By the time Cat reached the arena floor, the medical staff was already on hand, looking to fix up both of the previous combatants. Once she got there, Cat stopped the one working on Erik. "Sorry, he hates having others heal him. He'll fix himself up in time."

The staff member sighed, "He won't be able to hold to that once he leaves the Academy. The military is much less lenient to graduated students. He's incurred significant damage, and most of it looks self-inflicted. Perhaps your faction leader should have a talk with him. Whatever techniques he was using, they aren't sustainable."

"Lily nodded. "We know. He's a work in progress. Normally he's pretty relaxed, but he gets incredibly stubborn over the weirdest things. That little meltdown is something we're trying to work him through."

"That was more than a little meltdown." The woman stared hard into Cat's eyes. "He better get it figured out quick before it gets him killed. He wasn't all that close this time, but that won't always be the case."

Cat nodded mutely. The medical officer was right, of course. It's why Caeden and Lily's initial plan only involved Erik taking down David and then stepping down. When those two found out about his weird meltdowns, they instantly moved him to less dangerous parts of the plan. Unfortunately, neither really seemed to get Erik on the same level Cat did. He acted relaxed and goofy because inside, he wasn't either of those things. Cat understood. It's why she always projected confidence and control.

"Spectral assassin." Cat manifested a construct. The creature looked at her from under its white, semi-transparent hood with burning green eyes. "Take the idiot back up to the observation room. Just lay him on a bench or something. After that, you're dismissed." Construct saluted before hefting Erik's bleeding body over its shoulder and heading up the stairs, vanishing from sight, along with its living cargo, as it went.

Cat sighed. It was still amazing to her, being able to make specters. All her life, her shroud had been more of a curse than anything else. What even was a soul? She had no idea. Often she envied Lily and Caeden for their simple, easy-to-understand shrouds. Soul sounded like a strong domain. If only she could figure out what to do with it.

Even with the massive improvement her specters represented, her shroud had massive, glaring weaknesses. Mainly, she had zero ability with the standard principles of either aura or infusion. No aura sense, or aurakinesis. No physical enhancement or formshift. She was stuck with invasion as her only attack method that wasn't a specter. Even after months of trying and her friends helping her as much as they could, there had been no improvement, period.

"Well, what a wild match, both the Jester and the Black Blade, taken out at the same time! Quite an impressive battle! Now we have fighters on both sides. From the Metal Knights, it's Ramzi Bijou the Unbreakable! He currently holds eighteenth place in the rankings and has the Diamond shroud. From the Forged, It's Cat, the One Woman Army! She ranks twenty-seventh in the Academy, and her shroud is Soul. Neither of our fighters for this round has a splinter."

Cat scowled at the teacher's announcement. She hated how her own rank had slipped while her friend's increased. Well, Lily hadn't, but she was in second place, so that didn't count. Cat let out a pent-up breath. Her friends constantly noted that Cat had a bad habit of complaining about anything and everything. She tried to curb it, even in her own head, but it tended to slip out when she was stressed. Like right now.

Before Elune could announce the beginning of the fight, Cat tapped her pole on the ground twice. It wasn't loud by any means, but the noise wasn't the point. At her signal, five spectral brutes marched into the arena through one of the larger entrances. They were carrying all the weapons Caeden had forged for her specters of the last several months.

All of them moved to stand behind her before collapsing in on themselves and vanishing. As the big gorilla-like constructs vanished, their dissipating substance gently deposited the crates onto the ground with hardly a bump. Cat had spent long hours fine-tuning every specter mnemonic she had so they were better at what she made them for. That included making it so that the brutes didn't drop all her shit on the ground when they dematerialized. All of her specters were chock full of little improvements like that. Too bad quality of life improvements didn't really help in a fight.

“AAAAAAND BEGIN!”

Ramzi immediately formshifted, his skin becoming resplendent diamond. He was wearing full plate mail and wielding a two-handed battleaxe. Cat couldn't guess what kinds of materials or infusions had gone into any of it. That was Caeden's forte. All she knew was that it was going to be a pain in the ass to get through. She wasn't going to sit back waiting.

"Spectral encampment." Cat breathed, pale smoke with flickers of green rising from her mouth. Something Caeden had shown her months ago was stacking mnemonics. Like his rose garden, you used one mnemonic as the basis for a more complex one. That had been a blessing for Cat. Setting up specific battle formations or troop compositions in the middle of a fight was a bitch. It was great just having a catch-all that got her started without having to say the same mnemonic a hundred times.

With her words, dozens of specters began forming around her. Encampment was a defensively focused troop disposition, so her primary forces were all soldiers. Each of her specters had its own special ability for each type, and her soldiers came with spectral armor. They were more durable by far than either her assassins or archers. All her efforts in refining these constructs had focused around making that defense even better. Encampment gave her 25 of them. Hopefully more than enough to hold off Ramzi for a while.

