Chương 159: 60. Allocation 1

If the first round of room assignments had been pre-war positioning, then someone had just pulled the pin and politely informed everyone: "Feel free." I stayed quiet for three seconds. Not because I had nothing to say. It was because I suddenly understood, with perfect clarity, that if this went wrong, the third floor's daily reality wouldn't be "girls harmoniously sharing an off-campus dorm."

It would be "seven dangerous individuals with distinct agendas and volatile emotions garrisoned along a single corridor, with me living precisely at ground zero." In other words: I deserved this. Jess raised her hand first.

"I'll go on record. I support me living next to Shimo."

"Vetoed," Maki said.

"I haven't even given my reasons yet."

"You could give them. Still vetoed."

"Hey, that's not very democratic of you."

"We're discussing residential security, not hosting a talent show."

"I am the security." I glanced at her.

"You're the incident."

"Thanks. You finally admit I have main-character energy."

"I admit you have disaster-level impact." Jess showed no shame whatsoever. Instead, she cheerfully dragged her chair forward and laced her fingers together, striking the full pose of someone about to deliver a campaign speech.

"Everyone, my platform is simple. Shimo here says she doesn't need it, but her actual ability to maintain functional stability depends entirely on 'someone keeping an eye on her.' She forgets to eat. She reads until her soul leaves her body. She's so stubborn she'll insist she's fine right up until she drops dead from exhaustion. Someone like that, living in the central position, needs a neighbor with high mobility, fast situational response, and zero fear of being glared at."

She paused and pointed at herself with no apparent shame.

"I meet every requirement." Harvey was the first to boo.

"What you meet is 'unafraid of getting punched.'" Roy pushed his glasses up, delivering a steadier follow-through.

"Also 'highly likely to personally generate the incidents she'd need to respond to at 2 a. m.'" D crossed his arms, voice flat.

"Risk factor's too high."

"Could you not gang up on me just because you're jealous of my charisma?" Jess turned to me, eyes suspiciously bright.

"Shimo, tell them. Haven't you already gotten used to having someone like me around? Someone who checks in on you, keeps you on your toes, and occasionally rescues you from dying of boredom?"

"What I'm used to is you generating extra work for me."

"Wow. Ice cold."

"Accurate, though," Akari said. Only then did Maki slowly set her terminal down. Her movements weren't large, and her voice wasn't loud, but that distinct I am now officially responding aura she projected was enough to make everyone at the table automatically go quiet for half a beat.

"If we're laying out qualifications," she said, looking at Jess, "then I'll state mine." Jess smiled and spread her hands.

"By all means." Maki's tone stayed light.

"First: I currently know Shimo's schedule, habits, study rhythm, downtime patterns, and how often she forgets to eat better than anyone here. Second: I don't generate noise, and I don't redistribute her materials across every surface she needs tomorrow. Third: if something actually happens at night—nightmares, feeling sick, or her pushing herself past the breaking point again—my response will be more effective than yours." She paused, then slid the knife in.

"And finally, I don't help while also enjoying the show." Jess blinked.

"That last part was the real attack, wasn't it?"

"Good that you caught it." I quietly turned my face away. The problem was that every single thing Maki had said made sense. Too much sense. So much sense that I couldn't just swat it away with a casual "shut up" like I could with Jess. Because lately I really had, very unfortunately, gotten used to her quiet, surgically precise interventions—which book I'd left open, where my pen had rolled, whether I'd skipped lunch again, whether I was saying "I'm fine" when my eyes were already half dead.

Having someone map out the small edges of your life like that should feel dangerous. What was more dangerous was that I'd started treating it like a built-in convenience. Jess had clearly picked up on that too, because her smile sharpened into something with more teeth.

"Maki, that's not fair." She propped her chin in her hand, voice going artificially sweet.

"We're assigning rooms here, not filling out a marriage certificate." The table went dead silent for half a second. Harvey coughed like something had gone down wrong. Roy pushed his glasses higher, adopting the clear posture of someone who had not heard anything that should appear in any official record. Lan pressed two fingers to her brow, looking like she was reconsidering why she studied, why she lived, and why she was sitting at this table trying to chair a meeting.

I calmly crumpled a napkin and pegged Jess in the forehead with reasonable precision.

"Ow."

"Say that again and I'm putting you in the top-floor laundry room so you can date the dryer."

"That's not so bad. At least it's consistently warm."

"Your standards are genuinely rock bottom." Maki didn't snap back immediately. She just looked at Jess for a moment, then said: "If you only want to mess with Shimo, living right next to her isn't actually what you want."

"Oh?" Jess tilted her head.

"Then what would I want?"

"One room over," Maki said, without inflection.

