The teleportation released them all at once.
One moment the Academy's central courtyard, Sariah's voice still fading behind them, the weight of eight hours pressing into every muscle and bone. The next, Westia's territory materialized around them in the familiar arrangement of walls and open ground that Raze had spent a month learning to think of as theirs.
Except it wasn't the same.
The walls were whole.
Every gap the Coalition had punched through, every section Blossom's forces had crumbled with lightning-enhanced strikes, every damaged stretch of fortification that Raze had watched crumble during the trial's worst hours — gone. Repaired. The stone looked newer than the original construction in places, the Academy's restoration working with materials better than what their kingdom points had purchased at the trial's start. The three stone golems stood in their original positions, fully intact, as if they hadn't been reduced to rubble in the first place.
