The five guardians did not attack individually.

  That was the first thing Tunde registered as they rose from the ground in a single coordinated surge, wings beating in overlapping rhythms that merged into one overwhelming sound, filling the burning chamber with a vibration that he felt in his chest before he heard it with his ears.

  They had not been stationed here as independent sentinels. They were a unit, and whatever communication passed between them did so faster than he could track with his Ethra sight, their movements adjusting to one another with the fluid responsiveness of a single organism operating through five bodies.

  Mid-tier 2. All five of them.

  And behind them, the queen continued her work with the monstrous indifference of a being whose entire existence had been constructed around a single purpose, her coiled abdomen rising and falling in the slow, mechanical rhythm of continuity itself, as though the burning of everything she had built was simply weather.

  The heat at Tunde's back had become something he could no longer afford to simply register and set aside.

  The fire had found new fuel in the deeper passages behind him and was eating through the hive's architecture with an appetite that did not distinguish between structural and incidental.

  Smoke threaded through the chamber in thin, acrid ribbons that thickened with every breath, and the light had shifted from the cool bioluminescence of the wax to the hot, unsteady orange of combustion.

  He had perhaps minutes before the chamber itself became uninhabitable, and the queen's guardians had likely reached the same conclusion, which meant they would not be drawing this out.

  He kept the relic blade low and held his Ethra steady, letting the weapon drink only what it needed, no more.

  The relic's hunger was always present, always pulling, and learning to meet it with measured supply rather than open-handed generosity had been one of the harder disciplines these past weeks.

  Too much and it would outpace his reserves faster than the fight justified. Too little and it would dull itself against the carapace of creatures built to an entirely different standard than the tier 1 beasts he had spent the morning on.

  The first guardian came in from the left.

  Its six barbed legs extended ahead of it like a thrown net, each one tipped with a point designed to puncture rather than slash, and it led with its stinger in the center of the formation the way a spear leads a charge.

  Tunde read the direction and moved right, inside the sweep of the outer legs, and the relic blade took two of them at the joint with the thorax in one drawing cut that came from the wrist rather than the shoulder.

  The guardian shrieked and spun, the severed limbs falling, and Tunde was already rotating away because the second guardian had filled the space the first one had vacated with the seamless efficiency of a unit that had drilled this exact scenario without ever needing to be told it was drilling.

  He ducked under the second one's stinger, felt the wind of it cross his ear, and came up with an elbow into the underside of its head that produced a satisfying crack and drove it upward and slightly sideways, buying him the half-second he needed to pivot and present the blade to the third guardian, which had been angling to take him from behind with its pincers.

  The relic blade took the pincers at their base, and the guardian recoiled, shrieking, the stump of each appendage trailing a thin spray of greenish fluid that caught the firelight as it fell.

  Two down from functional capacity, one crippled. Two untouched. The queen watching from the center of the room with an attention that had nothing human in it but was no less focused for that.

  The remaining two came in together from opposite angles, and Tunde did the only thing available to him, he chose one and committed entirely, driving toward the guardian on his right with every gram of speed his disciple-ranked body could produce, the relic blade extended ahead of him in a line rather than a swing, letting momentum do the work that strength alone could not.

  The tip found the gap between the head and thorax that his Ethra sight had flagged in the approach and drove through it, and Tunde used the creature's body as a brace against which to reverse his direction, planting his foot against its carapace and pushing off as the fourth guardian's stinger came down in the space he had just occupied.

  The guardian he had used as a fulcrum folded around the blade as he withdrew it. Three.

  Venom struck him.

  Not a stinger, one of the remaining guardians spitting with the accuracy he had been warned about, the stream catching his left shoulder and upper arm before he could complete the rotation that would have taken him clear of it.

  The pain was immediate and specific, not the diffuse burning of the hive workers' venom but something sharper and more directional, driving straight inward from the point of contact and announcing its intentions to every nerve it could find along the way.

  His body received it. Not without protest, not without cost, but it received it the way a trained fighter receives a blow they had anticipated, with the impact managed rather than absorbed helplessly.

