The Sovereign Veil Chapter 12: Chapter 12: I Am an Awakened

Read chapter 12 of The Sovereign Veil by GodEmperor on NovelPedia.

Lucian started the sapphire coupe, pulling the navigation coordinates for the hotel from his academy's class channel. The planetary traffic grid was heavily congested. Above, a few high-end aero-cars zipped through the sky, completely unaffected by the gridlock. Seeing them reminded Lucian of the Zenith Interceptor incident from earlier in the week. He wondered if the Vance dynasty was going to cause any further trouble. Just then, his comm-link chimed. It was Chloe Marce. "Little Boss, do you still remember me?" a deliberately cutesy, saccharine voice echoed through the cabin speakers. "Of course I remember. You're my favorite Sister Chloe..." Lucian drawled, rolling down the window to catch the breeze. "Hehe! You really don't hesitate to play along, do you?" Chloe laughed, returning to her normal, sharp tone. She had called to update him on the fallout from the car club incident. "Marcus has been grounded by the Vance Patriarch. House arrest for a full month," Chloe reported, sounding incredibly satisfied. The Marce family moved in the same elite circles as the Vance dynasty, so she was well aware of the internal corporate gossip. After fleeing the track, Captain Cheng had immediately escalated the incident to the Patriarch. The Vance high command was profoundly shaken. It was impossible for even a Tier-3 corporation to casually bypass Terra-Nova's planetary surveillance grid. The sheer geopolitical weight required to scrub an event from orbital satellites in real-time meant Lucian was backed by an apex authority. The Vance intelligence division had tried to pull Lucian's civilian records, but they unanimously concluded that his profile as a 'mid-tier logistics student' was a meticulously crafted decoy. "Their analysts believe your backing comes directly from the Under-Grid," Chloe said. "Which means you're basically untouchable. Even the Pan-Asian Coalition doesn't directly poke the Sovereign of the Under-Grid." Besides grounding Marcus, the Vance family had reached out to Chloe, asking her to sound out Lucian's intentions regarding a settlement. "Little Boss, do you want me to leverage this and squeeze the Vance family? I could easily get them to compensate you with a brand-new Zenith Interceptor," Chloe offered, entirely willing to sell out her corporate peers. Lucian was momentarily tempted. A free multi-million-credit aero-car sounded fantastic. But on second thought, it didn't fit the terrifying persona the Primal AI had accidentally built for him. If Lucian were truly a geopolitical titan backed by the Under-Grid, why would he stoop to extorting a mid-tier family for a single vehicle? It would make him look petty and break the illusion. "Forget it," Lucian replied, his tone perfectly detached and casual. "A corporate dynasty on a mid-tier planet? I have zero interest." On the other end of the line, Chloe's heart skipped a beat. His vision isn't even limited to Terra-Nova. He operates on an interstellar scale. It made perfect sense; why would an Apex entity care about a local family's petty squabbles? Twenty minutes later, Lucian pulled into the designated hotel. To ensure zero logistical failures, the academy mandated that all seniors stay at a unified location the night before the placement examinations. Even for those pursuing an Aether-core, baseline cultural and strategic scores were heavily weighted by the elite military academies. Lucian found Instructor Xu in the lobby to collect his room key and identification pass. "Lucian," Instructor Xu sighed, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. "I heard what happened between you and Quinn Sterling. Life is long, son. Keep an open mind. Don't let a broken heart ruin your tactical exams tomorrow." Lucian stared at him blankly. The entire academy thinks I got dumped? He took his room key and headed upstairs. The academy assigned two students per room. Lucian's roommate was Hugo Hayes, a refined, bespectacled kid who was currently aggressively reviewing a holographic textbo