Ervalen walked into the command tent at dawn on the fifth day.
He looked like four days of road — dusty coat, boots that had seen better terrain, the specific tiredness of a man who had been thinking hard the entire time his body was moving. He set nothing down. He didn't ask for food or water. He walked straight to the table where Straze was standing over the tactical maps and said:
"He already knew I was there."
Straze looked up.
"Not when I walked in," Ervalen said. "He knew before that. The gate guard who stopped me in the inner courtyard — that wasn't a standard security check. He was flagged to watch for anyone claiming Macedonian intelligence and bring them straight up." Ervalen pulled out the chair across from the map and sat without being invited. "He set it up. Probably right after he sent the network declaration."
Straze said nothing. He was listening with his whole attention — the focused stillness of a man who could receive bad information without reacting to it until he understood its full shape.
"He's been reading everything available on this garrison," Ervalen continued. "He knew my rank, my ability, the duration of my Brand. He'd assessed your timeline independently. He gave me four sentences and then told me to stop wasting both our time." He paused. "He was right that I was wasting it. The visit confirmed three things I needed confirmed, and then it was done."
Kane was in the corner of the tent, writing. He had the good sense not to speak.
---
"What three things?" Straze said.
"One." Ervalen held up a finger. "The reports are accurate. Not exaggerated — accurate. What he can do is what they said he can do." Second finger. "Two. He's not reactive. He doesn't respond to stimuli the way a person does. You can't pressure him, can't provoke him, can't use his emotional state because he doesn't appear to have one that functions as a lever." Third finger. "Three. He's doing this alone."
Straze's eyes sharpened. "Explain."
"No second. No advisor. No strategist operating alongside him. He's running a fourteen-province empire's administration, an active military intelligence operation, and whatever internal planning he's doing for the next phase — all of it, himself." Ervalen lowered his hand. "He's extraordinary at it. But it's still one mind. One processing point."
The tent was quiet for a moment.
Straze picked up the pen he'd set down when Ervalen walked in and turned it slowly in his hand. "Can he be surprised?"
Ervalen was quiet.
Not hesitating — thinking. Straze recognized the difference.
"Once," Ervalen said. "Maybe once. He's pulling information from every available source, but he's pulling it about things he's already identified as relevant. His intelligence is deep on known variables." He met Straze's eyes. "He might not see something he hasn't thought to look for."
Straze set the pen down.
He smiled.
It was a small thing — barely a shift in the lines of his face — and it lasted approximately two seconds. Kane looked up from his notes. Ervalen, who had served under Straze for three years and had never seen it before, registered it the way you registered a sudden stillness in a storm.
"Then we only need to be right once," Straze said.
He turned to the map.
---
The next fourteen days were the most intensive of Ervalen's military career.
Straze did not sleep. Or if he slept, it happened in intervals that didn't interrupt his visible working hours, which began before dawn and ended after midnight. He moved through the command tent with the contained energy of a man who had found a direction and was allowing himself the momentum of it.
He built in three layers.
The first layer was personnel. Every Rank 4 officer who had committed to the coalition received a specific assignment — not join this unit or report to this position, but a detailed brief on what their specific ability could do in a specific configuration. Straze had been collecting ability assessments since before Ervalen's report. Now he slotted them together like parts of something.
Ervalen watched it take shape and understood, slowly, what Straze was building.
Not an army. An argument. A structured case, made in the language of power, for why a single point of extraordinary force could be reached, held for a specific duration, and exploited.
"You're not trying to overwhelm him," Ervalen said, on the eighth day.
Straze didn't look up from the brief he was annotating. "No."
"You're trying to create a moment."
"One moment," Straze confirmed. "Sustained for long enough to matter."
"How long do you need?"
"Eleven seconds," Straze said, without a trace of humor.
Ervalen stared at him.
"He killed the Emperor in eleven seconds," Straze said. "That's his confident pace against a Rank 4 opponent with no strategic preparation. Against a prepared battlefield with multiple simultaneous pressures — different ability types, overlapping attack vectors, no single pattern to adapt to — that pace changes." He set down the brief. "I don't need to defeat him in that window. I need to damage him. One genuine strike that lands, that costs him something, that proves the model has a gap." He looked at Ervalen. "Because if the model has a gap, it can be widened. And if it can be widened—"
"The next generation of heroes has a target," Ervalen said.
Straze held his gaze. "You're going to be Rank 5 before this is over."
"He said Rank 6," Ervalen said. "In ten years."
"He was probably right." Straze picked up the brief again. "Which means in ten years you'll be the one closing the gap, not me." He turned a page. "Right now I need you to be Rank 4 with perfect execution. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Ervalen said.
"Then go train. I'll call you when the second layer is ready."
---
The second layer was SOLOMON.
The response from the SOLOMON INSTITUTE in Achaemenia arrived on the sixth day — not by courier, but by direct relay-crystal contact, which meant Solomon had been tracking events closely enough to have the frequency ready.
Straze held the crystal and listened.
The Sage King's voice was precise and unhurried — an old voice, not weakened by age but refined by it, the way a blade got lighter and sharper the more you worked it. He was already briefed. He had questions that indicated he'd read every available report and arrived at several conclusions Straze had also reached, which was the most efficient kind of confirmation.
"The fire operates conceptually," Solomon said. "Not elementally. Standard energy resistance is irrelevant."
"I know," Straze said.
"The soul-fire suppression I've been developing for the past three years works on elemental foundations. Against conceptual fire—" A pause. "It buys time. Not much. Perhaps enough."
"How much?"
"In ideal conditions? Four minutes." Another pause. "But I need to be on the field to maintain it. I can't do it remotely."