  He kept moving.

  He closed on the spitter before it could reload and put the relic blade through its wing joint, dropping it from the air to the burning floor, where it thrashed and found no purchase with two functional legs and diminishing enthusiasm. Four.

  The fifth had been working toward a flanking position since the engagement began, patient in a way that suggested it was the most experienced of the five, or simply the most careful, which in a tier 2 creature amounted to something functionally similar.

  Tunde turned to face it directly, because there was no angle left from which he could take it that it had not already accounted for.

  It feinted with its stinger. He committed to the dodge a fraction too early, and it adjusted mid-strike with the flexible precision of a creature whose body had not been designed with rigid joints, and the stinger connected with his left side in a shallow graze that took a line of skin with it and delivered a secondary dose of venom directly into the wound.

  He hissed through his teeth.

  His left arm was becoming a problem. The accumulated venom from two separate contacts was stacking up against his body's processing capacity, and while his system was managing it, the management required resources that were not simultaneously available for other things.

  He could feel the competition in his channels, his body parsing its Ethra between healing, fighting, and detoxifying in a constant three-way negotiation.

  He took the fifth guardian's next strike on the flat of the relic blade, redirecting rather than blocking, and drove a straight thrust into the gap between its compound eyes with the full weight of his body behind it.

  The guardian dropped.

  Tunde straightened slowly, breathing through his nose, letting his Ethra sight sweep the chamber. The four disabled guardians were no longer threats worth the Ethra required to finish them; the fire would accomplish that more efficiently than he could. The fifth was dead. He turned to face the queen.

  She was watching him.

  Whatever intelligence moved behind her pale, coiled stillness, it had assessed the situation and reached a conclusion.

  The eggs she had been laying when he entered the chamber had stopped. Her abdomen had stilled for the first time since he had laid eyes on her.

  Her guards were gone, her hive was burning, and the thing that had come into her home and done this to it was standing six paces from her with a blade that hummed with harvested Ethra and showed no intention of leaving without completing what it had started.

  Then the folds of her body moved.

  He saw it happen in his Ethra sight before he registered it with his eyes, a signature inside the queen's body that was distinct from hers, separate and dense and vibrating at a frequency that put every instinct he had on immediate high alert.

  Something had been held inside her, not like an egg, more like a weapon stored in a sheath, its own Ethra coiled and compressed and building toward release.

  It came out fast, fast enough that the word fast did not fully contain what he was observing.

  His Ethra sight gave him the trajectory a quarter-second before the creature itself crossed the distance, all-black exoskeleton absorbing the firelight rather than reflecting it, its form sleek and compact in a way that none of the guardians had been, built for a different kind of work entirely.

  Tunde brought the relic blade up in a cross-guard and hoped it would be enough.

  The impact drove him backward three full steps, his boots finding no purchase on the burned and bubbling floor, the force of the collision transmitted through the blade and into his wrists and shoulders and straight down through his spine to the soles of his feet. He caught himself on the edge of the doorway and held.

  The creature hovered before him, a few wingbeats back, and regarded him.

  Peak disciple rank.

  He felt it without needing to measure it, the way you feel the temperature change when you walk into a room that is significantly colder than the one you left.

  The pressure this creature carried was categorically different from anything else in the hive, a density of Ethra that did not announce itself loudly but simply was, the way gravity is, present in every interaction without needing to perform its presence.

  The insect king, it had to be, emerged from the queen's body as a final line of defense. Its exoskeleton had no stinger.

  What it had instead were limbs that had been engineered for a different kind of killing than the guardians', sharper and more purposeful, the tools of something that had not been built to defend through attrition but to end things decisively.

  It removed the limb it had used to strike him and pulled it back, and Tunde registered in the half-second available to him that it was preparing to drive it through him with considerably more commitment than the first pass had carried. His free hand moved.

  The relic blade swept upward in a single arc and took the limb at a joint just above the midpoint.

