Chương 107: 41.Flare 41-4

Early on the second day, we broke camp and cut northeast, and got our first real look at an official shelter—visible, and completely inaccessible. The thing was half-buried in a blackened slope, blast door thick enough to contain a monster. The ID lamp beside it was dead red. My HUD showed nothing. No marker meant no entry. Jess crouched at the edge of the slope and prodded at the ground with her blade tip.

"Someone's been here. More than one team." I followed her blade down. The stone face beside the door had been scratched with hard objects, over and over. Several half-drawn circles and arrows—someone tracking the pattern of when it opened. Maki crouched and looked at it for a moment, voice even.

"Someone's studying the rotation cycle."

"Obviously," I said.

"You're stuck on this planet for close to a month—if you're not studying that, what are you doing, figuring out how to roast yourself more evenly?" Harvey touched the door surface near the edge and pulled his hand back immediately.

"Locked tight. Forcing it isn't realistic."

"Wasn't planning to headbutt it open," I said, standing and checking the HUD again.

"One standing rule from here on: any unlit physical shelter is a headstone. Worth observing. Not worth gambling your life on." Jess tilted her head at me, mouth pulling sideways.

"Frost 01, you're starting to sound more and more like an annoying old veteran."

"Thank you," I said.

"I'd rather be an annoying person than an agreeable corpse." From the second day onward, Team 144 settled into a rhythm. Daytime: move, scout, find processable water. Afternoon: avoid the worst heat zones, stay along edges that gave cover without getting swallowed by carnivorous plants. Night: make camp, four people in one tent, Harvey re-running that ugly, honest alarm wire every single evening. On the third day, we spotted a second official shelter from a distance, already circled by three teams.

Nobody was stupid enough to rush the door. Everyone was working the perimeter—finding observation points, leaving markers, keeping options open. Someone had carved times into a tree trunk. Someone else had sketched a rough diagram on a stone face with burnt charcoal. One team was sitting upwind like they were waiting for prey to walk into their sights.

"These people have patience," Jess said, flat on her stomach behind a charred log. I watched through the scope. None of them were really talking—just watching each other. That quiet wasn't peace. It was the quiet of people who all knew the shelter wasn't going anywhere, and not moving today didn't mean not moving tomorrow.

"Because the shelter doesn't run," I said.

"Which makes it worth watching, worth logging, and worth hitting someone over." Maki studied the cold marker on her HUD and added, perfectly flat:"The handbook doesn't specify rules against long-term occupation."

"Which means you can file a complaint," Jess said with a grin, "or file it with your fist." Harvey put the scope down, voice clipped as a ruling.

"Stay clear. That's a situation over there." I nodded. He was right. The worst thing about this place wasn't that the rules were too many. It was that the rules were deliberately incomplete. The Academy had written half of them into the handbook and left the other half in the field for you to learn with your bones. Learn slow, and someone else would run the lesson for you—with their fists, or a shovel. On the fourth day, we cleared camp ahead of a Purgation Gale before the system even went red.

The Strangler Pyre-Vines started pulling back to their trunks. The large ferns folded shut. The wind shifted from wet-sticky to dry-burning. Before the HUD could flash a warning, we'd already sealed the scent sources around the tent, re-sealed the water bladders, and switched the alarm wire to a wider early-warning perimeter. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Nobody said much. Everyone just moved.

By the time I registered that, I was already helping Harvey pull a retention strap, Maki had already logged time and wind bearing, and Jess was looping back from the outer perimeter to report: "Left side clear, something shifted in the vegetation right-rear." I didn't say anything out loud. But I was clear enough on it inside. Team 144 no longer looked like four unlucky strangers jammed together by a roster.

More like four people with genuinely bad temperaments who had at least figured out how to keep each other from dying too fast. On the fifth day, we circled back to an official shelter we'd passed before. The day before, only old footprints and ash marks around the door. Today: fresh seal fragments beside the entrance, shallow new track impressions in the dirt beside it, and two rectangular drag marks where supply crates had been set down and removed. I stood at a distance, the back of my neck prickling.

The note Aki Kushima had pressed into my pocket suddenly had weight. —Official rest stations receive a resupply within twelve hours of each use. So that wasn't just something to rattle me.

"Frost 01?" Maki said from beside me. I pushed the prickling down, kept my face still, and said quietly:"Log it. This one's been resupplied." Jess exhaled through her teeth.

"So these places aren't just for riding out Gales. They're bait."

"More or less," I said. Harvey studied the door, eyes cold as a measuring tape.

"Going forward, when we approach an official point—find the watchers first. Look at the door second."

"Agreed," I said, moving my eyes off the door.

