Isaac did not ask what had happened to the courtyard. He looked at it for approximately two seconds and drew every conclusion that needed drawing.

Then he looked at Lancelot.

Something moved in his pale blue eyes. The calculating neutrality shifted into something underneath it, something with a direction to it. His normal cold was climate. This had a target.

Lancelot moved first.

The attack came without preamble, without weight shift or telegraphing, the same instant quality he had used against Vane’s ribs except this time at full extension, his body crossing six meters of courtyard stone in a window that did not register as movement. It registered as a change in location.

The spell circles erupted.

Three concentric rings of absolute zero frost, geometric and perfect, arriving in the same fraction of a second as Lancelot’s fist. Not a response to the attack. Simultaneous with it. As though the anticipation was running ahead of the event, as though the geometry of the fight existed for Isaac in a space slightly ahead of the present moment.

The fist hit the outermost circle. The circle held.

The black ice armor came next, seeping outward through the uniform fabric the way it always did, the obsidian-dark plates interlocking across his shoulders and chest and forearms with the sound of a frozen lake settling.

Lancelot stepped back one pace and looked at him.

From the courtyard floor, propped against the vault entrance with his hand pressed against his fractured ribs, Vane watched.

He had caught up to Isaac at the end of the first semester. He remembered the clarity of the Falling Star’s tip resting one millimeter from Isaac’s chest, the recognition in those pale eyes. He had pulled himself from the cathedral floor and burned through everything he had and found the ceiling of what an Elite could do, and Isaac had been right there at the same ceiling. Then in the training hall three weeks ago, Isaac had dismantled him without breaking a sweat, and he had told himself that was the new ceiling.

What he was watching now was something else entirely.

Lancelot tilted his head one degree. He looked at the black ice armor with the same expression he looked at everything.

Then he used the instant attack.

Vane did not see it happen. He only saw the result: Isaac standing absolutely still, a fracture line running from the pauldron to the collarbone of the black ice armor, a jagged crack in the obsidian surface that had absorbed everything Vane had thrown at it in the Iron Cathedral without marking.

Isaac exhaled slowly.

Vane activated the Usurper out of reflex.

[Target: Isaac Glacium]

[Rank: 4 (Mid Sentinel)]

[Authority: Pale Eternity (SSS)]

He had seen this read a hundred times. He knew it the way he knew his own hands.

Then it changed.

The Usurper could scan anything. He had run Target Analysis on Headmistress Evangeline and received a full return. He had scanned Isadora Glacium, a Rank 9 Transcendent, and the Usurper had given him her classification without error. In six months at Zenith it had never once failed to categorize an Authority. It had looked at SSS-rank, at EX-rank from his own internal read, at power levels that dwarfed anything a first-year class had any business standing near.

The classification flickered. SSS dissolved.

[Authority: Pale Eternity (EX)]

He stared at the display.

Then it flickered again. The EX held for one second before the Usurper ran its verification loop, and the loop did not resolve, and what it returned had no category it had ever returned before.

[Authority: Pale Eternity (???)]

Vane looked at the question marks in his vision and felt the specific quality of silence that comes when something you understood as fixed stops being fixed.

The two anomalies. He heard Nyx’s voice from the dining hall, syrupy and deliberate. She had said two, before meeting Lancelot. She had been looking at him when she said it. He had assumed one of them was himself.

He looked at Isaac standing in the courtyard with a cracked pauldron and an Authority that had just broken the Usurper’s classification system.

He had been standing next to the third anomaly since September.

The cracked plate shed itself from the armor and fell to the courtyard stone, and what replaced it was not a repair but a reformation, the new plate denser and a different quality of dark, following its own geometry.

Isaac raised his hand and the courtyard bent.

They moved through the fight at a pace Vane had no reference for. Lancelot’s instant transitions chained together and Isaac’s spatial prediction met each one, the spell circles arriving before the strikes completed and fragmenting and being replaced before the fragments hit the ground. The black ice armor absorbed kinetic force that should have shattered it. They seemed even.

Vane watched Lancelot’s right hand. The broadsword had not appeared. Across six minutes of sustained combat that had put four Sentinel-rank Authority users on the ground without drawing steel, he had not drawn his sword.

And Isaac’s face had the particular quality of someone spending something real. The Pale Eternity at this output had a cost, and it would compound.

Isaac knew it too.

He stepped back one pace and placed three seconds of spatial geometry between them.

“Stronghold 2,” he said. His voice was even. “Your ward.”

Lancelot looked at him.

“Six squads. Coordinated challenge window. She has been holding for eleven minutes.”

“Anastasia Aurelia is a Sentinel with a SSS-rank Authority,” Lancelot said. “The Academy operates under Imperial treaty law. No organized assault on an Imperial ward would be tolerated by the administrative structure.”

“The terrarium,” Isaac said, “is populated by students from the eastern kingdoms, the elemental palaces, the old merchant republics, and every faction that has a generation’s worth of reason to hate Imperial expansion. It is not tolerated by the Imperial structure. It is merely attended by it.” He looked at Lancelot with those pale calculating eyes. “I took her Stronghold twenty minutes ago. The six squads are there now.”

Something crossed Lancelot’s face. So small and so fast that Vane almost missed it. A single degree of movement in the eyes, there and gone inside half a second, in a face that had not moved once in the entire time Vane had known him.

Then it was gone and the flat red gaze was back.

But the air in the courtyard changed.

It was not a mana phenomenon. It was not a skill or an activation. It was the kind of thing very old soldiers described and younger soldiers disbelieved: the pressure shift that comes from a body that has decided, completely and without reservation, that something needs to stop existing. It had a quality of certainty that made aggression seem casual by comparison.

Isaac went still. He had killed beasts in the deep mountain corridors before his voice broke. He had survived three assassination attempts before the age of fourteen. He had stood in the Iron Cathedral against the entire first-year class and felt nothing qualify as fear.

He was still now.

Lancelot reached to his right side. The broadsword materialized in his grip, the dark iron settling into his hand.

“This,” he said, “is not going to be a battle anymore.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep