One skeleton came up out of it. Then a second, from the next one, and James did not stack them beside himself — Grave Command pushed them apart, one to the left lane and one behind Ronan, spreading his own board out before he had a board worth spreading.
By the fourth body he had options. By the sixth he had a Corpse Explosion available and three separate places he could be standing in under a second. By the eighth, Call of Souls was feeding him back enough mana that the arithmetic stopped being a countdown.
The difference between minute one and minute five was the entire shape of him.
Maeve said the useful version out loud, when they stopped for water.
"First minute of anything big is when he's least dangerous. Not the last. The first."
"Then the first minute's our job," Finn said, and drank his water, and that was the whole conversation.
They ran crowd pressure after that, which was the thing the projection had promised more than anything else.
