Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users - Chapter 425

Chapter 425: Elira Korrin 3

Elira didn’t raise her voice to call them back to attention. She didn’t need to. She stood the way a person stands when they know the room will listen, and the room did.

The last chairs clicked into place. The last whisper tucked itself away. The map still faintly glowed on the wall, a dim breath waiting to be drawn full.

“This isn’t a beast hunt,” she said. “It isn’t points for cutting down things that roar. We’re measuring decisions. How do you decide to move? Who you decide to follow.

What you decide to leave behind, even when it hurts your pride. The midterm will not start you at the same place. It will scatter you.

The field you earn here is the ground you stand on there. You’ll land where the ground won’t fight you at every step if you show balance and clarity.

If you can’t bend, if you try to force a door that isn’t a door, the exam will set you where the lesson comes harder.”

A low murmur ran through the rows and faded fast. Everyone understood the shape of that. Start zones weren’t just luck. They were a mirror.

Elira lifted her hand, and the holo thickened into clean lines. Labels floated without fuss. Forest.

Breaklands. Low marsh. Verge ruin. Fault ridge. Each zone shifted under a light veil of randomization that kept trying to hide its pattern and failing to do so for anyone who knew how to look.

A thin lattice of numbers ticked in the corner of the display, the exam’s quiet heartbeat counting time that wasn’t here yet.

“The simulation mirrors forbidden zones,” she went on. “It is not the same as a real one, but it behaves like a relative that learned bad habits in the same house.

Beasts will appear. Some are echoes, some are constructs, and a few are tests of nerve that don’t leave marks if you listen.

The schedule for those appearances will shift. If you try to memorize that schedule, you will waste hours and learn nothing. What we are measuring isn’t how many claws you cut.

It is how you balance survival with exploration. It is how you keep your pair alive while still bringing something back that wasn’t yours when you walked in.”

She tapped the edge of the desk, and small panels unfolded from the wall like petals. They lit with soft color instead of sharp numbers.

“Performance tracking,” she said. “Kills. Rescues. Resource gathering. Cooperation. Your ability to count on each other under pressure matters more than your ability to count trophies.

You can fight, hide, lead, or mislead, and see if I notice. Some of you will try each of these because you’ve been good at one of them for years.

I want to know which one you pick when all of them will work, and which one you pick when none of them will.

There is no single path to success. There is a very short list of ways to fail. Pride. Panic. Silence when speaking would save time. Speech when silence would save blood.”

The room tightened a little. Boasts went quiet before they could turn into sentences. A few faces paled. A few set harder.

Evelyn sat calmly, eyes on the map but mind already somewhere in the seams between labels.

Everly smirked, not reckless, just sure of the same thing she had always been sure of: that she could carry weight and that Ethan would be two steps where she needed him to be without being told.

Ethan watched Elira instead of the field. He listened to the edges of her talk. She didn’t waste words. She left space for the room to think. He liked that.

“You are not going to be ranked by who yells loudest while running,” Elira said. “You will be ranked by who can count the most small truths in a row without dropping any.

If you rescue someone, it had better be because you could spare the breath and not because you wanted a story to tell.

If you bring back a resource cache, it had better be intact. If you decide to break off a fight, you will not be punished for that if your reasons stand up in front of any adult in this building who has ever had to drag a bleeding student out of a gate.

You are here to practice not dying and keeping others from doing it. You will fail at something.

Many of you will fail at something small. That is expected. You will not fail at telling me the truth about it afterward.”

She let the words sink in. Then she pointed toward the far right of the map, where a pale band ran like a scar along the fault ridge.

“This zone is not for your cohort,” she said. “It’s marked, and it’s locked. If you see this during the midterm, the exam decided you needed a lesson I did not assign.

That will be rare. If it happens, you will back away and call it in. If you are tempted to see what waits there, come see me after the midterm and explain what you thought you would teach yourself alone that this room could not teach you together.”

A few pulses quickened at that. Forbidden inside the exam itself had a special shine for the kind of student who liked to turn locks just to prove the key wasn’t needed. She had cut that shine down cleanly.

She raised her hands. She took three in quick order. A boy with a careful voice asked about rescue protocols inside a simulated collapse.

“Name the ceiling,” Elira said. “If you can’t name the ceiling, you don’t trust it, and you don’t stand under it. You shore with what you have. You don’t wedge with your back. Your spine is not a beam.”

A girl with a scar on her thumb asked whether deceiving another team might ever be counted as cooperation if the deception kept them alive.

“If you trick them into safety,” Elira said, “I will know, and I will not punish you for buying time with your pride.

If you trick them into danger, I will know that, too. If your story is so clever that it almost fooled me, I will mark it as bright and heavy, and you will still lose points because I am not interested in clever that spills blood.”

A quiet student near the door asked whether a pair could break formation if one panicked. Elira looked over the rows and made sure everyone met her eyes at least once.

“If your partner panics,” she said, “you do not leave them inside that feeling. You break the moment.

You name five things you see. You name three sounds you hear. You name two exits. You put their hand on a strap. Panic hates lists.

You give it one. If that fails and you need to move, you move as far as it takes to get them breathing in a way that can carry words again.

You do not abandon a partner in panic unless you carry a third person who cannot walk or follow a proctor’s order.

If a proctor tells you to leave a partner, you will hate that order and obey it, and you will then come to my office and admit you hated it.”

A thin laugh ran through the room at the end of that. The kind you get when people hear something hard and feel better because someone said the hard part out loud without dressing it up.

Elira lowered her hand. “That’s enough questions for today,” she said. “You will think of more after dinner. Good.

Think them. Bring them in the morning if they still matter. Remember what I told you earlier. If you are afraid, say it to your pair.

If you aren’t, find someone who is and learn what they know about exits. When you step into the field tomorrow, remember this.

The midterm isn’t only about proving what you are. It’s about proving what you can become when the map doesn’t match your plan.”

She cut the holo down until the map was just a film of light, the classroom’s bare wall behind it like a promise that rooms can go back to being rooms after they host a storm.

“Go,” she said, and that was dismissal enough.

People rose. The room exhaled. Bags thumped softly. Friends found each other’s shoulders without making a scene of it.

The boy from earlier, who had asked to let the proctors handle danger, moved through the aisle with a different set to his jaw.

He wasn’t humbled in the showy way. He walked like a person adjusting his grip on a weight he still intended to carry.

The note-taking girl tucked her spare elastic back into her pocket and tugged her partner’s sleeve toward the door with the sort of gentle bossiness that keeps teams from being late.

Two students traded places at the threshold so the one with the shorter stride wouldn’t have to jog to keep up—the small measures, the small truths.

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