Caeden rolled his eyes at Lily’s cavalier attitude. He knew she said it more as a joke than in any seriousness, but it was still ridiculous to hear. “Yeah, let me just jump up there and wrap this up real quick, that’ll be super easy.”

“To be fair, I’m pretty sure you could take out ships on your own.” Lily laughed.

“So could you,” Caeden snorted. “The problem isn’t the power of the individual ships.”

“It’s the number.” Lily gazed up, looking at the hundreds, thousands of ships in the sky. “I still can’t believe they managed to field an army of this size. There might be more Etherships here than in Central City. And I’m including all the little taxi ships that can barely hold five people in that count. All of these are warships, even if they’re modified passenger vessels. All of them have shields and weapon emplacements.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’re not short on firepower ourselves.” Caeden waved his hand, a dozen Entrance Blades opening up across the rubble-strewn city around him. Anywhere there was a relatively open spot without too much broken building underfoot, he dropped another circular portal.

Caeden had taken a moment while he was bantering with Lily to review the conversation she’d had with Father in its entirety. He thought he had the gist of it, but he wanted to be sure. It ended up that he was right, but it never hurt to check. After all, they were taking a big step here.

Long before any of this had happened, back when Caeden and Lily believed there would be an attack on the Tournament city, but weren’t sure when it would happen, they’d made plans. Most of them had been more broad strokes outlines rather than specific details. After all, they had no idea what they’d end up fighting.

That being said, a scenario like this was pretty obvious in the broad strokes. Seeing it coming wasn’t that hard. They knew what the Revolution’s goal would be, terrorism. And they knew what they were going to do, prevent as many deaths as they could while stopping the Revolution.

If you put those competing goals together, a few situations become inevitable. They were going to fight. If they fought, one side was going to start winning. If the winning side was them, the Revolution would have to escalate their response or lose. If they escalated and Caeden’s team kept winning, they’d have to keep escalating. Eventually, the Revolution would run out of escalations or Caeden’s team would lose. For all that the details could change wildly, those basic facts wouldn’t change.

Once they saw the armada coming through the portal, the details of that chain of events started to fill in. They’d walked through every step in that line until now. Finally, Caeden was almost certain they’d reached the next point in the chain. What to do once the Revolution ran out of escalations and his side was still winning.

While he and the others were cleaning up the dregs of the Revolution’s last ditch effort, Lily and Father had been discussing their answer in more detail. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. Lily and Father had talked several times during her aerial battles while she was recovering her shroud reserves after dropping off a captured ethership.

That had made this final talk relatively short, more a recap of already discussed ideas and a little debate over whether or not the advanced Ethermen’s capabilities should change said ideas. Ultimately, they decided to start out more tame and then ramp up their response instead of going all out at once. Hopefully they could bait out any Revolution response they could manage. Or even better, maybe the Revolution would truly be out of tricks and fold like a bad hand of cards.

All this led to here and now, with Caeden opening up the largest number of Entrance Blades he’d ever had. Bladeborne poured out from inside them, the first time most of them had ever left the Forge. They didn’t only bring themselves. Many exited alongside massive weapons of war. These hadn’t been made by Caeden or Father. Rather, they were his children’s own original creations.

“Reporting for duty Father, ready to engage the enemy.” A Bladeborne drifted forward, hovering several feet above the ground. He flashed through a series of colors that trailed along his plasmic matrix. He was excited, more than Caeden had ever seen him.

“Brutus, happy to have you. None of you had to do this.” He smiled at his overeager son. Brutus was composed of thick bands of neon purple plasma connecting his core blades of a spear, a longsword, and a glaive. Those core blades were surrounded by a dozen more reach-based weapons. He was practically vibrating with delight.

The Bladeborne had taken to his request for aid with an overwhelming amount of gusto. It was like they’d been waiting for him to speak up the entire time. The outpouring of support had been gratifying and heartwarming. For all that he had made them, Caeden had never taken his children’s obedience as his due. So seeing them so eager to assist confirmed his hopes that he was a good father to them.

“Nonsense, Father. We’ve spent our whole lives unable to repay you for all that you’ve done for us, not the least of which being making us in the first place.” His matrix surged out in lightning-like bolts that spiked several inches from his main mass, the Bladeborne version of laughter. “We’ve wanted to find a way to show our gratitude for generations. I cannot begin to express my pride to be present for our first battle under your command Father.”

“As I am proud to fight alongside my children.” Caeden looked across the mass of Bladeborne. For a moment, he was taken with the urge to make some kind of speech. If he were leading a human force, it would be appropriate to do so now, when they were about to engage the enemy.

But Caeden knew his children better than that. The Bladeborne were creatures of heat and metal, their bodies made of tools and weapons. They didn’t really think the same as humans. Motivation was an intrinsic part of their beings; Caeden had never seen a bored or listless Bladeborne.

They didn’t need him to boost their morale. They didn’t even need to hear how much he appreciated them. The Bladeborne were well aware of how he felt toward them, and they’d volunteered in droves to be part of this mission because of it. There was only one thing they needed to hear from him right now.

