Chapter 163: Chapter 163: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [3]
I was tossed to the side like a doll.
It was clearly a palm that hit me, but the force of it was thrice anything Caelus had managed.
The impact didn’t just move me.
It erased the floor from under my boots and turned the avenue into a brief, violent flight path.
Ribs screamed.
Air left my lungs in a single useless rush.
And the worst part was the dark.
My vision went black even with the chains still connected, which meant the Hive had gone with it.
No Gianna’s markers or Rei’s blood-budget.
Just pure, absolute black and the distant, muffled sound of both of them grunting somewhere I could no longer map.
I dismissed the chains on pure instinct.
Better to cut the link clean than leave them tethered to a fulcrum that had just been turned into a projectile.
BAM!
I hit a wall hard enough to feel the structure complain, bounced, and fell the rest of the way off whatever roof or upper floor the palm had chosen for me.
Concrete met my shoulder.
Dust filled my mouth.
For a second the only thing I owned was the sound of my own breathing trying to remember how lungs worked.
Vision returned in ugly stages.
Grey first. Then colour. Then the shape of a man standing over me.
Tall.
White hair cut shorter than Giselle’s.
Darker eyes.
The same one who had trailed her in the hall like a bodyguard who had decided the best place to stand was inside the blast radius.
Up close, he looked less like a student and more like someone the academy had borrowed from a different bracket.
Shit.
This guy was strong.
Before I could get my hands under me, another hand came from the side, aiming for my skull.
The fingers were wrong.
Too long.
Joints that didn’t belong on a normal human frame.
I twisted, caught the wrist on reflex, and felt the give of elongated bone under my grip.
A woman stood several metres away, smirking, the rest of her arm stretched across the distance like a living cable.
"Hehehe..."
I tightened my hold until something in the wrist clicked, then used the full line of her own technique against her and threw.
She went sideways into a storefront with a sound of glass and surprise.
I was already turning back toward the white-haired support, right hand forming the first link of a chain, when the dark hit again.
No warning.
Just black.
BOOM!
A boot found my chest while I was still blind.
The kick lifted me off the ground a second time and drove me into the street hard enough to crater the asphalt.
"GAH—!"
I hit, rolled, and came up tasting blood.
"Fuck!"
My senses stretched in every direction and found almost nothing.
The white-haired man’s energy was being held so tight, so deliberately low, that he sat under the threshold most scanning techniques would even register.
Near-invisible.
A support who had learned how to stop being a signature.
Vision flickered back.
He was standing close enough that I could see the calm in his eyes.
No performance.
Just the quiet confidence of someone who had already decided the outcome.
His right hand moved.
I brought the chains up on pure panic—
—and a bald man on the perimeter chose that exact second to launch an entire wrecked car at me like it was a training weight.
Concentration shattered.
The Hive was already gone.
The shared feed was gone.
All I had left was the arithmetic of three threats arriving at once.
I activated Fracture Step and forced every available point of stolen energy into my frame at the same time.
[Fracture Step — Active]
[Kinetic diverted — Strength temporary ceiling raised]
[Warning: Host regulation load spiking]
The world skipped.
I displaced just far enough that the car’s full mass clipped my side instead of removing my torso.
The impact still drove me back across the avenue in a skidding, bone-deep slide.
Concrete tore at my coat.
Something in my left shoulder made a sound I did not like.
When I finally stopped, I was on one knee, lungs burning, vision swimming at the edges.
Panting hard.
Rei and Gianna were nowhere in the immediate radius.
I was surrounded by five people now.
The white-haired support in front of me.
The elongated-arm woman climbing out of the storefront with murder in her expression.
The bald kinetic specialist already looking for the next piece of architecture to throw.
Two more I didn’t recognise yet: one with a low, constant shimmer around both hands that smelled like displacement fields, and another whose eyes were the wrong colour for a human, too pale, too fixed.
Each of them wore a different expression.
Interest.
Annoyance.
Calculation.
The faint pleasure of people who had found a hard-track fulcrum alone.
I pulled my chains back into my hands and wrapped the links around my fists the way some people wrapped tape.
The only thing in the radius that still answered me without hesitation.
"Useless," the white-haired man said.
"You’re quieter without the two of them."
"They’re not gone," I said.
My voice came out rougher than I wanted.
"They’re just busy."
"They’re cut off," the elongated woman corrected, rolling her wrist with a click.
"We made sure of it. Standard peel. Separate the anchors, then the package becomes a conversation instead of a problem."
The bald man cracked his neck.
"Board’s watching. Elevated extraction weighting. You going to make this interesting, or are we just collecting?"
I laughed once.
"For the next few minutes," I said, tightening the chains around my knuckles until the metal bit into skin, "don’t blame me if something happens to your core."
The white-haired support’s eyes narrowed a fraction.
First real reaction.
"Threat?"
"Warning."
I pushed myself fully upright.
The essence Caelus had left me was still warm under the skin.
Fracture Step sat coiled and ready.
The Hunger the class kept in the dark was starting to notice how many high-density cores were standing in a neat circle around a single, isolated target.
"You wanted the fulcrum alone. You got it. Now you get to see what the fulcrum does when the people who usually keep him polite aren’t in the room."
The displacement specialist raised both shimmering hands.
"He’s bluffing. Laila already flagged him rigid. Prefers his own anchors. Won’t adapt."
"Laila flagged a lot of things," I said.
"She also dropped from a ceiling and still couldn’t make me hand over people I trained with. You’re welcome to test the same theory."
The pale-eyed one finally spoke, voice soft and wrong.
"His output is climbing. Not standard Acolyte variance."