The second observer arrived on Sora's fifth day of bed rest.
Her name was Yoo Jimin, and the first thing Sora noticed about her — without the diagnostic modality, without vital sign monitoring, relying on the civilian-grade sensory input that she'd spent three years replacing with clinical data — was that Jimin smiled. Not the controlled professional expression that Jungsoo maintained. An actual smile, the kind that engaged the zygomatic major and produced crow's feet at the lateral canthi and indicated either genuine warmth or the specific subspecies of institutional performance that the Association deployed when direct surveillance had proven insufficient.
"I'm told you're recovering well," Jimin said. She stood in the medical wing's doorway with a tablet under her arm and a lanyard badge that identified her as Bureau of Awakened Affairs, Compliance Division, Field Monitor — the same division as Jungsoo, the same institutional apparatus, a different instrument calibrated for a different function. "The guild's medical reports indicate channel recovery at nine percent per day. Ahead of schedule."
Sora sat upright in the bed. Day five. The tremor had shifted — still arrhythmic, still damage-pattern rather than adaptation-cycle, but the amplitude was decreasing. Her fingers shook against the bedsheet with the diminishing vibration of infrastructure that was rebuilding. The channel walls were healing. The inflammation subsiding. The cellular damage from Life Drain's foreign energy processing resolving along the timeline that Hana had predicted.
She still couldn't activate her modalities. The channels conducted baseline metabolic energy — the body's autonomous mana flow that sustained healing and cellular function — but the deliberate activation of diagnostic or inverted polarity produced the same pain response she'd encountered on day one. The channels were closed for repairs. No visitors.
"Jungsoo already documents everything I do," Sora said.
"Observer Lee handles dungeon-related and field compliance. I'll be covering daily monitoring — guild activities, medical interactions, training observations." Jimin's smile held. The crow's feet stayed engaged. "The enhanced surveillance protocol requires dual-observer coverage. One for field. One for facility."
One for the dungeon. One for the cage.
"You'll have access to the medical wing?"
"The guild master has allocated a monitoring station in the common area. I'll conduct daily check-ins at 0800 and 1800. Mana output assessments every seventy-two hours. Channel stability evaluations weekly." Jimin listed the schedule with the pleasant efficiency of a hotel concierge explaining the amenities. "The council wants to ensure your recovery proceeds without complications."
The council wanted to ensure she didn't use her abilities. The recovery monitoring was the mechanism — the institutional framework that converted medical observation into restriction enforcement, the documentation of channel healing serving simultaneously as evidence that the Calamity-class hunter's capabilities were returning and as the trigger for additional containment measures when they did.
"Understood," Sora said.
Jimin's smile adjusted. A fraction. The zygomatic major relaxing by a millimeter — the micro-expression that Sora's clinical training identified as recognition. Jimin recognized the compliance as performance. Sora recognized the smile as the same.
They understood each other. The understanding changed nothing.
---
Minho came at noon with a bag of convenience store kimbap and hands that both functioned.
"Hana's been treating me." He sat in the chair beside the bed — the same chair he'd occupied during the medical wing sessions, the patient's seat, except now the power dynamic had inverted and Sora was the one in the bed and Minho was the one whose hands worked. "Modified protocol. She says it's based on yours but she's adjusted the frequency modulation to account for the fact that she's, and I'm quoting, 'a D-rank healer doing S-rank work with duct tape and a textbook.'"
"Sounds accurate."
"The treatments hold for about four hours. Down from your six. But she's doing them three times a day, so the coverage is—" He unwrapped a kimbap roll. The rice and seaweed smell filling the medical wing with the mundane evidence of a life that continued outside the institutional framework of surveillance schedules and channel evaluations. "Functional. Not great. Functional."
Sora watched his hands. Both of them. Without the diagnostic modality, she couldn't measure the conduction velocity, couldn't assess the demyelination progression, couldn't quantify the neural degradation with the clinical precision that her treatment protocol required. She could see that the fingers moved. She could see that they gripped. The assessment stopped at the surface — the physician reduced to observation, the surgeon watching from the gallery.
"How's the team?"
