The Abyssal Leyline Leakage was the closest site — three kilometres north of the settlement, at the edge of where the agricultural perimeter thinned into raw frontier terrain.
The spatial tear was visible from fifty metres: not the red or violet of standard gate phenomena, but the corrosive grey-green of uncontrolled primordial fluid venting into the local coordinate system. The surrounding soil had already absorbed enough of the fluid that the mineral composition had changed, the normal iron-ore substrate of the steppes replaced by a crystallised acidic compound that the agricultural operations in the adjacent fields would not survive if the leakage continued another month.
He read the anchor point through the spatial sense and found it quickly. The tear wasn't a gate — no dimensional boundary, no intelligence behind it. A raw crack in the local spatial fabric, probably caused by the same tectonic pressures that the Tier 5 anomalies were generally a product of in this environment.
He sealed it with the precision the work required. The corrosive fluid stopped venting. The tear's edges drew together as the coordinate relationships that had been holding them apart were addressed.
The surrounding soil would need time, but the agriculture would recover.
"That's the first contract," he said. "The ore seam next."
The Obsidian Core Inversion was three kilometres beneath the northern shelf's surface, which required a different approach from the atmospheric anomaly. The ore miners had abandoned the three deepest levels when the geological instability began; the tectonic mass below had been building kinetic pressure for approximately six months, and the assessments from the abandoned survey posts put the timeline for a catastrophic collapse at under two weeks.
He went down with the team via the vertical tunnel the miners had cut, his spatial sense mapping the tectonic mass's structure in real time as they descended. The pressure was building at a specific internal point — not evenly distributed, the way natural geological stress was, but concentrated, as if something was directing it.
He noted this.
The direction was consistent with the gate harvesting architecture he had been documenting. The tectonic pressure anomaly was not natural.
He addressed the accumulated kinetic pressure through the spatial law's coordinate authority — not releasing it explosively, distributing it across the broader rock formation at a rate the geological structure could absorb. The process took forty minutes. By the end, the ore seam's stability had returned to pre-anomaly baseline.
He recorded the directional signature of the pressure accumulation. It was going into the documentation.
"Two down," Rosanne said, coming up the tunnel beside him.
"The aerial sovereign is the third," he said. "That one we fight."
The Crimson-Winged Sky-Sovereign was an aerial apex predator whose territory covered the primary trade route between the settlement and the next major population centre to the west. The bounty documentation had included the previous two years' casualty reports from trading parties who had been caught in the open.
It found them rather than the other way around — the three suns' glare from above was considerable and aerial predators in this environment used the backlight to approach from angles their targets couldn't read through standard visual processing.
The Ghost Sense flagged it forty seconds before it entered standard visual range.
Forty seconds was enough.
The engagement that followed was the team's best work of the week. Not because the Sky-Sovereign was easy — the combined aerial speed and the gravitational dive attack it used were genuinely difficult in the primordial world's physics — but because the calibration week had produced what it was supposed to produce. Mika's atmospheric density read giving her the correct angle for the constraint technique. Donna's wind management at the high altitude where the creature's attack patterns were calibrated. Jessica's electromagnetic arc using the conductivity of the creature's own wing membrane. Rosanne's timing, which had been the thing that improved most consistently across the week, placing the finishing technique at the exact moment the arc had disrupted the sovereign's pattern.
He contributed the targeting data and the spatial field that managed the debris from the creature's final descent.
They harvested what was worth harvesting. The core, the wing membrane, the talons.
It was on the return from the third site that Tan's people appeared.
Twelve of them, half the group on a ridge above the trail, half blocking the path below. The formation suggested someone who had done enough hunting to know what an encirclement looked like and thought this was one.
Young Master Tan himself was at the front of the lower group, which told Markus he was operating on anger rather than judgment.
"You embarrassed me in the plaza," Tan said. His voice had the specific quality of someone who had spent several hours working up to this moment. "You made me back down in front of everyone. That doesn't go unanswered here."
"Your choice," Rosanne said. She was reading the same threat assessment Markus was — twelve Tier 3 practitioners, formation that didn't account for the team's actual capability at the current calibration stage.
Tan gestured.
The twelve came in.
What followed was the specific kind of engagement that happened when a large group of Tier 3 practitioners attacked a team of Tier 4 practitioners who had been running calibration drills for a week in an environment that had compressed their combat physics upward. Not a massacre — the team's approach throughout had been measured force, and the Ghost Sense training's body-awareness made the difference between incapacitation and something worse legible in real time.
Rosanne took the three nearest simultaneously, the atmospheric density she had adapted to making her footwork faster than the opposition expected. Jessica and Donna handled the ridge group with the combination that disrupted mana-channel coordination without the more permanent option. Mika's constraint technique pinned Tan himself without the thermal output engaged.
Twelve Tier 3 practitioners, incapacitated. Time elapsed: approximately ninety seconds.
None of them dead. Three with channel stress injuries that would require medical attention. Two with fractures from impact with the basalt terrain that their armour hadn't fully absorbed.
Tan was uninjured, pinned under the ice constraint, looking up at Markus with an expression that had moved through several emotional states and arrived at something that was probably closer to accurate self-assessment than anything he'd had before the engagement.
"The medical facility in the settlement is equipped for your people's injuries," Markus said. "Get them there." He released the constraint. "And consider what the Platinum zone would have looked like for you if you'd followed through on the original plan."
He helped two of the incapacitated guard into positions they could be moved from and sent the spatial sense's injury assessment to the team's channel so they could triage who needed immediate attention.
Tan, to his credit, did not say anything further.
He began coordinating the extraction of his people back toward the settlement.
Markus watched this and then turned back toward the trail.
"The registry," he said.
"The cores," Rosanne said.
They went to submit the contract completion.