The Oracle found him in the forest four days after the Voss meeting.
He was running a Portal session in the Ash Ridge wilderness, his extended version now, thirty-five minutes in the First Layer, when she appeared at the edge of the silver tree clearing without warning or approach sound, simply present in the way that beings outside the mortal timeline were sometimes present, as if she had always been there and his perception had only now included her.
"You closed the ring," she said.
"Yesterday." He was seated, the Void Core passively absorbing, the Register warm and full beside him. "The city's mana field is restabilizing. Bael's fracture-prep is undone."
"Which has made him impatient." She sat across from him with the fluid ease that seemed ageless and settled. "He is accelerating the Avatar's deployment. It will arrive in three weeks, not six."
Three weeks. He ran the numbers. His current Register strength, his Void Affinity at 1,847, Sera's combat output, Stormward and Nyx and the Einherjar and Herald and Fenris, all of it evaluated against the Oracle's previous description of an Avatar equivalent to four S-rank Hunters.
"Can we handle it in three weeks?" he asked.
"You can handle it now," the Oracle said simply. "What you cannot yet handle is what comes after the Avatar."
He looked at her.
"Bael himself," he said.
"The Avatar is a test," she said. "This is what the Demon Kings do, they send an Avatar first, observe how their opponent responds, and adjust. If the Avatar is defeated, Bael will know precisely what he's dealing with and will come personally, with the full force of the Seventh Layer behind him." She paused. "And then you will need to fight in his domain, not yours."
"The Seventh Layer."
"Yes. A Void Sovereign cannot defeat a Demon King at full power in the mortal world, the dimensional distance between the Demon King's home layer and the battlefield blunts your connection to the Void. You need to fight Bael on his own ground, where the Void's inverted polarity is amplified rather than dampened by dimensional proximity."
"So I need to go to the Seventh Layer," Liu Yun said.
"After the Avatar. After your Register grows stronger from that battle. After you understand what Bael is, completely, before you face him." She looked at him steadily. "There is someone in the Underworld who can prepare you for the Seventh Layer. Someone who knew the first Void Sovereign personally and who has been waiting, as Nyx waited, for the line to continue."
"Where in the Underworld?"
"The Third Layer. The Court of Shades, the domain of accumulated neutral dead, those belonging to no mythology and affiliated with no divine master. It is the most populous layer and the most politically complex. The entity I speak of rules a faction there."
"I'll need to extend my Portal range," he said. "Currently I can reach the First Layer reliably."
"The Third Layer requires a different approach," the Oracle said. "Not a Portal, but a full descent. Your shadow army can anchor you, with enough shadow presence deployed in the Underworld, you can use them as relay points to maintain your mortal anchor while descending to deeper layers."
He filed that. It was something to develop after the Avatar engagement.
"Three weeks," he said.
"Yes. Prepare the city. Prepare yourself. And" She paused in a way that was unusual for her. "prepare for people to see what you are. When the Avatar arrives, concealment will no longer be possible. What happens after will define how the world understands your position."
He thought about Voss and his office and the careful political balance of the negotiation they had conducted.
"That's going to be complicated," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "But complexity is preferable to the alternative."
She was gone between one breath and the next.
He sat in the silver-tree clearing for a while longer, letting the First Layer mana absorb, thinking about three weeks and the Seventh Layer and a Demon King who had killed his father's potential and stolen twelve years of his own life and was now sending an Avatar as a test.
His Void Core burned very cold and very quiet.
He activated the recall and stepped back through the Portal into the Ash Ridge forest and walked to the transit station and rode back to the city and went to find Sera.
They had three weeks to make sure Veramore survived what was coming.
He intended to use every hour of them.