Chương 150: 56. Living Off-Campus 2

The next morning, I dragged myself through the first two periods carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who'd only talked about housing last night but woke up feeling like they'd been asked to form a government. Military academy mornings were excellent at converting people back into instruments. First period dismantled your brain into components. Second period reassembled those components and confirmed whether they still functioned.

By the time the second period bell rang, I wasn't thinking about the lecture, or lunch, or the instructor's handout that had been delivered with the energy of someone reading a death sentence. I was thinking: exactly how many people are we working with?

More precisely: if you counted D, Jess, me, Maki, Akari, Harvey, plus Roy and Lan from Mars, and then factored in the rotation personnel who were clearly going to get pulled in—we'd been running well past the eight-person figure we'd been casually citing since last night. Last night we'd been holding very confident eight-way-split discussions. Looking back now, I wanted to find yesterday's version of myself and slap her twice.

"Shimo." Maki, packing up her notes beside me, turned her head.

"That's the third time you've zoned out."

"I wasn't zoning out. I was correcting a structural calculation error."

"Ah." She closed her book, tone infuriatingly even.

"So you finally noticed our headcount isn't eight." I looked at her.

"You already knew?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't say anything?"

"I assumed you'd figure it out last night." …Damn it. That was the most annoying kind of answer. Not a dig—just the calm acknowledgment that she'd believed I was capable of it and I'd simply, demonstrably, failed to deliver. Worse for the ego than being laughed at. I snapped my textbook shut and stood up.

"I'm skipping next period." A few people in the front row turned to look at me like they were witnessing the final stage of a slow mental collapse. Maki, unsurprised, picked up her own books and stood alongside me.

"Where to?"

"Library," I said.

"I need to find out whether last night's conversation was tactical housing planning or collective delusion."

"I'll come."

"How do you always make it sound like an afterthought?"

"Because I was already going," she said, perfectly calm.

"And if you go alone, you'll be fighting the regulations manual within thirty minutes." She really was getting better at mapping my behavior patterns. I was about to argue, but Jess leaned in from behind, beaming like she'd just scored front-row seats.

"Oh, the truancy duo rides again? Shimo, you've evolved to the point where you even have company when you skip class. That's real quality-of-life improvement."

"You want to come?"

"No, I'd like to preserve what little remains of my self-image as a law-abiding citizen." She waved us off cheerfully.

"Go, go. Find out what the regulations actually say. If you discover eleven people can apply, I'm starting my apartment research tonight." That, more than anything, made me want to go confirm. The UIMA Central Library was more crowded in the late morning than the afternoon. Crowded enough that walking in, you stopped thinking of it as a library and started thinking of it as a slow digestive organ—one that swallowed students whole and eventually expelled the remains as junior officer candidates.

The atrium dome cut the morning light into sections that fell across the floor and railings. Students crossing the second-floor walkways moved with the purposeful misery of white ants driven by invisible whips, arms full of documents, terminals, textbooks, and souls being slowly crushed by credit requirements. We went up to the east reading section on the second floor. Quieter here. High shelves, deep table alcoves, softer light.

Good for studying, good for falling asleep, and excellent for discovering that regulations were more trap than text. I spread everything across the table—terminal, housing guidelines, textbook, last night's conditions list—and opened with maximum directness.

"How many people are we actually counting?" Maki sat down and opened her terminal with the manner of a physician pulling up a patient file for someone who had finally asked the right question.

"If it's just the core group from field training, eight," she said.

"But it's not just that group anymore."

"No." She pulled up the student practicum housing and unit composition guidelines, tapping through a few screens.

"So the real question isn't 'how many people'—it's—" She turned the terminal toward me.

"Whether more than eight can still apply." I stared at the screen. The title was long—very long. The Federation's gift for taking one sentence of plain language and expanding it into sixteen annotated subclauses was on full display. I skipped the preamble and went straight to the text. Top-team off-campus housing application eligibility: Practicum units designated for pre-finals deployment shall consist of no fewer than eight members as a baseline.

Subject to mission scope, academic track, coordination requirements, and housing conditions, units may expand to ten to twelve members. Three seconds of silence. Then, with complete sincerity:"… Shit." Maki looked at me, perfectly calm.

"Yes."

"So eight is the floor, not the ceiling?"

"Correct."

"Then last night's eight-person budget meeting—""Was a spirited discussion built on a false premise." Clean, precise, delivered without hesitation. I put my forehead on the table. My voice came out muffled.

"I hate regulations."

"You don't hate regulations." Maki reached over and moved my terminal out of the collision zone.

"You hate that you didn't read them first."

"You're genuinely bad at comfort."

