Three new alerts screamed simultaneously.
Budapest wellspring destabilizing. Shroud Guard team trapped between corruption nodes. Civilian population in the blast radius—hundreds, maybe thousands.
And one portal route. One extraction window.
The mathematics resolved instantly in my mind, cold, certain, and brutal.
Group A: Forty-seven civilians, including children. Zero combat training. High casualty rate if left behind.
Group B: Twelve Shroud Guard. Elite fighters. Strategic value. Already injured from containment operations.
One portal. One choice.
Save the civilians and lose our best tactical unit. Or save the guards and watch families die.
I opened my mouth to give the order.
Keane! Cyrus’s voice was urgent. Budapest corruption is accelerating. We need extraction now.
The window was closing as dimensional stress was building. Another ten seconds and the geometry would collapse entirely.
Group A, I said. My voice came out flat and analytical. Civilians first. Guards hold position.
That’s a death sentence, someone protested.
It’s triage. I was already reconfiguring the portal geometry, widening the aperture to compensate for increased mass. Guards are trained for this scenario. Execute.
The portal opened. Civilians flooded through—terrified parents clutching children, elderly witches who could barely walk, young ones who didn’t understand why the sky was turning silver-black.
Forty-seven lives saved.
On my displays, I watched the guard team’s vital signs. Watched them take defensive positions. Watched corruption close in like a tidal wave. Watched Captain Ruen’s signature flicker last. She’d covered the others. She always had.
Gone.
Watched them die.
Not heroically. Not buying time for anything meaningful. Just… methodically. The corruption was spreading faster than healing could counter, bodies giving out despite perfect tactical execution.
Twelve guards—dead because I’d chosen correctly.
The weight of it settled into my chest, but I couldn’t stop, couldn’t process. Three more alerts flashed: Tokyo destabilizing, Chicago showing cascade failure patterns, Mumbai corruption accelerating.
I opened secondary dimensional anchors, forcing stabilization beyond safe thresholds. I ignored the way my vision was fracturing into overlapping geometries, how the nosebleed had become a steady stream, how Wisp was flickering in and out of existence.
The mathematics still worked. My body didn’t.
Keane, you need to stop… Elio started.
I need to maintain architecture, I interrupted. Tokyo portal opening. Chicago evacuation route calculating. If I stop, the network collapses.
If you don’t stop, you collapse, he shot back.
Acceptable risk.
It wasn’t, but the alternative was watching more people die while I rested.
The portals held, barely, as dimensional stress built past critical thresholds. My consciousness stretched across too much space, holding connections that wanted desperately to break.
