I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 397: The Ring

The assessment field woke up the second his boots touched the stone.

It was a familiar sensation. The floor hummed with dormant spell-work, drawing ambient mana to map the weight, density, and output signature of whoever stood on it. Over the last three years, Vane had spent countless hours in these rings. He knew exactly how the stone felt when it scanned him.

But the floor had never felt him like this.

Thorne stood at the opposite end of the ring, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. The Vanguard instructor’s pale eyes swept over Vane, running a silent, punishing analysis. It was a flawless read, mapping Vane from the ground up, tracing his mana channels and measuring how his aura displaced the ambient air.

’He’s comparing me to the old file,’ Vane thought, settling his grip on his spear.

Thorne’s internal model of Vane was eighteen months out of date. It ended at High Sentinel. It cataloged a developing Silver Fang and a Storm Step that ran a half-second too slow. What Thorne was looking at now bore absolutely no resemblance to that boy.

To his credit, Thorne didn’t blink. He discarded his obsolete intel instantly. For a thirty-year Vanguard veteran, a broken tactical model wasn’t a crisis; it just meant you needed a new one.

Thorne moved.

There was no warning. No formal bow, no shifting into an opening stance. The gap between his decision to attack and the physical engagement compressed to zero.

He crossed the lower third of the ring in a blur. The suffocating pressure of an Expert-tier core hit Vane before Thorne even closed the distance, the dense, settled weight of Rank 6 mana pressing violently against Vane’s aura.

Through the Usurper, Vane’s Null Point had already mapped Thorne’s field in three seconds flat. An Expert’s aura was incredibly dense, hardened by decades of use. But it wasn’t a solid wall. There were gaps. They were microscopic, but they existed.

And Vane was already moving.

The Storm Veil had been quietly running since he first walked into the hall. It projected a phantom mana-coordinate exactly two meters to his left—a perfect ghost mimicking Vane’s output signature, density, and movement vector.

Thorne’s highly trained mana-sense caught both targets simultaneously. In the critical fraction of a second where he committed his weight to his opening strike, his instincts betrayed him, dragging his aim just a hair toward the phantom coordinate.

A fraction of an inch was all Vane needed.

He engaged the Silver Fang. At Peak Justiciar, the boundary principle wasn’t just a sharp edge; it was a conceptual wall. It forced the opponent’s aura to stagger and process the threat before physical contact even occurred.

Thorne’s strike clipped that boundary. Combined with the Storm Veil’s decoy, the Vanguard’s opening blow became a clean miss, sailing past Vane’s shoulder.

Vane’s spear was already driving forward.

He flowed into the first form. Eight generations of Razar martial discipline snapped into alignment. The kinetic chain of the Water Spine rushed from the stone floor, up through his ankle, knee, hip, and shoulder, arriving at the spear tip with absolutely zero wasted energy. He packed the entire conceptual weight of the Silver Fang directly behind the steel point.

He drove it straight into the microscopic gap Null Point had found—a tiny fracture between Thorne’s left shoulder compression and the outer edge of his core.

The strike landed.

It wasn’t a clean hit. Thorne’s thirty years of survival instincts compressed his reaction time into something barely human. He twisted at the last possible millisecond, taking the spear at a glancing angle. His Expert defense field absorbed the brunt of the physical force.

But the Silver Fang ran deeper than physics. The conceptual edge of the strike bled straight through the dense mana barrier. Thorne’s defense field shuddered, trying to categorize an attack it had no structural defense against.

Thorne reset his footing instantly, refusing to yield the momentum.

He had already figured out the Storm Veil. His spatial mana-sense was compromised, so he simply shut it off. He abandoned the supernatural read entirely and shifted to pure, brutal physical timing. Without Authority, Thorne couldn’t counter Vane’s conceptual strikes, but decades of fieldwork had taught him that sometimes a good pair of eyes and raw muscle memory were the superior weapons.

He closed the distance recklessly, bypassing Vane’s spear entirely, aiming a devastating close-quarters strike directly at Vane’s chest.

Vane triggered the Ephemeral State.

He didn’t try to block or deflect. Exactly where Thorne’s fist was about to land, the boundary between the real world and the Dreamscape blurred. For a split second, Vane’s physical reality became uncertain. He was committed to neither existing nor not existing.

Thorne’s strike passed entirely through empty air.

The instructor stumbled forward, his eyes going wide. For a man whose tactical taxonomy had been flawless for three decades, encountering an opponent who could simply choose not to be there was a jarring, system-breaking shock.

Thorne recovered with a snarl. He abandoned timing. He abandoned technique. He opened his core to maximum output, flooding the ring with the sheer, crushing pressure of a full-fledged Expert. Every channel in his body spiked to the ceiling. If he couldn’t hit Vane conceptually, he would drown him in raw, unadulterated power and see if the boy’s bones could hold up under the weight.

Vane grounded his feet and dropped into the fourth form.

He didn’t just apply the technique; he embodied it. The deep, unshakeable conviction of the fourth form anchored him. It was a permanent architecture now, forged in the freezing isolation of the north, perfected during endless repetitions in a cabin surrounded by monsters. The Silver Fang coiled tightly behind the form, inevitable and heavy.

As Thorne’s crushing aura closed in, Vane fired the Argent Release.

It was a point-blank detonation. He discharged the entire conceptual weight of the Silver Fang through the rigid structure of the fourth form. It wasn’t a strike meant to test a shield. It was a violent, undeniable statement about reality, forcing Thorne’s dense defense field to process a conceptual paradox at the exact same moment a massive wave of kinetic force slammed into him.

Expert density was incredibly strong. But Expert density without Authority had absolutely no language to defend against a conceptual shotgun blast.

The shockwave tore through the ring.

Thorne went down.

The veteran instructor hit the stone hard. He dropped to one knee, catching his weight on one hand. His Expert field had done everything it possibly could to keep him standing, which was a testament to his own immense skill, but it hadn’t been enough.

The hall was dead silent.

Thorne stayed kneeling for a long moment, his chest heaving. He stared at the cracked stone between his fingers. He looked up at the steel tip of the spear hovering in a neutral guard just inches from his face. Then, he looked up into Vane’s eyes.

Vane wasn’t gloating. He wasn’t breathing heavily. He was just waiting.

Thorne slowly pushed himself up to his feet. He dusted off his trousers and walked out of the ring, not bothering to look down at the assessment field’s glowing residue. They both knew exactly what it had recorded.

He walked over to the administrator waiting nervously by the heavy oak doors. Thorne pulled a small leather ledger from his coat, jotted something down with a piece of charcoal, and handed it over. He spoke a few quiet words to the clerk, turned, and left the hall without looking back.

The administrator looked down at the ledger, swallowed hard, and read the two words aloud to the empty room.

"Rank two."