They came out of the forest in a flood from all directions. It was a nightmare scenario that dwarfed what the team had dealt with in the tunnels underneath Black Reach. There, they had held a single entrance against less enemies that were weaker than the ones before him with more people. Now, Caeden was down to half his team and fighting to cover more ground. It should end in disaster.

For some reason, Caeden didn't feel like it would.

Instead, he felt confident in a way he hadn't come close to before. Instead of dwelling on that, he decided to focus on doing his job and dealing with these monsters. His first responsibility was to take down the most powerful of the false dragons as fast as possible. Meanwhile, Cat would hold the ground as his massive cloud of thorns blocked the air.

To that end, Caeden tapped into his newest ability set, his martial arts. He had not tested any of these techniques yet; there hadn't been time. But he knew what he needed, and he needed all the power he could get. So instead of second-guessing, he went for it.

"Dragon Saga Arts, Third Technique." Caeden intoned, feeding lines of Physical Enhancement through his body in a specific pattern as he flexed the muscles in his arms and back just so. His infusion shroud followed along his muscles and flowed toward a point just below his shoulder blades. There, it pooled before his will forced it out of his body. Physical Enhancement once more became manifested aura, the purple-gold liquid flowing to form the bones of the most pathetic chicken wings Caeden could imagine. A moment later, Sharp joined in to form ragged feathers that looked like they belonged on a diseased fowl.

{King Eagle: Swiftwing Steps}

They were hardly the impressive ten-foot wingspan he had envisioned. But Caeden had just begun to form his martial arts. It couldn't hold a candle to his expectations, as Erik had explained to him not long after they left.

{}

"Martial arts has two parts," Erik told him. They were sitting on a bench in one of the training rooms aboard the Turtle Fortress. "You got image and skill. For image, you think about what you want the technique to be. That's where the stories come in. Something that you think is powerful, that inspires you, makes a strong base for a technique or even an entire martial art. Some people base their techniques on the natural world, like volcanoes, flying whales, or other real things that fill them with awe. But I like stories because a story can always be more impressive than reality."

He shoved another handful of popcorn into his mouth, somehow talking through the buttery kernels. "If you have a weak image, the technique will be weak. But it's all about perception. If you think a dandelion is the most impressive living thing in existence, and bears are weak little bitches, then a technique you make based on dandelions could split a mountain, while one about bears wouldn't scratch a piece of tissue paper. It's gotta be something you believe in."

"Now, skill. That's the easy part." Erik nodded. "The better you are at controlling your weapons and your body, the more you understand yourself and how to use what you've got, your ability to use your shroud in tandem with your body, the closer you'll get to the image you created. At first, whatever you make won't be even a hundredth of your image. But the better you get, the closer you'll become to that ideal. That's why the image is so important. It sets how high you can go, how strong your technique can get. Skill is just the training it takes to get there."

He smirked at Caeden. "You finally have the bare minimum skill to even think about making a technique. Congrats, bro. If you nail it on the image, that'll carry you until your skills catch up. Until then, don't expect your techniques to do more than give you an edge."

{}

Caeden shook his head, banishing the memory. Caeden's image for his martial art was the Saga of Emperor Dragon and the King Beasts, a series of interconnected stories that were his favorite when he was young and his adoptive parents were still alive. Some of his most cherished memories were when they told him those tales.

He couldn't think of a stronger image to base his martial arts on than those special moments that still filled him with awe. Tales of adventure and comradery, personal struggles, and triumphing over evil that made his heart soar. He thought he had buried them along with his parents, but when the time came to start forming a martial art, the memories bubbled back up. In the end, he couldn't imagine using anything else.

Obviously, his skills were severely lacking, if the half-formed pathetic excuse for wings hanging limply off his back were any indication. But he didn't let that stop him. He was committed, and the time for doubts was over. His mind was calm, his heart content. This was the right thing to do, and he could live with the consequences.

The monsters were about to reach the lines of Cat's specters. They had already taken casualties, both from his hovering armada of thorns and the dragons in the nest itself. Caeden had paid little attention to the dragon's own preparations for the oncoming monster wave, focused on his personal efforts. The lime green dragon had attested that these false dragons were resistant or even immune to dragon breath which was proven true.

A dozen different types of elemental fury rained from hundreds of mouths as the dragons fired everything they had at the oncoming horde. Despite that, only a handful of the monsters suffered any damage, and the rest simply ignored the barrage.

Despite the lackluster effect of their natural weapons, it was immediately obvious to Caeden that the dragons had been defending their nest for a long time. Because even as many continued to use their breath attacks, doing whatever damage they could, others were picking up massive boulders that had been prepped ahead of time and flying them over the charging monsters. Each rock dropped resulted in at least one monster dying and dozens of others suffering residual damage from the boulder fragments that resulted from the impact.

Eager to add his own efforts, Caeden dug his feet into the ground, eyes locked on one of the largest and most powerful monsters of the oncoming rush. His first step was assisted by a pathetic flap of his half-formed technique.

