---
The second half of the day gathered itself like a fist.
For a while, the fist only pressed. Vorak's vanguard did not try anything clever. They leaned. They rotated ranks. They took their losses and offered more men to the ramp as if emptying a very patient jar. The mountain answered in the way Kai had told it to answer: wall and teeth, teeth and wall, no charges, no heroics.
But walls have numbers too.
By the time the sun had begun its slow drop toward the desert's shoulder, the Net's quiet ledger had turned ugly.
"Ring One, full," Silvershadow reported, voice thinner than it had been at dawn. "Dead today… one hundred ninety. Hard wounded… three hundred and climbing. We have under eight hundred still standing on the line. Some of those are standing on stubbornness."
"Ring Two is not much fatter," Vexor added. "We are holding only because the dead do not push back."
