The upper tier went quiet at the attack's hundred-and-tenth minute.
Ashe and Isaac had held the second tier for seventy minutes and the approach paths had been clear for the last fifteen of those, the beasts drawn downward by the giant's movement through the lower district, the reorientation producing an absence on the hill that had the specific quality of pressure suddenly gone. Students had stopped coming. The approach paths were empty. The injured Vanguard instructor was sitting against the ridge stone with his eyes closed and his breathing controlled in the way of someone managing a significant cost.
It was not over. The absence was not safety. It was the hill registering a shift in where the attack's weight was concentrated, and weight that moved toward one place moved away from another, and the place it had moved away from was here, for now, which was a different thing from finished.
Ashe stood at the western chokepoint entrance and looked at the upper hill.
