Unc cracked his knuckles, looking over his nephew’s new forge. His body felt light and breezy; all the aches and pains from decades of forging vanished under that tall boy’s power. He was looking to get some of those aches back. It had been far too long since he last held hammer in hand and walked the path of the One Hundred Hands.

His smithing technique had been passed down through his line for generations; it was older than the Central Authority, older than the country that had ruled before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. Of course, Unc wasn’t actually blood-related to the founder of his resonance style. Each of the masters before him had fostered many students, spreading the method across continents. Not just handing it from father to son. Though the pinnacle techniques, those had been saved for family.

Several masters had found themselves in a situation much like Unc’s, with the craft consuming their lives and costing them both love and family. In which case, they would adopt a son to take up the hammer and walk the One Hundred Hands after them. It was by this method that Unc had ended up holding the pinnacle methods. Passed from his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s master all the way down the line to him.

Which had weighed heavily on his heart. Because Unc had failed to pass them on to his nephew and heir before the blast meant for Caeden had robbed him of his ability to do so. He wasn’t so much upset by the damage or the inability to forge. He knew one day he’d have to put down the hammer when his body gave out. It was a fact of life. It had just happened to him sooner than expected.

No, the real tragedy was that he had never had the chance to guide Caeden down the last steps to true master status and show him the pinnacle of the Hammer of One Hundred Hands. He had sent him off to forge on his own, something the boy had intended to do anyway, and Unc never felt the need to tell him it was the last step on his path to mastery. In fact, there was a lot Unc had never told Caeden.

A fact he regretted. But the boy had been through enough. His only family dead in front of him. Not something anyone passed through easily. For a time, he was angry. Then it seemed like all emotion left him. He had been a happy child, if a bit lonely. The other families with kids his age didn’t take kindly to them playing with a shrouded. Something that Unc couldn’t blame them for, no matter how much it hurt his nephew. After all, a moment of anger from Caeden could see their own children dead at his hand.

Unc had sent him off when he was of age, hoping some time to himself would let him grow past the pain in his heart. It seemed he had chosen poorly. The Caeden he saw before he had left for the Academy smiled no brighter than the one that had left his forge.

Now though, surrounded by friends and young adults his own age, ones that had suffered their own wounds, Unc saw him brighten like never before. Caeden had become reserved, and that stayed with him. He didn’t show his hurt. But his smiles were bigger, his laughs longer. And it did Unc’s soul good to see the boy look so well.

Now, he was off with those friends of his, doing some training. Unc could only shake his head. To think that something else could compel his nephew as much as smithing. It was a new experience. Not that Unc could complain at being left behind. His nephew had set him up in a ridiculous ethership with more spacial infusions than he had thought possible. A ship which the young man apparently owned.

He had a forge, a hammer, and more raw ether and magical materials than he knew what to do with. It was an ethersmith’s paradise. Oh boy, did he intend to abuse it. Unc had nearly a year’s worth of rust to knock off his perfectly repaired and renewed muscles. And he better be up to snuff when his nephew came calling.

They had a lot of work to do.

{}

“We have so much work to do!” Lily groaned.

Caeden couldn’t help but chuckle. “I know what you mean.”

He looked at his girlfriend, who was currently holding her bonded monster companion, the Glacial King Kodiak, Snowball, in her arms. The bear could change sizes between a massive hulking monster that stood twenty feet tall while on all fours and a tiny fluff ball no bigger than a pumpkin. The lazy bear tended to pick his smaller form, as it meant Lily was more likely to carry him around.

They were back in their typical Invasion Pressure training room in the Core Seat, one of over a dozen heavily reinforced and infused spaces that were designed to withstand shrouded going all out against each other to train and improve their skills. And training was what they were here for. Outside Caeden, everyone else on the team was either dealing with brand new powers or working to understand what they already had.

Cat had had the most free time to explore her Necromancy shroud over the last two weeks. One week on the Hearthhome as they had rushed back to the Academy, and one week at the Academy while Caeden and Lily managed the chaos the campus had devolved into following the Revolution assault. Lily had spent her time on the Hearthhome studying the ancient texts in its library.

