The veterans had been noticing it.

They mentioned it among themselves with the calm of people who had seen enough variations that one more didn’t change their disposition, but who didn’t ignore it either, because ignoring it would have been ignoring precisely the type of information the wall required not be ignored. How many they eliminated. How many arrived afterward. The balance was never clearly positive on the extermination side.

The numbers didn’t appear to deplete... If anything, the opposite.

Dunn had said it on the second night, in the same tone he had used for the wind at position seventeen: "Their numbers don’t seem to exhaust themselves. If anything..."

He hadn’t finished the sentence and yet it was the most precise description available.

♢♢♢♢

The first afternoon with real activity arrived almost at the end of the first week.

Ren had received the suggestion to keep a low profile for as long as the situation didn’t escalate, the opposite of the instruction they gave all new arrivals with unverified capability levels for the sector, and had decided that following it was also the most efficient way to see how the wall functioned from inside the structure rather than above it.

You learned different things depending on where you stood relative to the system.

So he observed.

What he saw was different from what he would have seen years ago.

The beasts of the tamers emerging from the gaps in the middle section of the wall were plants, frogs, and creatures that the still-official-but-already-aging bestiarium classified as "common", the most frequent bonds in the general population, the ones that had been available to most people for most of Yano’s history, the standard issue of a city that hadn’t always had better options.

But the levels at which they were operating were not the levels that classification would have predicted years ago.

High Silver... Several Golds in some parts of the wall, among those who had been there less time and had continued cultivating using Ren’s methods, the ones that had been spreading through the population the way useful things spread when there was no reason to keep them contained.

Beasts that in any previous generation would routinely have never surpassed Bronze were operating at ranks that the older cultivation systems would have described as impossible for that type of bond.

The ceiling had moved.

The effect on the wall was immediate and concrete.

Defending from height, the tamers launched their beasts or projected their attacks downward through the angle the structure provided, and what arrived at the equivalent-rank mutant creatures from that elevation, with that density of combined fire, was fundamentally different from the kind of defense the wall could have generated with the same number of people years earlier.

The math of a higher average baseline multiplied by the positional advantage of the structure, compounding into something the enemy side of the equation hadn’t fully adjusted to yet.

The Silver-rank mutant creatures that managed to reach the base of the wall didn’t have enough time to assess how to climb before the attacks reached them.

The ones that reached the wall itself by luck encountered a concentration of fire that didn’t correspond to what their threat level would have justified in the previous generation.

Ren sent out some wind blades.

Basic wind, with the precise amount of power the work required and without the additional mana that would have drawn the attention of people currently occupied with their own contributions who only noticed others’ when they were particularly visible.

The wind was not particularly visible.

But it was effective enough that the soldier nearest to him, a man of about thirty with a Red Eagle at Silver 3, working the right flank with the efficiency of someone who had been doing it long enough not to think about the mechanics of it, looked over once and gave a nod of approbation.

"Good angle, control, and cut quality, you must have a strong wind beast," he said.

Not an elaborate compliment. The technical assessment of one soldier about another.

Ren found it more fresh and satisfying than several of the more elaborate ones he had received in years.

♢♢♢♢

The wave passed.

The process of clearing the access points and verifying the state of the defense positions had a mechanics that the veterans executed with the automaticity of something done enough times that the steps no longer required conscious thought, the body knowing the sequence the way hands knew the keys of an instrument they had played for years.

The newer soldiers in the sector, Ren among them, followed with the attention of people learning the order of things without anyone explaining the order of things.

The only instruction was observation.

One of the veterans, a man whose name on the list was Garret, whose beast rank suggested he had been at the wall long enough to have watched at least two generations come and go, looked at the group of recent arrivals with the evaluative expression Vehn had, but with more inclination to verbalize it.

"This year’s new arrivals," he said, directed at nobody specific, in the tone of someone processing something aloud rather than starting a conversation, "are bringing more changes than the last ten years put together."

Another veteran, checking a section of wall a few meters away, responded without looking up: "Last year’s were also stronger than the year before."

"This year is much more different." Garret said it without defensive urgency. As an observation that didn’t require debate because it was based on direct and recent information. "The one on the right flank." A gesture toward Ren. "And the other three who arrived this week... They’re going to run out of excuses for keeping us here soon."

The other veteran looked up for a moment. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Then looked at Ren and the group of new arrivals.

"I have five years of accepted age before they make me leave," he said, with the calm of someone who had run that Vitality calculation many times and no longer had any particular feeling about the result. "But maybe I won’t even have time to stay relevant for those five years."