The waves came harder after the Devourer, and they came without pause.
By the eighteenth hour, the monsters stopped arriving in waves at all and simply kept arriving, a steady grinding pressure that never fully broke and never fully let up. Ananta Regalon's tower answered it the same way it had answered everything else, in shifts, in rotations, with Kayla moving constantly between positions and nobody standing the same watch twice in a row.
"Fourteen towers," Marcus reported at the twentieth hour, reading the board with red-rimmed eyes. "Down from twenty-two. Whatever's hunting the others is working fast."
"Not whatever," Maya said quietly. Farsight Loom had been stretched wide across the battlefield for hours, and she'd been watching something take shape out there that nobody else could see yet. "Whoever. Three kingdoms are moving together. They've stopped defending their own towers entirely and started splitting the work."
Rudra's head came up sharply at that. "Explain."