Now Erik was added to the list of people with new powers to adapt to. Which left their team in an awkward position. They were all stronger than ever, thanks to a long series of miraculous and unique circumstances, but they had very little experience with their new powers. And they were about to take part in a tournament against the most talented and experienced of their peers from four other nations.

“We’re going to have to train like every demon in the unshrouded hells is coming after us.” Caeden chuckled. It wasn’t a new experience. From arriving at the Academy woefully unprepared, to working to surpass the Seat factions, to trying to survive both underneath Black Reach and on the dragon continent, Caeden and his team were used to driving themselves forward at a breakneck pace, adapting to stay ahead.

Lily nodded vigorously. “Well, I better get to work too. Asherta’s language tutor should be coming around soon. What are you doing?”

“Working on my integration. I at least want to get Sharp above 75% before we have to leave in two weeks.” Caeden frowned at Forged Infinity, which hung from the sash of his robe. Cat had already repaired all the damage Caeden had done by evolving Erik’s shroud, though the process had taken almost an entire day. She even managed to bring both shrouds down to 1% damage by comparing Erik’s soul to his. As she predicted, seeing a proper example of a dual-shrouded soul had helped her along. Unfortunately, that last 1% still eluded her.

Each of them was pursuing their training in different ways. Asherta was still learning Central Common, something Caeden and Lily agreed was a priority for her. Despite having very little control over her shroud, Asherta was already a powerhouse fighter. Instead of banging their head against the wall that was the Age domain, they decided that increasing their communication was better. If the Tournament of Powers included group combat, Asherta’s current level of fluency wouldn’t cut it, while her combat capabilities were more than enough already.

Cat was working on her Necromancy, obviously. But she had left summoning behind at this point. Since she had found a way to turn her Soul mnemonics into Necromancy spells, Cat had started with a leg up when it came to replicating her previous ability to bring an army to the fight. Now, she was starting to work with the more unfamiliar aspects of Necromancy.

For the first time, Cat could directly attack others with her shroud instead of just creating or summoning forces to fight for her. Necroflame, the green fire that filled the eyes of her undead summons, was a potent weapon and one she could wield herself. The process wasn’t as intuitive as manifesting one's shroud. Cat couldn’t create gouts of Necrolame to command at will. She needed to learn and utilize the specific patterns of Mana that formed spells.

For this, Dave was acting as her teacher. The Spirit of War had spent untold millennia stuck as a mid-tier undead with little in the way of raw magical power. Death Knights had only a small capacity for magic. This actually made Dave the perfect teacher, as he had long ago learned to be incredibly resourceful and efficient with his spells.

Cat was still working on the basics, according to Dave. In his experience, which involved teaching millions of undead, the fundamentals of Necromancy started with Necroflame. Despite being something that almost every undead had access to, few took the time to properly master it, as this involved constant spell drills. That was what Cat was currently doing.

She would form an apple-sized ball of green fire, then a watermelon-sized one, then one she could fit her entire body inside. Each was its own individual spell that required a different set of Mana symbols to activate. Doing this helped Cat grasp the variations in energy input to size difference and intensity, allowing her to control the spells she was casting more accurately. All of this was meant to give Cat an innate sense of how much Mana she should use in battle and stop her from dropping a Necroflame ball on a target that only needed a fist-sized one.

And Cat was taking to it like a fish to water. After Cat discovered mnemonics and began creating her specters, most of her time was spent optimizing her mnemonic designs to be as efficient as possible. Since most of Dave’s battle experience was rooted in the attrition-based warfare of the Necroverse, his teaching and her previous experience melded perfectly, and she was advancing at a rapid pace.

Plus, Cat just enjoyed throwing around balls, fans, and lances of Necroflame. Having a direct attack was novel for her, and she was having the time of her life learning how to use it in a variety of ways. Besides all the fire practice, Caeden knew that Cat had been tinkering with both monster and human corpses. It turned out buying a dead human body wasn’t that hard, as there was an entire family of shrouded based around the Human domain. They typically used it for organ replacement services, but producing a whole living body was within their abilities. Producing a corpse was even easier.