"I'm not trying to comfort you." … Fair. Very her. I lifted my head and read the line again. Ten to twelve members. Counting Roy and Lan, we had eleven. Exactly in range. That was a strange feeling. Like you'd been quietly convinced you were over the limit, then opened the rulebook to find you weren't just compliant—you were in the recommended window. In moments like that, your feelings about the system got complicated. Yesterday it was barbed wire. Today it was a ladder.

The Federation was very good at producing realists.

"So we can apply," I said, half to myself.

"Yes." Maki nodded.

"And eleven people actually makes a stronger case for requesting a full residential unit rather than trying to squeeze into standard student apartments."

"Full residential unit…" She pulled up another appendix and slid it toward me.

"With eleven people, you can't approach this as 'renting a few rooms,'" she said.

"You need to think in terms of floor configuration." I looked at the document. It wasn't listing square footage. It was listing residential needs by function. The longer I read, the more it stopped looking like student housing and started looking like a requirements brief for a small forward operating base. Maki tapped her pen on my open notebook.

"Start with the broad framework," she said.

"Tonight, don't let the discussion get stuck on 'how many beds per room' right out of the gate."

"You're making it sound like we were planning a city with stone tools last night."

"More or less." Infuriating. Also unanswerable. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. She pulled my notebook slightly toward her and started writing—fast and neat, as always.

"First pass: overall floor configuration." She wrote and recited simultaneously:"Men's floor. Women's floor. Common space floor. Rooftop laundry. Elevator." I looked at those five lines, and something shifted from abstract to concrete. Not "living off-campus" as a concept anymore. An actual building. One that could hold eleven people and let them live like something resembling human beings.

Men's floor—at minimum, D's walking style, which suggested a personal grievance with all structural integrity, wouldn't be registering as seismic activity above my head. Women's floor—Jess's 2 a. m. laughing fits wouldn't wake the entire building. Common space floor—meetings, meals, studying, arguments, gear discussions, all centralized. Rooftop laundry— I stopped and looked at Maki.

"Hold on. Isn't rooftop laundry basically a guaranteed social disaster zone?" She paused mid-writing.

"Yes."

"You're agreeing surprisingly fast."

"Because you're right." She finished the line, tone unchanged.

"But separating laundry from the living floors is more practical than cramming wet uniforms and training gear into residential space." I clicked my tongue.

"Fine. That one stays." Maki glanced up at me, and there was the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.

"The elevator matters too."

"I know—books, gear, people, all easier to move."

"Including you."

"What do you mean, including me?"

"If you fall asleep over your textbooks again like yesterday, at least someone can get you back to your room without carrying you up stairs." I nearly choked.

"…Have you been getting progressively more comfortable saying things that are technically out of bounds?"

"No." She looked back down, as if nothing had happened.

"I'm just describing practical logistics." …Right. That was the most dangerous part. She delivered lines that made your ears warm in exactly the same tone she used for risk assessments, then wore the expression of someone doing routine safety checks. Absolutely no sportsmanship. I pulled my attention back and kept writing.

"So first pass is floor configuration, second pass is functional infrastructure?"

"Yes." She nodded.

"Bathrooms, kitchen scale, dining or shared eating space, cold storage, lockers—none of that can be sorted until the floor model is established first, or it becomes noise."

"Room assignments last?"

"Last." Maki glanced at me.

"Because that's where things get ugly." I agreed completely. With eleven people under one roof, the thing most likely to blow through rational thought wasn't tactical assignments. It was: Who sleeps where. How. Whether everyone gets their own room. That sentence sounded dangerous on its own. It was equally dangerous in a housing context.

"Shared rooms are cheaper," I said.

"But long-term, they grind people down."

"Private rooms are comfortable."

"But expensive, and they fragment unit cohesion." I looked at her.

"You've already worked through all of this, haven't you."

"Not all of it," she said, evenly.

"I've just pre-sorted the things you'll definitely argue about tonight." Two seconds of silence. Then, with genuine sincerity:"You are genuinely suited to being a pre-disaster preparation checklist."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I know." … Damn it. We roughed out the major infrastructure points: Bathrooms—enough of them, or eleven people sharing would generate actual hatred before the week was out. Kitchen—functional, not decorative. Eleven people needed to be able to use it in rotation without it becoming a performance space. Dining or shared eating area—adequate, or everyone would end up crouching in separate corners with meal boxes like refugees.

Cold storage, freezer, lockers—sufficient, especially if certain people had a habit of hoarding cola under their beds, which ideally the system could regulate. At that point Maki added one more line.

"Parking." I blinked.

"…Right." I'd nearly missed that entirely.

"Because some of us are adults?" I asked.

"Reserve multiple spaces at minimum," she said.

"Even if not everyone needs them now, gear transport, borrowed vehicles, break travel, additional movement before finals—it'll come up. No parking is a real problem."

"You're talking about this like we're not renting housing, we're taking over a small military installation." Maki asked, with complete calm: "Is there much of a difference?" …Fair point. There really wasn't. I was writing minimum two parking spaces when my terminal buzzed. The caller ID was a single letter. D Maki and I exchanged a look. I picked up.

