Chapter 205: The Nature of the Void

Vane’s brain scrambled to process the physical and tactical reality of his current situation.

Seconds ago, he was standing in the apocalyptic ruins of Zenith Academy, watching a Transcendent witch systematically slaughter the most powerful people on the continent. Now, he was lying flat on his back on the thick rug of his own living room. The fire in the hearth was crackling steadily, casting warm orange light across the intact wooden walls.

And Nyx, the undisputed apex of the Second Year class, was sitting directly on his chest.

He had interacted with her before in the Void Chambers. She was a walking hazard, an anomaly wielding an EX-rank Authority who seemed to derive a dark amusement from treating reality like a suggestion. But this was entirely out of left field. He had never expected her to pull him into her localized Dreamscape simply to tear his psyche apart, only to casually inform him that she was going to make him stronger.

“What are you doing?” Vane asked. He squirmed, trying to shift his weight to gain leverage.

“Stay still,” Nyx commanded.

Her voice was a slow, syrupy purr that vibrated directly against his ribs. She leaned forward, the ambient light of the hearth catching her features. Vane’s previous assessment of her in the adrenaline-fueled dark had been skewed. She wore the standard dark academy uniform, but she wore it like pajamas: loose, unbuttoned at the collar, and hopelessly wrinkled.

She was small, her skin as pale as porcelain, with features that were almost too symmetrical to be human. Her long, lavender hair fell in a messy curtain around her face, the tips darkening into midnight blue. She looked less like a newly ascended low Justiciar and more like a sleepy cat that had found a warm sunbeam. But her eyes, deep vortices of violet and shadow, swirled with a myriad of mesmerizing colors as she easily pinned his fractured body to the floorboards.

“Do not worry about the security wards,” Nyx continued, a lazy, amused smile playing on her lips. “It is late in the night. At my current level, only Headmistress Evangeline or the senior professors would be able to notice something is wrong, and only if they were actively focusing their perception on this exact room.”

“I—” Vane began speaking, trying to formulate a rational demand for her to get off him.

“You do not get it,” Nyx sighed, cutting him off effortlessly. She tilted her head to the side, her lavender hair brushing against his collarbone. “Well then, let me explain it to you in simple terms. I crossed a threshold recently. Since I am so terribly special, when I reached the rank of Justiciar, I became capable of seeing more to the world. The mana does not just look like glowing mist to me anymore. I can see the indentations it leaves behind in a soul.”

Vane stayed entirely still. He let her finish what she was saying. His combat logic dictated that struggling against a Rank 5 entity while his left arm was fractured was a mathematical impossibility.

“I looked at your silver core,” Nyx said softly. “I realized your Authority has the ability to copy the absolutes of others, though I do not quite understand the mechanism behind it. You copied General Senna’s Authority. That absolute severance is how you became strong enough to survive the first practical evaluation.”

She traced a single, pale finger down the center of his chest, right over his bandages.

“This theft, coupled with your overwhelming natural mana talent, is what allowed you to go toe to toe with Isaac Glacium during the second practical evaluation,” Nyx mused, her swirling eyes narrowing with intense fascination. “And now, looking at you after your little trip to Mourn-Hold, I see even more ghosts. You possess the heavy gravity of Valerica’s Star and the perfect grey resonance of Isole’s Duality. Albeit, it is just a trickle right now. Merely an echo in your circuits.”

Nyx stared at him, her lips parting a bit as a genuine, burning curiosity bled through her usual bored facade.

“It is fascinating,” Nyx whispered. “How does this power even work, Vane? Can you copy my power?”

Vane stared up at her. He thought about the mechanics of the Usurper. He did not simply point at a target and copy their magic. The Authority required a conceptual hook. It required a profound emotional resonance, an anchor forged in shared trauma, absolute trust, or crushing grief. And, the original loophole, it required deep physical intimacy to bypass the soul’s natural defenses to copy.

He internally shook his head. There was absolutely no reason for him to tell that to Nyx. Sharing the mechanics of his core with an unpredictable Justiciar was tactical suicide.

Nyx’s eyes suddenly widened. A faint, uncharacteristic flush of red colored her pale porcelain cheeks.

