Cat watched. That was all she ever did when it came time for actual fighting to be done. Her powerset didn't involve much involvement on her end. She set her specters to defend a position, and they did what they did best. She wasn't a part of the equation. It ate at her, just sitting back and waiting.

This time was worse than most. She watched as Caeden casually and effortlessly ripped through monster after monster. By comparison, the second the horde reached her line of soldiers, Knights, and Guardians, they were pushed back. Her specters were all skilled beyond what any shrouded of her age and ability had any right to produce, but they were limited by how much shroud she could invest in each specter.

These monsters mimicked dragons with thick scales and powerful bodies. The swords, spears, and shields Cat could make using her Soul shroud were a poor imitation of the masterworks Caeden had forged for her. Every attack merely bounced off. While she watched Caeden blur by in the background, her specters struggled to survive. Even acting purely defensively, just trying to hold the line, they were losing.

And here she stood, just watching it happen. Cat desperately wanted an attack, a weapon, something she could use in this situation. But every attempt she had ever made to produce an attack with her shroud failed. All her specters were more skilled and experienced than she could ever hope to be, so stepping in and taking up a weapon was liable to get her killed more than anything.

She just felt so…weak.

This wasn't the first time, not by a long shot. Ever since she joined up with Caeden, Lily, and Erik, she'd been something of a third wheel to three people. At first, since she was Lily's roommate and she and Erik had hit it off, those things let her slot into their friend group just fine. It hadn't mattered that much that she was so much weaker, as none of them were that strong.

But things changed. As time slipped by, the power gap grew wider and wider. When she had found out how to make her specters, she had been so happy. Cat finally thought she had found a way to stand with her newfound friends as equals and make her family proud.

It had been a cute dream. Caeden and Lily outstripped her and Erik by a fair margin in only a few months. At least then, she hadn't felt as useless. Her specters were uniquely different to what everyone else brought to the table. She had a niche. Plus, Erik wasn't that much stronger than her. She was content to be part of the second-class duo with her partner in crime. She and Erik could walk in their friend's shadows.

Again, it was a dream. Suddenly, Erik revealed both martial arts and followed it up by becoming the second Nascent Shroud on the team. Suddenly, she was all alone. All of her friends now dwarfed her in strength, as Caeden was proving so succinctly. He was carving a path of devastation through a monster army her specters could barely hold back.

Cat wasn't stupid or blind. She knew full well that Caeden must be burning through Physical Enhancement at a rapid pace to keep up that speed and damage. It wasn't sustainable. But the problem was, he could do it. Cat couldn't even touch that level of raw power. Still, it might have made her feel a smidge better if she hadn't looked up.

At the start of the fight, Cat had been worried about the monsters coming by air. Caeden had trusted her to block the horde while he dealt with the more powerful monsters. But none of her specters could fly except for the Swarm, which couldn't get through the monster's scales.

Checking the skies, she felt silly for worrying. Caeden had created a truly absurd number of thorns, and they were currently in the process of shredding every flying monster into unidentifiable chunks of ground meat. They didn't even move, just floating in place and spinning was enough to devastate everything that approached.

The thorns weren't the most durable manifestations, so many broke before others bored through the false-dragon's scales, but there were so many it just didn't matter. Plus, Caeden continued to make ever more as he zipped across the ground. At this point, Cat couldn't even imagine how much Sharp that mass of constructs was creating. There were tens of thousands of thorns. In fact, there were so many they were creating their own shade on the clearing below.

The damage to the flying monsters was so bad that the mostly mindless creatures actually caught on, and many decided to land and approach on foot. That was how bad the skies were. Nothing was getting through there.

Which left Cat in the same position. Watching and waiting. Occasionally she would make a new specter whenever one fell and unmanifested. Other than that, she just watched Caeden cut down monsters by the hundreds. It was galling how different they were. She could barely hold the line while Caeden devastated entire sections of charging pseudo-dragons. What was she doing wrong?

How did he make it look so easy?

