The flanking unit was larger than the Sight had fully resolved — thirty Dracaenae and four Laestrygonian giants, moving in coordinated formation through 44th Street toward the Empire State Building's eastern service entrance. They were not the largest force the Threshold Network had faced, but they were larger than anything the two-zone combined team had handled so far today.
He ran the numbers while running. Zone B's probability work could fragment the formation's coordination. His shadow work and Lantern Step could provide cover and disruption for the flanks. But the giants were the problem — they did not fragment as readily under probability interference, their physical mass enough to continue operating even when the statistical nudges worked against them.
Soraya, who had pulled to their position from Zone A when the relay went out: 'Two Crossroads Wards — one at each end of the block. Catch them in the middle.'
He looked at her. He thought: she is better at this than the plan accounted for. 'Yes. You take the east end. I'll take the west. Twenty-foot separation, ward deployment on my signal.'
'Done.'
He moved to the west end of the block in Lantern Step, running across the 44th Street intersection and taking the position at the building corner that gave him angle on the approaching formation without putting him in the direct path of thirty dracaenae who would be very motivated to go through him.
He drew the Crossroads Ward. Three lines, staff moving through the air, the MANA channeling through the pattern — 35 units committed, the ward settling into the threshold position at the west end of the block. He felt Soraya's ward go up at the east end a few seconds later.
The formation hit the east ward first. The leading dracaenae hit the invisible threshold and staggered; the ones behind them piled into the disruption, the formation collapsing under the impact of unexpected resistance. The giants at the back of the formation, still moving, pushed into the suddenly stationary group from behind.
'Now,' he said into the relay. 'Emmett — probability on the giants. Zone B — flanks, through the gaps. I'm hitting the middle with shadow.'
What followed was twelve minutes of concentrated chaos. He was not precisely tracking each individual engagement — he was tracking the shape of it, the formation's continued fragmentation, the ward at the west end holding under pressure while Soraya's eastern ward had broken and she had shifted to direct combat with her own considerable threshold abilities.
The shadow work he deployed was the most extensive he had used in a single engagement: a field of targeted shadow covering the entire 44th Street block, not a screen but an environment — shadow placed on every giant's eyes simultaneously, each placement requiring individual attention. His MANA dropped fast. He watched it with the corner of his attention that was always watching.
At fifty-five remaining MANA, he pulled the field back and shifted to single-target deployment. The four giants were still up, their formations scrambled but their individual physical capacity unaffected.
He engaged directly. Not recklessly — with the specific calculation of someone who had trained for this and knew exactly where his capabilities ended. Staff work against a Laistrygonian giant was not a fight he would win alone; it was a fight he could win in combination with Emmett's probability interference reducing the giant's tracking accuracy and Soraya's threshold work cutting off its retreat options.
Eleven minutes and forty seconds. The corridor was clear.
He stood in 44th Street with his breathing elevated and his MANA at forty-one and the specific quality of exhaustion that comes from twelve minutes of everything at once. Around him the Threshold Network was doing the post-engagement inventory.
He pressed his hand to Soraya's forearm — she had taken a dracaenae blade across the shoulder, not deep but bleeding — and released what remained of the solar reservoir into the touch. The warmth moved through.
'Good work,' he said.
She looked at him. She was breathing hard. She said, simply: 'You too.'
In the distance, above them, somewhere in the Empire State Building that rose over the city like a needle stitching the mortal world to the divine one: Percy Jackson was ascending.
The corridor was clear.