I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 481: Isaac’s Wall

The northern corridor was the only clean route left between the Grand Hall and the lower district, which meant it was also, within about ninety seconds of Isaac reaching it, the most contested twenty feet of hallway on the entire island.

He’d frozen the floor first. Instinct more than plan, a wide sheet of ice spreading out from where he stood, rough enough that fleeing students could still get traction if they were careful, smooth enough that anyone trying to charge through at speed went down hard. It bought him a few seconds. He used them to freeze the ceiling supports next, thick columns of ice locking three structural beams in place that had already started to crack from something happening two floors up.

Students streamed past him in both directions, some heading for the exits, a few of the older ones peeling off to actually fight, robes and uniforms torn, faces set in the specific grim calm of people who’d trained for exactly this kind of day and never expected to need it.

Isaac counted six separate skirmishes within his line of sight alone. A pair of loyalist third-years had a younger Imperial student cornered near the archive stairs, and Isaac froze the ground under all three of them before it went any further, giving the younger kid a clean window to bolt while the two upperclassmen slid and swore. Further down, someone’s mana signature flared crimson and vast, familiar in a way that made Isaac’s stomach drop until he registered it was Ashe’s, holding the exits the way she’d said she would, not close enough to help him yet.

A younger student stumbled past him, maybe fourteen, robes half torn, and Isaac caught her arm just long enough to point her toward the far exit before letting her go. She didn’t thank him. She didn’t have time to.

Then the corridor’s east archway lit up gold, and Professor Halden Voss stepped through it.

Isaac knew him only in passing, a broad-shouldered Expert-rank instructor who taught advanced combat theory to fourth-years and had a reputation for running his classes like a war college rather than a lecture hall. Voss’s eyes swept the corridor once, cataloguing the fleeing students, the skirmishing loyalists, the general chaos, and something in his expression settled into flat, professional resolve.

"Stand aside, Glacium." Voss’s voice carried easily over the noise, not shouting, just certain. "This corridor is compromised. I’m authorized to neutralize hostile combatants."

"There’s nobody hostile in this corridor," Isaac said. "There’s a lot of scared kids trying to get to the exits."

"There are loyalist sympathizers actively engaging Imperial students not forty feet from where you’re standing." Voss’s gaze flicked past him, toward the skirmish near the archive stairs, already fading now that Isaac’s ice had broken it apart. "My orders are to contain this uprising by whatever means the situation requires. I don’t have time to sort combatants from bystanders in a hallway this crowded, and neither do you."

"Then don’t sort them. Just don’t attack them."

Voss’s mana gathered, gold and heavy, the specific weight of an Expert-rank technique building fast.

"Move, Isaac."

"No."

Isaac’s own mana answered before he’d finished the word, pale blue frost climbing up both arms, the full weight of four years training with Isadora finally showing itself in something other than a drill. He’d never actually tested himself against an Expert before. He had about half a second to wonder if that had been a mistake before Voss’s opening strike arrived.

It came as a wide arc of golden force, not aimed to kill, Isaac registered distantly, aimed to clear, meant to sweep the whole corridor regardless of who was standing in it. He threw up a wall of solid ice between himself and the strike, thick as a door, braced both hands against it, and felt the impact travel up through his bones like being hit by a wagon.

The wall held. Barely. Cracks spiderwebbed through it in the shape of the blow, and Isaac felt his own knees buckle slightly from the force transferred through the ice into his own frame.

"You’re stronger than your file suggested," Voss said, already gathering for a second strike. "Justiciar rank, if I had to guess. Peak of it, maybe. That’s genuinely impressive for your age." He said it without malice, the way a man states an observation he found professionally interesting, the kind of detached respect one soldier gives another right before trying to put them down. "It won’t be enough."

"Wasn’t asking for your opinion."

Isaac didn’t wait for the second strike. He drove his own hands forward, twin lances of ice screaming down the corridor at Voss, faster than the professor had clearly expected from someone playing purely defensive a moment ago. Voss batted the first aside with a burst of gold, but the second clipped his shoulder, and for the first time something like genuine surprise crossed his face.

"There it is," Voss muttered, and came at him properly this time, gold light gathering thick and fast around both fists now, the polite restraint of the opening exchange clearly finished.

The next several seconds were pure exchange, no room in either of them for words. Isaac laid down ice as fast as his channels would let him, walls, spikes, a floor gone treacherous underfoot that he was careful to keep confined to their own patch of corridor so the fleeing students further down stayed clear of it. Voss answered every wall with force enough to shatter it, every spike with a controlled burn that turned Isaac’s ice to steam before it could reach him, driving forward one measured strike at a time, professional and relentless and clearly capable of ending this significantly faster than he currently was.

Isaac was losing ground. He knew it with the same cold clarity he brought to everything, watching his own defensive line collapse three feet backward, then five, sweat freezing on his own skin from the sheer output he was burning to keep pace.

"Last chance," Voss said, not unkindly, gathering for what was clearly meant to be a finishing strike. "Step aside. I don’t want to hurt one of Isadora’s students. But I will."

Isaac planted his feet in the ruined, refreezing floor, both hands raised, frost climbing past his elbows now, breath coming hard. Behind him, distantly, he could hear more footsteps still moving through the corridor, more students still getting out, the evacuation route still open as long as he stayed standing exactly where he was standing.

He thought, briefly, of his mother, and what she would say about a boy his age holding a line against a full Expert. He thought she would probably be proud, in the specific terrifying way she got proud of things that also frightened her.

"Then you’ll have to," he said, and held the line.

Voss came at him again, and the corridor filled with ice and gold and the sound of two people who had no intention of stopping, and somewhere down the hall the last of the students finally cleared the exit, and neither of them had time to notice.