Rosanne was upright before the twenty-minute interval had fully elapsed, which was consistent.
"The other two gates," she said.
"Yes," he said. "Sectors 5 and 6. I'll take them."
"We can—"
"Your channels are in recovery," he said. He was not being dismissive; he was being accurate, which was what the situation required. "At your current reserve level, the feedback from technique activation in the first two hours risks compounding the depletion damage. I'm not asking you to stand down because you can't contribute. I'm asking you to stand down because contributing right now would cost you more than it would gain."
She held his gaze.
"The gates aren't going anywhere in the next hour," he said. "The mutation pattern in this pocket dimension has peaked. With the Colossus down, the remaining two gates are losing their primary mana feed. They're unstable but not escalating."
This was the accurate tactical statement. He watched her run the calculation and arrive at the same conclusion.
"You go solo," she said.
"Yes."
Jessica made the sound she made when she disagreed with something and had determined that the disagreement was not going to change the outcome. Mika and Donna were both running their own channel assessments, the Ghost Sense Stage 4 training's body-awareness application producing accurate readings on their own states. He watched both of them arrive at the same conclusion Rosanne had.
"The estate," Rosanne said.
"The estate," he confirmed. "Rest and monitor. I'll report when it's done."
He folded the space between the crucible and the estate's warded perimeter — a stable sub-space transit route rather than a rough fold, the kind that could be traversed without requiring the travellers to manage the spatial conditions themselves.
Rosanne went through first, which was Rosanne, and the others followed.
He closed the fold.
Nagini had been waiting at the crucible's edge with the patient awareness of something that had 100% spatial law comprehension and had followed everything that had been said and was ready to work.
"Two gates," he said. "Sector 5 first."
She moved into the sub-space layer.
He followed via spatial fold.
The Sector 5 gate had been losing structural integrity since the Colossus's fall, the primary mana feed that had been sustaining all three portals' concurrent instability no longer operational. What remained was an active gate whose internal population had been depleted by ninety minutes of engagement against four practitioners and whose dimensional anchor was operating on reduced supply.
He addressed the anchor.
The same category of operation as the Red Gate, the Mother-Seed, the Colossus — at 100% spatial law, the coordinate relationships maintaining a dimensional anchor were directly addressable. Without those relationships, the anchor lost its structural integration with the dimensional fabric, and the gate collapsed from the boundary inward rather than from the interior outward.
The Sector 5 gate took eleven minutes.
Nagini managed the internal population that reached the threshold during the process with the efficiency that characterized her approach to work that was significantly below her operational ceiling.
The Sector 6 gate took nine minutes. Its anchor structure was simpler — the most recently opened of the three portals, without the extended instability period that had complicated the other two.
When the Sector 6 gate's boundary folded closed, the violet discharge that had been visible from the garrison's monitoring station across the northern shelf disappeared.
Twenty minutes total. Less than the time the team had spent recovering.
He walked to the summit edge.
Not immediately back. There was no tactical imperative for immediate return — the situation was resolved, the Dominion's garrison would have read the atmospheric normalisation on their monitoring equipment, and the team was at the estate in a warded perimeter with Isolde's compounds doing their work.
He stood at the edge and looked at what the northern range looked like without violet dimensional scars bleeding into the atmosphere.
The answer was: vast and precise and cold. The geological architecture of the ranges extended for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, the specific geometry of tectonically compressed stone that had been doing what stone did for longer than any of the civilisations currently occupying it had existed.
He thought about what it had looked like before the mana event.
Not the Valerian Empire, not the Borealis Dominion, not the dungeon networks and the portal tears and the atmospheric mana concentration that was now visibly higher than it had been two years ago. Just this: the mountain range in the specific condition of a thing that existed according to the physics it had been shaped by, without the mana event's additional variables.
There was a category of beauty in that that he did not have a framework for, which was unusual. He usually had frameworks.
The mountains before the mana event had not needed to be managed. They had not required a sealing operation or a diplomatic framework or a temporal anchor survey or a guild to be operational in the next three years before the Calamity's timeline made them necessary. They had simply been the mountains, doing the thing that mountains did.
He did not know if that baseline was recoverable. The atmospheric mana concentration was not going to decrease. The second awakening's process was not reversible in any model he had been able to construct.
What the world was going to be was not what the world had been.
He stood with this for a while.
Nagini coiled across the summit boulder beside him — not the comfort gesture, the presence one. The spatial domain she maintained around herself at 100% spatial law comprehension produced the specific quality of shared space that was the most accurate expression of what she was. She wasn't leaning against him. She was occupying the same coordinate system and being there.
He appreciated the distinction.
"I'm going to need to understand the temporal anomaly network before the Calamity's timeline makes it urgent," he said. Not to Nagini specifically — she couldn't provide the information. To the situation, the way he sometimes said things to situations when the saying helped him organise the implications.
The temporal anchor he had found at Frost-Anchor had transmitted a status pulse when he made contact. Something had been notified. Whatever had built that network — his father's lineage, before the mana event, at a depth that indicated it had been planned rather than improvised — had designed it for something specific.
What that something was would require the Heavenly Scriptures, the Time law tome's remaining pages, and probably the restricted archive's full holdings on pre-mana-event constructions at this kind of geological depth.
He looked at the horizon.
The work existed. The work was what it was.
He had done the work today that today required.
He opened the sub-space fold to the estate and went through.
Rosanne would have opinions about the timeline for the return debrief. He would listen to them.
The mountains remained exactly as they had been.