Vane activated the Usurper.

[Target Analysis]

[Name: Ryuken Razar]

[Rank: 9 (Transcendent)]

[Authority: Iron Heaven (SSS)]

[Danger: Error]

He had seen this chilling result exactly twice before. Once was for Isadora Glacium at the Winter Gala, the scan flickering violently in his mind as it tried to process a Rank 9 vessel before returning that single, stark word, as if the system itself had simply thrown up its hands in surrender. The second time was for Evangeline, standing in a corridor that smelled of fresh blood and ancient stone. Both times, that blinking Error had told him everything he fundamentally needed to know. The number the Usurper was desperately trying to calculate vastly exceeded whatever mortal scale it was built upon.

This was exactly the same. Transcendent. Iron Heaven SSS. The Authority name sat in his assessment with the crushing, specific weight of a mountain that had been carried for a very long time.

He stood frozen at the top of the stairs, saying nothing.

Ryuken looked up at him. The visual sweep contained absolutely no hostility, no posturing, and no theatrical performance of dominance. It was the deeply unsettling look of a man who had been dissecting the world for decades and had honed the process down to a terrifying efficiency. Ryuken looked at Vane’s hands first. Then his stance. Then, with a brief twitch of his eyes, he analyzed the spear leaning against the wall. He spent approximately two seconds on all of this combined, digesting a novel’s worth of martial data.

Then his gaze snapped to Ashe.

“You look healthy,” he stated. His voice was entirely at odds with the suffocating pressure filling the room. It was low and perfectly even, carrying the peculiar, relaxed quality of a man who had long since stopped needing volume to make the world listen to him.

Ashe was still standing near the back stairs. Vane noted the chalk dust clinging to her boots and the tight wrap secured around her forearm. The expression she wore was one Vane had never actually seen on her face before, and he catalogued it immediately. It was Ashe with every single layer of performance completely stripped away. She was not afraid, she was not warm, and she was not aggressive. She was just entirely, exhaustingly present, looking the way a person does when trapped in a room with a hurricane they cannot lie to.

“You didn’t send word,” she said, her voice flat.

“No,” he agreed cheerfully.

He immediately looked back at Vane, his eyes gleaming with a sudden, intense focus.

“Show me the Quicksilver Thrust,” he demanded.

Vane did not move a muscle. “I have fractured ribs.”

“I know. Show me anyway.”

There was a bizarre quality to the request. It was not quite a standard command. It did not have the shape of an instruction issued by a commander who expected blind compliance. It had the shape of an absolute, unavoidable fact that was going to become true in approximately the next thirty seconds, regardless of what words were spoken in the interval.

Vane gritted his teeth and picked up the spear from the wall. He descended the stairs slowly, his side throbbing a dull warning. He stopped in the foyer. The space was completely inadequate for the first form’s full, sweeping extension, but he ran through it anyway at a sharply reduced output because his ribs were screaming at the rotation.

He completed the fluid motion, swallowing a wince, and returned to a neutral stance.

Ryuken watched the entire sequence without blinking. He said nothing for a long, heavy moment. Then, with a sudden burst of eccentric energy, he walked a slow, deliberate half circle around Vane. It was a completely abnormal response to watching a spear form, making Vane feel like a strange insect pinned to a board, but he wisely did not move to interrupt the inspection. Ryuken finally stopped right in front of him.

“The woman who taught you this,” he murmured, his head tilting slightly. “What rank did she reach.”

“Expert,” Vane replied tightly. “At the end of her life, fighting a Hydra.”

Ryuken nodded once. It was not a gesture of human sympathy. It was the sharp, satisfied nod of a scholar watching raw data perfectly confirm a prior estimate.

“Her form is living inside your bones,” he said, his eyes tracking invisible lines across Vane’s posture. “Her absolute ceiling is also in your bones.” He pointed a calloused finger at the spear. “They are not the same ceiling.”

He abruptly spun on his heel toward the door.

“Pack for eight weeks,” he called over his shoulder. “We leave tomorrow.”

Vane stiffened, his grip tightening on the spear shaft. “I haven’t agreed to that.”

Ryuken stopped dead. He slowly turned back around. He looked at Vane with an expression of mild, genuine confusion, treating the refusal not as an act of defiance, but as a simple mathematical misunderstanding that could be cleared up with basic logic.

“The thing that broke your ribs,” he asked, his tone almost conversational. “Do you want to actually be able to stop it next time.”

A heavy pause settled over them. The foyer was suffocatingly quiet.

“That,” Ryuken stated brightly, “is your agreement.”

He turned away again, fully intending to walk out the front door. In his mind, the conversation had reached its logical conclusion. Vane shot a desperate look at Ashe. She was watching her father with the weary, hollow expression of someone who had grown up subjected to this exact brand of terrifying logic and had been forced to make a private peace with it somewhere around the age of ten.

Frustration flared hot in Vane’s chest. “I have things here I need to deal with first.”

Ryuken did not bother to turn around. He merely tilted his head slightly to the right, which was apparently his eccentric way of indicating he was still listening.

