Hekate watched Lily resume tearing her way through the founder’s barrier for a moment before wrenching her eyes away to focus back on the massive Etherman. Glancing at Erik, she could immediately tell that they were on the same page. The two of them needed to handle the Etherman to let their teammates resume what they’d been doing before the founder’s soul attack knocked them out.

“I’ll handle the the physical attacks if you can stop the shrouds.” Erik offered.

Hekate took a moment, running through the sensation she’d felt intercepting the bronze-colored shroud with her Necroflame. Could she handle it? A hand landed on her shoulder, interrupting her thoughts.

“We’ll do just fine with that.” Gramps spoke for her, smiling lightly at Erik. Then he turned to her. “I think you should call back that friend of yours, yes?”

Shaking her head at her grandpa’s almost lackadaisical confidence, Hekate muttered the single phrase needed to pull Dave back to this universe. At the same time, she took a scant moment to look once more at Erik. But this time, her eyes swirled with Soul shroud, greying out her pupil and sclera. She wanted to see how his soul was doing.

The answer she got was both heartening and surprising. Erik’s soul blazed with power and solidity. Somehow, the trauma he’d undergone had led to explosive growth. Growth that was still ongoing as his soul adapted to its newfound strength.

Once more, Hekate was mystified by the depth and breadth of souls. Some part of her felt validated by this surprise. She’d spent most of her life being frustrated by her lacking abilities with her Soul shroud. But now that she understood how much power lay there, how complicated and contradictory souls could be at times, she felt much better about that struggle. Honestly, the fact that she’d learned to do anything with this shroud was impressive, considering how esoteric and unwelcoming understanding the soul was.

But watching Erik’s soul gave her some interesting insights. Things she couldn’t act on now, but definitely would, given the opportunity. She filed those thoughts away, returning her attention to her summoned familiar.

Dave had spent her scant moment of inattention absorbing the surrounding situation as it had developed in his absence. Completely unsurprisingly, that was also all the time he needed to understand what was going on.

“Wow, he has really just been stalling us the whole time. A conservative and secretive presence.” Dave chuckled, looking at the giant Etherman even as it manifested a dozen red strings and bronze, interlocking beams. “I’d bet he’s hiding even more. I wonder when he’ll decide he needs to pull out all the stops. Will it take Lily and Asherta breaking that barrier, or is there another one underneath, waiting to stop us once more?”

“That’s depressing.” Hekate snarked, already starting to shape spells to summon more undead.

Dave glanced her way, before waving off her motions. “Don’t bother. I’m sure that the founder can trigger another soul attack like before. And while I’ve seen how you inoculated your friends against it, there’s no way to stop such a brute force attack from interfering with the summoning. At least, not in the short term. We’d have to revise the base spells, and that’d take a while.”

“Well what are we supposed to do then?” Hekate sighed. Already, the Etherman was looming over them. Erik had used a combination of Binding chains and physical blows to deflect another fist attack. The raw power the giant displayed was shockingly high, even if its attacks were intermittent at best.

“Well, the founder left us all these wonderful resources.” Dave gestured toward the scattered piles of dead Ethermen that Erik had finished off. “It would be a shame not to use them.”

Hekate smiled darkly. She’d had few opportunities to test out the core ability of Necromancy, actually raising the dead. Generally, she lacked corpses to work with. Both shrouded and Ethermen tended to make for unviable targets. The amount of physical damage needed to put them down also rendered them almost unusable for necromancy.

This was a unique opportunity. The Ethermen had been rendered unconscious and unable to resist, and Erik’s precise attacks had killed them without overly damaging the bodies. And this was where both Hekate and the bodies themselves could shine.

Every single corpse was that of a shrouded that had at least achieved Embodiment, and then been enhanced by ethertech. They were far more physically robust than a base human. And that played to Hekate’s advantage.

In Dave’s home universe, the Necroverse, the process of converting a body into an undead took time and special reagents if one wanted to make anything better than a basic Zombie or Skeleton. Dave had taught her that process, and also explained why it was done that way.