That wasn't all she got, though. There were ten archers with spectral arrows as a backline, but after that came her new units. First were her spectral workers. They were the backbone of her army, acting as multi-skilled support units. They were much more mechanical in both appearance and action than any of her other specters, with quadrupedal robotic legs and six arms with pincers instead of hands. They had no heads, just a green flame floating over stick-like bodies. They looked like someone took a candlestick lit with green fire and added little robot arms to it. They were only two feet tall.

Despite the small size, they cost the same as all the basic units like soldiers and archers. She had halved that cost from her original 100 down to 50. They cost the same because her workers could take all that excess shroud packed into them and inject it into other specters, healing them. More than that, they were fast and agile. They had trouble carrying large objects, like a human, but something like a sword or buckler shield was easy. Immediately after they were manifested, her force of 15 workers ran over to the crates and popped them open, pulling out all the weapons and rushing them to the frontline soldiers. With their efforts, all the soldiers were armed with a shield and sword in under a minute.

This all led to the last two units created with encampment. Her Guardians. Cat's friends had suggested she make more powerful units that didn't need equipment to be effective. Guardians were one of four designs she created with that in mind. Eight feet tall and coated in spectral plate mail, her Guardians were much more powerful than her soldiers. Every inch of them was covered in armor easily twice as durable as the more limited protection her soldiers had.

That increase in defensive ability led to an equally significant increase in cost. Each Guardian cost 200 shroud to create, despite all her efforts to increase their design's efficiency. That extra cost was undoubtedly worth the four soldiers she could have made instead. That fact was shown immediately, in spades.

Ramzi was not idly watching while Cat's forces were armed and assuming formation. No, his diamond-coated form charged across the arena right at her. He wasn't an idiot. This fight was over if he managed to take out Cat before she could establish herself properly. That charge was stopped cold. One of her Guardians body-checked Ramzi at full speed, slamming its massive, armored shoulder into his gut. One of the benefits of her constructs, she could manifest them anywhere she wanted.

Ramzi was knocked off his feet due to the angle of the impact, but he was completely unharmed. The Metal Knight used an infusion shroud with a diamond domain. His moniker of Unbreakable was no joke. Fortunately, Cat wasn't trying to hurt him with her Guardians anyway. They were units maximized entirely for defense and interference, nothing else. She just wanted to stall him out while her own defenses were solidified.

With that in mind, and knowing their own jobs, the Guardians immediately dog-piled the diamond-man and tried to grapple him on the ground in a pile of infused flesh and construct creatures. Cat was always amazed at how insightful and competent her specters were. It was something to do with her shroud. Constructs created by others were usually much more limited in their skills and intelligence. Normally, a construct was only as skilled at any particular thing as the shrouded who created them.

Not so for her specters. At this very moment, one of her Guardians was trying to lock Ramzi into a submission hold, armored arms around his neck, legs interlocked as they struggled on the ground. At the same time, the other Guardian was repeatedly punching the Metal Knight in his gut and face. Their timing and cooperation were perfect, like well-trained soldiers who had fought side by side on the battlefield for years. Cat had none of the experience necessary for that level of teamwork, let alone the training to pull off that grapple.

While Ramzi wrestled with her Guardians, Cat had gotten her forces organized and armed. Now she had all 25 soldiers and 10 archers ready to go. Just in time as well. It seems Ramzi was tired of trying to pry the specters off of him and finally decided to take the two seriously.

"Shell!" He yelled, causing diamond to rapidly grow off his body until he was encased in a dome of the precious mineral over a foot thick. The Guardians couldn't do a thing about it. Their model of specter wasn't equipped with the offensive power to pierce that kind of barrier. The next moment, the dome exploded, firing shards and chunks of gemstone outward in an impressive blast.

The attack hit both Guardians full-on, dealing significant damage. Both had large pieces of armor blasted away, and a chunk of their underlying material was annihilated. They were still standing despite all that, but it was a close thing. They wouldn't last much longer.

From the rubble of that attack, Ramzi burst forth. He scooped his battleaxe off the ground along the way. One of the Guardians had managed to tear it from his hands in their struggles; now, he used it to cleave a damaged construct in half. With pieces of their armor gone, they were much more vulnerable.

Before he could turn to take out the other Guardian, arrows flew in, striking all across Ramzi's diamond body. Not a single one hit his armor. Every strike landed like a punch from the Guardians. Cat's attempt to refine her archers had allowed the constructs to slightly modify the arrows they produced, giving them different-shaped heads. The ones fired at Ramzi had blunt, flat tips instead of a typical point. After all, it wasn't like they would pierce that diamond formshift.

The shape caused the arrows to lose some speed compared to a traditional arrow, but the infused bows the archers held made up for the lack and then some. Each bow was infused to increase the power and force of each shot by over double. They were impressive pieces of ethersmithing in their own right. In the hands of the unreasonably skilled archers Cat could produce, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Cat recognized that throughout this whole fight so far, she hadn't done any real damage to Ramzi at all. Despite the shots her specters had landed with both fists and arrows, the Metal Knight hadn't even flinched. His formshift was incredibly durable. Cat was fine with that. The heart of the matter was, every attack landed required Ramzi to expend a little bit of shroud to hold his defenses. She knew better than anyone how much seemingly little costs could add up.

