Chapter 42 sneak peek!

It's not a high octane peek, but its something I and a lot of you have been looking forward too! i have NO idea what's gonna happen, so it'll be fun finding out together!

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If Catcher’s mood had been improved that morning, it was nothing compared to the literal glow he had after lunch, where Rei, Aria, and Viv recounted what had happened in Combat Theory to the Saber and Chancery both. Logan himself refrained from participating, letting the others handle the storytelling for him, but more than once Rei thought he caught the Mauler hiding a grin as he dug into his food with a lot more gusto now than he had during breakfast. Taken as a whole, the day was starting to feel normal again—or at least as normal as Rei’s life had been able to feel since his CAD Assignment Exam.

Maybe that was why he walked into combat class that afternoon with an anticipation he’d been feeling for a few weeks now, momentarily forgotten in the chaos of the last 24 hours or so.

With all the excitement around Gemela and Arthus, Shido’s lack of an evolution since Sectionals at the start of the semester seemed to have slipped under most everyone’s radar. Even Rei’s, to a certain extent. Aria had actually been the one to mention it first, when he’d hit B3, then again when he’d hit B4 with no change, and it had been tapping at the back of his mind ever since. Ordinarily there would have been absolutely nothing strange about a CAD skating by the first half of a full tier without an evolution. Most Devices were like that, with only those with abnormally high Growth spec averaging more than 1 per lettered rank.

As was decidedly the new norm, though… there was nothing average about Shido.

Since it had been bound around his wrists, Rei’d CAD had evolved roughly every 3 to 5 ranks. Somewhere between two to three times the standard expected rate, and that wasn’t even considering the sheer speed at which Shido improved. Rei had gone from wielding a glorified boxing glove in one hand to just shy of a full-body suit in just over half a year, a concept so ridiculous it had started to become a regular posting topic all over the feeds.  

But now… he was closing in on 7 upgrades without so much as a flinch of improvement in the actual manifestation of his armor…