"What the fuck is wrong with you! You've doomed us all!" One of the technicians immediately began shouting at Erik. The remaining armed revolutionaries stopped shooting when the lights started flickering.

"Dang it, Caeden! I told you this was a bad idea! You should have never given me a giant death laser. This was always going to end badly." Erik complained, completely ignoring the panicked ravings of the technician. The other one was furiously poking at a set of buttons that Caeden assumed controlled the whole apparatus.

"Ten minutes to core meltdown. CMS booting to auto-management. All Operator privileges revoked. Evacuate Continent 4235A."

The technician slammed his hands down on the buttons. "Fuck! It's not responding anymore. There's nothing I can do!"

"Attempting to rectify core fault. Searching."

Caeden was completely at a loss. He had hoped the weapon would simply shut down if it overheated. That was what the captured revolutionary implied. More than that, he had figured if it was going to explode, it would only affect the structure they were in, maybe the surrounding area. Not the whole continent. If Caeden had to die to stop this weapon from hitting the War God his uncle was on, so be it. Now, it seemed like his half-assed plan had doomed them all. If this meltdown really was going to take out the entire continent, there was no way the War God was outside the blast radius.

So Caeden just collapsed. He sat down, his sword-shaped lump of metal leaning against him. "I'm sorry, Erik. I fucked up. I…I don't know what to do. This is on me, not you." He didn't know what else to say.

Erik walked over and plopped down next to him with a sigh. He dropped the laser to lean up against Caeden's sword; the two weapon's now acting as a backrest between them. "Nah. My luck was going to catch up with me anyway. Your plan was solid. How do you predict continent destroying explosions, anyway?"

Caeden let out a small chuckle. "Man, I really hope this is the most dangerous thing that's happened to you, or I'm really going to start thinking you're cursed."

"Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as curses. I just have bad luck." Erik scoffed.

Caeden turned to look at him incredulously. "You do realize how ridiculous you sound, right?"

"Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Who believes in curses?"

"Who believes in luck so bad it leads to multiple near-death experiences every day?"

"Oh, come on. It's not every day. Just most of them."

Before Caeden could point out the flaws in that bit of reasoning, he was interrupted by the…weapon…voice…thing. Whatever that was.

Core resolution found. Commandeering materials in accordance with nominal authority. Prepare for integration and reassembly.

"What do you think it's talking abou-shit!" Caeden was lifted from the floor by an unseen force, along with his sword and the laser. He floated up toward the giant rotating mechanisms that made up the Central Management System until he was even with the center of its mass.

Beginning integration.

Caeden opened his mouth, maybe to talk, maybe to scream. Whatever it had been for was wiped from his mind as something so fundamentally wrong happened to him he could hardly even call it pain.

In an instant, massive quantities of both his shrouds began pouring out of him in long strings of red and purple-gold. More than he had ever held in his entire life, never mind that he had been completely out moments before. He felt that place inside him where his shrouds sat being pulled out of him, and it was like his soul was coming along with it.

While this all happened, some far distant part of his mind that wasn't currently experiencing his imminent and painful death noticed that both his sword and the laser were flowing into the center of the CMS in long strings of metal, their forms unspooling like a ball of twine. The light coming from the CMS, which Caeden had barely noticed, began to grow intensity.

Finally, it reached a point where Caeden was sure he would go blind even if he had had the presence of mind to be able to close his eyes. When all he could see was white light, and all he could feel was his soul being slowly ripped out, something changed.

Integration complete. Beginning reassembly.

The pull became a push, and all the feeling rushed back into Caeden's body. For a brief instant, he could hear colors and taste sounds. Then everything snapped back to normal with shooting, burning pains running through his whole body like someone shoved hot wires into his veins and built a furnace in his stomach. The white light remained, continuing to blind him for several long moments.

"...den…Caeden…Caeden! Come on, talk to me! I need you conscious!" Erik was yelling at him. It was at that point that Caeden realized he could feel the floor under his back and that there was something very wrong with his eyes.

"...eri-gahh!" Caeden nearly choked on his own tongue. His mouth felt like a desert.

"Shit, ok, so your brain is working. That's good, at least." Erik's voice was laced with relief and panic in equal measure.

Caeden tried again. "Erik."

