Chapter 92: Accidentally Trying to Kill the Only Other Guy

Chapter 92: Chapter 92: Accidentally Trying to Kill the Only Other Guy

Standing near the entrance of the research wing, talking quietly with Mira, was the white-haired support who still looked too refined to belong in the same category as the rest of us.

Shen Reinhard.

He turned as I approached, and genuine-looking excitement lit his pale features.

"You’re here."

An ugly spike of anger punched up through my chest before I could stop it.

Everything had started sliding the day he arrived and tested my core.

First breakdown. Priority alert. First time the system began speaking with that colder, optimizing voice.

I knew the correlation wasn’t clean causation, but my body didn’t care about clean causation.

Jenna, speaking with her authority, noticed the tension in my face.

"Shen asked for an hour with you," she said.

"If that’s acceptable."

Shen’s smile remained mild.

"I’ll be gentle."

We walked to a secondary room further down the corridor.

No reinforced sparring mat or weapon racks, no observation glass stacked with diagnostic arrays. Just a plain rectangular space with two chairs, a low table, and the kind of neutral lighting that made every expression harder to hide.

The door sealed behind us.

I didn’t sit.

"Why did you do it?"

Shen blinked once, as if he needed a second to place the question.

"The pressure test on the day we met?"

He exhaled through his nose.

"It was an accident in scale, not in intent. I only meant to see whether you could sense a recognition pulse. I didn’t expect your core to react that violently. Hearing the reports from Mira made me feel responsible. My bad."

The words were shaped like an apology. His face stayed largely indifferent underneath them.

"So," he continued, moving to one of the chairs and sitting with easy composure, "I heard you’ve been having difficulty with your class."

"And? What exactly do you think you can do about that?"

"I need to understand what your power actually is first."

"Not telling. You first."

Shen smiled at the refusal, as if he had expected it.

He raised one pale hand. Under the skin of his forearm, the network of nerves and vessels shifted color, taking on a faint luminous white that pulsed in time with something deeper than heartbeat.

"Symbiotic Battery," he said.

"I don’t just push mana outward. I act as a high-frequency pipeline. I tether my core to my Vanguard partners and absorb approximately thirty percent of incoming physical damage directed at them. That kinetic impact is converted inside me into mana, which I then feed back to overclock their skills. When the links are active, the tethers are visible, white data-threads that run from my chest and wrap the people I’m supporting."

As he spoke, three thin white lines extended from his sternum and hovered in the air between us, not yet attaching to anything.

They looked clean. Clinical. Nothing like the blue of my chains.

"You understand the basic shape?"

I studied the floating threads.

"Doesn’t the damage still hurt you?"

"For a moment, yes. Once the conversion finishes, the pain is gone. The energy has already been rewritten into usable output."

"And that conversion happens inside your core?"

"That’s right. You’re good at this."

It was a solid, high-value support framework.

Raid groups would build entire strategies around a man who could turn incoming damage into fuel.

But something in the explanation felt incomplete.

The numbers were too clean. The confidence too practiced.

"What happens if someone hits you with more force than your core can convert in time?" I asked.

"Pure overload. No interval for the pipeline to cycle."

Shen’s eyes widened a fraction. Then the smile returned, thinner this time.

"Do you think my core stays at baseline when I’m linked?"

"Explain."

"If I maintain active threads with three partners, my core expands to accommodate the shared capacity. In practical terms, I’m operating with the processing volume of four cores while the links hold. That distributed structure is what lets me withstand and convert the damage that would crumple a solo support."

Distributed load. Shared capacity. A network that grew more durable the more people it touched.

I stepped closer to the hovering white threads, stopping just outside their reach.

"Interesting."

"You’re the first person who immediately looked for the failure point," Shen said.

"Most ask how it feels for the Vanguards."

"I’m not most people."

Something in my tone must have registered as a challenge.

Shen’s posture shifted by a single degree, the polite excitement cooling into attention.

"Would you like a demonstration?" he offered.

"Low intensity. You form whatever construct you use for binding. I attach a single tether. We observe the interaction. Nothing invasive."

I considered refusing.

The anger still sat under my sternum, looking for a clean target.

But the system was quiet, Mira was presumably monitoring residual signatures from the corridor, and part of me wanted to see what happened when a rewrite-class support touched a conversion-class pipeline.

"One tether," I said.

"You don’t push. You only hold the link."

"Agreed."

I raised my right hand and formed a single Submission chain, keeping the output deliberately low.

The blue links coiled in the air, solid and familiar. Shen’s white thread drifted forward and made contact with the outermost loop.

The reaction was immediate and wrong. The moment the tether tried to seat itself against the chain, my core recognized the foreign structure and did what it had been shaped to do: it attempted to edit.

The blue links flared.

An invasive pressure raced up the white thread toward Shen’s chest before either of us could properly register the direction of the flow.

Shen’s eyes went wide for real this time.

He tried to sever the connection. The tether didn’t break cleanly.

For a fraction of a second, the rewrite impulse kept traveling, tasting the architecture of his pipeline, mapping the places where his core expanded to accommodate multiple partners.

Warning heat spiked under my bracelet. The band flashed hard red and clamped down with enough force to make my wrist bones ache.

My mouth curved upward without my permission.

The chain dissolved as his white thread snapped back into Shen’s chest as if burned.

Silence filled the plain room.

Shen was breathing faster.

One hand had risen to the center of his sternum, fingers pressing against the fabric of his shirt. His pale face had lost what little color it normally carried.

"What... was that?"

I flexed my fingers.

The bracelet’s warning pulse slowly receded from red to amber to its usual restrained green.

"You lied."

"About what?"

"You’re not expanding your core. You’re borrowing from the support you’re linked with."

"And how is that different?"

"You convert damage into mana," I said. My voice sounded flatter than I expected.

"I don’t convert. Your tether tried to treat my construct like a standard support channel. My core treated your tether like something that could be improved."

Shen stared at me.

The mild, pleasant mask had cracked.

"You nearly wrote yourself into my pipeline," he said quietly.

"I didn’t try to. The class did. There’s a difference. Some days that difference is the only thing keeping people around me intact."