I Copy the Authorities of the Four Calamities

Chapter 394: Flagged

The checkpoint was a piece of standard Zenith infrastructure, entirely devoid of malice. Built directly into the dock’s upper boarding ramp, the mana-scan arch cross-referenced the current student registry in real time. It had stood there long before any of them had first set foot on the island. A silent sentinel wrapped in gleaming metal and humming spell-work. It did not possess opinions about who walked through it. It simply executed its designed purpose with cold, mechanical efficiency.

Ashe strode through first, the arch glowing a soft, affirming blue. Valerica followed, her posture immaculate. Then Isole, her collar pulled tight against the chill. Finally, Nyx glided through, barely casting a glance at the glowing runes.

Vane stepped under the arch.

It produced a sound.

It wasn’t a blaring alarm or a screech of sirens. It was just a flat, dissonant tone. The precise note the system emitted when the mana signature found absolutely no match in the active enrollment database.

Within three seconds, an Academy official in a crisp grey uniform materialized on the other side. He had clearly been watching the line, assessing the group on their approach with the practiced eye of a man who handled this exact scenario multiple times a week. He bore the aggressively neutral expression of someone who harbored absolutely zero personal feelings about the delay.

"Name," the official demanded, his pen hovering over a thick leather ledger.

"Vane."

The man checked his ledger. He ran his finger down the page, paused, and then checked it a second time because that was the mandated protocol. He finally looked up, his expression unchanged.

"You’re not currently listed in the active registry."

"No," Vane replied smoothly. "I’m not."

"Non-students cannot access the island without authorized credentials," the official recited, his tone flat. "I will need to route a query to the administrative wing." He gestured lazily toward a heavy wooden bench pushed against the dock’s eastern wall, tucked safely into a shadowed alcove away from the main flow of disembarking passengers. "If you’ll wait over there, a representative from administration will be down shortly. It shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes."

"Thank you," Vane said.

He hefted his heavy canvas bag over his shoulder and walked toward the designated alcove.

Behind him, the official stepped back to his post. The normal, chaotic flow of passengers resumed, pushing past the arch and filtering out into the morning. Through the high, salt-stained windows of the upper dock, the island loomed thirty meters above. Vane could see the steep, winding incline of the spiral path, basking in the pale, golden wash of the morning light.

He dropped his bag onto the floor and sat down on the hard wooden bench, letting the cold seep through his coat.

He heard the distinct clatter of boots behind him. He didn’t bother turning around.

Ashe dropped her duffel bag right next to the bench with a heavy thud and promptly sat on it.

He looked at her.

"Go up," he said.

"No," Ashe replied, her tone perfectly conversational, as if his command had simply been a polite suggestion she was declining. She leaned her back against the freezing stone wall of the dock, folded her arms across her chest, and settled in with every indication of a person who planned to be there for a while.

Vane blinked, shifting his gaze past her.

Valerica had set her leather case down a few meters away. She was standing with her hands buried deep in the pockets of her tailored coat, staring out the dock window at the towering Academy. She wore a calm, resolute expression. The look of a woman who had already made a decision and had absolutely no interest in debating the logistics of it with anyone.

A few feet away, Isole had unceremoniously dropped cross-legged onto the freezing dock floor. She had pulled the first of the two massive Silver Wood volumes from her satchel, resting it gently in her lap, and was already deeply engrossed in the text.

Finally, Nyx drifted over. She looked down at him, her opal eyes completely devoid of their usual mocking performance. This was the real, unfiltered Nyx.

"I have been waiting two agonizingly long years to show you those document sets," she said, her voice quiet but firm. "A thirty-minute bureaucratic delay is not going to be the thing that stops me."

"This isn’t necessary," Vane sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Obviously not," Ashe shot back without missing a beat. "Absolutely nobody here is suggesting this is a necessity. It is a choice."

He looked at the four of them. They had just survived a grueling three-day ocean crossing from the eastern continent, fighting exhaustion, cold, and the lingering trauma of the north. Yet here they were, stubbornly occupying a shadowed alcove all because a mechanical arch had made a dissonant tone and temporarily exiled him.