"Yeah?" D's end was noisy. Not chaotic—cafeteria noisy. The specific noise of many people talking, trays colliding, chairs scraping tile, aging air conditioning, and students who hadn't yet starved to death.

"Everyone's in the Academy cafeteria." Straight to it, not a wasted syllable.

"Get over here." I frowned.

"Now?"

"Now." A brief pause, like he'd checked the people around him before adding: "Harvey says since you and Kushima went to check the regulations, don't waste it. We're locking in the framework today." …Perfect. This group had moved past having ideas into executing faster than should be humanly possible. I glanced at Maki. She gave a small, unhurried nod—the nod of someone who had already predicted the evening wouldn't be quiet.

"On our way," I said. After I hung up, I set the terminal on the table and let out a long breath.

"How'd it go?" Maki asked.

"Everyone's in the cafeteria." I closed my notebook.

"D's calling it. Looks like tonight's not optional." Maki gathered her materials and stood, and as she did, she collected my half-finished conditions list and slipped it back between the pages without being asked. Natural as a reflex. Like we'd already become a fixed routine.

"Good timing, then," she said.

"Good timing for what?"

"You won't have to sit with it alone." She looked at me, tone steady.

"Everyone's going to argue about it together tonight anyway." … That was strangely reassuring. Annoying. I picked up my books and walked out with her. The library's afternoon light was still quiet—quiet enough to feel like it didn't know yet how the institutional machine outside was about to bite. But I knew the moment we walked into that cafeteria, today's real trouble would officially begin. Because this wasn't just about whether we could live off-campus.

It was about eleven people—starting to figure out how to fit each other into daily life, the way people do when they're actually going to be thrown onto a ship together. That evening, the Academy cafeteria felt more like a combat zone than usual. Not because anyone was fighting. Just that military academy students at dinner carried a baseline energy of if the food doesn't arrive soon, we may start consuming the furniture, and this particular evening had that in full supply.

D was at a long table toward the back—obvious from across the room. Wherever that man sat, the surrounding space seemed to quietly agree it should stay put. Harvey had his terminal open beside two trays, eating and organizing data simultaneously, having apparently decided that combining meetings with meals was basic time management virtue. Akari was at the far end of the table, her face wearing its default expression of don't make me waste an expression on you.

Roy and Lan were both there too—Roy looking like someone who'd just been conscripted into a budget committee, Lan having already claimed the seat with the clearest sightline to the whole table. Jess was in the middle and waved enthusiastically when she saw me coming.

"There she is! Welcome to Squad 144's First Semi-Official Residential Conspiracy Meeting."

"Your naming instincts really do belong at an accident scene."

"Thank you so much." Maki sat down beside me. D, wasting no time, pulled the conversation back on course.

"Report," he said, looking at me.

"What did the regulations say?" I opened my notebook to this afternoon's page.

"Eight is the floor, not the ceiling," I said.

"The guidelines are explicit—practicum units no fewer than eight members, expandable to ten to twelve based on mission scope and coordination requirements. Eleven of us. We're compliant." A beat of silence around the table. Then Roy exhaled first.

"Okay. So at least the first problem isn't 'are we illegally running an oversized squad.'" Lan nodded, tone measured.

"Then let's talk about how we'd actually live." Harvey gestured for me to continue. I read out the first-pass framework Maki and I had drafted this afternoon:"Overall configuration first. Men's floor, women's floor, common space floor, rooftop laundry, elevator."

"Agreed." D, first.

"Agreed." Akari.

"Rooftop laundry, absolutely." Jess nodded fast.

"I want front-row seats when someone accidentally runs all the uniforms together and gets publicly executed for it."

"Your spectator priorities are remarkably consistent," I said.

"I have principles." Lan spoke then, voice quiet but precise.

"Separating by floor eliminates a lot of friction upfront. The common space is non-negotiable too—without a fixed meeting point, living and preparation just collapse into each other." Roy raised his hand with the energy of someone who had already envisioned his own future suffering.

"I'm voting for the elevator. Eleven people moving books and gear and supplies—no elevator and we die in the stairwell before finals."

"That's the most coherent thing you've said in recent memory," Harvey noted.

"I've decided to take that as a compliment today." I almost laughed. All right. Nobody was fighting yet. I kept going.

"Second pass: functional infrastructure. Bathrooms, kitchen, dining space, cold storage, lockers."

"Bathrooms first," Jess cut in immediately.

"Eleven people, insufficient bathrooms—the first thing to break before finals won't be morale. It'll be civilization."

"Each floor needs to have enough," Lan said.

"Men's floor can't be skimped on." Roy looked very serious.

"I mean it." Akari delivered a quiet, precise strike:"That sounds like self-awareness."