  The king and the queen shrieked simultaneously, the sound layered and resonant and carrying a harmonic quality that bypassed his ears and connected directly with something older in his nervous system, a sound his body recognized as a threat without needing his mind to process it. He rode out the instinctive flinch and pressed forward.

  The king circled him with the patient calculation of something that had just recalibrated its assessment of the target.

  No stinger.

  Its remaining weapons were its mandibles and its other limbs and the pure concentrated weight of its Ethra, which it was beginning to draw outward now in a way that Tunde's sight registered as a slow brightening around the creature's frame, as though it were coating itself in compressed force.

  Tunde had limited time and diminishing resources, a burning building around him, and a peak-tier 2 creature between him and the queen.

  He reached into his void ring.

  The scorpion stinger came out of the ring still dripping, its length and density unchanged by the time it had spent in storage, the venom at its tip glistening with a quality that his Ethra sight mapped in immediate, chemical detail.

  He did not throw it at the king. He looked past the king and threw it at the queen.

  The king moved to intercept.

  It was fast enough, just barely, and that barely was the difference because in moving to intercept, it vacated the angle it had been occupying and left him a clear line to the queen that had not existed a moment before.

  And by the time the king registered what had actually been thrown and what it was aimed at, the stinger was already in the air and traveling with all the force his disciple-ranked arm could impart to an object of its mass and aerodynamic properties, which was to say a great deal.

  It struck the queen's abdomen.

  The sound she produced was not a shriek. It was something beneath a shriek, something that existed at a register below what a shriek required, a sound that began in the hive's walls and moved outward through everything attached to them. Every surviving insect in every surviving passage dropped simultaneously.

  Tunde dropped with them, his knees hitting the floor before his conscious mind had finished processing the instruction to stay upright.

  His ears rang. His vision went to the narrow, bright quality of a system in brief but genuine overload. He pressed a hand against the floor and used it to anchor himself as the vibration passed through the stone beneath him in long, rolling pulses.

  Then he was on his feet, because the window this had opened was real and it was closing.

  The torch stick came out of his void ring, the last salvage item from a bandit's cache that he had nearly discarded twice for the space it occupied.

  He had never been more glad of his habit of keeping things on the theory that use might eventually present itself. He ignited it with a direct channel of Ethra, felt the flame take, and ran at the queen.

  The king screamed.

  The remaining guardians, the ones still functional enough to respond to command, moved to cut him off, but they were slow with the aftermath of the queen's cry still working through their systems, and slow was all the gap he needed.

  Multiple stingers caught him across the back as he drove through the outer ring of the queen's defenders, each impact a separate spike of pain added to the running total his body was already managing.

  The venom flooding in from three points simultaneously and meeting the resistance his system had built against hive venom, and pushing against it harder than the individual doses had done before.

  He felt it in his legs first.

  The heaviness that the venom brought, pressing down against the enhanced speed his Ethra provided, trying to reclaim the territory his body had spent all of last night fortifying against it. His body pushed back.

  The negotiation between his enhanced physique and the compounded venom charge was audible to him now in the quality of his own Ethra movement, turbulent and contested rather than smooth.

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  He reached the queen.

  He drove the burning torch into her abdomen.

  The white came before the sound.

  Then the sound came, and it was not so much heard as received by every surface of his body simultaneously.

  The shockwave of the queen's death transmitted itself through the air and the floor and the burning walls of the hive in a single concussive pulse that picked him up and redistributed him without consulting him about the destination.

  He was aware, distantly, of his void ring opening. The vitality elixir was in his mouth before his conscious mind had caught up with what his body had already decided to do, some survival instinct operating below the level of decision, and he swallowed it reflexively.

  Feeling it begin to work even as the white faded to a spinning darkness and the darkness resolved into the burned wreckage of the hive exterior, the canopy above him broke open by the force of the explosion, a circle of sky visible through the smoke and falling ash.

  He lay on his back.

