The monofilament wire didn't just glow; it screamed.

Vane pumped the Silver Mana into the thread, vibrating it at a frequency so high it passed out of the audible spectrum and became a sensation in the teeth. It was a razor of pure sound.

Ashe Razar was mid-air, propelling herself off a pocket of compressed air, aiming to take Vane's head off with a drop kick.

She saw the silver flash of the wire a split second before her neck hit it.

A normal warrior would have been decapitated. A careless one would have tried to break it.

Ashe did neither. She defied inertia.

She slammed her hands together, creating a concussive blast of red mana. It wasn't a spell; it was a raw rejection of the space around her. The shockwave hit the wire, bending the air itself. She used the recoil to blast herself backward, twisting her body in a violent, unnatural contortion.

The wire hummed harmlessly inches from her nose.

She landed in a crouch near the center of the gym, her bare feet cracking the tiles. She looked at the wire, then at Vane.

"Nasty," she rasped, her eyes narrowing. "That thread is vibrating fast enough to cut through a mana shield. If I hadn't stopped..."

"You would be headless," Vane finished. He stood near the back wall, his chest heaving. "And I would be expelled."

"Expelled?" Ashe laughed. It was a sharp, barking sound. "If you managed to kill a Warlord of the Red Tower with a piece of string, the Emperor would give you a medal."

She stood up. The red aura around her intensified. The gym groaned. The very structural integrity of the building was beginning to fail under the weight of her presence.

"But you missed," Ashe said. "And now I know where the traps are."

She took a step forward. The air warped. She was preparing another [Flash Art]. This time, she wouldn't aim for him. She would aim for the floor, the walls, the ceiling. She would turn the entire room into shrapnel.

Vane knew he had about three seconds before she realized she could just collapse the building on top of him.

She is faster than me, Vane analyzed, watching the way her calves bunched like coiled steel. She is stronger than me. In a test of stats, I lose 100 times out of 100.

He looked up at the flickering mana-lamp hanging from the rusted rafters.

So stop fighting her body. Fight her senses.

Ashe vanished.

She moved faster than sound. The sonic boom hit Vane a second later, blowing his hair back.

But Vane was already moving. He didn't dodge away from her; he threw his spear.

Not at her. At the breaker box on the far wall.

The steel tip of the spear pierced the metal casing, shattering the mana-crystal fuses inside.

ZZZT-POP.

The gym plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness.

The sudden shift from the flickering yellow light to pitch black was jarring. For a normal human, it would be blinding.

But Ashe Razar was an Oni.

"Cute," her voice echoed from the darkness. It came from everywhere and nowhere. "You think the dark saves you? I can hear your heart, Rat. I can smell the iron in your blood. I can feel the fear sweating off your skin."

She was right. To a predator like her, sight was a luxury, not a necessity. Her instincts acted like a radar, pinging off his position.

Vane stood perfectly still in the dark. He could feel her moving. She was circling him, silent as smoke, waiting for him to flinch.

He reached into his belt pouch. He pulled out a small, jagged stone.

He threw it upward.

It hit the massive, suspended sacks of flour he had rigged to the ceiling rafters hours ago. The stone sliced the burlap open.

Whump.

Five hundred pounds of fine-ground white flour cascaded down like a localized avalanche.

"Dust?" Ashe's voice was amused now. She was close. Maybe ten feet away. "You're trying to choke me? I can hold my breath for twenty minutes."

"I'm not trying to choke you," Vane whispered.

He held up his hand. He wasn't holding his spear. It was still in the wall. He was holding a tuning fork he had stolen from the music department.

He channeled the last dregs of his Silver Mana into it.

[Authority: Silver Fang: Resonance Cascade]

He struck the fork against his belt buckle.

HUMMMMM.

The sound wasn't loud. But the effect was catastrophic.

The Silver Mana leaped from the fork and hit the cloud of falling flour.

Every single particle of flour in the air began to vibrate. Millions of tiny specks of white dust started to hum in unison.

The air didn't just get dusty. It turned into White Noise.

To Ashe, whose senses were dialed up to eleven to compensate for the darkness, it was like someone had just detonated a flashbang inside her brain.

"GRAH!"

Ashe screamed, stumbling back. Her hearing was gone, drowned out by the screaming dust. Her sense of smell was clogged by the vibrating particulate. Her spatial awareness shattered because the air itself felt like a solid wall of sound.

She was blind. Deaf. And confused.

"Where are you?!" she roared, swinging her arms wildly. Her fist connected with a concrete pillar, pulverizing it. "Fight me!"

Vane moved.

He didn't run away. He ran toward the wall where his spear was embedded. He yanked it free.

He looked up. Above Ashe, hanging by two rusted chains, was the old scoreboard. A massive slab of iron and glass weighing easily a ton.

Ashe was thrashing in the dust cloud, trying to burn it away with her aura, but the vibration kept disrupting her focus. She was directly under the board.

Vane didn't aim for Ashe.

He threw the spear.

It flew through the dark, guided by his memory of the room. It struck the left chain holding the scoreboard. The steel link, already weakened by rust, snapped under the impact.

CREAK-SNAP.

The massive scoreboard swung down like a pendulum of doom.

Ashe looked up. Her instincts screamed at her. The heavy iron slab was falling straight for her head.

She didn't have time to dodge. She did the only thing she could.

She caught it.

SLAM.

The ground shook as Ashe caught the falling ton of metal with her bare hands. Her knees buckled, cracking the floor. She groaned under the weight, her muscles straining as she held the massive object inches from crushing her skull.

"Is that..." Ashe gritted her teeth, sweat pouring down her face as she bench-pressed the wreckage. "Is that the best you've got?"

"No," a voice whispered right next to her ear.

Ashe froze.

She hadn't heard him approach. The vibrating dust hid his footsteps.

Vane was standing beside her. He wasn't holding a weapon. He was holding a single, small dagger, the one he used to cut his apples.

He placed the cold flat of the blade against her jugular vein.

"You can't drop the board," Vane said softly. "If you move your hands, it crushes you. If you try to kick me, your balance shifts, and it crushes you."

He pressed the blade slightly. Just enough to dent the skin, not cut it.

"And if you try to pulse your aura," Vane added, "I open your throat before the shockwave hits me."

Ashe stood there, trembling under the weight of the iron slab. Her chest heaved. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, stared into the darkness where his face should be.

She was trapped. Physically pinned by the environment. Held at knifepoint by a boy with half her mana capacity.

Silence stretched in the gym, broken only by the settling dust and the groan of the metal.

Then, a sound broke the tension.

It was a chuckle.

It started low in Ashe's throat and built up until she was laughing. It was a breathless, manic, delighted sound.

"You crazy bastard," Ashe wheezed, grinning despite the ton of metal on her shoulders. "You actually did it."

"Do you yield?" Vane asked. His voice was steady, but his hand was shaking. He was running on fumes.

"Yield?" Ashe scoffed. "No. The East doesn't yield. We die or we win."

She looked at him sideways.

"But I'm hungry. And holding this thing is making me tired."

She shifted her grip, the muscles in her arms bulging as she held the weight steady.

"Get this thing off me," she said. "And I'll buy you lunch."

Vane stared at her. He calculated the odds of her snapping his neck the moment he helped her.

They were high.

But looking at the wild, genuine joy in her eyes... he decided to bet on the Warlord.

Vane sheathed his dagger.

"On three," Vane said, moving to grab the edge of the board.

"On three," Ashe agreed.

And in the darkness of the ruined gym, amidst the settling flour and the smell of ozone, the Rat and the Warlord lifted the weight together.

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