The Academy's response teams arrived within four minutes, which Vane knew was fast, because he'd sat through enough tactical briefings by now to know what fast actually meant in a crisis. Four minutes was good work. Four minutes was a security apparatus that had drilled for exactly this kind of thing more times than anyone liked to admit.
It didn't matter.
Eighteen senior security staff and armed upperclassmen formed up at the hall's northern entrance, the kind of number that should have meant something. Vane had seen formations like this hold against far worse. He'd been part of a few himself. Eighteen trained bodies, coordinated, working in concert, weren't eighteen separate problems for an enemy to solve. They were one large problem, and large problems were supposed to be harder to ignore than small ones.
