The heavy iron doors of the elevator had finally sealed, leaving Vane in a tomb of ice and silence. He did not look back. Every scrap of his focus was pinned on the figure standing ten meters away. Isaac Glacium was no longer looking at the exit where the other three members of Team 5 had escaped. He was looking at Vane's spear. Specifically, he was watching the way the silver mana was beginning to bead along the star-steel edge like liquid mercury, shimmering with a frequency that made the air around the blade blur.
Vane took a shallow, controlled breath. The air was so cold it felt like swallowing shards of glass, but his lungs did not seize as they once might have. He had come a long way from the boy who had watched his life burn in the mud of Oakhaven. He was no longer a victim of the world's physics. He was learning to dictate them.
He triggered the mechanism he had spent months refining in the darkness of the Old Gymnasium.
[Skill: Internal Pulse, Grade B]
