Webnovel's Extra: Reincarnated With a Copy Ability-Chapter 196: The Part That Looks Right

The next shift didn’t come from the grid.

Lucas noticed that almost immediately, and that alone put him in a worse mood.

He had spent half the walk to breakfast expecting another variation of the same problem. A faster sequence. A tighter margin. A new way for the projection system to punish hesitation without rewarding recklessness. Something mechanical. Something clean.

Instead, the training hall looked ordinary.

No strange overlapping grids. No delayed lighting. No instructors standing around with that particular kind of stillness that meant a new layer was about to drop on them.

People were warming up.

Talking.

Stretching.

A few were even laughing.

Lucas slowed near the entrance and frowned.

"I don’t like this."

Raisel, already a few steps inside, glanced back at him. "Because it looks normal?"

"Yeah."

"That’s fair."

Lucas stepped in anyway. The hall smelled like dust, metal, and the faint ozone tang the projection systems always left behind. Familiar. Too familiar. It made the back of his neck itch.

Dreyden stood near the side rail, watching the floor with his hands in his pockets. Not tense. Not relaxed either. He had that unreadable look he wore when he was waiting for something to reveal itself.

Lucas walked over.

"Tell me you see it too."

Dreyden shifted his gaze toward him. "Yes."

"That helpful as always?"

"Yes."

Lucas gave him a flat look. "You know, one day I’m going to start throwing things at you."

"No, you won’t."

"That confidence is annoying."

Dreyden looked back toward the hall. "It’s not confidence."

Lucas followed his line of sight.

That was when he saw what Dreyden meant.

The room wasn’t just warming up. It was sorting itself.

Not openly. No one was calling teams or making announcements. But students were gravitating toward familiar people again. Small clumps forming along the same lines they’d worked hard to loosen over the past week. A-tier with A-tier. Reliable anchors drifting back toward the people whose timing they already trusted. Strong suppressors choosing the lanes that made them look best.

Lucas exhaled through his nose.

"Oh."

Raisel joined them, arms folded. "They’re choosing comfort."

Lucas shook his head. "No. They’re choosing what already works."

Arden arrived last and stopped beside them without comment. She watched the floor for a few seconds, then said, "That’s the same thing."

Lucas wanted to argue.

He didn’t.

Because she was right.

Halvors let it happen.

That made it worse.

He was in the room. Lucas saw him near the control bank, speaking quietly to one of the technicians while the hall drifted into these old, easy patterns. If this was a mistake, he had every chance to stop it.

He didn’t.

Which meant it wasn’t a mistake.

Lucas rolled his shoulders once and muttered, "Of course."

The first official block started without fanfare. No speech. No warning. Just the normal call to positions.

Lucas found himself slotted into a formation with Tomas, one of the steady B-tier suppressors, and an anchor from A-tier he recognized but didn’t know well. A decent mix. Functional.

He checked the floor again while they took position.

The other groups had settled too. Cleaner than yesterday. More confident. Less friction. Less thinking out loud.

On paper, it looked like progress.

The grid lit beneath their feet.

First sequence.

Clean.

Lucas shifted with the projection as it changed, and the others matched him with only the smallest lag. The suppressor on his left collapsed the pressure at exactly the right time. Tomas held his edge. The anchor did his job without overcommitting.

No wasted movement.

Second sequence.

Still clean.

Lucas felt himself loosen by a fraction. Not enough to matter. Just enough to breathe easier.

That was all it took for the thought to land.

This is what it feels like when people go back to trusting the familiar.

The third sequence came in fast. Lucas adjusted on instinct and cleared it without trouble. The grid dimmed. No mistakes. No hesitation. No one stumbled. No one needed correction.

Tomas let out a breath that almost sounded relieved. "That felt good."

"Yeah," Lucas said.

And it had.

That was the problem.

Across the hall, other teams were finishing the same way. Smooth exits. Small nods. The kind of quiet satisfaction that made people believe they’d found the shape of the answer.

Lucas looked toward Dreyden.

Dreyden was already watching him.

Neither of them said anything.

They didn’t need to.

The second block made it clearer.

