In the middle of an attack, Snowball suddenly whipped his head to the side. Lily didn’t have access to her aura senses, but she could feel the approaching danger through her connection to Snowball. The Glacial King Kodiak leapt back from the fight, taking a hit to move out of the way and knocking over one of the five shrouded Ethermen surrounding him.

Just as he interposed himself between Lily and the rest of the room, she finally saw what Snowball’s senses had felt. A spear blade wider than she was tall plunged through the wall like it wasn’t there, taking three of the Ethermen with it as it continued past. The blade alone was longer than the entire room.

Then, it withdrew. Lily caught the passing image of one of the Ethermen nearly split in half on the blade, stuck to the edge by the mess of flesh and metal that constituted their body. Through the gouge left by the blade’s passing, Lily could see a gigantic gold and purple form holding dozens of weapons, many of which were rapidly turning their section of the artificial island into rubble.

“Well, that took longer than we thought.” Lily huffed, letting go of her hold on her connected domain. She allowed the connection to relax back into its original resting position. Despite still maintaining her Embodiment, she felt a rush of exhaustion cloud her mind as the energy sustaining her heightened state dropped.

Suddenly, she could feel the literal cracks that had begun to form in her Aspect body from the strain of channeling too much domain energy. The overwhelming air of power around Snowball also slackened somewhat, though he didn’t experience any negative effects like her.

Lily was dreading dropping her Embodiment at this point. She wasn’t sure how these cracks in her body would resolve once she was no longer an Aspect. Even worse, her shroud would be in a heavily weakened state after her Embodiment discorporated. And she was going to drop into a coma for a while.

Really, in some ways Embodiments were more trouble than they were worth. But Lily could easily admit that she couldn’t throw around the same kind of raw power without it. But right now, the consequences were what occupied her mind.

That was why Lily was immensely relieved when an Entrance Blade appeared next to her not a minute later. She watched through a several-feet-wide gap in the room as Caeden’s hecatoncheires form rapidly shrunk before falling into an Entrance Blade of his own.

“This is definitely cheating.” She laughed to herself, running her fingers through Snowball’s thick fur. Then she walked through the Entrance Blade. The moment she was on the other side, Lily released her Embodiment. She passed out for a second, and felt her body return to flesh and blood. She also felt how badly that body dealt with the damage her Aspect form had retained from overuse.

That, frankly terrifying, sensation was immediately swept away in a wave of burning power that scoured all the weakness from her body and shroud. Instantly, she was restored.

“Wow, you had to push farther than our testing went.” Caeden shook his head, standing in front of her. “The damage from expanding your connection…That was deadly. Your shroud was too weakened from Embodiment use to fill in the gaps. Unless you’re sure I’ll be there to get you into the Forge, you shouldn’t push that far again. Heck, any farther and I think you might have died even in your Aspect form. One of those cracks ran all the way to your heart. If it had gotten any bigger…”

“Yes, I felt it.” Lily shivered. Her heart had been broken. A hairline fracture, but it had been. Her shroud might have been able to keep her alive. Might. But that was when it wasn’t recovering from Embodiment use. The combination of Embodiment exhaustion and domain overexertion was enough to kill her if either got too high. “We never expected to find Ethermen with shrouds. It was…an eye-opening experience.”

“Is that what those were? The false aura was failing, but my senses were still a little blurry. I could feel you and the rest of the team by locking onto your shrouds, but everything was less clear.” Caeden frowned. “I did my best to avoid hitting anyone on the team, but I made those attacks assuming you were in better condition than you were. If Cat was in the same condition and I hit her…”

“She’ll be fine.” Lily shook her head. “Her Aspect is much more resilient than mine. Or at least, it would take a lot more to kill her when she’s like that. My Aspect is more…Brittle.”

“Fair enough.” Caeden shrugged. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it at this point anyway. But those fears were unfounded, as proven by the rest of the team coming through various Exit Blades around the travel terminal within the next half an hour. Considering the time difference between the Forge and the Starry Sea, they must have entered at basically the same time as Lily.

Cat and Dave were very obviously coming from a similar situation to Lily’s. They were both injured and showed signs of the same overuse strain that had cracked Lily’s body. However, the damage was less fatal than hers had been. The green flames that replaced their flesh had dimmed, and the bones underneath seemed worn as if they’d been rubbed down with sandpaper for hours. But nothing was cracked or missing.

Lily hypothesized that this difference was due to the nature of their respective domains, and the physical differences of their Aspect forms. As an Aspect, Lily’s body was Ice itself. That made her brittle in the face of the power flowing through her. Meanwhile, the corruptive and transformative influence of Necromancy imposed a different punishment on Cat and her Familiar. Rather than break them outright, the domain started warping the already-changed substance of their bodies.

There were benefits to her Ice Aspect that Cat didn’t seem to enjoy. After comparing their experiences, Lily could easily tell that Cat had started to experience a diminishing return on her expanded strength after a period of time. It seemed that the warping her Aspect body endured started to affect its performance. Meanwhile, Lily had been perfectly fine until she released that heightened state. In a way, the cracks in her body had been filled by that surge in power, like water flowing through ice. She didn’t feel the gaps until the flow stopped.

