"The thousand-day method is expensive and hard to keep consistent," said Garret. "And it only gives two sub-levels to whatever rank you already have. If you started wrong it doesn't pull you very far out of the hole." He looked at the new arrivals again. "The ones who don't have their beasts blocked by cultivation errors have it so different from us that comparing ourselves to them barely makes sense."

"Then why do we compare."

"Because it's what we need to do when it comes to defending our city."

♢♢♢♢

What Ren kept watching with more attention than the mutant creatures was something else.

The wall as a system had an intelligence that wasn't in any document he had read, it existed in the people who had accumulated it by doing the same thing in the same place across enough generations that the place had taught them things. Not written things. Not transmittable through instruction. The kind of knowledge that had no other vehicle except proximity, time and repetition.

The angle from which Garret covered his section with his men wasn't the obvious angle. It was the angles that left the minimum blind spots given the specific geometry of their wall sector, a finding that someone had arrived at by being wrong many times in previous positions and adjusted accordingly, by the persons before them being punished by being wrong and adjusting, until the sector had its best answer against the threats.

The way the veterans distributed during a wave wasn't the distribution that generic instructions would have produced. It was the distribution that years of trial and error in this specific sector had generated as a response to the specific mutant creatures that attacked this specific sector. Local knowledge, accumulated locally, transferable only by experiencing it locally.

Ren made a mental note.

Knowledge that transferred by being there and watching and following and eventually doing the same things for the same reasons as the people who had done them before.

The weeks with the group of similar capability were useful for other things, like the things that came from pushing against resistance at your own level, from the specific sharpening that happened between people who were equally matched… But not for this. For this you needed proximity to the people who knew.

The days here had a monotony that routines with not enough variation produced to keep from becoming entirely predictable, enough games to withstand the repetition to build the body knowledge the sector required, enough difference between one day and the next that full complacency was never quite available.

Nobody used his full name when they spoke to him. Red, or the number 17 new one on the right flank, or at most Pathfinder said as though it were a nickname someone had coined on the spot and that turned out to be manageable.

At the barracks table in the evening someone had set up a dice game that involved rules none of the new arrivals understood completely but that the veterans executed with the automaticity of something played often enough that the rules no longer needed to be remembered because they lived in the reflexes. The game existed in the hands more than the mind.

Garret explained the rules to Ren the same way Dunn had explained the wind at their defensive position: useful information, no decoration, assuming the recipient had enough judgment to do something with it.

Ren learned the rules.

He won the second round, which produced a reaction that was different from the reactions his victories usually produced. Not impression, not the exaggerated respect, not the specific mix of the two that arrived when people who knew him processed a win in the context of everything they already knew he was.

This time was just the mocking indignation of people who had just been beaten at their own game by a random young one.

"First week," said Garret, with the tone of someone filing a formal complaint.

"First week," Ren confirmed.

"That's lack of respect."

"It wasn't my intention."

"Still is…"

Ren laughed.

Everyone laughed.

The kind of laugh that came out when something surprised him in the pity yet fun way, in the specific space where nothing that had come before and nothing that was coming after had to be present. Just the moment and the table and the indignation and the weirdly almost round dice and the simple shared fact of being people in the same place at the same time without any of it needing to mean more than that.

It was, in its particular way, exactly what he needed.

♢♢♢♢

Day 2883…

The Mantis was a week from Gold 1, which was the exact distance between the current situation and the three-way fusion, which was the exact distance between the current situation and the fire dragon he would go face alone in a little under four months. His mushroom was at Gold 3, the same as the Hydra, and he had been extremely close to being capable of breaking the crystallization of the ruins in a single attempt.

He just had to wait those seven days before being able to act and finish some of his pending tasks.

That chain of consequences lived somewhere at the back of Ren's mind with the persistence of a countdown that made no noise but was always there when he looked for it. Not pressing… Present. The kind of awareness that sat quietly without demanding attention and that was there whenever he chose to check.

But there was no point trying to move the time forward. For now, the wall.

The wall had its own rhythm and Ren had learned it with the speed at which he learned things he needed to understand in order to function within them. The shifts, the rotations, the signals that distinguished a routine incursion from one that required scaling the response. The informal hierarchy that ran parallel to the official one and that was more relevant to daily functioning than the official version, the real chain of authority, built from years of people knowing who to look to when the listed hierarchy was somewhere else.

Selphira had been clear, as she always was when she said something that mattered: earning the right to be seen as a leader without using his fame would serve him much more than being recognized.