"What are we going to do? Obviously, none of us can touch it." Cat was looking at the sword thrust into the slowly resurrecting heart of a calamity monster. She occasionally glanced away as the aura the weapon put off grew too intense.

"We have several options. None of them are great, but this whole trip has pretty much sucked from the moment we fell down here." Caeden sighed. He felt like he should be more worried about their possible death and the destruction of an entire continent of people, but the last week, and especially the last few hours, had left him emotionally and psychologically drained. He couldn't even muster up the will to be afraid.

"Ok, where do you want to start?" Lily asked.

The next few minutes were spent forming plans on how to push the sword back down when none of them could touch it. It was a short discussion, as there were only a couple of things they could try that they were relatively sure wouldn't endanger any of them.

Cat was concerned that they should just leave, as all the time they spent on this was unlikely to succeed, and might cost the lives of people in the town above. Lily denied this, stating that a few minutes would make very little difference in an evacuation of this size. After all, the only viable method to escape the range of a Magma Titan in only a few days was via ethership, of which the town only had so many. It would take a day at most to load up every ship in town, at which point anyone left was doomed.

Furthermore, any knowledge they gained here and now could be critical to whatever response was brought in should they fail to stop the revival. After all, if they hadn't come to this chamber in the first place, they wouldn't have known about the Titan at all. AN evacuation for a collapsing mountain would look completely different from one planned around the arrival of a 1 billion IP monster showing up. Coming down here had likely already saved hundreds or thousands of lives.

Before they could start testing on the sword, they needed to deal with the revolutionaries they had captured. Which was a difficult subject. They couldn't let the men go for dozens of reasons, not the least of which being that they were terrorists and murderers who took pride in their crimes. The team was also unwilling to just execute them. The Academy may have adapted them to constantly being in danger of dying, but it hadn't made them cold-blooded killers.

The best solution would be to bring them along. After all, just because they didn't have any information immediately useful to the team or knowledge of the Revolution's larger plans did not mean they didn't know anything that would help stop further Revolution attacks. Keeping them as possible information sources to hand over to the CA was an option that appealed to everyone.

To handle that, Cat manifested one of her Passenger Brutes, and they shoved the revolutionaries into the ghost material of the seats. The men sunk in, unable to move. That way, they couldn't escape or interfere with the team's attempts to re-seal the Heartstone.

Officially ready to begin, they all gathered back in the Heartstone cavern, staring at the massive rock that would eventually become a continent-killing monster in only a few days. What was even more galling than that thought was the fact that the Heartstone didn't feel like the most dangerous thing in the room.

"Well, better give it a shot." Erik clapped his hands together. Strings of Stitch shot out from his hands and wrapped around the hilt of the suppressing sword before attaching to the Heartstone, trying to pull the two together. The operative term here being 'try.' This was the simplest, easiest method they could come up with to restore the sword to its previous position buried deep in the stone. It was also the most likely to fail.

Erik shroud was amazing at pulling objects together and binding them. It was the entire gist of Stitch as a domain. However, his shroud was less capable when it came to raw force. His shroud could lift a hundred-pound boulder, but if a ten-pound rock were stuck in mud, it wouldn't work. Basically, if there was a great deal of resistance, his shroud would not go into effect.

This was why Erik couldn't rip someone's body apart by stitching them to different things from multiple angles. A technique he had tried to create multiple times. His shroud simply couldn't detach things that were already connected. This principle of his shroud was completely devoid of physics. Logically, if his threads had enough power to lift something like a hundred-pound weight, a ten-pound weight that was only mildly impeded should get ripped out of that mud easily. This was just one example of a shroud being limited by the nature of his domain. His shroud attached things together. It didn't pull them apart.

The friction resistance from the sword already being in the stone and the natural resilience of the Heartstone, combined together to be enough resistant force to stop Erik's shroud from working. The sword didn't move an inch. It was unfortunate, but not unexpected. This just meant they had to fall back on other, more complicated options.

Next, Lily left the chamber to create the biggest, densest block of ice she could feasibly fit into the cavern. She had to go into the tunnels, as the suppressive effects of the sword limited how dense she could get her ice. Floating the couch-sized sphere back into the cavern and hovering it over the sword, Lily looked conflicted.

"This feels like a dumb idea." She looked at her own ice skeptically.

Caeden shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you. You're the one who came up with it."

"As a joke!" Lily protested.

"Then I guess it just comes down to your joke ideas being good enough that they might actually work," Caeden smirked.

Lily scowled at him, though the expression was ruined by a slight blush creeping up her neck and around her ears. Instead of responding, she moved the ice block up to the ceiling, some twenty feet over the sword, and let it drop.

