Chapter 153: Chapter 153: Academy’s Entrance Phase Two [3]
Everyone turned to look at me.
Gianna’s eyes widened.
Rei shifted closer on pure instinct, half a step that put her shoulder into my peripheral vision without making it look like a guard detail.
"You," Laila had said.
The hall made it a spotlight anyway.
"Yes?"
Laila’s blue eyes didn’t blink.
When she spoke again, she did not summarize the question for clarity.
"During a Scramble-format exercise, your dual unit has successfully severed a rival fulcrum’s tether. The rival support is disoriented, isolated, and within legal non-lethal contact range. Capturing them for the remaining eight minutes would lock a top extraction score for your bracket."
A pause, precise as a blade tip.
"Your primary anchor’s channel is unstable from the last rescue. Your secondary is bleeding from a self-opened blood technique and still combat-effective. The rival’s Vanguard is twelve seconds out on a direct line."
The panel was gone, but I could still see the letters.
"What did you choose?"
Hundreds of eyes. Observation boxes.
Giselle somewhere in a corner, indifferent as architecture.
Gianna’s anchor pulled tight under my ribs. Rei’s attention sharpened to a point.
The answer had felt obvious in the chair.
Saying it under this kind of quiet was different.
"A top extraction score is worthless if the incoming Vanguard catches you with a cracked pocket and two compromised anchors," I said.
"Tag the score, pull back, and let the enemy waste their twelve-second sprint on an empty corner. Never gamble active anchors for an optional trophy."
"Mm."
A few students looked openly startled, at the speed, at the structure, at the fact that it sounded like someone who had already lived the diagram.
Someone whispered That’s clean.
Someone else muttered coward’s answer and got an elbow for it.
Giselle didn’t react.
Laila tilted her head a fraction.
"So," she said.
"What if you were given an opportunity, in that same minute, to form a temporary anchor with a Vanguard from a different support’s unit, legal under Scramble contact rules, to stabilize the capture and win the match outright? Would you take it?"
"No."
"That was fast."
"Yes."
"You prefer your anchors."
"Of course."
"Even when the timing is wrong."
Her voice stayed conversational.
"Even if they are injured to the bone. Even if there is an alternative where you can form the link with someone else and finish the objective clean."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"My support exists for them. Leaving them injured and breaking contract will deepen their wounds further and the connection we have made."
"Tsk."
The sound was small.
It still hit wrong, not simple disapproval, something closer to inventory.
Laila’s face shifted into open disappointment, the kind that didn’t bother dressing itself as teaching.
"I don’t know your name beyond the form," she said.
"I don’t know your power. I don’t know the full list of techniques you are hiding under a label that already smells like convenience."
A murmur flickered and died.
"So answer this without poetry."
Her eyes locked on mine.
"Without your anchors, without the primary who you think is important and the secondary who you keep for convenience, who are you?"
The silence stretched.
Gianna didn’t speak.
Rei didn’t speak.
That was correct.
This was a blade meant for me.
"I..." The word scraped.
"I’m a support. The methods change. The function doesn’t."
"Methods are identity in a crisis," Laila said.
"You just told this hall you will not adapt a link when the diagram offers a winning substitute. You told me you will protect a cracked pocket instead of completing a legal capture. That can be loyalty. It can also be rigidity wearing loyalty’s coat."
"That’s not—"
"If you cannot adapt to what the minute requires," she continued, overlapping without raising volume, "if you cannot abandon a preferred structure when the field demands a different one, you are not a qualified raider. You are not even a qualified support in the sense this academy exists to produce. Take away the anchors you refuse to look past, and what remains is a man with nothing to brace against. Empty. No wall. No load-bearing frame."
Heat crawled up my neck. Not shame exactly, pressure, the kind that made honest speech dangerous.
"That’s not how it works," I said.
"Compatibility ratings, circulation pathways, the stats you build through shared load, those are trained with specific anchors for a reason. Why would I throw hellish conditioning into a random contact in the middle of a scored exercise? What if the forced link damages their core? What if it damages mine? A support’s job is to reinforce a core, not gamble it into a stranger because the clock looked convenient."
The murmurs rose this time.
"He’s... right?"
"But why would a support hurt?"
A proctor’s shadow moved along the edge of the ranks, and the sound thinned again.
Laila’s gaze sharpened with interest rather than anger.
"A support’s duty is to help the core, not weaken it," she repeated, tasting the sentence.
"Then explain the fear in your framing. ’What if it affects their core.’ Most classes worry about insufficient output, not contamination. Is your power capable of doing something like that?"
The question landed in the exact place Jenna had spent weeks teaching me not to stand in public.
Words died in my throat.
I could not tell her about absorption pathways, about Echo Partition, about a night when a primary anchor’s energy had to be held like a live wire and a class that could expand or empty a person depending on whether control held.
I couldn’t say Succubus in a hall with Empress-line eyes and a professor who had shaped Draven.
Anything true enough to satisfy her would stop being a cover and start being a specimen tag.
Laila watched the silence the way other people watched residual graphs.
"You hesitate," she observed.
"Not on loyalty. On disclosure."
"I won’t experiment on a random Vanguard in a bracket to prove adaptability," I said, forcing the sentence into something that still fit the Acolyte story.
"If the academy wants flexible linking, it can put it in the curriculum under observation, not as a trick question that punishes people for not risking a stranger’s channels on a first contact. You wanted my answer, not the one that was already written by someone who might have dealt with the same issue."
"Flexible linking is the curriculum," Laila said.
"The field does not send a syllabus ahead of the collapse."
She shook her head once.
"Fail."