Taking a deep breath, Caeden checked to make sure everyone was in place before reinforcing his lungs, and throat with an extra dose of Physical Enhancement. A single word blasted out of his mouth with all the force he could muster.

“FIRE!”

Hundreds of projectiles filled the air, each of them trailing a line behind it. Bladeborne technology was wildly different from the things used in the Starry Sea, mostly due to the environment inside the Blade Forge. But some of that difference was due to the Bladeborne themselves and their physical aspects.

Bladeborne could tie their plasmic matrix into any sufficiently blade-like object, which meant most of the tools and weapons they made were designed with that in mind. All of the artillery pieces they’d brought looked like swords and spears or had actual swords and spears as part of their construction.

Caeden had noticed that his children also had a strong predilection toward personalizing their weapons. Rather than create standardized weapons in bulk, they instead opted to put their own spin on every piece they made. No two artillery emplacements looked the same, and they even fired different projectiles. The only similarity between them was that they all were firing some kind of harpoon.

Bringing in the Bladeborne increased their manpower by a huge margin, but Caeden and Lily were still constrained by the same concerns they’d always had. Namely, dropping massive etherships full of active and volatile ether engines out of the sky was a great way to kill anyone that had managed to survive the bombardment.

They’d avoided that outcome before by having Lily use her domains to neutralize the ether reactions on the ships before encasing them in material she controlled and dropping the vessels into the Forge. Obviously, that wasn’t a scalable solution. Lily was only one woman and her abilities couldn’t be easily replicated, if at all.

So, they’d thrown the idea to the Bladeborne and let them go to work. Models were made, example battles were fought. All of it possible because of the time difference. Without that, they never would have had weapons capable of handling their specific set of circumstances. After all, most weapons are designed to fire-and-forget, not fire-and-make-sure-the-target-lands-safely.

The general premise of the artillery the Bladeborne had come up with was essentially a smart harpoon. The projectiles themselves were ethertech and bladetech devices combined together. The ethertech was necessary because it allowed the harpoon to interact with the mechanisms of the etherships they hit.

Caeden only had a surface level understanding of the actual mechanics, but this was his best explanation. A harpoon was fired from the weapon emplacement, where the initial launch would trigger the projectile. That would activate the bladetech in the harpoon, surrounding it in a layer of energy and activating the explosive jets that would power it toward the target vessel.

Once it reached the ship, the energy shell should allow the harpoon to penetrate the ethership’s energy barrier. From there, methods varied, but the harpoon would somehow reach the ship. Some had an outer shell that buried partly through the energy barrier before firing a smaller projectile to the ship. Others had more robust energy shells that allowed the whole harpoon to pass through.

In any case, the harpoon would bury into the ship, where its bladetech/ethertech components would start interfering with the internal ether flow of the ship. Every harpoon had been purpose-built to do this based on the designs of the captured etherships, many of which had been pulled into the Forge almost entirely intact. That had been a massive boon to designing these artillery pieces.

If the harpoons worked as intended, the interference would drop the energy barrier and set the ship’s flight to neutral. From there, the harpoons could be used to pull in the ship with little the enemy crew could do to stop them. Their ship would no longer heed their own instruments or commands. The only meaningful thing they could do was physically destroy their own engines, dropping them out of the air and almost certainly killing them.

From the ground, Caeden watched as exactly that happened overhead. Dozens of ships were compromised and steadily drawn in. In moments the Bladeborne had cleared a portion of the sky, doing work that would have taken Lily and Asherta at least half an hour if not longer.

Funnily enough, Caeden was also privy to all the conversations going on among the Bladeborne. He might have thought they’d congratulate each other on a job well done. Not so. The conversations were almost universally discussions or debates on the validity or shortcomings of this or that harpoon design.

This was how Caeden found out that his children had taken his task as a sort of competitive challenge where the most accolades would go to the most effective and consistent design. All the others would then be replaced with that design. They were literally using this as an opportunity to field test their ideas.

Needless to say, some conversations got heated. Literally, since Bladeborne ran a temperature of 8,000 K at the low end. They were made of plasma after all. There were several arguments on the merits of specific parts, as well as shouting matches about the taxonomic definition of ‘efficient’. It got a little out of hand.

Caeden could only sit at the sidelines and laugh to himself. He found himself wondering how he’d ever been concerned about the Revolution attack. Sure, a lot of people had died. But on the scale of the Starry Sea, this was on the level of a larger island being ‘cleansed’ as Lily’s father did on a regular basis. Some several billion humans lived in the CA alone. An island with a few million being lost was almost laughably small in comparison. Plus, Cat had managed to save quite a few people just in the small section of island they’d currently cleared. No doubt many more had survived as well, especially the shrouded.

He wondered how the Revolution would respond to losing dozens of ships in an instant. It would be interesting to see what they thought they could accomplish. After seeing what his children could do, he was suddenly much less worried. They still had a lot of ships to deal with and it would take time to do so, but he would dare say he was starting to feel optimistic about it.