"Yeah? What's wrong? I'll see if I can fix it."

"Erik, your luck is so shit."

He laughed. "What do you think I've been telling you?"

{}

Erik managed to fix Caeden's eyes. Apparently, it was something to do with his retinas. Caeden had no idea what that was, but his vision worked now, so he wasn't complaining. In the minutes since then, he had been lying on the floor trying to recover. Whatever had just happened to him had done nothing to refill his shrouds. Instead, he felt like he had been hit by that attack that blew the backside off the War God. Point blank.

Erik had taken it upon himself to subdue the rest of the revolutionaries while he rested. He quickly slipped past whatever resistance those collars allowed them, commenting that it was easy since they all "moved" the same as the previous ones. With all of them knocked unconscious for the foreseeable future, they were free to relax and wait for the CMS.

Whatever it had done to Caeden, it wasn't finished doing. The light coming from the core wasn't nearly as bright as it had been, but it hadn't gone away either. Neither of them was sure they were out of the woods yet, but there was nothing they could do in the first place. According to Erik, though, at least twenty minutes had passed, and they weren't all dead, so something had happened.

They got their answer only a few minutes later. The light flared back to its previous intensity, then vanished. The spinning pieces of the CMS slowed down until they were moving much slower than Caeden had seen. A small object separated from the core and floated down until it dropped on the floor beneath the structure, right by the control panel the revolutionaries had been using.

Reassembly complete. Central Management System fully operational. Excess energy resulting in meltdown diverted to generate new object scenario. Object is coded FI-V999. Object scenario incomplete, necessary data missing.

"Well, there you go!" Erik hopped to his feet. "No blowing up continents for us today. Good job, Cae!"

Caeden snorted. "I didn't do anything. I basically got my soul violated by a giant spinny ball while it fixed itself somehow. Also, Cae? Really?"

"Oh, come on. We're friends now, right? Save a guy's life a few times, and you're automatically friends! I gotta give you a nickname!" Erik stated like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Since when? And why Cae? That kinda sucks as far as nicknames go." Caeden shot back.

"What else am I going to call you? Your name doesn't give me a lot to work with." Erik pouted dramatically.

Caeden chuckled and shrugged. "Just stick with my name, ok? I don't need a nickname."

"Nope!" Erik shot down with a smile. "Totally calling you Cae from now on."

Caeden sighed. "Fine, whatever. I don't have the mental energy to argue with you right now. What came out of that thing?" Hopefully, Erik would just drop it. Not that Caeden was going to put much faith in that.

"Dunno."

"Well, why don't you go look at it?" Caeden asked after Erik stood there staring at him.

"No way, man." Erik shook his head vigorously, "It'll definitely blow me up. Or light me on fire. Or both."

Caeden opened his mouth to retort that Erik was just being paranoid, then changed his mind. "Yeah, that's probably pretty fair."

"Exactly! Me and weird magical artifacts that come from giant death rays don't mix."

Caeden rolled his eyes and got to his feet. It was less difficult than he thought it would be. His whole body ached, but standing didn't make it any worse. Walking over and picking up the item the CMS had placed on the floor was no more painful than laying down had been.

The object itself was roughly the size of his fist, a bit longer and thinner, but right in that range. It vaguely resembled a sword hilt if someone had taken one and added a bunch of buttons where one's fingers would rest. There were eight buttons, four on each side of the hilt. They were large, bigger than his own finger. In fact, the buttons were so big that they took up nearly the entire grip of the hilt.

The buttons were a deep purple, while the ends of the hilt were gold, and in between the buttons were slivers of red.

Closest to his wrist was a series of letters and a revolving dial along the back. The letters read 'FI-V', and the dial was set to '000'.

"No way," Caeden muttered. He reached for his shrouds. Over his brief rest, he had gained just a spark of each, barely enough to do anything. He pushed those sparks into the object.

Instantly, it thrummed. To Caeden, it was almost like the object came alive. He could feel the smallest spark of something inside it, something like an intelligence. It wasn't human or animal, but other. Above all else, it was happy. Caeden felt a purr of contentment sweep out from intellect when he fed it that tiny bit of his shrouds. In return, the intellect gave Caeden knowledge.

