Vane stepped off the cracked flagstones of the old meditation garden and moved deeper into the untreated sector. The fog here was thicker and colder. It clung to his uniform like damp wool. It muffled the distant and titanic hum of Zenith's levitation engines which reduced the world to a tight grey radius around him.
Hiss.
The sound was his compass. It was not a thud or a bang. It was a high-pitched whine. A shriek of displaced air that cut through the silence of decay.
He moved with the instinctive stealth he had learned in Oakhaven's alleys. He kept low and used the overgrown shapes of dead ornamental hedges for cover. The air grew thinner here. It smelled of ozone and disturbed electrons. It felt like standing too close to a high-voltage wire.
The fog thinned slightly near the edge of the floating island. The ground abruptly ended in a sheer drop into the endless cloud sea below.
Looming out of the mist was a structure that looked like it should have been condemned decades ago. It was a squat and brutalist building of water-stained concrete. It was perhaps an old armory or a forgotten research ward. Attached to its side and jutting precariously out over the void was a rusted iron balcony.
And on the balcony there was a figure.
Vane stopped behind the cover of a crumbling stone pillar. His breath caught in his throat.
It was a woman. She was sitting in an old manual wheelchair with her back to him. She wore a thin grey hospital gown that hung loosely on a frame that seemed too frail to support itself. Her hair was black and chopped short in a messy utilitarian cut that spoke of neglect.
She was not holding a weapon. She was holding a worn-out wooden broom.
She sat perfectly still for a moment. She stared out at the empty sky. Then her wrist flicked.
It was not a muscle-heavy movement. It was a twitch. A spark.
The broom moved.
It did not just swing. It blurred.
Senna began to rotate the broom in front of her. It started as a figure-eight motion. A basic deflection pattern. But it accelerated instantly. Within a second the wood was no longer visible. It was just a shimmering disc of grey motion in front of her wheelchair.
Hiss. Hiss. HIIISSS.
The sound rose in pitch until it was painful. The air around the balcony began to distort. The fog did not just move away from her. It was being shredded. The moisture in the air was being atomized by the sheer velocity of the rotation.
It was not a spell. If she was using mana it was buried completely inside her flesh. It fueled the movement without leaking a single photon of light. There was no glow and no visible construct. It was just a body that had spent decades teaching bone and muscle how to ignore the laws of friction.
Suddenly she stopped.
She did not slow down. She stopped instantly.
The sudden arrest of momentum transferred all that kinetic energy into the air. A blade of vacuum fired from the tip of the broom. It sliced horizontally into the cloud sea.
It did not make a booming sound. It made a tearing sound. Like a god ripping a bedsheet.
A perfect line appeared in the clouds. It extended for nearly a hundred meters. The clouds above the line drifted separate from the clouds below it. She had not pushed the air. She had severed the sky.
Vane stared. His mind tried to reconcile the frail woman in the chair with the terrifying lethality of that movement. Kael had called him a brute with a stick. This woman had just turned a cleaning tool into a guillotine.
He needed to know what she was.
He focused his eyes on her back and mentally triggered his Authority's active perception.
[Target Analysis]
The familiar overlay flickered into existence over her head. The text glowed with a dense silver light he had never seen before. It was jagged and sharp.
[Name: Senna]
[Rank: 6 (Expert) - Suppressed]
[Authority: Silver Fang (SS)]
[Status: Critical (Dead Mana Corruption)]
Vane nearly choked on the ozone-heavy air.
Rank 6. An Expert. And an SS-Rank Authority.
That was not just rare. That was royalty-tier power.
And it was sitting in a rusted wheelchair at the ass-end of nowhere armed with a broom.
The woman did not turn around. She did not even seem to move. But the broom handle shifted slightly in her grip.
"If you have come to stare at the cripple, freshman," her voice rasped. It was dry as dead leaves. "Get your fill and leave. You are disturbing the airflow."
Vane hesitated. He was caught off guard. Before he could decide whether to speak or retreat she flicked her wrist.
