Chương 147: 55. Invitation 2

The afternoon class was boring enough to qualify as slow torture. Not because the content was entirely useless—because the instructor had taken potentially useful material and was delivering it like a eulogy for dead paperwork. The first fifteen minutes, I held on through principle: attendance is part of the system too. Twenty minutes in, I was seriously questioning whether the human soul could gradually evaporate through the ears. The voice from the lectern was flat as a mechanical readout.

The diagrams on the board had all the vitality of a burial record. The light outside, though, was excellent. Excellent in that specific way that mocks everyone still sitting inside. I stared at the paragraph in front of me while my mind drifted to the morning's visitors, to Yukikaze, to Orion Alpha, to the fleet management notes Maki had broken down for me yesterday.

Sitting here for forty minutes watching an instructor prove he could read directly from a textbook—I'd be better off in the library, getting through things that might actually matter. The thought latched on like a bite. Ten minutes later, I was out the side door with my books. Not rebellion. Efficiency. That's what I told myself. The UIMA Central Library was absurdly large. Not decoratively large—not built to win size comparisons with other academies. Actually large.

The kind where you walk in and instinctively feel this building must have absorbed several normal structures to achieve its current mass. The atrium soared with unnecessary generosity, its transparent dome slicing afternoon light into sections that fell across floors, railings, and the shelves climbing upward in stacked tiers—bright in the way of a surveillance system that had decided to be pleasant about it.

The second and third floors, and levels above them, were connected by curved walkways, students moving across them like migratory birds driven by grades and deadlines. It was crowded. Crowded enough that even the quiet felt loud. People rushed past with armloads of materials, faces set like they'd be executed if they slowed down. People hunched over long tables writing notes with the dedication of someone annotating their own funeral portrait.

People curled into window seats with headphones on, eyes hollow in the way of someone whose soul had just been extracted by statistics. I went up to the second floor and found a corner against the shelves. Good light, reasonably quiet, sufficiently out of the way—out of the way enough to hide from the world. Not that I had anything suspicious planned. I was genuinely here to study. I spread my materials across the table.

Fleet Management: Fundamentals Shipboard Duty Rotation and Coordination Excerpts from the Federation Standard Destroyer Operating Framework Just looking at the covers made me want to call for medical support. Opening the first one, the situation was immediately worse than yesterday. Because today Maki wasn't beside me translating into human language.

The text reverted at once to its natural, hideous form—like ants in dress uniforms marching across the page, informing me as they went that the dynamic correlation between fleet configuration nodes and supply prioritization should be cross-referenced with Appendix Seven. Appendix Seven my ass. I pushed through for half an hour, forced my way through two chapters, even managed a few lines of notes.

Then—whether from the morning's soporific lecture, the mental loosening after escaping the afternoon class, or the library's air conditioning running at exactly the legal frequency for inducing sleep—I came back to myself to find my vision going soft. No. Can't sleep. I told myself. Finish this section first. At least line up this diagram. The next moment, my forehead was on my arm. … … When I came back, the first thing I registered wasn't visual. It was the sense that someone was beside me.

A strange presence—not heavy, not urgent. Not someone passing through, not someone wanting the seat, not a library staffer coming to drag a truant first-year out for display. More like someone who had quietly sat down, had been there for a while, and had no intention of waking me. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. My eyelids stirred, but I didn't open them.

Simple reason: if you'd survived this long in a military academy and hadn't learned to play dead and assess the situation first, that burning planet had been wasted on you. I kept position, evened my breathing, and let my ears work. A page turning. Very soft. The faint friction of papers being straightened. A pen tip stopping on a page, making a short, clean stroke. And a presence I recognized in a way that was both annoying and, against all logic, quietly steadying—settled beside me. Maki. I didn't need to look.

Only she could make sitting beside someone while they slept feel as routine as a scheduled inspection. I held still. A few more seconds, and a small sound came from beside me—someone picking up a pen that had slipped from my hand and setting it back, then smoothing a page that had crumpled under my elbow. Too small a gesture. Small enough that opening my eyes now would only make things awkward. So I stayed where I was. Temporary. Just temporary.

"… Shimo." She said it softly. Not the volume for waking someone—more like confirming something. My ears went slightly numb. I nearly broke cover. There it is again. When had they started saying my name like that? Like it was just natural? The field training? After the bonfire? Or earlier, and I'd been too busy surviving and being difficult to track the evolution? … Forget it. Let the past stay past. I continued performing unconsciousness at a professional level. She didn't call again.

