Two.

The third one had backed away from the first two’s falls, creating distance, which was the sensible response and also the one that gave Damon the clearest read of its positioning. He pursued at a pace that was fast enough to prevent the gap from becoming useful and the exchange that followed was three beats — read, close, find the entry.

Three.

He looked at the front of the cluster.

The resupply had stopped. The Year Three squad that had been managing the cluster’s front edge was finding, for the first time in however long they had been holding this position, that the pressure against them was not being replaced. The cluster’s front demons were dying and nothing was coming through behind them.

He watched the squad push forward.

Then he moved back toward the center.

Elias pointed right before he reached him.

Not a full gesture — barely a shift in his attention, a slight tilt of his head toward the right section that Damon read as a direction rather than a look.

"Year Four squad. Two Grade Fives are pressuring their right flank and pulling their formation apart. Get there before the formation breaks."

Damon changed direction.

The right section was louder than the left had been — more concentrated, the engagement there at a higher pitch, the sounds of a formation under real stress audible before he could see the formation itself. He found the Year Four squad as Elias had described it: a solid unit with two pressure points on its right flank, the Grade Five demons on that side applying coordinated stress that was pulling the squad’s right element out of alignment with the center.

If the right element separated fully, the demons would be inside the formation rather than against it.

He took the furthest Grade Five first — the one that the formation couldn’t reach because closing on it would require abandoning the position it was currently defending. He reached it from an angle that the Year Four students hadn’t created because they had been managing their position rather than moving off it.

The engagement was sharper than the Grade Sixes had been.

The Grade Five read his approach partially, had enough time to set for the contact, and the first exchange was a genuine exchange rather than a clean entry. He took a deflected hit to his forearm guard, the force of it enough to register clearly, and answered it in the second beat with a strike that found the demon’s exposed shoulder joint before it could reset.

The follow-through finished it.

One.

He was already on the second before the Year Four students on the right flank had processed that one of their pressure points had disappeared. The second Grade Five was more aware than the first had been, watching his approach, adjusting its positioning to deny the angle he had used against its partner.

He changed the angle.

It adjusted again.

He changed it a second time.

The demon was fast. Faster than its grade suggested as an average, which meant it was the upper end of the Grade Five band — the kind of demon that got more dangerous when it had information, and it had been watching him for four beats now.

He stopped giving it information.

Instead of the readable approach patterns, he committed to a direct drive — no angle, no feint, just forward at full pace with the blade inline and the intention completely visible.

The demon read it and prepared for a direct defense.

He pulled the strike at the last possible moment and redirected it low, under the prepared defense, and the demon’s guard was in entirely the wrong position to respond before his blade finished the exchange.

Two.

He looked at the Year Four formation.

The right flank had realigned. The students who had been being pulled out of position were back in it, the pressure that had been distorting their formation removed, the squad operating as a unit again rather than a unit and a separated element.

One of the Year Four students looked at him.

He was already leaving.

Back to Elias.

Back to the center.

Elias sent him left again — a different position from the first, a different problem, a Year Five student who was managing three engagements simultaneously and needed one of them addressed before the simultaneous management became impossible.

Then right again. A cluster of Grade Sixes that had packed tightly enough to be more efficient to break at the source than engage at the front.

Then left. A Year Three student who had pushed ahead of their squad position without realizing how far ahead they had pushed, and the space between them and the rest of their squad had demons in it now.

Each time Damon returned to Elias’s position, there was another direction.

Each time the direction was specific and correct — not a general "help over there" but the precise identification of what was needed where, the field awareness that Elias had been running for ninety minutes still functioning, still accurate, still finding the right problems in the right order.

Still straining.

But the straining was more managed now.

Because every time Damon returned and received a direction and went where he was sent, the map’s demands reduced by exactly as much as one capable, mobile, well-directed asset could reduce them. The suppression constructs Elias had been sending to distant positions to manage problems he couldn’t physically reach — fewer of them now, those positions having a different resource available.

Damon.

An hour into his time on the main line, Damon had worked through the field in a pattern that covered more ground than most students managed in a full engagement. He was not the most powerful student on the field — Elias was that, by a margin that was not close. He was not the most technically sophisticated.

But he was present. He was fast. He read what he was sent to read and addressed it and came back and went where he was sent next, and the cumulative effect of that mobility and responsiveness across an engagement that had been running for nearly two hours was something the main line was feeling in its favor.

He finished the fourth demon of his time on this field — a Grade Five leading a small cluster that had been trying to re-establish the resupply pattern he had broken on the left side, apparently sent in from a different angle to replace the function the original group had been providing.

He did not let it re-establish.

The exchange was the longest of the ones on this field — a Grade Five with enough awareness to force him to work for every beat of it, to take two hits to the guard that he answered with three strikes before finding the one that ended it.

He stepped back from it.

Looked at the main field.

Still active. Still demons. But fewer than there had been when he arrived, and fewer than there had been twenty minutes ago. The arithmetic was running. The engagement’s conclusion was not visible yet but its direction was established and had been for a while now.

He looked at his count.

Three Grade Sixes from the left-side cluster and the second resupply attempt.

One Grade Five from the right flank engagement.

One Grade Five from the cluster.

His count was moving.

He looked toward where Daveon’s five-kill lead sat in the back of his awareness.

Five.

He turned back to the field.

Still demons.

Still time.

He looked at Elias who was already pointing.

Without hesitation, he moved to where he was sent.

The count moved.

Not quickly — kills on a field like this were not a production line, and Damon had learned long ago that the difference between a clean, fast engagement and a dangerous one was often the specific amount of attention you were giving to how fast you were moving. He was moving at the pace that the field required, not the pace that the arithmetic preferred.

But the count moved.

He broke a Grade Six cluster on the line’s left section, two demons handled in quick succession before a third forced him into a longer exchange — faster than the others, more defensive in how it used its body, requiring four beats instead of two before he found the entry that ended it.

Three on that engagement.

He was sent right by Elias’s slight head tilt and arrived at a position where a Year Four student was managing a Grade Five that had been running the same feint pattern for three exchanges because it had found a specific window in the Year Four’s guard and was returning to it.

Damon watched the first exchange, identified the window, and closed it from a different angle before the demon could use it a fourth time.

The demon adjusted, lost the pattern it had been relying on, and spent one confused beat looking for a new one.

The Year Four student filled that beat.

Damon moved on.

The count moved.

Elias sent him to the right section again, then back to the center, then far left where a secondary cluster had begun reforming at the horde’s edge.

He broke the cluster, worked back toward center, picked up two more Grade Sixes that had been circling the main line’s edge looking for the kind of isolated target that isolation produced.