Caeden suddenly found himself in front of his target, inches from its brown scales. They were wrinkled and knotted like tree bark, and his face was now inches from its charging torso. Belatedly, Caeden felt the surge of power from both his shrouds flowing through the pathways defined by his technique, massively increasing the effect of his speed form and Limit Acceleration mnemonics.

Before he could think, Caeden's momentum continued forward at a blistering pace, and he slammed bodily into his targeted false-dragon. He didn't even have time to raise his daggers before he careened into the monster's broad chest. It was a massive beast, easily three times his height.

He was saved from splattering across the monster's scales by his Bramble mnemonic. He had spent months enhancing and refining the spikes he made using Sharp, and they were effective weapons all on their own. Combined with his momentum, Caeden carried into the monster's body as his spike-covered torso shredded into its facsimile flesh. It held for the briefest of instants before the momentum of Caeden's triple-enhanced movement, reinforced by speed form, Limit Acceleration, and the Swiftwing Step technique, blasted past what would normally be sturdy defenses.

He continued on, bowling straight through the monster's bowls, shredding its vulnerable internals and crushing bones into dust as its organs pasted against his body. A second later, Caeden burst out the other side of the monster, crashing into several lesser beasts before his momentum died down into something he could control.

He had just accidentally eviscerated and pulverized a 20,000IP monster. Caeden was stunned for a long moment until the ache in his abused flesh caught up with his brain. That move had hurt him, though not as much as he would have expected. Bramble had shredded flesh and bone ahead of his body, easing the way through. He was bruised over basically every inch of his enhanced form, but that was it. The Bramble spikes were shattered, though.

It took him a single word to re-establish the mnemonic. It wasn't even a real problem. If there was one thing he had plenty of right now, it was Sharp shroud. He had so many thorns going his reserves were restored in an instant.

Caeden had to take a brief second, even as the monsters around him seemed to catch up with what just happened and start to turn toward him. He had never dreamed his technique would be that effective. His skill was so low, so lacking, that it shouldn't have done much of anything.

With a shake of his head, Caeden decided to take this unexpected success and run with it. Though, with a bit more control going forward. Slamming into monsters was not his preferred solution. So his next step accounted for only a slight twitch from his half-formed technique, and the power only flung him halfway across the clearing instead of completely through his target and several monsters behind it.

Now that he was only a few normal steps away from his intended target and still enhanced with superhuman speed that made every monster around him look like it was moving at half speed, Caeden activated a second technique.

"Dragon Saga Arts: Thirty-First Technique." He intoned. "And the Eagle King swept down with grace and terrible power upon the vile monster. His vicious claws rent flesh and bone, and the rest were cowed before his might. In their silent fear, he spoke. 'Turn from your destructive path; else you will face my-"

{Ripper Talons}

As he intoned the technique, Caeden formed pathways from his heart, up his arms, and into his daggers. Physical Enhancement flowed through them, reinforcing his shrouded weapon even further. As the chant ended, he pulled a huge portion of Sharp into the edge of both daggers, thousands of IP worth of shroud flowing along the crimson edges.

At the influx, both blades expanded and extended, reinforced by the channeled Physical Enhancement and fueled by Sharp. What had once been daggers the length of his hand with a straight blade became weapons much more closely resembling short swords with curved edges and vicious serrations. These were blades meant to make the victim bleed to death, merciless and violent tools.

All of this only took a brief moment from an unenhanced perspective. With both speed form and Limit Acceleration, Caeden was operating on his own personal time scale. That was how he could manage the lengthy chant in the middle of a monster horde and not be attacked from all sides. A leap carried him and his newly enhanced daggers into the side of another treelike monster dragon, where he slammed the blades into its flank and ripped them upward, carried by the power of an enhanced jump. Once again, its scales could not hold against the absurd momentum he could generate with all his mnemonics.

A moment later and Caeden was in the air above a crippled and heavily bleeding monster, looking for his next target. His investigative sense revealed twelve more of these behemoth tree-dragons as well as a smattering of other similarly powerful monsters with different builds.

By angling his body and flapping his wings, Caeden was once again on top of another monster. A backward flick from his technique killed the momentum it generated, and Caeden paused for a moment in the air as he waited for gravity to catch up with him. In that time, Caeden took stock of himself.

So far, this plan was working. Caeden had killed two powerful monsters in under a minute with essentially no resistance. Unfortunately, they weren't free and clear yet. The problem was time. Caeden had enhanced his speed to a fundamentally new level with two mnemonics and a martial technique on top of his base enhancement.

While he was flush with all the Sharp he could possibly ever use, Physical Enhancement was a different story. The drain of so much enhancement, especially his techniques, was exorbitant. Caeden could only hold this much power for two or three more minutes at most. Then he would have to return to his base golden body if he wanted to continue using Physical Enhancement at all for the rest of the battle. In that time, he needed to kill as many of the more significantly powerful monsters as he could.

This is going to get rough. Caeden thought as he plunged down, ripping his technique-enhanced daggers across the spine of the monster he landed on. Really rough.