“Mercy, Mercy!” Erik cried out after everyone got a few smacks in. “I shouldn’t have said anything, I get it!”

Feeling vindicated, and slightly less tense, Caeden let up. Cat continued to waggle her staff threateningly in Erik’s general direction, but everyone else let up as well. With their displeasure vented, they turned to solving the current issue.

“We can’t stay here.” Lily sighed. “As much as I’d like to take the opportunity to beat some sense into whatever is left of five different governments, that…thing can’t be allowed to have what it's got. We need follow and retrieve the Entrance Blade.”

“You bet we need to follow! That thing had Gramps!” Cat jumped in, the topic pulling her from her continued threats toward Erik.

“What? You mean that Etherman had Damon?” Caeden goggled at her. “Where? How?”

“Dunno how.” She shrugged. “But he was in that cage it had.”

“I didn’t see him.” Caeden frowned, trying to remember. If the Headmaster had been in the cage, he felt he would have noticed.

Cat’s eyes swirled with sickly green energy. “I can see more than you. He was in there, just in his formshifted state. When he’s like that, he’s mostly on the soul plane. What I’d like to know is how that thing caught him and was holding onto him. It’s not easy to mess with the soul plane. The only things I’ve seen that can do it are me, Dave and other undead, and the researcher.”

“We know of at least two other instances of soul plane manipulation present in the Starry Sea universe.” Dave denied her statement.

“Really? What did I miss?” Cat frowned.

“Every single Etherman was created using a process that partially affected their souls, and the huge Etherman we just fought could both see and touch me when I used Spirit Walk, which places me entirely on the soul plane. Whoever is designing these things apparently has a great deal of experience interacting with the soul plane. Enough to develop materials that simultaneously exist here and there.”

“Well, that’s not disturbing at all.” Erik snarked. Everyone turned to glare at him. “Ok, shutting up now.” he raised his hands placatingly, slipping bacon from the group.

“Either way, that just increases the need to shut this Founder person down before he does something we’ll all regret.” Caeden shifted his focus back to their conversation. “Luckily, we can do that easily.”

After all, the problem was also the solution. The Revolution's secret leader and misleader had his Entrance Shroud. As of right now, he still hadn’t managed to sever Caeden’s connection to the Blade Forge’s creation. Likely, there was no real way for him to do so, ever. The Entrance Blade, and everything else born from Caeden’s shroud, carried its origins with it always.

And since he was that origin, he knew exactly where it was.

“Right, so we better get back to the Hearthhome and get out of here before we get pulled into any kind of political bullshit. You know they’ll try and tie us up for days.” Cat sighed. Lily nodded rapidly in agreement.

Caeden sighed. “We can’t. At least not instantly. There are others from the CA here, and since we now have all the leader either dead or captured, the other nations won’t hesitate to slaughter them. I’m not going to stand for that.”

Lily’s face went white as she realized he was right. “What are you thinking?” Even as she asked, his girlfriend's eyes flickered toward where the Bladeborne had gathered, their tasks completed when the last Revolution ethership was pulled from the sky. Caeden smiled, despite the circumstances. She was thinking exactly what he was.

“If we’re just moving, I can use Forged Throne and leave a path to the Forge open here. From there, the Bladeborne can get all the Central Authority people out before the other nations get any ideas.”

“You aren’t worried about them seeing the Forge?” Lily asked, concerned.

“Father and a team are already building a place just for them. As far as they’ll know, it’ll just be a strange shroud situation. We’re inverting a portion of the time dilation so that they’ll walk into the Forge, through another Exit Blade, and out wherever we’re leaving them with minimal time spent inside. Most of the ethertech works the same, it was just us learning how to invert the dilation, which wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be.” Caeden explained.

“Well, that works out.” Lily laughed. “I can’t believe I forgot about the Central Council dying so quickly.”

“That Etherman was pretty distracting.” Caeden chuckled.

“Guuuuuys.” Erik sounded nervous. Everyone immediately turned toward him, though there was no feigned anger this time. They knew that tone from one too many close calls. Erik had felt something. “I hate to interrupt, but something is going on with the engine room.”

Caeden whipped his senses toward the last remnants of the flagship. Somehow, he’d forgotten it. The flight mechanism had been cut moments ago by Caeden’s timed device. The Etherman had left not a moment too soon, as the engine room started to fall through the air, separating itself from the last bits of ship left as it did.

At the same time, he felt energy fluctuations bleeding off it. The false aura was still in his way, but the volatile Ki within the engine room was so intense that the effects reached beyond the impenetrable walls. It didn’t take him more than a moment to understand. After all, Caeden had felt this very thing before.

The ether engine was going critical. A runaway sequence of ether reactions had been started, causing more and more ether to interact unpredictably as the reaction swallowed the entire engine. This was exactly what had caused their ethership to explode over the dragon continent, but on an unimaginably larger scale.

That ether engine had been the size of a person. This one was over a mile long in every dimension. An unhindered ether reaction on that scale could and would wipe out Baserock in its entirety, along with everyone on it. The unstable ether fluctuations would rip through any defense the shroud could put up.

“Wow, we really lucked out.” Caeden shook his head. “It seems the Etherman, left us a parting gift. It seems he didn’t truly understand what we were doing with the flagship, though.”

