CHAPTER 173: SYNC CLASS

Kaiden leaned back into the couch, arms stretched behind Aria and Luna as Rae and Riven wrapped up their unexpected info drop. His smile lingered, but his thoughts drifted.

Level 72. A-Tier Awakened. Both of them.

That put the twins just below the true monsters, the rare S-Tiers that sat at the top of the food chain. Powerhouses capable of shifting battlefields by themselves. It was an elite bracket that only a handful of people in the country could even dream of.

Kaiden exhaled slowly.

Riven and Rae were strong. Incredibly strong. But not invincible.

That was important to remember.

Still, Kaiden wasn’t ungrateful. Quite the opposite. For what it was worth, the government had done a lot. They’d provided this high-tech house. A reinforced bunker disguised as a basement. Equipment, surveillance protections, a direct line to federal support... and now these two absurdly powerful bodyguard twins.

But Kaiden wasn’t naïve enough to think all of this was purely for his safety.

They weren’t just protecting him and the girls.

They were watching them.

The USA got next to nothing from him or his team. Not loyalty, not allegiance, not taxes, not even direct cooperation. They weren’t registered members of any domestic guild, association, or research initiative. Just private citizens with too many unknowns.

So really, from the government’s point of view, this whole setup wasn’t charity.

It was containment.

A comfortable cage with nice furniture.

Kaiden glanced toward the hallway. It wasn’t just a bunker: it was probably lined with enough scanners, sensors, and passive surveillance tech to feed a month’s worth of data into whatever black site lab had clearance for their case files.

And Riven and Rae?

They weren’t exactly prison wardens, but they weren’t here solely to play bodyguard either, he was sure of it. He liked the pair a lot, but if they didn’t have instructions to ’keep an eye on them,’ then he would be shocked to the very core.

Kaiden could swiftly decipher the thought process of the Awakened Association in assigning them these protections. If someone small-time came sniffing around, the twins would crush them before the alarm even blared. They could protect Valhalla’s Sinners from almost all threats, and they could sleep in peace in the bunker’s safe walls.

But if something serious came knocking? A black-ops team. An S-tier threat. A foreign nation’s elite strike squad?

Then all they’d be really good for is stalling.

Buy time. Raise the alarm. Hold the line just long enough for the real hitters of the USA to mobilize. Because giving a team like his 24/7 protection by true S-rankers? That just wasn’t going to happen.

Scarlet, the Flame Monarch?

She wasn’t going to spend her days standing on Kaiden’s porch with a clipboard and sunglasses. People like her were treated as national assets, used sparingly and strategically, not babysitting unaligned wildcards. Furthermore, she wasn’t even a government agent but a free awakened, hiring her services for such a work would’ve likely bankrupted the country sooner or later.

But despite this, Kaiden smiled faintly to himself.

Why?

Because this was fine.

He didn’t expect to be given anything more. Not when they were still flying so far outside the system’s lines. He was just glad the current arrangement didn’t come with more strings or veiled threats.

The only thing he had to give up was privacy. And sure, it stung badly, but compared to being kidnapped, dissected, or drafted? That was a bargain. They could retake their privacy once they were strong enough to protect themselves.

He looked toward the twins again. Rae’s mischievous grin as she was sending little kisses to Riven’s unamused cheeks, who was trying to throw the tanned woman off of her.

Kaiden gave a quiet nod to himself.

This was good. He could work with this.

Then, for just the briefest of moments, he mulled over the other information he learned about the newcomer pair.

Constructrix and Rendrix.

Kaiden turned the names over in his mind like puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit yet. He couldn’t say much about what they were truly capable of, not without seeing them in action, but the way Riven had described their dynamic left no doubt.

A sync class duo.

Classes that weren’t just complementary, but designed to function together. Like two halves of a living machine.

Riven built, Rae broke. One created order, the other thrived in chaos. Individually strong, maybe, but together? Something significantly more terrifying.

That kind of synergy wasn’t common.

But it wasn’t unheard of.

In a strange way... his own team was a version of that.

His Valkyries... their classes had been born from him. From his bond with each of them. Aria, Luna, Nyx... their strength didn’t come from external awakenings. It came from him. From his system. His growth.

But their classes weren’t tethered the same way he expected Riven and Rae to be. At least, not exactly.

They didn’t need to be right beside him to fight at full strength. Their powers didn’t short-circuit if he stepped out of the room.

If he had to guess... even if he died, they’d probably still keep their powers.

Probably.

But there was no telling for sure. The system was unpredictable. And the bond they shared... it wasn’t just emotional. It was something deeper. Magical. Structural.

He exhaled slowly, mulling over the contrast.

Riven and Rae were bound by blood. Structure. Specialization.

His Valkyries were bound by him.

By belief. By love. By whatever strange rules his system decided to follow.

’Well, with that out of the way... Let’s see,’ he thought inwardly, glancing at the clock on the wall.

’It’s been about 12 hours since I uploaded the video. Most of the world should’ve already been notified of what had happened, as from what I’d been told, we’ve been making the news all over the globe... Well, some dictatorships did do their best to censor the news, such as the damned Chinese... So no 1.4 billion viewers by default...’

His hands formed into tight fists, and he suddenly felt a very strong urge to deliver a strong punch to a certain Winnie the Pooh-looking prime minister, but he calmed his heart.

’Don’t get greedy, Kaiden... You can’t have it all... Well, you can, but only once you become strong enough. Anyhow. Thanks to the widespread media coverage, the biggest burst of views my monster subjugation video gathers will have already arrived. Of course, it’ll keep growing greatly in the future, too... hehehe...’

Having finished his inner thoughts, Kaiden stretched his arms with a lazy grin.

"Alright, girls... Let’s do this together."