The rotations held.

People performed well.

Almost too well.

There were fewer pauses, fewer questions between cycles. Less discussion about why something worked. The room had started acting like it already understood itself again.

Lucas watched a group near the center run a near-perfect sequence. Their timing was excellent, their spacing tight without being stiff. They moved like people who had worked together for months.

Because they had.

The projections ended.

One of them grinned.

"See? That’s what happens when we stop overcomplicating it."

Lucas heard it from two lanes over and felt his expression tighten.

Raisel heard it too. "There."

"Yeah," Lucas said quietly.

The phrase itself didn’t matter. The tone did. That relieved certainty. That belief that the answer had been there all along and the difficult part had only been a detour.

Lucas hated that tone because it was seductive. Because it made sense in the moment. Because after days of learning to trust instability, the chance to relax into something familiar felt almost righteous.

He dragged a hand over his mouth and looked away.

"It’s going to hit the wrong people first," he said.

Arden, standing just behind him between rotations, tilted her head. "Why?"

"Because the ones this works for will think it works for everyone."

No one disagreed.

The break between blocks didn’t feel like a break. It felt like a quiet retreat into old habits.

Lucas saw students drifting back toward regular partners without even pretending it was random. Conversations got shorter, more efficient. Fewer people stayed to review failed movements because there weren’t many visible failures to review.

The room was becoming legible again.

That should have been a good thing.

Instead, it made him restless.

He ended up near the outer wall with Tomas while they waited for the next call.

"You look annoyed," Tomas said.

"I am."

"Because we’re doing better?"

Lucas looked at him. "You say that like it’s simple."

Tomas frowned. "Isn’t it?"

"No."

Tomas glanced toward the floor where another familiar group was lining up together.

Then he looked back at Lucas.

"...Oh."

"Yeah."

Tomas shifted awkwardly. "So what, we’re supposed to force ourselves into worse teams forever?"

Lucas barked out a short laugh. "I didn’t say that."

"That’s what it sounds like."

Lucas leaned his shoulder against the wall and thought about how to answer that without sounding like Dreyden.

It didn’t work.

"You’re supposed to know why something works," he said. "Not just who it works with."

Tomas let that sit.

"That sounds harder."

"It is."

Tomas looked back toward the floor. "I liked the first rotation."

"I did too."

"That’s the problem?"

Lucas nodded once. "That’s the problem."

The next layer came in partner drills.

Of course it did.

The grid work had gotten too clean. The room had started settling around its own comfort. So the academy shifted sideways again, not by changing the system but by changing the kind of demand.

Halvors stepped onto the floor and called for close-quarters partner exchanges. No teams. No fixed lanes. Rotating pairings every few minutes.

The room reacted immediately.

Lucas could feel it.

Annoyance from some. Relief from others. A faint thread of anticipation from the people who preferred direct competition to the ambiguity of formation work.

He found himself paired first with the same A-tier anchor from the earlier rotation.

The guy gave him a short nod. "Try not to overthink it."

Lucas smiled without warmth. "You first."

They started slow.

Testing range.

Weight.

Pressure.

The anchor was good. Good enough that Lucas understood immediately why his team work had looked so clean. His movements were efficient and decisive in a way that made him easy to trust.

That was the trap.

On the fourth exchange, Lucas gave him a line that looked open.

The anchor took it instantly.

Correct choice.

Wrong context.

Lucas pivoted, redirected the committed strike, and turned the exchange into a position the other man had no choice but to abandon.

They reset.

The anchor’s expression sharpened.

"That was cheap."

"No," Lucas said. "That was familiar."

The anchor frowned. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

Lucas rolled one shoulder. "You saw an opening you’ve hit a hundred times. You trusted it."

"It was there."

"Yeah," Lucas said. "Until it wasn’t."

The next exchange came harder.

The anchor adjusted, less willing to commit cleanly. Good. Better.

Lucas tested a different angle this time. Less obvious. Less tempting.

The anchor didn’t bite.

Also good.

By the time Halvors called for the next rotation, the guy was breathing harder than before, not from exertion but from irritation.

He stepped back and said, "You fight like you’re trying to ruin patterns."