Simply put, Necromantic Mana was antithetical to living flesh. Even a dead body still held some of that vital essence it reacted to so badly. Under normal circumstances, Necromantic Mana forced into a body would simply cause it to rot, creating a simple lesser undead.

The soul strength of a more powerful undead required a more powerful and intact body to contain it. Creating a body like that required time and materials. Time to let the body acclimate to Necromantic Mana slowly without overwhelming and destroying the remaining vital force, and reagents to strengthen the body beyond its base form.

And this was why Hekate couldn’t have asked for better materials. The body of a shrouded that had reached Embodiment underwent a transformation. They were slightly more robust, and immune to some basic human vulnerabilities like disease and age. But the primary benefit was that the shrouded’s body became much more receptive to all forms of energy. This is what allowed the body to transform through Embodiment.

It also meant that these corpses were primed to absorb Necromantic Mana. Not perfectly, but far more than a normal human body. And the reagents? The ethertech acted perfectly in that capacity. With a few adjustments, these shrouded Ethermen could make for the ideal corpse for undead conversion.

And this was where Hekate’s unique advantages came into play, compared to a normal Necromancer. She had a depth of Mana reserves that most could only dream of. More than that, she could control that Mana in a way that Necromancer’s typically couldn’t. They needed spells to guide the shape of the Mana, while she could alter its form directly through her shroud.

Taking Dave’s words and running with them, Hekate started rapidly working through the forms of various spellworks to find the pieces she needed. A combination of the basic Raise Undead with higher-tier spells that required better components like Raise Death Knight, Raise Lich, and Raise Banshee. But that was all.

She needed to make the spell fast, and ready to absorb and modify the ethertech. It needed to incorporate the ether as if it were the normal reagents. A couple lightning-fast tests on a nearby corpse revealed that this step would be easier than she initially expected. The corpses were adjusted for Ki, and Ether was solidified Ki. Using her Necromancy shroud’s ability to convert Ki into Mana as a basis, she could construct a spell that would cause a holistic shift in the bodies, priming them to turn into undead far faster than normal.

As she worked, she left enough attention on the ongoing battle to not get blindsided. Erik continued to deal with the physical blows coming their way, mostly through deflections. She could easily recognize that Erik’s overall abilities had shot up meteorically after his soul was repaired, but it wasn’t enough to match the brute force of the massive Etherman that was obviously using physical enhancement from both of its dual shrouds. It was like trying to block a hit from Caeden when he put all of Physical Enhancement behind it.

Instead, Erik was being economical about the whole confrontation. His only job was to stop the Etherman from interrupting Asherta and Lily, so that’s what he did. Dave was using his arsenal to back up Erik’s play, dealing with the intermittent shroud attacks. Neither attempted to directly attack the Etherman, comfortable with the current balance.

Hekate also noted that the founder’s assertion that this Etherman was ‘a walking cataclysm’ missed the mark. It was extremely physically powerful, yes. But it was also slow, and its use of shrouds was even slower and more amateur than the single-shrouded Ethermen they’d fought up to this point. Though the potency of those shrouds was nothing to scoff at.

There was one person present who didn’t seem happy with the current balance, and that was the founder. Hekate hadn’t paid much attention to him or Lily and Asherta’s efforts, but the dual-shrouded Etherman obviously wasn’t doing its part to interrupt them.

“Guys, he’s doing something different.” Lily warned. Not a moment later, the Etherman threw a brutally fast and targeted punch right at her. Erik and Dave had to join their efforts to stop it, the speed several times higher than anything it’d shown before.

“Shit!” Erik grunted, having had to use his own body as a fulcrum to twist the blow off course, grabbing the incoming arm and flinging himself to the side with all the force Binding could muster in that brief moment. But he didn’t have time for more than that, because another blow followed immediately after, far outstripping the previous follow-up.

This one forced Dave to sacrifice several weapons to create a concussive blast strong enough to stop the fist dead in the air. He summoned more from his armory, but Hekate didn’t want to test how many times he could do something like that.