Lily's ice sphere weighed over five hundred pounds. She had created the densest, most durable ice she had ever made in her life by focusing entirely on those aspects. Despite that, it was still ice. The base durability was abysmal. Usually, Lily actively repaired her ice weapons in combat whenever they broke, and because her shroud had evolved into a conceptual one when she gained Cloud, she could actively enhance ice she created to reinforce it further. Something that was normally limited to modifier shrouds.

Nothing she could do could change the fact that ice wasn't great as what essentially amounted to a giant sledgehammer. Her domain was constantly at a disadvantage down here in the several-hundred-degree heat. The inherent fragility of ice meant that her efforts were like spitting into a raging fire. She had the right solution but the wrong material and not nearly enough of it.

So when the sphere landed on the pommel of the sword, there was a loud thunk, followed by a crack as the iced broke around the impact point and began to come apart. Again, this wasn't outside expectations. Ice was fragile, and Lily was working at a disadvantage under the extreme heat produced by the Heartstone's resurrection process.

"Cool, my turn, I guess." Cat rolled her eyes before calling up two of her strongest kind of specter. Cat's spectral Knights were hulking armored creations standing over eight feet tall and decked out in a ghostly version of full plate mail. They were designed to be Cat's elite attackers and had impressive strength to match that role.

"Caeden, can I get some hammers? It'll probably go better than having them punch it." Cat asked.

"Oh, that's a good idea. Can't believe we didn't think of that." Caeden turned to the wall and began using Sharp to carve out a hunk of the black stone. "Give me a minute, I'll make them actually decent."

"It's not only you and Lily who can have good ideas, Cae." Cat huffed.

Caeden just nodded absentmindedly, still carving up the rock into twin two-handed hammers sized for the Knights. He took them out of the cavern to do something he was still very bad at. Caeden used Physical Enhancement on the hammers.

Caeden's second shroud was terrible with aura. It was deeply infusion based, which was why he could formshift so easily and so often without overly draining his reserves. Trying to use aura with Physical Enhancement was completely different. For months it had simply refused to work. Caeden couldn't even use aura sense with it, let alone modify something. It was only in the last month that he had managed to affect anything outside of his own body.

Despite the difficulty, the effects were worth the effort. Caeden had, with the barest minimum amount of control he could muster, managed to enhance a pea-sized lump of coal into a raw diamond. Counterintuitively, Physical Enhancement seemed even more impressive when used as aura instead of infusion.

Focusing on just a scant sliver of the long haft of a hammer, Caeden slowly, carefully dragged a small bit of gold and purple liquid from the surface of his skin. Unlike Sharp's aura, which manifested as metallic strings that moved erratically and changed in size and dimension, Physical Enhancement's aura manifestation looked like globules of viscous liquid that slowly shifted from gold to purple and back again.

The globs floated down from his fingers and seemed to soak into the pitch black stone. Immediately, any imperfections in the rock shifted into perfect alignment with a slight grinding sound as the stone somehow became even darker, seeming to almost absorb the light around it. Caeden let out the breath he had been holding during the process. That small section had required his absolute focus. This was going to take a while.

It ended up taking almost half an hour for Caeden to fully modify both hammers. The end result was two perfectly formed blunt instruments with a dark sheen that seemed to be a deeper black than the rock it had originally been carved from. Caeden had precious little understanding of all the ways his shroud could affect things he modified with it, but he was happy with the results.

"Here." Caeden tossed the hammers to the Knights, which caught them easily. "They are significantly more durable than the stone was, and my shroud seems to have drawn out whatever vague magical properties it had. These will ignore a small portion of any resistance from whatever they hit, making the impact more intense than it normally would be. Honestly, it's a great result for what we want to use them for."

"Neat." Cat nodded toward her specters, tilting her head in the direction of the Heartstone. The Knights began levering themselves up onto the top. It was ten feet tall, and the Knights were a bit over eight, but their inherent strength made it easy for them to basically do a chin-up and haul themselves up after throwing the hammers up ahead.

The sword itself was at least as tall as the knights if the four feet of it sticking out of the Heartstone was any indication. Caeden would estimate the blade's full length at six and a half feet, consistent with many two-handed longswords. Most formshifts tended to add height to a shrouded, making many weapon designs larger to compensate. A longsword of similar design made for an unshrouded would be shorter by a few feet.

That left the pommel at a little under waist height for the specters. Perfect for what they were supposed to do. At a signal from Cat, the first Knight drew back his hammer in a massive overhead swing and slammed it down into the sword's pommel.

A grinding sound erupted from the point where the sword met the stone. The orange light underneath flared brightly, and a pulse emerged from it and flowed into the veins of light coursing out from the Heartstone and into the cavern and tunnels. The sword moved deeper into the stone by a fraction of an inch.

"Um." Caeden's eyes widened.

"Oh." Lily adopted the same expression.

"Shit!" Cat coursed. "Did we just fuck up? I think we just fucked up."

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

They heard the combined roar of thousands of monsters echoing through the tunnels.