The east gate opened.

The courtyard was roughly twenty meters square, bounded on two sides by the stronghold walls and on the third by the outer fortification. The vault entrance was at the far end. The ground was broken stone, old grass forcing through the cracks.

Vane was the only one in the courtyard. The other three were at the north and east approaches running post-wave cleanup. Two stragglers from wave fourteen had pulled back into the killing field rather than retreating cleanly, and Valerica had taken Ashe and Isole to close them out. He had heard the brief exchange of combat a minute ago. It had gone quiet. They would be back soon.

Not soon enough.

He was standing near the vault entrance with his spear in a loose grip when Lancelot came through the gate. The boy walked with his hands at his sides and nothing drawn. He looked at the courtyard with the expression of someone who had already been here. His red eyes found Vane immediately and stayed there.

He stopped six meters away.

Vane activated the Usurper.

[Target: Lancelot] [Rank: 4 (Mid Sentinel)] [Authority: None] [Danger: Extreme]

The same read as every time since before. Rank 4, no Authority, and a danger classification sitting at a level that had never made sense for those numbers.

“I know what you are looking for,” Lancelot said. His voice carried no inflection. “The one who put the Justiciar in a coma.”

Vane said nothing.

“It was me,” Lancelot said.

The courtyard was very quiet.

Vane had built this conclusion from evidence over weeks. He had held it as a working assumption long enough that it had become something close to certainty. He had stood at Nyx’s bedside thirty-one mornings in a row and carried the parchment in his jacket and told himself he understood the shape of what he was dealing with.

The shape of what he was dealing with was standing six meters away.

Nyx was a Low Justiciar. The undisputed strongest second-year on this island, with an Authority that could overwrite local reality, and she had been put in a medically induced coma to stop her own mana from destroying her while her core repaired itself. Broken jaw. Shattered confidence. Thirty-one days unconscious.

The Usurper said Rank 4. No Authority.

He tightened his grip on the spear and moved.

The Quicksilver Thrust was the first form and the most refined thing in his arsenal. Senna had built the entire Argent Horizon around one principle: a spear moving faster than the opponent’s decision-making arrives before the body can respond to it. At Sentinel rank, the form carried something it hadn’t carried when he’d been an Elite, something that went beyond the physics of the motion. The intent behind the thrust had weight. The silver mana coating the tip vibrated not just with cutting force but with the specific rejection logic Senna had spent a career refining into her marrow, and which the Usurper had transferred into his.

It was not just a fast thrust. It was a statement about the nature of what the spear tip was, and what it did to anything it touched.

Lancelot sidestepped it.

Not with a counter. Not with a deflection or a technique or any visible expenditure. He was not in the path of the thrust, the way a person steps around a piece of furniture. The footwork was small, efficient, and completely relaxed.

Vane recovered and came back into guard and looked at him.

Lancelot’s hands were still at his sides.

Vane changed his angle. He built the feint into the acceleration rather than the strike, using the Sentinel-rank refinement of the form to load the misdirection into the conceptual layer of the thrust rather than the physical one. At Elite rank, a feint was a physical deception. At Sentinel rank, the Argent Horizon could make the mana itself move in the wrong direction first, the intent of the thrust lying to anything that read intent.

Lancelot stepped inside the feint.

He had read the misdirection before it completed. Not the physical commitment that followed, but the conceptual setup that came before. He stepped inside the striking radius and put his hand on the shaft just behind the silver tip, and redirected the whole line of force sideways with the ease of someone adjusting a door that was swinging too wide.

The star-steel spear swung out of line. Vane went with it or absorbed a broken wrist.

He went with it. Used the momentum. Came back on a different line.

Lancelot had already moved to where the different line would arrive.

He tried the Lunar Deflection. The second form converted the spear shaft into a rejection surface, the silver mana forming a sleeve that operated on a mystical rather than physical principle: anything that came into contact with the spinning silver was refused, not deflected but returned to its origin as though the point of contact had simply decided contact was not permitted. Against someone who kept stepping inside his striking range, a surface that rejected entry should have forced distance.

Lancelot applied no force. He stood inside the sleeve’s effective radius and looked at him.

The Lunar Deflection could not refuse something that declined to touch it.

Vane stepped back. He breathed.

In the Iron Cathedral, Isaac had been a wall. There had been a shape to it, a concept to read even if reading it hadn’t been sufficient. The absolute zero of Pale Eternity had a logic. The spatial compression had rules. The architecture of the thing he was fighting had been terrible in scale but comprehensible in nature.

