Chapter 165: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [5]

Chapter 165: Chapter 165: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [5]

Both of us moved at the same time.

I let the chains vanish from my wrists and closed the distance on foot.

No more mid-range games or borrowed reach.

If Lain’s entire kit depended on cutting vision the moment I committed, then the only answer was to commit so hard the cut arrived too late to matter.

We met in the middle of the ruined avenue.

The world went black the instant our ranges overlapped.

I felt the punch coming anyway.

The Succubus override still singing in my joints treated even his throttled signature like dry kindling.

Direction, intent, the exact line of his shoulder, all of it painted itself across the dark in the half-second before his fist should have rearranged my face.

I slipped the punch by a finger’s width, felt the wind of it pass my cheek, and was already leaving the ground.

Right knee drove upward toward the space where his jaw had to be.

Lain blocked with his elbow.

The impact jarred both of us.

Bone met reinforced bone hard enough to send a bright spike of pain up my thigh.

I didn’t waste the contact.

Chains reformed mid-motion, blue and mean, and locked around the elbow he had just used to stop me.

His eyes must have gone wide in the dark, because the next sound was the ugly tear of spatial links being forced apart by raw strength.

The chains snapped like cheap wire.

I dropped back three steps the moment vision returned.

Figured.

He was too strong for the basic tension.

Whatever training Giselle’s circle put their supports through, it had given him the kind of physical ceiling that laughed at Level 2 bindings.

Running was the only clean option left.

I turned and sprinted.

Lain’s expression flashed pure confusion for a fraction of a second; people who could erase your eyesight usually expected the target to freeze or flail, then he followed with the same economical burst he had used earlier.

I hit the nearest intact post, threw a chain, and used the line like a pivot.

Momentum carried me in a hard spiral up the side of a half-collapsed transit structure.

Boots found broken ledge, then windowsill, then the edge of a roof.

I hauled myself over and kept moving.

Lain simply jumped.

No chains or tricks.

Just vertical power that closed the height difference in two clean bounds.

He landed on the same roof a breath after I did, already resetting his stance.

That was when I saw her.

Rei stood near the far edge of the rooftop, bleeding freely from a cut along her collarbone and another across her ribs, but smiling like the entire exam had finally become entertainment.

Two academy hopefuls lay unconscious at her feet, one still twitching, the other completely still.

A third man, some mid-tier Vanguard with a half-formed kinetic field, was still upright in front of her, trying to decide whether the blood on the concrete belonged to him next.

I didn’t give him the chance to finish the thought.

Chains snapped out, wrapped both of Rei’s wrists in a quick, non-binding contact, and I used the line as a guide more than a weapon.

My boot found the last standing opponent’s face with everything the override still allowed.

"AH-"

He left the roof horizontally and didn’t return.

Rei’s eyes flicked to mine, bright with pain and something close to relief.

"You’re alive?"

"Unfortunately."

I pulled her sideways by the linked wrists just as Lain’s next strike carved the air where her head had been.

The rooftop shuddered under the missed impact.

"Gia?" I asked, already scanning the surrounding structures through the thin, re-forming edge of the Hive.

"Don’t know."

Rei wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

"I will check. Give me ten seconds."

"You get five."

I nodded once, then used Fracture Step the moment Lain committed to another close rush.

The world skipped.

I reappeared three metres left, forcing him to reset, and stopped dead in the new position with a smile that felt sharper than it should have.

Lain slowed, white hair stirring in the portal wind, eyes narrowing.

"What is it?"

I didn’t answer with words.

I simply let the override and the re-established secondary channel finish the handshake they had been reaching for since the peel started.

[Zenith Circulation — Active]

[Infinite Stamina Loop: 60:00]

[Connection Established — Rei Lawless]

[Favorability threshold met]

The fatigue that had been stacking in my shoulders, the deep bruise in my ribs, the lingering dark spots at the edge of my vision, all of it flattened into clean, usable zero.

Power didn’t flood in so much as the cost of using power simply stopped mattering for the next hour.

I disappeared from the spot Lain was still watching.

Fracture Step carried me inside his guard before the vision-cut could spin up again.

My fist, wrapped in the last living links of chain and backed by everything the circulation and the stolen residuals could give, drove straight into his stomach.

BANG!

The sound was deep.

Lain folded around the punch with an involuntary exhale.

For the first time since he had taken my sight, the calm cracked.

His boots left the rooftop.

He flew backward across the open space, hit the low parapet, and tumbled over the edge in a controlled fall that still looked a lot less controlled than he wanted.

I stood on the empty roof with Rei at my shoulder, both of us breathing hard, yellow still thinning at the edges of my vision as the twenty-percent override began to wind down on its own.

Rei glanced at the place Lain had disappeared, then at the blood still running down her side, then at me.

"You look different when you’re not trying to be polite."

"Don’t get used to it."

"Too late."

She flexed her wrists inside the loose chains and let a fresh, thin edge of blood form along her palm.

"She’s alive. Pissed. Probably burying people under furniture."

"Good."

I dismissed the chains, rolled the shoulder that still complained, and looked out over the broken district.

"I’m hurt," Rei said.

"I can see."

She turned my face and kissed me.