Erik knocked a hand against the wall, whistling at the deep and solid ‘thunk’ that followed. “I’m not exactly an expert or anything, but that is thick.”

Not for the first time, Caeden wished he could use his aura senses. Despite how far they’d traveled through the flagship, they hadn’t found any of the equipment that maintained the false aura covering the vessel. It was frustrating, but their senses were confined in here just as surely as if they were still under the effects of the suppression field. Luckily, the false aura, much like an actual aura, couldn’t block aura manipulation and manifestation, only their senses.

Once again, they were faced with a wall of unknown composition, one even more robust than the flagship’s hull. Based on the position and his sense of the Entrance Blade’s location, Caeden was certain that they’d found the wall of the ether engine room. To get an idea of what they were dealing with, he and Lily had carved away the hallway wall, revealing a new material on the other side.

And Erik was right. What sat in front of them wasn’t just strong, but incredibly dense and deep. If Caeden had to guess, there were several layers of material between them and any kind of equipment or open space.

Caeden had already tried to use the material copy knife to sample the surface in front of them. It hadn’t even made a scratch. The material itself was visibly wood-like, with a white grain pattern including whorls and lines throughout that stood in contrast to the dark red surface. But it also had a metallic sheen and the kind of visible depth associated with crystals. Looking at it from an angle, Caeden almost felt like he could look behind the grain.

It was unlike anything he’d ever seen, and nothing they threw at it left a mark. With one exception. The black sticky substance that Cat could make had hissed and sizzled when it made contact. But it eventually evaporated, its corrosive power spent, and the surface underneath hadn’t shown any signs of change. But it was the only thing that had even gotten a reaction out of the maroon material.

Caeden had used a dozen different blades, Erik had tried to use his black chains to rip it apart, and Lily hit the thing with a miniature star. None of those raised the slightest response. Unlike the hull, which seemed to absorb and redistribute energy, the ether engine room’s wall simply didn’t react at all.

It was unlike anything Caeden had experienced, even including his impossibly long eternity spent forging endless weapons from every material he’d ever heard of or encountered in the Forge. Something that seemed impossible, and had Caeden wondering where exactly this stuff had come from.

“I don’t think we’re getting through it by just tunneling.” He sighed.

“Maybe we don’t have to.” Lily replied, looking at the unmarked surface speculatively.

“What are you thinking?”

“It’s a bit extreme.”

“I think we’ve reached that point and surpassed it by several orders of magnitude.”

“Yeah, fair.” Lily sighed. “Well, I was just thinking that we don’t necessarily need to break in, we just need to make sure that the Entrance Blade never makes it out. Right? We need to prevent the Revolution from ever extracting any useful data from it.”

“Yup.” Caeden felt like he might have an inkling of what Lily was imagining as her words sparked an idea in his mind, but he didn’t interrupt.

“So, they’ve almost made that part too easy. The engine room has the Entrance Blade in it, and it’s a nigh-impenetrable fortress. Why don’t we just…finish that job?”

Cat and Erik continued to look confused, but a growing and ever-so-slightly mischievous smile stole across Caeden’s face. “You want to cut the engine room off from the rest of the ship. Seal it up entirely.”

“It’ll cripple the flagship once their power is cut off, and it guarantees that the Entrance Blade is safe, even if we don’t get our hands on it.”

“I’ve got one better. We can just core the flagship like an apple, pull the engine room out and dump it into the Forge. Father would have to make a stupidly huge Entrance Blade, but we could do it. Once it's in there, I don’t care how resilient this stuff is.” Caeden knocked his hand against the wall, much like Erik had. “If it's in the Forge, I can peel it apart without even trying.”

“That sounds insane.” Erik looked between them before a manic smile shattered his faux-serious expression. “How do we start?”

It turned out that starting was both easier and harder than they expected. By this point, the team had confronted everything that the flagship had to throw at them in the way of defenses. More revolutionaries showed up as they moved, but none could do more than make them pause.

Despite that, the actual process of cutting the engine room off from the rest of the ship was a tedious and time consuming job. Suiting the size of the vessel it powered, the engine room was enormous. It spanned over a mile in any given dimension, being longer than it was tall. It really was the heart of the ship, sitting at the very center and echoing the flagship in shape, if in significantly smaller dimensions.

That size meant that finding every physical connection extending between the engine room and the rest of the ship required them to travel through dozens of different segments. The connections themselves also weren’t easy to find. They tended to follow parallel to the path of some hallways, but that was by no means a guarantee.

It became obvious that the nonsensical and convoluted design of the ship extended to the power lines running throughout. The lines and pipes could dip and wind, going where they were needed in a mess of interconnected and illogical webbing that centered around the ether engine.

