The run had taken nine hours.
That was three hours longer than the guild estimate, which Cael had learned to treat as a work of ambitious fiction rather than an operational document. The Hollow-type Fracture had been deeper than the cartography suggested, the fauna denser in the lower corridors, and Dael's broken arm had reduced their effective combat capacity for the second half of the run in ways that the team had compensated for professionally and expensively in terms of energy output.
He'd carried Dael's share of the equipment on top of his own for the last four hours. His shoulders had opinions about this that he was choosing not to engage with.
He sat on a supply crate in the staging area while the team went through the post-run debrief with Yuna and did what he always did in the
