No single person in the Chamber of Permitted Shapes had enough strength left to finish freeing Halin alone.
When the overhead Measure ring shuddered and dropped two pale blades six inches lower to shear across the chalk circle in the middle of Mina’s final draw, every fighter around the northern mat was already carrying an injury or a hard physical limit that would have been fatal in a solitary duel.
Nara Soth had only one arm, a bleeding left shoulder stump. A body that had spent twenty years pinned inside a bronze holding collar before walking all the way up the mountain with an ash stick. Ilyra was a Deeper Bronze spearwoman fighting with a four-foot broken shaft and a bruised shoulder against an array built to execute Crown deviants. Seyun had two cracked left ribs and a freshly scorched right forearm. Mina had no offensive training at all—only a healer’s hands and a pair of iron metal tongs.
Yet none of them pretended to be whole or tried to carry the entire chamber alone. Because of that, their three limited contributions interlocked across the span of two heartbeats with a care the Aperture Court’s machinery couldn’t calculate.
First came the upright weight at the northern notch.
