"I am not strong enough. If I fell now, the rogue wave would surge past the rubble, their deadly diversion complete. Just hold them. Just hold them. I repeated the mantra, each repetition burning like a whip across my consciousness."
RELL THORNE'S POV
The South Gate was a charnel house, and I was the furious Beta straining to hold the line. The Gate Collapse charges had gone off with a brutal, muffled BOOM, the signal that the tactical retreat was over. Rubble and twisted iron lay in heaps, jagged and unyielding, trapping the rogue Alpha tide but not stopping their advance entirely. Now, in the cramped corridor just inside the Northern Castle's outer wall, the only thing standing between total breach and annihilation was me, Valehart's core Alpha pack, and the exhausted 4th Regiment that Juno had desperately rerouted to my position.
