I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities-Chapter 233: Stronghold 2

The sector was seven minutes wide if you moved at normal pace.

Lancelot did not move at normal pace.

He went east from the northwest stronghold and then south, cutting across the open ground between the fortifications in a straight line, the broadsword still in his hand. The constructs in the outer sectors registered him as a hostile and moved to intercept and he went through them the way he went through everything: without adjusting his direction, without breaking stride, the dark iron clearing paths that a moment ago had not existed.

He had been away from Stronghold 2 for forty-three minutes.

Anastasia was standing in the central chamber when he arrived.

The chamber looked like the end of something. Three of the six squads were on the ground in various arrangements. The other three were still upright, but they were spread across the room with the careful spacing of people who had already made one costly mistake and were deciding whether a second one was worth making. The Siege Core behind Anastasia was still lit. She had not conceded the position.

She was breathing slightly harder than her posture admitted. Her rapier was in her right hand, the Imperial Steel blade running with the white-gold current of Blessed by Mana at sustained output, which meant she had been running it at sustained output for long enough that the effort had become visible. There was a tear in the left shoulder of her uniform. Her golden hair had come partially loose from the braid.

She looked at the door when he came through it.

She looked at the room.

She looked back at the door.

He crossed the chamber.

The three remaining squads made a collective decision that was both simultaneous and unspoken. Some decisions made themselves. The Siege Core behind Anastasia continued its amber hum, and the students who had been coordinating a challenge against it filed out through the south exit in an orderly fashion, which was a dignified exit given the circumstances, and within thirty seconds the chamber contained two people and a lot of evidence of recent combat.

The constructs came with the next wave cycle regardless of the political situation. Six of them, Sentinel-tier, through the north approach.

Lancelot went to meet them.

He did not run a rotation or hold a chokepoint. He walked into the approach corridor and the six constructs came down it and he cleared them the way he had cleared everything in the northwest courtyard, with the same quality of efficiency and the same complete absence of expenditure, the broadsword moving through each one and the corridor going quiet afterward. It took less time than the wave timer gave it.

He came back to the central chamber and stood near the entrance.

Anastasia had not moved from the Core.

The tear in her uniform shoulder was small. He looked at it.

"You are late," she said. Her voice had its usual precision. Her chin was at the correct angle. The Blessed by Mana current on the rapier was still running, not because she needed it now but because letting it drop in front of someone who had seen her nearly spent would have been a concession she was not prepared to make. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

He said nothing.

She walked toward him. Her boot heels on the stone, the same precise cadence they always had, every movement its own statement about who she was and what she required of the world around her.

She stopped close enough that he could see the specific way she was holding herself together.

She put her hand on his arm. Not the proprietary grip she used in public, not the regal claim. Her fingers closed around the fabric of his sleeve the way they had in private exactly twice before, in moments she had never acknowledged after the fact.

"Why did you leave," she said.

It did not come out the way she intended. She had intended it as an accusation, with the shape of a question and the weight of a command. It came out as the other thing, the thing underneath it, because she had been fighting six squads for forty-three minutes and her voice had gotten slightly ahead of her control.

He looked at her hand on his sleeve.

"I apologize," he said.

The flat mechanical delivery he gave everything. But he said it, and he did not qualify it or explain it or route it through the language of duty and directives. He said it the way something is said when it means itself and nothing else.

She did not let go of his sleeve.

He stood still and let her hold it, and the amber light of the Siege Core moved across the chamber walls, and outside the stronghold the sector was quiet for the first time since the evaluation began.

The evaluation band chimed at hour seventy-two.

It chimed simultaneously on every registered student in the sector, the Academy’s synchronized system running through the band network at 0600 exactly, a single pulse that indicated the evaluation had closed. In the northwest stronghold, Vane felt it against his wrist while Lyra was finishing her field work on his ribs, and the pulse was ordinary in the way that the end of something difficult always feels ordinary when it finally arrives.

The transport vessels appeared over the Embrasure an hour later, dropping into the sector on descent vectors and settling into the landing zones the Academy had designated before deployment. The boarding was slow. Most of the students who loaded onto the vessels did so with the specific quality of movement that indicated they had spent everything they had and were operating on the far side of their reserves.

The point totals compiled as the last squad boarded.

The evaluation system ran the final calculation. The result propagated to the administrative network and then to the class standing board, where it sat in the Academy’s records as a permanent entry.

Lancelot: Rank 1.

He read the notification on his band the way he read everything: without visible reaction, without comment. He was standing three paces behind Anastasia on the transport vessel, his hands at his sides, the broadsword long since dissipated back into the ambient mana of the sector.

The vessel’s engines engaged. The Embrasure fell away below them, the old fortress growing smaller through the hull’s single port window until the stone walls and the ruined towers and the seven strongholds with their amber cores were just a shape in the landscape.

Then they were above the cloud line and the Embrasure was gone and there was only the sky.