Free Web NovelChapter 266: 266 | The Unwinnable Scenario
It had been positioned across the stairwell entrance this entire time, waiting for exactly this moment. While Camille focused on pinning me to the floor and processing the fact that I’d kissed her during a training exercise, the construct circled around behind her and wrapped itself around her waist.
She felt it a quarter second before it acted. Her eyes widened and she started to turn, but the construct was already pulling her backward off my body with enough force to send her sliding across the hallway floor.
I rolled to my feet and extended all four constructs. Two pinned her arms wide against the floor. One wrapped around both her ankles. The fourth hovered six inches from her face with a strip of capture tape held delicately in its amber grip.
Camille thrashed against the restraints for three full seconds before she realized they weren’t giving. Her brown eyes locked on mine with a fury that could have melted steel.
"This isn’t over."
"It kind of is though."
I pressed the capture tape to her wrist.
The speakers crackled to life with Radiant’s voice, warm and amused. "Villain Camille Ortega has been captured! Hero team scores one point!"
The observation deck must have lost their minds. I could picture Caden falling out of his chair, Marco choking on a chip, and Felicity covering her mouth while her eyes went wide. The kiss had definitely been visible on camera. The position afterward had definitely been visible on camera. Every single person in Class 1-B had just watched me make out with Camille Ortega to win a training exercise.
Worth it.
I stood up and offered Camille a hand. She looked at it like I was trying to poison her.
"I’m captured. I don’t need your help getting up."
"Just being polite."
"You kissed me."
"You bit me."
"You deserved it!"
I couldn’t argue with that. Blood was still dripping from my lip, and the copper taste mixed with the lingering cardamom in a way that was going to make eating protein bars really weird for the foreseeable future.
"Good match." I meant it. She’d nearly killed me at least four times, and the only reason I’d won was because I’d been willing to do something stupid enough to break her concentration. In a straight fight with both of us at full capability, Camille would have pinned me to the wall inside thirty seconds.
Her eyes softened by approximately one degree. Still furious. But one degree less furious than before.
"You cheated."
"I improvised."
"Same thing."
She pushed herself to her feet without my help, and I noticed that the capture tape on her wrist glowed faint orange where her Aspect was testing the restraint without conscious direction. Even defeated, even pinned, her power wanted to fight back. That was the kind of instinct that made someone dangerous.
"Percy," I said into my earpiece, "status on the hostage?"
Silence.
"Percy?"
The building shook.
The tremor started somewhere above us and traveled down through the structure like a shockwave, rattling the fluorescent lights and sending dust cascading from the ceiling tiles. I dropped into a defensive crouch automatically, constructs fanning out to cover every angle while my Oracle Feed tried to make sense of the sudden chaos.
A boom followed the tremor half a second later, loud enough to rattle my teeth and make my eardrums protest. The sound came from the third floor, directly above our position, and it carried the particular quality of crystalline structures shattering under extreme force.
Petra.
"Percy!" I shouted into the earpiece. "What happened? Report!"
Static crackled through the channel for two long seconds. Then the speakers came alive with Radiant’s voice, still warm but carrying an edge of something that might have been respect.
"Hero Percy Mendoza has been captured! Villain team scores one point!"
My stomach dropped.
The hostage was still in the building. Percy had been extracting it through the window, which meant he’d gotten close enough to room 2C for Petra to detect his approach. She must have been waiting on the third floor, monitoring the situation below, and the moment she realized Camille was losing she’d abandoned the third-floor defensive position and dropped down to intercept.
Crystalline barricades weighing two hundred pounds per segment. Conjuration at Legendary classification. The highest raw Aspect capability in either cohort.
Percy didn’t have a chance.
I looked at Camille. She looked at me.
"Your partner just lost."
"I noticed."
"Petra’s still holding the hostage. You have to beat her or extract the objective without her capturing you." Camille’s voice held something that wasn’t quite sympathy but also wasn’t quite gloating. "Good luck with that."
"You sound almost concerned."
"I’m not. I just want to see if you’re stupid enough to try."
I was absolutely stupid enough to try.
The timer on my internal clock said we had roughly eight minutes left in the exercise. Petra was holding room 2C with a captured teammate and a hostage that couldn’t take significant damage. I was operating alone with four constructs, a bleeding lip, and the residual distraction of having just kissed a very attractive woman who had subsequently tried to kill me.
Standard tactical approach said this was unwinnable. Petra’s Conjuration could generate barriers faster than I could dismantle them, and her Aesthetic Perfection meant every construct she created was optimized for both function and form. I couldn’t out-brute force her, and I couldn’t out-finesse her in a sustained engagement.
But I knew something about Petra that maybe she hadn’t considered.
She thought I was the delivery boy.
She thought my Aspect was a mid-tier Channeler ability with a fifteen-foot range and approximately twenty pounds of maximum lift capacity. She thought Phantom Touch was respectable without being threatening, useful for support operations but not dangerous in direct combat.
She had no idea what I could actually do.
I started walking toward room 2C.
Camille watched me go with an expression that mixed disbelief and grudging interest. "You’re really doing this."
"Someone has to."
"She’s going to destroy you."
"Probably."
I didn’t look back. The hallway stretched ahead of me, fluorescent lights humming overhead and casting long shadows across the industrial carpet. The door to room 2C was visible at the far end, and even from this distance I could see the faint emerald shimmer of crystalline constructs sealing the entrance.
Petra had fortified.
I extended my constructs ahead of me, letting them probe the crystalline barrier while I assessed the situation. The emerald material was dense and surprisingly warm to the touch, humming with the particular frequency of an Aspect in sustained deployment. She’d layered it thick enough that my standard fifteen-foot range wouldn’t penetrate without significant force.
Good thing I wasn’t limited to standard.
I stopped twenty feet from the door and took a breath. The Oracle Feed was giving me nothing useful because Petra wasn’t in the system’s database with enough detail to generate a tactical profile. She was a blank spot in my awareness, an unknown variable with Legendary classification and zero recorded combat footage from the entrance exam she hadn’t needed to take.
This was going to hurt.
"Petra." I pitched my voice to carry through the barrier. "I know you’re in there."
