Helga's eyes locked onto Reidar. "And you will certainly join the war, I get it." She then paused to look at him. "But will you do the same for us and help us get stronger if we join?"

"If you help defend this place, yes," Reidar said. "I need fighters who can hold their own against the War Hounds. You need levels. It's a fair trade."

Aldric straightened. The lines around his eyes deepened as he studied Reidar, judging the younger man's reasons with the caution of someone who had seen too much betrayal in this new world.

"But why are you doing this? What makes you risk everything for a town that's not even your own?" Reidar's gaze drifted toward the window.

"For my family," he said. "My parents are here…" He paused, collecting himself.

That made things much clearer. "The Sun Chasers will stand with you then. We didn't come all this way to hide. If the monsters are not the only threat to our survival, then we will join against the humans."

Helga grinned. "The Ironsides are in too, then."

All the other leaders then nodded.

Seraphine nodded. "Good. Then we have work to do."

Reidar leaned forward. "If you want to level up well enough, we should take a core group hunting with me. Twenty or thirty of your best fighters. Once they reach higher levels, they can help power-level the others in their factions. with Seraphine's people," Aldric said.

"Yes." Reidar paused. "But to make it safer, everyone should buy summoning skills. They let you contribute to the fight without getting close to the monsters. Tag them from a distance, let the summons do the heavy lifting, and collect the C.L.A.S.P. points for you."

Seraphine's expression shifted from calm to concern, her fingers drumming against the rough-hewn table.

"We don't have enough vendors for that," she said. "Thousands of people will need new gear and skills as they level. Zix and the other vendors can't handle that volume of people alone."

Her gaze swept across the assembled leaders, noting how the reality of their logistical nightmare began to dawn on them. She could see the gears grinding as they did the math. The marketplace was already a mess, and now they were about to dump thousands more people into the mix.

"More vendors will come," Aldric said. "I spoke with ours before we left Gravenport. They said they were coming to wherever their assigned groups go. They already knew we were coming here, so they'll follow. Give it a day or two."

Helga nodded. "We should also use our Settlement Creator Tokens. Each faction leader brought theirs. We can establish safe zones throughout the district and expand the protected area. More territory means better defenses and more room for everyone."

"That would secure bigger chunks of the city," Kara said. She'd been silent until that point, but that didn't mean she wasn't paying attention or that she wasn't thinking on her own about a solution.

"Multiple safe zones would make it harder for the War Hounds to attack. They'd have to breach several barriers instead of one, spreading their forces thin and giving us strategic advantages we can't afford to ignore."

If the Spriggans huddled in one base, the enemy could focus all that firepower on a single point and crack it like a nut. But separate zones? That would force Judas to split his heavy hitters. Aaron couldn't be in more places at once, and without him supporting their lines, their level advantage would crumble as soon as the group leveling ended, leaving their separated squads vulnerable to being picked apart one by one.

Seraphine leaned over the map spread across the table. Her eyes traced the district's boundaries, the safe zones marked in green, and the enemy areas shaded in red. She tapped a finger against one of the yellow sections, then looked up at Kara. "Where would you place them?"

"Here and here," Kara said. She pointed to two sections marked in yellow. "Close enough to support each other but far enough to cover ground."

Reidar nodded. The plan was solid, and having more vendors meant better equipment access; more safe zones meant better defenses. More high-level fighters meant they could actually challenge the War Hounds.

Then Reidar turned around. He hadn't noticed when he entered, but his father was not there.

Aldric noticed his distraction. "Is there a problem?"

"Where's my father?" Reidar asked. He looked at Seraphine.

"He went to the vendor an hour ago," Seraphine said. "He said he was buying skills to heal Lena. He thinks he can wake her up now."

Reidar's tension decreased, if only a little. Matthias hadn't stopped digging for a solution since they dragged Lena into the medical bay, and if he really found the right skill combination at the vendor, she wasn't just going to get better—she was going to go back to her prime. It was a rare win in a sea of losses. With the War Hounds hunting them and the Church building digging their fingers into the city, knowing he was close to fixing at least one broken thing let him breathe for the first time in hours.

"Good," Reidar said. "He hasn't returned yet?"

"He should be back soon," Seraphine said. "The market isn't that far."

"Then I'm going to check on the War Hounds," Reidar said. He straightened. "The Vorathid Foragers should have followed them by now. I want to see what they found."

Reidar's fingers dug into the rough wood of the table as he forced his body upright. He couldn't shake the itch in the back of his mind, the itch that said that Aaron was still out there.

That mutant freak was plotting something, and Reidar refused to be the one caught with his pants down. He needed eyes in the dark where no human could be trusted to survive. That was why he'd deployed the Foragers.

He needed their eyes and ears; he needed the thousands of invisible spies shrinking down to slip past sentries and bring him the information he sought.

He was done with guesses and half-baked plans that relied on luck. He needed the cold, hard truth: coordinates, plans, a crack in their armor he could exploit.

He turned and walked out, letting the heavy door cut off the drone of the leaders arguing over logistics. Let them talk. He had a hunt to manage.

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