{}

Why is this so easy? Caeden couldn't help thinking to himself as he slammed a serrated dagger through the long neck of a snake-like dragon-monster. His other hand had just thrown his second dagger into the skull of a small, less powerful monster that was about to breach Cat's specters. One of the many buttons on Forged Infinity's grip had the blade flying right back to him.

Catching it, Caeden kicked another monster in the ribs, a spike on his shin catching its snout and ripping the face open. A flick of his wrists, and two more were left with severed stumps where their heads used to be. None of these monsters could touch him. None of them came anywhere close. They barely saw him as he carved them up like a festive turkey.

It was almost unnerving, how easy this was. Admittedly, he had known that stacking enhancement mnemonics and his new martial art would have a multiplicative effect. That was the point. It was a common strategy among the more melee inclined shrouded. But this level of difference was insane. The monsters here were more powerful, and Caeden had to fight them over a wider area compared to the battle under Black Reach, but this was dozens of times easier.

As he dashed across the battlefield, casually running the serrated edges of his technique-enhanced daggers along the hide of dozens of monsters and splitting them open like he had pulled on a zipper, a thought struck him. They were in an open space.

Down in the tunnels, Caeden had followed conventional wisdom, which stated that against a superior number of foes, limiting their direction of attack was the best way to ensure a victory. After all, if only one opponent could reach you at a time, then their numerical advantage was essentially moot.

But out here, in the open, Caeden felt himself flipping that thought on its head. He was powerful, incredibly so. He could acknowledge that. He was rapidly running out of Physical Enhancement, but right now, he was untouchable by a single monster on the field. None of them were a threat so long as he maintained his techniques and mnemonics.

So, at that point, wouldn't a smaller space just be limiting his ability to get at them?

During the defense of the Heartstone chamber, Caeden had run into multiple situations where he found himself unable to stem the tide of monsters because they stacked up faster than he could kill them. In the confined tunnels, he could only get to one at a time, by design. But Caeden was capable of killing far more than one monster at a time. As he had proven.

But up here, in an open clearing. There were no obstacles. He could leverage his blistering speed to the maximum and attack with impunity. Counterintuitively, the wide open space was working for him more than the monster horde.

That didn't even factor in Sharp. Caeden's speed was mainly a product of Physical Enhancement. But Caeden was not blind to the work his endless supply of thorns was doing. They were even more effective than he had imagined. This was the most he had ever made, and he just kept manifesting more, using Rose Garden at every spare moment. They never would have been this effective, killed so many monsters so quickly, if he was in a tunnel. The open air let more monsters throw themselves onto the mass of his thorns with ever more speed.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the new martial techniques that let him carve through the monsters with little effort; it was a perfect confluence of preparation and the right location. Caeden's shrouds, domains, and mnemonics were all perfectly suited to mass combat. A fact he had only just clued on to.

Of course, that was only as long as Physical Enhancement lasted. As Caeden finished his second lap around the nest, he could feel his time coming to an end. He had used too many shroud-hungry mnemonics and techniques to sustain this state for more than a few minutes. Luckily, his mission was accomplished. All the high-IP monsters had been brutally put down and were currently discorporating as weaker monsters ran over their savaged corpses.

But the empty pit in his soul that used to be his Physical Enhancement reserves highlighted something more alarming. He had too much Sharp. Caeden had never created this many thorns before. He had never been in a situation where he could leverage tens of thousands of them at the same time. But now that he could find a use for some many, he found it hard to stop making more.

At this point, every use of Rose Garden created another two hundred thorns, and the amount of shroud he lost was recovered instantly. With this many thorns, he was stacking Sharp no matter what he did. All of his Sharp mnemonics were efficient and relatively small except for the Rose Cannon, which required him to remain stationary for a long period as it charged. Plus, that mnemonic was designed to deal with powerful single targets, not a scattered crowd of weaker monsters.

So Caeden had spent the last few minutes letting all that generated Sharp pour into his stores. It was fine at first. Having more Sharp to work with was a good thing, and it was reassuring to know he had that to fall back on when Physical Enhancement wore out. But then it became too much.