"The door stays. People move." That night when we made camp, the four of us settled in a little more naturally than the first night. Not because we'd grown fond of each other—don't make it weird. Because after several days, everyone knew which leg to pull in where, which pack to brace against what, who was most likely to kick someone rolling over at 0300, who reached for their knife first when they woke up and who reached for their water.

I lay with my eyes open before sleep, watching the tent ceiling press slightly inward from the humidity outside, and had an annoying thought. Apparently what people called unit cohesion wasn't usually some blood-oath version of I've got your back. It was knowing which bastard wouldn't step on your face when the alarm went off at night. … Still an absurdly low bar. Still useful. Around midday on the sixth day, the sky was unusually tolerable. Not blue—just shifted from actively dying grey to not quite dead yet grey.

We were cutting south along a half-burned forest ridge. Low-ground water to the left, scorched root zones to the right, and scattered ahead, a few tender green shoots that had somehow survived the Purgation Gale and come back—looking offensively alive. I was checking the HUD for the next processable water point when Jess stopped.

"… Hey." Her voice wasn't loud, but that particular tone meant she wasn't about to be clever. I looked up and followed her line of sight. On the far horizon, a streak of light punched upward. Too bright for this planet. Not a Purgation Gale, not a plant, not anything natural. A distress flare. It drove straight through the grey-black air and left a clean, eye-cutting trail of smoke at the edge of the visible world. All four of us went still. Nobody spoke.

I watched that light climb for a few seconds, and felt the back of my neck go cold. Not because it was striking. Because I knew exactly what it meant. Not someone needs help. An entire team is out. Once you fire it, you can't take it back. Make-up exam list. The whole team goes on together. Jess spoke first, voice much lower than usual, still trying to force an edge into it.

"Looks like someone decided to sign up for remedials before we did." She didn't laugh at her own line. Harvey squinted at the smoke trail, voice cold as always.

"East-northeast. Not close. That sector's about to get messy—Academy might move in, other teams will be watching." Maki pressed her clipboard against her forearm, studying the light streak that hadn't dispersed yet.

"Forcing a full-team signal means more than a single minor injury. They've lost minimum operational capacity." My throat felt dry, and not from thirst. That signal was burning too clean against the sky. Clean in a way that made it look like all the filth on this planet had finally found an exit and used it to spit out one team, neat and complete. Jess glanced at me.

"Want to check it out? Might be gear they had to abandon." Practical. Normal. Anyone who'd made it to day six wasn't running on academy fairy tales anymore. Someone gets pulled, there might be a campsite. Water. Tools they didn't have time to pack. Thinking that way wasn't shameful—it was almost healthy. But I shook my head immediately.

"We don't scavenge. Not now." I kept my eyes on the signal trail still burning high above, voice flat.

"That's not a supply drop. That's an incident site. Anyone heading that way right now is volunteering to be accident number two." Harvey nodded first.

"Correct." Maki didn't waste words—just redrew a line on her board and shaded that whole sector as an avoidance zone. Jess looked at me for two seconds, then just clicked her tongue and let it drop. That was enough. Her not arguing didn't mean she'd suddenly turned agreeable. It meant she was accepting the call. Accepting the judgment, and accepting whose judgment it was to make right now. I adjusted my pack straps and forced my gaze off the flare.

But the smoke trail stayed burned behind my eyes anyway, no matter where I looked. Day six. Finally, someone right in front of us had genuinely broken. Not rumor. Not imagination. Not those cold lines Academic Affairs had printed in the handbook. Real light fired into a real sky, telling everyone still crawling on the ground below: this is what color the system glows when it bites through someone. I pulled in a breath of hot, wet air and chopped my hand forward.

"Frost 01 orders. Reroute south, clear the incident zone. Frost 03, forward security. Frost 02, watch for ground thermal pockets. Frost 04, recalc water and time. Move."

"Copy," Harvey said first.

"Copy," Maki followed. Jess moved last, still not able to resist muttering: "Shame. I thought today we might finally see something uglier than the Federation." I kept walking without looking back, just let my mouth twitch.

"Don't rush it. Forest School's only day six. Plenty of chances left." And we skirted that flare trail that still hadn't fully faded, stepping over scorched earth and wet mud, and kept moving. Team 144 hadn't gone soft. Nobody had a sudden breakthrough about believing in each other. We were still just as sharp-tongued, still just as short on water, still just as worn down as four pieces of scrap metal approaching the end of their service life. But by day six, I was certain of one thing.

If the day ever came when Frost 01 through 04 were pushed to fire that same damn flare into the sky— it wouldn't be because we'd broken each other first. Low bar. In the Evaporation Forest, low bars were usually the only things that looked like a way forward.