Chapter 23 Slater
slater
. . .
The assignment was supposed to be difficult.
Duskwyn always said that right before handing us something, like, ‘Summon a digital piece of your magic essence, bind it to your code, and train it to obey you while simultaneously hacking into human cloud files that are double-encrypted by their newest security AI.’
Simple work, in all honesty.
I never had to summon a piece of my magical essence the way she taught others to because I had Snakey.
I sprawled across my chair, one foot braced on the desk, the other tapping against the floor in restless rhythm.
The classroom hummed with crystalline servers and spell-directed-circuits.
Rows of glowing screens atop our desks bathed the room in blue.
Runes lit up over the long ceiling, keeping the air thrumming and cooling off the computers.
It took a lot of fucking power to have technology mixed with magic.
Our assignment blinked in soft white across my interface screen:
House of Innovation — Term 2, Assignment 4 Project
Digital Summoning of Magical Essence Code
Create and control a digital–magical hybrid to hack into encrypted files on the Human Cloud.
Avoid AI detection.
Extract without alerting security.
“Okay,” I muttered, cracking my knuckles. “Time to do this.”
Snakey slithered up from beneath my shirt, his obsidian-scaled head flicking side to side as his red eyes glowed faintly.
Chaos magic shimmered off me toward him like a heat-haze.
“You ready?” I asked.
He hissed, and I took it as a yes.
My fingers sank into the keyboard. My chaos magic stretched into the monitor with every press.
Chaos never followed code; it bent the code and scattered it so I could get what I wanted. I pushed my magical essence into Snakey and watched him phase into the system, his scaled body flickering like a corrupted video as he slid past firewalls.
The human’s security stirred as soon as I broke through. What I hadn’t expected to see was the blue-white light resolving into something vaguely humanoid with eyes like bright white fae orbs. A static mouth cut across its face with zero emotion.
“Unauthorized entry detected,” it said in flat tones that echoed. “Prepare for trace and rapid counterattacks.”
Snakey bared his tiny pixelated fangs as my grin widened.
“Go eat it,” I chuckled, and Snakey lunged.
The classroom blurred and darkened when he dove in and ate the AI, swallowing it whole. Chaos magic burst inside of me as a flood of cascading code and shifting firewalls rearranged.
Snakey slithered through the fractal cracks spiderwebbing outward until the code collapsed into nonsense symbols.
He hissed and darted for the core.
The AI formed again, attempting to recover, but Snakey infected the code, and it unraveled.
“Unable to trace foreign hack.” The human AI burst into nonsensical code again, its voice glitching out like a dying radio.
Snakey hissed and jumped out of the screen, coiling around my neck again.
“Good job,” I murmured, patting his scales. “You won.”
I typed a few more things, siphoning the data into my drive. No alarms. No pings. Just a clean hack.
That’s when I noticed Aura beside me.
She didn’t oppose the AI security at all. She wasn’t even sweating. Her fingers tapped the keyboard with casual precision, her blue eyes half-lidded like she already knew every passcode, every firewall sequence, and every hidden trap.
And the system…just let her in.
No resistance.
No alarms.
No tracing.
I leaned sideways in my chair, watching her screen glow faintly blue with unlocked files. “Well, aren’t you smart,” I muttered under my breath.
She glanced at me, lips curling. “What was that, demon boy?”
“I said,” I raised my voice, “it looks like the humans’ AI likes you. Got a human daddy in the cloud I should know about?”
Snakey hissed a laugh, but Aura didn’t.
Her fingers froze for a millisecond, just long enough for me to notice.
She smiled, sharp and smug. “Not my fault if you rely on cheap tricks instead of what’s in your brain.”
Snakey reared up off my neck and hissed. My chaos magic flared, responding to my irritation.
I leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Funny.” There was no humor in my tone. “That AI fought me like the Veil tore open. But you? It rolled over. Almost like…” I tilted my head. “You had the passwords.”
Her smile faltered, then snapped back like glass cracking under pressure. “Maybe I’m just better than you.”
“Mm.” I tapped the desk with two fingers, pretending to buy it. “Sure.”
Aura was smart. I’d give her that, but she made me nervous. She fucking knew a lot about tech but very little about magic. With her being an imp, it was weird to me. Unfortunately, everyone else in the class, other than the professor, was in awe of her intelligence.
The rest of the class blurred by.
My project uploaded cleanly into the House of Innovation cloud.
I finished first; Aura finished after.
Her code ran too smoothly, too perfectly, and she looked more smug by the second. But all I could think about was how wrong it felt. Human firewalls were hard as fuck to hack, more difficult than the academy’s. Yet…she could bypass it without using her essence?
Bullshit.
I didn’t trust her.
After dismissal, I hung back, pretending to scroll through my phone. Rune had a few more minutes of her class.
I watched as Aura drifted out into the corridor, heels clicking, her short blonde hair barely moving as she sped up.
And then, I saw her meet up with him.
Darian.
That smug fucker deserved to be slaughtered.
He leaned against the stone archway, waiting for her. When she approached, he didn’t even say anything; he just touched her wrist as she walked past him.
My stomach turned.
I wasn’t supposed to care, but the sight of Aura, fresh from sliding through human systems like she’d written the code and developed the AI herself, and then going straight to Darian? That was too much to be a coincidence.
Snakey coiled tighter around my neck, his hiss low and furious.
He’d seen it too.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “We’ve got a problem. What’re the chances she’s really even an imp?”
I holed up in my room that night, scrolling through feeds on my screen. Snakey darted in and out of them like a phantom eel.
I didn’t trust Aura; I sure as fuck didn’t trust Darian. And if I didn’t start connecting the dots soon, I was sick to my stomach that Rune would somehow get involved.
My thumb pressed over my messages with Rune.
Slater Havoc
Hey, venom baby. If you were a virus, you’d be the kind that crashes my system and makes me beg you to do it again.
I stared at the screen.
Snakey hissed in what I was sure was laughter, but I felt like it was a great way to flirt.
The typing bubble appeared.
Rune Bloodwyne
Slater….
You’re ridiculous.
But thanks. I needed that.
My chest eased for the first time all day, but the pit in my stomach remained. Something was off with Aura and Darian, and I didn’t want to wait to find out.