A moment later, Caeden funneled all his shroud into the Forged Throne. And a moment after, there was a massive Entrance Blade under falling engine room. They had truly lucked out. He’d already been prepared to drop the engine into the Forge, which was likely the only viable way to deal with it going critical. That, or he supposed they could have attempted to shove it into the Starry Sea before it detonated. The Ki sapping properties of the water there would have swallowed the explosion easily.

Even better, the engine’s massive size meant that it took much longer for the internal reactions to completely spiral into an unstoppable force. As it dropped into the Forge, Caeden could feel that the engine was only about halfway to true criticality. With a flex of will, he snuffed out the reaction. Nothing in the Forge was outside his control, after all. In there, the engine’s wildly fluctuating ether was as threatening to him as an afternoon breeze.

“Well, that could have been bad.” Erik sighed. “Can we go now?”

Cat, next to him, nodded in agreement.

After the engine room was dealt with, their time slipped into a rapid whirlwind of activity. Caeden gave the Bladeborne their new marching orders, while at the same time making sure that reinforcements from the Forge were on hand. After all, they had no guarantees that some shrouded wouldn’t catch on quicker than they’d hoped and start making trouble.

Ultimately, the team was only an Entrance Blade away, and the Bladeborne weren’t exactly pushovers. They could handle the current disorganized mess that was Baserock. And the looming threat of the missing Entrance Blade and the implications it had for the safety of their entire universe were more pressing than the off chance that a fight could start here.

Caeden was ecstatic to find that the ethership docking towers had been left alone during the assault. They’d been locked down, but that was hardly a problem for those who could fly. The Hearthhome was exactly where they had left it, and so was Unc. He’d peeked his head out of the ship after they didn’t come back from their match, seen the absolute chaos going on on the island, and wisely decided he was safer where he was.

All told, they left after less than an hour, Caeden steering the ship straight toward where he could feel the Entrance Blade. It was, to no one’s surprise, very far away. Based on the sensation, Caeden would place it deep into the continents, even farther out than most countries would venture. An unexpected positive was that it seemed to be stationary, so the Etherman hadn’t just taken it to another flying island like the flagship.

The distance was concerning. Even at the speeds the Hearthhome could travel, it would take them at least a couple weeks to reach their destination. That was a lot of time to let this founder mess around with some very dangerous ethertech. If he managed to glean any insights into the barriers between the Starry Sea and the rest of reality, he could cause irreparable damage.

Once they were underway, Caeden, Lily, and Dave spent several hours trying to think of something, anything that could accelerate their journey. They even discussed trying to replicate the portal technology that the Revolution had managed, using a CMS facility to cross the distance.

The discussion spiraled until it became apparent that the CMS was their only viable option. But they were all incredibly leery of even trying. It was a gamble that they could cobble together something that worked, and that was assuming that doing so was a good idea in the first place. The CMS held together their universe’s ability to sustain life. Without it, they’d all die very quickly. Doing anything with it was inadvisable, even in the current circumstances.

The likelihood of two weeks being enough time for the founder of the Revolution to crack the dimensional and planar barriers surrounding their universe was slim. It was more likely that whatever insights he gained from the Entrance Blade would lead him to one place, the Forge. And Caeden welcomed any invasion attempts to his dimension. It would not go well for the invader.

That fact alone was the deciding factor that kept them from doing anything drastic. It would be the height of stupidity and irony for them to cause the very crisis they were trying to prevent while their target spun his wheels, unable to make any progress.

Having weighed the risks and settled on a path forward, the next two weeks fell into an uneasy and tense routine. They’d just come off a major series of battles and were heading into what would likely be another. That left everyone feeling like they should be doing something about it, but there wasn’t a lot they could do. They just had to wait.

Caeden forged. Lily experimented with her Galaxy shroud. Erik spent some time with his brother, though he always came away from it more frustrated and angry than anything. Cat took her first trip offworld, visiting the Necroverse with Dave. She seemed to enjoy her time there, at least Caeden thought so.

It wasn’t exactly relaxing, the awareness of where they were going and why was too present. But it was the best they could do.

Finally, they arrived.

“Well, I don’t know what I expected.” Caeden sighed.

The Entrance Blade wasn’t on a continent. It was on an artificial island in the middle of the Starry Sea between two continents. Out this far, the waves were massive things, spanning thousands of feet tall and carrying a force to rival even the strongest blows of a powerful shrouded.

It was a mostly vertical structure, the very top sticking out above the tallest waves, while the rest was intermittently covered by the raging waves. Even in the deepest trough, he couldn’t see the artificial island’s base. It descended below sea level. How far, Caeden couldn’t even begin to guess.

It was surrounded by a fleet of ships, but careful examination revealed that all of them were unmanned. The founder had a hidden base, away from even the Revolution’s eyes. That aligned with the impression of him Caeden had got from Travis’s story.

“You know, I’m sick and tired of this nonsense.” He grumbled. “Anyone have a problem with me just…destroying this whole place?”

No one spoke up.

“Ok, great.”

With that, gold and purple lines of shroud began to pulse along Caeden arm, feeding into the throne detail on the back of his hand.