"Enough distance to be chaotic without actually disturbing her sleep." I almost laughed. That was brutally clean. Jess stalled for a beat, then started clapping.

"Beautiful. Really beautiful. That thing you do—prop someone up and sort them into a category while you're at it—you're getting more and more like your sister." Maki's expression didn't shift.

"Right back at you. You're getting more and more like someone who swaps name tags at diplomatic receptions."

"Thank you, I'll take that as a compliment on my initiative."

"It wasn't one." I realized that the way they were talking to each other had stopped being ordinary bickering. This was close-quarters swordwork wrapped in civilized language. No blood showing, but every thrust knew exactly where to go. What made it worse was that the subject of their duel was me. It felt like watching two people claim the same strategic high ground and politely ask whether I minded being the contested objective. I minded very much. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about that.

Aida's message appeared in the group chat. Aida: Listening in so far. Let me summarize. Aida: Jess is advocating for a "high-mobility incident-response neighbor." Aida: Maki is advocating for a "low-noise stable-support neighbor." Aida: The former optimizes for life as theater. The latter optimizes for life continuing to function. Jess replied instantly. Jess: Senpai, that summary is very hostile to me. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Aida: I'm just describing neutrally. Shimo: That sentence has about as much credibility as the Student Council's moral record. Aida came back faster than I expected. Aida: Which means you already understand how things work here. I turned my terminal face-down on the table. No. These people in high positions were too practiced at landing precision strikes. If I let them keep participating remotely, the third floor was going to end up carved into actual territorial zones. D cut in with his usual practicality.

"Set the emotion aside first."

"Isn't that a little too idealistic for a third-floor discussion?" I said.

"Can't set it aside? Pretend you can." D's expression didn't change.

"Operationally speaking, the two rooms adjacent to Shimo should serve two functions. One: stability. Two: buffer." Roy nodded immediately.

"Right. If she's in the central position, at least one side needs someone who can handle emergencies, and the other side needs someone who won't create them."

"Sounds like we're installing fire suppression equipment," Harvey said.

"For Shimo, that's about right," Akari said.

"Hey," I protested.

"Think about it." Akari looked at me with her permanently half-asleep dead-fish eyes.

"Who in this group is currently most likely to trigger a chain reaction?" I thought about it. And arrived, with some sadness, at the conclusion that the answer was probably me. Not because I was particularly good at causing trouble, but because this group had recently developed an excessive interest in anything involving me—where I lived, what I studied, who I walked with, whether I'd eaten, whether I was tired. Any of those topics and someone immediately went into combat readiness.

This was not good for cardiac health. Lan finally managed to drag the conversation back into meeting format.

"Let's set a principle first. Shimo takes the interior central room. The two adjacent rooms: one skews toward stable support, one skews toward controllable buffer. Does everyone accept that?"

"Accepted," D said.

"Accepted," Roy said.

"I have reservations, but I accept that it sounds very dramatic," Jess said.

"Accepted," Maki said.

"I don't accept being described as public infrastructure, but I appear to have no veto power," I said.

"Congratulations on recognizing reality," Jess said cheerfully. Which narrowed the problem down to something smaller and considerably more brutal. Who was stable support. Who was controllable buffer. Maki got voted into the first category without much contest. Nearly unanimous. Even Jess didn't argue.

"As much as I want to give her grief," Jess said, chewing on her straw, "I'll admit Maki's the better fit for this. She's already evolved into someone who tracks Shimo's books, reminds her to drink water, and can apparently sense in advance which days she's going to be in a worse mood. That's not normal clinginess. That's a semi-automated life management system." I glared at her.

"That description is offensive."

"But extremely precise," Harvey said. Maki didn't even deny it. She just said, very calmly: "At least I don't let her skip dinner every time she gets busy." The moment those words left her mouth, several people at the table turned to look at me. I immediately had a bad feeling.

"... Don't look at me like that." Roy glanced down at his terminal.

"Wednesday this week. Lunch. Skipped." Lan pulled up her records.

"Last Friday. Dinner pushed to twenty-one-thirty." Jess's grin was insufferable.

"If someone hadn't delivered food to the library that day, you'd probably have achieved enlightenment by now."

"Why do you people have logs of this?"

"Because you have a talent for becoming the kind of person who needs to be on record," Akari said. I said nothing. This wasn't me losing. This was me being buried alive by my own recent history on a fundamentally unfair battlefield. So Maki was pushed, with very little suspense, into the top slot for stable support. When the question shifted to the other side, things got messier. Because "controllable buffer" had sounded like it was describing Jess, but it came with too many attached risks.

Jess, naturally, refused to concede.

"Wait, if Maki takes the stability slot, then I take the buffer slot—isn't that perfect? One on each side, complementary strengths, Shimo with full coverage. Ideal arrangement."

