The third lumbar vertebra shifted against the disk with a sound like crushed glass.
Harsk Fenward did not pause. He adjusted his weight to the right leg, accepting the sharp, electric spike of pain radiating down his sciatic nerve, and stepped completely silently over the buried rebar.
Target structure. Thirty paces. Wind favorable.
He was nearly nine hundred years old. For most of that time, the Sovereign's Faith Point regeneration had kept his gnoll physiology at peak tactical efficiency. But the cull had broken the math. Zephyr's 0.7-second gap in the Eternal Forge had starved the grid to forge fanaticism, and the Heroes had paid the physical price. Harsk's regeneration had slowed to a crawl. The damage of the last thirty-five years of constant, high-lethality deployments had accumulated in his joints, in his ligaments, in the slow, grinding decay of his own architecture.
He moved through the ash of Sector 9 like a shade, but he felt like a corpse.
