Chapter 159: Chapter 159: Academy’s Entrance Phase Four [3]
The hulk was breathing hard already, shoulders rising and falling like bellows that had been asked to do too much too soon.
Up close, the age sat clearer in the lines around his eyes and the way his weight settled through old injuries rather than fresh training muscle.
He didn’t look like the average academy hopeful who had spent the last year polishing footwork for intake cameras.
Guy looked like someone who had been pointed at problems until the problems started looking like him.
"Tell me the truth," I said, keeping the chains loose at my sides while I circled just enough to keep the cracked asphalt between us.
"You’re not young, are you? Or did you fail the intake enough times that you get to spend your mid-thirties sparring with kids who still think the board’s provisional scores are destiny?"
His face darkened.
The roar that answered me was pure kinetic insult.
"Someone’s ticked off."
He came in a straight line again, less a technique than a decision to erase the space where I was standing.
I let a chain slip low and mean across the path of his lead leg, felt the link catch ankle and tendon, and hauled with everything the upgraded Submission tension would give me.
His mass worked against him for half a second.
The leg went out.
He went down face-first into the road hard enough to send a spiderweb of fresh cracks through the surface.
I tried to reclaim the chain before he could invent a counter.
His hand closed on the links anyway, thick fingers finding purchase with the kind of grip that had clearly ended fights before they became interesting.
"Shit..."
He heaved.
The world turned into a short, violent flight.
I cleared the walkway, hit the second-floor facade of the nearest commercial shell, and went through old glass and cheaper partition board in a spray of glittering debris.
BAM!
"Fuck," I muttered, rolling to my feet amid someone’s abandoned office furniture.
"I hate heavy hitters."
Part of me tracked the restaurant behind him: the snap of arrows, the bright edge of Rei’s laugh, Gianna’s markers flaring in the periphery of the anchor channel.
They could hold the twins.
They had held worse on less sleep.
The street in front of me was my problem until this big guy stopped being a moving wall.
I stepped to the broken window frame and looked down.
He was already staring up, dust in his hair, patience gone.
"Just a heads up," I called.
He made a questioning sound that was mostly breath.
"I’m lean, not weak. I can hit you the same way the board’s weighting says you’re supposed to hit me. What’s your name?"
Silence stretched while he decided whether names mattered in an extraction attempt.
"Come on. We are not at war."
"...Caelus," he said at last, voice rough enough to sand wood.
"Caelus." I tasted the syllables and filed them.
"Well. I’m going to beat the shit out of you now."
I jumped from the edge.
He jumped to meet me, which was generous of him.
Mid-air, I threw a chain to a bent lamp post on the opposite curb, let the link take my weight, and changed the vector the way Fracture Step had taught my legs to argue with gravity.
The arc carried me past his rising bulk.
A second chain left my hand in a tight spiral, found the column of his neck, and bit.
I hauled on both lines at once, post for leverage, neck for consequence, and drove him back into the street like a nail under a hammer.
BOOM!
The road broke.
Asphalt erupted in a shallow crater.
Caelus hit hard enough that the impact travelled up my arms and into my teeth.
He clawed for the links around his throat.
I dismissed them before his fingers could turn the restraint into a handle, let the ethereal blue dissolve into nothing, and Fracture Stepped into the space behind his shoulders while the after-image of my previous position still hung in the dusty air.
Fresh chains bloomed from both palms, thinner this time, faster, and wrapped his neck in overlapping coils that tightened the moment they completed the circuit.
[Combat link: Active]
[Target: Caelus — Heavy kinetic support]
[Binding tension: Scaling with Host Strength]
[Fracture Step: Cooldown cycling]
[Advisory: Mass advantage persists]
"Activate Submission."
[Special Condition Met: Target bound.]
[Initiating Energy Siphon.]
The moment the system message appeared, the chains pulsed brightly.
A sudden rush of warmth flooded up the binds and poured straight into my chest.
He bucked.
I rode the motion instead of fighting it, boots finding purchase on the ruin of his upper back for a breath before I stepped off and pulled the coils tighter from a new angle.
He tried to stand back up.
My grip tightened as I kicked the back of his knee.
Air became a resource he had to negotiate for.
His hands came up, not for me, for the links, and found only the kind of pressure that rewarded panic with less oxygen.
"You followed a plus sign on a board," I said, voice steady while the chains did the ugly work.
"Elevated extraction. That does not make me a prize you get to carry back to your twins like a completed errand."
Caelus drove an elbow backward with enough force to have folded a less careful torso.
I was already gone, Fracture Step chewing the cooldown, reappearing at his flank in time to feed another chain around his chest and pin one arm to his ribs.
The geometry of it was ugly and effective.
Heavy hitters hated angles they could not simply walk through.
"I would like to have you in the academy. We can be a good team."
Inside the ruined restaurant, a twin shouted something about the fulcrum playing dirty.
Rei answered with a laugh.
Gianna’s presence through the anchor stayed cold and precise, the signature of someone managing two projectile lanes without spare attention for my street theatre.
Caelus dropped to one knee, then both, the chains forcing the issue.
His face had gone the colour of someone discovering that mass was not the same thing as leverage.
I kept the tension just shy of the line that would turn an exam restraint into a medical problem the proctors would have to write up.
"Yield the extraction attempt," I told him.
"Or keep testing whether lean is a synonym for fragile. I have more links than you have air."