But I could feel she hadn't moved. She sat there, quiet as a lamp left on—inconvenient, unreasonable, and somehow increasingly natural to have near someone like me. Eventually I let my eyes open, just a fraction. And looked directly into her gaze, which had just lowered toward me. … Damn it. She knew. She absolutely knew I'd been awake. Maki looked at me, expression unchanged, only her eyes very still—like water with no wind on it at all. Her own notebook was open in front of her.

My copy of Fleet Management: Fundamentals had migrated to her side, its margins now carrying several lines of neat annotations. My water cup had been moved within easy reach. The papers that had been crumpled under my elbow had been re-stacked. Was she here to study with me, or to take over the logistics of my entire existence. My throat was dry. I went with the most useless opening possible.

"…What are you doing here." Maki looked at me for two seconds.

"You skipped your afternoon class," she said.

"So?"

"So I figured you'd be at the library."

"You sound like you're tracking a deserter."

"If you're going to run, I should at least know where you ran to," she said, calmly. That came out far too easily. Easy as breathing. Easy enough that I couldn't tell whether she was speaking as a teammate, or whether this was something stickier, more personal—the quiet extension of a perimeter that now included me. I sat up. My shoulders ached. My hair was probably a disaster. Maki glanced at the red mark the table had pressed into my temple, then reached over—very lightly—and touched it with her fingertips.

Not a stroke. Just the briefest contact, checking whether the mark was serious. That was the problem. If she'd just reached out normally, I could have bristled. But this was too restrained—restrained in a way that felt like it was leaving me room to retreat, and leaving herself room too.

"Sleeping badly?" she asked.

"Library tables are too hard."

"Your sleep has been off generally, these past few days."

"How would you know?"

"I know," she said, quietly.

"You've been turning over more at night than before." I said nothing. Not from embarrassment. From the sudden realization that this woman had become familiar enough with me to notice the rhythm of my restless nights—and I was only catching up to this now. This was dangerous. Very dangerous. I shifted my gaze to the books on the table.

"You're basically a surveillance system."

"If you'd sleep and eat on schedule, I could reduce monitoring frequency."

"Who authorized you to monitor anything."

"You never said no." …She really deserved to be hit for that. I looked up to glare at her, and she simply turned my book back to the right page and pointed to a passage.

"I marked this section. The second half of this page isn't hard—the author just writes like someone with brain damage." I choked on whatever I'd been about to say. Then, with extremely poor dignity, looked down at her annotations. Every section broken into short, clear pieces. Which parts were definitions, which were logical frameworks, which were just the textbook author proving they could make something simple read like encrypted imperial correspondence.

She'd even sketched a small flowchart in the margin, reordering the sequence of shipboard duty rotation, supply confirmation, and intelligence relay.

"…When did you write all this?"

"While you were asleep."

"You just sat here and rewrote my notes?"

"What else was I going to do?" She looked at me.

"Wake you up and let you keep fighting this book alone?" Damn it. She had a point. I stared at her annotations, and felt something warm creep into my face—not the dramatic kind, but something more inconvenient. The feeling of a gap you'd assumed you'd have to fill alone, quietly patched by someone else, and your first response isn't gratitude—it's not knowing what to do with yourself. Because you start getting used to it. I hate getting used to things. Especially getting used to someone being good to me.

What was worse—I was no longer sure I actually wanted to break the habit.

"Shimo." She said it again. Softly. I looked up. Maki held my gaze, and after a quiet half-second:"Next time you're really tired, you can just lean over and sleep. You don't have to push through." I'd been ready to say I wasn't pushing through, but what came out instead was:"… You're not always going to be here." She paused. Brief, faint—but one of the few visible hesitations I'd ever caught on her face. Then, quietly:"If you need me to be, I can be." … That was too much.

Not in terms of scale—in terms of precision. Like someone had found the exact point you least wanted seen and pressed there with a fine needle, not to hurt, but to say: I see this. Right here. I yanked the book back in front of me and pretended to be very busy.

"Can we—can we go over this problem. Why did you put duty rotation confirmation before supply inventory in this flowchart?" Maki watched me for a moment. Then, without calling me out, she followed where I'd steered.

"Because if the people break first, it doesn't matter how complete the supplies are…" She started explaining. Her voice settled back into that steady, even rhythm—the kind that always felt like she was clearing a path ahead of me. I listened, and worked hard at keeping my ears from getting any warmer. Perfect. Just perfect.

Not only did I need to catch up on second-year fleet management, I now also had to manage the emerging problem of my linguistic immune response to Maki Kushima undergoing progressive system failure. Life was getting richer by the day.