Eighteen hours after the five-front strike, the Alliance hit back—not with polish, but with the kind of feral coordination that only shows up when pride has been stripped away. Inside the forward command trailer outside Pyronis territory, the map was an angry scrawl of red arrows and pulsing hazard bands.
"They've triggered their emergency playbook," Viktor said, the Umbrythm lattice throwing fresh intercepts onto the wall. "Ashford's pushing distributed ecological attacks through farm co-ops we missed. Steele's turning projects into mobile fortifications. Cross has overridden his own safety rails—temporal distortions around three labs and counting."
They hadn't expected to be fighting for survival within a day. They'd expected to buy time. They were improvising with real teeth.
"Residual capacity?" I asked, though the numbers were already sliding into place.
