They walked until the hum disappeared.
Then Mara made them walk another quarter hour.
"The edge of a thing and the middle of being safe from it are not the same distance," she said.
No one argued with the woman who had just understood the danger better than the other five of them combined.
For most of those fifteen minutes, Vane turned the last hour over in his mind the way he might turn a blade in his hands, checking every angle for damage.
He had failed.
That was the plain accounting of it. The conclusion he owed himself, even if no one else intended to make him speak it aloud.
Ryuken had given him a lesson and a spear in the same morning.
Bend around what you did not expect. Do not waste time resenting the fact that you failed to expect it.
Then this place had handed Vane something he did not understand, and he had answered exactly as he always had.
With the largest weapon available to him.
No pause.
No measurement.
