Drayke Voss did not run.
That was the thing Levi would remember afterward — that he didn't run. He simply stopped being interested. The enormous shape beside him had fully solidified now, a contracted myth of considerable size, and as Levi moved toward him Drayke watched the approach with the same flat assessment he'd had from the beginning. Not threatened. Not impressed. Just watching.
Then he spoke again, just as quietly as before.
"My work here is done."
He made the same small gesture with his hand and the myth beside him dissolved — unsummoned as cleanly as it had been called — and Drayke turned and walked away. Not teleporting, not retreating into shadow. Just walking, back the way his unit had come, while what remained of the rogue force began to fall back around him in the same coordinated silence they'd arrived in.
Levi went after him.
He telestrided the distance in under a second, closing the gap to nothing — and found nothing. Drayke had stepped through a portal so precisely timed that Levi arrived at the spot where he'd been standing and felt only the faint residual energy of a passage that had already closed. No haste. No scramble. Timed to the second, like he'd known exactly how fast Levi could move.
Levi stood in the empty street.
Behind him the last of the rogue unit had disengaged — melting out of Veldmoor the same way their leader had, coordinated and surgical, leaving the chaos they'd started but taking themselves cleanly out of it. The myths were gone too, unsummoned or dispersed. The battlefield went quiet in the particular way that only happened when a fight ended without resolution.
Winters appeared at his shoulder. He looked at the empty space where Drayke had been, then at Levi.
"You couldn't catch him," said Winters. A fact being filed, not a question.
"He knew my speed," said Levi. "The portal was timed exactly."
Winters said nothing. He turned and surveyed the street — three buildings with ground floors gutted, civilians beginning to filter back cautiously, the twins visible at the far end of the left flank checking whether it was actually over.
Priscilla descended from her elevated position and landed beside Levi. "He was here to look at you," she said.
"I know," said Levi.
"That's not good."
"No," said Levi. "It isn't."
Curwyn crossed toward them from the direction of the relay tower, Ross a step behind. "Tower's intact," said Curwyn. "They got close but the twins cut them off in time." He looked at Levi. "What did he say to you?"
"My name," said Levi. "Like he already knew it."
Curwyn's jaw shifted very slightly. "Intel leak in the military channel somewhere. Has to be." He said it with the measured certainty of someone who had thought of this first and was now naming it for the group. "We'll report it to the King when we're back."
Levi looked at the scorched buildings. At the civilians at their doorways. At the settlement that had been hit with that precise, economical violence and left standing just enough to not quite be a massacre.
"He didn't come here to destroy this place," said Levi.
"We held the tower," said Curwyn.
"We held what he let us hold," said Levi.
The silence that followed was the kind that meant everyone had already thought the same thing and nobody wanted to say it out loud.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kylie and Kiyandra came in from the left flank, both still at combat readiness, scanning the street out of habit even though the fight was over. Zoe came from the evacuation corridor with Charlotte, civilians trailing in a ragged, frightened line.
"Civilian casualties?" asked Curwyn.
"Three injured, none critical," said Zoe. "We got them out clean."
"Good." Curwyn looked around at the squad. "Regroup. Full sweep of the settlement before we—"
The teleport relay at the end of the street activated.
Not the squad's return signal. Something incoming. A single figure materialised in the relay circle — uniformed, breathing hard, with the particular look of someone who had been moving urgently and hadn't stopped to compose themselves before arriving.
A military messenger.
He spotted Curwyn and crossed the street at a near-run. He held out a sealed report with both hands. "Captain Jankeys. Priority dispatch from northern military command."
Curwyn took it and broke the seal.
The squad watched him read. Ten seconds. His face gave very little away — it almost never did — but something in the set of his shoulders changed. Levi watched it happen.
Curwyn lowered the report.
"Halvenmoor," he said. The name of a countryside town three hours northeast of Frostilia. His voice was even. "The Rogues hit it while we were here. Full strike force." He paused. "There are no survivors."
Nobody spoke.
The word landed in the street the way heavy things landed — without echo, without rebound. Just settling into the ground and staying there.
—
Levi looked at the report in Curwyn's hand.
Then he looked at the settlement around him — the smoke still rising, the civilians at their doorways, the relay tower standing intact — and the understanding arrived fully and completely and with no mercy at all.
*My work here is done.*
Not the relay tower. Not Veldmoor. This. All of this — the alert, the deployment, the fight, the clean professional retreat — every piece of it arranged so that R.K Squad would be exactly here, holding exactly this, while Halvenmoor burned without anyone coming.
A diversion. Not even a particularly elaborate one. Just a competent one, designed by someone who had known where the squad was, who was on it, how fast they'd respond and how long they'd stay.
Someone who had known Levi Baron was in Blizzaria and had used that knowledge to guarantee the squad's attention would be split at exactly the right moment.
The twins stood very still. Priscilla had her arms folded, staring at the ground. Ross had one hand pressed flat against the side of a building like he needed something solid. Zoe's expression had gone somewhere internal. Charlotte was looking at the report in Curwyn's hand like she could change what it said by reading it herself.
Winters looked at nothing. But his eyes had gone very quiet in a way Levi was beginning to recognise — the look of a person adding something to a sum they'd already been working on for a long time.
Levi looked at the empty street where Drayke had walked away and felt the specific cold of understanding something too late to do anything about it. The cold wasn't Blizzaria's. It was the cold of a world that had been running a plan while they were still learning the rules.
He thought about the mystery man standing on his cliff above Olympicõ. He thought about Proteus in a soldier's uniform for six months. He thought about the coordinated timing of every attack he'd seen — Velvetia, Olympicõ, Olympus, and now here, now Halvenmoor.
The same patience. The same willingness to spend smaller pieces to move the larger ones.
He didn't say any of this out loud.
The smoke kept rising. The civilians moved around them. The relay tower stood intact and irrelevant in the middle distance.
Nobody spoke.