I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 489: The Ceiling

Vane called everything he had within the first thirty seconds of real fighting, and it still wasn’t enough.

He opened with Warlord, crimson pressure gathering thick along his arms, the Killing Intent aura rolling out ahead of him at the highest output he’d ever called from it. Nyx answered with a palm strike aimed at his sternum, and he caught it on the spear’s shaft, the impact ringing through both of them, his boots skidding a full foot backward across the stone from the force of it.

That told him what he needed to know within the first exchange. This wasn’t close.

Sael, still slumped near the base of the stage, watched with one hand pressed against her own cracked ribs, and something in her face, following the exchange, told Vane she’d already run the same math he was running now and arrived somewhere worse.

He layered Celestial Heart’s weight into the next strike, then Samsara’s dual light on top of that, everything he had stacked into a single thrust, Silver Fang’s silver mana carrying the whole combined weight of it down the spear’s edge. It struck her raised forearm and did less than it should have, the impact absorbed and answered a half second later by a counter that clipped his ribs hard enough to steal his breath.

Aura against aura, his output simply wasn’t reaching hers. He understood that plainly, gasping, backing off a step to reset his stance. Four Authorities poured into his channels at maximum output still added up to a Justiciar-rank total, peak of it, everything he had, and whatever Nyx had become tonight was operating at a raw magnitude above that, not by a small margin either.

"You’re stronger than me right now," he said, mostly to keep himself steady, spear raised again. "Straight up. No trick to it."

She didn’t answer. Blood had started tracking from one nostril, and she didn’t wipe it away.

He drove forward anyway, because stopping wasn’t a real option, and matched her fold for fold as best his body could manage, taking a shallow cut along his forearm from a strike he didn’t fully avoid, landing one clean line across her own arm in exchange. For a moment something in her flickered, distant and pained, before the black closed back over her eyes and she came at him faster than before.

He felt the Silver Fang lagging the whole time, and it was the specific thing that made an already losing fight worse. It wasn’t matching the other three anymore. It hadn’t grown in months, sitting frozen at the same output it had carried since the day Senna gave it to him complete, while Warlord and Celestial Heart and Samsara had all kept climbing, quietly, every week, without him asking them to. Tonight, against something operating above his own ceiling, that gap mattered in a way it never had before. Every strike he threw carried three currents pulling one direction and one current pulling noticeably less than the others, and the difference showed up as a fraction less force behind every single exchange, small enough to ignore against anyone slower and weaker than what he was fighting now.

He thought, briefly and uselessly, about the two letters he’d carried in his head for weeks. SS and EX. He’d wondered back then whether one sat above the other. He had his answer now, delivered the hard way, in the specific currency of getting hit.

The exchange after that went worse. He tried the same combined thrust twice more, hoping repetition might find an angle raw output alone hadn’t, and both times she met it with less effort than the last, her own strikes coming faster, harder, the blood on her face now tracking steadily down to her jaw and dripping onto the stone without her ever once seeming to register it was there.

She caught his next combined strike across her forearm, black cracks spreading another inch toward her elbow, and answered with a blow that sent him skidding backward into the base of the podium hard enough to crack the stone behind him.

He got up. He always got up. But he understood, wiping blood from his own mouth, that getting up wasn’t the same as closing the gap.

"There’s a threshold," he said out loud, half to her, half to himself, working through it as the words came. "Expert rank carries something past ordinary aura. I’ve heard instructors call it resonance. An upgrade to the whole output, not just more of the same thing stacked higher." He set his feet again, spear raised, breathing hard. "I don’t have it yet. I’m standing right at the edge of it and I don’t have it."

Nyx came at him again, faster, the Dreamscape’s cold weight pressing harder against his mind with every pass now, and Vane met her with everything he had left, four currents straining together at their absolute limit, and still felt himself losing ground with every single exchange.

He drove one more combined strike forward, everything poured into it, and it landed, clean, along her ribs, and she staggered back three full steps, the first real ground she’d given all fight.

Then she straightened, and came back at exactly the speed she’d been moving before, as if the hit had cost her nothing at all, and Vane understood, watching her close the distance again, that landing a clean strike wasn’t the same as having enough. He could hurt her. He’d proven that twice now. But hurting wasn’t winning against something whose raw output sat a full rank above his own, and no amount of stacking four currents at maximum was going to manufacture a fifth rank he hadn’t earned yet.

He needed the resonance. He didn’t have it. He had four Authorities, three of them EX and growing, one of them SS and standing perfectly still, and none of it, stacked as high as he knew how to stack it, added up to the one thing that would actually let him stand level with her tonight.

Somewhere in his chest, underneath the exhaustion and the specific, sinking knowledge of exactly how far short he was falling, a single sentence surfaced, unbidden, in a voice that hadn’t spoken to him in over a year.

Don’t you dare build a shrine, Vane.

He didn’t understand yet what it meant. He just knew, gathering himself as she came at him again, blood on her face and black cracks climbing toward her elbow and a raw power gap between them that four Authorities at full output hadn’t been enough to close, that something in him was about to have to change, whether he understood it yet or not.