The math was simple. That was the problem with it.
Vane sat at the desk in his room with the evaluation packet open in front of him and worked through it the same way he'd worked through every resource allocation problem in Oakhaven: strip it to numbers, find the constraint, build around it.
Four people. Seventy-two hours. A wave every four hours. Eighteen cycles total.
He wrote the number down and looked at it.
Eighteen.
He had never held a position through eighteen anything. The Clockwork Ruins had been forty-eight hours of constant movement. The Hollows had been a descent. The Duo deployment in Mourn-Hold had been seventy-two hours, but that was two people and a Grave Warden and a different kind of exhaustion entirely. This was sustained static defense, which was a different animal.
The evaluation packet was explicit about what sustained meant. The wave difficulty didn't scale based on how long the evaluation had been running. It scaled based on the squad.
