Dave found himself on the other end of a simple but effective principle of combat that he’d used to his advantage more times than he could count. Realistically, his strength dwarfed any of the Ethermen he was fighting by a wide margin. Even collectively, their power in a vacuum couldn’t match his. But it didn’t have to.

Each Etherman had adapted their combat style into a highly specialized niche. Normally, that would leave gaps for Dave to exploit, destroying them. But they’d formed a symbiotic trio, a combat formation so basic and so old it was one of the go-tos across all of existence. The reason it was so common was because it worked. Together, the niche fighters could fill in the gaps in each other’s styles, leaving Dave at a loss.

Ranged damage, fast melee, and a defensive healer. One hit hard, one was too fast to ignore, and the last was almost impossible to permanently put down. The healer kept the other two going and covered their inherently weak defenses, while they in turn kept Dave occupied and unable to focus on tearing through the healer's defenses.

Dave had both implemented and faced down similar formations, so he went with a standard response to start. The healer was the typical first target in combat, but Dave knew that even with his enhanced strength, taking down that wall of shields wasn’t going to be fast or easy. Likewise, the melee fighter was too fast and could disengage before Dave could definitively put it down.

That left the ranged Etherman as his most viable target. However, the last three runs at it hadn’t gone as well as he would have hoped. The first two attempts had seen the melee fighter leap on him the second he approached his target, aiming for any viable weak spot in Dave’s armor. The second time he tried to just take the hits and nearly lost an arm for it. The melee’s damage was low, but not low enough that he could outright ignore it.

The third time he’d attempted to use his arsenal to block the sword-wielding Etherman while he dealt with the ranged one. That had seemed promising right up until his opening blow was blocked by one of those damned flying shields. The healer was still playing defense, even after the fight had shifted into a higher gear. Each time, the ranged Etherman had taken his attempts as a free chance to shoot him point blank with its powerful energy explosives and rail cannons.

Frankly, Dave was fed up with the whole thing. He was taking too much consistent damage and running out of Mana faster than was acceptable. The only positive was that the Ethermen seemed to be in a similar situation energy-wise. Their actions were growing progressively more and more violent as the fight progressed, unlike their practically glacial pace earlier.

But the increased aggression was reaching a point where it was more than Dave could take. For all his increased abilities, he was facing a perfectly coordinated team of fighters that, while not on his level, were close enough to it for their coordination to more than make up the difference. At this point he was relying on their aggression leading to an opening he could exploit, something that had not happened yet.

Rather than rely on a lucky break, Dave decided to take a risk. He rushed the ranged Etherman again, and just like the last three times, the melee fighter moved in to strike. But this time, Dave rapidly reversed, calling on his arsenal to hem in the fighter, cutting off its escape routes. He reached out, attempting to get ahold of the fast but fragile Etherman.

It reacted far too definitively, not giving him the chance. Rather than let him get a hand on it, the Etherman sped through his arsenal, taking a dozen wounds as it did. Wounds that started healing rapidly as it moved next to the healer, the white lightning coming off the third Etherman repairing the damage at a rapid pace.

Rather than disengage, Dave rolled with it, reversing his direction again and going for the ranged attacker once more. The melee was out of commission for a brief moment, and the healer was occupied healing.

At least, that had been Dave’s hope. One that was quickly proven overly optimistic when several shields interposed themselves between him and his target before he could even reach them. The healer was taking no chances, slowing him down as well as blocking him.

But Dave wasn’t messing around either. Several of his floating arsenal flew in from behind the ranged Etherman at different angles, making the healer devote even more shields to blocking him. Then, for the third time, Dave shifted targets. The healer had had to remove some of the shields defending it to block all his attacks, leaving a tiny gap in it’s spinning wall of defensive shields.

The fact that the shields were spinning made penetrating them all the harder, but Dave had spent this entire fight calculating their paths and waiting for a chance to create a gap big enough to sneak an attack through. Of course, none of his weapons would be able to sneak through the tiny gap he’d managed to make. It was roughly the size of his thumb. But it was big enough for magic.

Extending a finger, Dave fired off an attack spell he’d prepared back when he’d cast all that enhancement magic. He’d been working to make a gap big enough for this specific spell since it was a high-damage and low-profile attack. He was just hoping it would be enough to take out the healer in one shot.

“Finger of Death.”

A thin beam of necromantic energy burst from his fingertip. It was a green so dark it was almost black and passed right through a gap in the shields barely big enough to let it through, the rotation of the shields only leaving that much space for an instant.

Dave felt his magic make contact, but the shields kept spinning, and the melee Etherman kept healing. Mentally, he cursed. That had been his best shot at finishing this in a timely manner. Now, the healer wouldn’t leave a gap that large again. Dave was rapidly running out of ideas.

Then his problems went from bad to worse. The ranged Etherman, instead of blasting him as it had before, switched its focus to the hill behind him where Dave knew his boss and Lily were. They’d finally noticed, which meant his time to finish this fight was officially over. He needed to defend the two shrouded before the Ethermen could switch focus entirely.

Just to make things even more chaotic, this was the time that Asherta chose to slam bodily into the melee fighter, clamping her draconic jaws around one of its six arms. Dave decided he’d been too focused on his own fight when he realized the half-dragon was missing an arm and half the scales on her body were broken. Looking toward her opponent, he found her missing arm buried in the torso of the Etherman she’d been fighting.

Dave had no idea how exactly that had happened, but he was glad for the support, even if said support looked half dead. It gave him a chance to lunge at the ranged Etherman, Spirit Walking around the shields in his way to slam into it before the melee fighter could escape its new problem.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to make a proper attack, instead bodily slamming into the Etherman to stop its attack from going off. He was just in time, as it fired in the middle of his tackle. He managed to throw off its aim, if only barely. Instead of blowing up the hill of debris, its attacks flew off into the distance, just barely passing overhead.

