They were three days out from the settlement when the Mayor's response arrived.
He had read the trailing signatures since the first evening — six practitioners in wind-suppression cloaks, maintaining a consistent two-kilometre distance. Professional enough to stay at range; not professional enough to account for the spatial sense at 100% comprehension, which read the coordinate distortions their movement produced regardless of mana concealment.
He had not told the team immediately. He had told Rosanne on the second night, quietly, while the others were establishing the camp's perimeter wards.
"Six," she said.
"Tier 4," he said. "Town guard equipment. Mayor Tan's family signet, probably, given the timing."
"Are we going to do anything."
"We're going to sleep," he said. "And we're going to be ready."
She had looked at him for a moment with the commander's read that he had watched develop since the tournament. "The wards."
"The wards are good for alerting," he said. "Not sufficient for Tier 4 in an ambush. Make sure everyone knows the situation before they sleep."
"Yes," she said.
They came at the third night's second hour.
The pheromone attractant was professional tradecraft — the kind that told him these were not the Mayor's general enforcers but someone with actual field experience in this world's threat environment. The drakes responded to it the way drakes responded to anything that triggered their territorial biology: fast, direct, committed.
The team woke because Markus had made sure they would. The ward he had modified after Rosanne's briefing wasn't the standard perimeter alert — it was the specific spatial configuration that produced a physical sensation rather than a sound, the kind that woke practitioners from sleep without producing the sound profile that would tell observers outside the perimeter whether the ambush had achieved its intended effect.
They rose quietly. They did not light anything.
The drakes came down the ravine walls in the pattern that apex predators used when the pheromone concentration was high — fast and territorial, the objective to establish dominance over the source rather than simply to feed. Four of them, heavy-bodied, the obsidian scales catching the starlight.
The team engaged them in the dark with the full Ghost Sense architecture running, the atmospheric pressure displacement giving them the drakes' positions before the drakes had resolved the team's. The engagement was not silent, but it was controlled — the confined ravine geometry and the team's positioning maintaining a defensive field that kept the drakes from flanking.
The six guards moved when the drake engagement was at its loudest.
They came over the northern ridge with the specific formation of people who had done this before in this world — the approach designed to hit from above while the primary targets were fully committed below, the timing intended to arrive at the moment defensive capacity was lowest.
He was on the ridge.
Not waiting dramatically. Simply in the position that the spatial sense had given him twelve minutes of preparation to occupy — the coordinate that the guards' approach trajectory would bring them through.
"Stop," he said.
One of them did.
The other five came forward.
What followed was not clean. Ambush situations at this capability differential never were — the guards were Tier 4 practitioners who had committed to an assault, and stopping a committed Tier 4 assault required force that didn't leave much room for the measured incapacitation he had used with Tan's daylight group. The terrain was wrong for it. The numbers were wrong for it. The timing was wrong for it.
Three of them died because the situations in which they could have been stopped without dying had passed before he had the option of putting them in those situations.
The other three he took down with the spatial law's coordinate compression, injuries significant enough to end their operational capacity without the outcome the first three had reached.
He sat down on the ridge when it was over.
Below, the final drake was down. He could hear the team's post-engagement check — the specific verbal shorthand they used to confirm everyone was functional.
"Clear," Rosanne called up.
"Clear up here," he said.
She came up the ridge a few minutes later and looked at what was there to look at.
"Three down," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Three survivable."
"Yes. The survivable three need medical attention in the next four hours. The settlement's medical facility is back the way we came."
She looked at him.
"We take them back," she said. It was not a question.
"We take them back," he confirmed. "We tell the Mayor exactly what happened and why it happened. All of it."
She looked at the ridge, the three who were down, the three who were not.
"He ordered this," she said.
"Yes," he said. "That's the conversation we have with him."
They carried the three injured practitioners back to the settlement on improvised stretchers assembled from the campsite's materials. The three who had died he wrapped in the cloaks they had come in, using the spatial law to secure the bundles for transit. He brought all six back. He was not going to leave bodies in the wilderness as though the people the Mayor had sent were disposable information.
The medical facility received the three injured at the settlement's dawn.
The Mayor came when the facility notified him. He came alone, which was either courage or the specific quality of someone who had already done the accounting and understood where it had landed.
Markus told him what had happened. Precisely, in sequence, without softening any of it and without dramatising any of it. The trailing, the night timing, the pheromone attractant, the drake draw, the ridge approach. What he had been able to stop. What he had not been able to stop because the guards had committed past the point where stopping was available.
"The three who survived," he said, at the end. "The facility has the spatial sense assessment of their injuries, which is more complete than standard examination at this kind of wound depth. They will recover."
The Mayor was quiet for a long time.
"I sent them," he said.
"I know," Markus said.
"My son—"
"Is in the recovery ward," Markus said. "His channel stress is improving. The compound I left has been administered."
The Mayor looked at the floor of the facility's entry corridor.
"Why did you bring them back," he said.
Markus thought about this for a moment — not because the answer was complicated, but because he wanted to give it accurately.
"Because they were your people and you deserved to know what happened to them," he said. "And because the version where I left them in the wilderness and told you a story about it was not a version I was willing to do."
Another long silence.
"You're going north," the Mayor said.
"Yes."
"Toward Vorash's territory."
"Yes."
The Mayor looked at him. The grief and the anger were still both present; the anger had less direction than it had the previous day.
"He taxes us," the Mayor said. "All of us. The settlement, the farming collectives, the mining operations. Every moon. If we pay short, he sends the enforcement units."
"I know," Markus said.
"What are you going to do."
"I don't know yet," Markus said. "The survey north is intelligence work. What comes after the intelligence depends on what the intelligence says."
He looked at the Mayor steadily.
"If there comes a point where what I'm doing in the north is relevant to the settlement's situation with Vorash, I'll tell you," he said. "That's what I can offer."
The Mayor said nothing for a long moment. Then he nodded — the nod of someone who has been given an honest answer in a situation where they had no particular right to expect one.
Markus left the facility.
The team was waiting at the settlement's northern gate with the packs and the survey equipment.
"Ready," Rosanne said.
"Ready," he confirmed.
They went north.