Erik was in a similar but different position. Both he and Cat gained, essentially, better versions of their previous shrouds when Caeden evolved them. Healing and Binding covered everything Erik ever did with Stitch and expanded his horizons. So Erik had found that, similarly to Cat, he could carry over his mnemonics from Stitch to his new shrouds.

The difference between them stemmed from their desired outcomes. Cat was focused on the aspects of Necromancy that Soul couldn’t copy. Direct attacks and animating the dead. She was currently satisfied with her summoning spells and wanted to shore up her weaknesses and pursue the new opportunities her new domain offered.

Erik trended in the opposite direction. He wanted to double down on his previous strategies, pushing them to a level beyond what Stitch could ever achieve. Erik fought as a pugilist, a martial artist focused on bare-handed combat. An incredibly rare choice in the CA, where access to infused weapons was common and plentiful. Though Caeden had recently learned that it was a much more common combat style in the lands of the Fire King.

Using Stitch, Erik had developed a combat style based around explosive damage and restraining techniques combined with efficient evasion. He would use Stitch to tension his own body, alongside a set of cloth wraps Caeden had made, to create extreme bursts of movement. Erik used this technique, which he dubbed Spring Stitching, to close distance and deliver attacks far more potent than would traditionally be possible.

Unfortunately, Spring Stitching had a fatal weakness. It put Erik’s body under massive strain. And while Stitch offered some healing capabilities, it barely enhanced Erik’s resistance to damage. If Erik went all out, the injuries he received from his own attacks would rapidly outpace his shroud’s ability to heal it. This was the ultimate limiting factor for Erik's combat capabilities. At his best, Erik could hit just as hard as Caeden, excluding the things he could do with Forged Infinity, which far exceeded all reason. But if Erik tried to sustain that output, he would literally kill himself.

With his shroud’s evolution and new dual-shrouded status, those concerns were essentially gone. Not only was Binding even better when used for Spring Stitching, now Spring Binding, but Erik could use Healing at the same time to recover from the blowback damage. Of course, this meant that Erik’s current battle plan involved being in a constant state of taking damage and recovering, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Instead, Erik’s focus was on expanding this strategy with even more Spring Binding. Caeden had to admit it was mildly terrifying to watch. Erik was moving so fast he practically disappeared while throwing out attacks that created shockwaves strong enough to fill the IP room with a decent breeze. But that wasn't the worst part. No, the part that was so unsettling was the sounds.

Erik had found that Binding could increase his damage resistance slightly, as his formshift tightly bound his skin, organs, and bones together, making all of them much harder to damage. But it wasn’t even close to the level of resistance Caeden had, and Erik was outputting far more force than what Caeden typically used. And since Erik’s current objective was to ramp that output up even further, he was still hurting himself with every movement and attack. A lot.

The grinding and snapping of bone and the ripping of flesh was a constant background to everyone else’s training as Erik repeatedly destroyed himself over and over. Caeden feared what would happen if Healing were any less potent a shroud, but Erik wielded it with an expert hand. His injuries vanished almost before they could register, and Erik seemed to do so on an instinctive level. So despite all the abuse his body was going through, Erik seemed to be continually reaching higher and higher heights.

The only major negative to his new shrouds came in the loss of his previous martial art. Erik had formed several techniques around his Binding Fist style but decided to scrap them and start over. Honestly, Caeden agreed, despite the setback doing so caused. The Binding fist was a martial art designed solely around Stitch and Erik’s own idiosyncrasies. Binding could fill the gaps, but then his martial art wouldn’t account for Healing. So instead of patching over the top, Erik decided to start over from the ground up. As an added benefit, creating a wholly new martial art would allow him to better incorporate any additional aspects of Binding and Healing he decided to exploit.

Asherta was learning to talk better than a five-year-old, Cat was playing with fire. And Erik was breaking every bone in his body. Overall, a productive training session. Until Caeden looked at Lily. He sighed. She was having problems.