Six days felt smaller with every hour that passed, but Asta refused to let the squad ride north without settling the question that had been sitting unspoken since the depot."We can't go into this blind about Kael and Seris." He said, the morning after Lucien's revelations, the whole camp gathered around a fire that had burned low with exhaustion and planning both. "Ardyn Vale took them both. If they're still alive, they might know something about the Hall's defenses that even Lucien doesn't.""If they're still alive." Roderick said, grim. "It's been over a week.""She wouldn't have killed them outright." Vex said, though his voice carried more hope than certainty. "Kael's forge-craft knowledge is too valuable to waste. She'd want to extract it first, which means keeping him alive at least long enough to try.""And Seris?" Mira asked."Seris knows the old manifests." Vex said. "Every name, every falsified record, every piece of the original program's paper trail. If Ardyn Val

Roderick's blade met the first guard's with a screech of metal, driving the man back into the second before either could raise a full alarm, and for a handful of desperate seconds the narrow corridor became nothing but steel and breath and the grim, practiced economy of a soldier who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how to make three seconds last as long as thirty.He dropped the first guard with a strike to the temple, disarmed the second before he'd finished raising his blade, and was already turning to follow the others when a third voice, not a guard's, called out from a cell further down the block, low and urgent."Wait. Please. Whoever you are, wait."Roderick hesitated, torn between the escape already underway and the desperate plea echoing off stone, and something in the voice's raw, worn quality stopped him from simply running past.He found the source in the block's last cell,an older man, gaunt, scarred along both forearms in patterns that looked disturbingly familiar, eyes

The next two days blurred into a grinding cycle of riding, planning, and stolen hours of sleep, the squad pushing hard toward the convoy's projected route while Yuki and Emrick refined their theory into something that might actually survive contact with reality."Resonance isn't a weapon." Emrick said, for what felt like the third time, sketching another diagram in the dirt as the fire burned low around them. "It's a condition. You can't simply throw fire at eleven merged voices and expect coherence to shatter. You need something that speaks to what's holding them together in the first place.""Which is what, exactly." Roderick asked, patience visibly thinning after two days of theory without a clear plan of execution."Shared trauma." Emrick said. "That's the foundation every successful bond I studied was built on. The Choir isn't eleven separate people cooperating. It's eleven fractured identities that found it easier to stop being separate at all. The harmony holds because sep

The light and dark flame collided in a violent, churning column above the shattered carriage, and Mira, thrown backward by the shockwave along with half the squad, watched in horror as the eleven fractured voices continued screaming, no longer coordinated, no longer speaking as one, a cacophony of grief, confusion, and raw, remembered pain pouring out of eleven bodies that no longer knew how to be a single harmony and hadn't yet remembered how to be separate people again."It's destabilizing." Emrick shouted over the chaos, having insisted on accompanying the strike team despite his weakened condition, his eyes fixed on the churning light with grim, focused intensity. "Exactly as theorized, but faster, more violent than I predicted. The resonance broke all eleven bonds at once instead of gradually.""Is that good or bad." Roderick shouted back, blade raised against the chaos while trying to keep the reeling, disoriented Council soldiers from regrouping around them."I don't know ye

The four survivors they'd stabilized in Emberfall were moved to a militia infirmary at the district's edge, still unconscious, still fragile, and it was there, three days later, watching over them alongside Sera and Emrick, that Mira first noticed the crowd gathering outside."They've heard." Sera said, watching through the infirmary's cracked window as the numbers grew, dozens, then hundreds, drawn from the surrounding streets, faces streaked with the particular exhaustion of people who'd lost homes and neighbors and were now searching for someone, anyone, to explain why."Heard what, exactly." Roderick asked, wary."What Asta told the commander.” Sera said. "Word travels fast in a city that just burned. People want answers, and the official Council report calling this a Covenant attack isn't matching what half the survivors actually saw with their own eyes."The infirmary door opened a short while later, admitting the militia commander from that first exhausted dawn, though his