I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 488: The Choice

She didn’t answer him. The silence stretched a half second longer, spear trembling an inch from her palm, neither of them moving, and then the air around her hand simply detonated.

Vane felt it before he saw it, a wave of cold psychic pressure blasting outward from her palm hard enough to throw him bodily backward across the hall floor. He hit the stone shoulder-first, rolled with the impact out of old instinct, and came back up onto one knee with the Silver Fang already gathering fresh mana along its length.

"All right," he said, mostly to himself, breathing hard. "All right. Real, then."

She came at him.

It wasn’t the graceful, unhurried movement he’d watched her use a hundred times in sparring sessions that were really just excuses to spend an afternoon together. This was faster, flatter, more direct than anything he’d seen from her before, the Dreamscape folding the space between them so that one instant she was thirty feet away and the next she simply wasn’t anywhere except directly in front of him, palm already driving toward his chest.

He got the spear up in time. Barely. Silver mana met whatever she’d gathered in her palm, and the impact rang through the hall like a struck bell, the shockwave of it cracking two of the overturned chairs nearby clean in half.

She didn’t let up. She came again immediately, another fold of space closing the distance before he’d finished recovering his stance, and this time he couldn’t get the spear fully up in time.

Her palm connected with his ribs.

It should have ended the fight there. He knew that with total clarity even as it happened, some cold analytical part of his mind already running the numbers on what a full, unrestrained strike from her ought to do to a body like his. He braced for the impact to cave his ribs in, to throw him across the hall broken, and instead felt something that landed like a hard shove rather than a killing blow, enough force to send him skidding backward but nowhere near what the raw output should have carried.

He hit the base of the podium and stayed upright, gasping, more from shock than pain. He looked down at his own ribs, half expecting to find them caved in regardless of how it had felt, and found nothing worse than a spreading bruise already forming under his shirt.

That shouldn’t have happened.

He didn’t have time to examine it properly. She was already coming again, and he threw himself sideways rather than test his luck a second time, silver mana trailing off the spear in a wide defensive arc as he rolled clear.

"You pulled that," he said, scrambling back to his feet. "I don’t know how, but you pulled that."

No response. Her eyes were still that depthless black, still fixed on him with the same distant, weatherlike attention, and whatever had softened that last strike gave no sign of doing it again as she closed the distance a third time.

Vane called on all three Authorities at once this time, deliberately, funneling Warlord’s aggression and Celestial Heart’s weight and Samsara’s dual light into the Silver Fang’s familiar forms, the same combination he’d used against Isaac once in a fight that had nearly killed them both. The Argent Horizon’s third form rose around him, silver and crimson and violet all bleeding together along the spear’s edge, more raw power gathered into a single stance than he’d ever called before in his life.

He met her next strike head on.

The impact threw both of them backward, Vane skidding a dozen feet across the ruined floor, Nyx recoiling further than she had all fight, the first real sign that something he’d done had actually registered as force rather than simply passing through her.

"There," he said, breathing hard, spear raised again. "That’s a start."

She came again immediately, faster this time, and the exchange that followed blurred past in a way Vane could barely track even with the Usurper’s passive read running at full attention, strike and counter and fold of space arriving faster than conscious thought could keep pace with. He caught glancing blows on the spear’s shaft, took a shallow cut along one forearm from something that might have been her own nails grown suddenly sharp and cold, drove the spear’s tip within an inch of her shoulder before she folded away from it entirely.

Sael, still slumped near the base of the stage, lifted her head enough to watch, one hand pressed against her own ribs, breath rattling in a way that suggested at least one of them was cracked. She didn’t try to intervene again. There wasn’t anything left in her to intervene with, and some flicker of recognition crossed her face, watching Vane meet a second strike, that said she understood exactly what she was looking at now that someone else had stepped into the space she’d already failed to hold.

Neither of them said anything else. There wasn’t room left in the fight for words anymore.

Somewhere in the exchange, Vane felt the first real strain start to show, not in his body, in his channels, three Authorities running at once through forms that had only ever been built to carry one. It was a discomfort he’d never felt before, a kind of internal friction he didn’t have a name for yet, silver mana grinding against crimson and violet and grey inside a container that seemed, for the first time in three years of using it without complaint, to be objecting to how much was being asked of it.

It reminded him, distantly, of the way three rivers might feel forced through a channel cut for one, water finding every seam in the stone and pressing against it, patient and enormous, looking for the place it would eventually give. He filed the sensation away next to everything else he didn’t have time to examine properly right now.

He didn’t have time to think about what that meant. She was already coming again.

He met her, spear raised, silver light singing along its edge, and somewhere underneath the fear and the friction and the growing certainty that he was losing ground rather than gaining it, some small, stubborn part of him held onto the fact that she had pulled that first strike. Whatever was piloting her right now, whatever had swallowed the girl who named stray cats and stole bread off his plate, it had held back once, just barely, just enough to matter.

That was something. He didn’t know yet if it was enough. But it was something, and he intended to keep fighting until he found out exactly how much it was worth.

The next exchange came faster than the last, and the one after that faster still, and somewhere in the relentless, grinding rhythm of it, Vane understood with total clarity that there was no version of this fight that ended with him walking away and calling it someone else’s problem to finish.

He’d made his choice the moment he walked through the broken doors. All that was left now was seeing it through.