Chapter 170: The Silent Forge

The weeks bled together.

They became a blur of grey stone and silver mana.

The winter deepened outside the walls of Zenith Academy. Snow piled against the high windows of the spires. The wind howled around the floating islands like a starving wolf.

Inside the private training hall of Villa 1 the air was hot.

It smelled of sweat and burning mana.

Vane stood in the center of the gravity press. The runic dial on the wall was set to four times standard gravity. His bones creaked. His blood felt like lead in his veins.

He held the Iron Horse stance. His legs burned. The [Silver Fang] hummed in his chest. It was agitated by the pressure. It wanted to lash out. It wanted to cut the gravity field.

Vane forced it down.

He activated [Internal Pulse].

He sent a vibration through his skeletal structure. He matched the frequency of the crushing weight. He turned his radius and ulna into tuning forks.

The pain was blinding. It felt like someone was drilling into his marrow with a rusty screw.

He did not scream. He did not break his posture.

He thrust the spear.

It was a slow movement. It was deliberate. He needed to desensitize his own body to the conceptual rejection of the Fang. In the Iron Groves he had nearly shattered his arms after six strikes. That was unacceptable. A King could not rule with broken hands.

He retracted the spear.

Click.

His wrist popped. A micro-fracture.

Vane ignored it. He cycled the mana through the break, knitting it back together with the heat of the exertion.

He thrust again.

This was the work. It was unglamorous. It was painful. It was the only way to hollow out the mountain.

Week three brought a different kind of pressure.

Vane sat in the center of Void Chamber 4.

The room was dark. The pool of raw mana beneath the obsidian floor cast a sick and pale blue light on the walls.

Vane looked at the door.

It was ten feet away.

He blinked.

Now it was fifty feet away. The hallway stretched out like a telescope. The perspective was nauseating. The angles of the corners did not add up to ninety degrees.

He looked at the corner of the room.

Nyx was asleep.

She lay in a nest of velvet cushions she had smuggled in. Her black hair fanned out around her pale face. She looked peaceful.

But the air around her was broken.

Her [Dreamscape] leaked out of her. It was an EX-Rank Authority that overwrote local reality with her subconscious. The floor rippled like water. The ceiling breathed.

Vane closed his eyes.

He opened his connection to the [Usurper].

He did not try to steal the Dreamscape. That would be suicide. Instead he let his Authority taste the distortion. He let the wrongness wash over his mental defenses.

The air shifted.

Vane felt the hair on his arms stand up. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a second.

The nausea intensified. It was no longer just visual distortion. It was physical. Gravity detached itself from the floor.

Vane floated an inch off the obsidian.

He opened his eyes.

The room was gone.

He was floating in a void of violet stars. There were no walls. There was no door. There was only an infinite expanse of cold and silent space.

He looked at the corner.

Nyx was still there. She was still asleep. Her breathing was even.

But the pressure was crushing. It was not the physical weight of gravity. It was the conceptual weight of existence. The Dreamscape was trying to erase him. It was rewriting the logic of the room to say that Vane does not exist here.

Vane gritted his teeth. He flared his mana. He used the [Usurper] to anchor his soul to his body.

I am here, he projected. I am real.

The stars spun faster. The void pressed harder. It felt like being crushed between two glaciers.

Vane looked at Nyx again.

She was not sleeping.

Her eyes were closed but her mouth was curved in a tiny and amused smile.

She was awake. She was doing this.

She was testing him.

Vane realized something terrifying in that moment.

He thought about Valerica. She used the [Celestial Heart] to throw suns. She used gravity to crush rocks.

He thought about Ashe. She used [Warlord] to burn brighter and hit harder.

He thought about Isole. She used [Samsara] to heal wounds and rot flesh.

They used their Authorities. They wielded them like weapons. They pulled the trigger and the magic happened.

Nyx was different.

She did not use the Dreamscape. She was the Dreamscape.

She did not cast a spell to change the room. She simply decided the room was different and reality scrambled to obey her. There was no lag. There was no activation cost. It was as natural to her as breathing.

This was what an EX-Rank Authority was supposed to be.

It was not a big gun. It was a rewrite of the laws of physics.

Valerica and the others were children playing with loaded pistols. They were powerful but they were clumsy. They treated their Authorities like skills.

Nyx treated her Authority like a limb.

Vane sweated. The silver mana in his veins screamed. The [Usurper] roared in defiance trying to eat the dream that was eating him.

The pressure vanished.

The stars blinked out. The violet void collapsed back into cold stone walls. Gravity returned.

Vane slammed onto the obsidian floor. He gasped for air.

Nyx shifted in her sleep. She rolled over and pulled a cushion over her head.

“You are loud,” she mumbled into the velvet. “But you did not pop.”

She went back to sleep.

Vane sat on the cold floor. His heart hammered against his ribs.

He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

He had thought he was closing the gap. He had thought that mastering the Silver Fang and perfecting the Argent Horizon would put him on their level.

He was wrong.

The gap was not about power. It was about nature.

Valerica and Ashe were strong humans holding divine power.

Nyx was something else entirely.

Vane stood up. He felt heavy. He felt mortal.

He walked to the door. It was exactly ten feet away.

He needed to rethink everything. He needed to stop looking at Authorities as tools. If he wanted to survive the monsters at the top of the food chain he needed to stop acting like a mechanic and start acting like an artist.

He left the Void Chamber.

The silence of the corridor felt shallow compared to the depth of the dream he had just survived.

Vane walked back to Villa 1.

The winter was cold. But the monsters inside the academy were colder.

He had work to do.

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