Chapter 89: Still Sweet, Even the Mixed Blood on the Lips

Chapter 89: Chapter 89: Still Sweet, Even the Mixed Blood on the Lips

Rei turned her palm upward and drew a thin line across it with her own nail.

Blood welled immediately, dark and controlled.

She shaped it into a short, dense blade no longer than a training knife and let it rest against her skin without dripping.

"Tell me, Revien," she said.

"How much have you improved since our last meeting? Can you use anything other than the chains?"

I stayed where I was in the center of the mat, hands empty, watching the way she shifted her weight.

No chains yet.

I wanted to see the first move before I answered.

"No."

"Then you didn’t train at all."

"I did. Just not with weapons."

Rei’s mouth curved.

"Of course you didn’t. They put you on redirection drills and emotional containment and called it progress. Typical."

"It was enough."

"No. It wasn’t."

She moved.

The blood knife came in low and fast, a testing cut rather than a committed attack.

I turned with it, letting the edge pass close enough that the displaced air brushed my shirt.

Rei didn’t reset.

She stepped in behind the first slash, closed distance, and dragged the blade in a shallow line across my cheek before I could fully clear the second angle.

Sting. Heat. The immediate scent of my own blood.

Rei stopped close enough that I could feel her breath. She leaned in, licked the thin cut clean in one slow pass of her tongue, and hummed as if confirming a data point.

The hell?

"Still sweet," she murmured.

"Even the blood."

I formed the chains.

Blue links snapped into existence around both forearms, longer and denser than the basic training versions.

Rei answered by pulling more blood from the cut in her palm and forcing it into a rough, incomplete lattice that mimicked the shape of my construct without the same structural integrity.

"You’re playing?"

"I’m learning."

The imitation held for half a second before my real chains punched through it and forced her to dissolve the failed copy.

She laughed under her breath and came straight back in.

The rest of the exchange stayed ugly and close.

Rei refused mid-range.

Every time I tried to create space with a sweeping bind, she stepped through it, accepting shallow cuts from the ethereal links in exchange for putting her hands on me, shoulder, wrist, the side of my neck, the front of my damp shirt.

Each contact lasted longer than necessary.

Each one carried the same evaluating pressure.

"Does it feel different?" she asked while locked against my guard, blood knife hovering near my ribs.

"Your body. Does it want me the way it wanted her?"

I didn’t answer.

The system answered for me.

[Target: Rei Lawless]

[Favorability: 19 / 100]

[Arousal: 34 / 100]

[Fatigue: 25]

[Rating: 9.6]

[Suggestion: Sustained proximity is elevating mutation signature. Controlled contact may accelerate secondary pathway formation.]

Rei felt the shift in my posture even if she couldn’t see the windows.

She pressed closer, one blood-slick hand sliding up the side of my neck until her thumb rested under my jaw.

"It’s showing you something," she said.

"I can tell. Am I a target now? Numbers climbing? Recommendations?"

I drove a chain toward her ankle.

She stepped over it, used the motion to drop her weight against my chest, and forced us both half a step back across the mat.

The blood knife kissed the fabric over my sternum without cutting through.

"You don’t have to protect me from the answer," Rei continued, voice still maddeningly even.

"I’m not going to recoil if your class decides I’d make a clean anchor. I already told you I’m not interested in becoming a permanent fixture. I’m interested in whether the system is already running the same calculations it ran with her."

Another flurry, knife, chain, knife again.

She took a shallow cut across her own forearm from one of my binds and didn’t bother sealing it.

The scent of mixed blood thickened in the space between us. The Pheromone Trace passive kept dispersing that cooling signature into the air; Rei inhaled it openly every time we broke and reset.

[Arousal: 41 / 100]

[Warning: Host’s core is registering elevated interest in high-compatibility combat residue.]

[Suggestion: Maintain contact. Secondary evolution pathways remain latent but responsive.]

"There," she said softly, almost pleased.

"You’re fighting the pull. I can feel it in the way the chains hesitate for half a second before they commit. Stop hesitating. If it’s going to treat me like a target, let it. I told you before. Don’t hesitate. It makes me miserable. I’d rather see the real numbers than watch you pretend the only safe version of you is the one that never reaches."

I snapped both chains outward in a hard horizontal sweep.

Rei dropped under them, slid inside my guard again, and ended the exchange with her free hand flat against the center of my chest and the blood knife resting, flat, not edged, against the side of my neck.

We stayed like that, breathing hard, sweat and blood and mana thick in the air.

Rei’s eyes flicked down to the small cut still open on her own palm, then back up to my face.

"How are you so good at fighting?" she asked, voice low, almost curious.

"Instincts."

"Your instincts adapt most scarily," she murmured. Her gaze moved across my eyes, my mouth, the thin cut she had left on my cheek earlier.

The blood knife never wavered.

"Most people need years to stop telegraphing. You rewrote your own timing in a single session. That should frighten someone. It doesn’t frighten me."

"Why aren’t you scared?"

"Because I understand you."

"You don’t know me?"

"I don’t. But I can feel what’s inside you. The day you kissed me to keep me stable in the simulation. You took something from me, didn’t you?"

I didn’t reply to her.

"See?"

Without asking, without telegraphing, she rose onto her toes and pressed her mouth to mine.

The kiss was brief, deliberate, and tasted of our blood.

When she pulled back, she turned her palm upward between us.

The cut had closed. Only a faint pink line remained.