Chapter 5
"—put on this suit."
The combat uniforms before my eyes were quietly displayed, and the exclamations and praises in my ears came one after another, as if they were coming through a thick layer of frosted glass.
Excited clapping, nervous breathing, eager discussions... these vivid emotional fluctuations are like the noisy background music of another world.
Kurozuka Kirishi stood there, feeling like a piece of ice thrown into boiling water. It was the others who were boiling, while she only felt the biting cold and complete silence.
Not even a ripple appeared on the frozen ground in my heart.
Her eyes fell on the combat uniform, and the only thought that came to her mind was clear and cold, with a slight physiological rejection:
Unacceptable close-fitting, almost naked body,
Her fingertips curled up unconsciously, as if she could already feel the suffocating feeling of the fabric tightly wrapped around every inch of her skin.
Kurozuka Kirishi is not inherently conservative.
In the fragments of memory, there is the smell of the summer sun scorching the asphalt road. At that time, she could wear a cool suspender and hot pants, walk calmly in the crowd, and feel the freedom of her skin being naturally exposed.
However, when the psychological pain entangles and tightens like a vine, and when the blade becomes the only tool that can temporarily pierce the feeling of suffocation, everything changes.
Arms, thighs, waist... the once smooth skin is now covered with scars carved by my own hands, some deep, some shallow.
They are like ugly centipedes, climbing and burrowing, forming uneven "scar areas" of varying shades of color.
At first, she didn't care about these marks at all, just like she didn't care about the emptiness in her soul.
After all, the body is just a bag that carries pain.
But the horrified and disgusted look in her parents' eyes pierced through her numb barrier. It was called "concern", but in reality it was accusation. Their endless chatter was like a heavy shackle, branding her heart again and again.
She was powerless to refute, nor did she want to defend herself.
In the end, after a moment of silence, he obediently changed into long-sleeved shirt and long pants, covering himself completely.
The wardrobe was also completely emptied, as if the past her was also erased.
Instead, there are clothes of the same color, as big as sacks.
The cloth wrapped her up layer by layer, forming a physical barrier that blocked out the outside world's gaze and the touch of air on her skin.
Over time, the sense of anonymity brought by the looseness became her only safe zone.
Perhaps it is because of this that the rejection of "nakedness" and "fitting" has been engraved deep into my bones.
Self-loathing has long surpassed the initial shame of scars and evolved into a deeper, conditioned fear of "exposure" itself.
Any clothing that tries to cling to her skin and outline her body contours, no matter how high-tech or how praised by others,
In her perception, it was like forcibly stripping off the protective shell on which she depended for survival, exposing her most unbearable and vulnerable part nakedly to the harsh scrutiny.
This combat uniform in front of me is just like this.
So disgust turned into an instinct that surged up from the bottom of my heart.
Kurozuka Kirishi's gaze lingered on the combat uniform for a moment, but he ultimately accepted his fate.
Thanks to the deep obedience honed in the past, she successfully suppressed the surging physiological rejection and began to change her clothes silently.
Inside the command room, the surveillance screen clearly captured a figure, the slowness of the change of clothes and the barely perceptible stiffness.
Hoshina Soshiro moved his hands behind his back to his chest. He raised his finger bones and placed them against his chin. "Can the testing procedures be adjusted this time?"
The bright light from the screen reflected on Xiao Qiong's beautiful glasses. She tilted her head slightly and said, "The rules don't say no..."
"Then let's start measuring the liberation force of the already equipped students."
"yes."
An emotionless electronic broadcast sounded immediately.
"Sengoku Sakuya, release 15% of your combat power."
"Harada Murami, release 4% of your combat power."
…………
Unleashing combat power? Kurozuka Kirishi's movements paused almost imperceptibly, and then the subtle sound of the zipper sliding open became slower and more cautious.
She was like a machine that needed extra computing resources, allocating some "threads" to parse the unfamiliar words.
