Chapter 138: Mind Your Own Business

Chapter 138: Chapter 138: Mind Your Own Business

Cecilia pinched my cheek once, two fingers, the gesture almost maternal and entirely evaluative.

"Train harder."

Then she looked at Gianna.

The temperature of the corridor didn’t drop the way the analysis room had, but something in Gianna’s anchor channel went tight against my ribs.

"Dear... you’ve grown beautiful."

Cecilia’s voice warmed by a calculated degree.

"I miss the time when you were in our guild, playing with Rei."

Gianna smiled the awkward, polite smile of someone standing on a political plate she hadn’t agreed to step on.

"Lady Lawless."

"Once the test ends, pay a visit to our place. Both of you."

Cecilia’s gaze flicked between us.

"Rei would love it."

She walked away before either of us could accept or refuse in a way that created a record.

Bows followed her down the corridor like a wake.

For a second Gianna and I stood in the leftover quiet.

"You know her," I said.

"I trained under Lawless structures when I was younger."

Gianna’s voice was controlled.

"Before Mom’s guild and theirs stopped pretending they were simply friendly competitors."

She glanced at my cheek as if the pinch might have left a mark.

"What did she want?"

"From me? A warning dressed as a compliment."

I rubbed the spot.

"From you, an invitation that didn’t sound optional."

Gianna started walking again, faster.

"We’re going to Mom."

"Gia—"

"Now."

Jenna already knew.

Of course she did.

The analysis room still smelled faintly of dropped pressure and Mira’s stress sweat when we entered.

Jenna took one look at Gianna’s face and one look at me and pointed at chairs.

"She found you in the corridor," Jenna said. Not a question.

"She called me handsome, pinched my face, and invited both of us to Lawless grounds after the test," I said.

"Also told me to train harder."

Gianna sat rigid.

Jenna’s jaw flexed once.

"You don’t have to worry about her for now," Jenna said.

She stood with both hands on the back of her chair.

"Whatever Cecilia is planning, we will handle it. You focus on the test."

Neither of us questioned her again.

Cecilia Lawless had looked more dangerous than Rei in the way policy was more dangerous than a blood edge, quiet, structural, hard to punch.

I didn’t want her as a complication layered on open tethers and Empress optics.

Gianna’s channel gradually loosened from rigid threat-response into something that could train again.

That was enough for the hour.

With Cecilia’s visit closed on paper if not in consequence, the week narrowed into compatibility work and almost nothing else.

Radius integrity.

Denial under pursuit.

Anti-hook footwork.

Stagger recovery after partial peel.

Zenith kept on a leash until the timing model stopped dumping all three of us into deferred fatigue at useless moments.

Fulcrum in the morning. Fury in the afternoon.

Mira’s schedules became the walls of our days.

We told Rei about her mother the same evening.

Her face darkened for a moment, true dark, not performance, then smoothed into the usual sharp calm as if someone had wiped a slate.

"She’s always like that," Rei said.

"You don’t have to worry."

Gianna watched her longer than I did. Rei didn’t offer more. We didn’t dig in the hall.

Training resumed.

As the days stacked, a pattern set in.

When the block ended and Gianna left, sometimes quicker than before, separate-homes discipline worn like armor, Rei stayed.

Extra cycles. Extra blood-budget burn against dummies that didn’t need that much death.

The private hall lights stayed on after the scheduled shutoff more than once.

On the third day, I went back in when she was training alone.

The mat still held the heat of her work.

Rei moved through a form with a thin blade grown from a cut she should have sealed an hour ago, breath controlled, eyes too bright.

"Thought you followed her."

I didn’t answer.

I walked to the edge of her lane and stood there until the blade paused.

"Why are you pushing yourself?"

"I’m not."

"You clearly are."

"Revien."

Her eyes cut to me.

"Mind your business."

"You being exhausted before the real test is my business."

"I know my limits."

"Do you?"

I opened a single spatial chain and locked it around one of her wrists, not submission theater, not a full bind.

A constraint.

"Try to land a hit on me without taking out the blood."

Rei’s eyes narrowed.

She didn’t ask questions and just lunged.

The first exchange was clean enough to respect.

She came in hard and low, free hand probing for a grip, chained wrist used as a feint more than a liability.

I slipped the line of her shoulder, Fracture Step reserved, feet only.

She adjusted mid-motion and threw an elbow where my sternum had been. I caught the angle on a forearm and let her pass through space.

"Faster," she spat.

She was faster.

She was also already spending the wrong currency.

Without blood constructs, Rei’s whole geometry changed.

The angles she trusted were gone.

What remained was pure body mechanics under fatigue she had been stacking for days.

Her footwork stayed aggressive. Her recovery steps started to fray.

She snapped a kick toward my knee.

I checked it and moved inside, forcing her chained hand across her own centerline so the next punch had to travel the long way.

She headbutted toward my face instead.

I leaned out.

The chain clinked once, a mean little sound.

"Stop running," Rei said.

"Stop telegraphing."

She snarled and pressed, a flurry of short strikes, hips committed, trying to make contact into a wrestle where the chain might help her more than me.

For three seconds she almost had my sleeve.

I broke the grip with a turn and put space back on the mat.

Her breathing roughened.

The relentless part didn’t fade.

Lunges got longer than they needed to be.

Resets got sloppier.

She started throwing power as if power could replace the missing blade, and every miss cost her more than it cost me.

"You’re dropping your left," I said.

"Shut up."

She came again anyway.

I could have ended it clean at any of a dozen moments, trip, lock, chain yank to the floor.

I didn’t and let her hunt the hit she thought would prove the limit conversation wrong.

Sweat ran into her eyes.

The sealed cut on her palm had reopened from strain alone, a useless line she refused to look at.

When her shoulders started to hitch with something that wasn’t only oxygen debt, I stopped moving.

I let the next punch land.

Bam.

Her fist cracked into my chest, not enough to break anything in a body that had already been rewritten upward, enough to make the point.