This was essentially a battle of attrition. Who would run out of shroud first? Cat had used over a fourth of her shroud on encampment alone, but it had let her set up a strong position to deny Ramzi a chance to drop her any lower. Every arrow her archers fired cost her some shroud, but her natural regeneration mitigated that loss. As her reserves grew, so did her regeneration rate. At this point, she recovered the cost of ten arrows every three seconds.

Ramzi ignored the rain of arrows falling on him and continued to attack the remaining Guardian. The construct didn't go down easily. It wasn't caught in a surprise attack like its fellow. The armored giant managed to block several blows from Ramzi's axe with what remained of its armor before falling to a powerful overhead chop. Each thwarted attack was another opening, another moment for the archers to pepper the Diamond shrouded with hits. Every unanswered attack Cat landed was a cost to her opponent's reserves.

When Ramzi could finally turn his attention back to his original target, namely her, he was faced with a wall of ten spectral soldiers two rows deep. Five were held in reserve to fill the gaps if any fell. With an inarticulate roar of anger and frustration, Ramzi charged the line.

What followed was a mess of melee that Cat had very little input on. When it came down to actual fighting, her specters were much more capable than her. She just sat back and watched, ready to create reinforcements at a moment's notice. Ramzi was in a difficult situation. The Guardians had only stopped him for barely two minutes, and he almost certainly expected to bowl over the visibly weaker soldiers. Instead, he experienced the weight of numbers.

The soldiers were extremely skilled and could communicate without any observable signal. Every time Ramzi landed a solid hit, that soldier would immediately slide out of the front line, their brethren in the backline seamlessly filling their slot. The soldier's spectral armor and infused shields were enough, in their skilled hands, to prevent any instant-kill strikes. So even after several minutes of back and forth, Ramzi hadn't dropped a single specter.

More than that, Ramzi's own defenses were constantly under pressure. The soldiers pressed in close, following his every move and crowding the range of his battleaxe, limiting the large weapon's potential. He was constantly under attack from so many directions that he couldn't even contemplate blocking them all. Infused swords constantly found the gaps in his armor the very second his attention shifted to another soldier, over and over again. He was like a lion being hemmed in by a pack of hyenas. He was clearly far and way more powerful than any of the soldiers or even the whole group. But their defenses were always just enough to prevent him from doing real damage, and every attack cost him a few hits. He was being bled out, and Cat was sure he could feel it.

With that in mind, he could only push the offensive. With a flex and deliberate twist of his wrists in a particular pattern, large diamond spikes emerged around his armor torso. Before the spectral soldier could respond or adjust, he had dropped his axe and grabbed one of them, crushing the pale white form into a spikey embrace.

The other soldiers were quick to react, all of them stabbing him repeatedly while he was relatively defenseless. However, they could do nothing to save the captured soldier. With a back and forth twisting motion, Ramzi scraped at the spectral soldier's shroud-made armor until it pooped like a bubble and dissipated into nothingness. Finally, he could start whittling down their numbers.

Ramzi spent the next several minutes repeating this pattern. In this case, the soldier's numbers worked against them as none could maneuver out of his grasp with their fellows around them, limiting mobility. Briefly, he was elated, feeling the solution to this fight falling into his lap. That was until he noticed that the number of soldiers hadn't decreased. In fact, there appeared to be more.

The Metal Knight had made a critical error. In the heat of battle, he forgot he was fighting constructs, creations of another shrouded. For every soldier he destroyed, Cat summoned another. In fact, she made more. Ramzi's new strategy involved leaving himself completely defenseless for as long as it took to crush and grind a specter into nothing. So she just piled on the damage with no reprisal, accelerating the process that had already been happening this entire fight.

Realizing this, Ramzi grew desperate. He quickly regained his axe and began taking wild, vicious swings, aiming to do as much damage as possible. The soldiers didn't let it happen. Every attack deflected off an infused shield, ultimately gaining nothing. Cat would guess he wasn't used to losing a battle of attrition. As a general rule, infusion shrouds tended to be more efficient, considering their combat style usually involved less shroud-consuming projectiles and the like.

Cat became the exception to that. She could output so much damage from so many sources that any opponent would be overwhelmed. Ramzi just didn't know what to do. Eventually, a sword stab caused his diamond formshift to crack, and the damage didn't disappear. He was on his last legs, with nothing left to restore the accumulating damage he took.

Within seconds there were cracks all over Ramzi's body. He was forced to drop the formshift, as it was no longer providing even a shred of protection. Instantly, ten blades were hovering over various vital points, ready to seriously injure him. Ramzi let out a sigh through his panting breath. He had to drop all physical enhancement almost a minute ago just to keep his formshift going. In less than a minute, he was out of breath, unable to keep up with the fight uninfused.

"I surrender."