Chapter 3: The Hammer

The iron gates of the courtyard did not burst open. They dissolved.

Vane stood at the window and watched as the Grade F reinforcements he had paid a fortune for turned into glowing orange slag. The metal dripped onto the cobblestones, hissing like angry snakes.

Through the gap walked a single figure in white armor.

“Miller!” Vane shouted. “Defense Pattern Alpha! Hold him at the choke point!”

Miller did not hesitate. He was a professional. He signaled the twelve guards stationed in the courtyard. They were veterans, men who had fought in border skirmishes and survived goblin raids. They formed a shield wall, bristling with spears and crossbows.

“Halt!” Miller roared. “You are trespassing on Lord Vane’s proper…”

The Knight did not stop walking. He did not draw a weapon. He simply released his pressure.

It was not a spell. It was the raw, suffocating density of Rank 4 mana.

The air in the courtyard turned solid.

Miller’s armor crunched inward. It sounded like a tin can being stepped on by a giant. He did not even have time to scream. His chest collapsed, blood spraying from his visor, and he dropped to the mud like a puppet with cut strings.

The other twelve guards followed him a second later. Their bones snapped under the weight of the atmosphere. Thirteen men died without a single blade being drawn.

Vane gripped the windowsill until the wood splintered under his fingers.

Miller had been with him for three years. He had a wife in the lower district. He peeled apples with a knife that was too big.

And now he was just a heap of scrap metal in the mud.

’Run,’ Vane’s instincts screamed. ’You cannot fight gravity.’

But Helena was in the room behind him.

Vane turned. Helena was staring at the window, her eyes wide, her hands clutching the blanket.

“Stay here,” Vane said. His voice sounded calm. It was a lie.

He vaulted through the window.

[Skill Activated: Featherfall (Grade F)]

He landed in the mud, ten meters from the intruder. The pressure hit him instantly. It felt like standing at the bottom of the ocean. His Rank 3 mana flared automatically, forming a skin-tight barrier just to keep his lungs from collapsing.

He tapped his temple.

[Target Analysis]

Name: Gareth

Rank: 4 (Sentinel)

Danger: Fatal

Authority: None

Rank 4.

Vane felt a cold sweat break on his back. A Sentinel. A being who had condensed their mana core four times. In the capital, these men commanded armies. Here, he was a god walking among ants.

Gareth stopped. He looked at the bodies of the guards as if they were uneven paving stones. Then he looked at Vane.

“Vane of Oakhaven,” Gareth said. His voice was bored. “I detected an unauthorized Authority signature. Hand over the anomaly.”

“You killed my men,” Vane said.

“I walked,” Gareth corrected. “They failed to move.”

He drew his sword. It was a plain blade, unadorned, but in his hand it felt heavier than the building behind Vane.

“Step aside, rat. Or join them.”

Vane did not step aside. He reached into the Library.

He had forty-three skills. He was Rank 3. He was the King of this puddle.

“Die,” Vane whispered.

He moved.

[Skill Activated: Flash Step (Grade E)]

Vane vanished. He moved faster than sound, a blur of black leather. He appeared behind Gareth, his daggers coated in [Corrosive Acid (Grade E)]. He aimed for the unprotected gap at the back of the knee.

Clang.

The daggers stopped an inch from the armor. They hit a wall of translucent white light.

[Passive: Mana Skin (Rank 4)]

Gareth did not even turn around. The acid hissed and evaporated against the barrier.

Vane gritted his teeth. He leaped back, cycling through his arsenal.

[Skill Activated: Earth Spike (Grade E)]

[Skill Activated: Fire Stream (Grade E)]

[Skill Activated: Wind Scythe (Grade E)]

The ground erupted. Spikes of stone tried to impale the Knight. A river of fire engulfed him. Blades of compressed air slashed at his helmet.

It was a storm of violence that would have leveled a city block.

When the dust settled, Gareth was still standing there. His white cloak was not even singed. He brushed a speck of dirt from his pauldron.

“You have a lot of tricks,” Gareth noted. “But tricks are for children.”

He swung his sword.

It was a casual backhand swipe. The shockwave hit Vane in the chest.

Vane’s [Stone Skin] shattered. He was thrown across the courtyard, slamming into the stone fountain. The impact cracked the masonry.

Vane coughed, tasting copper. He scrambled to his feet. His Rank 3 body was durable, but that hit had rattled his teeth.

’He is too dense,’ Vane thought. ’I cannot cut him. I cannot burn him.’

He needed something sharper. He needed a weapon that punched above its weight class.

He reached into his spatial ring. His hand closed around cold ash wood.

It was a spear. He had copied the skill for it six months ago from a Rank 4 Adventurer named Lyra, the strongest he had met up to that point. To get it, he had seduced her, and then he had been dragged into her nightmare. He had watched her team, her brothers, be eaten alive by ghouls while she lay paralyzed. He had felt her helpless, screaming rage.

That rage was a weapon now.

Vane leveled the spear.

[Skill Activated: Gale Thrust (Grade C)]

This was his limit. A Grade C skill fueled by Rank 3 mana and the trauma of a survivor.

The wind screamed. It compressed around the spear tip, forming a drilling vortex of vacuum and razor-air. The pressure cracked the cobblestones beneath Vane’s feet.

Gareth turned fully. For the first time, he looked interested.

“Oh?” The Knight tilted his head. “A Grade C skill? In a dump like this?”

“I bite,” Vane snarled.

He lunged.

He put everything into the thrust. His speed, his strength, Lyra’s grief. The spear became a streak of blue light.

It struck Gareth’s chest.

CRACK.

Sparks flew. The white light of the Mana Skin flickered. The wind drill ground against the barrier, screaming like a dying animal. Inch by inch, it dug in.

It pierced the light.

The tip of the spear scratched the white steel of the breastplate.

For a second, Vane thought he had done it.

Then Gareth sighed.

“Not bad,” the Knight said. “For a rat.”

Gareth’s mana flared. It was not a flicker. It was an explosion. The sheer force of it shattered the wind drill. The ash wood spear disintegrated in Vane’s hands.

Gareth raised his sword high. The blade began to glow. It was not the soft light of a spell. It was a blinding, condensed radiance that made the sun look dim.

“But you seem to have misunderstood the hierarchy,” Gareth said.

He swung.

[Skill Activated: Radiant Arc (Grade C)]

It was the same Grade as Vane’s spear skill. But Gareth had Rank 4 mana to fuel it.

A crescent of superheated light tore free from the blade. It was twenty feet tall. It did not just cut the air. It burned the oxygen out of it.

Vane saw it coming. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he could not dodge it.

“Mother!” he screamed, turning back toward the house.

He threw up every shield he had. [Rock Wall]. [Wind Barrier]. [Mana Shield].

The Radiant Arc hit the defenses. It did not pause. It sliced through the rock, the wind, and the magic as if they were smoke.

It hit the mansion.

The sound was not a crash. It was a roar, deep and terrible, like the earth itself screaming. The entire front of the estate, the heavy stone, the timber, the velvet curtains, was bisected in a flash of white light.

The shockwave hit Vane a fraction of a second later.

He was lifted off his feet and thrown into the darkness.

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