The Eastern Reach had been the loudest district in the city for two hundred years, and it stopped being loud in the time it took to cross a bridge.
Every body on the far bank turned toward the canal at once, shoulders squaring on the same syllable of an unspoken count.
Hajin felt it through his boots before he saw it, one rhythm under four thousand separate heartbeats.
"The compulsory layer is live across the whole district," Aria reported inside his thoughts. "Every citizen is performing a single shared defense pattern through Common Voice, and none of them chose this performance."
"The pattern is a spear wall."
Eirwen read the forming ranks from the canal wall with cold precision.
"Four thousand bakers, dockers, grandmothers are becoming one militia right now, on a drill they never learned."
The wall moved without a single shouted order, because orders were no longer necessary anywhere in the Reach.
