Reborn: Apocalypse Ready. War Goddess by My Side novel Chapter 15

Chapter 15 Fight Back

A cold, dangerous light burned in his eyes.

So the old hag thought she could throw her weight around against someone younger. How bold.

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Cassandra was shaking with fury, and underneath that fury was something that looked a great deal like shock.

She still couldn’t wrap her mind around it. A B–rank student had just laid waste to an entire group of A–ranks, and no reasonable framework she possessed could account for it.

By the time her mind had caught up with what her eyes were seeing, Timothy was already a ruin of bruises and split skin.

“Steven!” Her voice cracked through the training hall like a whip. “Insulting a faculty member and assaulting your fellow students! You’ve just buried yourself!

“I’m taking you to the Dean of Students myself, and you will be expelled!”

A Divine Sigil surfaced along Cassandra’s forearm, pulsing with pale white light, quiet and cold as a dying star.

It wasn’t the kind of power any student in that hall could stand against.

Cassandra’s Sigil ranked at C, the lowest tier, limiting her ceiling to that of a Two–Sigil Divine Envoy at most, but against a student, even that was enough to be genuinely threatening.

She broke into a run toward Steven, her breath sharp, her expression a storm.

She intended to take him down herself.

The students who’d been watching the fight explode across the training hall went completely still.

A teacher had drawn her Sigil.

This had gone somewhere none of them had expected.

Word spread fast. Students from other classrooms started drifting toward the commotion, drawn by the kind of gravity that serious trouble always generated.

“Steven actually made the homeroom teacher step in!” someone hissed. “He’s finished!”

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Chapter 15. Fight Back

“Why would he push it this far? What was he thinking?”

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Bianca’s composure cracked. Steven was strong, terrifyingly strong, but an Awakened was something else entirely.

An Awakened had the full force of a Divine Sigil behind every breath they took.

Nelson looked like he’d swallowed something sharp.

Timothy watched from where he’d fallen, his face still twisted in spite.

“Ma’am! Don’t let him get away!”

Steven didn’t move. And he didn’t look afraid.

“Nelson!” His voice came out low and precise. “The spear!”

Nelson’s instincts fired before his brain did. He grabbed the training spear from his own hands and sent it spinning through the air toward Steven.

“Catch!”

Steven was already in motion. His foot drove hard into the ground and he launched himself upward, rolling through the air in a single fluid arc, and the spear met his grip like it had been waiting for him.

The training spear carried no sharpened edge. It didn’t matter.

The moment the weapon settled into Steven’s hands, something shifted in the air around him.

The careless student who’d been standing there a moment ago was simply gone. In his place stood someone else entirely, someone who carried the weight of decades in the set of his shoulders and the steadiness of his gaze, someone who had walked off a hundred battlefields and walked back onto a hundred more.

The students stared.

“He’s actually going to fight the homeroom teacher?” The disbelief in the voice was absolute.

“Is he out of his mind?”

“Someone get the Dean of Students! This is going to be a disaster!”

Cassandra took one look at Steven’s stance, the economy of it, the readiness, and the fury and shock on her face collapsed into something that burned hotter than either.

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Chapter 15 Fight Back

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“You insolent child!” Her voice shook with outrage. “Get on your knees!”

She crossed the distance between them in a heartbeat, one hand shooting out to seize him.

The light in Steven’s eyes sharpened to something brilliant and absolute.

She was Awakened, yes. Her Sigil was active, yes. But to Steven’s eyes, every movement she made was a sentence read before it was spoken. He saw it all. Every angle, every line of approach.

He drove the spear forward in a strike ancient warriors had once named the Wrath of the Sundering Dragon, the shaft erupting from his hands like a living thing, aimed straight at the center of her palm.

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“Is this what he’s actually capable of?”

The Steven moving through that space with the training spear in his hands was not the Steven anyone in that hall had known.

This one moved with a kind of raw, granite–solid ferocity that came from somewhere much older than youth, a force of will made physical, and it hit the watching crowd like a wave breaking.

Several of the girls in the gathered crowd had entirely forgotten how to form sentences.

“He’s incredible,” one of them managed. “He’s actually incredible.”

Nelson had stopped trying to speak. He just stood there with his mouth open, watching the person he thought he knew dismantle everything he’d assumed about him.

Bianca exhaled for the first time in what felt like several minutes, and then immediately tensed again.

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Chapter 15 Fight Back

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Across the training ground, in a corner that had gone very quiet, Lilliana had stopped her own drills entirely.

She stood still, watching.

The level of ability Steven was displaying right now had exceeded every number she’d assigned to him in her head.

He was engaging an Awakened in open combat and not losing.

The implications of that settled over her like cold water.

Has he been hiding this the whole time? Is it because of me, because he hadn’t wanted me to feel the gap between them?

She was someone who had always measured the world by strength. If he had shown this from the beginning, she wouldn’t have kept that distance. She wouldn’t have been so indifferent.

Lilliana said nothing. She just watched.

Steven, she thought, what exactly are you doing? Is this your way of trying to get my attention?

From somewhere in the crowd that had gathered from other classrooms, a voice rose above the rest, bright with stunned disbelief.

“Wait, is that actually someone from your class? He feels stronger than the S–rankers I’ve seen!”

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