The main campus of Zenith was defined by light. Sunlight glinting off polished marble, the arcanic glow of ward-lines, the ambient luminescence of a thousand active spells.
It was loud, vibrant, and aggressive in its perfection.
Vane hated it.
He stood in Elara Vance's Advanced Mana Control Lab, sweat dripping onto the pristine floor mats. The air in the climate-controlled room smelled intensely of ozone and heated copper.
"Again," Elara ordered, walking between the rows of students. "Cycle to eighty percent maximum density. Maintain the flow. Do not let the pressure build in the joints."
Vane gritted his teeth and pulled on his internal mana. It felt like trying to lasso a thunderstorm with twine.
Thanks to the [Usurper] Authority, his body, his "chassis," as Kael called it, had been forcibly upgraded to handle immense power. He was an Elite, but his capacity pushed the very upper limits of that title.
His channels were wide and tough, built for volume, not finesse.
But he had zero training in how to use them manually. For his whole life, he had relied on the crutch of stolen Skills, flipping a mental switch and letting the stolen reflex do the work.
Now, trying to manually regulate the flow without that assist felt impossible.
When he pushed, the mana didn't flow smoothly; it crashed. It was turbulent.
His skin flushed dark red. The veins in his neck distended. He felt the raw power thrumming in his limbs, vibrating like a loose pipe under high pressure.
Next to him, Valerica Sol was a statue carved from obsidian.
The Gravity Titan stood perfectly still. Her internal cycling was so intense that the air around her shimmered with heat haze, distorting the light. The floor mat beneath her feet was slowly compressing, cracking silently under the sheer density of her existence.
She made it look effortless. Terrifyingly so.
"Vent," Elara commanded.
Valerica exhaled. The shimmering haze vanished instantly. The pressure in the room dropped. It was perfect control over catastrophic power.
Vane tried to vent. He didn't know how to feather the brake. He just dumped the power.
BANG.
A shockwave of uncontrolled reinforcement energy fired through his left leg. He stumbled sideways, nearly driving his knee into the mat.
Elara stopped in front of him. She looked down, her expression clinical.
"You have the output of a high Elite, Vane," she said dryly, noting the tremors in his hands. "But you have the regulation of a broken dam. You are treating flow like an explosion. You need to learn to idle the engine."
She moved on to the next student without waiting for a response.
Vane straightened up, wiping sweat from his eyes. Across the room, Valerica glanced at him.
It wasn't disdain in her eyes; it was just a flat assessment of a fellow powerhouse who hadn't figured out how to drive his own machine yet.
By late afternoon, when Vane crossed the invisible boundary into the forgotten sector, the cold fog felt like a relief. The silence here was honest. It didn't pretend to be perfect; it just rotted quietly.
Senna was back on the balcony. She looked worse today. The confession about the Hydra seemed to have sapped a reserve of energy she wouldn't get back. Her skin was translucent, the shadows under her eyes deep enough to bruise.
She didn't waste time with greetings. She pointed to a pile of fist-sized rocks she had gathered from the crumbling masonry.
"Pick up the spear," she rasped.
Vane grabbed the training spear. "Target practice?"
"Defense," Senna corrected. "Assume the Second Form. Lunar Deflection."
Vane stepped into position. He began to spin the spear.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
The figure-eight pattern hummed in the damp air.
"A shield can be broken," Senna lectured, her voice barely carrying over the wind. "A shield takes the energy of the attack and tries to absorb it. If the attack is heavier than the shield, you die."
She picked up a jagged piece of concrete.
"The Argent Horizon does not absorb. It redirects. We do not stop the force. We change its vector."
She threw the rock.
It wasn't a gentle toss. She whipped it with expert precision, aiming straight for Vane's chest.
Vane saw the rock coming. His instinct screamed at him to swat it away—to treat the spear like a baseball bat and hit the rock.
He tensed his arms, interrupting the flow of the spin to snap the shaft toward the projectile.
CLACK.
The wood hit the stone. The impact jarred Vane's wrists. The rock flew off to the side, but the spear stopped dead. The rhythm was gone.
