Three days after the attack on the Eastern Cardinal, the scale of it had finally settled into something concrete enough to actually work with.
The debriefing room's main wall no longer showed live feeds of fire and evacuation. It showed numbers instead, cold and final in a way that felt somehow worse than the chaos had. Five academies destroyed. Six hundred and forty-one confirmed dead, a figure that had climbed steadily over three days and only that morning finally stopped moving. Two thousand three hundred injured, spread across every hospital in the Cardinal and several beyond it. Students who'd lost their abilities entirely, sitting in recovery wards with nothing left of what had made them who they were three days ago.
Sophie stood at the head of the table, arms crossed, staring at the numbers like she could will them smaller through sheer refusal to look away.
