The gate sealed behind them.
The atmospheric pressure arrived immediately and concretely, the way a significant change in altitude arrived: not as an abstraction but as a physical fact the body registered before the mind had processed what was happening. Isolde's compound was doing its work — the channels weren't rejecting the environmental mana, the adaptation that the partial trial had produced holding at the level the preliminary tests had confirmed. But partial adaptation was not the same as full acclimatisation, and the difference between pre-framework mana density and standard framework density was not a small number.
Rosanne's first breath took more effort than she expected. She adjusted and took the second deliberately. The deliberate approach was better.
"The compound is working," she said. "Not completely, but working."
"Yes," Markus said. He had been here before and the atmospheric shift was familiar to him, though his own channels were operating at a different relationship with the environment than the rest of the team's. "The calibration takes time. Don't try to process it quickly — let it arrive at its own rate."
Mika was reading the ambient mana with the specific attention she brought to any new elemental environment: systematic, noting the properties before attempting to engage with them. "The mana concentration," she said. "It's not distributed evenly. There are gradient differences between the terrain features."
"Yes," Markus said. "The geological composition here affects the local mana distribution the same way it does at home. The difference is that the ambient concentration is high enough that the gradient differences are more pronounced."
"The Ghost Sense training helps," Donna said. She was running the Perception architecture at a lower setting than usual, taking in the new sensory information incrementally rather than at full resolution. "It's a lot of information at once, but the filtering protocol is managing it."
"Good," Markus said. "That's exactly what it's for."
He had been watching all four of them since they came through. The Perception training's value in an unfamiliar environment was precisely this: the ability to take in new sensory information at a controlled rate rather than being overwhelmed by the full volume simultaneously. They were adapting rather than staggering.
"We move," he said. "The adaptation improves with movement in an unfamiliar environment faster than it improves with stillness. Staying at the gate while your systems process is less effective than walking while they process."
The Obsidian Hearth had the same character it had had the previous week — the same noise, the same density of practitioners at the benches, the same innkeeper at the bar with the same evaluative quality of attention when someone unfamiliar came through the door.
He registered Markus with the particular recognition of someone who had previously provided useful information and received fair compensation for it.
"The same suite?" he said.
"Yes," Markus said. "For the week."
The transaction was efficient. The team's inspection of the volcanic jade bed situation was conducted with the practical professionalism of practitioners assessing sleeping surfaces for operational quality rather than comfort.
"Thicker than the academy dormitory beds," Jessica said.
"Volcanic jade retains heat," Markus said. "You'll sleep warmer than usual."
"I'm not complaining," she said.
The Brimstone Mercenary Conclave was three streets from the Obsidian Hearth, identifiable by the specific character of the practitioners moving around its entrance: combat-worn, practically equipped, moving with the weight of people whose working environment was genuinely hostile.
Inside, the registration desk was staffed by a practitioner whose mana signature indicated what the academy would classify as Tier 5 or above, wearing the attire of someone who had retired from field work into administrative function.
The registrar looked at the five of them with the assessment that any experienced frontier practitioner applied to new arrivals: capability estimate, danger profile, probability they would create problems.
"Independent hunting party registration," Markus said.
"Name," the registrar said.
"Eternity."
The registrar wrote it in the ledger without commentary.
"Designation stakes," the registrar said, sliding a set of iron tags across the counter. "You use these to claim contracts. First three contracts at Tier 1, mandatory assessment period. After that, your record determines your access tier." He looked at them. "You're not from here."
"No," Markus said.
"The compound you're on to manage the atmospheric pressure — it's partial, not full. I can see it in the channel signatures." He said it without judgment. "Don't take Tier 3 or above contracts until the adaptation period is genuinely complete. I've seen what happens to parties who assume their home-world ranking translates directly."
"We're starting at Tier 1," Markus said. "That was always the plan."
The registrar looked at him with the reassessment of someone whose initial estimate had been revised.
"The contract board is on the east wall," he said.
