Chương 119: 47. Duty 47-1

I'll start with something embarrassing—though in this particular hellscape, it's embarrassing in a perfectly reasonable way. After that brief ceasefire ended, the first thing Squad 144 did wasn't thank our lucky stars, or embrace each other with heartfelt relief, or stand in a circle shouting "Friendship, Effort, Future" like the academy's promotional reels always showed. No.

The first thing we did was crouch beneath a buttress root burned down to half a column of black charcoal, like four dogs who'd just crawled out of a trash heap, taking inventory of exactly how much we had left to bargain with fate. And me—Hoshino Shimo, fourteen years old, theoretically the squad leader, functionally the designated scapegoat for the entire team.

"Quick debrief." I kept my voice low, one hand pressed against my still-throbbing ribs, eyes locked on the shifting edge of hot zones on my HUD.

"Starting now, we stop letting the Jäger (Hunter) drag us around." Jess was the first to make a noise—a short, derisive snort.

"You say that like we were volunteering to get walked like dogs."

"Not volunteering. Just incompetent." Maki delivered the correction with perfect calm, not even looking up as she laid out our scattered gear piece by piece.

"There's a difference. Accept reality first—harder to die that way." Harvey was squatting on the outer edge, hands working a thin metal wire, his mouth running just as fast.

"Good news: my rigged motion alarms still work. Bad news: the Jäger's probably quieter than all three of you combined."

"Why am I included in that?" I glared at him.

"Because when you stepped on that root just now, it sounded like you were broadcasting to the whole forest that you're still breathing, Captain." Excellent. Less than ten minutes into the ceasefire and we'd already cycled back to our familiar routine of mutual humiliation. Somehow, that was reassuring. If everyone still had the energy to be awful to each other, it meant nobody was broken yet. I flipped my pack over and dumped everything useful onto the scorched ground in one go.

Two and a half pouches of treated water. One pouch of raw water. Eleven purification tablets. Half a roll of hemostatic tape. Two small-dose pain injectors, plus one local anesthetic whose expiry date I absolutely did not want to know. Three sets of Harvey's custom-rigged coil alarms. One roll of thin metal wire. Two acoustic decoy spheres. One folding shovel. One combat knife. Two close-quarters stun batons—one with a faulty contact that needed divine intervention before use.

And the rest was just the standard-issue gear on our bodies: heat-resistant, slash-resistant, but completely defenseless against the mockery of fate. I stared at the pile for three seconds and reached a deeply uninspiring conclusion.

"Do we look like four clowns holding school festival props, getting ready to ambush a regular army unit?"

"Not quite." Jess hugged her knees, flashing that particular nasty smile she reserved for moments like this.

"Clowns at least get paid for the performance." Maki finally looked up at me. Her expression was the same one she'd apparently been born with—the kind that made you wonder if she'd ever laughed once in her entire life.

"Stop wasting time. Give us the plan." When she switched to the direct form—no honorifics, no politeness—it meant she'd shifted into serious mode. She was cutting at the rest of us constantly, but when things got genuinely dangerous, she went clean and efficient. I drew a breath of hot air that tasted like ash and laid it out.

"The Jäger finds us through equipment advantage. Thermal, infrared, night vision, plus that heat-resistant armor plating—we lose any direct engagement. So we don't engage directly. We don't try to beat it. We make it waste time, misjudge, walk into the position we've chosen."

"Get to the point," Jess said.

"The point is," I dragged a finger across the scorched dirt, sketching a rough terrain map, "we stop moving in straight lines, and we stop being the first idiots cutting across open ground. We work through areas with dense burned root systems, surface heat pockets, steam vents. Harvey sets false movement trails. Maki holds the rear contingency. You and I handle the lure."

"Hold it—why am I bait with you?" Jess immediately frowned.

"Because you're fast, and your mouth is vicious enough to draw fire."

"…I genuinely cannot argue with that. I hate this." Harvey tossed one of the decoy spheres up and caught it. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I'll handle the front-end setup. Three layers. First layer is visible trail marks—deliberately sloppy, like someone panicking and running. Second layer is fake heat signatures: hot stones mixed with reflectors in the steam, enough to confuse a headcount. Third layer—" He snapped the wire taut. It gave a thin, bright sound.

"—is herding. Funnel it down the route we want." Maki picked up where he left off, adding several marks to my dirt map.

"Position assignments, revised. Hoshino up front-center. No heroics, no charging ahead. You watch the HUD, read the heat zones, call the orders. Jess, left-front angle—sound lure and close-range backup. Harvey, rear position—not rearguard, you're handling wire sets and retrieval. I take center-rear. I watch all three of you, and I hold the medical kit and water."

"I don't love the phrase 'no heroics,'" I said.

"Would you prefer: prohibited from doing things that look impressive and get the whole squad killed?" Maki asked.

"…Did the desert wind blow away whatever respect you had for your squad leader?"

"There wasn't any to begin with." Jess burst out laughing at that, nearly spraying her mouthful of water. — That was the current operational state of Squad 144. Mutual trust? Nonexistent. Chemistry? Marginal at best. But at least everyone was finally willing to point their particular skills in the same direction, instead of wasting energy proving it was someone else's fault. I laid down the final rule.