Straze looked at his map. "I can protect your position."
"I know you can." Solomon's voice was dry. "I'm concerned about what protecting my position costs you operationally."
"Let me worry about that."
"Straze." The voice shifted — still precise, but with an undertone of something that wasn't quite gravity and wasn't quite concern, but occupied the space between them. "I want to be clear about what I'm committing to. I can build a suppression field. I can sustain it for approximately four minutes under sustained assault. What I cannot do is guarantee it will affect him the way we expect it to." A long pause. "He may find a third option."
"He always finds a third option," Straze said. "I'm building for the options I can predict and hoping the ones I can't are slow to arrive."
Silence on the crystal for a moment.
"I'll be at the Prussonian Pass in twelve days," Solomon said.
"Eleven," Straze said.
A sound that might have been a laugh. "Eleven," Solomon agreed. The crystal went quiet.
Kane, who had been listening from the corner, looked up. "The Sage King of Achaemenia is coming here."
"Yes."
"Personally."
"He's the only one who can run the suppression field." Straze set the crystal down. "So yes. Personally."
Kane was quiet for a moment. "If he's wrong about the four minutes—"
"Then we adjust." Straze returned to the map. "It's always been a question of when to adjust, not whether."
---
The third layer was Ervalen.
Not his combat role — that was already planned. Something else. Straze called him in on the fourteenth day, when the rest of the operation was set, and told him to sit and listen.
Ervalen listened.
"Every configuration I've built," Straze said, "is designed to create pressure that forces adaptation. Multiple simultaneous Rank 4 attacks from non-standard vectors. Solomon's suppression field cutting his output. My direct engagement holding his primary attention." He laid it out on the map as he said it — positions, timing, overlapping fields of pressure. Ervalen followed it and recognized the craftsmanship of it. It was, genuinely, the most sophisticated battlefield architecture he had ever seen. "Every piece has a function. Every function has a backup."
"And my function?" Ervalen said.
Straze looked at the map for a moment.
"You are not in the main engagement."
Ervalen went still.
"You're positioned here." Straze indicated a point to the eastern flank — outside the main formation, separate from the pressure configuration. "You observe the entire engagement. You track his adaptation pattern. You identify the moment — if it exists — when his attention is fully occupied by the suppression field and the simultaneous pressure vectors."
"And then?"
"You come from outside the pattern," Straze said. "From the angle he hasn't needed to account for because everything inside the formation has been accountable." He looked at Ervalen. "You get one shot. One full-output DIVINE LANCE strike, from maximum possible distance, at the moment of maximum saturation."
Ervalen stared at the map.
"That's not a plan to win," he said slowly.
"No," Straze agreed.
"It's a plan to prove something can land."
"Yes."
Ervalen looked at the position on the map. Outside the main formation. Observer. One shot.
"You're not expecting to defeat him," Ervalen said. Not accusation. Understanding.
"I'm expecting to discover whether he can be marked," Straze said. "Whether the suppression field creates a real gap or a theoretical one. Whether one full-output Rank 4 strike from an unexpected angle, at the right moment, actually reaches him." He held Ervalen's gaze. "If it does — if you land it, even partially — we know the model is breakable. We know what direction to build in."
"And if I don't land it?"
"Then we know that too, and we build differently."
Ervalen was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the map — at his position, separate and eastern, the single variable outside the main configuration. The one angle Straze was gambling might not be accounted for.
"He told me in ten years I'd be Rank 6," Ervalen said.
"He was calculating your potential," Straze said. "He wasn't planning for it. He looked at you and saw a Rank 4 with a trajectory. He didn't look at you and think: this one will be the problem." A pause. "That's the gap."
Ervalen's jaw tightened.
Not anger. Something more precise than that — the sensation of a thing clarifying. Of understanding what role you were being asked to play and choosing, deliberately, to play it well.
"He'll see me coming," Ervalen said.
"Probably," Straze said. "But he'll be busy."
---
On the fifteenth morning, Solomon arrived.
He was older than Ervalen expected — late sixties, white-blond hair, violet eyes behind an expression of absolute attentive calm. He wore traveling clothes that had seen serious distance. He carried no weapon. The living rune-script that scrolled along his forearms was the only visible indication of what he was.
He walked into the command tent, looked at the map, looked at Straze.
"You've built something," Solomon said.
"Yes," Straze said.
Solomon studied the map for a long time. His eyes moved across the positions slowly, tracking the logic.
"He'll break the suppression field," Solomon said.
"How long?"
"Four minutes. Maybe three and a half."
"It only needs to hold for two," Straze said.
Solomon looked at him.
"Two minutes of suppression," Straze said. "Thirty seconds of simultaneous pressure from eight Rank 4 vectors. And one shot from outside the pattern."
"One shot." Solomon's eyes moved to Ervalen, standing at the edge of the tent. He looked at him the way he had looked at the map — with that full, complete attention. "You're the shot."
"Yes," Ervalen said.
Solomon looked back at Straze. "And if the shot lands?"
"Then we know," Straze said. "And we tell everyone who comes after us exactly where to aim."
Solomon was quiet.
Then he unclasped his traveling coat and set it on the back of a chair and began rolling up his sleeves, the living rune-script brightening as he did.
"Show me the deployment layout," he said.
Straze turned to the map.
For the next six hours, in the cold Prussonian morning, three people built a trap for something that didn't know it could be caught.
Outside, the army waited.
---
Three hundred kilometers south, in an administrative office in Byzantium, a white-haired man reviewed a grain surplus report and noted, without particular emotion, that the Macedonian garrison had gone quiet.
Quiet meant building.
He made a note. Turned the page.
He would address it when it was ready.