The guard's expressionless mask stayed fixed on them.
No weapons appeared. No obvious signs of activity flared up. But the pressure around the armored figure stayed high to signal that a local sentinel here had a greater base weight than any of them currently did. The silence dragged on long enough to become its own demand.
Zeus answered first.
"We don't have the markers you're looking for," he said. "We didn't use a pathway. We were pulled."
The guard's head tilted a little.
"Pulled." The word was unpleasant in their ears. "From where?"
"A lower universe," Athena said evenly. "One that was under active erasure."
This earned a longer pause. The pressure around the guard fluctuated once before they received the result of the second impossible internal check.
