Sneak peek at Chapter 45, and fun art WIP.

Gonna try to get this chapter out before the end of the week for you, but didn't want to leave you guys hanging too long on that cliffhanger. Soooo... enjoy! 😊

Highly recommend you check out vinchie's art WIP at the bottom after you read the sneak peak!

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“Kalus… You ever seen anything like that…?”

Aria wasn’t sure she’d been meant to overhear Jetwing whisper to her brother from where the woman stood on his other side. For all her cheer and laughter, Jayden Wainwright took her duties seriously as one of Firesong’s trainers, and knew when, where, and how to apply a joke. In another situation, Aria might have thought the S-Ranked Lancer was trying to draw an easy laugh out of Kalus, leveraging the ridiculousness of the situation.

Even without looking around at him, though, Aria could tell her brother’s usually easy demeanor was all stone as he answered Wainwright with nothing but a silent shake of his head.

This had gone far, far beyond a laughing matter.

They were all standing on the privacy ring—something Aria thought she better start getting used to—looking down once again from their raised vantage point onto a scene of crumbling rubble and settling dust. Dent had called a hard halt to the other training going on around them—which Catcher had been very relieved by until he’d been told what was going on—and gathered everyone around the north Team Battle field before calling up the ring. The captain now stood on the floor below, hands hanging by her sides as broken stone and billowing dust settled around her boots, looking—maybe for the first time since Aria had known the woman—at a total loss for words.

Not that anyone was about to blame her.

“Whaaaat the hell…?” Aria could hear Dice muttering in shock from somewhere off to her left. “Whaaaat the ever-living hell?”

When Rei had initially called on Shido, there had been a few immediate changes Aria had been able to make in his basic Brawler Mode. The top of his skull was no longer exposed, for one thing. Sleek, rounded plating of black steel complete encased his head, two trailing bands of white cloth flowing out from the back of his newly completed helm. His visor—originally metal crossed by two simple slashes of vysetrium—had smaller, additional blue lines cutting vertically down over where each of his eyes would have been. Rei’s claws hadn’t changed, but the armor across his body had, manifesting with more detail in patterns of white underlayering and glowing blue interspersed through the finer plates and thinner coils of steel that now officially shielded every inch of him. That alone should have been astounding enough. Her boyfriend—at an unheard of B6 Rank—had become the only first-year cadet in the history of the ISCM to manifest full armor.

But then he’d called up his new ‘Breaker’-Type…

“May have to bump it up again, ma’am,” Rei’s voice spoke from the center of the ring just as the dust cleared enough for everyone to see clearly. “A0 didn’t feel too bad either…”

Out of the rubble—the remnants of the 5-foot-thick cement wall Dent had the Arean manifest for him—a heavy, dark shape lumbered. It navigated the shattered stone carefully, every step it took announced by a heavy thud of boots on steel, then stood tall as it looked up and around.

When it found Aria, it raised thick, armored hand—each black knuckle studded with a pointed gem of blue vysetrium—and gave her a thumbs up.

It was all Aria could managed to do to smile down at her boyfriend, hoping the lingering shock had stopped showing on her face.

When she said he ‘stood tall’, she meant he stood tall. Despite Rei still only coming in at probably a little over 5’8” or so, his Breaker-Type was closing on a full 6 feet. The additional height was all bulk, the lift mostly coming from the thick steel soles that matched his oversized leg armor. Then again, everything about Shido felt oversized, in this mode. Layers on layers of metal appeared to overlap over thick white underlayers, with lines of vysetrium forming mostly around Rei’s complex, thick joints. The flexible, threaded wiring that usually made up the armor of his torso was nowhere to be found, replaced by curved, weighty plating, with the same molded steel forming heavily around his arms and legs. The mode was largely symetrical, exceot for his right shoulder—and only his right shoulder—where a hunk of solid vysetrium that couldn’t have been less than 8 inches across protruded, heavy and pointed like the much smaller nubs that adorned each of his knuckles. 

It all gave Rei a massive, imposing silhouette, especially since this as-yet-unheard-of Type also had little in the form of a neck, and he’d already made a note that it was much harder to look around in the mode than he’d liked.

Then again, they’d figured out pretty quickly that being a ‘Breaker’ had nothing to do with mobility. Quite the opposite.

“We’ll bump it to A2. Back to the starting circle.”

Dent had found her voice again, and was indicating the red ring just inside the south end of the field. Rei turned and jogged over as ordered, and even though Aria imagined she could feel every thudding step shaking the floor. She did know of other User’s whose CADs took on significant mass when they were called. Captain von Bor could be considered one—her white and gold armor turning her into a towering, cloaked knight—as did many Phalanxes whose focus was Defense. She knew, too, of outliers, like the famous Gatebasher, and even Galen’s own Annika Ivanov, the third-year Lancer whose hulking CAD had been one of the reasons she’d been Lennon’s final match in the winner’s bracket of the Inter-Schools.

Thing was… Even Ivanov was ranked in the upper-As, while von Bor and every other example Aria could think of was S-Ranked.

Rei reached the starting ring and turned to face the center of the field. Any trace of the ruined wall was gone, replaced with a new, pristine slab of polished concrete. Now that it was intact once more, Aria could again see the black lettering in the top corner of the simulation that had said ‘A2’—up from the previous projection's ‘A0’—the wall’s measured Defense value.

“When you’re ready, Ward,” Dent called out, and Aria couldn’t help but noticed the woman take what seemed to be an instinctive half-step back.

Rei nodded, setting himself. Aria saw his massive shoulders rise and fall as he took a pair quick, deep breathes.

And then he was flying at the wall full-tilt, sprinting headlong at the solid concrete.