“Before I go anywhere,” Vane insisted, his voice hardening. “There are things I critically need to say to people in this squad.”

“Tomorrow,” Ryuken dismissed.

“Tonight.”

Ryuken finally turned around. He stared at Vane for a long, unblinking moment, bringing back that flat, deeply invasive assessment that had been reading his entire existence since he came down the stairs.

Then, he moved.

It was not an instant strike. It was not even aggressive. It was simply a hand placed gently on the back of Vane’s neck. The pressure was so incredibly specific, so impossibly and perfectly calibrated, that Vane’s central nervous system had absolutely no mechanism to negotiate with the input. Vane registered the strangely warm contact. Then the walls of the foyer violently tilted sideways. Then the hardwood floor rushed up to greet him, and then there was nothing but dark.

He woke up in the back of what appeared to be a transport carriage moving at a bruising pace. The enclosed space smelled strongly of cedar and old, polished leather. His spear was resting safely beside him. His travel bag was also sitting beside him, fully packed. That meant someone had been rummaging through his private room.

His fractured ribs immediately registered a sharp, burning opinion about the quality of the carriage’s suspension.

He groaned and forced himself to sit up, rubbing the back of his neck.

Ashe was sitting on the bench directly across from him. Her arms were crossed tightly, her jaw was set in a hard line, and she wore the distinct, bitter expression of someone who had tried to argue with a brick wall and predictably lost.

He glared at her through the lingering fog in his head.

“He packed your bag himself,” she offered into the silence. “It took him exactly four minutes. He reorganized your belongings.”

Vane blinked, his frustration momentarily derailed by sheer disbelief. He looked down at the canvas bag. It was completely different from how he usually packed it. It was vastly denser, ruthlessly efficient, and the weight distribution was objectively perfect.

“Where are we going.” he ground out, the anger returning.

“The leviathan dock. The ship leaves at dawn.” She looked away, staring out the rattling carriage window into the dark. “He was going to leave without you if you said no. He just decided that saying no wasn’t actually an option available to you.”

Vane sat in a rigid, furious silence for a moment. “The things I needed to say.”

Her expression softened by a fraction of a degree. “I heard what you were going to do,” she admitted quietly. “Before he arrived.”

He looked at her, his jaw clenching tight.

“Isole said it in the ward.” She looked down at her hands, her voice dropping. “You were going to talk to them tonight.”

A miserable pause hung in the cedar-scented air.

“He didn’t give you the chance,” she said softly. It was not an apology, because she had no control over the storm that was her father. It was just a quiet, shared acknowledgment of the theft.

He leaned his head back against the vibrating carriage wall, staring blankly at the wooden ceiling. He thought about the unopened boxes sitting on the shelf in his room. He thought about a manic demigod who had evaluated his entire worth in forty-five seconds and decided he was moving across the continent without any further discussion.

“Your father does this often,” Vane muttered. It was not really a question.

“He has never taken a disciple,” she corrected him, her eyes distant. “Not once in my entire lifetime. He stopped trying twenty years ago.” A beat of silence passed between them. “Whatever he saw when you ran that form, it was enough.”

The carriage jolted over a rut in the road. The towering lights of the Academy were visible through the small rear window, steadily growing smaller in the distance. Somewhere back in Villa 1, those boxes were still sitting on the shelf, and Valerica and Isole had absolutely no idea what had been delayed and what had been completely upended.

“He knocked me out,” Vane said, the sheer absurdity of the violation finally settling in.

“Yes.”

“In my own foyer.”

“Yes.”

“With one hand.”

“He is highly considerate that way,” she noted dryly. “He easily could have done it from across the room.”

He glared at her. She looked back. The very specific expression she wore when she was internally debating whether a terrible situation was actually funny crossed her face, lingered for a second, and was ruthlessly managed away.

“Get some sleep,” she advised softly. “The leviathan crossing takes ten days.”

He closed his eyes and let out a long, frustrated breath.

“Ashe.”

“Yes.”

“Valerica and Isole. They need to know I didn’t just choose to leave without saying a word.”

She was quiet for a long moment, listening to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels. Then she reached deep into her jacket and produced a small, glowing communication crystal, the expensive short-range type used strictly for inter-villa emergency messages. She held it out across the aisle.

He took it gratefully. He sat with the warm stone resting in his palm for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

He activated the crystal. He sent two messages into the night. They were short, brutally honest, and exact. He sat in the dark and waited, his heart pounding against his bruised ribs. The two distinct acknowledgment pulses came back within a single minute. That meant they were both still awake. That meant they had both been sitting up, waiting for a conversation that was never going to happen.

He handed the dimming crystal back.

Ashe pocketed it without a word. She turned her gaze back out the window, watching the dark silhouette of the academy shrinking into nothingness behind them.

He closed his eyes again. The carriage rolled relentlessly forward. His fractured ribs made their painful position known with every bump in the road. The metal of his spear was cold against his arm, the crisp night air was biting at his ankles from under the carriage door, and somewhere far ahead in the dark, a massive sky leviathan was waiting at the eastern dock to swallow his summer whole.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep