Chapter Four: Scissors for Ten Minutes

allocation. Class Zero's foothold vanished as soon as it had been won. Back in the hangar, Lin's arm convulsed. Four borrowed terrors replayed until typhoon winds drowned his mother's voice message. Bai Qi offered Pain Transfer. He refused. “Moving pain won't move memory.” Su Mi projected the echo waveforms and cut away their emotional peaks. “Then we don't move it. We edit.” Every Blinkstep invocation forced Lin through two seconds of smoke before the useful action. Vector Deflection always began with an arrow leaving its bow. Su Mi found that the ability structure occupied only a small part of each crucial ten minutes. Emotion had forged it and could not be deleted, but its entry point could be moved to the frame where the action began.