d searched wasn’t nearly big enough to cover that entire floor of the ship, and there was no way that they found to reach the other sections. Which meant the only way was likely traveling up to a higher floor and then taking a different set of stairs down again.

If that hypothesis was accurate, that meant that the only way to navigate the ship might be to continually weave up and down between floors. To the Revolution’s credit, the ship was set up to accommodate such an inefficient design. The storage floor had bedrooms and a mess hall, so the revolutionaries that worked there never really had to leave.

The floor they’d entered was a weapons battery, with many sections that stuck out the side of the ship to fire its giant salvos down on the island below, or whatever other target emerged. The team quickly found that it was designed similarly to the floor below, in that it was focused around being an absolute maze functionally independent from the rest of the ship.

“Yup, it’s the same system.” Caeden nodded, standing over a flat section of metal embedded with various ether crystals. “But it only moves non-living material. Or rather, things that don’t move. Anything that’s actively moving would be displaced weirdly and probably explode.”

They’d discovered dozens of rooms on the storage floor similar to the one they were in now. It had taken them a while to understand what they were for, but they found out when they broke into one that was in the middle of being used. It turned out that these rooms were the answer to a question that Caeden and Lily had been asking for a while as they cleared the weapons battery.

Why would a ship need extra storage if each segment was meant to be independent. The room contained a locational matter-to-energy teleporter. Each pad was connected to another specific relative location. The pads would convert whatever was placed on them into a stream of energy, then losslessly transmit that energy to its paired pad where the energy would be returned to matter form.

It was extremely limited compared to something like the Entrance Blades, or even the portal tech the Revolution used to get the Baserock. The pads could only connect to a single other source, and once they were set up, they could never be moved. The flagship got away with it by having all the pads only connect to other pads on the ship. Since their distance relative to each other didn’t change, it worked.

Besides that issue, the pads couldn’t teleport anything that was in motion. Any movement introduced a level of positional uncertainty that the system couldn’t handle. That precluded them from teleporting anything living, as even the pumping of a heart was enough to cause issues. Really the only motion the pads could handle was the microscopic movement of atoms and electrons in their orbits.

That also meant that the team couldn’t use them to move around the ship. Not just because they’d die if they tried, but the pads were locked to a single other pad. This one was likely connected to another storage area. But it did explain why the flagship had independent storage areas. Apparently the minimal security gained by having each segment fully independent was superseded by the efficiency gained from having a dedicated area for storage.

“Well, that’s nice to know, but it’s not exactly helpful.” Cat sighed, leaning on her staff. “We need to find some kind of map or something. This is ridiculous.”

Their journey through the weapons battery hadn’t been as smooth as the last floor. The Revolution had rightly recognized that the battery would be an obvious target for anyone attacking, so they’d loaded it up with far more security than the storage area.

“Ugh,” A quiet moan of pain came from the ceiling. A revolutionary in heavy armor with several large weapons strapped to his frame was dangling from a strand of blackish-green goo that was slowly eating through his armor with a sinister hissing sound.

Cat had started using some spells on this floor. Everyone on the team unanimously agreed that they kinda wished they hadn’t let her, but she’d insisted that standing around while everyone else fought was both boring and silly. She ignored the looks of disgust and quiet gagging that followed every spell used. That goo did not smell good.

“I think the only place we’d be likely to find a map of the entire ship is at their command center, and that’s not exactly a viable target at the moment, considering we don’t know how to get there, and it’ll be the most heavily guarded spot on the ship. Next to the engine, obviously.” Lily answered Cat’s question.

Caeden stood from his crouch next to the teleport pad, but not before making a dagger and shoving it into the edge, shattering an ether crystal. He’d done the same on every other pad they’d encountered. There was no reason not to sabotage the entire ship while they were here. He couldn’t think of a better way to do that than cutting off their logistics. At least, no immediately accessible method that was easier. Shutting down the suppression field would end the fighting in minutes, really.

“Let’s keep moving. I don’t think the weapons battery has as many connections to the rest of the ship as the storage floor had. We might need to go back down there and head up another stairs.”

“Boo!” Erik whined. “Backtracking suuuucks.”

Cat nodded along in agreement.

Caeden shrugged. “I don’t know what our other options are. We’re still in the lower portions of the ship, and it’s been over an hour and a half since we entered. We need to pick up the pace. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Founder decided to take the Entrance Blade and leave if he felt like we had a real chance of getting it back. We need to reach it quickly to prevent that.”

“This whole thing sucks.” Erik flicked his wrist, dropping a dozen more revolutionaries to the floor that had been hanging above them as they left the room. It hadn’t just held the teleport pad, but also all the munitions stored in the battery. It was the most heavily guarded room they’d encountered so far.

“I’m not disagreeing, but we don’t have other options.” Caeden patted him on the back. “Look at the positives. We’re going to trash half this ship before we get to the engine room at this rate. That’ll be fun.”

Erik’s expression brightened. “Yeah, that is pretty nice. Ok, let’s go faster from now on. You and Lily have a pretty good idea of how this place works now, right?”

