By the second day, three additional tears had opened.
The Verakh scouts, deployed across the southern plains in the widest surveillance pattern their numbers could sustain, reported each new tear with the precise, emotionless efficiency that their training demanded. The second tear appeared four leagues southeast of the first, in a dry riverbed where the stony ground resisted the corruption's spread. The third opened five leagues to the southwest, in the heart of a grassland where a herd of wild aurochs had been grazing. The fourth, smallest and most unstable, flickered into existence two leagues south of the city itself, close enough that the sentries on Yohan's southern wall could see the faint shimmer of wrongness in the air when the light was right.
But it was the Verakh reports about what came through the tears that changed the strategic calculation from manageable crisis to genuine emergency.
Three Demons of the Lower Order had emerged. Three.
