The nearest anchor point was sixty kilometers east. Caleb’s Team Three was there — four Hunters, two engineers, a conduit specialist. Their mission: monitor the Tower, report reversion status, hold the position.
Glen arrived by transport at noon. The team was camped at the base of the Tower, a tactical setup that looked professional and nervous in equal measure. Equipment arrays. Sensor pylons. Defensive wards. The kind of preparation that said: we’re doing our job, and we’re also ready to run.
The team leader was an S-Rank named Mwangi. Broad shoulders, close-cropped hair, the kind of calm that came from a decade and a half of hunting and three years of war. She met Glen at the perimeter.
She’d earned her S-Rank in the Second Wave clearing a nest outside Nairobi — thirty-six corrupted, alone, because her team had been killed on the approach and she’d gone in anyway. The promotion had come the next morning. She’d refused it twice before accepting, and only because her command officer told her the rank meant she’d never have to wait for backup again. That had turned out to be a lie, but a useful one. It had kept her moving through three years of a war where the rank above you was just a different way of being alone at the front.
A decade and a half had taught her to read a battlefield the way a sailor reads weather — the small signs that told you what was coming before it arrived. She’d read Glen the same way when he stepped out of the transport. She’d taken in the way he moved, the stillness in him, the way the air around him felt compressed. She’d felt the frequency he carried before she’d seen his face. An S-Rank learned to trust that feeling or didn’t stay S-Rank for long.
"The Tower hasn’t reverted yet," Mwangi said. "But it’s close. The System’s energy signature is degrading. The pre-System frequency is building underneath. Caleb’s sensors show it’ll flip within forty-eight hours."
Glen looked at the Tower. Still blue. Still System-regulated. But the blue was flickering — intermittent, the extraction engine sputtering as the pre-System infrastructure underneath pushed toward the surface.
"How’s the team?"
"Nervous." Mwangi didn’t sugarcoat it. She was S-Rank, she’d been in the war since the First Wave, and she didn’t waste time pretending things were fine when they weren’t. "The cultist cell we cleared was running a sabotage operation on the anchor point’s backup systems. We found evidence they’d been disabling the failover protocols for months. If the Tower reverts and the backup systems are down, the anchor point drops off the network entirely."
"Are the backups restored?"
"Partially. Our conduit specialist rebuilt the primary failover, but the secondary systems were physically damaged. The cultists didn’t just hack them — they cut cables, smashed conduit housings. We need replacement parts."
Glen filed that. The cultist sabotage was deeper than they’d thought. The cells near the anchor points hadn’t just been monitoring — they’d been actively damaging the infrastructure. If enough anchor points lost their backups, the reversion wouldn’t just revert the Towers. It would shatter the network connections between them. The ley-line network would fragment.
He wanted the specifics. "Walk me through what they hit."
Mwangi gestured toward the camp, and one of the engineers brought a tablet up. The sabotage log was three pages long. The cultists had started six months before the cell was cleared — slow, methodical work. First they’d compromised the monitoring software so the failover status reported green when the systems were offline. Then they’d cut the redundant signal lines between the primary and secondary conduit arrays. Those lines were supposed to carry the handoff when the primary failed; with them severed, the secondary would never know to activate. After that they’d gone physical: conduit housings pried open, the frequency-tuned crystal matrices inside chipped with chisels, the calibration shattered. Not destroyed — degraded. Damaged just enough that the systems would pass a surface inspection and fail under load.
The engineers had found the compromised monitoring software by accident, during a routine calibration check, when the numbers didn’t match what the dashboard reported. If they hadn’t caught it, the first reversion would have taken the anchor point silently. No warning. No failover. The node would have dropped off the network and no one would have known until the ley-line feeding it went dark.
The deeper Glen looked, the worse the design of the sabotage became. The cultists had left the primary systems intact on purpose. A dead primary would have triggered an alarm and brought an engineering team within hours. A primary that reported healthy while the secondary quietly rotted — that bought months. The cell had been playing the long game, and whoever had planned it understood that the anchor point’s value wasn’t in the Tower. It was in the connection. Kill the Tower and the network rerouted. Kill the backups and let the Tower die on its own schedule, and the network had nothing to reroute to.
"How many anchor points were hit this way?" Glen asked.
"Three confirmed," Mwangi said. "Caleb’s running checks on the other seven. Same cultist footprint at two of them — same software compromise, same cable cuts. Someone taught these cells the same playbook."
That meant coordinated sabotage across multiple nodes, executed over months, by people who understood the conduit architecture well enough to know which lines to cut and which crystals to chip. The cultists had either recruited someone with infrastructure knowledge or they’d been given it. Either answer was bad.
"Get the parts," Glen said. "Priority. I’ll authorize whatever you need from Eden’s supply depot."
Mwangi nodded. She turned to walk him toward the camp, and as they passed the sensor array, Glen felt the Tower shift.
