Chapter 96

• Five percent. Then six. Then, two hours into the sustained defense, seven.
• The Nexus Lock was recovering, thread by thread, anchor by anchor, through the combined work of five teams holding five points and a unified connection that ran between all of them through Kael and Angelica at the Celestial Core. It was slow work — agonizingly, nerve-shredding slow, each percentage point earned through sustained effort across dimensions and through the relentless grinding down of the First's assault by teams that had no reinforcements and no margin for error.
• Kael was aware, with the portion of his mind not occupied by the demands of the unified connection, that this equilibrium was not stable. The First had not committed their full force. They were patient in a way that mortal beings, for whom patience costs time, struggle to comprehend — patient in the way that a geological force is patient, because they experienced time as something that happened to other things rather than to them.