Chapter 477 | A Squad of Near-Strangers [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 477: 477 | A Squad of Near-Strangers [CASTLE BONUS]

Eight-thirty in the morning, and I was standing in a parking lot in a charcoal and amber costume that a dead hero’s insurance money paid to design, watching two instructors argue about something they clearly didn’t want us to hear.

Cole Dravid stood with his cane planted and his blue-black hair gathered at the nape of his neck, saying something low and clipped to Imara Steele, whose gold athletic jacket had been swapped for something that read faculty-formal. Her pink eyes kept flicking toward the road that led down from Creston Hills toward the city. Whatever they were discussing, it involved someone who was supposed to be here and wasn’t.

I couldn’t read the words at this distance even with a hundred Intelligence. The debuff had shaved eight percent off my cognitive processing, and connections that should have snapped into place were arriving with a lag that made me feel like I was reading a subtitle track running half a second behind the audio.

Dash Reyes bounced on the balls of his feet beside me, his white and blue bodysuit somehow already looking like he’d worn it through a rainstorm. "Man, this is gonna be sick. You think there’s real fire? Like actual fire, not the fake stuff?"

"Trauma sensors," I said. "So probably real enough to hurt."

"Sick." He grinned wide, warm brown eyes crinkling. Dash Reyes was the kind of guy who heard the words active disaster simulation and got excited the way normal people got excited about brunch.

To my left, Elara Camo stood with the stillness that made her the second most dangerous student in either cohort behind Cain. Her ice-white hair caught the morning light, and her expression sat pleasant and closed, the face of someone who was doing considerably more thinking than she let show. She’d swapped into a fitted suit in silver and pale blue, the kind that would let her Glacial Aspect read her velocity and build ice off her momentum. Standing still, she generated nothing. I made a note not to let her start moving if we ended up on opposite sides of anything.

And Zara Whitfield rounded out my group of four, arms crossed, lime-green tips of her blonde hair pulled back, her whole posture communicating that she’d been ready since seven and everyone else was wasting her time.

None of my people. Not Felicity, not Percy, not Sloane. The weighted randomization had done exactly what it was supposed to do and dropped me into a squad with three near-strangers, which was either good pedagogy or the universe having a laugh at my expense. Probably both. Usually both.

"Belmont." Zara’s accent came through when she said my name, that faint Eastern-European musicality her father left in her mouth. "You look like garbage."

"Thank you. I moisturize."

"No." She studied me with the same flat threat-assessment she probably ran on training dummies. "You are slow today. I watched you at conditioning. Your feet land behind where you look. Are you injured or stupid."

Twelve percent off my physical stats, eighteen percent tacked onto my reaction time, a System debuff burning through my nervous system because I’d told a mandatory quest to go fuck itself in front of four women I actually cared about. Not a great answer for a Wednesday.

"Bad night’s sleep," I said.

Elara’s pale eyes moved to me. She didn’t say anything. She just filed it, the way she filed everything, and went back to watching the instructors.

Over by the 1-A bus, Sloane’s cohort was loading up, and I caught a flash of pink hair for half a second before the doors swallowed it. The Devotion’s Echo pulsed warm and steady against my chest, her frequency all sharp anticipation and competitive fire, a girl about to walk into the biggest evaluation of the semester and absolutely thrilled about it. I let it settle in my ribs for a second longer than I should have.

Koda Brynn’s laugh carried across the lot, loud enough to reach both buses, and somebody in 1-A yelled something back that made the whole group of them lose it. Different energy over there. 1-A trained under Vincent Hale, who apparently made championships out of everything, and they moved like they knew it. Like the outcome had been decided and the exercise was a formality.

I was going to enjoy proving them wrong. Or I would have been, if my body were running at factory specs instead of eighty-eight percent of them.

Steele finally cut her hand through the air, ending whatever the argument was, and turned toward us. Whatever she’d wanted from the conversation with Dravid, she hadn’t gotten it. Her jaw was tight in the specific way that meant she was rebuilding a plan around a missing piece.

"Class 1-B." Her voice cut across forty feet of asphalt without effort, and every one of us straightened by biological reflex. "On the bus. We’re moving out."

Petra materialized at Steele’s elbow with her planner, saying something quick, and Steele shook her head once. Not now. Whatever the missing piece was, we weren’t getting the explanation.

Dash was already halfway to the bus. "Let’s gooo."

I fell in beside Zara, who walked like she was marching toward something she intended to defeat. Elara drifted ahead, and I found myself watching the way she moved, economical and quiet, banking momentum she wasn’t spending yet. Everything about her said she was faster than she looked and colder than she seemed, and my debuffed brain took a full second to appreciate the joke that her Aspect literally made that true.

The bus wasn’t a bus. It was a coach, the kind agencies used to ferry ranked heroes to press events, leather seats and tinted windows and enough legroom that even I could stretch out. Halloran didn’t do anything halfway. The academy that produced the highest field survival rate in the world was not going to drive its students to their most important evaluation in something with sticky floors and a broken heater.

I dropped into a window seat two-thirds back. Dash claimed the aisle beside me before I could object, which I wouldn’t have anyway.

"So what’s your read?" He twisted to face me, all restless energy. "Four environments, lives-saved scoring, joint with 1-A. You think they’re gonna split us up between cohorts or keep us separate?"

"Split us." Elara’s voice came from the seat across the aisle, quiet and certain. She hadn’t looked up from the window. "The point is coordination between people who don’t train together. Same-cohort squads defeat the purpose."

"Huh." Dash considered this. "That’s smart. That’s really smart. See, this is why I like being in a group with smart people, I just sit here and absorb it."

"You will not absorb anything if you die in the first ten minutes." Zara had taken the seat directly behind Elara, and she leaned forward between the seats to deliver this. "You run at everything. I watched your exam footage. Full speed, no plan, hope it works."

"It usually works!"

"It usually works," Zara repeated, deadpan, the accent flattening the words into something devastating. "This is not a strategy. This is a coin flip that has landed heads and made you arrogant."

Dash opened his mouth, closed it, and grinned. "Okay that’s fair. That’s, like, brutally fair."