"The hill is warmer than this," Vane pointed out.

"The hill is significantly warmer than this," Valerica agreed, not bothering to turn away from the window. "We are acutely aware of the temperature."

Vane let out a breath, finally leaning his head back against the wall behind the bench.

The dock continued to bustle around them. Passengers cleared the checkpoint, their boots echoing loudly on the ramps. Dock workers shouted coordinates, running through their complex close-out procedures as the leviathan’s massive mana anchors locked into the lower berths with a resounding, deep-bass thrum. It was a perfectly normal morning.

Isole carefully turned a fragile page of her tome.

"The pre-consolidation Chapter is actually much better than I remembered," she remarked to the group at large. "The terminology overlap with the texts I discovered in the Silver Wood archive is remarkably specific. It is definitely not a coincidental phrasing."

Nyx perked up, her attention pivoting instantly.

"How specific?"

"Three exact matching terms within the span of six pages," Isole replied, looking up over the leather-bound spine. "It utilizes the exact same grammatical construction, not merely historical synonyms. When we finally lay the two document sets down side by side, I suspect the overlapping section will be substantially longer than you originally estimated."

"I estimated eight pages," Nyx mused, her eyes narrowing.

"I think it is going to be closer to twelve."

Nyx looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the dock. Her lips twitched into a small, fiercely satisfied smile. The specific expression of a scholar revising a calculation upward and finding the new data entirely to her liking.

"Twelve is significantly better. Twelve gives us a much wider margin to work with."

Vane listened to their quiet back-and-forth, his gaze drifting from the glowing arch to the island framed in the upper window. He looked down at the scratched wood of the bench he was sitting on. Right now, this slab of wood was the absolute closest he was legally permitted to get to the only place he had called home for the last three years.

Ashe was watching him. She possessed a unique talent for tracking a person’s emotional state without making it obvious she was doing so.

"What exactly are you thinking about?" she asked, her voice cutting through the ambient noise.

"I am not thinking about anything."

"You are doing the Oakhaven look," she countered effortlessly.

He turned his head to look at her, defensive. "The what?"

"The look where you are quietly running the grim calculation of being left on the outside of something," she explained, entirely unfazed by his glare. "You have done it exactly three times since the ship docked. I am not asking you what the internal calculation is. I am asking what you are thinking."

Vane was quiet for a long time, the rhythmic crashing of the waves against the lower pylons filling the silence.

"I grew up on the outside of most things," he finally said, his voice stripped of its usual armor. "You would really think that it would stop feeling like anything by now."

"It stops feeling like a surprise," Ashe corrected gently, her dark eyes softening just a fraction. "It never actually stops feeling like anything." She looked down at the scuffed floorboards beneath her boots. "But you need to realize you are not on the outside. You are exactly thirty meters below the campus, sitting here waiting for a piece of paper."

"On a freezing dock bench," Vane muttered.

"On a highly functional, sturdy dock bench," she replied, a ghost of a smirk appearing. "And in thoroughly excellent company."

Valerica finally turned away from the window, her dark eyes locking directly onto his.

"You will walk up that hill in thirty minutes," Valerica stated, projecting her voice with absolute, ringing authority. "The greenhouse meeting will take place tomorrow morning. After tomorrow morning, you will be enrolled again. These are facts. This bench is temporary."

Something settled in his chest that he did not name.

Exactly twenty-three minutes after the checkpoint had emitted its jarring tone, a junior administrator dressed in standard Academy grey came rushing down the boarding ramp. She carried a thick, wax-sealed document clutch in one hand. She walked directly to the alcove, handed the heavy envelope to Vane, quickly confirmed his identity against a small ledger, and briskly left without speaking.

Vane broke the red seal.

The language was entirely institutional. Provisional assessment candidacy, temporary island access, report to the greenhouse annex, third hour tomorrow. Evangeline’s signature rested at the bottom.

He looked up. They were all looking back at him.

"Third hour tomorrow," he said.

"The greenhouse," Ashe stated.

"Yes."

"Let’s go."