I spread my hands over Percy’s notebook like a general surveying a battlefield, which was a comparison I found privately hilarious because three months ago I’d been an Unmarked kid whose most dangerous tactical decision involved choosing between instant ramen flavors.

"The original teams treated this like a siege," I said. "Four squads rotating breach attempts through predictable entry points, each one getting displaced the moment they entered the Villain’s sight line. They were playing his game on his terms."

"Obviously," Camille said without looking up from her tablet.

"So we don’t play his game. We don’t breach at all."

That got her attention. Her brown eyes lifted from the screen and found mine with the specific intensity of someone who had just heard something wrong and wanted to confirm it was as wrong as she thought before committing to dismantling it.

"You don’t breach," she repeated flatly.

"We don’t breach. We deny." I pointed at Percy’s floor plan. "His Aspect requires line of sight. Every window, every doorway, every open corridor is a firing lane for displacement. So we remove the firing lanes. We seal the building."

Percy’s pen stopped. Felicity leaned forward in her chair.

"Think about it," I continued, warming to my own brilliance in the specific way that usually preceded someone telling me I was wrong. "If we block every window on the ground floor, barricade every external door, and eliminate every sight line from the Villain’s documented positions on the third floor to any point outside the building, his Aspect becomes useless against our approach. He can’t swap what he can’t see."

Felicity’s eyes went wide with the particular brightness of someone who had just heard something that sounded incredibly smart and was already composing the compliment.

"That’s actually kind of genius," she said.

"It’s not genius, it’s environmental denial. Dravid literally covered this concept in his first lecture. Remove the conditions that enable the threat and the threat neutralizes itself." I was on a roll now. The words came out smooth and confident in the register that Diane had taught me to use when selling an idea to a room full of people who hadn’t decided whether to buy yet.

"We send a team to the parking structure, which Percy’s blind spots confirm has no sight lines to the third floor. We use Aspects to block every window from the outside. Then we send a second team through the maintenance corridors on the ground floor to seal the interior sight lines on the first and second floors. By the time we’re done, the Villain is operating in a box with no visual access to anything beyond his own floor."

"And then?" Camille asked. Her tone hadn’t changed. Still flat. Still waiting.

"And then we send Percy through the service elevator shaft on the east side. It’s one of his blind spots. No line of sight from any documented position. Percy runs Analyze on the floor, identifies exactly where the Villain and all seventeen hostages are positioned, and feeds that information back to us in real time. We breach from below through the floor using structural disruption, which bypasses every door and window the Villain is monitoring, and extract hostages through the same route."

I sat back in my chair with the particular satisfaction of someone who had just solved a problem that four licensed Hero teams couldn’t figure out in six hours.

"Questions?"

Percy’s pen hadn’t moved. He was staring at his own floor plan with the unfocused eyes that meant Analyze was processing something at a speed his mouth couldn’t match.

"Oh, that’s so good," Felicity said. She actually clapped her hands together once, a quick little pop of enthusiasm that drew a glance from Maribelle’s group two rows over. "The environmental denial thing is straight out of Dravid’s lecture. Steele will love that we’re cross-referencing curriculum."

"Steele will love that we have a plan that doesn’t involve charging through the front door and getting teleported into a wall," I corrected. "The cross-referencing is just a bonus."

Felicity grinned and bumped her shoulder against mine. The contact lasted about half a second longer than casual friendship required, but I’d stopped tracking Felicity’s contact duration because the numbers kept climbing and the data was making my life worse.

Camille hadn’t smiled. Camille hadn’t clapped. Camille was looking at my plan the way her Precision Read looked at stress fractures in load-bearing walls, which was to say she was identifying exactly where the whole thing was going to collapse.

"You’re wrong," she said.

The two words landed on the table between us with the weight of a bag of concrete dropped from chest height. Felicity’s enthusiasm cooled by several visible degrees. Percy’s pen started moving again, which was either agreement with Camille or preemptive documentation of my public humiliation.

"About which part?" I asked, keeping my voice level.

"The important part." Camille set her tablet down and leaned forward. The shift brought her closer to the center of the group and incidentally closer to me, which I noticed because my brain never stopped noticing proximity to Camille regardless of how many parameters she established about maintaining professional boundaries. "You said we seal the building to deny the Villain visual access. Block windows. Barricade doors. Eliminate sight lines."

"That’s the plan, yes."

"And what happens to the seventeen hostages when you seal every exit from a building that contains a Villain with a combat-grade Aspect and no remaining escape routes?"

The question sat in the air between us.

I opened my mouth.

I closed my mouth.

Camille watched this process with the particular patience of someone who had already won the argument and was simply waiting for the other party to realize it.

"You just locked seventeen civilians in a box with the threat," she said. "Your environmental denial strategy removes the Villain’s ability to project his Aspect outward. Great. It also removes every evacuation pathway that those seventeen people would need if the situation escalates. If your breach from below goes wrong, if the Villain panics, if anything deviates from your plan by even five percent, you have seventeen people trapped in a sealed building with someone who can rearrange the physical positions of everything in his visual range."

She picked up her tablet and pulled up the incident timeline. "The original Hero teams failed because they couldn’t coordinate. Your plan fails because you forgot the civilians exist as anything other than extraction objectives. You’re treating them like packages that need to be collected and moved to a safe zone. They’re not packages. They’re people who can panic, who can run, who can open doors you sealed and reintroduce sight lines you eliminated."