"Taeho's radius healed. Clean set, Hana handled it. Jina's shoulder is back in place — she's already training. Park's pelvis is the worst. He's on six weeks rest. Says he'll be back in four." Minho ate with the unselfconscious efficiency of a person who'd spent a career refueling between operations. "Dohyun's filing the appeal. He's got the guild's legal team working on the enhanced surveillance — says there's a procedural argument about the dual-observer protocol. Something about the authorization chain for facility monitoring requiring a review threshold that the emergency session didn't meet."
"The procedural argument will take thirty days to process."
"And the council will deny it, and Dohyun will file an appeal of the denial, and the appeal will take another thirty days." Minho's jaw worked around the kimbap. "The man knows how to fight in conference rooms. I'll give him that. But conference rooms don't clear dungeon breaks."
The silence held. Three seconds. The absence of heartbeat data making the silences longer — Sora filling the gap with observation where she used to fill it with clinical measurement, and observation was slower, less precise, more dependent on the interpretation that she'd spent years training herself to replace with data.
"The Mapo-gu break," she said.
Minho stopped chewing. Set down the kimbap. His hands — both functioning, both temporary, both borrowed time — rested on his thighs.
"It was a C-rank. Standard mineral formations. Nothing special. But the constructs carried organic components — same kind as Yongsan. The initial response team didn't know what they were looking at. Their assessment classified the organic material as cosmetic — decorative growth on the mineral structure. Nobody checked for airborne biological output until the contamination was already in the residential buildings."
"Nobody checked because nobody knew what to check for."
"Nobody knew because the only person who'd encountered hybrid dungeon biology was lying in a bed in Dohyun's medical wing."
The statement hung between them. Not accusation. Not comfort. The clinical presentation of a fact that both of them had calculated independently and whose conclusion was the same: Sora's absence had cost. The Life Drain that saved one building had incapacitated the only diagnostic capability that could have prevented the next contamination.
"Two kids." Minho's voice compressed. The burst rhythm tightening to the frequency that indicated the fortress was under stress from inside. "Seven and nine. Both recovering. Both going to be fine. But—"
"But they wouldn't have been in the ICU if I'd been functional."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"It's what you were calculating."
Minho met her eyes. Without her diagnostic modality, his gaze was just a gaze — brown eyes in a face whose micro-expressions she had to interpret instead of measure, the pupils at a dilation she couldn't quantify, the blood flow in the capillary bed invisible to her baseline visual acuity.
"I was calculating whether you'd have used Life Drain again. At Mapo-gu. If you'd been there. If the contamination had hit a residential building with kids inside." He picked up the kimbap. "And I think we both know the answer."
She would have. The realization wasn't new — it had arrived during the hours of ceiling-staring between Hana's treatment updates, forming in the clinical assessment framework that operated without her modality's data input. If the situation recurred — contamination in a civilian structure, lives at risk, her conventional capabilities insufficient — she would activate Life Drain again. She would absorb the dungeon's biology and convert it to decontamination energy and her channels would overload and she'd spend another three days on a bed while the next break produced casualties that her absence couldn't prevent.
The pattern was recursive. Save lives, destroy capability, miss the next emergency, save lives again at a higher cost. The clinical term for a system that consumed itself to function was autoimmune disorder. The body attacking its own tissue because the defensive response couldn't distinguish between the threat and the host.
"You came here to deliver kimbap," Sora said.
"I came here to tell you that Hana's treatments are holding and the team is functional and the guild is operational without you." He stood. Collected the kimbap packaging. The deliberate motions of a man who'd learned to be careful with his hands. "And to tell you that being without you sucks. But the guild survives it. So maybe the next time a building needs its air cleaned, you could let someone else figure it out."
"There wasn't anyone else."
"There's always someone else. The someone else is just slower. Less effective. Makes more mistakes." He paused at the doorway. "But the someone else is still standing the next day."
He left. The medical wing settled into the silence that his presence had displaced. Sora listened to the building — the HVAC system cycling, Hana's footsteps in the adjacent room, the muffled rhythm of a guild operating under dual surveillance with its primary asset bedridden and its legal strategy measured in thirty-day increments.
She reached for the water glass. The tremor made the reach take two attempts. The fingers closed on the third.
---
The meeting happened on day seven.
Not in a laundromat. Not in the guild's common area. Not in any location that the enhanced surveillance protocol's dual-observer coverage could monitor without the subject's active cooperation in being observed.