"I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for humanity in general." D ignored the entire exchange and returned to practicalities.

"Kitchen needs to handle volume. Not just reheating things." Harvey nodded.

"Right. And proper cold storage—fridge and freezer both. Eleven people's worth of food and drinks doesn't fit in a student mini-fridge." Jess looked up immediately.

"Beverages need to be listed as a formal requirement." I looked at her.

"Are you trying to classify junk food as combat supplies?"

"Not trying. They already are." Completely serious.

"In high-pressure environments, sugar and morale are critical operational resources." Maki added, serenely:"Cola quantities will be regulated." Jess clutched her chest and performed a theatrical death.

"You see this? This is what institutional violence actually looks like."

"You don't have to drink it," Maki said.

"That's not an option, I need to survive." …Hard to argue with that. The conversation slid naturally into the most dangerous territory. Rooms. Harvey opened, with the tone of someone announcing a deeply unwelcome actuarial result.

"Individual rooms are the most comfortable and the least realistic—unless we actually end up in officer housing and the subsidies come through better than expected."

"Open dormitory is cheapest and most efficient at generating collective resentment," Akari said. I looked at her.

"That sounds like experience talking."

"Doesn't require experience. Just logic." Lan set down her utensils and organized her thoughts carefully.

"The most stable option is separate rooms, but not all singles," she said.

"Some people need solitude. Some do better with someone nearby. All singles is too fragmented, open dorms are too compressed—doubles or small triples balance it better." Roy nodded immediately.

"I vote separate rooms. If I'm in an open dorm and someone grinds their teeth, I'll want to commit a crime by day three." Jess's smile turned wicked.

"Don't worry, you won't be first. Shimo will have already smothered the entire floor with a pillow because someone turned over too loudly at 2 a. m."

"I'm not that violent," I said. The whole table looked at me. …Right. The more I argued, the more I confirmed it. D tapped his knuckles on the table and delivered a very D summary.

"Don't lock in room types yet. Just list requirements. Separate rooms preferred, open dorm absolutely not."

"Parking," Maki added then. Everyone turned to look at her. She held the same steady tone, like she was filling in the piece that should have been thought of first and always arrived last.

"Multiple spaces minimum," she said.

"Some of us are adults. Even if not everyone has a vehicle now, there will be borrowed cars, passenger transport, gear movement, travel to practicum sites. No parking means significantly reduced mobility." D nodded.

"Two spaces at minimum." Harvey agreed.

"Two is the floor." Jess let out a low whistle.

"We really are planning a small forward operating base, not looking for an apartment." I looked down at the rows of conditions in my notebook, and something strange settled over me. Last night we were still saying living off-campus sounds nice. Tonight, eleven people were sitting in the Academy cafeteria having a serious discussion about floor configuration, bathroom count, dining space, cold storage, room types, and parking—discussing it like we weren't moving in, we were deploying.

And what was worse: None of it was empty. Every item was real. Every item connected to something—daily life, studying, rest, friction, and whether anyone would arrive on Yukikaze already broken by their own living conditions. I realized something. We weren't picking a more comfortable place to live. We were using a life we hadn't started yet to test, in advance, whether this unit could actually board a ship together. That thought almost made me laugh. The Federation was a genuinely disgusting place.

It offered you privilege with one hand and used the other to set up a larger arena where you had to prove whether you deserved to be sent somewhere more dangerous. And we were worse. We knew exactly what it was, and we were still sitting here seriously drafting conditions, trying to extract every last gram of use from it. Harvey tapped the rim of his plate with his fork.

"That's enough for today," he said.

"Conditions only, no submission yet. Once the list is finalized, we look at actual properties. If we're using that Platinum Bridge connection—" He didn't say the name outright, but everyone at the table knew who he meant. Aida Rosen. The Defense Committee Chair's daughter. If anyone could bring officer residential housing—the kind of option that sounded like a corruption trap—to the table in the most legitimate and procedurally defensible way possible, it was probably her. I didn't pick up that thread.

I just closed my notebook.

"That's it for tonight," I said.

"We have conditions. We have a framework. Everything else continues tomorrow." No one objected. Because everyone understood: getting eleven people's requirements organized into something this coherent in a single session was already a reasonable day's work. The cafeteria lights ran warm and yellow. Dinner heat and conversation layered over each other, and the whole scene suddenly felt like something that didn't quite belong in a military academy. Not warm, exactly. Not sentimental enough for that.

More like: a group of people who would each have died separately in different places, sitting down together and drawing the first halfway-decent blueprint for what if we tried to survive this together. More troublesome than a firestorm. A firestorm just wanted to kill you. A unit would grind you down while you were still breathing—and in the process train you to accept that some things wouldn't be decided by you alone ever again. I didn't like that feeling. Unfortunately, it was already a little late.