  He conducted a brief inventory. His vision worked. His hearing was a sustained, featureless ringing that had entirely replaced the concept of sound for the moment, but it was functional in the sense that it was occurring.

  His body ached in the deep, structural way that suggested he had been accelerated in a direction that his musculature had not endorsed.

  His burns were significant, concentrated across his back and shoulders where the queen's explosion had reached him with the most directness.

  He turned his head to the side and looked at the crater.

  Then he closed his eyes and let the vitality elixir continue its work and allowed himself to drift without fully losing consciousness, staying at the surface of awareness rather than descending completely, because descending completely in the middle of a burning hive's remains with surviving insects somewhere in the vicinity was not a strategy he could endorse.

  *****

  He slept, eventually, in the way that a body takes sleep when it has decided the decision is no longer the ranker's to make. He did not choose it. It chose him.

  When he opened his eyes, the ringing had subsided to a level that permitted him to hear the forest again, the distant sounds of the living world having resumed their ordinary business beyond the radius of destruction he had created.

  The ash around him had settled. The fires had burned through their fuel and guttered down to scattered embers that glowed in the dim light filtering through the smoke-hazed canopy above.

  He sat up.

  His Ethra sight showed him a body still in the process of completing several overlapping repairs, the venom signatures waning but not yet gone, his burns healed to a degree that had moved from critical to merely painful.

  The burns themselves had closed, the deep tissue work ongoing beneath surfaces that looked functional from the outside.

  He did not try to summon the relic blade.

  The spike of pain behind his eyes when he reached for it told him everything he needed to know about that particular option's current availability. He filed it, accepted it, and moved on.

  He found the skinning blade still attached to the corpse of one of the guardians nearby and pulled it free, imbuing it with a careful measure of Ethra before he began to move through the wreckage with the methodical attention of someone who understood that nothing in this field of destruction was waste unless he decided it was.

  The cores he found were not numerous. The fire had been comprehensive in its work, and most of the insects had not survived it in a state that left their cores intact.

  But some had. He found them with his Ethra sight, small concentrated pulses of residual energy in the cooling remains, harvesting each one with the focused care of a craftsman who respected the value of what he was recovering.

  He moved toward the crater at the center.

  The queen's remains were not what he had expected. The explosion had been total in the way that high Ethra releases tended to be total, catastrophic, and consuming, and yet the queen's upper body had survived in portions.

  Her skull and the armored plating of her thorax were partially intact, the devastation concentrated in her abdomen where the torch had done its work.

  What had survived was remarkable in its own quiet way, and his Ethra sight traced something extraordinary in the fluids still leaking from the cracks in her carapace.

  Gold.

  Not golden in color, golden in Ethra signature, a concentration and quality of Ethra compound in that fluid that bore no resemblance to the dark venom the hive workers had carried.

  This was something the queen produced for a different purpose entirely, something her body had generated from the raw Ethra of the tier 2 territory over however many years she had occupied it, refined and concentrated through processes he did not understand but whose output his Ethra sight assessed with immediate and unambiguous clarity.

  He found a suitable container in his void ring and began to drain it carefully, watching the golden liquid fill the container with the focused patience of a ranker who understood that the most valuable things in the world were often quiet about their value.

  He sealed the container and stored it.

  The insect king lay at the crater's edge, its lower half simply absent, its upper body intact enough to have sustained something resembling consciousness until a relatively recent point.

  One mandible had melted to slag in the explosion's immediate radius. Its eyes, black and dense and built to a specification that was meaningfully different from the workers', tracked him as he approached, and the quality of what he saw in them was not something he had encountered in a tier 2 creature before.

  Something that was not quite rage and not quite recognition, but occupied the space where both of those things bordered on something more complex.

  He stood over it for a moment.

  "I have nothing against you," he said, and meant it, because he had come into this hive with a purpose and the king had simply been part of what stood between him and that purpose, and there was no malice in what he had done, only necessity.

  He was not sure the king understood, or that understanding was a category the creature possessed. But he said it anyway.

  The skinning blade was in his hand, imbued, and he ended it cleanly.

