Lenny formed the students into three ranks on the main staircase.
Before, each of them had shouted commands to their own beast. Now they put away their seals and withdrew behind stone shields.
Two war apes came in first. White lines forced them to smash through the doors. The students knew the animals by name, but they could not hear their masters.
Lenny did not order them to stop.
He sat down on a step and placed one ape's favourite toy in front of him: a wooden wheel she spun after training.
The beast raised her fist.
Then she saw the wheel.
The blow landed beside him.
The second ape kept attacking. The students dropped a net with no seals on her from above and held her down by force. No one tried to enter the beast's mind.
At the western entrance, fire hounds advanced through foam from the fire-suppression pipes. People from the dyers' district opened the steam valves. Cole directed the evacuation, not the fighting.
Every old skill had to be used differently.
Lily restored the broadcast through the training crystals. She showed people not victories but ways to survive an encounter: remove signs of threat, leave a path for retreat, break the physical collar, do not surround a freed animal.
The city copied her.
Kane increased the pressure.
The white lines burned through the beasts' skin, and some could no longer be freed without surgery. Mira set up a treatment station right in the lecture hall by the entrance. Students brought in animals that had been trying to kill them only moments before.
Styx watched them through her captains.
"They choose," she said.
"While they still can."
The golden ring of the Chain Basilisk opened above the academy. It began to crush the building's protective dome.
Stone cracked.
Kane was no longer trying to persuade the city. There were too many witnesses, and he needed silence.
Leon looked at the Void Dragon.
"We can cut through the ring, but then he'll find us through the channel."
"Let him," Lily replied. "We need a path to him too."
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