"Dead," Senna pronounced flatly. "You stopped. You tried to hit the rock. Now your spear is still, and my second rock hits you in the throat."
She threw another stone immediately.
Vane scrambled to restart the spin, but he was too slow. The stone clipped his shoulder, stinging even through his uniform.
"Don't hit it!" Senna yelled, her voice cracking. "You are not a bat! You are a sawblade! Keep the rotation constant! Let the rock hit the spin, not the shaft!"
Vane gritted his teeth. He started the cycle again.
Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.
"Faster," Senna commanded. "Create the boundary."
She threw a third stone.
This time, Vane didn't try to intercept it. He focused on the Hum. He kept the spear moving in its figure-eight, trusting the geometry of the art.
The rock flew into the path of the spinning weapon.
Ting!
It didn't clack. It pinged off the rotating shaft, shooting upward and away at a sharp angle. Vane didn't feel the impact in his wrists because the centrifugal force of the spear ate the energy. The spear didn't stop. It kept spinning.
"Yes," Senna hissed. She picked up two stones. "Again. Maintain the velocity. If you slow down, the heavy things get through."
She began to pelt him. Stones, chunks of brick, pieces of rusted iron.
Vane danced. He kept his feet moving, pivoting his hips to keep the spinning disc of the spear between him and the projectiles.
Ping. Ting. Clatter.
Debris bounced off the "shield" of motion. He wasn't blocking them; the velocity was rejecting them. He felt like he was standing inside a tornado of his own making.
"Good," Senna breathed. "Don't let it drop."
She reached for a larger brick, but her hand spasmed.
The sound was smaller today—a sharp, sudden intake of breath through gritted teeth, followed by a rigid freezing of her frame.
It wasn't the full-blown seizure of yesterday, but the recoil hit her hard.
Her head snapped back against the chair rest, her neck cords straining. The black veins pulsed angrily at her collarbone, visible even in the dim light. The engine was misfiring.
Vane didn't panic this time. He dropped the spear and stepped in close.
He didn't try to feed her mana. He didn't ask useless questions.
He moved behind the chair and placed his hands firmly on her shoulders.
She was vibrating with tension, her body locked in a silent scream as the dead mana gnawed at her nerves. It was the turbulence he had felt in the lab, magnified a thousand times.
"Easy," Vane said, his voice low and steady near her ear. "I've got you. You're not crashing."
He could feel the cold radiating off her, the unnatural chill of the corruption trying to stall her heart.
He held her firmly, letting his own body heat seep into her thin gown.
"Cycle it," he instructed, his voice taking on the rhythm of the spear drill. "Don't fight the pressure. Just let it flow through. In. Out."
He pressed his chest slightly against the back of the chair so she could feel his breathing.
"Keep the engine running, Senna. Don't let it stop. If it stops, the weight catches up."
For two agonizing minutes, she fought the pain, her body rigid as iron under his hands. He just held on, a living stabilizer in the fog.
Slowly, the tension began to leak out of her. Her head slumped forward.
A shudder ran through her frame, and she drew a ragged, wet breath that matched his own.
Vane didn't let go immediately. They stayed like that for a long moment in the silence of the forgotten garden—the thief from the slums holding up the broken expert, surrounded by the mist.
Finally, Senna stirred.
"You know," she rasped, her voice wrecked, "most people have the good sense to leave the room when I start short-circuiting."
Vane stepped around to the front of the chair. He crouched down so he was eye-level with her. She looked absolutely drained, but her eyes were clear.
"I'm from Oakhaven," Vane said flatly. "I know what a stalled engine sounds like. You just needed a kickstart."
Senna stared at him. A corner of her pale mouth twitched upward. It wasn't quite a smile, but it wasn't a sneer either.
"Liar," she murmured.
She jerked her chin toward the spear on the flagstones.
"Pick it up, freshman. The velocity dropped. And when the velocity drops..."
"...you die," Vane finished.
He picked up the spear. He spun it. The Hum returned to the garden.
"Good," she whispered, closing her eyes for a second. "Keep it spinning."