In the Library, the dual chronometer was running:
**Avulum: Day 107, Hour 14**
**Earth: Day 30, Hour 6**
Six hours into Day 30. The thirty-first day beginning.
The Vassal-Link residual would register at a Tower monitoring station within hours, if it hadn't already. Somewhere on Earth there was a Tower agent who had been embedded since Day 2 and was almost certainly already processing the transit confirmation signal. I had, at best, twelve hours before the Tower's Earth-side operation began actively looking for me.
I had a city to find my family in, a military structure to introduce myself to, a network of early mana-sensitives to quietly identify and not alarm, and an invasion that was losing but hadn't finished losing yet.
And somewhere in the Lens chamber I'd just left, Theln was sitting with a data reading she didn't have a category for and a Councilor whose contamination narrative had just successfully covered the most audacious deliberate sabotage in Avulum's recorded history.
*85%,* I thought. *I need to find out if 85% is enough.*
The Earth-lattice hummed, reintegrating, three hours into an estimated six-hour recovery.
Eight elements. Six functional. Two broken. Mana pathways stressed but holding.
*Operational.*
I climbed down from the wall and started walking east, toward the sound of organized humans doing the work of surviving.
I was home.
The creature was a mid-tier territorial predator that Avulum's classification system called a Scorch Hound — roughly two meters at the shoulder, exothermic, built for short bursts of lethal speed. On Avulum, a mid-tier Scorch Hound was a genuine threat to an unprepared Tier 2 mage. On Earth, at 0.07% mana saturation, after thirty days of operating in an environment that was essentially hostile to its biology, it was the mana-equivalent of a very large, very aggressive dog with a bad respiratory infection.
It came around the rubble corner fast and low, tracking the heat differential from my Earth-lattice — even at mana-depleted output, I was the warmest thing in a half-kilometer radius that wasn't on fire.
It died in eleven seconds.
I didn't use anything elegant. Fire-aspect Thermal Cascade, applied as a localized pressure spike to the air column above it. The Hound's own mana-poor internal temperature regulation couldn't compensate for the sudden forty-degree atmospheric shift. It lost coordination, stumbled, and by the time it recovered I'd already run a Water-aspect Hydraulic Scalpel through its primary mana organ — a small, dense structure just below the base of the skull that in a mana-rich environment would have been protected by active shielding. Here it was just anatomy.
Eleven seconds.
I stood over the creature for a moment. The Stone was running the same kind of post-engagement diagnostic it always ran: energy expenditure, technique efficiency, threat assessment review. All numbers were favorable. The technique had consumed forty-seven mana units total. I'd estimated sixty.
On Avulum, this creature had a combat rating of "approach with caution." On Earth, it had a combat rating of "eleven seconds."
I was trying to figure out how I felt about this when the shouting started.
It came from twenty meters to my right — a doorway in what remained of a mid-rise building's ground floor. Several voices, arguing in the clipped shorthand of people who had been communicating under pressure long enough to develop efficient abbreviations.
"—confirmed contact, sector four—"
"—signature's wrong, not one of ours—"
"—heat reading shows—"
"—just wait, Yara—"
A woman came through the doorway first. She was holding something that was not quite a standard military weapon — the barrel assembly looked right, but there was a modification at the stock that had the layered quality of something built in the field by someone who understood both the tool they were modifying and what they were modifying it for. The modification was, I realized after a moment, a resonance detector. Someone had figured out how to attach a mana signature reader to a rifle.
Thirty days, and someone had built a mana detector.
Behind her, six more people. Varied gear, consistent posture — the flat, weight-forward stance of people who had been moving through uncertain terrain long enough to adopt it unconsciously. Two of them were watching the dead Scorch Hound. Three of them were watching me. One was watching both me and the Hound with the particular attention of someone doing simultaneous threat assessment and trying not to appear to be doing simultaneous threat assessment.
The last one was watching everything, from further back, with the specific quality of stillness that comes from twenty or thirty years of making decisions in rooms where the wrong one killed people.
He was approximately fifty-five. Grey at the temples. He held nothing in his hands, which was the loudest possible statement in a group where everyone else was visibly armed.
"You killed that," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"In how long."
"Eleven seconds."
A pause. He looked at the creature, then at me. The calculation behind his eyes was unhurried and specific — not panicking, not impressed, just processing.
"Yara," he said, without looking at the woman with the modified weapon. "Stand down."