The lead-lined iron grate slammed home with a dead, suffocating snap.
Beneath Arthur's boots, the pneumatic seals of the intake shaft sucked tight against the dressed basalt, drowning out the subterranean chamber below. The muffled whine of violins, the hum of raw mana coursing through violet conduits, and the lazy, insolent drawl of the drunkard vanished behind forty centimeters of engineered alloy and lead.
Arthur did not linger to secure the hex-latches.
He lunged through the frozen basin, clearing the moss-slick rim of the aqueduct buttress before the acoustic ping of the iron panel could propagate across the flagstones. The mountain draft struck him like a slab of iced iron. At an altitude of 10,000 meters, with the primary environmental wards throttled down for curfew maintenance, the ambient air bit directly through the weave of his wool mantle. His breath did not rise in plumes; his respiration remained strictly gated, shallow and cold, drawn across the roof of his mouth to prevent moisture from condensing into visible steam.
Beneath his sternum, the residual electrical backdraft still hummed through his bone marrow.
The Autonomic Merged Processor remained fully locked over his nervous system. Stripped of language, stripped of fear, his consciousness existed as a high-frequency analytical crucible, running vector telemetry across the terrain while dissecting the violent exchange blow by blow.
That lightning.
The speed had been terrifying, but his mind palace pulled the optical memory shard and laid it against the immutable laws of natural manipulation.
It had not been atmospheric lightning. True, sky-splitting lightning—the catastrophic fury summoned when high-order mages fundamentally altered atmospheric charge and breached terrain—propagated between 30,000 and 201,000 kilometers per second. Had the discharge moved at natural velocity, the air in the subterranean corridor would have superheated into an instantaneous vacuum bomb, shattering the basalt ribbing and pulverizing Arthur's eardrums before the light registered on his retinas.
The stranger's bolt had traveled at approximately 45m/s.
It was roughly 2.22 million times slower than a cloud-to-ground strike.
Yet kinetic velocity was meaningless without spatial context. At a deployment distance of barely one single meter, forty-five meters per second compressed the transit window to an agonizing ~22 milliseconds
Standard human neuromuscular transmission—the raw biological lag required for an eye to receive light, the optic nerve to fire, the brain to formulate a somatic command, and motor units to recruit skeletal muscle—consumed between 150 and 250 milliseconds
A biological impossibility. Had the Autonomic Merged Processor not stripped the linguistic friction from his cognition, had William Sinclair not forced his conscious executive function to fuse directly into subconscious reflex, Arthur would have been charred meat before his heels cleared the diamond plating.
Upper King-rank, Arthur calculated, his boots devouring the frost-dusted flagstones of Sector Six in long, weightless bounds. Seventy-seventh to eighty-fourth quotient.
The geometric wheel had etched itself from ambient mana, locked its harmonics, and discharged at critical density in less than a second.
Worse was the kinetic execution that preceded it. Maintaining continuous, friction-free movement across diamond-plate steel by deploying an autonomous micro-crystalline sheet of ice beneath his soles—without verbal syntax, without somatic hand seals, and while carrying a drunken, asymmetric posture—demanded a water proficiency well beyond the Saint-rank threshold of the 56th to 70th Quotient.
Operating two high-order affinities at King-rank density was an anomaly that defied the statistical reality of Geenna.
And the man could not have been older than twenty-four.
A face like that doesn't walk the continent in shadow.
An aristocratic countenance carved with classical symmetry, midnight-black hair styled with deliberate, sweeping elegance, and those mismatched irises—one incandescent, predatory amber-yellow, the other deep sapphire. An individual commanding that caliber of dual-element slaughter at such an age was not an anonymous guest, nor was he an eccentric researcher tucked away in the lower annexes. He had to be an apex figure possessing vast continental renown.
Then came the memory of the stranger's parting drawl, echoing through the cold quiet of Arthur's skull:
As a saint, I must then stop you...
A phantom scoff dissolved behind Arthur's clamped teeth.
