I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities-Chapter 241: Day One

The leviathan crossed into open sky an hour after departure. The academy vanished into the thick cloud cover. After that, there was only the ocean.

Vane retreated to the upper deck before the cloud line even fully closed. The cargo hold below smelled strongly of aged cedar, pungent fuel, and the suffocating staleness of trapped air. The upper deck was wide open. The morning wind was freezing, clean, and sharp. Vane had not slept a single minute in the carriage. He had been awake since before Ryuken Razar walked into Villa 1 and shattered his summer, and he had absolutely no intention of trying to sleep now.

He ran his forms.

Standard Argent Horizon. First through third. He ran them exactly the way he had been running them every single morning since October. He was not performing for Ryuken, who was sequestered somewhere below deck. He was not performing for anyone. The spear forms were simply what he did when his chaotic day lacked any other structural foundation. Other people brewed tea or counted their breaths. Vane gripped cold steel. The heavy spear hissed through the freezing air. The dark ocean spread out endlessly below them. The morning light was a flat, unforgiving grey.

He finished the sweeping arc of the third form, snapped back to a neutral stance, and rested the spear vertically at his side. He was breathing hard. His fractured ribs burned with a bright, familiar agony.

Lancelot was standing at the far railing.

He had not been there when Vane first came up. He was there now. That meant the boy had scaled the metal stairs silently enough that, while the Usurper had passively registered the sudden mana spike, Vane had been too deep in his physical meditation to hear a single footstep. Lancelot stood perfectly still at the heavy iron railing. His hands hung loosely at his sides. He was staring out at the distant horizon with flat, red eyes that contained absolutely nothing at all.

He was not watching Vane’s forms. He had not been watching the forms. He was looking at the ocean. He would have been looking at the ocean regardless of whether Vane was standing there or if the deck was completely empty.

Vane slowly slid his spear into the leather harness across his back.

The wooden deck was perhaps twenty meters long. Lancelot occupied the far end. Under any normal circumstances, involving any other human being Vane had ever met, twenty meters of space and a turned back constituted a very clear, unambiguous social signal.

Vane was just not entirely sure Lancelot possessed the biological hardware to register social signals.

Vane stood rooted in the center of the deck. He deliberately looked at the ocean on his left, a completely different patch of water from the one Lancelot was monitoring. He strongly debated going back below.

The immediate problem was that below meant cedar, fuel, and claustrophobia. Ashe was currently down there running her own morning forms in a cramped, narrow corridor between heavy storage racks. She had woken up before him and stubbornly decided that was her space. Kaito was busy running the massive ship. Ryuken was doing whatever a Transcendent did in his spare time. The freezing upper deck was the only viable space left.

Vane stayed.

For approximately four minutes, he stood rigidly in the center of the deck. Lancelot stood like a marble statue at the far railing. The leviathan pushed relentlessly east. Neither of them spoke a single word. Four minutes was plenty of time for the silence to curdle, moving from entirely incidental to suffocatingly present.

The silence possessed a strange, heavy quality that Vane could not fully categorize. It was not hostile. It did not carry the specific, electric tension of two people who had recently tried to beat each other unconscious and were now stubbornly choosing to ignore it. It was certainly not companionable. It was simply the profound silence of a creature that held no particular feelings about the situation one way or the other.

The agonizing discomfort of the silence belonged entirely to Vane. Recognizing this fact did absolutely nothing to make it easier to swallow.

By any honest accounting, Vane was the only one finding this awkward.

Lancelot was not finding it anything. He was just looking at the horizon. He had been looking at the horizon before Vane surfaced, and he would still be looking at it long after Vane went back below. The simple fact of Vane’s physical presence on the deck was just raw data. Lancelot’s body had logged the information, filed it away, and was currently doing absolutely nothing with it.

Vane stared at the back of the boy’s head. He thought about the bloodstained evaluation courtyard. He thought about Lancelot casually walking into the open challenge window, weaponizing the evaluation’s own rigid rules. He thought about two casual fingers resting on his spear shaft, the sickening crack of his ribs, and the flat, emotionless line Lancelot had delivered about Ashe while she lay bleeding on the stone. He thought about Lancelot calmly placing the spear back into Vane’s paralyzed hand before walking away.

Absolutely none of these violent memories seemed to be informing Lancelot’s current experience of the morning.

This was not a stoic performance. Vane had been actively reading people since he was an eight-year-old street rat in Oakhaven. He had learned to read them well enough to survive a brutal environment where misjudging a person’s violent intentions was a fatal error. He knew the distinct difference between someone aggressively managing their presentation and someone who simply did not have a presentation to manage.

Lancelot was not suppressing any discomfort. The situation simply was not producing any discomfort in him. It was not producing anything in him at all, except the basic spatial observation that there was another mass of matter on the deck, and the deck was mathematically large enough for both of them.

The heavy metal hatch clanged open. Ashe came up from below carrying three ceramic plates.

She forced the hatch wide with her shoulder. She looked at Vane. She looked at Lancelot. She absorbed the suffocating, awkward state of the upper deck in approximately one second. She set one plate down on a crate near the hatch for Vane. She marched the full twenty meters down the deck and set a plate on the railing near Lancelot. She did not say a word. She did not even slow her stride. Then, she marched right back to the hatch, picked up her own plate, dropped down to sit heavily on the deck with her back against the iron hull, and began eating.

Lancelot slowly turned his head and looked at the plate beside him. He picked it up. He ate.

Ashe ate.

Vane sighed, picked up his own plate, slid down the hull until he was sitting, and ate. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

The vast ocean rushed by below them. The sky was grey, cold, and slowly turning a lighter shade at the edges where the sun was brutally working its way up. The massive leviathan made the very particular sound that all large mana-powered vessels made. It was a deep, thrumming resonance felt much more through the vibrating hull than heard with the ears. It was a sound that, over the course of ten days, would eventually become entirely indistinguishable from silence.

Ashe eventually stopped chewing. "How long is the crossing."

"Ten days," Vane replied, his voice slightly raspy from disuse.

She stared blankly at the dark ocean. "Right."

She finished the rest of her food in silence. She stood up, brushed off her pants, and went back below deck.

The upper deck was painfully quiet again. Vane stared at the horizon on his designated side. Lancelot stared at the horizon on his. The distance between them remained exactly twenty meters. The silence regained the exact same heavy, maddening quality it had possessed before the food arrived. It was still entirely Vane’s problem and not Lancelot’s. Vane forced himself to sit with it, because the hold still smelled of cedar and fuel, and there was simply no viable alternative.

After a long while, the sky finally finished what it had been trying to do. The sun broke over the water. The dreary grey became the blinding, flat gold of open ocean in the early morning. It was not entirely unpleasant. The biting cold had softened slightly. The ocean was impossibly enormous, and their leviathan was incredibly small upon it. That was a measurable fact rather than a messy feeling, and Vane found facts vastly easier to hold onto right now.

Vane looked at the back of Lancelot’s platinum head.

Fourteen weeks. They would be trapped at the eastern compound for fourteen weeks. Twelve of those would be active, brutal training. Vane had absolutely no idea what twelve weeks of training beside something like this looked like. He did not know what it was supposed to produce in either of them. He had no tactical framework for this reality. The silence was crawling under his skin, and Lancelot was never going to do anything to fix it, because Lancelot did not experience the silence as something broken.

Vane put his empty plate down on the deck. He reached back and unhooked his spear.

He stepped back into the center of the deck. He ran the forms again from the very beginning, first through third. It was what he did in the morning to keep from losing his mind, and this long, terrible morning was not finished yet.

Lancelot kept looking at the horizon.

The leviathan pushed relentlessly east.