Dohyun arranged it. The guild master whose formal register never broke and whose institutional maneuvering operated at frequencies that compliance divisions couldn't detect deployed a mechanism that Sora's damaged modalities couldn't assess but whose result was: at 2200 on the seventh day, she was sitting on a park bench in Bukhansan's lower trail with a scarf over the lower half of her face and a winter coat that belonged to Hana and an aching in her mana channels that the thirty-minute walk from the guild had aggravated.
Eunji arrived eleven minutes late. The researcher approached the bench from the trail's eastern spur with the hurried stride of a person whose relationship with punctuality was adversarial. Glasses catching the park's security lighting. Hands in her pockets. No tablet, no devices, no recording equipment that Sora's non-functional diagnostic modality couldn't detect anyway but whose absence Eunji presumably intended as a gesture of trust or an acknowledgment that trust had been spent and something else had replaced it.
She sat on the opposite end of the bench. The gap between them: one meter. The distance of two people who had shared information and watched the information become a weapon and were now meeting to discuss whether the next exchange would produce the same damage.
"You look terrible," Eunji said. Fast. The researcher's verbal cadence that accelerated under stress, the sentences pushing against each other like commuters in a subway car. "The channel overload — hypothetically, I've been reading the theoretical literature on foreign energy processing in modified mana architectures, not that I've seen your specific case file obviously, but the theoretical framework suggests that Life Drain's vitality conversion in channels that have undergone autonomous remodeling would produce a cascade failure pattern that — you used it on the dungeon's biological network. The organic material in the ventilation system."
"You already know that."
"I know what Jungsoo documented. I know what the council reviewed. I know the official narrative, which is that you deployed a Class-5 restricted ability in a civilian structure and the deployment resulted in channel overload." Eunji's glasses caught the light as she turned. "I also know that the biological network you encountered in that ventilation system was not random contamination."
"Your message said architecture."
"Because that's what it was. The organic material didn't just drift into the HVAC system and settle. It colonized. It established metabolic connections with the building's power grid. It organized a biological network that drew energy from the infrastructure and used it to sustain and expand its growth." Eunji spoke the way she always spoke about data — fast, precise, the excitement of pattern recognition overriding the social filters that regulated how much information a person should deliver before confirming the recipient could process it. "That's not contamination. That's construction. The dungeon's biology was building something inside the building."
The park's November air pressed against them. Seoul's skyline beyond the treeline — the lights of a city that contained dungeon portals and institutional machinery and compliance divisions and two women on a bench discussing the possibility that the dungeons were doing something no one had accounted for.
"You leaked my data to the council."
Eunji stopped. The verbal acceleration hitting a wall. Her hands came out of her pockets — the nervous gesture, the glasses adjustment, the physical tic that Sora had cataloged in their first meeting as the researcher's involuntary response to direct confrontation.
"I submitted my research findings through the required academic channels. The council accessed them through the standard review process." Her voice dropped out of the data-delivery mode into something lower, flatter. "I didn't choose for the findings to be used against you. The academic submission protocol routes through the council's oversight committee. I knew the routing existed. I submitted anyway because the research was — because I believed the scientific community needed—" She stopped again. The glasses adjustment. Twice in four seconds. "I knew and I submitted anyway."
"Why."
"Because the data showed that your class mutation follows a pattern consistent with four other documented cases from 2006 — all of which ended in subject fatality. The council needed to know that the Calamity classification carries a mortality risk that your current medical monitoring isn't tracking." Eunji's voice carried the specific register of a person attempting to justify an action whose justification she no longer fully believed. "I thought the information would result in better medical support. Increased monitoring. Resources directed toward understanding the mutation's progression. Instead—"
"Instead they weaponized it."
"Instead they used the mortality data to argue that you're a degenerative case. That the Calamity classification is itself a terminal condition. That restricting your activity is — in their framework — palliative care." Eunji's hands returned to her pockets. The warmth-seeking or the self-containment. "They took research that says 'she might die' and turned it into justification for 'so make sure she can't do anything before she does.'"
The bench held them. The meter of gap between their positions. The night air carrying the scent of pine and frozen earth and the distant hum of a city whose dungeons were learning architecture.
"The 2006 cases," Sora said. "The four fatalities. You mentioned them in your message routing — the historical footnote about the healer fatality spike."