This was not comprehensible. There was no concept operating behind Lancelot’s movement. He was not using an ability or a technique or anything the Argent Horizon’s intent-reading could grip onto, because intent required a goal to point at and his body had no goal, it simply moved. A Sentinel-rank body with no division between intent and action, no gap between decision and execution, the whole engine of him running at a single unified frequency that his spear art had no language to address.

Isaac had looked at him like an interesting problem. Lancelot was not looking at him like anything. The red eyes were patient in the way that a stone is patient: not waiting, just present, indifferent to the passage of time.

Vane ran the Falling Star.

The third form, the one that had cracked Isaac’s defenses in the Cathedral. Full-body rotation, every gram of Sentinel-rank mana driving the spin axis, the silver conceptual edge becoming a drill that severed not just physical material but the logical resistance of whatever stood in its path. He came down from a full leap, all of it committed, the star-steel tip aimed at center mass.

The impact came from his left side.

He did not see it happen.

Between one instant and the next, before the Falling Star completed, before he could register any change in the space between them, something hit his ribs with a force that had no ramp-up, no travel time, no warning in the mana around him. It simply arrived. The sound it made against his body was dense and wrong, and the pain came a half-second later like an afterthought, a wave of it that bleached the edges of his vision white.

He hit the courtyard stone on his right side. The spear clattered away from his hand.

He lay still for a moment because that was what his body had decided to do. His left hand went to his ribs automatically. The bones under his fingers had a quality they hadn’t had before.

He understood what had happened. He did not understand how.

Lancelot was standing two meters from where he had been standing. His right arm was at his side. There was nothing different about his posture. He had not drawn his sword. He had not activated anything. The Usurper, running continuously since the first exchange, had registered nothing between the previous position and the current one.

Nyx’s jaw had broken the same way. The same impossibility. No telegraphing, no approach, just the result arriving before the cause was visible.

Vane pushed himself up from the stone. His left arm was supporting weight it shouldn’t have been supporting, and his breathing had a new and specific quality, each inhale hitting a register of pain that told him the number of intact ribs on his left side had decreased.

He stood up anyway.

Lancelot watched this without expression.

The Argent Horizon’s three forms had not landed once. The feints, the refinement, the Sentinel-rank intent loaded into every thrust, all of it had been read and managed and set aside. Senna’s art, which she had spent her career perfecting and which the Usurper had transferred into him with thirty years of earned precision, had been deconstructed by someone who had simply been present for it, moving through each form the way water moves around stone, not because he had a counter but because the forms themselves were not large enough.

Vane pulled everything he had.

The Silver Fang at full output first, not the low coating but the full conceptual manifestation, absolute severance running at maximum density, the spear tip no longer a physical object but a pure principle. The silver mana consumed the star-steel rather than coating it, the entire weapon becoming an expression of what cutting meant at its most fundamental.

Then Event Horizon. The gravity skill copied from Valerica during the second practical, the dense localized pressure that multiplied the kinetic weight of whatever it inhabited. He felt it settle into his channels with the familiar foreign ache of a borrowed power, slightly wrong in his mana pathways but functional, the crushing density threading through the silver edge and making the conceptual weight of the severance heavier.

Then Grey Veil. The skill from Isole, the grey resonance layered over gravity’s weight. A localized application of Samsara’s decay principle: the silver edge began to blur with necrotic dissolution, buzzing at the frequency of endings, a blade that would not just cut but unmake the continuity of whatever it passed through.

Then Ephemeral State. Nyx’s Grade SS skill, violet light flooding his silver core with the particular violence of a power that was not built for his channels, burning through the mana pathways as it ran. The localized manipulation of the boundary between illusion and reality. The three other skills fought it actively, four contradictory energies competing for the same channels, the friction of it registering as heat along every bone in his arms.

Then Perfect Copy.

[Skill: Perfect Copy (Grade S)]

The silver mana cohered. The silhouette began to form at the edge of his peripheral vision, the quality of presence he recognized before it completed. Raven-black hair in a sharp pragmatic cut. The weight of a woman who had survived everything the Empire could produce and had then died in a forgotten sector teaching him how to not get killed. Her combat logic overlaying his nervous system like a second skeleton, the Rank 6 Expert’s precision replacing the gaps in his own.

His veins were burning. The courtyard was very bright.

All four contradictory currents ran through a single channel, fighting each other and being held together by the Perfect Copy’s borrowed architecture, the complete stack lit at once for the first time.

He looked at Lancelot across four meters of broken stone.

The ribs on his left side informed him, with some urgency, about their current state.

He moved anyway.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep