I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 485: Anastasia’s Struggle

Vane heard Anastasia before he saw her, a low golden roar rolling down the corridor of the Aurelia wing that sounded less like a fight and more like weather.

He rounded the corner into a courtyard he’d never actually been inside before, and found her standing in the center of it, rapier out, golden light saturating the air in a wide, steady radius, and at least nine loyalist students spread out around her in a loose, wary ring.

She was winning. That was the first thing he registered, watching her cut down a strike from her left with a single unhurried parry that sent the attacker’s blade spinning out of his hand entirely. She was winning every individual exchange, decisively, without visible effort, the same way she always won things, mana pouring off her in that limitless, unbroken stream Isole had once called a fusion reactor that didn’t leak.

She just wasn’t winning fast enough.

Vane understood the shape of it within a few seconds of watching. Nobody in that ring was trying to beat her outright. They knew better than that. They were trading, deliberately, one attacker feinting in to draw her attention while two others circled wide, falling back the instant she turned to answer, never committing to a real exchange, just testing her attention span and her stamina the way you’d test a wall for the one brick that might eventually give.

It was working, slowly. Vane could see it in the set of her shoulders, the faint sheen of sweat at her temple that hadn’t been there a minute into the fight, the half-second longer it took her to recover her stance after each parry. Her Authority meant she’d never run dry, not really, not in any way that mattered against a normal opponent. But stamina wasn’t only about mana. Muscles still burned. Reflexes still slowed. A body could hold a limitless reserve of power and still, eventually, simply get tired of moving it.

"Ana!" A boy’s voice, one of the ring, taunting. "Where’s your pet? Did he finally get tired of fetching for you?"

"He’s occupied," Anastasia said, breathing hard but level, cutting down another feint before it fully committed. "I’ve managed worse odds than nine of you without him."

"Not this many. Not this long."

She swung her rapier in a wide arc, a crescent of gold tearing across the courtyard stone, and two of the ring scattered rather than test it directly, which told Vane everything he needed to know about how the numbers were actually working against her. She could clear the whole ring in one motion if any of them held still long enough to let her. None of them were foolish enough to hold still.

Vane stepped into the courtyard.

"Nine against one," he said. "That’s an interesting definition of a fair fight."

Every head in the ring turned toward him, and for half a second the tactical spacing that had been keeping Anastasia pinned wavered, a gap opening on her flank that she took immediately, driving one attacker back hard enough to put him briefly out of the fight.

"You," Anastasia said, not quite looking at him, attention still split across the remaining eight. "This is not your concern, Vane."

"You’re being worn down in a courtyard by a mob. I’m making it my concern."

One of the loyalists, a girl with a scarred jaw who seemed to be running whatever coordination the group had, spat toward him without breaking her spacing from Anastasia. "This one’s Imperial to the bone. You want to protect her, that’s your funeral too."

"I’m not protecting the Empire," Vane said, echoing something he’d heard Ashe say an hour ago without quite meaning to. "I’m protecting the person standing in this courtyard who isn’t currently trying to kill anyone who isn’t already trying to kill her."

He called the Silver Fang without further ceremony, silver mana pooling clean and quiet along the spear’s length, and stepped into the gap Anastasia’s counterattack had opened.

The fight reshaped itself immediately. With two fronts to manage instead of one, the loyalists’ careful, patient attrition strategy came apart at the seams, the coordination that had been working against a single target failing to account for a second one arriving mid-exchange. Vane caught a flanking attacker’s blade on the spear’s shaft and redirected it wide, using the Silver Fang’s edge in short, economical strokes rather than the wide arcs Anastasia favored, cutting the ring’s spacing apart from the outside in.

Anastasia used the opening ruthlessly. Freed from having to watch her own back, she pressed forward properly for the first time since Vane had arrived, gold light gathering thick around her blade, and the crescent she cut through the air this time didn’t scatter anyone. It caught the scarred girl full across the front and sent her down hard, weapon skidding away across the stone.

"Regroup," the girl shouted from the ground, voice strained. "Fall back, we’re not equipped for two of them."

They fell back, fast, the loose ring dissolving into a genuine retreat down the far corridor, and within seconds the courtyard had gone from nine attackers and two defenders to just the two of them, breathing hard in the sudden quiet.

Anastasia lowered her rapier slowly, chest heaving, sweat plastering a few strands of golden hair to her temple. She looked, for the first time since Vane had known her, genuinely exhausted rather than merely inconvenienced.

"I had them," she said, between breaths.

"You were losing ground for the last five minutes. Slowly. But you were losing it."

"I would have found the opening eventually."

"Maybe." Vane let the Silver Fang’s mana fade, the spear settling back to ordinary steel. "Or maybe you’d have kept trading favorable exchanges for another ten minutes while they wore you down exactly the way they wanted to, and then one of them would’ve gotten lucky." He looked at her properly for the first time, taking in the torn sleeve, the shallow cut along one forearm she hadn’t mentioned. "You’re not weak, Anastasia. You’ve never been weak. You were just fighting nine people who understood that beating you outright wasn’t the actual plan."

She didn’t have a ready answer for that. She stood there instead, rapier still loose in one hand, staring at him with an expression he’d never once seen her wear in three years of mutual, practiced dislike.

"Where’s Lancelot," she said finally, quiet.

"Not here. I don’t know where."

Something in her face tightened at that, brief and real, before the old composure slid back over it.

She looked at the retreating corridor a moment longer, something unreadable passing over her face, and then back at Vane.

"They weren’t wrong, you know," she said. "About what I am to most of them. Imperial to the bone. My family did all of this." She gestured vaguely at the courtyard, the chaos beyond it, the whole burning shape of the day. "I’ve never once pretended otherwise."

"I know."

"And you still stepped into a nine against one fight to keep me breathing."

"I did."

She studied him a moment longer, something calculating and uncertain both at once behind her eyes, the practiced royal mask slipping just enough to let a real question through.

"Why."

"Because nine against one isn’t a fight. It’s a slaughter with extra steps. I don’t care whose side you’re on when I’m looking at that." Vane shifted his grip on the spear, glancing toward the corridor the loyalists had fled down. "You can hate me again once we’re both somewhere safer."

"Then I suppose," she said, straightening, wiping the blood from her forearm with the back of her hand, "you’ll have to do."

Vane didn’t answer that either. Somewhere beyond the courtyard walls, the wider chaos of the day was still rolling on, and neither of them had time to stand here working out what this particular strangeness between them was actually supposed to mean.