It was around the point where he had reached double his natural capacity. His natural shroud regeneration stopped after a certain point, but if he artificially converted sharpness into shroud he could add more to his reserves past that limit. And when he reached twice that amount, he started to feel bloated. It was like he had overeaten, but the sensation came from his soul, not his body.

First, it was only a little annoying. Caeden unthinkingly poured that extra shroud into more thorns, which turned out to be a mistake. What was initially uncomfortable became painful as the amount neared ten times his limit. To fix the problem, Caeden tried to compress the shroud. It was the same principle he used with the Rose Cannon.

At first, that worked. The shroud in his soul was essentially the same as the stuff he manifested. It was Ki flavored by his domain. So compressing it with his will alleviated the bloating and pain he felt. Until it didn't. Eventually, the amount of shroud in his reserve was too large for him to compress. Maybe if he wasn't in the middle of a fight, he could have pushed harder, but he only had so much attention to give right now.

Which meant the pain came back. And it kept mounting. His soul stretched, the reserve bulging and shifting unnaturally. He wasn't ready to hold this much raw shroud. So now Caeden was moments from losing his techniques and mnemonics as his Physical Enhancement ran out, while his Sharp reserve was ready to explode. As he had thought earlier, things were about to get rough.

Finally, Caeden used the last of Physical Enhancement. Just as he was stabbing another monster, the last speck of his reserves died. All his enhancements dropped at once; the Ripper Talon Technique unmanifesting caused his daggers to emerge from the monster's throat as they lost the added length.

Caeden was ready. He had been keeping careful track of his reserves for the last minute, waiting for this to happen. Now, his focus was on using as much Sharp as fast as possible. He had briefly contemplated unmanifesting all the thorns, but they were still operating as a bulwark against the flying monsters. If he dropped them, a horde could fly right over his head, rendering everything he did pointless.

Instead, now that he was back to his human form, Caeden formshifted into his lanky, spindly Sharp formshift. Every surface of his body sharpened into an edge, and his fingers, hands, and limbs all thinned and lengthened. More than with his Physical Enhancement formshift, his entire body changed into a long-limbed, gangly, crimson nightmare creature. His Sharp formshift barely resembled a human.

He didn't limit himself to that, also changing Forged Infinity to better suit his current body. The dagger merged and returned down to the base handle, then extended out into a single curved blade that extended out further and further until it reached nearly six feet long as Caeden's pointed fingers clicked through the options. This was a foreign design coming from the land of the Fire King. Called an Odachi, the blade was designed for larger formshifts or mounted combat and was built to maximize cutting power instead of stabbing. A perfect weapon for using vast quantities of Sharp as fast as possible.

Gripping the blade in his extended fingers, Caeden swung a wide arc out toward the jungle. As he did, he let out a sharp exhalation tinted with Sharp, the trigger for his Blade Wave mnemonic. Instead of allowing the burst of cutting power to fire off normally, Caeden mentally grabbed hold of the mnemonic and flooded it with as much shroud as he could shove into the attack. It was wildly inefficient, but it burned hundreds of IP worth of shroud in an instant. Caeden wasn't worried about efficiency.

Along the arc of his swing, a massive, three-foot thick band of dark crimson energy blasted out, buzzing and shaking under its own force. It carved a path through the monsters in front of him before detonating in a blast of pure energy only a few feet away as the overloaded mnemonic collapsed under the added power. Still, it achieved what Caeden wanted and burned a chunk of Sharp.

Despite using what would have been a large chunk of his normal reserves, that attack was only a drop in the bucket compared to what Caeden currently held, so he set out swinging his shrouded weapon as fast as he could, blasting out dozens of Blade Waves. Thousands of IP of shroud vanished in moments, but it still wasn't enough. Caeden had too much Sharp. He needed to come up with something else, and fast.

He didn't want to know what would happen if his reserve could no longer contain the raw shroud inside it or what that would mean for his soul.