Lucas wiped sweat from the side of his face.

"No," he said. "I fight like I don’t trust them."

That landed harder than he expected.

The anchor didn’t answer. He just moved off to his next pairing.

Tomas, somewhere behind Lucas, muttered, "That was a little cold."

Lucas didn’t turn. "Yeah."

"You meant it?"

Lucas looked at the floor for a second.

"...Yeah."

The room changed after that.

Not because of him alone. Because the same thing was happening everywhere.

Pairs that looked smooth at first were being pulled apart by familiarity. People trusted reflexes they’d earned in old conditions. They committed to openings because those openings used to be real. They leaned on habits that made them look sharp right up until someone used that sharpness against them.

Lucas saw it play out in half a dozen different versions.

A suppressor who always stepped inside after a high feint getting tagged because the feint wasn’t meant to land this time.

A fast striker who relied on first-contact pressure overcommitting when his partner gave him a lane he thought he recognized.

Two people from the same old team moving beautifully together until that beauty turned into predictability.

None of it looked like failure from the outside.

That made it worse.

The room was full of almost-right decisions.

And almost-right was where people got hurt.

Not physically. Not today.

Something else.

Confidence. Flexibility. Trust in their own read of a moment.

Lucas circled with a B-tier girl he’d never worked with before and found her much harder to read than the stronger, more familiar partners from earlier.

She didn’t move elegantly. Didn’t bait cleanly. Didn’t follow the polished sequences everyone expected from someone trying to prove themselves.

She moved like she was watching his weight instead of his weapon.

Twice she caught him leaning into a pattern he hadn’t realized he was falling into.

On the third exchange, he stepped back and laughed under his breath.

"What?"

She kept her guard up. "You’re annoyed."

"A little."

"Why?"

Lucas shook his head once.

"Because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to."

Her mouth twitched. "Neither are you."

That one stayed with him longer than it should have.

By the end of the session, the room felt different again.

Not fractured.

Exposed.

The clean confidence from earlier had worn off. Not completely. But enough.

Students were talking more between pair changes now, and the tone had changed. Less certainty. More questions.

"That felt wrong."

"I thought you were going to go high."

"I was, until you shifted."

"No, you weren’t. You decided after."

That one made Lucas glance over.

Exactly.

They were seeing it now.

The movement wasn’t just about what you knew. It was about how quickly what you knew became outdated.

When Halvors finally ended the block, no one left quickly.

That told Lucas everything he needed to know.

People stayed where they were, replaying exchanges with their hands, with their feet, with the lines of their shoulders. The room had gone from performative competence back to something uglier and more useful.

Real thought.

He found Dreyden near the side rail and stopped beside him.

"That was the point, wasn’t it?"

Dreyden didn’t ask what he meant.

"Yes."

Lucas watched the floor. "Make them comfortable. Then make that comfort wrong."

"Yes."

Lucas exhaled slowly.

"That’s cruel."

Dreyden’s gaze stayed on the room. "It works."

Lucas let out a humorless laugh.

"Yeah. I know."

For a moment, neither of them said anything.

Then Tomas approached, looking more thoughtful than tired.

"I think I get it now."

Lucas glanced at him. "Dangerous thing to say."

Tomas ignored that.

"It’s not that familiar things are bad," he said. "It’s that they stop you from checking if they still fit."

Lucas looked at him for a second longer than necessary.

Then he nodded once.

"Yeah," he said. "That’s it."

Tomas smiled faintly, like he wasn’t used to getting that kind of answer from Lucas.

"Well," he said, "that’s depressing."

Lucas smirked despite himself.

"Welcome to the Triangle."

Tomas snorted and headed back toward the others.

Lucas watched him go, then looked out over the hall one more time.

No one was comfortable now.

Good.

Not because discomfort was the goal. Because comfort had started lying to them, and the room had finally noticed.

The next time something looked easy, he thought, they’d check it.

The next time a pattern felt familiar, they’d test it before trusting it.

That didn’t mean they were safe.

It just meant they were learning what not to believe.

And in a place like this, that might have been the only kind of progress that lasted.