Vane moved with everything lit.

The Perfect Copy had his nervous system running at Senna’s frequency, the Rank 6 precision overlaying his bones, the spear becoming an extension of thirty years of accumulated expertise rather than just his own five months of Sentinel-rank refinement. The Silver Fang at full conceptual output ran under Event Horizon’s crushing density and Grey Veil’s necrotic dissolution and the Ephemeral State’s reality-boundary manipulation, four contradictory energies held together by the borrowed architecture of a dead general.

His channels were burning. The friction of it was loud in every bone.

He ran the Quicksilver Thrust at full output with Perfect Copy’s precision behind it, and the silver tip aimed for center mass, and it was faster than anything he had ever thrown.

Lancelot put two fingers on the shaft.

The thrust stopped. Not deflected, not redirected. Stopped. The kinetic energy that Vane had loaded into the motion, the Sentinel-rank mana, the Silver Fang’s severance principle, the added weight of Event Horizon’s density multiplier, ran into those two fingers and went nowhere.

The reversal traveled back up the spear shaft into Vane’s hands and his wrists bowed under it.

The Perfect Copy framework told him, in the clarity of Senna’s borrowed perception, exactly what had happened. At Sentinel rank, the Argent Horizon operated on an intent-based logic. The thrust carried the will behind it as well as the physics of it. Lancelot had not matched the physics. He had negated the will. He had placed his fingers at the exact point where the intent of the strike was thinnest, where the conceptual weight of it was lowest, and he had held.

The framework also told him there was nothing in the Argent Horizon’s three forms that addressed this.

He dropped the shaft angle and drove his elbow into the gap and tried to create space.

Lancelot was not in that space anymore. He had moved somewhere to the left without Vane registering the transition. Then a hand closed around Vane’s left forearm, and the torque it applied was not a throw so much as a statement about where Vane was going to be in approximately half a second, and Vane went there rather than absorb what the alternative would have cost his shoulder joint.

He landed on the stone. The fractured ribs sent a wave of white through his vision on impact. He pushed up from the ground with his right arm and came back to his feet.

The silver light around him was still burning. All four skills still running. His mana channels were screaming but functional.

Lancelot stood six meters away. He had not drawn his sword. His hands were at his sides. The expression on his face was the one it always was: nothing.

Vane understood, with absolute clarity, that the full stack had not changed the equation.

The gate behind Lancelot opened.

Valerica came through first. She took in the courtyard in one sweep, Vane standing with the silver light still lit around him and Lancelot between them, and the air around her changed immediately. The Celestial Heart activated not as a skill but as a condition of her presence, the gravity in the courtyard thickening the way a room thickens before a storm.

Isole and Ashe came through the gate behind her.

Ashe’s eyes went to Vane for one second. Then to Lancelot. Her horns were humming before she cleared the threshold.

None of them asked what had happened. The courtyard told them.

Vane stepped to the side. Not retreating, not conceding the position, just making room.

The three of them moved at once.

Valerica led with Event Horizon at full extension, not the controlled chokepoint application she used in the corridors but the open-space version, the gravity well manifesting above Lancelot’s position with enough mass behind it to fold the stone floor beneath him. The air groaned. The broken flagging cracked in a ring around the well’s edge.

Lancelot braced.

The gravity took him. His stance widened, his weight dropped, and he held inside the well’s field the way a tree holds in wind, fundamentally still but acknowledging the force. His feet stayed on the ground.

Isole came through the left side of the well’s field while he was anchored in it, bone staff running with the dual current of Samsara, light and dark simultaneously. The grey resonance spread into the courtyard with the quality that made the air smell of cold stone and endings. She ran Divine Judgment at close range, the bolt condensed to a needle width and aimed at the joint where his neck met his shoulder.

He stepped inside the field’s edge where the gravity differential was smallest, and the step took him out of the bolt’s path with a margin of centimeters. The Divine Judgment hit the courtyard wall and left a hole in the stone.

Ashe was already moving on the angle Valerica’s gravity and Isole’s entry had opened on his right side. Flash Arts at full burn, the air where she had been standing detonating with the concussive force of the displacement. She came in with the odachi held in both hands, Weapon Communion running through the blade in its silver-black current.

She hit him across the left shoulder.

The sound of it filled the courtyard. A real strike, solid, the Weapon Communion biting into the space Lancelot occupied.

He took it. He absorbed it the way a cliff absorbs a wave, the kinetic energy running into the density of his body and dissipating without moving him. His feet stayed planted.

Then he moved.

Not a technique, not a skill. He moved the way water moves into a gap, finding the angle that all three of them had left between their positions, and he was through it before the geometry closed. Valerica’s gravity well was behind him. He had moved across its field’s edge while Ashe’s strike was still in contact with his shoulder, using her own momentum as part of the direction.

He put the heel of his hand into Valerica’s sternum.

She flew. Not the instant strike he had used against Vane’s ribs, that had been something else entirely, something that still had no explanation in Vane’s mind. This was direct kinetic force applied with such precise placement that her mana anchor had nothing to push against. She hit the stronghold wall and dropped.

Isole pivoted, the Samsara dual current condensing around the staff into a barrier of grey light between her and him. The barrier was genuine, not illusion, both Samsara energies held together at maximum density.

Lancelot hit the barrier with a closed fist.

The grey light fragmented. Not instantly. It held for a breath, the dual current straining against the impact before the pieces separated and the fist continued through. Slower than the blow against Vane. She had cost him something, a fraction of a second, a degree of momentum. Not enough.

He caught her staff as she brought it across in a sweeping counter and held it. She pulled. The staff did not move. He set her down on the courtyard stone with controlled, measured force, the same way you would set something fragile on a shelf. She landed on her back and the Samsara current broke apart on impact.

Ashe came back on a second angle, Flash Arts burning, not giving him the moment to reset after Isole. She came in low this time, the odachi in a single-hand grip for the extension, the other hand free to close if he moved inside.

He moved inside.

He stepped into the single-hand extension before it completed, and the free hand she had ready for the close was not where the counter came from. It came from his right elbow, the same compact arc, and she had the half-second to get her forearm up and into the path of it.

The block landed. She took half of it.

The other half put her into the courtyard stone on her right side. She got her arm under herself before full impact and absorbed it across her shoulder and hip, and she lay on the stone breathing hard with one hand flat against the flags.

The courtyard went quiet.

Lancelot stood in the center of it. Valerica was against the wall. Isole was on her back. Ashe was on her side, breathing. Vane was still upright against the vault entrance with the silver light fading as Perfect Copy’s timer ran out and the borrowed framework dissolved back into Silver Fang’s base output.

Lancelot turned toward the east gate.

The gate opened.

Isaac walked through it. He moved at a measured pace, with Lyra two steps behind him already working the glass ledger. He looked at the courtyard the way he looked at every tactical situation: completely, quickly, without emotion.

Then he looked at Lancelot.

Something changed in his face. Not much. Isaac’s face did not do much. But the particular quality of his stillness shifted. The calculating neutrality he used for problems was replaced by something underneath it, something with a direction to it. His normal cold was climate. This was something that had a target.

The temperature in the courtyard dropped several degrees.

“I have no business with the Ice Palace,” Lancelot said. The flat mechanical delivery he gave everything. No threat in it, just a fact being stated.

Isaac looked at Vane. He looked at Ashe on the ground, and Isole, and Valerica against the wall. He looked back at Lancelot.

“You put four Sentinels down,” Isaac said. His voice was very even. “Does that make you think you are a match for me?”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep