Chapter 355: 355 | A Heartbeat That Belongs to Someone Else
Hikaru walked away without looking back, her footsteps silent against the grass in that eerie way she managed even while favoring her injured side. I watched her go and wondered when exactly my roommate had become someone willing to die for people she’d barely spoken to.
The answer was obvious, of course. She’d always been willing. That was the Tanaka clan breeding, the generations of warrior philosophy hammered into her bones before she could walk. The only thing that changed was that she now had people worth dying for instead of a family legacy that treated her like defective merchandise.
I checked the time. Four seventeen. Less than two hours until deployment.
My phone had accumulated messages like a dam collecting debris.
Aurora sent a photo of herself in the Summit gym, one hand wrapped around a protein shake bottle while the other held her phone at an angle that managed to capture both her smirk and an impressive amount of cleavage in that ridiculous sports bra she insisted on wearing to workouts.
The caption read "Come home alive or I swear to god I will find whatever afterlife you end up in and drag you back just so I can kill you myself."
Addison responded to Aurora’s photo with a skull emoji and the words "bring me his leather jacket if he dies, I’ve had my eye on it for weeks." Then, ten minutes later: "Actually bring it either way. He doesn’t deserve nice things until he stops almost dying every other week."
Belle had posted a fourteen-point list of things Jace Monroe was not allowed to do during the gate run. She’d written it in the group chat at three in the morning when she should have been sleeping, and the increasingly unhinged formatting suggested she’d composed it in a single caffeine-fueled burst of anxiety. Item one was reasonable enough:
"Don’t split from the group unless absolutely necessary." Item four already showed signs of deterioration: "Stop making that face when you’re calculating something, it makes people think you’re about to do something stupid."
Item seven had abandoned all pretense of tactical advice: "Stop trying to be a hero, you are built like a dairy farmer not a protagonist." Item twelve, the one that made me actually laugh out loud, read: "If you die I get the grey crew neck permanently, this is legally binding and I will fight your ghost in court."
The final item, number fourteen, was just a single line: "Come back."
Naomi had sent nothing. Which meant she was either focused entirely on preparation or too scared to type words that might feel like a goodbye.
I pocketed the phone and stood. My legs responded with that pleasant soreness that meant the muscle fibers were still rebuilding from Vale’s morning session, the C-rank Endurance converting recovery from a day-long process into something closer to a couple hours. The combat suit fit properly now, black composite material clinging to a frame that had shed thirty-five pounds and gained muscle in places that would have been fictional six weeks ago. The spear’s weight in my hand felt correct. The four essence bottles in my inner vest pocket pressed against my ribs like a heartbeat that belonged to someone else.
Fourteen days of life. Four cups of Silver essence. Three Bronze abilities and one Copper death scythe waiting in storage. Two buffed teammates with forty-eight hours of enhancement. One very real possibility that not everyone walking into that forest was walking back out.
The math was not encouraging.
At five thirty, Misato assembled both squads at the departure staging area near the eastern gate complex. The academy maintained three permanent transport platforms for gate deployments, each connected to FGRA relay stations that could redirect to confirmed gate locations within a twenty-minute window. Platform Three had been reserved for our operation, and the massive circular pad glowed with the dull amber light of standby mode while technicians in grey uniforms ran final calibration checks on the relay crystals.
Blair arrived with her squad in formation, which represented a minor miracle given the afternoon’s abysmal coordination scores. Charles wore his tactical suit like someone posing for a recruitment poster, the composite material tailored to emphasize every muscle group that his trust fund had purchased years of personal training for. Dante walked beside him looking like a man who had accepted his own funeral arrangements and simply wanted the coffin to be comfortable. Javier carried two notebooks, a standard academy combat knife, and the barely contained energy of someone who genuinely believed that every gate held the secret to becoming a hero. Hikaru brought up the rear in her male tactical suit, her expression communicating nothing and her red eyes communicating everything to anyone who knew how to read them.
Which was me. Just me.
Belle appeared at my elbow. "Your hickeys are showing."
I adjusted my collar. "They’re training bruises."
"Training bruises from what? A vampire convention?"
"Drop it, Fox."
"The one on your collarbone looks like teeth. Human teeth. Two sets of human teeth, actually, if I’m reading the bite radius correctly."
"You are genuinely terrifying sometimes."
"Thank you." Belle smiled with all the warmth of a loan shark reviewing payment terms. "I try."
Jordan arrived last, carrying his short sword and the expression of a man walking toward his own execution with full awareness that complaining about it would not alter the outcome. He took position beside Naomi, who stood with her staff in one hand and her mother’s shell necklace visible at her collar, the pink and black braid I’d done that morning still holding together despite a full day of combat drills.
Naomi caught me looking. Her pink eyes held mine for one full second, and in that second she communicated everything she’d been unable to text, a complete emotional data packet compressed into eye contact that contained fear and trust and love and the specific kind of anger that comes from caring about someone who refuses to promise safety.
I nodded once. She nodded back.
Misato stood between the two squads and addressed the combined group. "Transport activates in eight minutes. Formation assignments are final. Communication protocols are established. Equipment checks should already be complete. If your equipment is not ready, you have exactly zero time to fix that, so I suggest you’ve already handled it."
"Handled," Belle confirmed.
"Likewise," Hikaru said.
Charles cracked his knuckles. "Born ready."
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