MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 8: A BOND THAT CANNOT BE SEVERED

James spent two sleepless nights deciding what to do with what he'd discovered, and in the end, curiosity won out over caution, the same way it always seemed to when Bond Link was involved.

He located the suspected teammate during a quiet evening hour and reached carefully toward the residual bond still connecting them from their years on the same team — the same kind of faded thread he'd used to monitor the captain's condition. He intended only to observe, to gather more information before deciding what, if anything, to do with what he knew, telling himself he would pull back the moment anything felt wrong.

The connection refused to cooperate the way every other bond had.

Where James expected the familiar thin, manageable thread of a severed team connection, he found something denser, older, resistant to his attempts to simply observe and withdraw, a wall where he'd expected a doorway. The interface flagged it immediately, text flaring across his vision with an urgency he hadn't seen from the system before, sharp enough to make him wince.

BOND TYPE: DEEP LINK.

James had never created a bond of that classification with anyone. He didn't fully understand what it meant, only that it felt structurally different from every connection he'd built himself — heavier, more deliberate, like architecture built by someone with far more experience than he had, someone who had done this before, many times, with far less hesitation.

Reckless with unease, he pushed further, attempting to glimpse whatever memory or intention lay behind the bond's resistance. For one disorienting second, an image flooded through him: a dim room, several students standing in a loose circle, and at the center, someone explaining the mechanics of Bond Link itself in careful, instructive detail — the exact kind of information James had spent weeks discovering through trial, danger, and exhausting experimentation, information that should have been impossible for anyone else to already possess.

The face of the person speaking refused to resolve, blurred by something deliberate, some protective mechanism built into the memory itself, a defense that felt almost hostile in how thoroughly it resisted him. James severed the connection immediately, gasping, sweat cold against his skin, before whatever safeguard protected that memory could do more than singe the edges of his own mind, a heat behind his eyes that took several minutes to fade.

He sat on the floor of the empty corridor for a long time afterward, piecing together the implications with hands that wouldn't quite stop shaking.

Someone already knew about Bond Link's true nature. Someone had trained people to understand and possibly weaponize the exact ability James had only just begun to comprehend himself. And that same someone might have deliberately orchestrated the circumstances that led James to discover his own hidden power — the betrayal, the severance, the awakening that followed almost too conveniently for coincidence, a chain of events that suddenly looked less like misfortune and more like design.

He returned to his dorm well past curfew, exhausted and unsettled in a way sleep wouldn't fix, and found a note waiting on his desk that hadn't been there when he left, sitting square in the center of the surface as if placed there with deliberate care.

No signature. No indication of who had entered his room or how, though the door had been locked, and nothing else in the room seemed to have been disturbed. Just a single handwritten line, the ink slightly uneven, as if written quickly or under some kind of pressure.

Never form a Bond with someone you cannot trust.

James read the sentence twice, three times, searching for hidden meaning in the plain, almost gentle warning. Before he could decide whether it was a threat or an act of mercy, Bond Link stirred faintly against his awareness, a sensation he'd never felt before — not from any of his five teammates, not from the fading remnants of his old team, something colder and more distant than either.

Someone, somewhere on campus, had just attempted to connect to him.

He didn't sleep again that night, the note pinned under his palm like something that might crawl away if he let go of it. He turned every possibility over in his mind — a rival academy, a jealous classmate, an instructor testing the limits of an ability they didn't fully trust — and none of them fit the shape of what he'd felt. Whatever had reached for him carried none of the clumsy, exploratory quality of a first attempt. It had felt practiced. Familiar. Like something that had touched the edges of his awareness before, long before he'd ever known Bond Link could be touched at all.