"Fifty-three high-power healers died in 2006. Four of them were classified anomalies — healers whose abilities mutated under extreme stress conditions. The official cause of death for all four: channel destabilization. The channels widened beyond structural tolerance and collapsed." Eunji paused. The verbal speed dropping to measured. "Your channels are widening. The autonomous remodeling that the System classified as adaptation — the channels are expanding their throughput capacity. In the 2006 cases, the expansion continued until the channel walls couldn't sustain their own structure."
"You're telling me my channels will collapse."
"I'm telling you that four people with a similar mutation died from channel collapse. I'm telling you that the timeline between onset of autonomous remodeling and structural failure was, in those cases, eight to fourteen months." She turned on the bench. The full rotation, facing Sora directly, the research-mode orientation that Eunji adopted when the data was more important than the social dynamics of the conversation. "I'm also telling you that those four cases occurred before the System was modified. Before the Class Rebalancing Initiative. Before the healer class was deliberately suppressed. The channels that collapsed in 2006 were operating under the original System parameters — parameters that may have been causing the expansion to occur without the structural reinforcement that the current System provides."
"You're saying the old System killed them."
"I'm saying the old System expanded their channels without reinforcing them. The suppression update changed the healer class parameters. Reduced throughput. Narrowed channels. But it also — theoretically, hypothetically, this is speculative — added structural constraints that function as channel reinforcement. The suppression didn't just weaken healers. It made the channel architecture more stable."
The implication landed in Sora's damaged channels with the weight of a diagnosis that reframed every symptom she'd been tracking. The autonomous remodeling. The widening channels. The adaptation that the System had classified with a directive she'd read in a dark storage room.
*Survive.*
Not just a command. An engineering specification. The System was reinforcing her channels as it expanded them — the suppression-era constraints functioning as scaffolding that prevented the expansion from exceeding structural tolerance. The 2006 healers had expanded without scaffolding. Their channels had grown without support. They'd collapsed.
Sora's channels were growing with support. The tremor — the adaptation cycle — was the reinforcement process. The twenty-four-second vibration that she'd been tracking for weeks wasn't damage. It was construction. The channel walls vibrating at the frequency that promoted structural integration, the same way bones vibrate under load to stimulate density growth.
"The dungeon biology," Sora said. "The architecture in the ventilation system. You said you wanted to discuss who taught the dungeons how to build."
"Thirty years." Eunji's speed returned. The excitement overriding the restraint. "I've been tracking dungeon ecology patterns for six years, building on research that my predecessor compiled over twenty-four. The organic components in dungeon constructs have been present since the first recorded portals. But they were simple — biological adhesive, metabolic tissue, nothing more complex than a fungal network. In the last three years, the organic architecture has been accelerating. More complex structures. More organized metabolic networks. The Yongsan hybrid constructs weren't just carrying organic material. They were carrying biological computing systems. Neural analogs. The organic tissue between the mineral plates wasn't connective — it was processing."
"The constructs were thinking."
"The constructs were executing. The thinking was happening somewhere else. The biological network in the ventilation system — the one you drained — that was a relay node. A communication hub. The dungeon wasn't just releasing contamination into the building. It was extending its nervous system into the city's infrastructure." Eunji's hands were out of her pockets again. Gesturing. The researcher in full data-presentation mode, the social awareness stripped away by the significance of the pattern. "And here's the part the council doesn't want you to know. This isn't happening at one dungeon. The organic architecture evolution is occurring at every high-rank portal in Korea. Simultaneously. At the same rate. As if—"
"As if they're receiving the same instructions."
"As if they're being taught."
The park's security light hummed overhead. The pine trees stood in the November dark with the patient geometry of organisms that had been growing for decades without anyone asking who designed their architecture. Seoul's skyline glittered beyond the ridge.
"The council knows," Sora said. Not a question.
"The council has the same data I do. They've had it for eighteen months. The organic evolution reports were submitted through the standard research channels by three separate investigation teams. The council reviewed the findings, classified them, and directed all three teams to cease independent analysis and route their data through a centralized assessment program."
"A centralized program they control."
"A centralized program that hasn't published a single finding in eighteen months." Eunji's voice dropped. The excitement giving way to something colder. "They're not studying the evolution. They're containing the information about it. The same way they contain you. The same institutional machinery. The same compliance framework. Documentation as suppression."
The bench. The park. The cold. Two women sitting in a darkness that the Association's compliance division couldn't monitor because the guild master whose formal register concealed an institutional strategist had arranged the meeting through channels that predated the Bureau's existence.