  Then he sat beside it for a moment and breathed.

  ****

  The hollow was exactly as he had left it, cold and dark and smelling of the purge his body had conducted the night before, which made it, paradoxically, one of the safer locations he was aware of in the immediate area, since anything with a functional sense of smell had likely decided there were better places to spend time.

  He sealed the entrance with a boulder that required more effort to move than he was entirely comfortable acknowledging, lit the last of his torch sticks, and sat down on the cave floor with his back against the stone and looked at the state of himself.

  His pants had, through a combination of fire, venom, and the general violence of the past several hours, been reduced to roughly half their original length and a fraction of their original structural integrity.

  His skin was unmarked above the waist because his body had finished that work somewhere during his sleep, but the burns across his shoulders and upper back were still present in the memory of his nerves, even if they were absent from his skin.

  He had no upper clothing. He had no remaining healing elixirs. He had no remaining vitality water beyond the one small container left in his void ring.

  He had his wits, his body, the relic currently resting in band form at his wrist and sending him the quiet equivalent of a creature that had eaten recently and was satisfied, several dozen beast cores of varying quality, a container of golden queen's fluid, a collection of carapace material, and his void ring's remaining contents, which he inventoried with the careful attention of someone making rationing decisions.

  He spread the remaining food in front of him and ate without enthusiasm and with considerable gratitude, because the alternative to having limited food was having no food, and the alternative to having no food in the tier 2 territory was a problem he had no solution for at the moment.

  The roasted scorpion meat was there too. He looked at it.

  His body's response to it now was different from this morning's response to it. His Ethra sight mapped his own system's signature as he considered the meat and found the architecture around the Venomspike scorpion's toxin compounds had changed, reorganized in the same way it had reorganized around the hive venom, the channels and tissues around those specific pathways restructured to acknowledge and process rather than fight and fail.

  The venom in the meat was real and present and if he consumed it now it would still have an effect, but the effect would be substantially different from what it had been when he had first eaten it in this cave.

  He added it to his meal.

  The taste was still not something he intended to recommend to anyone.

  ****

  The fire had settled to a low, steady burn by the time the thoughts he had been managing throughout the day finally surfaced with the insistence of things that had been patient long enough.

  Thorne.

  He had not allowed himself to sit with the question of the revenant properly since the elder had taken him into the forest, because properly sitting with it required the kind of stillness he had not had, and stillness in the tier 2 territory was an invitation to become someone else's problem.

  But the cave was quiet and the fire was small, and his body was healing, and the question of what had been done with his first friend in this world would not wait any longer.

  He did not know if Thorne was being held. He did not know if the clan regarded him as an asset to be studied or a problem to be contained or something in between those things.

  He did not know if Thorne himself was even aware of his own condition in the way that self-awareness required, whether the revenant state was one from which a person could look outward at their circumstances and understand them, or whether it was a place you existed in without the tools for that kind of examination.

  He did not know if Elyria was managing well, whether she had been given resources commensurate with her standing, whether the clan was treating her as what she was or as what her circumstances had made her appear to be at first impression.

  She was not fragile. He did not think of her as fragile. But the clan was a political environment, and political environments had ways of applying pressure that had nothing to do with combat capability.

  He would win the duel.

  That was the one concrete thing he could do that changed conditions for everyone involved. A disciple with a victory over Thalas Verdan was a disciple with a standing, and standing was the currency through which all other things became possible in a place like this.

  It would draw attention, the kind Joran had warned him about, but attention and leverage were often the same thing viewed from different angles, and he needed the leverage more than he feared the attention.

  He picked up a stone from the cave floor and held it in his palm, feeling its weight.

  The question that had been forming at the back of his mind since the elder had explained projection began to take clearer shape in the quiet of the cave. He turned the stone over, feeling the texture of it, the cool density of it, solid and simple and useful in the way that simple things were useful when you understood them properly.

  Resonance built in his right hand. He felt it accumulate in the familiar way, a pressure gathering in his palm and fingers, restless and wanting release.

