Chapter 169: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [8]

Chapter 169: Chapter 169: Academy’s Entrance Final Phase [8]

My hands locked tighter on Giselle’s Jaw

Not a grab for balance or a last desperate clinch.

A claim.

"Wha—?"

Her eyes widened for the first time since the biscuit.

Genuine surprise, clean and unguarded, the expression of someone who had spent an entire exam treating every variable as already solved.

I opened my mouth against hers.

Not a kiss.

Nothing the board’s intimacy filters would cleanly categorise.

My eyes went dark at the edges.

The yellow of the override flared hard enough that I felt it more than saw it.

At the same moment, her own eyes opened wider under the contact, as if the act itself had forced the lids apart.

The system didn’t ask permission anymore.

[Core Absorption Activated]

[Compatibility Failed]

[No Anchor Detected]

[Proceeding Forced Extraction...]

[Initiating deep draw...]

[Progress: 0.2%]

Giselle’s body seized.

A single, violent shudder ran through her from shoulders to knees.

"Ugh..."

Something cold and enormous and layered with decades of conditioning tried to stay inside her and failed for a fraction of a second.

A flicker of her core: dense, old, trained under Draven until it no longer felt entirely human, crossed the contact and slammed into me like a live current.

The Hunger that had been waiting behind the fifty-percent wall lunged for it.

She blurred.

Every ounce of power she had left went into the launch.

One moment she was locked in my grip, the next she was ten metres sideways in a streak of displaced air and red chain residue, boots skidding across broken concrete as she fought to stay upright.

To every feed in the observation hall, it would have looked like a deep, aggressive kiss mid-combat.

A support losing his mind or hard-track fulcrum making a final, theatrical mistake.

Only the two of us knew the shape of what had actually happened.

Giselle caught herself against a fractured ventilation stack, chest heaving.

"Hah... hah..."

Her eyes were unfocused for three full seconds.

The red of her irises had gone temporarily dull, like someone had turned the saturation down. ℴ

The system finished its quiet violence inside my chest.

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 30]

[New Skill Unlocked: Seduction]

[Seduction (Lv. 1): Passive influence radius expanded. Non-hostile targets within proximity experience elevated receptivity to Host suggestion and residual transfer. Combat utility: limited. Social/political utility: high.]

Eh?

That was not what I had expected.

Not a combat module or a cleaner drain pathway.

A social skill with a name that sounded like a joke the system was telling at my expense.

I didn’t get the chance to argue with it.

Giselle’s eyes cleared.

Then they turned red in a way that had nothing to do with light or portal glare.

The colour went deeper, hotter, the exact shade of someone who had just felt a foreign class reach into the centre of what she was and take a piece without permission.

Is she mad?

She straightened.

The red chain in her hand lengthened without visible effort. The air around her tightened the way it did when a high-tier Vanguard stopped treating the fight as measurement and started treating it as removal.

"You," she said, voice low and almost conversational, "are not an Acolyte."

"Never claimed the full title."

"You reached into my core."

"You threw my primary at a rupture for optics. We’re even on the disrespect."

She moved.

No feint or testing strike.

The red chain came in a vertical cleave that would have split a lesser support from collarbone to hip.

I Fracture-Stepped out of the line by less than a hand’s width and felt the displaced air burn across my shoulder.

The concrete behind me opened in a smoking trench.

I answered with every chain I had left.

Blue links filled the space between us in a dense, overlapping net meant to foul footwork and force her into a bind she had already proven she could refuse.

She stepped through the first layer, cut the second with a short, vicious motion of the red length, and was inside my guard before the third could close.

Her palm found my sternum.

Shit.

The impact drove me backward across the rooftop in a skidding, rib-deep slide.

I hit the low parapet hard enough to crack it and used the rebound to throw a single heavy chain at her leading ankle.

She let it land, then simply broke the tension with a twist of her leg that should not have been possible at that angle.

"Draining," she said, reading something in my posture or my residual that I had not intended to show.

"That is what your class is capable of, isn’t it?"

"I didn’t pick the power."

"No. You picked the theft."

She came again, faster.

The red chain became three shorter lengths that moved with independent timing, forcing me to track multiple threat lines while the override screamed proximity warnings.

I gave ground in stuttering Fracture Steps, using the borrowed flexibility from the elongated woman to fold under one strike and the strength from Caelus to take another on a hastily formed gauntlet of links.

Every exchange made the yellow in my vision burn hotter.

Giselle was no longer measuring.

She was hunting.

The calm inventory she had worn since the hall was gone, replaced by the focused, personal violence of someone who had felt her own foundation flicker and decided the only acceptable response was to erase the source.

I stopped trying to look controlled.

The fifty-percent override took more of the motor planning.

Chains stopped waiting for clean angles and started arriving where the Hunger wanted contact.

Once I closed the distance far enough to put a shoulder into her midsection, she took the hit, locked an arm around my neck, and tried to drive a knee into the same ribs Lain had already ruined.

I reversed the hold with a chain around her waist, and both of us went over the edge of the roof in a controlled fall that became a messy, mid-air brawl of red and blue links.

That’s when it happened.

I lost control of my body.

My hands automatically moved to choke Giselle while falling.