"Saying it one more time. The goal is to survive, not to win. Nobody engages the Jäger head-on. If someone goes down, assess whether you can pull them out. If you can't, we don't all go down with them. And if anyone lets their ego take over and charges out, I will—""You'll what?" Jess raised an eyebrow. I thought about it, then went with the honest answer.

"I'll yell at you first, then charge out right after you. Because I'm an idiot too." Half a second of quiet. Harvey ducked his head; his shoulders shook once. Jess rolled her eyes, but she couldn't kill the curve at the corner of her mouth. Even Maki let out a barely audible breath, like she was thinking: Fine, at least the captain knows exactly what's wrong with her. The moment the debrief ended, we moved.

— The terrain we'd chosen was the scorched fringe of a black rainforest—burned twice over by successive firestorms, not quite dead, not quite anything anymore. The place looked like someone had crammed an entire forest into a furnace, baked it to about seventy percent done, then lost interest and left it to sit. The buttress roots were charred and cracked on the outside, still holding dark red heat within.

The ground was riddled with collapsed root hollows, steam vents, and thermal pockets that would blister your ankle straight through the boot if you stepped wrong. Any sane person would avoid it. The problem was, the Jäger almost certainly didn't count itself among the sane. Harvey spent over twenty minutes on the wire setup. He started with the outer ring—a set of footprints made deliberately obvious, uneven depth, with a dragging section that read like a wounded person's gait.

Then he buried both decoy spheres near the steam vents, and mixed reflective strips with hot stones to fake a heat profile that looked vaguely like scattered bodies. The final layer was a series of nearly invisible wire runs looped around sections of burned wood that looked load-bearing but would slide the moment anything touched them.

"If it steps here, the shell gives." Harvey indicated a narrow passage.

"Might not fall. But the weight shifts."

"And then?" I asked.

"Then we find out if we can use that second well." Thank you for that brutal honesty. I was almost moved to tears. Jess was down in the left-front position, pressed flat in the shadow of a buttress root, a rock and short baton in each hand, like a feral cat waiting to claw someone's face off. Maki was half-crouched to my right-rear, medical kit and water pinned close, no heavy weapon in hand—and somehow, because of that, the one person we could least afford to lose. Harvey had disappeared into the rear.

Every so often, two quiet taps through the earpiece confirmed he was still breathing. And I crouched behind a split section of black wood, watching the HUD, watching the scan display sit there in a silence that made my stomach hurt. Time moved. The forest was too quiet. No birds. No insects. No wind through leaves—though that might have been because the leaves were mostly gone. Only the distant heat shimmer warping the air, making everything look like it was underwater. My palms were soaked. Not from the heat.

Because I knew it was coming. Five minutes later, the corner of the HUD flickered. Not a full lock—more like a heat signature compressed to almost nothing, moving. My throat closed.

"Contact." The earpiece went dead silent. And then, for the first time at this range, I saw the Jäger. When it stepped out from behind a fallen giant trunk, the first thought that popped into my head—completely involuntary, arriving before anything tactical—was: What the hell, Imperial remnant. All black. Not just dark clothing—the kind of black that actively suppressed heat, light, and presence.

All-terrain armor plated in articulated sections, heavy without being bulky, the surface carrying a matte finish that looked like it had been designed to survive things that shouldn't be survivable. The sealed helmet erased the face entirely, leaving only a mirrored forward-vision module. No expression. No sound. Even its breathing seemed to have been absorbed into the suit. A human shape standing there, engineered to tell you that running was beside the point. It stopped. Examined the trail signs we'd left.

I nearly forgot to breathe.

"Take it—" Jess murmured in the earpiece, barely voiced at all.

"Come on, eat it, you black tin can—" If she put this much devotion into studying, she'd probably have better prospects than most of us. The Jäger took one step forward. Onto the first false trail layer. Paused for two seconds. Took another step. It didn't take the center line we'd planned for. It angled fifteen degrees right, circling the outside. My stomach dropped.

"It's testing the path," Maki said quietly.

"I can see that." I bit down.

"Harvey, second layer, stand by." The next second, the decoy sphere near the steam vent triggered—a brief scatter of small sounds, then the hot stone shifted, and a column of steam punched upward. From a distance, it read convincingly like the residual heat impression of someone slipping and catching themselves in a panic. The Jäger's helmet turned toward it. Working.

"Jess—one stone, left side, three seconds." I said immediately.

"As you wish, Your Highness."

"Call me that again and I'm giving Harvey your sleeping bag."

"Throwing it now." The stone skipped off a section of burned wood to the left, then rolled into the hollow of a buttress root. The Jäger turned toward the left-front. It began walking into the passage we'd prepared. I could almost feel Harvey holding his breath somewhere behind us. One step. Two steps. Three— The burned shell gave. Just that instant—the Jäger's right foot landed at the wrong angle, and its center of mass tipped.

The side armor scraped against a broken root as it shifted, producing one low, hard sound of metal on charred wood.

"Now!" I shouted. Jess moved first.