The Academic District at the fifty-third minute of the attack.
Rowan had been here since before the alarm finished sounding.
Not because he'd run toward the danger. He hadn't been running anywhere. He'd been in the administrative corridor between the practical evaluation offices and the main academic wing when the ambient mana field changed in the specific way it changed when something very large and very wrong was entering the island's frequency range.
He'd been a Vanguard officer for thirty years and he'd felt field changes before and he knew the difference between a weather event and a breach.
This was a breach.
He'd moved before the alarm activated.
The first thing he did was not fight. He went to the shelter point access corridor and found twelve first-year students already there. Early. The ones who'd read the mana shift and moved on instinct and arrived at the shelter point ahead of the protocol.