“Oh, it works like that?” Nyx breathed, a delighted and entirely wicked smile spreading across her face. “What a naughty boy.”

“What the—can you read minds?” Vane asked in genuine shock, his stoic mask slipping completely.

“Of course I can, little rat,” Nyx laughed, the sound bright and terrifying in the quiet room. “You are completely submerged in the residual mana of my Dreamscape. Your surface thoughts are rippling right into my head. Hmm, that explains things perfectly. I did not know a commoner like you had it in him to do the General, though.”

Vane felt a cold spike of outrage at the words she directed at Senna, the mentor who had sacrificed her final breath to forge him into a weapon, but he immediately forced it down. He sighed, closing his eyes for a second, and forced a long, heavy breath into his working lung to calm his accelerating heart rate.

There was no logical action to take here. Getting angry and frustrated would just make things worse. He could not punch her. He could not outmaneuver her. Nyx stood on a completely different level of existence from him right now. She was holding all the cards, and she was currently sitting on the table.

As he forced his mind back into a state of cold, analytical observation, Vane looked at the girl pinning him to the floor.

He realized with sudden, absolute clarity that his previous reading of her original personality had been completely wrong.

He had initially categorized Nyx as a predator who played with her food because she enjoyed inflicting pain. He thought she was aloof and arrogant, a sadist who liked reminding the weaker students of their place in the hierarchy. He thought she collapsed floors and warped space just to mock them. But looking into those swirling violet eyes, seeing the genuine spark of entertainment replacing her usual heavy lethargy, he saw the underlying truth.

She was not malicious. She was profoundly, terminally bored.

She was exactly like Isaac Glacium, but infinitely worse. Isaac complained about the physical effort of walking because his ice magic made everything too easy. He froze the world because it was too slow. But Nyx had reached the absolute apex of the academy’s power structure before she even hit her third year. She possessed an EX-rank Authority that allowed her to dictate reality itself. The physical world was too rigid for her. Nothing challenged her. Nothing surprised her. The world was a dull, predictable script, and she slept through it because consciousness was tedious. She was desperate for anything that broke the rules.

And Vane broke all of them.

“You are an anomaly,” Nyx said, her tone shifting away from the teasing mockery into something much more grounded. She stopped tracing his chest and rested her small hands flat against the rug on either side of his head. “I was interested in you initially simply because you are a commoner. Just like me.”

Vane narrowed his eyes slightly. The highborn elites dominated Zenith Academy. The Glaciums, the Sols, the Aurelias—they ruled because they were born to. To find another student who had crawled out of the dirt to reach the absolute peak was practically a myth. He had assumed she was just another haughty noble playing games.

“I watched you walk into this terrarium of noble heirs and Imperial bloodlines,” Nyx continued softly, her lavender hair forming a tent around their faces, isolating them from the rest of the room. “I assumed you would break. I assumed they would chew you up and spit you out by the end of the first month. But you did not break. You adapted. You stole their fire.”

She leaned her weight forward again, her small frame pressing heavier against his chest.

“I did not think you would be this interesting, Vane,” Nyx admitted, her swirling eyes locking onto his silver gaze. “You are a thief trying to rob the gods blind. And the best part is, you actually have the potential to get away with it.”

Vane kept his breathing steady. “Why does that matter to you?”

“Because the board is getting incredibly chaotic,” Nyx whispered. “I saw the blue-haired woman in your mind during the Dreamscape. The Transcendent witch. The cage is cracking, Vane. The monsters are waking up. And I want to see how high the rat can climb before the world shatters completely.”

She lowered her head until her face was hovering a mere inch above his. The ambient temperature in the living room seemed to plummet, replaced by the heavy, suffocating scent of shadows and raw mana. The pressure of her Justiciar rank pressed against his skin like a physical weight, but the expression on her perfectly symmetrical face was one of absolute, dark devotion.

Nyx smiled. It was a breathtaking expression that promised absolute ruin and infinite possibility.

“Tell me, Vane,” Nyx whispered, her lips brushing against the shell of his ear. “Do you want it? Do you want my Authority?”

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