Julius listened without interrupting, which was how he listened when information was new and necessitated him to update several things at once. Lin's expression, beside him, was the one she had when sothing confird a theory she had already been carrying but hadn't been able to verify. Her eyes moved between the girls and the point where the artifact had sunk back into the ground, connecting what she was hearing to what she had already seen.
Reed heeded while his hands proceeded their work. Fern listened with her eyes fixed on Ren's face. Taro listened and understood roughly half of it, his expression was honest about that. Liu stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set in the way of soone who doesn't like what he's hearing but knows he needs to hear it.
"The original corruption hasn't disappeared," said Julius when the three of them finished. It wasn't a question, he was already certain of it. "It's dormant. Maybe waiting for different conditions, maybe working on sothing we can't see yet. But it hasn't gone anywhere."
"No," Larissa confird.
"Then we need to…"
The ground moved.
Not the familiar tremor of earth techniques, which everyone in this arena knew by texture and frequency at this point. This was sothing different, the vibration of sothing erging from below, pushing upward from the sa point where the artifact had just finished sinking back in. As though the retreat had been a pause and not an ending. As though whatever had been interrupted was simply resuming.
Mutants again.
The flow that ca out of the gap was imdiate and large. Not the initial trickle of a new incursion but the sustained pressure of sothing picking up exactly where it had stopped, with no reduction in scale, the full weight of it arriving all at once.
Julius didn't spend ti thinking on it.
"Fall back." He said it to the girls, to Ren's parents, to the healers, and to the tars who had been active long enough that keeping them in combat was going to cost more than it returned. "Anyone with decent reserves follows ."
Lin took Ren carefully by the shoulders to help move him.
Julius was already moving forward.
The earth tars from his group who remained fell into formation with the automaticity of people who had run this kind of sequence enough tis that the individual steps no longer required thought. The ground rose at Julius's direction, barriers closing angles, walls cutting the space between the erging mutants and the people pulling back into sothing with good elevation and resistance. The earth knew his mana well enough by now that the conversation between them was short.
But the mutant flow was large. As large as it had been at the start of this, possibly larger because the ergence point was now more concentrated than the earlier dispersal had been, all of it pushing through one gap instead of spreading across a periter.
Julius held the line.
He was holding it and had already remarked precisely where in his reserves he was sitting and how long he would resist when the shadows ca from above.
Zhao landed without announcent, with the accuracy of a raptor who had picked his point of impact from the air and committed to it cleanly. His blade feathers cut through the front of the first wave before it reached Julius's barrier, buying space with speed that earth couldn't generate on its own. Behind him, the high-mobility group spread across the periter with the coordination of people who had been working together long enough that basic positioning decisions happened without anyone issuing them.
And on Zhao's beast, Selphira. Victor in another unconscious but present, held by one of the other tars in the group, color in his face and breath in his lungs.
Julius took that in during the one second he could afford to look away from the flow.
Victor was alive.
Sothing in his chest that had been pulled tight for several hours released just enough to give the rest of his thinking room to function. He turned back to the barrier and kept working.
"Tell everything." Said Selphira as Zhao's beast set her down carefully on the ground…
♢♢♢♢
With the reinforcents the defense had stabilized into sothing that held well…
"I think the eastern mutant flow stopped because you intercepted the twins, and the southern flow stopped because Orion redirected pressure to push the Southern Wall´s Army out of the Goldcrest territory," said Selphira, her mana reserves were low enough to be visible in the way she moved, but her mind was running at its usual speed. "He would have used that window to regroup his army and even his brothers' crystals before pushing everything back here."
"We saw the artifact from before, but complete," said Julius, closing a gap in the barrier without looking at it directly. "And the mutants we had here didn't stop moving or change direction, they were likely doing so kind of ritual… But now that you ntion it, maybe they stopped coming for so ti and those were the ones already here based on the summary I got."
He gave her so more of the outline of the local situation in a few sentences, the convergence, the entity, the transformation, the collapse.
Selphira processed it. Her face had the expression of soone adding up numbers she doesn't like.
"Orion doesn't have full control," she said, with the tone of soone who has arrived at a conclusion that irritates her in a specific way. "If he did, there would have been no reason to pause for whatever that artifact process was. He's directing this flow, yet parts of it respond to him, but other parts respond to sothing above him that he hasn't accounted for." A pause, brief and precise. "The idiot is working for the original corruption without knowing it. He thinks he's using it. He's not."
"You're sure?" said Julius.
"No." Selphira's answer was imdiate. "But it makes more sense than the alternative… Orion running that artifact from a distance and trying to corrupt our promising young tar at the sa ti. That's too many moving pieces for one foolish person managing it consciously."
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