Zhao was already positioned even against his true will.
That was the quality Julius valued above almost everything else in soone in that line of work the ability to process the situation at the sa speed as the commander, to have already reached the sa conclusion without being walked through it. Zhao interpreted the group in seconds, who had flying beasts, who could carry an additional person without sacrificing the speed they'd need, which order minimized bottlenecks at the exit point, and organized the first wave out with the thodical efficiency of soone who had made these calculations in worse conditions than this and knew which variables actually mattered.
"Yes, take the faster ones and you go first," Julius told him.
Zhao opened his mouth.
"It's not negotiable," Julius added.
Zhao closed it again, with the expression of soone who disagrees but recognizes when the conversation is already over.
♢♢♢♢
When Julius had pushed a lot and was just a few ters from the exit, the frightened twins had already switched to their barrier and fled. Which, if Julius was honest… Was a relief because it allowed him to conserve so of his energy, which would soon run out if he maintained the fusion much longer.
So they erged from the ruins with more energy reserves than he had expected.
And Zhao was gone the next mont.
Outside, Julius oriented himself and read the mutant flow. His group's earth affinity gave him a natural sensitivity to the way large numbers of creatures moved across the ground, the pressure they exerted, the direction that pressure was building toward, and what he read stopped him for a mont.
The flow was moving upward. Toward the massive bridge connecting Yino and Yano.
Mutants without direction normally scattered. These weren't scattering…. The line was deliberate and consistent, organized in a neat way that very likely didn't co from the creatures themselves. Julius traced it to its most probable destination and held that conclusion in his mind for a second before accepting it.
They were crossing from Yino to Yano.
He noted where Zhao had gone. The energy traces his beast's fusion left in the air were readable to anyone with sufficient mana sensitivity, and they pointed toward Goldcrest territory, the direction the twins had taken when they ran. Julius didn't yet know what the twins were about to do there or what their next move looked like, but Zhao had decided to follow their direction until its probable end in seconds and Julius just trusted that kind of decision was good since it ca from a scout that always understood without needing much explained to him. Zhao had even left soone shadowing the twins already, quiet and good for hiding from good senses, also fast… So tracking two people considerably slower than Zhao's flying group would be easy.
That was enough for now.
♢♢♢♢
Julius moved toward the bridge. Earth tars were rarely fast, and the beasts his group ran with were built for endurance and strength rather than speed of movent. But the bridge was considerably closer than Goldcrest territory, and crossing alongside the mutants, through the noise and mass of them rather than against it, turned out to need so specific techniques applied with patience. Earth had a long list of tricks for situations that glanced impossible from a distance and rely difficult from up close.
They arrived faster than he'd expected.
The castle was still holding.
Hundreds of fighters at the entrance to the vault, the marks of hours of sustained combat and slow retreat to the deeper zones of the castle visible in the way they stood and in how they managed their mana, that particular economy of movent that tars developed when they knew they couldn't afford to spend anything beyond the strict minimum. Each use was asured against what remained and what was still coming. They were holding. But it was the kind of holding that had a deadline on it, and anyone who had spent enough ti in long fights could read the deadline in the posture.
Julius had arrived ready to be the relief.
Then the mutant flow stopped.
Not gradually... It stopped the way sothing stops when it receives an instruction, which is entirely different from how sothing stops when it runs out. Julius now knew the difference because he'd 'watched' the corrupted mutants under the twins' control long enough underground to have ford clear opinions about how directed movent looked versus undirected movent. This was directed. Sothing had changed for the mind behind all this. Then the flow reversed direction.
Julius felt the movent and tracked the new line, and the feeling that settled in his chest wasn't quite fear, but it shared enough characteristics with fear that he didn't waste ti arguing about the distinction.
The academy.
He left a third of his group at the castle, just in case the mutants ca back, and moved the rest.
♢♢♢♢
What Julius found when he reached the academy was not sothing he could have prepared for even with a warning… Maybe not even with full knowledge in advance.
Eight artifacts had ford a structure in the center of the academy grounds, and his brain took several seconds to finish processing it, the kind of thing the eyes recognize before the mind accepts what it is actually seeing, that brief gap between perception and classification where the only available word is wrong. Wrong…
There was no coherent anatomy to it. No logical reference point in anything Julius had studied or faced in combat, except maybe loosely a spider, and even that comparison broke down imdiately when you considered the range of movent and what it was clearly capable of. The construct wasn't built around any principle he could na. But it was still built around a purpose, and the purpose was visible in how everything about it oriented toward 'holding' the figure above.
It was 'elevating' sothing.
The energy emanating from that central point made the combined presence of every tar on the field feel irrelevant by comparison. Julius had sensed the distortion from a distance, had felt it building as he approached, but the rate at which it had escalated since then sat at the edge of what he was willing to call alarming without sounding like soone who panicked easily. He was truly not soone who panicked easily… He was also not going to pretend the number was sothing other than what it was.
In the elevated position, in the palm of what might generously be called one of the 'spider's hands', if you were willing to stretch the definition, stood sothing that didn't fit any prior category Julius had available.
His father was the first thing that arrived to mind. Then the feeling arrived, and it was the complete opposite, and the power was much larger.
Hybrid... Human, dragon, and corruption in one, and maybe sothing beyond all three that none of those terms fully reached. The entity stood at height, still, in a way that wasn't the stillness of soone waiting. It was the stillness of a process that hadn't finished yet.
But that amount of energy…
Sothing that large should have been felt from much farther away. Even from inside the ruins, from Goldcrest territory, Julius calculated that Zhao must have sensed it too, or would have by now.
But he didn't know that this didn't work like ordinary mana.
The dark energy radiating from the entity in the palm wasn't expanding outward the way energy always expanded, dispersing and thinning with distance. It was accumulating inward, pulling toward a central point that Julius could only perceive at all because of how close he now was, because it was actively interacting with the energy around it, drawing it in rather than pushing it out. Like a void that fed on everything within reach, growing more efficient the closer you ca, the pull increasing with proximity in a way that suggested it wasn't close to finished.
If you could feel it, that was only thanks to how plentiful it was. Even escaping the voids' vicinity.
And around that void, a wall of mutants moved in a continuous churning mass, channeling into the center with the single-minded consistency of sothing that had surrendered any individual direction. Not attacking but feeding and defending. Delivering what they had to what was accumulating above them with the blind montum of a current that no longer needed anyone to sustain it.
Julius assessed his reserves.
They weren't enough to make a difference here. Maybe they wouldn't have been enough at full capacity. That wasn't pessimism. It was simple arithtic.
Then his heart lurched… He saw the girls in front of the entity.
All three of them in maximum fusion, though Liora looked like she was forcing hers just a second on mana fus. Luna and Larissa's stances had that particular quality of people who had already decided sothing and were past the point where additional information was going to change it.
Julius advanced forward without calculating the odds further. But he already knew he wouldn't reach them in ti
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