The five far anchors held Kest's replayed count together, and Nox read every one of them through the board Diana had thrown wide. The decoy had bought him the timing, and the timing was the only thing standing between five cities and five dead cores.
He stood at the near Haron anchor with his claim still clean on it, a full country between his feet and the platforms the count would erase. His interface knew the discharge to the second, and the burned channel from the last overreach ached with every field he held open.
[ Anchor-purge: armed on five far platforms. Three-second arm. Single discharge each. Trigger: First Player signature (replayed). ]
Five stranded cities sat on those platforms, each one keyed to a bid it could not pay and now to a discharge it had not earned. Lose the cores and the national spine dropped five endpoints at once, and every city past them lost the line for good.
