Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users - Chapter 427

Chapter 427: Good. In You Go. Don’t Make Me Come Fetch You

The line moved without chatter. Packs sat where they should on the shoulders, and straps lay flat. Water sloshed once and then settled.

Pairs checked each other’s zippers and pulls, then checked them again because that was how you told your partner you meant to see them on the other side.

Elira stood near the proctors and didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. She had said everything yesterday. The rest was doing.

Pods waited along the wall, smooth white shells with soft lights along their rims. They weren’t coffins, though a first glance always tried to call them that.

They were doors laid on their backs. Each one hummed at a low pitch that felt like a cat you couldn’t see. Proctors took names and nodded.

Clipboards were old-fashioned, but the school used them because paper keeps people honest in a way screens forget to.

The room smelled clean, like new cloth, metal wiped down, and something faintly sweet from a disinfectant that had learned not to bite.

“Ethan,” a proctor said. The woman’s braid was pinned high and tight. Her eyes were steady. She looked like someone who liked checklists because checklists had once saved her.

He stepped forward. Evelyn squeezed his arm, quick and warm, not a grip, just a promise that she would be where she was supposed to be.

Everly bumped his hip so lightly he could have called it an accident if he needed to pretend not to like it.

He didn’t pretend. He held her look for a beat. She grinned the same way she always did before a drill and then sobered because she knew this was not only a drill.

“Counts,” he said. He gave them the first rule because it made them feel right to hear it again.

“Counts,” Evelyn echoed, already turning to her pod.

“Counts,” Everly said, and then under her breath, “and crush anything that deserves it,” just loud enough to make him give her the flat look that meant wait your turn.

She rolled her eyes and smiled. She would wait. She knew how.

He handed his pack to the assistant, who would weigh it, tag it, and slide it into the cargo recess.

He set his boots on the foot marks painted on the floor, the same faint blue marks the academy used everywhere, so you never had to ask where to stand.

He named in his head what Elira had told them to name. Water. Pull. Flares. Knife. Coil. Hands. Feet. His system stirred the way it always did at the edge of a gate.

No voice. No advice. Just that panel of lights that meant the instrument side of him was awake and counting too.

“Breathe in,” the proctor said, tone so calm it made room for breath to do what it does. “Breathe out. No jewelry. No loose sleeves. No charms are registered and approved.”

He raised his forearms so she could glance at his wrists. She nodded. “Good. In you go. Don’t make me come fetch you.”

“I never do,” he said, and it was almost a joke but not quite. He lay back. The pod’s interior gripped him like a hand takes yours and doesn’t ask for more than weight.

The lid lowered. The light in the seal softened and slid toward a warm tone like a late morning in winter that pretends it isn’t cold.

He looked up. The inside of the pod roof held the faintest pattern, seven dots in a curved line.

He had counted them the first time he had been here. He didn’t count now. He let the hum enter his bones.

He let the cushion take his shoulder blades and the back of his head and the curve of his ribs. He loosened his jaw because he’d learned not to clench when the shift came.

The world changed without a lurch. The kind of change you feel in your fingernails before you feel it in your chest.

Light took on weight. Sound stepped aside and then returned with a new voice. The pod was gone the way a room is gone when you walk through a door, and it closes behind you.

He stood in a ruin that had not been built to impress anyone. Half-collapsed buildings leaned on each other like tired men.

Moss had taken the edges and then kept going. Doorways stood like missing teeth. Balconies jutted out with nothing beneath them, the supports eaten by time.

The air held a wet chill that bit fingers first and then knees. It smelled of stone, old leaves, and a metallic note he couldn’t name yet.

Small insects drifted in slow spirals, their bodies lit from inside by a soft blue that made the shadows look deeper. They didn’t care about him. Good.

He didn’t move yet. He named the things Elira had told them to name. Ceiling. None he trusted. Shelters.

Two partial walls and a propped beam that would hold for a little while and crush after that. Exits.

Six, he could reach fast without jumping stupidly. Sounds. Water somewhere it didn’t know where to go.

Wind is lying about its direction in the gap between two roofs. A soft scrape behind him that belonged to a small animal or a person who wanted him to think so.

He made himself look at the ground. Not at the thing behind him. Not yet. Ground first. Always the floor before anything brave.

The moss lay in thick mats that hid broken glass. The glass had been there long enough to be dull, but dull glass still cuts.

A line of cracked stone ran like a scar toward a sunken courtyard. He could use it as a path or a trap.

He filed it away. His system blinked twice at the edge of his thoughts. It was not warning him.

It was counting alongside him, marking the same six exits, the same partial shelters, the same lie in the wind.

He turned slowly. The scrape came again, meant to be heard. A low figure slipped into view between two leaning pillars.

Then another. Then two more. Wolves in the rough sense and not the exact. Their shoulders rolled too high.

Their legs had lengths that didn’t agree with their bodies. They carried crystals along their spines like growths that had decided to be armor.

The crystals caught the blue insects’ glow and threw it back in shards. Their eyes weren’t wild.

They were steady in the way things are steady when they know how to rush without warning.

“Simplified,” he said under his breath, naming it not for them but for himself. The forbidden zone had held worse.

Faster. Smarter. This was a version with its edges sanded down and then sharpened in a different place.

A test for instinct. Not for endurance. He let his shoulders settle and let his hands hang where they could rise without snagging.

They spread without fanfare. One drifted left, right, low, and higher along a broken stair, the old move.

He didn’t punish them for it by pretending to be surprised. He gave them something else instead.

He let his weight go light at the edge of his feet. He looked past the left one and focused on a point a meter to its side.

He pictured himself stepping there, turning there, exhaling there. He pictured the sound his boot would make on old stone and the rustle his sleeve would make at his wrist.

He pictured it cleanly. Then he left his body where it was and let the picture leave him like a thread.

To the wolves, a shadow of his movement bled into the broken light. A faint step. A breath that didn’t belong to the air. Two heads turned.

Their bodies didn’t because they were good at not overcommitting—better than most students would be. The low one went first.

The burst was ugly, a stuttered leap that used too much muscle in the first half and not enough in the last. It crossed the ground fast anyway.

The crystal ridge along its spine scraped the pillar as it passed. The sound lit something in the others that wanted to follow.

He moved when he had taught them to look the other way. His boot hit the cracked line of stone he’d marked. He let the dull glass under the moss sing.

Not too hard. Just enough to throw a bright, wrong sound into the space. He felt the old training slide into place without effort. Illusions liked sharp edges.

They liked greed. He didn’t give them that. He gave them the ordinary errors beasts make when they hurry and the ordinary noises a body makes when it tries to be quiet and fails.

He mirrored those. He didn’t paint a false world. He smudged the real one at the edges where eyes are lazy.

The low wolf bit where he hadn’t been. Its teeth met stone and slid. The higher one commits.

He let it, then bled another step sideways in their hearing, not far, just enough to move their map of him one notch. Its strike cut through the air where he had been and came down too deep.

It had to plant both paws to keep from falling. Its crystal growths clicked against each other. The sound told him where to set the next breath.

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