Kael didn't have it in him to stay there, not after watching the minimap light up like a funeral pyre. The whole damn map was turning up in flames from the outside, a ring of towering markers that looked almost decorative from here, almost.
Though it didn't look like it was approaching and simply remained far away, the kind of far away that still made your skin crawl because it wasn't distance, it was inevitability.
That, however, will change the following day, and the day after that. Kael didn't need the Tower to spell it out any clearer than it already had. He'd triggered a countdown and a closing net, and now the floor itself was going to start squeezing.
"I have no time to waste," Kael realized the impending doom, and that realization had teeth. It wasn't the abstract fear of dying "sometime." It was the cold, arithmetic panic of a shrinking calendar.
