The space they’d entered was dark, but that was quickly remedied when Lily created a fistful of light and waved it around, filling the entire room. It was immediately obvious to Caeden that they’d broken into a storage space. There were piles of boxes stacked around in a massive space that spanned dozens of feet up and several hundred across.

They were closer to the stern side of the room than the bow, but very much in the middle of the space. Everyone had remained tense and ready for combat when they’d entered, despite Erik and Caeden’s words. But it didn’t take more than a moment to figure out that this area was devoid of life.

“I wonder what they’ve got in here.” Erik idly peeled back a tarp covering a pile of boxes and jumped the twenty feet up to reach the top of the stack. Cracking it open, he whistled. “It’s some kinda rocket. Hold on.”

Before anyone could stop him, Erik started rapidly jumping between stacks and cracking open box after box. “Well, it looks like we ended up in their ammunition storage. Seems really dumb to not guard something like that, but whatever, not my ship.”

Lily laughed. “Erik, I don’t think they were expecting anyone to tunnel into the room through the hull. I’d guess that they have someone in place at the entrance to prevent people from casually wandering in. We probably skipped all that by entering the way we did.”

Jumping down from a stack, Erik shrugged. “Ok, like I said, not my problem. All I wanna know is what we’re supposed to do from here.”

“I can still feel my Entrance Blade. It’s that way.” Caeden pointed up and further into the ship. “It feels like it’s almost at the center. This ship is more spherical than the others, more of an oval than a box or traditional ship shape. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Entrance Blade is wherever the ether engine and suppression field generator are.”

“Why would they put it there?” Erik asked, leaning idly against a stack while spinning a rocket in his hands.

“Because, that would be the most heavily defended area of the ship.” Lily jumped in. “They’ve seen Caeden using the Entrance Blade for teleportation. Even just based on that, it’s one of the most valuable pieces of ethertech in the entire Starry Sea. If this Founder has even an inkling of what it can actually do, he’d want it to be as well protected as the engine and generator.”

“How are we supposed to navigate?” Cat asked. “I know Caeden can feel the direction of the Entrance Blade, but unless we want to literally tunnel through the entire ship, we need to find a path to get there. The artificial aura is blocking our senses now that we’re in here. What’s the plan?”

Caeden and Lily stared at each other for a long moment before they both sighed heavily.

“What? What’s the problem?” Cat looked between them. Next to her, Dave laughed.

“I think I can guess. They came up with a plan, but they don’t like it.” He smirked. “I bet I can even guess what that plan is. And it’s pretty bad.”

““Yup.”” Caeden and Lily answered at the same time.

“This is a real Erik-level plan.” Caeden sighed.

“Like, we’re almost ashamed we couldn’t come up with something better.” Lily added.

“Hey!” Erik tried to protest. But he was distracted by his efforts to manually pull apart the rocket he’d found. Inside a munitions room. When he finally glanced up from his project, he found everyone staring at him. “What?”

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Cat asked, focusing back on her other friends. “If it’s at Erik-level I’m worried about our odds of survival.”

Erik opened his mouth to say something, looked at the partially bent rocket in his hand, looked around at where they were, and closed it.

“We don’t have anything I’d consider to be a good option.” Caeden shrugged, with Lily nodding along beside him. “We’re on enemy territory with our aura senses heavily limited. The ship could have any layout imaginable, and it's massive. Navigating it is going to be difficult, if not impossible. At the same time, we’ll have to deal with whatever the Revolution will throw at us while we’re inside their base of power. There just isn’t a good answer to that.”

“So, what’s the answer?” Cat prompted.

“Brute force.” Lily shrugged. “We bust through everything in front of us while heading toward the Entrance Blade as best we can. At the same time, we follow the path of greater resistance. It stands to reason that their defenses will grow ever more intense the close we get to the engine room. By that logic, if we follow down the path that pushes back the most, we’ll find what we want.”

“Seriously? And that’s better than just tunneling?”

“Tunneling will eventually be discovered.” Caeden explained. “It limits our line of sight and could dump us into unknown and disadvantageous situations. Plus, considering what we encountered to get in here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the engine room was surrounded by a mix of materials that makes it virtually impenetrable with only one viable entrance. We’re better off following their own paths of travel to find that entrance. In spite of everything they could put in our way, they have to have some kind of way into the engine room to maintain it. And if they have an entrance, that means we do too. Making our own path guarantees us nothing.”

“Alright, I guess this is what we’re doing. Unless you have a better idea?” She asked Dave.

“Nope,” He shook his head. “Moving through the ship as intended is the most likely method of finding our way where we want to go. And it’s the only method that guarantees an entrance of some kind.”

“What are we waiting for then?” Erik asked, tossing aside the rocket. A patch of cloud caught it before it hit the ground. “Let’s go tear this place apart!”

And he was off, taking enhanced leaps over the boxes in the room and ignoring the normal paths through the building.

“He’s way too excited.” Lily sighed.

“He’s all mixed up after seeing his brother.” Caeden patted her shoulder comfortingly. “He just needs to blow off some steam. He’ll calm down after some fighting.”

The next hour was a blur of constant combat. They busted through the munitions room exit, surprising a revolutionary in a protected booth so badly that he didn’t even react before he was wrapped in black chains and knocked out by a puff of something Lily made.

Leaving the booth was harder than it should have been. The door was locked with an encoded pattern even from the inside. It was also much tougher than it had any right to be. They made several attempts to open it without breaking the door to avoid setting off some kind of alarm, but nothing could fix them not having the code. And the revolutionary wasn’t going to be waking up any time soon. The decision was made to knock it down, which Caeden did with Physical Enhancement reinforced fists..

