Hours bled together. Vienna. Chicago. Cairo. Tokyo. Sydney. Each evacuation was successful. Each one drained more of my reserves than the last.
Then Salzburg’s alert turned critical. Full wellspring destabilization. Corruption jumping to stage four—past recoverable, into catastrophic. Population center. Thousands at risk.
And my portal geometry was already at maximum capacity.
I started calculating anyway. If I collapsed the Prague route, rerouted through Vienna, used Munich as a secondary anchor…
The mathematics resolved—possible, just barely, requiring dimensional stress that would probably kill me.
I opened the portal anyway.
Space screamed. Reality bent wrong. The geometry held for exactly three seconds before beginning to collapse.
Not enough time. The evacuation needed thirty seconds minimum. People were still in the dimensional corridor when the architecture started failing.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I used myself as an anchor. Not a technique. A last resort.
I pulled the dimensional stress directly through my nervous system instead of distributed through portal architecture to become the connection point. I held space open through sheer force of will while my body tried to tear itself apart.
Wisp shrieked—a sound I’d never heard from her. Her spectral form stretched impossibly thin, mirroring my overextension.
The people made it through, all of them. Salzburg evacuation complete.
And the corruption kept spreading anyway. I watched it happen in real-time. Nodes reseeded faster than we could evacuate them. Vienna. Chicago. Cairo. Tokyo. The corruption didn’t care about geography. It spread everywhere simultaneously. We watched the solstice geometry continue aligning with mechanical precision.
The realization hit like physical impact. Even perfect execution didn’t stop it.
I’d made every correct choice. Calculated every variable. Executed flawlessly despite impossible conditions.
And the system completed itself anyway. The evacuation worked. The alignment kept advancing.
The automated corruption propagated regardless of my decisions. The master’s infrastructure completed itself whether I saved people or not. Intelligence wasn’t enough. Control wasn’t protection. Knowledge couldn’t outpace a self-sustaining mechanism designed to finish itself.
My worst fear was confirmed: I couldn’t think my way out of this.
The dimensional anchor I’d created through my own nervous system finally collapsed.
Reality snapped back like a rubber band. The feedback hit my brain with catastrophic force as every portal I was maintaining destabilized simultaneously.
I felt myself falling and felt Wisp’s presence fracture into nothing. My consciousness scattered across too much space with no way to pull it back together.
Then Cyrus caught me.
His arms came around my chest from behind, physically grounding me. His voice in my ear—steady, certain, taking command without hesitation.
Elio, shut down the active portals. Priority sequence: Tokyo first, then Chicago, and Vienna last. Parker, reroute remaining evacuations through conventional transport. I’ll stabilize Keane.
No chaos. No panic. Just immediate, competent action.
Elio’s illusions flickered across the room, revealing the true state of my dimensional work and showing Parker exactly which connections were stable and which were actively failing.
Got it, she said. Already moving. Already adapting.
I tried to protest, tried to maintain the geometry, but my magic was gone—scattered across dimensional space, inaccessible.
My body gave out.
