They managed to take down several more ships before anything drastically changed. In between each attack, Lily would rest up inside the Forge while Asherta picked out her next target. Of course, the revolutionaries weren’t just taking it lying down. They’d quickly made things harder for Asherta, doing everything they could to dodge her breath attacks and outmaneuver her.

Unfortunately for them, Asherta was more nimble in the air than any ethership could ever hope to be. Outrunning her wasn’t an option either since the sky was so chock full of ships that none of them could go anywhere near their full speed without risking hitting another vessel. If they dropped down beneath the body of the fleet to get enough room, they were left exposed and vulnerable before they could begin to accelerate.

That left the Revolution with only one real option for dealing with the pseudodragon. Increasing the intensity of their attacks. It wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, but it did stall. Every time Asherta moved in to attack a ship, she’d have to dodge out of the way of a fresh salvo.

That alone was starting to become a source of frustration for Lily. She wasn’t happy with the pace they were making, not at all. At the rate they were going, it would be several days before they managed to thin the skies enough to actually attack the flagship.

Lily wanted nothing more than to ignore the fleet and head straight for the behemoth hovering overhead, but it wasn’t going to be that easy. A direct assault had been their first idea, but the sheer amount of firepower they’d have to get through was daunting. So much so that Lily wasn’t sure she had enough shroud to manage it.

The other option was using something like her comet to burst through at high speeds, reaching the flagship before anyone was prepared to stop them. But that had problems of its own. First of all, they didn’t know what kind of defenses the flagship had, but they could assume they were even stronger than those of the rest of the fleet.

That meant that the most likely outcome of Lily charging in was them arriving at the flagship only to get stalled by the defenses long enough to get ripped apart by every other ethership in the vicinity. Maybe in any other situation, Lily might have taken that risk, but the Revolution had continually shown off new depths of ethertech during this assault, leading her to be especially wary of taking risks. There was no telling what other secrets they had hiding on that behemoth of a ship.

Eventually, something changed. It didn’t even take that long. The ships that had shifted their focus from pounding the Tournament city into a fine powder to deal with Lily and her group suddenly pulled back. New ships moved in to take their place.

At the same time, the rest of the ships bombarding the surface of Baserock also stopped. Lily had been expecting this, and it meant it was time to make some more risky moves. Any kind of shift like this was going to create openings. One advantage Lily and Asherta had over their enemy was their small numbers.

In most circumstances, that was a problem, not a benefit. But right now, the group of ships attacking them was coordinating dozens of different vessels working in tandem to keep up the assault on her team while the others moved back. It was a lot of moving parts in active combat, something difficult to manage under the best of circumstances.

No matter how skilled they were, someone was bound to slip up.

Sure enough, one of the retreating ships was slower to move than the others. Why, Lily didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter. Even if they’d planned it as a trap to draw in Asherta, they would expect what was about to happen. Lily hadn’t spent all her time in the Forge just relaxing.

“Ash!” Lily signaled her teammate, but the half-dragon had already caught on before she needed to say anything.

This whole time, Asherta hadn’t used her Hoard for anything other than the passive increase in power it gave her. All the Mithril she’d used was a product of her breath weapon. Interestingly enough, the stuff she breathed out wasn’t permanent but a magical reproduction. It would vanish after a while, and it wasn’t actually as potent as real Mithril. Lily likened it to a magical reproduction of the effects and appearance of Mithril rather than the real thing.

Now, Asherta used her Hoard. Darting toward the vessel's side rather than bothering to move over the top of it, the ship didn’t know how to react to the sudden change in approach. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as Asherta held out a taloned hand in which a spike of Mithril materialized, pulled directly from her Hoard.

This spike wasn’t something she’d had at the beginning of the day. Rather, it was a forged piece of equipment Father made in the Forge after he and a team of Bladeborne studied the etherships Lily had already captured. They’d managed to capture a ship at some point that had the energy shield system completely intact.

Father had taken the opportunity to make this spike. Asherta gripped the Mithril tight, shoving it toward the ship and right into the energy barrier. There was a moment of resistance before the spike flared with a bluish silver light, and a ripple of power rolled out the back of it opposite the ship.

The shield popped like a soap bubble.

Asherta and Lily jumped into action. The former didn’t bother attacking the exposed ship. Instead, she immediately moved toward another vessel that had been left open by this one being out of position. Lily, on Sky’s back, held on tight to her bonded monster as the Stellar Roc flared with swirling cosmic arrays before flashing brightly and appearing directly above the disabled ship.

Lily immediately flooded the ship with her knockout gas Null Water mnemonic and moved to follow her draconic teammate, who had already popped another ship by the time Lily had thoroughly flooded the first vessel.

They moved like this, pinging between a dozen ships in a matter of moments, following the gap in ships their own assault created. The whole time they’d been waiting for this exact situation, for the fleet to have something else to focus on other than them.

Once they stopped their barrage, each ship would have a brief moment where the crew switched from worrying about managing the barrage to managing the recovery. It was inevitable that the collective mental load that transition added would create a little chaos, even in the most disciplined crew.