The blue flickered. Hard. The System’s extraction engine stuttered, the regulated mana flow dropping to half its normal output for three seconds before recovering. The pre-System frequency underneath spiked — a pulse of indigo that Glen felt in his chest, in the void, in the tuned frequency the Herald had given him.
He stopped walking. The pulse hadn’t faded. It was still there, a low hum beneath the Tower’s blue surface, like a second heartbeat under the first. The System’s energy was trying to drown it out and couldn’t. The regulated flow would surge, stabilize for a few seconds, then gutter again as the indigo pushed up from below. Each cycle was shorter than the last. The System was losing the contest of endurance.
Glen reached into the void. The pre-System frequency answered immediately, too eagerly — the energy climbing to meet him, resonant with whatever was building inside the Tower. The System’s interface lagged behind, its classification engine struggling to parse his skill signature the way it always did when the local frequency shifted. He felt the lag in his status window: a half-second delay, the numbers flickering, the System trying to measure him with instruments that were slowly going blind.
The transition was close. The Tower was a vessel with two fluids in it, and the heavier one was rising.
He let the void frequency extend toward the Tower, not to stabilize it — not yet — but to read it. The pre-System energy underneath had a texture the System’s mana didn’t. It was denser, less uniform, shot through with patterns that predated the System’s regulation. Running his awareness along it was like touching a language he half-remembered. The Herald had spoken in this frequency. The court would speak in it too, when it woke.
The blue surged back to full strength. Held. Mwangi’s team exhaled — Glen could hear it, the collective release of four Hunters who’d been holding their breath. The sensor pylons chirped, logging the event. But Glen kept his hand on the void. The indigo hadn’t retreated. It had only paused, gathering, the way water gathers behind a dam that hasn’t broken yet.
Mwangi felt it too. Her hand went to her weapon — instinct, the S-Rank reflex, the body responding to danger before the mind could classify it. She looked at Glen.
"What happens when it goes?" she asked. "When the Tower reverts. What do we do?"
"You monitor," Glen said. "Report the reversion to Caleb. Track the energy signature. The Tower will go indigo — pre-System frequency, same as the one north of Johannesburg. The System will lose its interface. Your classifications might lag. Your skill activations might stutter. Don’t panic. The skills still work. The System just can’t measure them for a few seconds."
"And if the Lost come?"
"Then you hold the position until I get here."
Mwangi studied him. The study was the same one Halsey had done at the summit — calculation, not assessment. She was weighing Glen’s capabilities against the threat. An S-Rank with a decade and a half of experience, measuring herself against a being the System couldn’t classify.
She’d fought corrupted. She’d fought Heralds — one, at the Battle of the Ridge, where she’d been part of the flanking unit that distracted a Herald long enough for the heavy teams to reposition. Seven Hunters had died holding that line. She’d been one of the three who walked off it. That Herald had been killed by a combined strike from twelve S-Ranks working in concert, and it had still taken forty minutes and the loss of two more Hunters to bring it down. She knew what a Herald cost to kill. She knew what it took.
"You killed the Herald," she said. "Alone."
"Yes."
"Could I have killed it?"
Glen looked at her. The question was honest. Not bravado, not self-pity. Mwangi wanted to know the gap. She wanted to know where she stood.
"No," Glen said. "The Herald’s energy was pre-System. Same frequency as the void. Only someone carrying pre-System energy could hurt it. Your skills would have been absorbed. Your mana would have been useless. You’d have lasted four minutes."
The number landed. Glen watched her process it. Four minutes wasn’t a fight. It was a countdown. She’d spent a decade and a half building the strength, the technique, the instinct to be the one who held the line — and the line she’d held against a Herald at the Ridge had been built on twelve S-Ranks and a coordinated strike and it had still nearly broken them. Alone, she’d have been a delay. Not a threat.
Mwangi absorbed that. Her jaw tightened — not offense, just the adjustment of someone recalibrating their understanding of the battlefield. She’d been S-Rank for years. She’d been at the top of the food chain. Now she was learning that the food chain had a new top, and it wasn’t hers.
A decade and a half of climbing, and the summit had moved. Glen had seen it before, in the other S-Ranks — the moment they understood that the scale they’d built their careers on wasn’t the real scale. Some handled it. Some didn’t. The ones who handled it stopped measuring themselves against the thing they couldn’t reach and started measuring themselves against the thing they could. Mwangi was already doing the math.
"But you can hold this position," Glen said. "The Lost soldiers aren’t Heralds. They’re corrupted. Degraded. Your skills work on them. The System’s classifications work on them. What’s coming — the court, the thing that’s waking up — that’s mine. The soldiers are yours."
Mwangi nodded. The recalculation finished. She had a role. It wasn’t the top of the food chain, but it was a role, and roles were what kept people functioning when the world was changing under them.
Glen spent an hour with the team, checking the sensor setup, reviewing the cultist damage, making sure the failover systems would hold when the Tower reverted. The conduit specialist — a young woman named Pham who was better with cables than people — walked him through the repairs. She’d done good work. The primary failover was solid. The secondary was held together with spare parts and stubbornness.