  He coaxed it down, pulling it back from its natural tendency toward explosion, redirecting it away from the full-force output it was designed for and toward something more contained, a fraction of the charge, held deliberately at a lower threshold.

  The stone absorbed it.

  He felt the resonance enter the material and spread through it in a network of fine cracks, not detonating, not releasing, simply residing inside the structure of the stone, held there by the thin thread of will he maintained on the charge.

  The cracks spread to the surface and glowed faintly with the starry darkness of his Ethra, delicate lines mapping the force waiting inside.

  He threw it at the cave wall with an ordinary motion, no resonance, no imbuing, simply the mechanical act of throwing a stone.

  It hit the wall.

  The charge he had placed inside it detonated on impact with the precision of a release trigger rather than a manual explosion, and the stone did not shatter so much as disappear, the cave wall behind the impact point sporting a clean, deep pocket that should not have resulted from the mass and velocity of the projectile that caused it.

  The force had tunneled through the stone rather than radiating outward from the surface, concentrated inward, and then released at the point of maximum compression.

  He stared at the hole in the wall.

  Projection.

  Not held in his body to damage his Ethra lines. Not held in the air, where it could not find a delivery mechanism.

  Held in the stone, which became the delivery mechanism, traveling wherever he threw it, detonating only when it found its target.

  He sat with his mouth slightly open for several seconds.

  Then a slow, genuine, wide smile spread across his face, the kind he did not produce for anyone else's benefit, the kind that existed simply because he was genuinely delighted by what he had just understood.

  He began filling his void ring with stones, not quickly, and not carelessly.

  He sat by the fire in the hollow cave in the middle of the tier 2 territory with nothing to wear above the waist and the smell of burned hive still in the air, and he worked, loading resonance into stone after stone with the careful, controlled precision of someone who had found a tool and was learning its dimensions.

  Each stone received a slightly different charge. Each throw tested a slightly different parameter, distance, angle, surface material, and the relationship between the charge held and the force released.

  By the time his eyes had grown heavy and the fire had burned low, his void ring carried a collection of primed projectiles, and his understanding of what he had built was substantially more complete than when he had started.

  He lay down on the warm cave floor, still smiling.

  Sleep came immediately, the sound sleep of a body that had done everything asked of it and then more besides, complete and dark and restorative in the way that only genuine exhaustion and genuine safety could produce together.

  Outside, the tier 2 forest went about its ancient business, indifferent and vast and entirely unaware that the ranker sleeping in a small cave at its margin had just added something new to his arsenal that had not existed in the world before today.

  ****

  The forest edge was a different kind of alive.

  Elyria stood at the boundary where the cultivated paths of the Jade Tower compound gave way to the true undergrowth of the outer woods, and she felt the Ethra pressure before she saw its source.

  A pulse moving through the natural lines of the forest like a deep current disturbed at its source, radiating outward in slow waves that had a quality she recognized from her years in Silvershade.

  A rift.

  She had grown up understanding rifts differently than these Jade Tower disciples seemed to.

  In Silvershade, where the continent-spanning forests were themselves Ethra-dense ecosystems of extraordinary antiquity, a rift opening was regarded the way weather was regarded, something to be acknowledged, prepared for, and worked around rather than immediately descended upon.

  The forests absorbed the Ethra that gushed from a fresh rift and grew stronger for it, the trees and creatures inside them cycling the energy in ways that took months to fully process.

  Clearing a rift was the last resort, undertaken only when the collapse risk or the emergence of genuinely abominable creatures made containment impossible.

  Here, the disciples had assembled as though the rift were a market that had opened ahead of schedule.

  She watched them from her position at the edge of the gathering, cataloguing without appearing to.

  Twenty-three disciples from nine houses, the counting was automatic, a habit from years of environments where understanding the composition of a room before anyone had cause to turn hostile was simply sensible preparation.

  Their equipment was impressive in aggregate; tier 2 beast hides worked into armor with the Ethereon metal she had identified in the market, conductive and Ethra-responsive, turning each disciple into a system for channeling their power into their protection as well as their offense.

