Chapter 173: A Long Conversation with the Board

Chapter 173: Chapter 173: A Long Conversation with the Board

[All active grids locking]

[Proctor intervention authorised]

[Extraction teams inbound]

I’m fucked.

I’m so fucked.

Not the ordinary kind of fucked where you fail a bracket and get a lecture.

The irreversible kind.

The kind that lives on every recording the academy just made and every feed that will loop the moment the proctors finish their paperwork.

My mind was still hazy, edges soft, the last of the override still clinging like smoke that refused to clear.

The system wasted no time confirming it.

[Succubus Override: 54% → 49% → 41%]

[Forced extraction residue: Stabilising]

[Giselle core fragment: 0.6% retained — Integration incomplete]

[Succubus Transformation: 2.5% → 2.7%]

[Public exposure index: Critical]

[Advisory: Host actions during Phase Two have generated multi-sector observation flags. Containment protocols probable.]

Whatever had just happened on that rooftop: the choke, the kiss that wasn’t a kiss, the way I had looked at Giselle and asked about her mother, was entirely my fault.

The Hunger had driven, but I had given it the wheel the moment I said fifty.

I had felt every percentage climb and still let it keep climbing.

No one else got to carry that.

We landed back in the same vast hall where the portals had first opened.

The ceiling still felt too high.

The light still felt too clean.

Another difference was the sound.

Hundreds of voices rose at once: relief, celebration, anger, disbelief, yet every thread of it seemed to bend toward the exact square of floor where I stood.

Some participants jumped and shouted, already counting provisional placement and academy slots.

Others stood pale and silent, staring at me like I had dragged something unclean back through the gate with me.

A hand touched the back of my neck.

I froze.

The contact was light, almost professional, but my body still read every unfamiliar touch as a possible drain or a possible restraint.

I turned too fast, vision swimming, and found myself looking at a face I had not expected to see again so soon.

Warm brown skin. Dark curls. Eyes that still carried that permanent hint of amusement even now.

"Ruby..."

She smirked, already peeling the small metallic compressor off the base of my spine with neat, practiced fingers.

"Just getting my device back. You alright?"

"Nope."

"Figured."

She slipped the compressor into a side pocket like it was nothing more dangerous than a data chip.

"I know you were weird when you kissed Rei during the test. Didn’t know you were doing it to everyone."

There was no answer that would not make it worse.

Sarcasm felt childish.

Honesty felt like another confession the feeds could loop.

I settled for silence and the slow, humiliating work of staying upright.

Ruby tilted her head, studying the yellow that had not fully left my eyes.

"Aren’t you a healer?" I asked, mostly to change the vector.

"I am. Healer, but I also like to make things."

She patted the pocket where the compressor had gone.

"Especially things that stop supports from rewriting the exam mid-broadcast. We can’t trust men. Even when they are scarce."

"Isn’t Saber here?"

"Oh, she is. Just somewhere on the other side. Blind girl still managed to clock a higher rescue tally than half the teams that could actually see the civilians. I’ll find her once the shouting dies down."

I nodded once.

The motion made the hall tilt.

The essence from Giselle’s core still sat under my ribs like a second, colder heartbeat, and every time I breathed I tasted blood and the memory of a mouth that had not wanted mine.

’Did I make her an anchor?’

A single sharp clap cut through the noise.

Laila Thornsworn stood on the raised podium at the far end of the hall, exactly as she had at the beginning, blue eyes moving across the crowd with the same wheat-and-waste precision.

When those eyes reached me, they stopped.

The entire ranked audience followed her gaze until the silence became a physical weight.

"Before we announce the results," Laila said, voice carrying without effort, "Revien, please move to the confinement room."

I let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped since the rooftop.

Of course.

Three guards in academy black were already walking toward me, expressions professionally blank, suppressors visible at their belts.

The path they took opened automatically.

No one wanted to stand between a flagged support and the door that led to quiet rooms and long questions.

They didn’t reach me first.

Gianna did.

She crossed the last of the distance in three long strides, caught my face in both hands, and kissed me.

Not the desperate hallway claim from the week of distance.

Or the trauma-tinged surrender on the rooftop.

A deliberate, public, eyes-open press of mouth against mouth that lasted long enough for every camera still active in the hall to record it.

"What is she doing?"

The murmurs rose again, confused, speculative, a few edged with the same ugly interest that always followed visible intimacy between a scarce male and a ranked Vanguard.

Even the guards hesitated.

Gianna didn’t.

Between one breath and the next, while her lips still moved against mine, she whispered so only I could hear:

"Hold on. Don’t give in."

The override, already falling, shuddered once more and dropped another three points.

I closed my eyes and kissed her back: carefully, humanly, the way the boy in the car would have done, and for the first time since the peel started I felt the Hunger recede far enough that my own hands were the ones holding her waist.

When she pulled away, her nose was still bleeding, and her markers were still dark, but her eyes were clear.

"Confinement," she said quietly.

"I’ll be waiting. Don’t let them put anything in your neck. You don’t watch them prepare."

"How fucked am I?"

She didn’t reply.

I let the guards take my arms.

The suppressors hummed to life against my skin, cold and precise, and the last of the yellow finally guttered out of my vision

[Host status: Under Restraint]

They walked me toward the side corridor that led to the confinement wing.

Giselle’s eyes tracked my movements, then whispered something to the guards and followed me.

*****

A/N: Thank you [ZM0N3Y] for the Golden Tickets.