The Academy's G Chapter 46: First round [5]

Chapter 46: First round [5]

"Anyway, this round is all about—"

"NOW!"

The voice ca from nowhere and everywhere at the sa ti, sharp and sudden, cutting straight through the mont.

Lucas turned toward the sound.

He didn’t finish turning.

A streak of yellow light crossed the space between them in less than a heartbeat — there and then not there, a single flash that left no ti for anything.

CRASH.

The hemisphere was gone.

Not cracked, just gone. The impact erased it mid-air, fragnts bursting outward in every direction, raining down around Lucas’s feet in broken pieces before he had fully registered what had happened.

His hands were still curved in the shape of sothing that no longer existed between them, fingers gripping empty air, the ghost of the weight still there.

He stared at his own hands.

"...What."

The footsteps were already retreating — two figures moving fast through the trees ahead, not stopping, not looking back, already putting distance between themselves and what they’d done.

Sylvia looked down at the fragnts scattered at her feet.

One second of stillness.

Then sothing in her expression closed, went quiet in the way hers went quiet when it was the opposite of quiet underneath, and her fingers curled into a fist. Lightning burst around her hand without ceremony, sharp and sudden and not particularly interested in being controlled.

She moved—a streak of light cutting through the forest in a straight line, closing the distance before the thought of it finished forming.

One of the fleeing cadets glanced back.

She was already behind them.

The lightning ca from above, a clean vertical strike that split the space between the two figures and drove through them simultaneously.

The impact threw them forward, both bodies losing control of their footing and hitting the ground hard, the strike’s force doing exactly what it intended.

By the ti the sound finished echoing off the trees, both of them were bound.

Lightning rope — bright strands coiling around their arms and legs in tight deliberate loops, pulsing faintly at intervals just enough to remind them that struggling would be a decision with imdiate consequences.

They lay on the ground blinking the disorientation out of their eyes, and then went very still as the situation assembled itself in front of them.

Sylvia stood over them.

Cracking her knuckles.

One at a ti. Slowly.

Lucas a few seconds behind her, slightly out of breath, his thoughts still doing their best to catch up to the sequence of events that had just occurred. ’We had a hemisphere. Then we didn’t. Then Sylvia disappeared. Then lightning. And now—’ He looked at the two bound cadets on the forest floor. ’...What just happened?’

He recognized them.

The sa two from before. The ones who had broken their own hemisphere rather than hand it over.

"Let us go!" one of them shouted, straining against the binding, then imdiately going rigid when the current pulsed in response to the movent. "What do you think you’re doing?!"

Sylvia tilted her head.

"That’s a strange question," she said. Her voice was calm in the specific way her voice was calm when the calm was doing a lot of work. "Coming from you."

Her eyes settled on them, sharp and level.

"You destroyed your own hemisphere after we beat you cleanly. Then you ca back and destroyed ours." A pause. "To satisfy your pride."

The words landed and both cadets flinched at exactly the sa ti.

They were frightened. Genuinely, visibly frightened, the earlier confidence completely gone, replaced by the specific expression of people who have made a sequence of decisions and are now standing at the end of that sequence wishing they could go back to the beginning.

"Okay — okay, we get it!" the one who could still form sentences managed, his voice cracking slightly at the edges. "We’ll fix it! We’ll get you a replacent hemisphere — no, we’ll get you a complete sphere, we swear, just let us go and we’ll bring it back right now—"

Sylvia looked at him.

Said nothing for a mont.

Then shook her head once. "No."

Both of them blinked.

"I’ll let you go," she continued, sa tone, sa pace. "You don’t need to bring anything."

Their shoulders dropped with relief simultaneously, shaky exhales leaving them both, the tension visibly deflating—

"I’ll just kill you first," she added, almost conversationally. "Then you’re free to go wherever."

Everything stopped again.

"WHAAAT—"

Both of them recoiled, pressing instinctively toward each other like proximity would help, faces draining of whatever color had co back into them.

Lightning surged around Sylvia’s hand, bigger this ti, the crackling energy building with the particular quality it had when she wasn’t managing it carefully, the air around her arm trembling slightly under the pressure.

"Kill—?" Lucas stepped forward imdiately. "Hey — Sylvia." He moved between her and the bound cadets with the urgency of soone who has heard a sentence and understood that he needs to be in front of it. "You cannot kill people in a tournant. That’s a suspension. That’s an expulsion. That’s multiple things—"

"I’m pissed," she said.

She said it the way you state a weather condition.

Lucas looked at her.

Looked at the lightning around her hand.

Looked at the two cadets who were now trying to beco part of the ground.

"Okay," he said, carefully, the tone of soone approaching sothing that might react badly to sudden movents.

He stepped closer and put both hands on her shoulders from behind, pulling her back a step. "Hey. Look at

for a second."

She didn’t turn, continued moving forward.

"You’re not thinking straight right now," he said, keeping his voice level. "Which is fair. They destroyed our hemisphere and that was genuinely infuriating. But killing them in a tournant is going to create paperwork for both of us." He adjusted his grip slightly, grounding. "So just — give it a second."

Her eyes shifted sideways toward him.

"Let go, Lucas," she said, quiet and precise. "If you keep getting in my way like them, I might not stop at just them."

He stared at the side of her face.

’...That was genuinely creepy,’ he said, under his breath, "and I’m not letting go."

A beat passed.

"I’ve figured out how to clear this round," he said. "Properly." He kept his hands where they were, steady. "So give it a mont. It’s worth hearing."

Sylvia was quiet.

The lightning around her hand flickered once.

Then again.

Then faded.

She exhaled one slow breath, the anger not gone but filed sowhere it wasn’t running things anymore. Her shoulders settled slightly under his hands.

"...Fine," she said. "What’s the plan."