"Why are you telling me this." Sora's voice carried the flat register of a person asking a question whose answer she'd already diagnosed. "You submitted research that destroyed my operational status. You knew the routing. You submitted anyway. Now you're offering information that contradicts the council's position. What changed."
Eunji was quiet for four seconds. The longest silence Sora had observed from the researcher — the verbal processor encountering input that required more cycles than her output-first architecture normally allocated.
"My brother was assigned to a suicide squad in Incheon last month. E-rank healer. Twenty-two years old. His first dungeon deployment is scheduled for January." She pushed her glasses up. The gesture slow this time. Deliberate. Not the nervous tic but the conscious action. "The council's suppression of the organic evolution data means the response teams entering those dungeons don't know what they're walking into. The constructs are more organized. More adaptive. More dangerous than the current threat assessments indicate. And the people going in first — the E-rank support. The healers whose channels are too narrow to fight and too weak to run — they'll encounter biology that nobody prepared them for."
"Because the council classified the research."
"Because the council decided that the information about the dungeons getting smarter was more dangerous to their authority than the dungeons getting smarter was to the people entering them." Eunji's voice hit the flat register that Sora recognized as the researcher's equivalent of her own clinical remove — the detachment that scientists adopted when the data pointed to conclusions that the emotional framework couldn't contain. "I submitted your data because I believed in the system. The academic channels. The review process. The institutional framework that was supposed to use research to save lives. I was wrong about the system the same way you were wrong about the Association."
The parallel was precise. Chapter twenty-five: Sora learning that the Association was actively hostile, not merely bureaucratic. Now Eunji, arriving at the same diagnosis through different symptoms. The institution that classified saving lives as a violation. The institution that classified research as a threat. The same autoimmune disorder: the system attacking its own tissue because the defensive response couldn't distinguish between protection and suppression.
"What do you want from me," Sora said.
"I want to study the Yongsan contamination data. Your diagnostic readings from the organic network. The data your modality generated while you were processing the Life Drain — the biological architecture's structural patterns, the metabolic connections, the neural analogs. That data doesn't exist anywhere else. Phoenix didn't collect it. The Bureau's documentation covers the tactical events, not the biology. You're the only person who read the dungeon's nervous system from the inside."
"My modalities are offline."
"The data is in your clinical memory. The diagnostic modality processes and stores everything it scans — every biological pattern, every mana signature, every structural assessment. When your channels recover and your modality comes back online, the Yongsan data will be there. It's what you observed. It's part of you."
"And you want it."
"I want to use it to understand what the dungeons are building. Before my brother walks into a portal in January that contains something the current assessments don't predict." Eunji stood. The park bench releasing her weight. She looked down at Sora with the expression that the researcher wore when the data was complete and the conclusion was pending. "I betrayed your trust. I'm not asking you to trust me again. I'm asking you to give me data that might keep a twenty-two-year-old healer alive."
The request was clinical. Precise. Stripped of sentimentality and wrapped in the specific kind of selfishness that Sora's diagnostic framework classified as honest — the researcher wanting something for herself, for her brother, and offering the thing Sora wanted in exchange. Not trust. Information. The currency that both of them valued more than the institutional framework that had punished them for pursuing it.
"When my modalities recover," Sora said. "Not before."
"I'll wait." Eunji stepped back from the bench. The trail's eastern spur behind her, the descent to the park's entrance, the return to the city where the dungeons were extending their nervous systems into the infrastructure and the council was filing the evidence into classified storage and the compliance division was scheduling daily check-ins for the healer whose diagnostic capability was the only instrument that had read the architecture from the inside.
"Eunji."
The researcher paused. Half-turned. The glasses catching the security light.
"If I give you the data and you submit it through your academic channels, the council will classify it and the information will disappear into the same centralized program. Same result."
"I know."
"So what's the plan."
Eunji's expression produced the configuration that Sora's civilian-grade observation interpreted as the specific combination of determination and something that might have been the researcher's version of dark humor — the face of a scientist who had reached a conclusion that the methodology didn't support but the data demanded.
"The plan is we don't submit through channels." The words fast. Committed. The acceleration of a person driving past the speed limit because the destination mattered more than the traffic laws. "The plan is we find someone who can act on the data without the council's permission. Someone whose operational authority doesn't route through the Association's compliance framework."
