Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 291

Zaeryn read the words on his wrist comm.The cruiser had already cleared the landing pad by the time he looked up.

"Mireille, hold up. Can you set us back down? The high commander wants to see me, I’ll have to step out for a little while."

Leia heard him immediately and whatever patience she’d been holding onto for the day emptied out the instant she realized he intended to step out and delay them yet again.

She turned to face him fully, her arms crossed and her green eyes gone sharp and cold, carrying the particular anger of someone who had organized her entire schedule down to the minute only to watch it come apart in front of her. "We’re on a strict schedule, anomaly. If you walk out of this vehicle right now, do not expect me to sit here and wait for you to crawl your way back."

Zaeryn only smiled at her, the venom in her voice landing nowhere near him anymore. "Duty calls. Try not to miss me too much while I’m gone."

He didn’t stay long enough to hear the retort he already knew was forming behind her teeth. He slipped through the parting side doors, dropped back down onto the transport pad, and set off on foot toward Lysara’s private chambers.

Whatever the High Commander wanted from him, he didn’t know how important it was. But she had called for him, so it was important enough.

He reached outside her chamber and at the same time, the doors hissed open from within.

Lysara emerged first, and Zaeryn understood right away that this wasn’t the private meeting he’d expected, because another woman was walking in step right beside her, close enough that the two of them had clearly already been talking before he arrived.

He hadn’t seen this one around the Citadel before. She wore form-fitting tactical pants and a cropped top, with a dark jacket thrown over it and left unbuttoned, hanging open to show off a tantalizing strip of toned midriff underneath.

There was an effortless, dangerous swagger to the way she carried herself, the unmistakable confidence of someone who had never once felt out of place, no matter how lethal the room.

A lollipop stick angled lazily out of one corner of her mouth, and her hair fell loose around a sharp, spectacularly pretty face in a striking shade of electric blue.

"High Commander," Zaeryn said, coming to a stop. "I got your message."

Underneath the greeting, his mind was already working through the possibilities. He found himself far more curious about the blue-haired stranger standing beside the commander. ’One of my new instructors, maybe.’

"I can see that." Lysara’s voice carried the faintest note of approval. "Good. I’m glad you came quickly."

She turned toward the woman at her side, and only then did Zaeryn notice that the newcomer had already fixed her attention entirely on him, studying him with open, unhurried interest, like a buyer deciding whether something was worth the price.

The corner of her mouth curled around the lollipop into a slow, delighted grin, like she had already found something worth being entertained by.

"I wanted the two of you to meet." Lysara turned to the woman. "This is Sylvaine. She’ll be taking over a significant portion of your training from here on."

She let the statement settle for a moment, giving it the weight it deserved before she continued. "There’s been a change of plans. You were originally assigned a rotating roster of four specialized instructors, one for each discipline you carry. Sylvaine is going to replace two of them. She’s taking your entire kinetic-force suite, Kinetic Repulsion, Concussive Blast, and Kinetic Rupture, along with your Kinetic Acceleration work. All four of those abilities fall under her now."

Zaeryn’s brow drew together as he tried to reconcile this against the breakdown Lysara had given him only days earlier. "What happened to the original setup?"

"She only just became available." Lysara delivered the explanation with the same chill and unshakeable authority she brought to everything else. "She’s fresh off the front lines, and she’s better suited to your particular parameters than the two instructors she’s replacing, because she actively wields all four of those abilities herself. The others each spent an entire lifetime mastering a single discipline apiece. Sylvaine has personally conquered every kinetic attribute you still need to learn. One master who holds all four paths in her own two hands is worth considerably more to your development than three or four people splitting the work between them."

So that was the shape of it, Zaeryn thought. This woman had stepped off a frontline transport within the last day, and in that same short window, the High Command had already rearranged the entire structure of his training to build itself around her arrival.

Sylvaine rolled the lollipop to the other side of her mouth without breaking eye contact, then pushed up onto the balls of her feet and circled him slowly, taking her time about it, her gaze dragging up and down his frame like she was pricing livestock at a market stall.

She stopped directly in front of him again, the same height as he was, and plucked the lollipop free with a wet little click, grinning around the words that followed.

"So this is the famous anomaly." Her eyes narrowed, deliberately unimpressed. "Huh. Doesn’t look like much to me. You sure you didn’t drag me here for someone who even the most basic vitae wielder could train?"

The comment landed close enough to an insult that a different version of him might have reacted to it on principle. But not now, he let the comment roll off him and met her gaze with an easy grin of his own, refusing to give her whatever reaction she’d clearly been fishing for. "Nice to meet you too. Guess you’ll just have to stick around long enough to find out."

"Oh, I already know exactly who you are." Sylvaine’s grin sharpened, and she closed what little distance remained between them, reaching out to knock her knuckles once against his sternum like she was testing whether he’d topple over from the impact. "Daphne and the High Commander practically had to beg me to leave the frontlines and take on a male student. So this is what all the fuss was about, huh? A pretty face and good posture."

She was deployed on the frontlines fighting the vorthaks? Lysara and Daphne made her come back to train him?

Zaeryn only nodded, a knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth at the mention of the Chief Scientist’s personal involvement, already able to picture exactly how much arm-twisting a stunt like that would have cost Daphne.

"Well." Lysara’s gray eyes swept over the two of them. "Now that introductions are finished, I have other matters waiting for me. I’ll leave the two of you to sort out the logistics of your schedule." She turned on her heel without waiting for a response and walked back to her chamber.

The silence rushed back into the hallway the instant she vanished from sight, and Sylvaine turned to face him fully, her electric blue hair catching the lights overhead as she closed the last of the distance between them and planted herself directly inside the boundary of his personal space, apparently uninterested in observing one that existed at all.

She reached up without asking and caught his jaw between two fingers, tilting his face left and then right like she was checking for scratches on brand new gear, humming to herself the whole time.

"What are you doing?" Zaeryn asked. Although by now he was used to this. Usually people did this to get a closer look at him and confirm if he really was existing.

"You’re cute for a male," she remarked. "Relax." She let go, popped the lollipop back into her mouth, and grinned around it. "I don’t bite. Much. Now let’s go figure out how many hours a week I get to ruin your life."

"Can we pick this up another time? I’ve got a school project I need to get back to," Zaeryn suggested.

Sylvaine tilted her head at him, turning the request over and clearly finding it wanting. "A school project? I gave up a war zone to be here, and you’re telling me you’d rather go sit through a homework assignment."

"It’s not homework, it’s a senior research project, and my partner already threatened to end me over her academic standing once today. I’d like to avoid giving her a second opportunity." He gave her a short nod, and turned to head back the way he’d come, already moving before she had the chance to argue him out of it. "Alright, we’ll sort out the schedule next time."

By the time he climbed back aboard the cruiser, there was no sign of Leia anywhere on the pad.

Arya glanced up at him the moment the side doors sealed shut behind him, her expression as unreadable as it always was. "Your project partner left the moment you did."

Zaeryn processed that for a second and he was relieved. If Leia had already given up on him and gone home, that meant no research session, and the whole day was his.

"Nice. I need a nap anyways," he said.