Chapter 148: Academy’s Entrance Phase One [2]

Chapter 148: Chapter 148: Academy’s Entrance Phase One [2]

The speaker screamed loud enough to push pressure into the skull.

We kept our posture without moving.

Around us, other teams flinched hard; some dropped to a knee, a few actually hit the floor with hands over their ears.

Showing that kind of break in a hall full of students was an invitation to be hunted.

Gianna’s shoulders stayed set.

Rei’s braid didn’t move.

I locked my jaw and let the noise pass through instead of folding around it.

Beep!

The screech cut.

Silence slammed down in its place, thick enough to feel.

"DISCIPLINE!"

A woman’s voice cracked across the hall, not from the stage, but from above.

Students whispered at once.

I looked up.

Someone was walking on the ceiling.

Upside down. Foot planted on stone that should not have held her. Long white hair hanging toward the floor in a pale sheet.

She crossed the underside of the vault as the world had simply agreed to flip for her convenience.

"Holy fuck," I breathed.

"Do you want your eardrums to explode, students?"

The whispers died mid-syllable.

She was older than the cadets by a clear margin, skin lightly lined, blue eyes sharp enough to sort a crowd into wheat and waste. She traced the hall from above, unhurried, as if counting how many people had already failed a test that hadn’t been announced.

"How can you fight," she said, still inverted, "if your body will not react according to the situation?"

She finished her crossing, then dropped.

No flourish or slow descent like the movies.

She simply released the ceiling and landed in the center of the marked floor without a stumble, without a sound beyond the finality of boots finding ground.

"You cannot fight," she continued, voice even, "if you can’t even read the room."

Dead quiet now.

Hundreds of people and almost no air moving.

"My name is Laila Thornsworn."

She let the name sit.

"I will be your leading professor in conducting these tests. I have selected students across generations, guided warriors like Draven, who is now a world-changing calamity, and produced four warriors who currently sit as Empresses ruling their sectors."

A few murmurs escaped before self-preservation crushed them again.

"So understand this."

Her blue eyes swept the tiers.

"Their victories didn’t come from regular training. Whatever you practiced until now- guild circuits, private halls, parent-funded simulations- throw it away. None of it works here the way you think it does."

Rei’s jaw tightened.

Gianna’s anchor went very still against my ribs.

"I decide who you train with."

Laila’s tone didn’t rise.

It did not need to.

"I decide who you will sleep with, if sleeping is what your class requires to stop being dead weight. Feelings?"

A slight tilt of her head.

"Throw them away. From this point forward, your focus is the fight, and the death of our world if you fail to become useful inside it."

Silence again.

"That is," she added, almost mild, "if you pass this test, of course."

Her finger lifted.

She pointed at a girl clinging to a support’s arm near the third marker line, body language soft, weight leaned in like the hall was a date and not a sorting machine.

"Get out."

The girl opened her mouth.

Staff was already moving.

Two of them took her by the elbows with professional boredom and walked her toward an exit that had not been obvious until it opened.

The support she had been holding froze, then stepped back as if proximity itself had become a stain.

Laila didn’t watch them leave.

She pointed again.

A woman too close to her male counterpart, fingers hooked in his sleeve.

Another whose eyes tracked her support instead of the exits.

A third who flinched when Laila’s gaze passed and tried to hide behind someone broader.

Each selection was small. Precise. Not a purge, a demonstration. Enough removals that the hall understood the standard without needing a pamphlet.

Very few, relative to the hundreds.

Still enough to show the boundaries inside her class.

Then her gaze locked on mine.

Violet hair. Acolyte on a form. Two women bracketing me like a claim and a warning at once.

For a moment it felt like she might ask something, my name, my class, a private sentence that would turn every observation box toward us before the clock started.

She didn’t.

Laila turned and walked to the stage as if I had been a curiosity filed under later.

"That was scary," I muttered.

"Shh," Gianna breathed.

Laila stepped onto the raised platform and faced the hall properly.

Up close under the stage lights, the white hair and blue eyes looked less like theater and more like a verdict that had learned to stand upright.

"Welcome to the Grand Central Academy Selection Tests."

"Every year," she said, "before we begin the test, we give everyone an equal chance."

A ripple of attention.

Hope, greed, disbelief- hard to tell from the floor.

"Some of you have trained all your lives. Some of you were spoiled by parents into learning inside guilds and similar facilities. Some of you—" her mouth twitched, not kindly "—have touched almost nothing except the act of acquiring a support."

Rei’s breath left her nose in a quiet, humorless huff.

"So," Laila continued, "to give a fair chance to everyone here."

She reached into her coat.

What she withdrew caught the light like a coin and a trap at the same time: a single biscuit, gold-leafed or gold in truth, small enough to close in a fist, bright enough that half the hall leaned forward without meaning to.

"Anyone who catches this," Laila said, lifting it between two fingers, "gets an immediate pass to the academy."

The silence somehow deepened.

"No need for tests. No more of the grueling interview. One catch. One seat. The rest of you continue under Inverse rules like the problem you came here to become."

She didn’t smile.

"Will our support be included?"

"Yes."

The whispers echoed across the hall.

"Do try not to kill each other on my floor. Lethal force remains prohibited until I say otherwise. Everything short of that..."

Her blue eyes swept the gold nodes, the collared pairs, the girl with three supports, us.

"Is education."

Gianna’s voice was barely audible beside me.

"Don’t move unless we move."

Rei’s was flatter.

"If that thing leaves her hand, half these teams will forget the word prohibited."

I watched the biscuit. Watched Laila’s wrist. Watched the way the observation boxes above us seemed to brighten, as if Sector 1 itself had leaned in for the first bloodless violence of the day.

"Equal chance," I said under my breath.

"Equal chance to show who panics," Gianna corrected.

Laila’s fingers opened a fraction.

The gold biscuit sat on her palm like a fuse.

"Begin when it flies," she said.

"Not before."