To Dean Godsthorn, this new update was barely an inconvenience.

He could walk out to meet it himself, and the horde would cease to exist within minutes, and he would not need to draw on anything close to his full capability to manage it.

The barriers that protected the academy grounds—ancient, layered, maintained continuously since the institution’s founding—did not need to be raised for something at this scale.

They existed for contingencies far beyond what a demon horde such as this one represented. Like what had happened months ago although they hadn’t managed to use it even then.

He could end this without effort.

He considered that option for exactly as long as it took to dismiss it, because dismissing it was the correct response and had been the correct response for every similar report that had come through this door over the years.

What ElderGlow’s students needed was not protection from a threat at this scale.

They needed experience with it.

Godsthorn stood.

The motion was unhurried—everything about him was unhurried, the deliberate economy of someone who had stopped needing to demonstrate urgency through physical performance centuries ago—but the room’s attention followed him completely.

"Gather the students," he said. "Year Three through Year Five."

Maren looked up from her notes. "All of them?"

"All of them."

"Dean, the Year Threes—" Calbreth started, then stopped, recalculating something. "You’re sending them out."

"I am."

"Against this?"

Godsthorn’s expression did not change. "A horde of this size, approaching at this speed, with this much advance warning, is precisely the kind of engagement our students should be facing under supervision rather than encountering for the first time without it."

He moved toward the door as he spoke, the instructors rising from the table and falling into step behind him with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before, even if not at this exact scale.

"The Year Threes are Silver Rank," Maren said, keeping pace. "Most of them. A handful of Gold among the senior cohort."

"I’m aware of their rankings, Instructor."

"A horde this size will include demons that exceed Silver capability individually. Possibly Gold, depending on what’s leading it."

"Then they will learn what exceeding their capability looks like, in a controlled context, with senior students and instructors present to manage the engagement." Godsthorn’s pace did not change as they moved through the corridor outside the meeting hall, the late evening light filtering through the high windows of the academy’s central building in long, angled bars.

Then he continued. "There is a considerable difference between a Year Three student encountering something beyond them for the first time in a controlled deployment against a known, bounded threat, and that same student encountering it for the first time in the field, alone, with no support and no instructor present to intervene."

"You want them to feel it," Calbreth said. Not a question.

"I want them to understand it. Feeling it is part of understanding it." Godsthorn glanced toward him briefly. "Fear that is encountered for the first time in a survivable context becomes useful. Fear encountered for the first time when survival is genuinely uncertain becomes paralysis. I would prefer our students learn the difference here, where we can manage the outcome, rather than in the field, where we cannot."

They reached the central courtyard.

The academy’s bell was already active—Maren had signaled ahead through the runner network before they had even left the meeting hall, the particular advantage of staff who had worked together long enough to anticipate what came next without needing instruction.

The deep, resonant tone of the assembly bell rolled across the grounds, the sound carrying through every building and training yard within the academy’s perimeter.

Students began emerging.

Not in chaos—ElderGlow’s drills had been thorough enough, repeated often enough, that the emergence had the quality of practiced movement rather than panic.

Year Threes moved from their dormitories and training halls toward the central courtyard with the particular nervous energy of students who recognized the assembly bell’s pattern and understood, somewhere in the back of their minds, what it might mean.

Year Fours moved with more composure, having been through this before. Year Fives moved with the calm of students who were close enough to graduation that this kind of deployment had become almost routine.

Within minutes, the courtyard held several hundred students, organized loosely by year and cohort, the noise of their gathering settling quickly into something more ordered as instructors moved through the crowd directing positions.

Godsthorn stood at the edge of the gathering, watching.

He did not need to address them at length. The instructors would handle the briefing—the specifics of the horde’s composition as the reports continued to refine, the deployment formation, the senior students who would lead each squad, the instructors who would accompany them.

Godsthorn’s role in this part of the process was largely presence. The students fought better when they knew he was aware of what they were doing, even when—especially when—he was not the one fighting alongside them.

He thought about the barriers.

The academy’s defensive array was old enough and powerful enough that raising it for something at this scale would have been, in its way, an insult to the threat’s actual significance—the equivalent of bringing overwhelming force to bear on something that did not require it, which communicated nothing useful to the students about what they were facing.

The barriers would remain down.

The grounds themselves did not need protection. What needed attention was the deployment itself—several hundred students, organized into squads, moving out to meet a horde that was, by every reasonable measure, within the academy’s collective capability to handle even without his direct involvement.

He looked toward the Array Chamber.

The teleportation arrays housed there were among the academy’s oldest functional constructs—built into the foundation of the building itself, maintained through generations of mages whose specific role was to keep the arrays calibrated and operational. Their range was significant.

Their speed was instantaneous. A squad standing in the courtyard now could be standing miles outside the city, at the projected interception point with the horde, within seconds of the arrays activating.

"Instructor Calbreth," he said.

Calbreth turned. "Dean."

"You’ll lead the senior cohort along with a few other instructors. Year Five primarily, with Year Four squad leads accompanying for command experience." He glanced toward the gathering crowd, the organization already taking shape under the other instructors’ direction. "The Year Threes deploy in the second wave, behind the senior squads, with full instructor coverage."

"Interception point?"

"The watch stations will refine it as the horde’s path becomes clearer. The arrays can adjust the deployment coordinates in real time if needed."

Calbreth nodded once, the brief acknowledgment of someone who had received exactly the information he needed and nothing extraneous, and moved off toward the senior cohort.

Godsthorn remained where he was.

The courtyard’s organization continued around him—the particular controlled motion of an institution executing a drill it had executed many times before, students finding their squads, instructors confirming assignments, the low murmur of conversation that came from young people who were nervous but trying not to show it too obviously in front of their peers.

He thought, briefly, about the broader picture.

The war was not going to be won by hordes of this size being intercepted near training academies. Everyone in this courtyard understood that, even the youngest of them. The real engagements—the ones that mattered, the ones that would determine the actual course of the conflict—were happening elsewhere, at scales and intensities that made tonight’s deployment look like exactly what it was.

Practice.

But practice mattered.

Every student who walked through the Array Chamber tonight and emerged on the other side of it to face something real, however manageable that something was in the broader context, would carry that experience forward. Would be slightly more prepared for the next one. Would, eventually, be among the people fighting the engagements that actually mattered.

That was the function ElderGlow served.

Not to win the war directly.

To produce the people who would.

"Dean." Maren had approached while he was thinking, her own preparations apparently complete. "The squads are formed. Calbreth’s cohort is ready to deploy."

Godsthorn nodded.

"Send them."

Maren moved toward the Array Chamber, and within moments the courtyard’s atmosphere shifted—the particular quality of anticipation that preceded an array activation, the air around the chamber’s entrance beginning to carry the faint resonance of ancient constructs preparing to do what they had been built to do.

Godsthorn watched the senior cohort move toward the chamber in organized ranks.

Behind them, the Year Threes waited their turn, the nervous energy in their section of the courtyard not quite hidden despite their best efforts.

He thought, distantly, of how many of these students he had watched go through this exact sequence over the years. How many had gone on to become instructors themselves, Dunters, mercenaries, the people who held the lines that the war had drawn across the world.

How many more would, after tonight.

Woooooong~

The arrays activated.

The senior cohort vanished from the courtyard in the particular instant flash that teleportation arrays produced, the air where they had stood rippling once before settling back to stillness.

Somewhere, miles outside the city, they were already arriving.

Godsthorn turned toward the Year Three section.

It was their turn next.