Chapter 162: Chapter 162: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [2]
What happened next was almost too clean to notice in time.
A chain, spatial, the same family of technique as mine but wrong in colour and wrong in intent, snapped out from the higher floors and went for Gianna’s throat.
Like it had been waiting for the exact second our attention turned upward to the portal.
Rei moved first.
Blood from the cut already open on her palm hardened into an ugly knife mid-motion.
She met the chain on the way in and cut it.
Snap.
The severed length recoiled with a metallic scream and vanished into static.
"Incoming—" Rei started.
More chains answered the first one.
Three, then five, branching from different angles, all of them trying to find her wrists and ankles the way I had once bound a dummy in a guild hall that felt years away.
I didn’t wait for the second cut.
My own chains formed in both hands, blue and fast, and I threw them low.
One looped Gianna’s waist.
The other took Rei.
I pulled hard enough that both of them left the roof edge in the same breath and came with me into open air over the avenue.
"Rev—"
"I’ve got you. Stay on the line."
A fireball the size of a transit door howled out of a broken window on the opposite block and tried to erase the space we had just occupied.
Gianna’s hand flicked once.
A wrecked civilian car lifted off the sidewalk like it weighed nothing, rotated, and met the fireball square.
BOOM!
Metal and flame argued.
The car won long enough for us to hit the street without becoming ash.
We landed hard in the middle of the empty avenue.
Dust.
Heat.
The red portal’s pressure sat on the shoulders like a second atmosphere.
I fed mana into the upgraded Submission lattice and opened the Synaptic Hive without asking permission.
[Synaptic Hive — Active]
[Targets linked: Gianna Everheart | Rei Lawless]
[Shared vision: 360° composite]
[Combat efficiency: Synchronized]
[Host note: Multiple Hostile Signatures — Elevated]
The world expanded.
Through Gianna I saw the telekinetic field already mapping every loose object within thirty metres.
Through Rei I felt the blood-budget calculating angles and the exact cost of another open vein.
Through my own eyes I saw the skyline of the broken district and the twenty figures that had taken position along the rooftops and upper floors like a jury that had already decided the verdict.
They looked down at us.
Some wore academy tags still bright under the dust.
Some had already shed anything that looked like student courtesy.
One stood slightly apart from the rest, white hair catching the portal light, red eyes fixed on me with the same flat inventory she had used in the hall when she put the biscuit on the floor and waited to see who was stupid enough to touch it.
Giselle.
She didn’t move.
Everyone else did.
"Twenty," Rei said, voice tight with adrenaline and something close to delight.
"They brought a fucking committee."
"Doctrine," Gianna snapped.
"Sever. Do not collect. We are not staying to introduce ourselves."
"Copy."
The first wave came as hooks and kinetic harpoons, displacement tools built for the Inverse rules, designed to latch onto an Anchor-class frame and drag.
Three of them locked onto my signature the moment the Hive opened.
I felt the pull like someone had tied a transit cable to my ribs.
Fracture Step answered before the hooks finished their claim.
I displaced five metres sideways in a single frame, after-image left behind for the first harpoon to bite.
The real me was already throwing a chain net high enough to foul the second and third lines.
Gianna’s markers lit the net and gave it weight.
The harpoons tangled, sparked, and lost purchase.
"Left flank," Rei called.
"Three with projectile focus. I’m taking the angle."
"Don’t open the palm unless you have to," I said.
"I always have to."
She cut anyway, controlled, and the blood became a short whip that cracked across the nearest rooftop edge hard enough to make two of the projectile users flinch.
Gianna used the flinch.
A slab of broken facade peeled off the building and became a sliding shield that covered our advance down the avenue while I kept the Hive feeding them both the positions of everything that was trying to kill or capture us.
A second fireball.
Larger.
Gianna didn’t bother with another car.
She simply redirected the first wrecked one, still smoking, into the new trajectory and let physics do the rest.
The explosion painted the upper floors orange.
Someone screamed.
Someone else laughed like this was the best day of their life.
"They’re not trying to kill the package," I said, reading the vectors through the shared feed.
"They’re trying to separate it. Standard Scramble peel. Get the fulcrum past fifty metres, and the grid-lock does the rest."
"Then we don’t give them fifty metres," Gianna answered.
"Or we give them a different problem," Rei added, already moving.
I felt her intent through the Hive a half-second before she acted.
She broke left into a narrow service alley, blood constructs forming a trail of false residual that would look, for a few critical seconds, like the secondary had decided to run alone.
Two of the rooftop figures took the bait and dropped into pursuit.
"Rei—"
"I know the doctrine," she called back.
"I’m not collecting. I’m making them spend."
Gianna and I kept the main avenue.
I used the chains as mobile cover and as weapons in the same breath, one link binding a kinetic specialist’s ankle long enough for Gianna to put him through a storefront, another link yanking a displacement hook out of the air and returning it to its owner with interest.
Fracture Step kept me from becoming a static target.
Every time the Hive showed a clean line on my chest, I was already somewhere else.
Giselle still hadn’t moved.
She watched from her higher position like the entire exchange was a demonstration she had paid for and intended to grade later.
The rest of the twenty were the ones burning resources.
She was the one taking notes.
"She’s waiting for the mistake."
"Then we don’t make one," Gianna replied.
"Exit vector?"
"South service corridor under the transit node. Low cover. Narrow enough that numbers stop being an advantage."
"Move."
Before I could plan our next move, my vision darkened.
BAM!
Someone slammed my ribs from the side.