Vane stepped off the cracked flagstones of the old meditation garden and moved deeper into the untreated sector. The fog here was thicker, colder, clinging to his uniform like damp wool. It muffled the distant, titanic hum of Zenith's levitation engines, reducing the world to a tight grey radius around him.
Thwack.
The sound was his compass. It was hypnotic—a metronome of perfect, violent impact cutting through the silence of decay.
He moved with the instinctive stealth he'd learned in Oakhaven's alleys, keeping low, using the overgrown shapes of dead ornamental hedges for cover. The air grew heavier with the scent of ozone and disturbed earth.
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, brutalist building of water-stained concrete, perhaps an old armory or a forgotten research ward. Attached to its side, 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 catching in his throat.
It was a woman. She was sitting in an old, manual wheelchair, 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, chopped short in a messy, utilitarian cut that spoke of neglect.
She wasn't holding a weapon. She was holding a worn-out wooden broom.
She sat perfectly still for a moment, staring out at the empty sky. Then, with a sudden, violent torque of her torso that seemed impossible for her wasted frame, she thrust the broom forward.
Thwack.
It wasn't a spell. If she was using mana, it was buried completely inside her flesh, fueling the movement without leaking a single photon of light. There was no glow, no visible construct—just a body that had spent decades teaching bone and muscle how to move with perfect efficiency.
The tip of the broom moved with such impossible speed and focused intent that it compressed the air in front of it. A visible shockwave—a localized sonic boom—ripped through the fog, punching a clean, perfectly circular tunnel through the mist that extended for fifty meters out over the drop before dissipating.
Vane stared, his mind trying 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 siege weapon.
He needed to know what she was.
He focused his eyes on her back, mentally triggering his Authority's active perception.
[Target Analysis]
The familiar overlay flickered into existence over her head, the text glowing with a dense, silver light he hadn't seen before.
[Name: Senna]
[Rank: 6 (Expert) - Suppressed]
[Authority: Silver Fang (SS)]
[Status: Critical (Dead Mana Corruption)]
Vane nearly choked on the fog.
Rank 6. An Expert. And an SS-Rank Authority.
That wasn't 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 didn't turn around. She didn't even seem to move. But the broom handle shifted slightly in her grip.
"If you've come to stare at the cripple, freshman," her voice rasped, dry as dead leaves, "get your fill and leave. You're letting the cold in."
Vane hesitated, 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, seemingly aimed at nothing.
A crescent of compressed air sliced through the fog between them. It hit Vane before he could even think about dodging.
A sharp, hot sting flared across his left cheekbone.
Vane stumbled back a step, bringing his hand to his face. He pulled it away and looked at his fingers. They were coated in bright red blood.
She hadn't used a Skill. She hadn't even looked at him. She had just pushed the air hard enough to cut him from thirty feet away.
Senna slowly turned her wheelchair using one hand. Her face was gaunt, the skin pulled tight over sharp cheekbones. Her eyes were dark, sunken, and exhausted, but they held a terrifying, razor-sharp focus.
She looked at him, taking in the pristine uniform, the expensive boots, the posture that was currently radiating shock.
"Look at you," she said, her voice dripping with disdain. "A uniform with no bones in it."
Vane lowered his hand, letting 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 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... competence. Like someone who actually knew what a spear was supposed to do."
Senna let out a short, hacking laugh that turned into a cough. "Competence. That's a rich word coming from you. I watched you walk up here. You walk like a knife-fighter trying not to trip over his own shadow."
Vane grit his teeth. "I know. The instructors told me. I have no foundation. I'm all trick, no art."
Senna's dark eyes narrowed. She leaned forward slightly in her chair, scrutinizing him with an intensity that felt heavier than Kael's glare.
"No," she murmured. "That's not it."
She pointed the broom handle at his chest.
"You've got ghosts in there, boy. I can see them twitching in your muscles. You've got habits that don't belong to your body rattling around inside that expensive uniform. Someone else's reflexes. That's why you look wrong. You're 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, turning her chair back toward the void. "Go back to your shiny classes and play soldier. If you're still hanging around in this graveyard after a week, maybe I'll bother figuring out what's wrong with you."
She dismissed him completely. Vane stood there for another moment, the blood drying 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, retreating through the fog. He didn't go back to the main campus, though. He couldn't handle the light and the noise yet.
He skirted the edge of the forgotten sector, heading toward a different quadrant of the perimeter. The sun was down now, the fog turning 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, rhythmic, and brutal.
Vane slowed down, peering through the gloom.
Valerica Sol was there.
The Rank 4 Titan was alone in the storage yard. She had found a massive block of discarded architectural granite, probably weighing two tons, hanging from a rusted crane hook.
She wasn't using her gravity Authority. She was just punching it.
Over and over again. Her fists, dense beyond measure, 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 a mask of grim, silent concentration. She was venting the frustration of a day spent breaking quills and being told she was too much for the world around her.
Vane watched her for a moment. The edge of Zenith collected problems the Academy didn't know how to fix—broken veterans, overbuilt monsters, and frauds who'd climbed too high too fast.
Two ghosts in the fog. One breaking the air with a broom, the other breaking stone with her bare hands.
Vane touched the cut on his cheek. He was the weakest thing in this sector, but for the first time all day, he felt like he was in the right place.