Ultimately, it was obvious that Cat had the superior Aspect Embodiment. After all, they had both experienced similar levels of strain from the enhanced domain connection, but Cat was merely weakened and injured, while Lily would have died without the god-like power Caeden held while in the Forge. Compared to that, it hardly mattered that Lily didn’t experience the slowly diminishing strength that Cat had.

Erik and Asherta were perfectly fine, Erik more so than Asherta. Her Hoard Embodiment wasn’t particularly strong considering Asherta’s natural abilities. It allowed her to become a full dragon, but the result was underwhelming. Compared to her Age and natural draconic transformation abilities, Asherta could display more raw power outside her Embodiment than with it. But the Embodiment was also more sustainable and less punishing than the backlash from overusing her natural abilities. It was an odd reversal of most people’s experiences with their Embodiment, but the facts were the facts.

“So, everything went how we expected?” Lily asked Erik.

“Ehh, not exactly. There was a bypass on the first transformer that stopped the sabotage from working. We had to go find a second one.” Erik shrugged.

“Ah, of course.” Lily sighed. “We might have expected his own base to have a few improvements, even on something as simple as an energy management relay. Well, at least it ended up being a simple fix.”

“Yup.” Erik glanced between her and Caeden. “So what’s the next step? We just storming the place or slicing it up some more with Caeden’s Embodiment?”

“No,” Caeden shook his head, his expression heavy. “That won’t work. The damage I did won’t be easy to fix, but the damage to the energy grid was localized. The shield was still up over most of the island, and I couldn’t pierce it casually. Even with the relay down, the shield managed to stay up until Asherta dispersed it. It’s strong, more than anything else we’ve seen. And I doubt the weakness of the transformer stations will go unaddressed. The founder is nothing if not a capable ethertechnician. He’ll figure something out. No, we’re going to concentrate our efforts, work together from now on.”

“I think our Embodiments have reached the limits of their usefulness. And the idea of shrouded Ethermen is…Concerning. I’m not sure how we respond to that. We need to pause for a bit and figure out how to advance with the new information we’ve gained.” Caeden concluded.

“Ugh, you’re so boring. Let me know when you’ve got a new kickass plan.” Erik waved him off, wandering out of the terminal and toward the building all of the humans occupied while staying in the Forge.

“He’s antsy. I don’t think he liked the role we put him in.” Lily grinned at Erik's childishness. “But you’re right. The trick with the transformers was supposed to be something of a trump card for us. Not a way to manage to reunite. We weren’t expecting that teleport.”

“Yeah,” Caeden sighed. “Well, let’s get to planning.”

{}

Damon watched the founder slowly losing his mind. The localized shut down might have been an easy fix for the man, but not after Caeden’s absurdly powerful Embodiment turned part of the island into barely-functional scrap metal. Now, the entire island facility was suffering a knock-on effect that seemed to offer up some…Challenges.

“What do you mean, ‘it won’t connect’? That’s literally all it does! I designed the entire system, I know how it works! The port is bent? Then why did you try to plug it in? Because I told-Ugh!” The founder slammed a button cutting off communication. “Why did I decide to make the entire facility run by artificial humanoids? They have no creativity.”

Damon rolled his eyes. The man was complaining about the shortcomings of his own abominations. The reason the Ethermen were so literal and direct was because they’d been stripped of their free will. An action the founder had done deliberately, declaring it more ‘efficient’ in one of his long-winded rants.

Perhaps Damon could see the logic there. After all, things tended to move more smoothly when everyone agreed on a direction. But the founder had done himself a disservice in creating such a situation artificially. Without dissenting opinions, there was no one to point out the flaws in his actions. And that left those weaknesses open for his enemies to find, much as Cat’s friends had.

Now he was paying the price. Damon had no doubt that the founder had undergone this process before. Seeing his creations make contact with an opponent and fail to live up to his expectations. From there, he had likely refined them further to achieve better results. But that process relied on one factor that the founder no longer had. Distance.

Instead of being across the Starry Sea from him, the enemies were at his door. And suddenly the founder was finding his defenses woefully unprepared for that assault. He dredged up secret plans and weapons long held back, but they weren’t as effective as he expected. Much like everything else this man had created, they held a distinctive mark that lacked for dissenting opinions.

For his part, Damon had to hold back his laughter. It was cathartic, to see the only person to ever capture him in his entire, incredibly long life brought low in the face of the unexpected. Seeing that boot on the other foot was amusing. He wondered what those kids were up to. They’d vanished from every view that Damon could see, and part of the founder’s panic seemed to be based in this disappearance as well.

He kept glancing sharply across the room toward the captured portal he’d stolen from Caeden. Likely he had the same suspicions as Damon. His granddaughter’s team had traveled to wherever those portals led to recover from using their Embodiments. If that was so, they’d likely be gone for an extended period. Recovering from Embodiment use could take weeks, at the upper end.

As if to spite his thoughts, alarms began to ring out across the island’s controls, and the founder’s panic increased further. Now how did they pull that off? Damon wondered. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too long before he found out.