Dave almost thought they’d managed to get a hold of the situation, only for Mel to mentally ping him with some unwelcome news.

“Dave, we’ve got incoming. Ten more Ethermen, five of them look half-destroyed. I think they’re the ones you blew up.”

That was more than a little surprising. He had fully expected those five to be utterly destroyed. Just how durable were these things? The five undamaged ones must have been busy healing their heavily damaged comrades. But apparently Cat and Lily represented enough of a threat to warrant them entering combat without finishing their recovery.

Dave didn’t blame them. His boss and her comrade hadn’t been idly sitting by the entire time. Rather, they had been preparing to deal with the ship, a threat greater than any of these Ethermen. Its damage output and defenses dwarfed the individual machine-men by orders of magnitude. Case in point, Dave’s weapons had hardly put a scratch on the ship but could easily tear into the armor of these Ethermen. Only their energy-reinforced shields could block his attacks, and only for a moment. It just so happened that a moment was all they needed.

The only reason the three Ethermen had survived Dave’s assault was their precise teamwork and high level of specialization. They could push one or two aspects of their abilities beyond his own limits by abandoning all other aspects; otherwise, he’d leave them in the dust in every metric. Not that that fact made his inability to end them any less frustrating.

But Dave had zero confidence in his ability to take down that ship. At least, not without an army of mid and high-level undead at his back. A War Wight was strongest at the head of a powerful army, something Dave didn’t have right now. He wasn’t the kind of undead to throw around massive city-destroying spells. He was the kind that took over a planet in a decades-long war.

That left the ship to Lily and the boss. Cat was an accomplished Necromancer with more raw Mana than Dave had ever seen in anything short of an undead deity. In the same vein, Lily’s Galaxy shroud gave her access to truly horrifying levels of power.

The downside with both was that they were time-intensive power sets. Necromancers required rituals and time to bring about powerful attacks, and Lily couldn’t control her strongest creations without lengthy mnemonics and preparations to contain the effects. Otherwise, she’d wipe out the entire island and several of its neighbors when she created an actual sun on top of them.

Dave, knowing what they were doing, could feel the buildup of necromantic energy and cosmic power from just over the debris hill growing throughout his fight. He’d just hoped that the Ethermen wouldn’t catch on until it was too late. Apparently that was a naive hope, considering the amount of force they were bringing now.

Fifteen Ethermen. Five were more damaged than not, and one had an arm shoved through its chest that seemed to hinder it quite a bit, considering it was moving very slowly and couldn’t seem to summon up any of the white energy these Ethermen used. Four more were running out of energy, while the final five were completely fresh, minus whatever energy they’d used to restore their damaged compatriots.

Dave didn’t like those odds. At all. In fact, he was sure he could do nothing to stop them, even with Mel and Asherta. He’d truly underestimated just how strong they’d be by a wide margin. But it was no use thinking about that now. His job wasn’t to win; it was to stall the Ethermen long enough for Lily and Cat to destroy the ship. That, he hoped he could manage.

Apparently, the Ethermen had expected his interference. Not that hard to guess, but once more Dave had hoped for a better outcome. Either way, the damaged five peeled off to intercept him as the three he’d been fighting also worked to constrain him. Shields surrounded him as the melee fighter still dealt with Asherta, and the ranged gunner opened fire on him. Then the five damaged Ethermen added their own attacks to the mix.

All of that together was enough to slow him down, even with his using every ounce of speed he could squeeze out and even Spirit Walking several times in a row. There were just too many shields, too many attacks filling the air. Anywhere he appeared was filled with beams and bullets. Worse, he couldn’t Walk through the shields; the energy inside them somehow extended even into the soul plane. So his avenues of movement were limited.

The five fresh Ethermen slipped past him uncontested. But he wasn’t the last line of defense. That fell to the undead Cat had summoned ahead of time and Lily’s bonded monsters. An Elder Lich and a Death King popped up, the former throwing out a ball of Necroflame the size of a house and the latter swinging a sword so fast the air rippled and warped. Both managed to stop a single Etherman.

A skyscraper-sized bird appeared in the sky while a bear the size of a stadium shook the ground as it showed up. Both fired beams of energy from their mouths, occupying two more Ethermen. But that still left one more to head straight for Cat and Lily.

Dave watched, still working to get free of a full eight Ethermen to stop that last one, as Lily jumped from her hiding place, a light so intense it burned his magical senses in between her clenched hands. She aimed at the ship, no doubt trying to get her attack off before the Etherman could reach her. But it was still faster.

It reached her just before she could bring her hands on target, a spear stabbing out at supersonic speeds toward her chest. Dave grit his teeth. He’d failed. It was not the first time he’d failed in his long life, nor would it be the last. But it still hurt to let down those that relied on him.

Luckily, his failure would not be the end of Lily’s life.

The Entrance Blade, hidden in the same fold of debris that Lily had been hiding in, flared as a figure of purple and gold blurred out faster than even the Etherman could react, grabbing the spear before it could reach Lily’s chest. Her attack fired an instant later, a beam of light so intense space around it warped and folded blasting across the distance between her and the ethership before anyone could even understand the raw power the attack contained.

A bubble of pitch-black absence surrounded the ship as the attack struck, hiding the results from everyone. But the purple and gold man didn’t wait. He slammed a fist the size of a small boulder into the Etherman, blasting it away sans its spear-wielding arm.

“Well,” he rumbled, his words holding a depth to match his massive figure. “It looks like I should step in.”