There had been zero Holy-attribute mana circulating within that steel-clad corridor. Arthur's senses had cataloged no divine radiance, no ascetic weight, and none of the terrifying, suffocating gravitational dread that Cyril Celestine inadvertently bled into the floorboards. Above all, a drunken libertine reeking of distilled spirits, sauntering along an engineering gantry to pick fights with trespassers, was a direct desecration of ecclesiastical dogma. The stranger bore no stigmata of the Celestial Sun Church, nor the concentric geometry of the Moon.
He had not invoked the word as an ordained minister of God. He had invoked it in its secular, continental sense.
In the secular parlance of Geenna, a "Saint" was not a creature of piety. It was a secondary cultural moniker—a title of veneration bestowed upon peerless prodigies who tethered an entire domain of mastery to their name until the masses worshipped the concept itself. Two thousand years ago, during the War of the Gods, the human companion who hammered Arcanite into existence alongside the Human God had been immortalized across the fractured world not as a cleric, but as the Saint of Illustrious Crafts.
Before entering the Academy, Arthur had committed what little broadsheet news reached the provinces to memory: the few apex disciples orbiting the God-rank Magic Tower Masters who bore secular Saint designations.
He knew virtually nothing about their personal dossiers or internal doctrines; half the Tower Master disciples held no Saint title at all, and the lives of those who did were jealously guarded by their patrons. But a few titles had bled through continental gossip:
The Saint of Strategic War—the disciple tied to the Earth Tower.
The Saint of Gold Light—the prodigy rising beneath the Fire Tower.
And then there was that third title—a moniker so bizarre, wild, and unfitting of standard academic prestige that it had stuck in Arthur's baseline memory:
The Saint of Barbarian Piracy.
Arthur vaulted the low stone balustrade of a darkened research annex, dropping into the shadow of an elevated quartz aqueduct.
He knew nothing of that figure's specific lineage, elemental affinities, or weapon of choice.
Yet the mental snapshot from the catwalk resolved with violent clarity.
The swaggering, drunken irreverence. The lazy, predatory grin flashed through an alcohol-thick slur. The sheer lawless insolence of a man who treated an armed midnight trespasser on a sovereign gantry not with administrative protocol or martial alarm, but with the loose amusement of a rogue plundering a coastal skiff before sauntering back to his wine.
The title had seemed like an absurd exaggeration on paper. But matched against that man—his mockery, his effortless violence, his untamed, piratical posture—the moniker fit him with grotesque precision.
The Saint of Barbarian Piracy.
Based on the title alone, the probability hovered well above seventy-five percent.
Arthur slipped through the geometric blind zone of an oscillating surveillance crystal pylon, counting the twelve-second sweep before accelerating down a granite colonnade.
He needed absolute confirmation, but the Academy was a hermetic cage. The Academic Board throttled the continental broadsheets, filtering news of external wars, succession crises, and political shifts to keep the student body isolated and pliable. And Sector Seven—now confirmed to be hosting an unannounced gathering under the guard of Saint-rank mercenaries—was an impassable chokepoint.
He could not force the inner sector blind. Lingering near the basalt curtain wall would inevitably drag upper-rank combatants down upon his head, collapsing the fragile foundation of his cover.
If the administration censors the board, I must extract the pieces from the living.
William Sinclair's thesis on social leverage resurfaced in the quiet of his mind. Coercive force was crude; it incurred an exhausting thermodynamic debt, requiring endless vigilance to maintain the leash. But intrinsic human motivation—vanity, ambition, and social posturing—was entirely self-sustaining.
Arthur's thirty-minute exchange on the conservatory terrace with Matthew of House Vane had laid bare the eastern border's economic choke points, mountain smuggling passes, and deacon-brokered trade tariffs for the simple price of stroked pride. High-born scions did not keep secrets; they traded them like currency to prove their proximity to power. They lived on court whispers, continental rumors, and salon gossip. If an apex figure like a Tower Master's disciple or a sovereign guest was walking the grounds of the flying island, the noble circles were already vibrating with the news.
The strategic pivot settled firmly into his calculus. But night was waning, and the immediate physical toll of the breach demanded containment.