He wasn't wrong about any of it. The protocols existed because people had died, in the particular and systematic way that forces bureaucracies to generate paperwork. Void Gates ate teams. That was their entire function in the hunter ecosystem, to remind everyone that the Under didn't play fair and sensor technology was exactly as reliable as the dimensional boundary conditions allowed it to be.
Which, right now, was not reliable at all.
I looked at the jungle pressing in from every direction. The trees were massive in the way that said centuries, not decades, of growth in an environment where mana concentration turned everything bigger and meaner and hungrier than its Earth-born ancestors.
The canopy formed a nearly solid ceiling sixty feet overhead, and what sunlight managed to force its way through arrived in thin shafts so narrow and so widely scattered that the forest floor existed in permanent green twilight. What reached the ground wasn't proper sunlight anymore.
