SSS Ranked Awakening: My Summons Are All Calamity-Class Gods

Chapter 26: Chapter 26 | Different

Then he picked his device back up.

"Forty-seven versions of what happened in the gate so far," Dex said. "One of them says you single-handedly defeated thirty armed operatives using only your mind."

"There were nine," Corbyn said.

"I know," Dex said. "I was there." He scrolled. "Another one says the whole thing was staged by Vael to test your loyalty to the academy."

"Was it?" Corbyn said.

Dex looked at him.

"I genuinely don’t know anymore," Dex said.

Corbyn almost smiled.

A knock at the door.

Dex got up and opened it.

Lyra stood in the corridor. She had her notebook under her arm and the expression of someone who had been thinking hard about something since the gate and had arrived at a point where thinking wasn’t sufficient anymore.

She looked at Corbyn.

"Can I come in," she said.

"Yes," Corbyn said.

She came in and sat in the desk chair. Dex relocated to his bed with the practiced ease of someone who had learned when to become furniture.

Lyra looked at Corbyn.

"The bond severance technique," she said. "They designed it specifically for the Calamity Summoner class."

"Yes," Corbyn said.

"Which means they have historical records about the class that shouldn’t exist outside the Voss family archive and the Council’s classified files," she said.

"Yes," Corbyn said.

"Which means there’s a leak," she said. "Either in the Council or in my family’s archive. Or both."

Corbyn looked at her.

She said it evenly. The way she said everything. But underneath the evenness something was working very hard.

"Vael is looking into it," Corbyn said.

"I know," Lyra said. "I’m going to look into it too." She paused. "The family archive is my responsibility. It has been since my parents died. If something has been taken from it I need to know."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Dex was very still on his bed. Looking at the wall.

"Lyra," Corbyn said.

She looked at him.

"Thank you," Corbyn said. "For what you did inside the gate. Moving the students. Staying organized."

She looked at him for a moment.

"I didn’t do anything," she said.

"You did," Corbyn said. "You just did it without making it a thing."

She looked at him a moment longer than she needed to.

Then she opened her notebook.

"The Rift," she said. "I want to know everything Vael told you about them."

Corbyn told her.

Dex listened from the other bed, device face down, not pretending to do anything else.

Outside the dormitory window the campus had gone quiet. The emergency response had packed up. The gate perimeter was sealed for investigation. The regular evening sounds of the academy had resumed around the edges of what had happened, the way ordinary things always resumed around extraordinary ones.

=========================

The Next Day

Corbyn woke at four forty-five without the system chiming.

He lay still for a moment. The ceiling crack above him. Dex breathing steadily on the other side of the room. The campus outside the narrow window still dark and quiet.

The heat beneath his sternum was there.

He pressed a hand to his chest and felt both pulses. His own. And the slower, heavier one that had been there for three days now, moving with the patience of something that had decided to pay attention and wasn’t in a hurry about it.

Eight days now.

He got up, dressed in the dark, and went to the courtyard.

Cole was already there.

No paper cup today. No documents on the bench. Just Cole standing at the edge of the courtyard with his arms folded, looking at the sky in the east where the dark was starting to thin.

He heard Corbyn coming and turned around.

"Yesterday," Cole said.

"Yes," Corbyn said.

Cole looked at him for a moment.

"How are your channels," Cole said.

Corbyn checked the notification automatically.

[MANA CHANNEL STABILITY: 91%]

[NOTE: BOND SEVERANCE EXPOSURE DETECTED — RESIDUAL INTERFERENCE NOMINAL]

[CALAMITY SUMMONER CLASS — ALL FUNCTIONS AVAILABLE]

"Ninety-one," Corbyn said. "Residual interference from the severance technique but the system says nominal."

Cole nodded.

"The severance technique," Cole said. "Walk me through exactly what you felt when you pushed back against it."

Corbyn described it. The red-edged field. The way it pushed at the bond rather than at either of them directly. The stutter in the pulse. What he’d done to hold it.

Cole listened without interrupting.

When Corbyn finished Cole was quiet for a moment.

"You went around it," Cole said.

"Same principle as the movement drills," Corbyn said. "You said don’t fight what’s stronger than you. Move through it instead."

Cole looked at him.

"I said that in the context of footwork," Cole said.

"It seemed applicable," Corbyn said.

Cole picked up his pen from the bench and made a note on a page Corbyn hadn’t seen him put there.

"It is applicable," Cole said. "More than you know." He set the pen down. "The Calamity Summoner class is built around a specific principle that most summoner classes aren’t. Standard classes amplify what the summoner already is. They take your natural output and multiply it through the contracted entity." He paused. "The Calamity Summoner class doesn’t amplify. It integrates. The bond between you and your summons isn’t a channel you push power through. It’s a shared system. What you feel, they feel. What they know, you can access. What threatens the bond threatens both of you equally." He looked at Corbyn steadily. "Which means defending the bond isn’t your summon’s job. It’s yours."

Corbyn thought about that.

"And the severance technique was designed knowing that," Corbyn said.

"Yes," Cole said. "Whoever built it understood the class mechanics well enough to know that targeting the bond was more effective than targeting either party directly." He paused. "Which tells us something about the Rift that should concern everyone in this academy."

"They’ve been preparing for centuries," Corbyn said.

"Yes," Cole said.

Then Cole picked up the page of notes.

"Today we do something different," Cole said. "The footwork can wait. I want to see what happens when you try to extend the bond awareness externally."

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