Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users - Chapter 440

Capítulo 440: Sensible Boy

Its head swung low, and multiple eyes were glowing faintly and cruelly. A test boss. The ground trembled under its weight as it stepped forward.

Its breath came out in waves that smelled of iron and ash. The exam had built this thing to push them, to strip them down and see what they had left when nothing easy remained.

“Big one’s mine,” Everly said automatically. “Yours with help,” Ethan corrected. “Fine,” she said, grinning anyway. The beast charged, plates rattling.

Ethan threw light across its eyes, scattering its focus with brief flickers that tugged sight just off true.

The head swung toward a shape that wasn’t there. Evelyn slid in at that opening, her blade feeling for the joint between plates.

Sparks jumped. Everly followed, hammering her weight into the seam Evelyn had warmed. One plate is split enough to show raw tissue.

The tail whipped. Ethan tugged Everly half a step by pulling her attention, and the tail took stone instead of ribs.

They kept the rhythm. Ethan misled, Evelyn opened, Everly finished. Again, and again. The beast chased ghosts and hit real metal.

At last, Everly drove her blade down through a final seam.

The sound ran out of the canyon like a bell struck hard. Weight fell. Dust surged and then settled. Three figures stood, steady, breathing, ready.

The picture of that final strike hung on a huge panel high above the trial grounds. The control room had no windows.

Light came from a layered wall of projection glass, from small status bars that slid along the edges, from the soft glow of consoles where technicians sat with headphones that did not cover both ears because good staff keeps one ear for the room.

The air smelled of metal warmed by electronics, and of the faint citrus someone had set near the vents to make the place feel less like a machine and more like a room where people worked.

Every screen was moving. Some tiles showed pairs picking their way through the marsh.

Some showed a single student in a ruin alley counting breaths and exits, waiting for a mistake to pass by.

Others watched forests, stairwells, and an empty square where an invisible proctor paced in a slow circle while the ground reset its tricks.

Lines of text crept along one panel that never showed faces. It counted water used, flares left, pulls tested, and then put back; items were ignored on purpose.

None of that drew attention unless you had learned to see what mattered.

At the room’s center, Elira Korrin stood with her hands behind her back. She did not lean on the console, ask for a chair, or braid her hair loosely down her back.

The silver in her eyes caught the screen light and held it quietly. When she spoke, it was soft, but the room had learned to listen even when the air hummed with a dozen feeds.

“Shift the ridge view three degrees right,” she said. “We are losing the angle on Seven.” A technician touched a dial, and the picture slid cleanly.

A student who had been half hidden came into full view. The boy did not look up. He was busy tying a strap that he should have tied an hour earlier. Elira watched for two breaths.

“Log,” she said. “Note: strap late, correction without complaint.” The technician nodded, fingers moving without fuss.

To Elira’s left, a woman with neat hair and the posture of a fencing coach took notes with the kind of quick, exact strokes that make pens feel respected.

“Too much muscle on Fourteen,” she said to the room at large, not unkind. “Raw speed. He spends three steps where one breath would serve him better.”

A man with a soft sweater that somehow belonged in a room made of glass and graphs did not look up from his screen.

“He’s learning to wait for the room,” he said. “He listened to the floor on that last jump. Watch what happens next.”

Another instructor, older, lips thin from years of grading the same mistake, pointed with a capped marker.

“They are all leaning too hard on single tricks. That pair in the northwest keeps throwing the same feint. The realm has already learned it.”

“And changes to punish it,” Elira said. “Note that message to their proctor. Save the blow. Nudge. No intervention.”

The capped marker lowered. The old instructor breathed out and wrote exactly that.

A hum ran through the far wall. Three feeds broke apart and recombined to show a larger view of the same terrain.

A short man with a face that always looked half-amused, even when he was not amused at all, tapped the edge of a screen.

“You see this?” he asked no one and everyone. “Girl in the swale. She keeps glancing to the left like she knows where the safe line should be.

It isn’t there. It’s one meter off. She’ll correct. Wait.”

On her next step, the girl corrected herself. She did not smile at her own good sense. She kept moving.

“Yes,” Elira said. Mark’s line kept under pressure.”

A bored voice came from the back. It was not bored with the work, but bored because the body found stillness hard.

“We are doing this too early. This is still the sorting. The real test will come when the field splits them for the midterm.”

The boredom fell away as he spoke the last word. He was not careless. He was tired of saying what everyone knew.

He stretched his neck, clicked his pen closed, open, and closed again, and then stopped when the woman with the neat hair did not look up but very clearly heard the clicking.

“We watch now,” Elira said. “Because we place them.” She let the words sit. The room quieted the way good rooms do when a point lands. She did not speak further. She did not need to.

On the side wall, a small strip of feed never grew larger than a hand. It showed a hallway somewhere far from this room, where a man at a desk moved names with care no one else would ever see.

That strip was for one person only. No one looked at it directly. Sometimes a tiny dot pulsed. When it did, a proctor changed their angle, and a blind spot shrank.

Screens rolled on. A student in a ruin study opened a case that gleamed too brightly. He hesitated.

He closed it again and marked the place with chalk, not for himself, but for someone else who would need it.

A voice near the back said, “That one.” Elira said nothing, but her eyes warmed and then went still.

A teacher with iron-gray hair who usually taught field medicine leaned close to a screen where two girls were bandaging a minor cut on a knee without making a drama of it.

“Good wrap,” she said. “Too tight by a hair. They’ll fix it on the next stop.”

Another instructor shook his head at a feed where a boy slashed at a swarm with proud swings and no patience. “Too loud,” he said. “Too greedy.”

“Adjust the record to capture his breathing,” Elira said. “Pattern might be the reason, not pride. If it’s fear, we teach breath. If it’s ego, we teach walls.”

Her tone carried no heat. The room wrote her words into the right place. The boy on the screen ran on, still loud, still alive.

On a long panel near the ceiling, a strip plotted how many times a student chose to drink when water was easy versus when it burned.

Another tracked how often a pair left a clear path behind them instead of noise. A third counted little mercies: a stone moved, a hand offered, a warning spoken without waiting for a thank you. Those numbers did not rank. They filled.

Far below the glass, the canyon where Ethan and the twins stood finished shedding dust from the fallen boss.

Their tile stayed midsize, one of many. No special border announced it. No trumpet implied that one fight mattered more than any other.

Even so, a slight hush pulsed when that tile came into the periphery of three different conversations at once.

It was the kind of hush that knows what it sees without needing a name for it.

“That trio,” said the sweatered man, tapping his pen against his screen just once. “They default to count.

They don’t waste scolding. He overextends twice, and each time the correction is minor and sticks.”

“Twins on pace,” the fencing coach said, following their movement with her eyes. “One risks to find the edge, the other trims the edge until it holds.”

“Middle one works which way?” asked the iron-gray medic. “Illusions as cloth or illusions as a knife?”

Elira answered, not quickly, not slow. “Cloth first. Knife only when the cloth has done its work. He buys seconds instead of applause.”

The neat-haired woman smiled without showing teeth. “Sensible boy.”

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