The Tier 1 boards were exactly what Tier 1 boards were in any mercenary context: the work that experienced practitioners didn't want because it didn't pay well enough relative to the effort, claimed by the practitioners who needed to build a record or the ones who had specific reasons for the lower-tier engagement.
He took three tags from the bottom section — an Iron-Root Razorback culling contract, an invasive variant disrupting a particular herbal ecosystem in the Low Ashen Steppes.
Mika looked at the tags. "We're capable of significantly higher-tier work even under the atmospheric adjustment."
"Your capability isn't the constraint," Markus said. "Your calibration is. You've spent seven years developing muscle memory for combat physics with a specific gravitational constant and atmospheric resistance. Here, both are different. If you engage at the output level your calibrated instincts produce, the air resistance and gravity differential will throw your timing off by enough to matter." He held her gaze. "Millisecond variances matter at Tier 3 and above. At Tier 1, the error tolerance is large enough to be educational without being catastrophic."
Mika received this.
"We establish the baseline first," Rosanne said. She had arrived at the same conclusion independently — he could see it in her expression. "Then we expand."
"Yes," he said.
The Low Ashen Steppes were twenty minutes from the settlement's edge — the specific terrain type that the name described, low-elevation volcanic plain with the silica-mineral soil composition that the Iron-Root Razorback's diet apparently required.
The six Razorbacks in the clearing were considerably more substantial than the name's initial impression suggested. The iron-silica plate armour that each one's hide had formed was the natural consequence of decades of consuming mineral-rich soil in a high-density mana environment. The tusks carried the tectonic frequency that high-density earth-element mana produced in biological structures.
He stepped back to the perimeter.
"No instinctive technique use," he said. "Everything deliberate. What you think you're going to do, then do it slowly enough to feel where the atmospheric resistance changes the result."
Rosanne moved first.
Her strike arrived two inches low — the air resistance on her forearm's extension exactly as the physics predicted, the deceleration across the final centimetres of the arc dropping the contact point below where her calibrated instinct had aimed. The strike hit the shoulder plate rather than the neck.
"I felt it," she said, resetting. "The drag is in the extension, not the draw."
"Yes," he said. "Shorten the arc and drive through the resistance rather than swinging into it."
Mika's fire technique over-saturated before she had completed the formation — the ambient mana so dense and reactive that the technique's formation process drew more than her calibration had allocated. The plasma output was double what she had intended, dispersing rather than projecting.
"Reduce formation intent by sixty percent," Markus said. "The ambient mana is providing the rest without being asked. You're competing with the environment rather than using it."
She tried the adjustment. The second attempt produced a thin, concentrated lance of heat that cut through the nearest Razorback's plate armour with considerably more efficiency than the standard formation would have at home.
She looked at her hands.
"That was significantly less effort than that should have been," she said.
"Yes," he said. "The ambient concentration is doing work that your channels would normally have to do alone. Once you understand how much the environment is contributing, you can stop overriding it."
The calibration ran for forty minutes.
Each of them found, through their specific errors and adjustments, the specific corrections their combat physics required in this environment. Jessica and Donna discovered that the heavier downward gravity required a lower centre of mass in defensive positions than their home-world instincts defaulted to. Rosanne found the shorter arc that the air resistance required. Mika found the dramatically reduced formation intent.
By the end, six Razorbacks were down and the team had a working understanding of where their calibration needed adjustment.
"Better," Markus said.
"What are the corrections for Tier 2 engagements," Jessica said.
"Same corrections, more margin for error when you make mistakes you haven't found yet," he said. "We run two more Tier 1 contracts before moving to Tier 2. The baseline needs to be consistent before you're increasing the stakes."
Rosanne was already reading the contract tags.
"Next one is in the morning," she said. "Tonight I want to eat something from that tavern and see if it's as good as the specimens Isolde is running tests on suggested it would be."
He had thought the same thing, actually.
"The stew," he said. "Start with the stew."
They went back.