"There's no one whose authority doesn't route through the Association."
"There's the guild that the Association is currently trying to suppress. Run by a guild master with a three-year timeline who's building something that has to outlast him. Staffed by a team that just held a B-rank break with C-rank resources for seven hours without institutional support." Eunji met her eyes. "The council can classify research. They can restrict hunters. They can double the surveillance and revoke the loopholes and file every rescue as a violation. But they can't classify a dungeon break that's already happening. And they can't restrict a response that saves lives in real time."
"That's not a plan. That's a philosophy."
"Plans come later. Right now I need the data and you need to heal." Eunji turned to the trail. Paused. One more thing — there was always one more thing with Eunji, the researcher whose output exceeded her filter capacity. "The channel reinforcement. The System-assisted remodeling. It's not just making your channels bigger. It's making them resilient against foreign energy processing. The Life Drain overload damaged you because your channels were mid-renovation. When the remodeling completes—"
"When the remodeling completes, Life Drain won't overload the system."
"Theoretically."
"Hypothetically."
"Speculatively." The ghost of something on Eunji's face. Not the researcher's analytical detachment. Something more human. Briefer. "Recover fast, Sora."
She disappeared down the trail. The footsteps fading into the pine-scented dark, the researcher returning to the city where her brother was training for a dungeon he didn't understand and the council was filing information into vaults and the compliance division was scheduling its 0800 check-in for a healer whose channels were rebuilding themselves according to specifications that the System had set and the institution couldn't classify.
Sora sat on the bench. Bukhansan's lower ridge above her, the mountain's mass pressing against the Seoul skyline like a body leaning into a wound. Her hands rested on her knees. The tremor ran through them — arrhythmic still, damage-pattern, but underneath it, if she concentrated, if she let her awareness sink below the pain and the inflammatory noise and the burnt-channel static, she could feel something else.
The rhythm. Faint. Beneath the damage. The twenty-four-second cycle, still running.
Not the tremor of overloaded channels. The vibration of channels being rebuilt. The frequency that promoted structural integration. The scaffolding that the 2006 healers hadn't had.
The adaptation continuing underneath the injury. The renovation proceeding despite the fire damage. The System's directive operating below the threshold of her conscious awareness, reinforcing the walls that Life Drain had scorched, widening the architecture that the institution wanted to restrict, building something that the council's compliance framework couldn't document because it was happening inside her body at a cellular level and the only instrument that could measure it was the instrument that was currently offline.
*Survive.*
She stood. The park bench released her weight. The walk back to the guild would take thirty minutes and would aggravate her channels and Hana would be awake when she returned and would express her clinical disapproval through the specific configuration of a D-rank healer whose patient had violated bed rest and whose vocabulary for the violation would be simultaneously professional and personal.
Sora walked. The mountain behind her. The city ahead. The tremor in her hands and the rhythm underneath it and the darkness that contained a researcher with data and a guild master with a timeline and a team that had held a line and a child who'd drawn a picture of a woman with glowing hands who made the blue air go away.
The compliance division would be at the guild at 0800. Jimin's smile and Jungsoo's tablet. The dual observation. The institutional machinery converting recovery into documentation and documentation into restriction.
And underneath it all, in the channels that the institution couldn't reach and the Bureau couldn't monitor and the council couldn't classify — something was being built. The architecture of a healer whose body was learning to contain what her power demanded. The renovation that the System had started and the dungeons had tested and the institution couldn't stop.
Seven days since Yongsan. Five since she'd woken. Her channels at forty-five percent and climbing. Her modalities offline but approaching the activation threshold. Her hands shaking with damage that was resolving into something that the tremor's buried rhythm promised would be stronger than what had broken.
The guild's lights were visible from the last turn of the trail. Warm. Fluorescent. Hana's specific color temperature. The medical wing where a bed waited and a treatment schedule ran and a D-rank healer who'd invented decontamination in a parking structure at three in the morning would be standing in the doorway with the expression that said *I noticed you left* and the silence that said *I didn't stop you.*
Sora's feet carried her toward the light. The mountain at her back. The city spread below. The dungeons underneath it, extending their nervous systems through infrastructure that the council had classified and the compliance division had documented and that nobody — nobody except a Calamity-class healer with burned channels and a researcher with a brother and a guild master with a secret — was preparing to fight.
Forty-five percent.
Climbing.
