The Surveyor had forty-eight seconds to exist in one place, and it spent the first by drawing a line through Nox's feet. The ground under the Territory Registry became a separate parcel, leaving one foot on either side of the new boundary.
Nox jumped backward before the division closed around his ankle. The core blade came up, but another line crossed the weapon at the guard and separated the steel from the hand holding it.
The blade dropped onto the gray side of the new boundary. The Surveyor's cadastral plate rotated above its collar while the measuring rod wrote one valid rule after another into the collapsing district.
"A-rank boundary authority confirmed; it can separate valid relationships. Do not cross a line by force unless someone has identified what it is separating," Vasa said over every patched city relay.
