Meanwhile...
Ellen stood beside the monitoring array with her arms folded behind her back, her eyes on the administrative feed with a frown on her face.
The organizer beside her was a middle-aged man from the academy's event coordination staff, currently explaining something about the portal synchronization schedule that Ellen was listening to with approximately forty percent of her attention.
The other sixty percent was on Seraph's locator seal, which had reactivated twenty minutes ago, briefly, and then gone quiet again.
"...and the second phase transition should begin at the scheduled time regardless of current participant distribution, so the ranking cutoff will..."
"One moment."
The organizer stopped mid-sentence.
Ellen's eyes had moved from the administrative feed to the dungeon realm's ambient energy display, a secondary monitoring panel that tracked the overall mana density of the sealed space and flagged unusual fluctuations.
The needle was moving.