“What in all hells?” Erik growled, sounding supremely annoyed.

“He’s fine-tuning the consciousness of the Etherman.” Lily answered the unspoken question. “I don’t think he put much effort into making them smart. Now, he’s putting in the effort.”

“Well, isn’t that just fucking peachy.” Erik braced himself against the floor before springing up with a concussive blast that propelled him into the underside of another approaching attack, pushing it high.

The situation started to rapidly unravel as the pure physical might of the Etherman was enough to bring its strikes ever closer to Lily and Asherta’s efforts to pierce the energy barrier. But before that could happen, Hekate finished her refined spell and started casting.

“Raise Ether Undead: Hekate’s Spite.” She intoned the name of something that ended up being halfway between a spell and a mnemonic. Since it was her own personal creation, designed to turn construct against creator, she felt the name was justified.

All the Etherman corpses started to spasm and flex as flows of Necromantic Mana carefully surged through them, transforming and converting the ether and flecks of Ki left in their bodies. At the same time, the ethertech, the materials infused with Ki, began to shift and melt, flowing through the bodies that had hosted them into new shapes.

Hekate had quickly found that completely converting the shrouded Ethermen into traditional undead was a sucker’s game. The grip of Ki was strong in them, and converting it into Mana was a chore. Rather, she decided to shift the Ki content, shaping into a more friendly form.

She converted it all into Necromantic Ki.

She’d never worked with the Ki version of her Mana, though she knew it existed. After all, her domain handed it to her, and her shroud converted it into Mana for her to make spells. She’d flipped that process partially, allowing her shroud and the connected domain to corrupt the existing Ki into a new form. Necromantic Ki and Mana both had an inherently transformative influence that made the shift easier than converting it all to Mana.

That just left the adjustment to the ethertech and the bodies themselves. And this proved far easier than she expected. Ki seemed to be a more physically involved energy than Mana, allowing it to shift existing materials in a way that Mana found more difficult. The flesh and metal and glass and other materials in the Ethermen flowed like water, shifting to fill the cup that Hekate had created with her mnemonic spell.

Then came the last component, the soul. Robust bodies aided an undead, but only insofar as it allowed them to have a more powerful soul implanted. And here, once again Hekate held a supreme advantage. Her other splinter was an easy source of as much raw Soul as any necromancer could ever ask for. Her mnemonic spell took the loose fragments of souls that were left in the Ethermen from the previous inhabitants and flooded them with raw soul material, forging strong cores, more powerful than practically any undead that Hekate had ever summoned, outside Dave himself.

The result was undead armored and armed in the implements that had bound them to the founder’s will, their bodies honed by shrouds, then ether, then Ki and Mana. If there was a single stronger base from which to draw a grand construction, Hekate couldn’t imagine it.

Then, she flooded them with necromantic Ki, reinforcing that base and giving the undead souls within those bodies the requisite material to build something truly spectacular. Following the influence of the Ki, their bodies grew even more robust, and many variations developed from the various soul seeds Hekate had expanded.

Immediately, Hekate could tell that these undead would have less magical acumen than their counterparts formed from Mana, but they more than made up for it with a level of sheer physical vitality and might that was startling.

THey were clad in armors of different colors and styles, each refined to suit the unique soul remaining within. Hekate hadn’t had time to create a uniform template for the undead to fill, like what Dave had taught her. Instead, she’d just let them develop however they could, it was faster that way. And it seemed that the end result suited these newly minted undead perfectly.

Each one produced an oppressive aura. A literal, shroud aura. They didn’t have shrouds of their own anymore, but the souls and bodies of the undead seemed to remember the sensation well, and they all drew on Hekate’s Necromancy shroud to produce auras reminiscent of her own. Emerald green flames burned in place of eyes, the color distinctly different from Mana-produced Necroflame.

If she was being entirely honest, Hekate had no idea how powerful her Ether Undead would be, but she was excited to find out.