That did set off an alarm, and they hadn’t even made it down a single metal-covered hallway before a side-door burst open revealing five more revolutionaries armed with guns and a lesser version of the armor that Travis had been wearing. It seemed to merely function as armor and a minor booster to the revolutionaries’ physical abilities with no self-repair or in-built weapons.

Obviously five revolutionaries weren’t enough to even slow them down. Nor were the next fifty they encountered. Running through dozens of identical featureless corridors had the entire team rapidly losing their sense of direction and position. Caeden managed to mitigate that, relying on the Entrance Blade as a reference. But his sense of it wasn’t perfectly precise, at least not at this distance.

After so much time, they still hadn’t found the one thing that had a solid chance of getting them closer to their goal. They searched dozens of side rooms, breaking down door after door, only to find more storage. It seemed that they’d entered the flagship on a storage deck with minimal staff. But none of them had what they were looking for.

“Where the heck are the stairs?” Caeden slammed his golden-purple fist through another door. At this point he’d found just the right spot to hit them to pop them right off their hinges. Looking inside, Caeden found yet more stacks of boxes covered in tarps. “Seriously, you’d think they’d have a lot of them, considering how big the ship is.”

Their plan to follow the path of greatest resistance hadn’t even started yet, as every direction they took seemed to provide an equal number of revolutionaries in similar gear. Instead, they started looking for stairs. The plan had been to find stairs and then climb them until Caeden felt that they’d come even with his Entrance Blade. From there, they could switch back to the original plan.

But they couldn’t find the stairs. After a certain point, the whole team had started breaking off the doors of every room they passed just to check. It also doubled as a convenient way to tell if they’d accidentally doubled back on themselves, something that had happened more than once. Areas with unbroken doors meant they’d never been there before.

“What I want to know is how the heck these guys can find their way around down here.” Caeden poked an unconscious revolutionary with his foot. “Are you telling me that they somehow memorized the layout down here? It's a freaking nightmare maze.”

“If you’d worked down here long enough, I’m sure that you’d figure it out after the first few times you got lost.” Caeden shrugged. “Just memorize a certain number of lefts and rights and you could find your designated location just fine.”

“Nahh,” Erik laughed. “That’s too much work. I’d just write it down or something.”

Caeden and Lily paused at the same time, mid-step.

“Surely not.” Caeden looked at her.

“I mean…They’re not all exactly the brightest.” Lily looked back, shrugging.

“What? What is it?” Erik asked, looking between them.

“We need to start searching all the revolutionaries.” Lily turned her gaze on Erik.

“O…K?”

“Just go with it.” Caeden said, picking up another unconscious figure further down the hall and starting to rifle through their pockets.

“Cat, could you make some specters to search some of the ones we knocked out a while back?” Lily asked, searching her own revolutionary. “We’re looking for paper or a CV pad.”

“Sure,” Cat shrugged, “I haven’t been doing much of anything, anyway.” Cat’s abilities didn’t lend themselves to what they were doing, since her undead were usually slow or vulnerable. Anything fast enough to search would fall to the first revolutionary it encountered. Plus, they wanted to conserve her shroud for when they encountered stiffer defenses.

It took over twenty minutes to sort through the dozens of people they’d encountered and find what they were looking for. Ironically, it was Erik who found what they were looking for.

“Hey, this CV isn’t broken.” Erik waved the compact screen in the air. A bundle of cloud snatched it out of his hand and brought it to Lily’s waiting digits. Not a moment too soon either, as the revolutionary Erik had been searching suddenly woke up and whipped out a pistol, blowing a hole through Erik’s raised hand before anyone could react. Another shot hit him in the face before Binding chains locked them down and a cloud knocked them back out.

Erik rolled his eyes as his face regrew in a glow of warm yellow light. “Seriously, only mine ever wake up. I mean, I get it, but still. And they always go for the face.”

“Maybe they just don’t like how you look,” Cat laughed. “That, or aiming at someone’s face is just a smart decision.”

“Nah, they probably just think I’m ugly.” Erik took the ribbing easily.

“Cae, it’s here.” Lily interrupted the banter, waving her boyfriend over to join her in looking at the small, pocket-sized CV screen. “Look, an entire map of the floor. It looks like they drew it themselves. How much do you want to bet that there are no official maps of the ship?”

“No bet.” Caeden shook his head. The Revolution was extremely paranoid about information dissemination even among their own people. “Hey, look. Stairs. Lots of them. But what’s this symbol?”

The hand-drawn map had various symbols to indicate different aspects of the ship, but there was no key to know what the symbols actually indicated. It was a map meant for just one person, after all. They already knew what the symbols meant, so why write it down.

They quickly found that the map also wasn’t exactly accurate. The person who’d made it was obviously guessing when it came to relative distances, and Caeden and Lily could clearly tell which sections of this floor the wannabe cartographer was more familiar with, as some areas were far more accurate than others.

Each stairway was attached to a symbol on the map. The same symbol. Once Caeden and Lily had figured out the map’s idiosyncrasies, they managed to find a place that they were sure matched up with the location of one of the supposed stairwells. From there, a thorough search covered the entire stretch of hallway.

Finally, several dozen feet further down the hall than they’d thought based on the map, they found what the symbol referred to.

“We’re all dumb.” Caeden rubbed his hands over his face. Lily patted his back in solidarity, feeling much the same.

“I mean, it does make some sense.” Cat shrugged.

“So, ready to go?” Erik asked, hanging from a section of the fold-down stairs that had previously blended into the ceiling. He’d been the one to find the small button on the wall that lowered them.

“Let’s get out of here.” Lily patted Caeden’s back once more before stepping toward the stairs. Caeden wordlessly followed.