That effect was even worse for the ships actively fighting Lily’s group. They had even more to worry about and more unknowns pulling at their attention. These revolutionaries had shown that they weren’t idiots. Lily had no doubt that they had expected her team to make a move during the transition. It was such an obvious opportunity that only an idiot would pass it up.

That alone made her confident that the first ship they’d attacked was some kind of trap. She didn’t know how they’d planned to deal with Asherta, but it was a moot point because Lily had anticipated the trap. That’s why she decided to switch things up to this rapid assault tactic that completely went against the slow and careful assault they’d been pursuing this whole time. There was no way the Revolution could have predicted that they’d have a tool specifically designed to bypass their energy shields, and that gap in their knowledge was an opening.

That opening was compounded by the trap Lily had been betting on. Because the only way to make a convincing trap, to make your enemy believe that there was a gap in your defense, was to leave an actual gap. Of course, it wasn’t a real gap if they fell for the trap. After all, the dead can’t exploit a gap unless they were a part of Cat’s army of corpses.

But since Lily had outmaneuvered them, she’d turned her own hidden advantage into a tool to make the enemy’s false gap into a real one. And she and Asherta proceed to dive headfirst into the gap, driving a wedge into it and prying that gap open wider and wider with every ship they shut down.

This was also why Lily hadn’t had Sky use her teleportation ability before now. It was the perfect tool to exploit a small lapse in timing and placement such as they’d just found. She wanted to take the opportunity to remove as many ships from the air as possible.

Like the first, Lily and Asherta took out dozens of ships in the span of minutes. The Revolution had no opportunity to respond before they’d crippled the fleet in the skies over Caeden and Erik’s position in the arena below.

That was a major step forward. They were attempting to turn the arena into a fallback position, shelter, and recovery station for the populace of the Tournament city. While Erik’s Binding shroud could make powerful barriers, he was also working as the main healer for everyone Cat’s army recovered. Making him focus on protecting the arena from an aerial assault was a waste of his time.

Of course, their plan wasn’t over. Lily had kept careful track of the number of ships they took out the entire time, waiting for them to reach the maximum number she thought they could handle. Because all those ships were failing, slowly losing engine power and flight capabilities as the Null Water infected their ether engines, and the crew was too unconscious to fix it.

If left alone, all those ships were going to drop onto the city below, the exact problem Lily had been trying to avoid the whole time. But it’s not like she didn’t have a solution. After all, she’d had plenty of time to plan while in the Forge, and Father had been more than willing to help out.

So, once the number hit her guesstimated limit, Lily called Asherta off and got to work.

First of all, Lily had Sky teleport her above the first ship, which was both the lowest and in the process of actively falling toward the city. From there, she went through a series of gestures very similar to her Create Comet mnemonic but slightly different. In moments, the ship was encased inside a dully reflective, dirty brownish-black oblong sphere.

Then, Lily snapped her fingers, using literally the most basic mnemonic she’d ever created with Galaxy. A burst of light bright enough to blind anyone looking at it filled the sky. With the signal given, Sky immediately moved to the next ship without prompting.

Though she didn’t see it, being too busy repeating the same actions on the next ship, Lily knew what was happening back at her first target. The signal was for Caeden, who had, of course, been privy to all the plans Lily had made with his Forge based alter ego.

Below the encased ethership, an Entrance Blade would appear, one large enough to accommodate the largest ships Lily and Asherta had disabled in their blitz. Except, this Entrance Blade was different from the rest. Rather than just a circle of ethertech with a sharp edge defining its blade-ness, it also had three upward-facing prongs set equidistant around the rim.

These prongs lit up with ether glowing an alternating, pulsing, red and purple blend. These were ether-powered super-magnets, and this Entrance Blade had been made of non-magnetic metals. All of this was designed to interact with the particular mnemonic Lily had used on that ship. Create Ferrous Asteroid. The high density of unrefined iron in the rock let the magnetically capable Entrance blade pull the ship into position directly over the aperture and maneuver it in.

Lily and Caeden repeated this process across the sky, dropping every single ship into an Entrance Blade. It was a near thing. The number of ships and the time it took Lily to make an asteroid meant that most of the ones she had disabled were already falling at terminal velocity by the time she reached them.

They just barely managed to grab every one of them before they started hitting the ground, with successive ships managing to get lower and lower as they worked. Especially with Lily having to take several breaks in the Forge to regain her shroud.

At the end of it, they’d taken out a sizable chunk of the fleet, especially over their area of the island. It was only a fraction of the total number and they hadn’t managed to get any of the larger vessels, but it was a start. The downside being that their attack window was now closed, and they’d exposed a number of tricks to the Revolution to do it, not the least of which being the existence of the Entrance Blades.

The Revolution likely assumed that all the previous ships had been dropped underground and out of the way since Lily and Caeden had been careful to place that first Entrance Blade out of the way in a hard-to-see spot. It had been on the ground, giving the illusion that the comet-wrapped ships were simply going under the surface. Now, they had to know that their attackers had some variant of teleportation. Especially after seeing what Sky could do.

Luckily, they likely would never guess that they were actually using a time-dilated pocket dimension, a fact Lily and Caeden still planned to abuse.