Chapter 47: Lucian’s Luck

At the fifty-meter mark, the irregular firing sequence finally erupted.

Eight pneumatic cannons fired nearly simultaneously while several lasers scorched down the corridor from different angles. Lucian did not hesitate. He dove forward in a wild manner, rolling on the composite floor as if he were a kicked sack of grain.

He bounced once.

His boots shot out.

Bang!

Both of his boots struck the edge of the terminal pressure plate, making a metallic sound.

Chime-!

The timer stopped and a moment later, the digital board flashed as it analyzed Lucian’s penalty points and compared it to the evaluation threshold.

It displayed an A+.

The stadium was unusually quiet.

"Candidate Lucian."

The computer announced to the arena.

"Run time: 4.89 seconds. Laser breaches: 0. Kinetic impacts: 0. Final Evaluation: A+."

A stunned murmur slowly swept through the stadium.

Students gave the display a look of utter bewilderment, even those who had just been taunting Lucian could barely comprehend how someone so clumsy managed to cross the entire suppression grid without a single penalty.

Eric’s expression went entirely blank.

His muscles tensed with the pressure applied by his hands against the ice pack on his ribs.

"Zero...?"

He stared at the screen as if it had just personally humiliated him.

"Not a single hit?"

Zero breaches.

Zero impacts.

A run time under five seconds.

For several seconds the students gaped at the digital display as if it had lied to them.

"An A-plus?!"

"He didn’t get hit once?! Not even a single laser penalty?!"

"Are you kidding me?! He looked like he was about to fall flat on his face five different times! How did he not clip a single wire?!"

"Luck! That has to be pure, dumb luck!" a student from the second squad shouted, his voice full of disbelief, "Did you see that slide at the twenty-meter mark? If his foot had slipped another half inch, his head would have smashed straight into the tracking sensor! The guy literally tripped his way into an A-plus!"

Down on the track, Lucian slowly pulled himself off the floor, brushing the gray dust from his knees and elbows. He deliberately feigned exhaustion, putting both his hands on his hips while he took deep breaths, as if he had just escaped the jaws of an insufferable beast rather than finishing a military-grade agility assessment.

"Whew!" Lucian called over to the nearest examiner, flashing an innocent grin, "Man, that floor is slippery! I almost broke my neck back there! Guess my morning prayers really worked today!"

The nearby military technician blinked at him, deadpan, for several seconds, the man almost seemed to be unsure whether Lucian was joking, serious, or simply incapable of comprehending how suspicious his ’performance’ was.

In the waiting area, Evelyn crossed her arms as she observed Lucian’s performance with a look of utter amusement, the subtle twitch at the corner of her lips giving away just how entertained was Lucian’s antics. She gave her own lips a slight pout as he continued, his ’story’ far more ridiculous than any she had seen personally.

Luck?

She rolled her eyes.

You shameless liar. You displaced your hip by two centimeters using pure skeletal manipulation to dodge that cannon round. If that was luck, then every stray dog in Silverwood City is a Martial God.

Still, when her gaze drifted towards Eric Vance as well as his retinue of clan retainers, the look on their face was far more entertaining than Lucian could have ever imagined. It was enough to make her lips twitch in a subtle, satisfied smile.

WUUUUU—!

A heavy solemn horn suddenly thundered from the northern towers of the military base, it’s deep resonance sweeping throughout the entire parade ground, silencing whatever conversation had took place.

The students fell silent at once.

Behind the main reviewing platform, massive steel doors began to separate with a deep mechanical hiss. Hydraulic systems groaned at the reinforced doors, widening the slit enough to see the elevated passage behind it.

Two figures soon emerged from the passage, stepping onto the raised dais, drawing the immediate attention of the entire arena. Behind them, twelve fully-armed federal shock troopers marched after them, clad in advanced mechanized exoskeletons.

Their synchronized footsteps rang loudly against the metal plate.

Clang

Clang

Clang

The man on the left was an old man dressed in loose gray scholar robes with hands clasped leisurely behind his back, but a warm grandfatherly smile plastered on his deeply lined face, despite his age he had a certain air of presence about him.

It was Principal Warren of Silverwood Elite High School.

The man standing beside him however, radiated an entirely different kind of presence.

He was nearly two meters tall, and built like a tank, clad in deep crimson carapace armor with the insignia of the three-starred Federal Border Defense Command embedded in his chest, a thick jagged battle-saber hung vertically behind his back, the sheath made from the hardened and tanned sinew of a high-class Otherworldly Beast.

His face was like chiseled old granite, emotionless as he surveyed the young candidates with cold, piercing eyes that missed not a detail, the air around him gave the impression of a veteran Martial General who had cut through mountains of beast corpse.

General Thorne.

The Supreme Commander of the Silverwood Garrison.

As soon as General Thorne arrived to the front of the dais, a feeling of pressure seemed to settle heavily on the sixty meter staging area, temperature seemed to drop a few degrees and the muttering students fell silent under an invisible weight that seemed to press down on their shoulders

It wasn’t an oppressive threatening kind of pressure,

merely the innate feeling of a battle-hardened veteran who had seen countless fronts and returned with scars to show for it.

Every candidate seemed to unconsciously straighten their backs.

Even the instructors who had been discussing the preliminary exams grew silent and reverent as they faced the legendary commander standing in front of them.

General Thorne surveyed the students before fixing his gaze on the center of the staging area, when he finally spoke, his voice reverberated with an incredible force that seemed to echo in the bones of every candidate present

"Phase One is concluded."

He spoke without a microphone,

yet the sound of his voice seemed to boom in the periphery of every student’s mind, vibrating straight from his vocal chords and directly into their ribcages.

"You have shown your baseline strength, have displayed your physical agility."

A cold look seemed to sweep across the two hundred awakened candidates standing bellow him, his piercing eyes scanning the group until they landed on a few particular students, several of which seemed to lower their heads subconsciously before a smirk crawled across the General’s face.

"And frankly most of you are pathetic"