  Rhyn moved through the preparations with the calm economy of someone who had done this before, checking his own equipment with the absent thoroughness of long practice.

  She was aware of his assessment when he arrived at her side and found her without her armor on.

  She let the liquid metal move at her intent, feeling it flow from its stored configuration outward across her body in the familiar spreading chill of it finding its shape, the surface tension of it forming plates and seams, and the joint coverage she had spent considerable time optimizing across her time in this city.

  The long blade materialized at her left side, drawn from the same source, its weight settling into place with the simple rightness of something that had been measured for her specifically.

  Rhyn looked at the result.

  "Adequate," he said, which from Rhyn she had learned to interpret as a form of approval he was not entirely comfortable expressing more directly.

  Sorin arrived from the assembling group looking marginally less prepared than he apparently felt, based on the expression of someone who had forgotten a specific item and was running a mental inventory to determine which one.

  He joined them with the comfortable ease of a person who had decided that his own company was generally an improvement on alternatives.

  "Twenty-three disciples for one rift," Elyria said, not quite a question, framed in the register of someone checking an assessment against available information.

  "Peak tier 2 bordering on tier 3," Rhyn replied, his eyes on the forest rather than on her, which she had learned meant the topic was being given serious rather than performative attention.

  "The resource to be gained justifies the numbers. The houses want to maximize extraction before the beast surge changes the predictions for the rift."

  She absorbed this.

  The pressure she was feeling from the rift confirmed the rank he had described. It had the particular quality of an Ethra source that had not yet stabilized fully, the fresh-opened quality of something still exhaling its initial rush, and the volume of that output at this distance told her the rift was either large or deep or both.

  Then Elder Joran was present. She had not seen him arrive, nor had she sensed him approach.

  He was simply not there, and then he was, standing atop the defensive structure at the forest's edge in his green robes with his hands folded and his blindfold in place and the particular quality of relaxed attention that she associated with a person who was taking in more information than their apparent posture suggested.

  The disciples dropped without ceremony. She followed, pressing a knee to the ground, her armor adjusting to the motion with the fluid responsiveness that the Ethereon weave permitted.

  His voice carried without effort.

  He outlined the situation with the economy of a man who saw no purpose in extended preamble, the rift's classification, the resource opportunity it represented, and the situations within which he expected them to act.

  No killing among their own. No maiming. Every disciple needed for the beast surge that was coming, and that need superseded whatever individual advantage a cleared field might offer in a competitive context.

  She noted the absence of specific instruction regarding encounters with any previously sent individuals.

  Then he was not there anymore, which was simply how Elder Joran departed from situations, and the assembled disciples rose and began moving with the organized urgency of twenty-three people who had been given a direction and had good reasons to be first in it.

  Elyria moved with them, her armor tracking her pace with the steady responsiveness of something that had learned her movement patterns over time.

  The forest received them with the impartiality it extended to everything that entered it, neither welcoming nor hostile, simply present and consequential and indifferent to the preferences of the creatures that passed through it.

  She moved through the inner domain with the particular attention she brought to environments where the threat profile was genuinely unclear, her Ethra sight running at a level that did not broadcast itself but did not close down either, a middle register that let the world come to her rather than reaching out to find it.

  Somewhere deeper in this forest, a ranker she was not sure she should think of as a friend but found she kept thinking about anyway was alive or not alive, advancing or not advancing, doing something that was probably inadvisable in the way that most of what that particular ranker did turned out to be inadvisable in retrospect.

  She did not pity him; she had been very clear with herself about that.

  But she moved with the faint, persistent awareness of where in the forest his general direction was, and she noted, without attaching more significance to it than it deserved, that the direction she was currently headed and the direction he was likely to be were not entirely different.

  The rift pulsed ahead of her, its Ethra pressure building against her senses like a sound that had not yet found its loudest register.

  She walked toward it, and did not look back, and did not stop.