Chương 144: 54. Acclimation 1

I was just about to speak when something ice-cold slapped against my cheek. I nearly launched out of my chair.

"—Fuck!" A voice I knew entirely too well, and entirely too punchable, dropped from somewhere above me.

"Oh good, she's alive. I was about to start planning the funeral. Death by Foundations of Fleet Management—tragic, but fitting." Jess peeled the cold drink can off my face, grinning like she'd just caught two small animals building a secret nest. Her other hand held a plastic bag that clinked with several more cans, making her look like she'd come to the library to run a smuggling operation. I touched my nearly-frostbitten cheek and glared at her.

"What is fucking wrong with you?"

"Chronic condition. Long-term. The school can't fix it." She set the can on the table and dragged over a chair, sitting down with the ease of someone who'd always belonged there.

"Lunch was almost over and neither of you had come back, so I figured someone might've been dismembered by the textbooks. Brought supplies." Her gaze swept between me and Kushima. Less concerned visitor, more field researcher collecting samples.

"Ooh—" she drew it out, "so that's what's going on. No wonder the atmosphere over here looked thick enough to cook soup in."

"Shut up," I said.

"No." Flat refusal. She turned to Kushima with a smile that meant nothing good.

"Kushima, you're impressive. Buying lunch, organizing the reading list, breaking down the textbooks, keeping Hoshino alive through fleet management—this isn't tutoring, this is animal husbandry." Kushima, expression unchanged, shifted her notebook slightly to make room for Jess without disrupting our materials.

"I'm just preventing her from actually dying in front of a textbook."

"Wow." Jess performed admiration with zero sincerity.

"That sentence sounds exactly like a declaration of love, military-industrial edition."

"It's not," Kushima and I said simultaneously. Jess's smile got worse. She reached into the bag, pulled out a can of cherry cola, and set it by my hand, then cracked open her own sparkling drink. The tab made a small, crisp click in the quiet library corner.

"Here. Restore your HP." She propped her chin on her hand and looked at me.

"Also let me see how far the Kushima family study-hell has gotten. Shimo, are you up to when supplies run short, who gets to die first?" I picked up the cola and glanced at her.

"How did you know?"

"Because every advanced course at this academy eventually circles back to that topic. Just different packaging." She shrugged.

"Some call it resource priority. Some call it maintaining combat effectiveness. Some call it organizational efficiency. Strip it down and it's—sorry, everyone matters, but someone always has to go first." If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. She said it like she was commenting on the weather. But I knew she understood. Understood the sick feeling of standing between survival and fairness, knowing you can usually only pick one.

Kushima didn't argue either. She just flipped back to the page I'd been stuck on and added a short annotation beside it. Understand the logic first. You don't have to accept it yet. I stared at that line, and something in my chest went warm. Not the romantic kind of warm. More like something very small, very steady, quietly finding its footing. Jess, predictably, had no intention of letting the atmosphere stand. She took a sip of her drink and leaned in, dropping her voice with theatrical purpose.

"So—how far has today's tutoring package progressed? Are we at Shimo, you're frowning, or Shimo, eat your lunch first, or have we already reached Shimo, you might as well just sit in my lap, it'd be faster?"

"That last one is something you want to see," I said, expressionless.

"Obviously." She admitted it without shame.

"But I have standards. I only watch. I don't interfere with the main characters' development." Kushima finally looked up and gave her a cool look.

"You're interfering right now."

"Wrong. This is atmosphere regulation." Jess smiled pleasantly.

"Without me, the two of you would have one person lecturing like a battlefield briefing and one person wrestling the textbook, and the library air would congeal into military-grade construction material." After Jess sat down, the corner somehow stopped feeling so tightly wound.

Kushima still broke down the materials for me, and I still talked back the whole time while getting rescued anyway, but having someone whose designated role was prevent this from turning into a deathbed scene made the whole afternoon move differently. The next few hours passed faster than I'd expected. Kushima divided Foundations of Fleet Management into sections I could actually digest and walked me through them one at a time.

Fleet formation first, then duty rotation systems, then the division of responsibility between the bridge and CIC. She never loaded too much at once—just supplied the necessary context right before I was about to disconnect, and let me find the rest myself. Jess chimed in occasionally. Sometimes mocking the textbook authors for being raised by administrative formatting. Sometimes pulling a concept back to earth with an example from the forest assessment.

A few times she'd shown up to deliver drinks and ended up just spreading her own homework on the table and staying the rest of the afternoon. By my third pass through the material, I could finally work through a section on shipboard rotation and command relay nodes without help. Still slow. Still muttering at the Federation Textbook Compilation Committee. But no longer drowning in place. Kushima listened to my summary and nodded once.

"Close enough." I leaned back in my chair and exhaled.

"I finally understand why some people finish second year looking like they took early retirement." Jess immediately supplied: "Because fleet management ground their souls into spreadsheets."

"Terrible. Accurate." Kushima was already collecting my draft pages, stacking them in order, sliding them back into the book. Same efficient movements, same naturalness—like organizing my things was something that didn't warrant being mentioned. That was the problem. At three in the afternoon, I'd still found it alarming when she brought me lunch. By five, I was already automatically handing her the textbook before she reached for it when I'd been reading the wrong page. I hadn't noticed. Jess did.

She was spinning her pen, chin in hand, and let out a lazy laugh.

"Do you know what you two look like right now?" I looked up, guarded.

"No. Don't want to know."

"Like people who've sat next to each other for ten years and evolved past needing to speak to know what the other person's about to do. Old married couple energy."

"—pfft—" This time I was the one who nearly sprayed my drink. Kushima's hand moved fast, pushing a napkin toward my mouth before I'd registered it. I coughed and grabbed it, ears inexplicably warm, furious enough to want to shove Jess between two bookshelves and use her as a human bookend.

"Did you come to bring drinks or to preside over my funeral?"

"Either works, depending on your needs." Jess blinked innocently.

"But I have to be honest. When did you start letting someone manage when you eat, what order you read things, which book comes before which? You're even copying her notes now without a fight. Shimo. You're done for."

"I'm not done for."

"You are."

"I'm just too lazy to organize everything myself."

"Translation: she does it too well to criticize." I tightened my grip on the cola can and genuinely reconsidered whether violence was as uncivilized as society claimed. Then Kushima twisted the knife without looking up.

"Her progress today was good," she said, reviewing her own notes like she was filing a standard learning report.

"At least tonight she won't have to start over from page one."... Great. Tonight had already been naturally folded into the shared plan.