Worse, the engine itself was tied into many other segments across the ship that seemed to act as auxiliary ether transformers and substations. That interlinked system meant that some of the pipes had free flowing ether inside them, some of it charged. It made cutting them off dangerous in the best of circumstances. It was a step beyond that when they were constantly waiting for more revolutionaries to jump out and take a shot at them.

It took hours, but over time they circled around the engine room, always checking occasionally for structural weaknesses or a change in the material, never finding anything different. It was a vault with the sole exception of the power and ether pipes. They even tried attacking through some of those pipes, only for them to seal over with the same wood-grain material as the rest of the engine’s shell.

“Do you think the engine room is self-sustaining?” Lily asked as they carefully cut another pipe with ether flowing where they couldn't reach, deeper into the engine room. “You’d think that with all this incoming ether we’ve been cutting off that it would eventually fail outright.”

“I doubt it,” Caeden shrugged, sealing off the pipe with a glowing hot sword. “I’ve no doubt that the ship’s other functions require these connections in one way or another. It’s likely that some other part of the ship requires the ether engine to transform this ether into another kind that flows out somewhere else. But the engine itself should be entirely self-sustaining.”

“The suppression field?”

“The suppression field.”

Caeden wasn’t surprised that Lily had drawn the same conclusion as him. It was the most likely explanation for why the ether engine was so well defended. Why the flagship hadn’t split up its power generation into multiple segments for security and redundancy like every other feature on the massive ethership.

The ether engine needed to be centralized and absolutely massive to power the suppression field. At the same time, the suppression field generator was the most obvious and valuable target for any attacking shrouded, as it was essentially the only thing keeping the Revolution from getting pasted across the horizon by millions of angry shrouded.

Thus, this giant vault was created. Caeden had no illusions, the engine inside would continue to function even when completely severed from the rest of the ship, if only to keep the suppression field going. In any other circumstance, that alone would have been enough to ensure the Revolution a fighting chance even if the flagship itself fell.

Unfortunately for them, Caeden was more than capable of cheating.

{}

“Well, this is quickly becoming a nuisance.” The Etherman poked at various monitors as yet another machine went silent. “They’ve managed to inadvertently disable several useful instruments. Though I suppose it’s no major loss, considering that they can’t do anything to stop the engine itself. I wonder if they think that disconnecting the engine from the rest of the ship will disable it? Naive.”

Damon sighed as the Etherman continued to monologue. After listening to him so much, Damon had learned to pick up on the slowly increasing level of annoyance that was growing every time another machine shut down.

As far as he could tell, the Etherman was not lying or putting on airs. The main ether engine was still thrumming powerfully, churning through cycles of ether transformations and interactions to power the suppression field sitting right next to it. But the actions of Hekate’s team hadn’t gone unnoticed.

Several machines, including those that the Etherman had been using to inspect both Damon himself and the portal circle, had shut down as flows of ether coming from elsewhere in the ship were severed. The main ether engine seemed to be entirely contained within the engine room, but the rest of the equipment still relied on the ship that surrounded it.

Now, the Etherman was flying around, connecting different machines to each other, redirecting pipes and plugging CVs into everything. More and more displays popped up, spitting out strings of numbers and letters that meant nothing to Damon, but had his ‘host’ huffing in annoyance at whatever he was seeing.

“Honestly, at this point it would almost be better to cut and run. I think I have enough…” The massive machine-man turned, the metal facsimile of a head pointed toward the suppression field generator in the center of the space.

Not for the first time, Damon contemplated what it was supposed to be doing. Obviously, the field didn’t just hinder shrouds, containing them within the shrouded’s body. If that was all it did, then why were tens of thousands of souls flowing through it?

For once, Damon wished that the Etherman would speak up, if only to clarify what was going on. He’d been so talkative about everything else. But the moment his focus shifted to the suppression field, he fell silent. Then his attention returned to whatever he was doing with all the other equipment in the room.

He only said one more thing. “No, not yet. Not yet.”

Damon couldn’t even begin to guess what was going on, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the suppression field’s purpose, its true purpose, was this Etherman’s only actual focus. That was why he seemed so unaffected even as the ship around him was being systematically destroyed. That was why he showed nothing more than annoyance as more and more of the equipment he’d been using shut down.

Damon and the portal ring were curiosities. Something to do while he waited for the suppression field to finish whatever it was doing. It was galling, to a certain degree, that Damon was merely a distraction. But that left a much more disturbing impression.

What was so important that one of the strongest shrouded on the Starry Sea and actual on-command portal travel took a distant second place in this thing’s focus?

Damon wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.