Forged Infinity. That was what it was called. The most self-aggrandizing name Caeden had ever heard. But, from what he could understand, it deserved the hype. Clicking the button underneath his right hand, the hilt let out a series of whirrs and clicks, like clockwork, before a slot opened along the top, and a crimson blade unfolded from within the device. The counter ticked over to '001'.

"Ok, this is way too cool." Caeden grinned like a kid in a candy shop.

{}

With nothing else to do, and no idea what was going on outside the structure, Caeden and Erik agreed to try and exit the door they had come in, hoping that whatever monsters had been stirred up by their landing had returned to their dens in the hours since. They also decided to drag the revolutionaries along with them. They had eight unconscious people to haul up many, many flights of stairs and very little shroud to go on.

Erik had revealed earlier that he could use his shroud on his own body, much like how Caeden used Physical Enhancement. It made him stronger by orders of magnitude, though it didn't grant the larger size or extreme durability that Caeden's own shroud did. The boost to his strength was also much less if his carrying capacity was anything to go by.

Caeden had been hoping his new toy would be able to help, but that hope was quickly dashed. It took his shrouds to fuel its transformations, and he had nothing to give. Plus, he got the impression that what had once been a completely malleable lump of metal was now strictly a weapon. He doubted he would be able to turn Forged Infinity into literally anything as he had previously.

Pressing on the weapon's pommel ejected a small clip, which Caeden used to attach it to his pants. Caedens clothing had several holes from the shots he had taken during his storming of the CMS room, but they were mostly intact. The knowledge about the clip came from the alien intelligence in the weapon itself. Caeden had been contemplating how to keep hold of it while also carrying people. He didn't want to put it down, and it refused to stick to him as it had previously. Reacting to that thought, Forged Infinity had prodded him to tap on the pommel, revealing the clip. The clicker rolled over to '009'.

They spent the next couple of hours just hauling bodies up flights of stairs. During that time, they found a card on one of the technicians that they could use to open all the doors. There was a panel next to each door that neither of them had paid any attention to, not knowing what it was for. If they waved the card in front of the panel, the door would open.

Once they had all the unconscious people near the top and thoroughly tired of carrying limp bodies, They went searching for how to open the door to the plateau. It was a completely different mechanism with no panel in sight. They found the controls they needed one floor down, in a room with a strange screen that showed the top of the plateau. Erik had been poking around while Caeden kept hauling people, and he had stumbled across the room. He managed to trip some kind of alarm, with flashing red lights and a siren upon entering, which startled him into slamming his hand onto a c control panel and opening the door while also jamming his wrist. Somehow.

There was no sign of why the door had let them in the first time, but Caeden was less concerned with figuring that out than he was with trying to signal the War God, still floating overhead with many shrouded working to repair the damage. They needed to let them know they were here without calling a horde of monsters down on their heads.

Ultimately, they ended up using the lowest-tech option. Caeden grabbed the shiniest bit of metal from all the shattered equipment in the room leading to the CMS and waved it back and forth in the afternoon sun, betting that eventually someone would notice and come looking, considering the War God had just been hit by a massive weapon of unknown origin.

He was right. It took a few minutes, but several skippers headed down toward them loaded with three soldiers each, not including the pilots. On one of those skippers was Anthony.

"Damn, kid. What in the name of the One Shroud is all this?" Anthony shook his head, though he couldn't hide a slight grin. "I thought you and that bean pole there bit it when that blast hit. Now I find you down here with what looks like a bunch of revolutionaries. Care to explain?"

The soldiers were looking at Caeden and Erik with heavy frowns like they had done something wrong, which Caeden couldn't understand. They were here with a bunch of unconscious enemies of the state. What could they have possibly done wrong? "How do you know they are revolutionaries, anyway?" They looked like normal continentals, after all.

Anthony tapped his throat and pointed to the unconscious forms of the two technicians and the guard that had survived Caeden's attack on the CMS room.

"Oh, yeeeeah," Erik spoke up. "Totally forgot to take those off them. My bad. I knocked them out and then forgot about it." All four still had their ethertech collars on.

Caeden rolled his eyes. "Yeah, a lot happened. Most of it I don't think you'll believe. It's all pretty crazy."

A series of roars, identical to the ones that had chased Caeden and Erik into the structure beneath their feet, rang out.

"Maybe we can talk about it on the ship?"