Three simultaneous impacts from above, no warning. The ancient stone of the hall, something that had been holding for centuries and had finally decided it was done and gave way.

Zhao came through the center with every blade feather already deployed before the dust had a chance to settle, the Owl and Raptor fusion already visible above him, wings open but already closing at the attack angle of something falling from height with insane top speed.

Taro was being carried on the left talon, a spinning technique already fully charged when he entered, the one with the highest concentration of yellow crystal shifted to orange-red from the build-up, which was what had opened the roof without losing momentum.

Liu came in on the right talon with a sound attack, not visible but felt in the structures before it was heard.

Behind them, more. The flying squad that had been holding the mutant flow in the Starweaver sector, freed because the flow itself had been interrupted a while ago, and who had sensed no mutant mana anymore but the exchange of mana from where they were with enough intensity to understand that the correct direction to keep fighting was here and not anywhere else.

The three impacts converged on the position where Orion stood. The combined force of everything arriving at once threw up a cloud of pulverized stone that expanded through the hall in every direction simultaneously.

The battle had left Orion unable to direct the mutants for some time already. Which was what had freed this group to come back at all.

The dust of the impact filled the hall.

For a long moment there was nothing to see inside but the news from outside began to arrive.

Not as an organized report. It arrived the way a room’s atmosphere changes when something that has been pressing against it from outside suddenly stops pressing: in the sounds that now came through more clearly from beyond the doors, in the posture of Orion’s soldiers standing nearest to the entrances, in the small unconscious adjustments of people who had spent enough time in combat to read those signals before the verbal information caught up.

The forces that had been pushed south had come back.

The mutant flow that Orion had been using to keep the defensive forces separated, the constant pressure that had made it impossible to concentrate tamers in one place without leaving another place unprotected, had stopped way earlier than expected.

First as a pause, then as a genuine absence. The tamers who had been paying the cost of holding that flow without rest, hour after hour, finally had enough breathing room to send scouts out and understand that the pressure wasn’t coming back soon.

And then to decide what to do with that information.

What they had decided was obvious to anyone with a view from above like Zhao.

Most of them came in through the rear of Orion’s army.

Not in numbers that changed the equation decisively, Orion’s plan had been constructed too carefully and too far in advance for a last-minute repositioning to undo it completely. There were still considerably more soldiers on his side.

But the difference between a comfortable numerical advantage and a numerical advantage that required constant management to prevent erosion was the difference between an army that could press forward into the hall and one that had to watch its own flanks while doing it.

Those were not the same thing.

So the pressure inside the hall dropped one degree.

Only one... But it was perceptible to everyone in the room who had enough experience to feel the difference.

Yang came through one of the lateral doors, reading the field in the seconds it took him to cross the threshold, already redistributing the soldiers he had brought before anyone told him where to put them.

Lin came in behind him with her left arm held at an angle that suggested the fighting outside had formed opinions about its condition, but with eyes that had the same quality they had when she was evaluating her students and deciding how much more they could give. Those eyes moved across the hall and landed on specific people and things in a sequence that wasn’t random.

Wei arrived with his fellow instructors. Director Ignatius came with the guards who had been able to respond, fewer than would have been ideal, but present.

The temperature of the hall changed. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Not the real temperature. The other one, the one that shifted when the balance of people willing to keep fighting moved in a direction and the side losing ground felt it, even without saying it.

Orion’s allies registered it.

Julius’s registered it too.

Larissa, still on the floor working through what Orion’s pulse had done to her, registered it from where she was and decided it was time to get up regardless of what her lungs thought about that decision.

She had a task that couldn’t wait... Liora was out, and the fusion light that could treat internal damage was going to disappear when Larissa’s fusion ran out, and internal damage needed treatment, at least enough to ensure that the internal damage did not claim his life soon...

So she would crawl if she had to.

Everything was relative. Nothing was decided. But it looked possible in a way it hadn’t looked possible thirty minutes ago.

There was new hope.

The dust from Zhao’s entry and Taro’s and Liu’s finally finished settling.

The center of the hall, where Orion had been standing when three simultaneous impacts came through the ceiling, showed the accumulated damage of several energy exchanges in a space that had not been designed for any of them.

Ancient stone, fractured. Furniture that had occupied specific positions since before anyone present was born, reduced to irrelevant debris.

The allies of Orion who had been standing closest to the impact when it arrived were on the floor, some still moving and some not, but Orion himself had dealt with most of them himself before the attack came, with his indiscriminate pulse, and that detail registered differently now that the dust had settled.

Since Orion was...