Chapter 576

Chapter 576: Chapter 576

"Then we move," Satou said. "Quickly. Observe what we can on approach, plan on the move, and accept that Chronus will be prepared to some degree when we arrive."

He looked at Morgana.

"Tell me what you’ll need to do when we get there," he said. "The runes. The gateway."

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They moved through the three miles in forty-five minutes.

Satou could have moved faster — his evolved form could cover three miles of forest in significantly less time. But Morgana moved at the pace of someone who was reading the ambient field continuously as they went, and what she was reading was informing decisions she was making in real time, and having her stop to catch up would cost more than the speed would gain.

So they moved at pace that worked for all three of them, and Satou used the forty-five minutes to think.

The working had seven anchor points — redundant anchoring, Freda’s notes had called it. Her three days of concentrated analysis, built on seventy years of Morgana’s training, had mapped the theoretical structure of a seven-anchor temporal working with the kind of rigor that made her absence from this team feel, right now, like something he should have argued harder to prevent.

He’d read her notes so many times across eight days of travel that specific sections had become available as direct recall. He went through them now, walking north-northeast toward a location that was pulling at his awareness with the clarity of something close and awake.

Seven anchors create redundant structural integrity — the working’s spatial boundary is held at seven independent points simultaneously, each one capable of supporting the full boundary if the others fail. Disrupting one anchor causes the others to compensate. Disrupting several simultaneously in a controlled way causes the compensating mechanism to overload. Disrupting all seven simultaneously, or disrupting the central power source, collapses the working without the cascade sequence of a partial disruption.

The challenge of simultaneous disruption: the anchors are distributed in a rough circle around the central mechanism. Radius approximately half a mile from center. A single being cannot be at all seven positions simultaneously.

Solution options: (a) Multiple beings, coordinated strike on my signal. (b) A working that can propagate disruption outward from a central point simultaneously. (c) Destroy the central power source directly, which bypasses the anchor redundancy entirely by collapsing what the anchors are anchored to.

Option (c) requires reaching the center. The center is where Chronus is.

He’d read those options many times. He kept coming back to option (c) — not because it was simpler, but because it was the one that didn’t require perfect coordination or a secondary working. It required reaching the center, which was difficult and possibly dangerous, but it was direct.

"Morgana," he said, as they moved.

"I’m reading," she said, her attention split between the ambient field and the conversation.

"The teleportation runes. What does it cost you to set them up, and how long does it take?"

She was quiet for a moment, balancing the two demands on her attention.

"The runes themselves take approximately thirty minutes to inscribe correctly," she said. "They don’t require continuous mana once inscribed — they’re passive until activated. The activation requires a specific signal, which I’ll send to Loki’s settlement through a pre-arranged channel." She paused. "Once activated, the runes create a one-way transit point — anyone at Loki’s settlement who steps through the complementary gate arrives at the rune location."

"One-way," Satou said.

"One-way," she confirmed. "Transit in that direction only. For the return, they’d need to use conventional means or I’d need to create a second set of runes." She paused. "But the purpose of the gateway isn’t a return route. The purpose is to allow Loki and whoever he brings to arrive at this location. They’re the backup."

"The backup," Seraphina said. "That implies we’re the primary."

"Yes," Morgana said. "We three go in first. We do what we can. If we can stop the working, we stop it. If we can’t, or if Chronus is more capable than we can manage at half power—" She paused. "We have Loki coming through that gate."

"How far behind would Loki be?" Satou asked.

"The moment I activate the runes and Loki gets the signal — assuming he has people ready to move, which he will, he’s been preparing since Vael’kira — twenty minutes," she said. "Possibly less. He’ll have warriors and his own capabilities and access to whatever he’s had time to prepare in the weeks since the attack."

Satou nodded.

"Then we set the runes before we go in," he said. "Before we’re anywhere near Chronus. Give Loki the maximum lead time."

"Yes," Morgana said. "That’s exactly right. The runes first, then we approach the working."

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They found the outer edge of the working’s visible influence at the three-mile mark — the place where the ambient disturbance went from background texture to something you couldn’t ignore, where the temporal influence was dense enough that the air itself shimmered at the edges of vision in a way that wasn’t optical illusion but wasn’t quite physical either.

The tree canopy above them was wrong in ways that Satou now understood after days inside the boundary. Leaves in impossible combinations of seasonal stages. Branches that had grown in spirals around themselves as if trying to navigate competing time cycles. The light coming through was correct in wavelength but wrong in behavior, casting shadows at slightly the wrong angles as if the sun was in a position it hadn’t reached yet or had already left.

They stopped at the edge of this.

Morgana went to her pack and removed what she needed — chalk composite, specialized in the way that materials Morgana used tended to be specialized, carrying its own magical substrate that she’d been maintaining for years the way one maintained a tool that needed to be reliable when called upon. A stone inscribing tool. A reference document she checked briefly and then set aside, her memory apparently sufficient.

She found a flat stone surface — a granite outcrop at the forest floor, large enough for the inscription and stable enough that the runes would hold.