The Void attacks came in waves after that.

  Not constant — Arkhavel was expending real energy forcing tears without the benefit of the prepared cascade mechanism, and the expenditure had limits even for something of his scale. But regular enough that the academy shifted, over the course of two weeks, from its normal operational rhythm into something that did not have a name but felt like a state of sustained readiness that was two degrees below emergency and one degree above the capacity for anyone to relax fully.

  The faculty adapted faster than Raka expected. Serath reorganized the combat rotation within forty-eight hours of the first alarm, drawing up a response protocol that accounted for Dormitory Seven's specific capabilities — their detection advantage through Sena, their structural analysis through Tobas, the coordination that six weeks of working together had built into something more durable than formal training. The protocol did not place Dormitory Seven under faculty command. It placed them as a parallel response unit, reporting to Serath but operating independently.

  Headmaster Vel approved this arrangement with the equanimity of someone who had decided to stop being surprised by what seven first-years were capable of.

  Raka found himself, by the third wave, doing something he had not anticipated: teaching.

  Not formally. Not in a classroom. But the second and third-year students who formed the faculty response teams had trained for Void incursions the way you train for things that have not happened in eleven years — theoretically, thoroughly, and without the specific, accumulated knowledge of people who had closed three tears and fought five combat-class Voidborn in the past two weeks. They had ability and they had technique and they had one thing Dormitory Seven had been lacking until very recently: years of practice.

  What they did not have was Tobas's structural analysis, Sena's detection range, Damar's tactical patience, or the coordination that comes from six people knowing each other well enough to function as a single body under pressure.

  So Raka shared what he could. He talked to response team leads between waves. He brought Tobas to debrief sessions and let him describe, in his precise near-whisper, the structural weak points he had identified in each combat-class Voidborn they had faced. He connected Sena with the Void Observation Tower's senior operator, and the two of them worked out a combined detection system that gave the academy approximately nine minutes of warning instead of the instrument-dependent four.

  He did not think of this as leadership, exactly. He thought of it as not keeping useful things to himself. The distinction mattered to him.

  'You're running a two-front operation,' Damar told him one evening, with the tone he used for observations rather than criticisms. 'The academy defense and the Heart maintenance. You cannot personally anchor both.'

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  'I'm not,' Raka said. 'You're anchoring the Heart maintenance. Mira's running the information side of the defense coordination. Lenne and Tobas are running the Voidborn engagement analysis. I'm just — '

  'The person connecting all of it,' Damar said.

  Raka looked at him.

  'That is a role,' Damar said. 'It is not a lesser role than the others. But it has its own cost, and you should account for it.'

  Raka thought about this.

  'I'm accounting for it,' he said.

  'You are sleeping four hours a night,' Damar said. 'That is not accounting for it.'

  Raka did not have a good answer for this, so he went to sleep at a reasonable hour for the first time in two weeks, and woke up the next morning with the clear-headed quality of someone who has been running on fumes and has just remembered what actual fuel feels like.

  He kept the reasonable hour for the rest of the wave period.

  * * *

  Drev Casson appeared at the boundary of Dormitory Seven's response area during the fourth wave.

  Not in distress — the fourth wave had been three small tears rather than one large combat-class incursion, and the faculty response had been sufficient. He appeared afterward, when the tears were closed and the response teams were standing down, and he looked at Raka with an expression that had abandoned the careful composure of rivalry and arrived somewhere more direct.

  'I want to help,' he said.

  'You are helping,' Raka said. 'Your team is in the south response rotation.'

  'That's not what I mean,' Drev said. 'I mean I want to help with whatever you're actually doing. The thing the faculty is treating like first-year work but that is clearly not first-year work.' He paused. 'I know you're not just closing tears. I know there's a reason your dormitory is always the first response regardless of tear location. I know Sena is detecting things the Tower instruments miss.' He looked at Raka steadily. 'I'm a good fighter and I'm a fast learner and I have a team that is the same. Tell me what you need.'

  Raka studied him. Drev met the study without flinching, which was consistent with everything Raka had observed about him — he was someone who could be wrong and knew it and was not afraid of demonstrating either.

  'The barrier points,' Raka said. 'There are seven of them. Sealed for now, but Crane primed three of them before we stopped her. The priming degraded but the thin points remain. If Arkhavel changes strategy back to the cascade mechanism, those points become critical again. I need people who know the perimeter well enough to monitor for re-priming activity.'

  'Perimeter patrol,' Drev said. 'We can do that.'

  'It's not glamorous,' Raka said.

  'No,' Drev agreed. 'But it matters, and you can't be everywhere. Neither can your team.'

  Raka nodded.

  'I'll have Damar brief you on the point locations,' he said. 'Tonight.'

  Drev nodded once. Then, before he turned to go, he said: 'For what it's worth — second place in the tournament was legitimate. We got lucky in the semifinal and you know it.'

  'I know it,' Raka said.

  'Next year it'll be different,' Drev said.

  'Next year it'll be different,' Raka agreed.

  Drev left. Raka stood for a moment in the aftermath of that conversation and thought that it was a strange thing, how urgency changes people's willingness to be honest. Or perhaps it did not change it. Perhaps it simply removed the obstacles that ordinary time allowed people to maintain.