In the command room, in front of the surveillance screen, Hoshina Soshiro spoke at the right moment. His voice came through the loudspeaker, with a hint of just the right amount of explanation:
"Unleashed combat power refers to how much you can unleash the inherent potential of your combat suit. Through training, ordinary people can usually reach around 20%."
Potential? This uncertain thing...if I can't unleash it, does that mean I'm incompetent?
An almost inorganic question flashed across the surface of Kurozuka Kirishi's cold mind. She zipped up the last zipper, and the tightly fitting fabric wrapped around her body.
There was no "sense of fusion" or "surge of power" as described by others, only a suffocating feeling of being tightly wrapped by a foreign object.
But it was also expected, after all, she was not a human being in the conventional sense.
At the same time, after smelling the aroma of food on the combat uniform, a long-lost, strong feeling of hunger suddenly came over him without warning.
He swallowed unconsciously in his throat, and Kurozuka Wushi could clearly "feel" it - not with his senses, but with some deeper, cellular level of consciousness.
Every cell in her body was devouring something at an astonishing, almost greedy speed.
Was it the energy of this combat suit? No... She felt it was more likely the material that made it up. It turned out to be a monster...
But she couldn't expose herself.
Almost instinctively, Kurozuka Kirishi began to concentrate his remaining willpower, like using an invisible giant hand to forcibly hold down a group of violent beasts, trying to twist and tame the command of "devour" into "fusion".
"Kurozuka Mist, release 39% of combat power!"
A cold electronic voice read out the numbers, creating a small piece of silence in the slightly noisy background.
Almost reaching the level of a team leader... Hoshina Soshiro sighed, "It seems that the level of this batch of newcomers is quite good."
Once again becoming the focus of the audience, Kurozuka Kirishi did not feel any extraneous.
Barely suppressing the instinct to "eat" the combat uniform, skin and bones, she almost exhausted all the remaining energy of her consciousness that had been "cold-handling" in the past.
A sharp buzzing sound came from deep within my brain, like a rusty gear being twisted to its limit.
An overwhelming feeling of fatigue, like an icy tide, instantly overwhelmed her.
So tired...
She lowered her head deeply, almost as if she was overwhelmed. The dark circles under her eyelids, set against her pale skin, looked even more gloomy, like a cold and stagnant night.
Suddenly, the airtight door slid open silently.
Hoshina Soshiro's figure was embedded in the middle of the door frame, his hands casually behind his back, "Okay, everyone is dressed." He walked slowly into the house,
Kurozuka Kirishi looked up, and when she heard the other person's voice again, despite the pain in her brain to stay awake, she suddenly understood the reason for the strange emotions in her heart before.
The other person's special voice, soft and with a hint of teasing, was just like—
A cat meowing and acting cute towards people?
Almost at the moment this thought came to mind, the vague outline of the "color block" in my sight actually underwent a strange distortion.
The lines softened, the edges disappeared, and finally condensed into a rounded, extremely simplified cat head with soft ear contours, covering the originally blurred face of Soshiro Hoshina.
This illusion lasted for less than a second before vanishing like smoke, but the effect it brought was real.
An extremely faint, almost instinctive feeling of relaxation, extremely rare, penetrated her thick shell of numbness, like a thin stream of warmth flowing through frozen nerve endings.
She likes furry...
This was not a secret she was ashamed to talk about. On the contrary, it was one of the few "necessities" in her past world that was accepted and even collected actively.
In those days when even the light seemed painful, her bed was a furry fortress,
Various dolls were piled up in a disorderly manner and surrounded her, like a group of soft and silent guardians.
Recalling the comfortable feeling his skin felt when his fingertips sank into those fluffy or fine hairs, Heizhong Wushi retracted his fingers.
"Final test, let's begin." Almost the moment the words fell, Hoshina Soshiro felt a subtle chill on the back of his neck.
He cleared his throat imperceptibly, trying to brush away the sudden strange feeling that he couldn't even explain.
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