Chard built for fourteen seconds before the entity understood what was happening inside it and responded.
The response was not a strike. It was a system activation — something deep in the entity's architecture that Rean's vessel flagged as a counter-intrusion measure, a mana expulsion technique designed specifically to eject foreign mana constructs from within its physical structure. The expulsion hit Chard's building formation and pushed outward and Rean felt the technique destabilise at the seven-second mark of its construction, the internal weapon losing coherence as the expulsion architecture worked against it.
He committed more mana.
The Chard formation and the expulsion system ran against each other for the remaining seven seconds like two currents meeting in the same channel, and at the fourteen second mark the Chard formation was larger than the expulsion could contain and the weapon resolved.