“Yup,” Caeden nodded. “I’ve even got Father relaying everything to a few Bladeborne. They’re constructing a three-dimensional map of the ship as we move. The more ground we cover, the closer we get to discovering any patterns the layout might have.”

“Sweet, let’s go!” Erik cheered, running forward and using Binding to pull apart anything he passed, literally ripping the ship apart.

The next hour saw them covering much more ground than the last, with the team moving through multiple segments both up and down. They did end up backtracking, as the segment above the weapons battery ended up being purely a crew area. They weren’t exactly asking questions, but Caeden and Lily figured it housed backup crews for the battery below so that the guns could fire continuously.

The dead end led them back down into the storage area and up another set of stairs. The one they took this time was closer to the center of the ship, and held a full blown ether processing factory. Everything needed to generate almost any kind of ether was there, ready and waiting.

Following the example of the weapons battery and the factory, the team quickly found out that all the outer segments of the flagship were centered around offensive capabilities, while the inner segments were repair and manufacturing centers. The ship was entirely self-sustaining, with the team even running across hydroponic farms, greenhouses, and livestock storage areas.

Since the whole place was powered by an ether engine in a self-sustained loop, the only thing the ship couldn’t replenish was the munitions they spent. At least, that was what Caeden and Lily assumed. Their thoughts changed when they came across a foundry segment that had ethertech similar to an ether engine. Instead of producing power, it poured out molten metal as the ether inside cycled.

From that point, it became obvious what the actual intention of the ship was. It wasn’t truly a warship, though it certainly had those capabilities. They were inside a small flying nation with sustainable access to any resource imaginable. So long as the ship didn’t lose a significant portion of its ether, it was a perpetual motion machine with no power loss.

“Why would they even make it like this? Isn’t it a warship?” Lily questioned as she flooded another segment with sleeping gas. Several revolutionaries wearing masks rushed through the thick cloud only to be smacked in the face with a golden fist and have their masks ripped off by a few Skeletons standing to the side, waiting to do exactly that.

“I don’t know, and at this point I’m not sure I care. Though I can say that this place explains why no one could ever find the Revolution’s leadership. If they have other ships like this, they could park in the middle of the Starry Sea, out by the continents where there’s so much Sea to cross that no one would ever run into them by accident. A massive, flying, self-sustaining fortress that they could just park in the most unlikely location is a perfect hiding spot. Aside from it being stupidly huge, of course.” Caeden laughed. It was almost absurd to think that something this large would be a good place to hide, but the Starry Sea was a huge place. It might be as big as Baserock, but the island below was one of the smallest livable landmasses. Out in the continental Seas, the flagship would be comparatively tiny.

“So, what? You think they don’t have an actual stationary base?” Lily asked.

Caeden understood the incredulity in her tone. Because his idea had one glaring hole. “Obviously they do. After all, they had to build this behemoth somewhere. But I’m just saying that the reason they were able to hide all this insanely advanced ethertech is because of things like this ship, or that underground mining area where we found the suppression sword.”

“I wonder where that base is. It would have to be huge to build something of this scale.”

“An uninhabitable continent, if I had to guess.” Caeden shrugged. “That seems like the standard practice for these guys at this point. After everything we’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if this Founder guy managed to figure out how to interfere with the atmospheric Ki enough to stop monster creation. Or maybe they just buried the whole thing.”

“You don’t think they’d just leave it in the open?” Cat asked, joining the conversation as her undead hogtied revolutionaries.

“I don’t think they could.” Caeden shook his head. “Even with everything we’ve seen, I don’t think the Revolution has the raw firepower to deal with some of the monsters that spawn in the farthest continents. They’d just stay at the edges like everyone else.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“How’s the map coming?” Lily asked, refocusing the conversation.

“I think we’re starting to see a pattern to the stair layout and how they connect floors leading deeper into the ship. But the placement running from bow to stern still seems random.”

“That makes sense. The ship is longer than it is wide, they could fit a larger pattern running the length than they could along the breadth. And we’ve been pushing deeper rather than moving down the length.” Lily nodded.

“Wait, does that mean we know how to get to the engine?” Erik landed next to the group, dragging a collection of revolutionaries wrapped in chains behind him.

“I don’t have any guarantees, but I think I can try to get us close.”

“Awesome! Wrecking this place is pretty fun, but it’s starting to get old, you know?” Erik flung the unconscious crewmen into the waiting arms of the Skeletons.

“We’ve still got a ways to go. The ship is massive, and the route we have to take is circuitous at best-”

“Nope, Nononono, I don’t want to hear your negativity!” Erik exclaimed, cutting Caeden off. “We’re almost done. That’s all I heard and that’s all I want to hear. Now let’s go kick this Founder guy’s ass.”

“We don’t even know if he’s here. In fact, it’s more likely that he isn’t-”

“Not listening!” Erik sprinted further into the ship.

Shaking their heads, the rest of the team followed.