Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2055: Alleyway

Naysha sat back against the side of Jason’s bed and wiped a faint smear of solder residue from her fingers onto a cloth. When she looked up at Ning again, the smile had already faded into something much more serious.

“Was it Liam?” she asked, having guessed that the same thing might have happened to them as it had to her.

“I’m certain of it,” Ning said. “He doesn’t have the skill to do work this precise himself, but getting into a locked room without anyone noticing is exactly what his Calling is for.”

Jason, who had been holding his helmet in his lap as though afraid it might stop working again if he let go, lowered his eyes toward the floor.

“This is my fault,” he said quietly. “I told you this would happen if you kept sitting with me. Anyone who gets close to me ends up in trouble eventually, and now it’s happened to you too.”

“It wasn’t you,” Ning said, and the certainty in his voice made Jason look up. “If anything, it was the other way around. Liam came to this room a few days ago and asked me to teach him how to pilot. When I refused, he told me I was making a grave mistake. This is him showing me what he meant. You just happened to be living in the same room when he decided to do it.”

Naysha let out a slow breath through her nose. “That sounds like him. He’s never been good at hearing no.”

She looked down at the small pile of broken components she had set aside, the severed camera and microphone and the scorched transistor, as though they might tell her something more.

“We have no proof, though,” she said. “Even if we’re all certain it was him, we can’t show anyone anything that connects him to this. Is there some way to find proof?”

Ning considered the question, though not for very long.

“I don’t particularly care about proof right now,” he said. “What I’d suggest instead is that we act as though nothing happened at all.”

Jason frowned. “Nothing?”

“Neither the breaking nor the fixing,” Ning said. “Liam expects one of two things to happen. Either we report the damage and get ourselves into trouble, or we keep quiet and go around with broken helmets until someone notices. If we do neither and simply carry on as though everything is perfectly normal, he won’t know whether his plan worked or not. He’ll have to wonder whether the helmets were ever damaged in the first place, whether we fixed them, or whether we’re hiding the damage and waiting for something.”

He smiled faintly.

“It’s a double bluff. Let him be the one who has to guess for a change.”

Naysha studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Fine. I’ll keep quiet about it.”

She stood, brushed off her uniform, and gave Jason one last glance to make sure he was holding the helmet properly rather than clutching it to his chest, then left the room without another word.

After that, Ning and Jason returned to their normal lives.

They wore their helmets to class each morning as though nothing had ever been wrong with them, and if anyone had looked closely, they would have found nothing to suggest that either of them had spent an evening sitting on the floor while their equipment lay in pieces around them.

Liam, however, seemed to be looking very closely indeed.

Over the following days, he began appearing around Ning far more often than coincidence could explain. He lingered near Ning’s table in the cafeteria, passed close to him in the hallways, and made a habit of standing nearby during combat training with his arms folded and a thin smile on his face, saying things just loud enough for Ning to hear.

Most of it was the kind of thing meant to provoke a reaction, remarks about transfers who thought too much of themselves, about people who couldn’t keep track of their own equipment, and about losers who found each other and huddled together at the back of the cafeteria.

Ning gave him nothing in return. He smiled pleasantly whenever Liam looked his way, answered any direct question in the most ordinary manner possible, and otherwise behaved exactly as though there were nothing between them at all, which seemed to frustrate Liam more with each passing day.

Several days went by in this manner until Ning was assigned to Daywatch again.

His route that afternoon took him through one of the older commercial streets several kilometers from the academy, and the two hours passed much as they had the first time, with a stalled delivery vehicle to push, a lost child to return to her mother, and a great deal of walking.

When his shift ended, he started back toward the academy by a slightly longer path than usual, mostly because the weather was pleasant and he had no reason to hurry.

That was when he saw them.

Four cadets in academy uniforms were walking along the far side of the street with someone in the middle of them, close enough on every side that their companion could not easily step away.

Ning recognized two of them immediately as the men from the cafeteria, the same ones who had kicked him while he played the beggar, and he recognized the person they were surrounding just as quickly.

Jason.

His shoulders were drawn in, and he kept his eyes on the ground as the group steered him off the main street and toward the narrow mouth of an alleyway between two buildings.

Ning crossed the street without hurrying and followed them in.

The alley was dim and quiet, lined with waste containers and the backs of storefronts, and it ended in a high wall that made it a convenient place for exactly the sort of thing the four cadets were planning.

By the time Ning stepped around the corner, they had already pushed Jason against the wall, and one of them was rolling his shoulders in a way that made his intentions very clear.