Chapter 164: Chapter 164: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [4]
The system chose that exact second to stop being quiet.
A clinical panel slid into the corner of my vision while the five of them closed the circle another step.
[Succubus core — Stabilising under isolation stress]
[Impulse ceiling: Elevated]
[Host regulation load: Critical]
[Query: Override Host baseline for limited autonomous response?]
[Y / N]
I didn’t answer with a word.
I answered with a number.
"Twenty percent."
The panel held for a fraction of a second, as if the system itself was surprised I had given it a ceiling instead of a refusal.
Then the flood started.
[Partial override accepted — 20%]
[Succubus sub-routines: Engaging]
[Ocular shift: Initiating]
[Motor prioritisation: Threat avoidance + contact yield]
[Warning: Cover integrity at risk if duration exceeds sixty seconds]
Yellow edged into the black of my pupils.
Not the empty, hungry takeover that had once put my hands on Gianna’s throat.
Just a thin ring of something older and less polite, sitting behind my own eyes like a second set of instructions waiting for permission.
I looked at the five.
The white-haired support was the real problem.
His energy sat so low it barely registered.
The moment I committed to a vector, he would take my vision again, and the rest of them would finish the sentence.
To the side, the elongated-arm woman would reach first if I shifted left.
The bald kinetic would throw architecture if I shifted back. The displacement specialist would collapse the space I tried to occupy. The pale-eyed one looked weakest on paper, but weak people in a five-man peel were usually the ones carrying the hidden angle.
I couldn’t open the full pathway.
Not with the board watching and Giselle somewhere on a higher floor taking notes.
The core-drain threat they thought was bluster had to stay mostly bluster, or at least look like it until the sixty seconds ran out.
Sixty seconds.
If the Hive had only been cut and not destroyed, Gianna and Rei would already be burning the district to close the distance.
I just had to still be standing when they arrived.
"Your name?" I asked the white-haired man.
He considered the question the way other people considered whether a target was worth the mana.
"Lain."
I nodded once.
"Lain..."
I moved the instant the name left his mouth.
Side-step.
Low.
Exactly the vector that should have triggered the vision cut.
Lain’s pupils vanished on schedule.
The world went black again, but this time the twenty-percent override was already running the arithmetic.
I had mapped the elongated woman’s position before the dark hit.
I didn’t need eyes for the next half-second.
My body simply wasn’t there when her stretched hand arrived.
Yellow flared brighter behind my lids.
The chains I had wrapped around my own fists uncoiled like they had been waiting for the order.
One link found her wrist in the dark, tightened, and locked.
[Submission — Active | Partial override]
[Target: Elongated-frame combatant]
[Contact yield: Initiating]
[Drain rate: 20% ceiling — Host-limited]
Vision snapped back in time for me to see her eyes go wide.
I didn’t stop and dragged her.
The chain became a leash.
I pulled her through the open space between the other four like she was a piece of mobile cover and a battery at the same time.
"Agh!"
Her boots scraped.
She tried to retract the arm and only fed me more contact.
Power came across the link in a thin, hot stream: flexibility, reach, the gift of joints that didn’t care about normal human limits.
She dropped to one knee, then both, face going grey.
"What the fuck?" the bald man shouted.
I smiled.
It didn’t feel entirely like my smile.
The woman went limp in a few seconds.
I cut the Submission before the override could ask for more than twenty percent, let her fall, and felt the stolen density settle into my shoulders and spine like someone had rewritten the blueprints while I wasn’t looking.
I moved again.
Faster now.
This time, when I raised my hand, it wasn’t a chain that answered.
My arm elongated.
The same wrong, cable-like stretch the woman had used, now sitting in my own ligaments for as long as the residual lasted.
I reached past the displacement specialist, past Lain’s peripheral vision, and caught the pale-eyed one by the back of the collar from an angle that should have been impossible.
"No..."
I slammed his face into the asphalt hard enough to leave a personal crater.
BAM!
He stopped being a problem.
Lain finally committed.
He came forward in a clean, economical burst, vision-cut already spinning up again.
I retracted the borrowed length, felt my arm snap back to normal proportions with a sensation like cold water, and jumped.
He jumped with me.
Mid-air, I threw a chain at the largest piece of broken masonry still sitting on the avenue, a transit barrier stone the size of a desk.
The link wrapped, locked, and I used the full line of my body plus the strength to swing the stone in a vicious arc.
The bald kinetic specialist was still turning toward the sound of his teammate hitting the ground when the stone met his face.
That impact was wet and final.
He went over backward and did not get up.
I landed in a crouch, chains coiling back to my wrists, yellow still burning thin rings around my pupils.
Three down.
Two left.
Lain and the displacement specialist.
The shimmer around the specialist’s hands intensified.
Space between us started to fold in ugly ways.
Lain’s voice was still calm, but the calm had edges now.
"That wasn’t Acolyte work."
"Never said it was."
"Giselle will want a full report."
"She can have whatever’s left of you."
The override timer in the corner of my vision ticked down from the original sixty.
Forty-one seconds remaining.
Thirty-nine.
Somewhere beyond the immediate circle, past the dust and the ruined avenue, I felt the faintest, almost imaginary pull, the ghost of an anchor channel trying to re-form.
Gianna.
Or Rei.
Or both.
I rolled my shoulders, felt the elongated woman’s still singing in the joints, and let the chains hang loose and ready.
"Your move, Lain," I said.
"Clock’s running for both of us."