Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 281

The lift doors slid open with a heavy, pressurized hiss, revealing a subterranean staging area that looked more like a military bunker than the polished upper tiers of the Citadel.Daphne was leaning against a terminal console, her violet eyes tracking the opening doors. Her lab coat hung open over her normal clothes: a sleek, form-fitting sleeveless white high-neck top that hugged her curves, paired with a fitted black leather mini skirt cinched with a thin belt and silver buckle.

"You took your time," Daphne said with a smile. Her gaze lingered on Zaeryn a second longer than necessary.

Annalise stepped out of the lift first. "Hey, Daphne."

"Annalise." Daphne acknowledged her without looking away from Zaeryn, then pushed off the wall and closed the distance between them.

There was nothing tentative about it. Her hand found his jaw, and she kissed him like she’d been waiting for the lift the entire time it took to arrive, slow at first and then not slow at all, his hands settling at her waist as she leaned into him. By the time she pulled back, unhurried, there was a faint flush high on her cheeks that had nothing to do with embarrassment.

Annalise had gone a little pink herself, watching with the particular stillness of someone who hadn’t quite decided where to look.

"So..." Annalise cleared her throat, and tried again. "Are we, um. Are we heading to the training hall?"

"Yeah," Daphne said, then turned to Zaeryn. "How do you feel about it? You have access to the most advanced training facility in this sector, not even the facilities at the Lyceum are built like this one."

"Really?" Zaeryn said. "It’s better than the Lyceum’s training halls? What is it built on?"

"I’ll explain once we’re there," Daphne said. "Let’s not waste time."

Before they’d gone more than a few steps, two figures turned from a corner, and were now walking towards them from the corridor’s far end.

Zaeryn’s gaze drifted naturally toward the movement, but his casual curiosity vanished the moment he recognized the figure. It was Dusk, his classmate.

Dusk walked in front with her black hair pulled into its usual braid, her eyes fixed somewhere past everyone in the room rather than on any one person in it.

Beside her, a woman Zaeryn didn’t recognize moved alongside Dusk, a faint holographic readout glowing above her open palm.

"I’m proud of you today, as always, Dusk. Now you just have to hold the form through the release," the woman said, her eyes fixed on the scrolling data.

"You’re losing it in the last half second, every time. That’s where it gets away from you."

Dusk said nothing, which seemed to be answer enough. As they drew parallel, she cast a brief, unreadable look toward Zaeryn, gone before he could even begin to decipher it. and kept walking without a word of acknowledgment.

The woman beside her, however, slowed her pace. She offered a polite smile to Annalise and Daphne. "Councilor. Chief Scientist. Good day."

"Hey, Marlene," Annalise responded easily.

Marlene’s gaze shifted, settling directly onto Zaeryn. "And Mr. Noctis."

Zaeryn blinked internally. She knows my name? He kept his posture relaxed and nodded. "Hello."

Marlene offered a final, brief nod and hurried to catch up with her student. Once they had moved well out of earshot, Zaeryn watched them go, the curiosity plain in his eyes.

"That’s Dusk," he said slowly, turning back to his companions. "Does she train here?"

"Yes." Annalise’s tone didn’t shift, exactly, but something in it sharpened, the way it did whenever a topic moved from casual into something with actual weight behind it. "I’m guessing you’re in the same class, since you know her. She trains here. The High Commander arranged it personally."

Zaeryn filed it away, turning the information over. Interesting. So Dusk had to train here, too?

Normally, the Lyceum was supposed to be more than enough for any student, regardless of how strong their Vitae ran. As far as he understood it, only the rare few with genuinely high-potential output, people like Mireille, ever needed anything beyond what the academy could provide. If Dusk needed that same kind of special arrangement, it put her in a category he hadn’t realized she belonged to, somewhere close to Mireille’s level, possibly past it.

He turned to Daphne and then Annalise, "Why—"

"Before you ask," Daphne cut in not allowing him to even finish his question, "the rest of it is classified. Council clearance only."

"You could just tell me," Zaeryn said. "I’ll keep it classified.

"No," Annalise said.

He conceded quickly. No point in pushing more. They weren’t going to tell him. But maybe he could find out on his own. Or maybe he didn’t need to, it was already evident that Dusk was kind of special and they had trouble training her at the lyceum.

He fell into step beside the chief scientist and Annalise. And then he let his arm settle around her shoulder. Daphne glanced sideways at it. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Is it that big a deal?"

"No," she said. "But you should know this reads very intimate, and everyone here can see us." A second passed. "Not that I mind."

"I don’t mind either," Zaeryn said.

They walked down a massive, sloping corridor that tunneled deep into the planetary crust, Annalise falling into step on his other side.

The corridor ended at a pair of towering blast doors, taller than anything else he’d seen in the Citadel. Daphne pressed her palm flat against a panel set into the frame, and the doors groaned open without anything in her hand.

Zaeryn stepped through, and the sheer scale of the chamber caught him completely off guard.

The walls here were made of a matte-black, seamless material that looked like obsidian but felt cold and subtly kinetic to the touch. It looked unbelievably big and wide.

The training hall was staggeringly massive. In the terms of the Queendom, it was easily the size of five grand martial amphitheatres laid side by side, stretching out into a vast, seamless expanse.

The ceiling was lost in a haze of soft, artificial daylight generated by massive power arrays humming somewhere far overhead, and that same haze bled outward along the horizon, swallowing whatever walls stood at the edges of the hall until there was nothing ahead of him, nothing to his left, nothing to his right.