Chapter 996: Gates Of Transcendence
The roof was big enough for a bad dream. Brass ribs framed a pale, fake sky, and the miasma breathed like a sleeping, venomous animal. The Archduke didn’t rush. He trimmed my space the way a patient butcher trims fat—one careful, irreversible cut after another. A thin veil slid across the lane my hips liked. A drifting after-blade waited half a step behind my shoulder.
I was losing. It was a simple, mathematical fact. My sword was a screwdriver at a house fire.
Red Hunger pressed in like warm applause for a fight well fought and slid off the glass of my Harmony. He cut, and I parried, and everything in that exchange was simple and ruinously expensive. His edge rode the shortest line without announcing it. Mine met it and did not argue, but the cost of the meeting was a shudder in the bones of my arm. He checked my sleeve with a touch of trained weight as a veil leaned into my elbow. Valeria’s bone-shell flashed white and cracked with a sound like heartbreak.
"Rude," she said in my palm, her voice thin. "Invoice later."
"There might not be a later," I told her.
He was better. Not by a flash of genius. By a relentless lack of waste. Everything he did cost a single coin and bought him two seconds of advantage. Everything I did—every Grey seam, every Aegir ribbon, every Mythweaver whisper—cost a coin and bought me one and a half. That half-second deficit, repeated over and over, is where fights end.
A window of opportunity had opened at the rim of the roof. "Hello, Arthur," Lucifer had said, and for a moment, the floor had become honest. He had shown me the shape of the cheating. But the Archduke was powerful enough to pay the price, to break the honest lines and reassert his own corrupt grammar. Lucifer’s help wasn’t a rescue. It was a diagnosis. The report was terminal.
I hit the wall. The real one. The place where your choices are out of budget and your will is overdrawn. My shoulder was a knot of grinding fire. The miasma burns on my arms were a constant, cold drain on my focus. My lungs felt scraped raw.
He tightened the ring again, squeezing the last few feet of air out of my world. "All courage will shake," he said, his voice mild. The vow landed, and the commitment in my bones, the simple will to stand, trembled like a table with a bad leg. Harmony slid a folded napkin of calm under it. The wobble kept asking. I kept choosing. But I was running out of choices.
He lifted his chin a hair. The next, and final, vow gathered like thunder under my shoes. It would be the one to end this.
Something inside me gave way.
It wasn’t pride. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t my body. It was a lock that had been rusted shut all my life finally, quietly, turning. The enlightenment wasn’t a flash of light. It was a moment of profound, terrifying stillness. I had been trying to bail out the leaky boat. I had been trying to plug the holes. I had been trying to out-steer the storm. I had been trying to solve the problem
.Julius’s voice echoed, not as a memory, but as a present truth. Stop expecting the world to help you. Pay now. Leave exact change. Stillness that hurts.
I stopped trying to solve the problem. I stopped trying to win. I let go of the fight, of the storm, of the boat itself. I just stood there, on the treacherous floor, under the fake sky, and for the first time, I accepted the absolute, honest truth of the moment.
And in that acceptance, the world changed.
The desperate, noisy battle on the roof faded to a distant hum. I was standing in a quiet, dark space. Before me, I saw them. The Gates of Transcendence. The cold blue line on the horizon of my mind. The mountain peaks I had only ever seen from a great distance. They were here. And they were closed.
They had watched men fail politely for a thousand years. They did not clap. They did not judge. They simply were. The final barrier.
And I understood. I had been trying to climb the mountain. I had been trying to kick down the gate. That was the lie. That was the assumption. You don’t force your way through.
You just have to be the key that fits the lock.
It started behind my breastbone: a pressure like a door that had been part of the wall all my life deciding it was a door after all. A single, clean click. My breath went cold, then clean, then easy, as if someone had just scraped the soot off the inside of my ribs.
The Gates of Transcendence opened in me. There were no trumpets. No modest flicker. It was fireworks in a silent cathedral.
The Grey flared out from me, not as a weapon, but as a statement of fact. It came in flat, clean sheets of ordinary that sliced through the Archduke’s miasma architecture like they were paper dolls. There was no noise, just new, clean edges where there had been none. The fake sky above the fake sky cracked, and through the fissure, a seam of not-quite-night flashed with quiet, distant stars that weren’t there a second ago. The city far below, a place I had promised to protect, went silent for a single heartbeat, as if it was listening for a bell that only my bones could hear.
The Crown of Twilight, which had been a faint halo of silver, solidified above my brow, cool and real.
Lucent Harmony widened out of me. It was no longer a personal shield. It was weather. It settled over the entire roof like a cool, morning fog. The warmth of Lust that still clung to the brass ribs died at its threshold without offense. The petty, compulsive tricks in my knees and elbows lost interest and went home.
The weight in my hands became simple, and heavy, and right.
Valeria sang a long, low note, a sound like a bow being drawn across the cello of the world. "Finally," she whispered, and for once, there was no sugar on it. Just awe.
I hadn’t gotten faster. I hadn’t gotten stronger. The world had just gotten honest. The little taxes on my movement stopped. The vows, "no breath shall steady," "edges arrive late," "distance is treacherous," were still there, but they were now suggestions, not laws. The ring of the Archduke’s control stopped charging me for being alive.
I had achieved Sword Unity long ago, a perfect harmony between my mind, my body, and my blade. This was different. This was Sword Accord. The room itself now agreed with the cut.
The Archduke flinched—not in fear, but in pure, professional surprise, like a master craftsman watching a tool in his hand suddenly become perfect. He pressed his attack anyway. He was a professional to the marrow. He threw a clean, simple line that would have ended most days, that would have ended my day ten seconds ago.
I met it. It felt like pushing on a door that wasn’t latched. My parry wasn’t a desperate block. It was a polite redirection.
’First step is on time,’ Mythweaver wrote on my ankle again, but the ink was unnecessary. The step happened because I said so. Lightning walked in my tendons without drama. The Grey kept the lanes of the floor simple. Harmony kept my house quiet. Soul Resonance took the best, most steady beat from his own posture and played it back at him for half a heart, just to settle an old debt.
The thrust that followed my parry wasn’t deep. It didn’t need to be. The world let it go where it was intended.
White light cracked along the brass ribs of the tower. The entire structure shuddered once, remembered itself, and held.
Lucifer’s twin crowns blazed, then dimmed to a polite glow. He smiled, a real smile, like a brother at a graduation, and said nothing.
"I see it," Julius’s voice echoed from the rim of the roof, and for once, he sounded pleased.
I stood in the ring with the door open behind my heart and knew, for the first time, that I had room.
The Archduke looked at me, measured the new weight in the air, and set his feet for the last exchange.
"Again," he said, but there was a new, heavier meaning on the word now. It wasn’t a command. It was a request.
"Again," I said.
We moved. And the city below kept silent, long enough to hear me step through.