I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 496: The Retreat

The Emperor caught Isadora’s next strike on his forearm, held it there a beat longer than any exchange before it, and simply stopped.

Not staggered. Not forced back. He straightened out of the stance he’d held for the better part of ten minutes, golden light easing off his skin in slow, unhurried waves, and looked at the four Transcendents arrayed around him with the mild, satisfied expression of a man closing a book he’d enjoyed.

"That’s enough for today," he said.

Ryuken didn’t lower his guard. "You don’t get to decide that’s enough."

"I rather think I do." The Emperor’s tone stayed pleasant, untroubled by the blood still drying along his ribs. "I could keep going. You all understand that, I think, better than most people ever get the chance to. But four Rank 9s making me bleed once is a genuinely excellent afternoon’s work, and excellent work deserves to end on its own terms rather than be dragged past the point where it stops teaching anyone anything new."

"Nyx isn’t a lesson," Varian said, low.

"No." The Emperor’s gaze moved past all four of them, toward where Nyx stood, hollowed out and shaking, still held upright mostly by the fact that nobody had let her fall. "She’s a project I’ll return to eventually. Today simply isn’t the day for it, given the company she’s apparently collected." He inclined his head, almost courteous. "Congratulations, incidentally. Four Transcendents responding to a single Academy incident within the hour is not a small thing to have earned. I’ll remember it."

He turned toward the broken gate.

"Where are you going," Isadora said, ice still climbing the floor around her boots.

"Away, for now." He glanced back once, amber eyes settling briefly on Vane, still pinned and gasping on the stone. "I meant what I told your little Usurper earlier. I look forward to the day his spear actually reaches me. Today gave me a great deal to think about in the meantime." He looked at the wreckage of the hall, at Sael still on the ground, at the frozen faculty finally beginning to twitch as whatever had held them started, slowly, to release. "Someone should tend to your ceremony’s other casualties. It’s a bit undignified, leaving them like this."

He walked through the broken gate without hurrying, and somewhere past the threshold, the crushing weight that had filled the hall since the moment he arrived simply lifted, all at once, like a held breath finally let go.

Nobody moved for a long moment.

Ryuken was the first to break the stillness, crossing the hall in three long strides to reach Ashe, still slumped against the wall. He knelt in front of her, and for just a second, something in his usually unreadable face cracked open into something closer to an ordinary father’s fear.

"You’re breathing," he said.

"Barely." Ashe managed something that might have been meant as a smile. "You took your time getting here."

"I was in a council session on the mainland when the alert reached me." Ryuken’s jaw tightened. "I should have been faster."

"You weren’t slow. You were exactly as fast as anyone could have been." Ashe’s hand found his forearm, weak but certain. "I’m fine, Father. Mostly."

Evangeline moved through the hall methodically, checking each of the frozen faculty in turn, murmuring something low to each one that seemed to ease the last of whatever hold had gripped them. When she reached Sael, still on the ground, something in her expression softened.

"I was at the southern tribunal," she said, before Sael could ask. "Three Rank 9 disputes require a Headmistress’s signature by treaty, scheduled months before any of this. I would have been here in seconds if I’d had any warning at all."

"I know," Sael said, hoarse. "Nobody’s blaming you."

"I’m blaming me," Evangeline said, and moved on to the next fallen instructor without further comment.

Varian crossed the hall last, slower than the others, favoring one arm that hadn’t fully recovered from the angle the Emperor had bent it at earlier. He stopped in front of Vane, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"You did well," Varian said finally. "Better than well. I watched you cut a hole clean through something I’ve never seen anyone manage to touch before today."

"It wasn’t enough."

"No." Varian didn’t soften it. "It wasn’t enough yet. That’s a different sentence than the one you’re currently hearing." He crouched, resting a hand briefly on Vane’s shoulder, steady and warm despite everything. "You reached Expert rank in the middle of a fight against a Calamity. Most people spend a decade waiting for a breakthrough like that and never get one at all. Give yourself the hour to actually feel that before you decide it wasn’t enough."

Vane didn’t have an answer ready. He simply let the hand stay where it was, and for a moment, that was enough on its own.

Somewhere behind them, Isole had finally managed to get both halves of Samsara flickering weakly along her fingers again, and she’d made her way to Nyx first rather than to any of the others, checking the black cracks along her arms with a care that had nothing clinical left in it at all. Valerica sat up against the far wall, still breathing hard, watching the gate the Emperor had walked through like she expected it to open again any second.

Isaac finally stepped fully through the wrecked doorway, frost cracking off his boots with each step, and made it about ten feet into the hall before Isadora spotted him.

She crossed the distance in something that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the measured, devastating grace she’d carried through the entire fight against the Emperor. She simply ran, arms already open, and collided with her son hard enough to nearly knock them both over, wrapping him up so completely that his frost-armored shoulders vanished entirely into her embrace.

"You’re alive," she said, muffled against his hair, any trace of Absolute Zero’s icy composure gone entirely. "You’re alive, you’re alive, I felt the alert go out and I nearly turned this entire Academy into a glacier finding my way here."

"Mother." Isaac’s voice came out strangled, half from the force of the hug and half from sheer mortification. "I’m fine. I was never actually in the fight."

"You were standing in a hall where an Emperor was fighting four Transcendents." She pulled back just far enough to hold his face in both hands, inspecting every inch of it with the frantic thoroughness of a woman checking for injuries that clearly weren’t there. "Do you understand what almost happened here? Do you have any idea?"

"I have a fairly good idea, yes, given that I was watching the whole time."

"Don’t be smart with me right now. I am allowed exactly one full minute of not being reasonable about this, and you are going to let me have it."

Ashe, still propped against the wall beside her father, let out a short, disbelieving laugh despite everything. "Absolute Zero just tackled her son like a golden retriever."

"I heard that," Isadora said, not letting go of Isaac’s face.

"You were meant to."

Isaac closed his eyes, resigned, still fully wrapped in his mother’s embrace in the middle of a wrecked hall that thirty seconds ago had held the single most terrifying fight any of them had ever witnessed, and somewhere in the exhausted, battered wreckage of the day, a few of them managed, briefly, to laugh.