The network shattered from the center outward.
Jake felt it through his Mana Sight as a cascade rather than a simultaneous event - the central crystal fracturing and the signal it had been maintaining dying and the secondary crystals registering the loss and losing their own coherence as the hierarchy they depended on ceased to exist and the soldiers mid-advance stumbling in the way that entities sharing a single thought stumbled when the thought was interrupted from its source.
The stumble lasted two seconds.
Two seconds of disorientation while sixteen altered soldiers in the outer ring and however many more behind them recalibrated from collective function to something more individual, the transition between those two states creating the same gap that the formation's shield wall break had created on the ground floor.
Jake looked at Ankerita.
She was already moving.