It was a lazy backhanded motion with the broom. It was seemingly aimed at nothing.
The air between them shivered. A crescent of vacuum sliced through the fog. It hit Vane before he could even think about dodging.
A sharp hot sting flared across his left cheekbone.
Vane stumbled back a step. He brought his hand to his face. He pulled it away and looked at his fingers. They were coated in bright red blood.
She had not used a Skill. She had not even looked at him. She had just spun the stick fast enough to throw a blade of air thirty feet.
Senna slowly turned her wheelchair using one hand. Her face was gaunt. The skin was pulled tight over sharp cheekbones. Her eyes were dark and sunken and exhausted. But they held a terrifying and razor-sharp focus.
She looked at him. She took in the pristine uniform and the expensive boots. She looked at the posture that was currently radiating shock.
"Look at you," she said. Her voice dripped with disdain. "A uniform with no bones in it."
Vane lowered his hand. He let the blood drip onto his collar. The humiliation of the arena came rushing back fueled by the sting of the cut.
"I didn't come to stare," Vane said. His voice was rough.
"Then why are you here? This isn't the path to the dining hall."
"I heard it," Vane said. "The sound. It sounded like... velocity. Like someone who actually knew how to make a spear move."
Senna let out a short hacking laugh that turned into a cough. "Velocity. That is a big word for you. I watched you walk up here. You walk like a turtle trying not to trip over its own shell."
Vane grit his teeth. "I know. The instructors told me. I have no foundation. I'm all trick and no art."
Senna's dark eyes narrowed. She leaned forward slightly in her chair. She scrutinized him with an intensity that felt sharper than Kael's glare. The air around her buzzed with static. The hairs on Vane's arms stood up.
"No," she murmured. "That's not it."
She pointed the broom handle at his chest. The tip was perfectly steady.
"You have ghosts in there, boy. I can see them twitching in your muscles. You have habits that don't belong to your body rattling around inside that expensive uniform. Someone else's reflexes. That is why you look wrong. You are wearing other people's movements like ill-fitting clothes."
Vane froze. No one, not Rowan, not Kael, not even Isole, had seen that. They just saw bad form. Senna saw the stolen muscle memory warring with his natural physiology.
"Get out of here," Senna said. She turned her chair back toward the void. "Go back to your shiny classes and play soldier. If you are still hanging around in this graveyard after a week maybe I will bother figuring out what is wrong with you."
She dismissed him completely. Vane stood there for another moment. The blood dried on his cheek. The image of that SS-Rank tooltip burned into his mind.
He was out of his depth. Again.
He turned and walked away. He retreated through the fog. He did not go back to the main campus though. He could not handle the light and the noise yet.
He skirted the edge of the forgotten sector and headed toward a different quadrant of the perimeter. The sun was down now. The fog turned indigo in the twilight.
Ahead near the boundary wall of an old storage yard he heard a different sound.
CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
It was the sound of rock impacting rock. Heavy and rhythmic and brutal.
Vane slowed down. He peered through the gloom.
Valerica Sol was there.
The SA 4 was alone in the storage yard. She had found a massive block of discarded architectural granite. It probably weighed two tons. It hung from a rusted crane hook.
She was not using her gravity Authority. She was just punching it.
Over and over again. Her fists were dense beyond measure. They slammed into the granite. Each impact sent spiderwebs of cracks racing across the stone surface and made the massive block swing wildly on its chain.
She was covered in stone dust and sweat. Her face was a mask of grim and silent concentration.
Vane watched her for a moment. The edge of Zenith collected problems the Academy did not know how to fix. Broken veterans. Overbuilt monsters. And frauds who had climbed too high too fast.
Two ghosts in the fog. One cutting the sky with a broom. The other breaking stone with her bare hands.
Vane touched the cut on his cheek. It still stung with a phantom sharpness. He was the weakest thing in this sector. But for the first time all day he felt like he was in the right place.