"When the Tower reverts," Pham said, "the energy flow changes. The System’s regulated mana stops, and the pre-System energy starts flowing through. The conduits aren’t built for that frequency. They’ll handle it for a while, but the longer the Tower runs on pre-System energy, the more the conduit housings degrade."
"How long?"
"Days. Maybe a week. Then the housings crack and the anchor point drops."
She said it the way she said everything — flat, factual, her eyes on the cables rather than him. She’d already done the math on her own work’s shelf life and come out the other side into a kind of grim practicality. The repairs would hold. The repairs would also expire. She knew both things and didn’t pretend otherwise.
Glen filed that. Another problem. The infrastructure was built for the System’s mana. Pre-System energy would burn through it. Stabilizing the Towers wasn’t just about the Towers — it was about the conduit network that connected them. If the conduits failed, the network fragmented even if the Towers were stable.
He left Mwangi’s team with clear orders and flew back to Eden. The transport ride was twenty minutes. He spent it looking at the veldt — the scarred landscape, the healing blast marks, the grass growing back. The world was trying to fix itself. The System was trying to fix itself. The Towers were trying to fix themselves. Everything was trying to fix itself, and the court was trying to wake up, and Glen was trying to find a third option that might not exist.
The transport hummed under him and the numbers turned in his head.
Ten anchor points. Mwangi’s was the closest to reversion — forty-eight hours, maybe less. The other nine were staggered behind it, the reversion front moving outward from the epicenter like a slow wave. Caleb’s projections had the second node flipping in four days, the third in six, the rest cascading over the following two weeks. By the end of the month, every anchor point in the network would be running on pre-System energy or trying to.
Each one would then start burning through its conduits. Pham’s estimate: days to a week per node, depending on load. The housings were rated for the System’s regulated mana, a clean, measured frequency. Pre-System energy was rawer, denser, closer to the frequency the void ran on. It didn’t flow through the conduits so much as press against them, and the press accumulated.
He could stabilize a Tower. He’d done it — walked into the reversion, held the frequency, kept the System’s regulation intact long enough for the extraction engine to reset. It cost him. Each stabilization drained the void’s reserves, and the void’s reserves were the only weapon he had against the court when it woke. Every Tower he stabilized was energy he wouldn’t have for the fight that mattered.
The math was simple and bad. One Tower cost him roughly a quarter of his current reserves, and recovery took days. Two Towers in close succession would leave him running near empty. Three would empty him completely. Meanwhile the reversion front was pushing ten nodes, and behind the nodes were the conduit housings degrading on a timer he couldn’t reset without the replacement parts that didn’t exist in the quantities he needed.
Even if he stabilized every Tower, the conduits would still fail. Even if he replaced every conduit, the Towers would still revert. He was fighting two clocks running at different speeds, and he could only slow one of them.
There was a third clock underneath the other two, and it was the one that decided everything. The court. It was waking, and the reversion of the Towers was part of that waking — the pre-System energy pushing to the surface was the same frequency the court breathed. Every Tower that reverted was a breath the court took. The more breaths, the closer to waking. So slowing the reversion wasn’t just infrastructure maintenance. It was keeping the court asleep.
Which meant his reserves weren’t just a combat budget. They were a leash. Every stabilization he spent on a Tower was pressure he couldn’t apply to the court later. Every conduit he saved was a few more hours of the network holding, and the network holding was a few more hours of the System’s regulation keeping the pre-System energy — and everything that rode it — below the surface.
The network fragmentation was the real danger. A single Tower reverting was a problem. The network fragmenting was a catastrophe — the ley-lines connecting the anchor points were what channeled the System’s regulated mana across the continent. Break enough nodes and the lines went dark. The System’s coverage would contract to whatever region still had intact nodes, and everything outside that region would run on pre-System energy full-time. The Lost would multiply. The corrupted would spread. The safe zones would stop being safe.
He had Mwangi’s node for forty-eight hours. He had the supply depot authorization for the replacement parts. He had maybe a quarter of his reserves per stabilization, and ten nodes, and a court waking up somewhere underneath all of it.
The transport crossed a ridge and the veldt opened up below him, green and scarred and stubborn, the grass coming back over the blast marks like the land had decided to ignore the war. Glen watched it and let the numbers settle. He couldn’t solve all of it. He could solve the next piece.
Mwangi’s node first. Parts, failover, conduit housing. Then the second node, then the third. One clock at a time. The court could wait, because the court had to — it was still waking, and waking took time he could borrow. The conduits couldn’t wait. The reversion couldn’t wait. Those were the clocks that would break first, so those were the clocks he held.
The transport descended toward Eden. Glen felt the void hum inside him, the pre-System frequency still resonant from the Tower’s pulse, still answering too eagerly. He pulled it back. Held it. Saved it for the work ahead.
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