The route nine exit comes out onto a gravel shelf nineteen metres across, with rock on three sides plus the down slope behind it. Coldwater was standing on that shelf when the first of the Blackforge four came up out of the tunnel mouth.
A tunnel with one exit is a corridor until somebody is standing at the far end of it.
Coldwater is a northern faction ranked forty-fourth nationally, six entered, four days into a route they had finished clearing before noon. Nothing inside a walled tunnel had any way of telling the people climbing it that six of them were up there.
Their captain is Dain Prell, thirty-one, four Games behind him plus no disciplinary entry in the imperial register. Nothing in the Blackforge account of that shelf requires him to have been a cruel man, which Yenna has been careful about in writing.