"That's not complementary strengths," I said.

"That's pacification on one side and active demolition on the other."

"That's called balance."

"That's called structural risk," Roy said coldly. Harvey nodded, still chewing his cracker.

"Yeah. And if Jess lives next to Shimo, the first sound you'll hear at midnight won't be an alarm. It'll be laughter."

"Laughter is better than crying, isn't it?" Jess said with conviction.

"Has it occurred to you that sometimes the crying is caused by the laughter?" I asked. Aida landed another remote strike. Aida: From a management perspective, I wouldn't recommend placing the two people most likely to compromise Shimo's sleep quality in adjacent rooms. Jess objected. Jess: Hold on. Two people? Who's the second one? Aida took two seconds to reply. Aida: You. Aida: The other one is Shimo herself. I stared at that message and found nothing to argue with. This was what made her genuinely terrifying.

She could always find the most objective, most professionally measured tone available, and use it to say something that made you want to throw your terminal into the soup. Jess burst out laughing.

"Okay, fair. I'll give her that. Shimo really is also a nighttime risk factor."

"Thank you so much. I'm deeply moved by your collective investment in my sleep quality," I said dryly. The discussion stalled for a few minutes. Lan was drawing lines on paper, D was studying configurations, Roy was recalculating pathways, Harvey looked like he was enjoying a fire he hadn't started, and Akari resembled a fish sunning itself on the shore—too lazy to move, but every comment precise enough to make you want to kick her back into the water.

The one who finally broke the stalemate was, unexpectedly, Maki.

"I'll step back," she said. Everyone looked at her. Jess raised an eyebrow.

"Oh?" Maki turned her terminal around and pointed to the floor plan.

"I take one room next to Shimo. The other doesn't have to be assigned." The table went quiet for a full two seconds.

"... What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean we designate it as a flexible room for now." Maki looked at me, her tone as calm as if she were arranging shelf space.

"Temporary document storage, shared quiet room, or rotating use. That way Shimo doesn't have someone on both sides, Jess can still be nearby, but not directly next door." Jess's expression shifted from amusement to something more serious in half a second. Because she'd understood. This was a brilliant move. Brilliant to the point of being almost devious. Maki wasn't going for a greedy play—claiming both sides for herself.

Instead, she voluntarily gave up one slot, which made her look generous, reasonable, functionally minded, even mature. The kind of proposal that comes from someone thinking about overall operations. But the actual effect was this: she secured absolute priority at my side and quietly pushed Jess from next door to in the vicinity. The execution was clean enough to send a chill down your spine. Jess smiled. Not the easy, spectator's smile from before.

This was the smile that appeared when she'd finally found a worthy opponent—the kind that meant she was actually more pleased, not less.

"Maki, you really are getting good at this."

"I just think it's the quieter arrangement."

"Come on." Jess propped her chin in her hand, eyes bright.

"That was a territorial declaration wearing a management costume." Maki didn't deny it. She even tilted her chin up, slightly.

"Are you going to object?"... Wow. Something entirely without dignity moved through me. That sentence didn't belong to the usual quiet, clingy Maki. This was someone who was still sitting at a dining table and already thinking in terms of territorial warfare. Jess looked at her for a long moment, then suddenly turned to me.

"Shimo, what do you think?" Every eye at the table followed. I understood immediately. They'd been arguing all this time and had only now remembered that the contested territory was still alive, present, and theoretically entitled to some pathetic scrap of input. I stared at the floor plan. Then at the corridor that was about to be haunted by this conversation. And I thought about it, seriously. If Jess lived next door, I'd probably want to strangle her within the first week.

If Maki controlled both sides, the power structure on the third floor would go quiet in a way that was worse than noise. If both sides were occupied, any late-night knock from either direction would immediately be known to the other. If one side stayed flexible... that actually did seem safer. At least for my heart. I raised my head slowly.

"... For now, we go with what Maki said," I said. Jess narrowed her eyes.

"Well, well." Maki's expression didn't change much, but something in her eyes shifted—like someone who had won and was working very hard not to look like it. I cut in before Jess could respond.

"Temporarily. Because what we're discussing right now is survival, not anyone's personal interests."

"My personal interest is keeping you alive," Jess protested.

"Your personal interests also include watching me embarrass myself."

"That's added value." Harvey completely lost it. D gave a single nod, the kind that closes a meeting.

"Noted for the third floor, round two: Shimo takes the central room, Maki takes one adjacent side, the other side remains flexible for now, reassessed after move-in." Roy added the follow-up immediately.

"Also noted: Jess is not permitted to unilaterally treat the flexible room as her personal annex."

"Hey!" Jess slapped the table.

"That's targeted harassment!"

"Not targeted," Lan said.

"Preventive."

"You people have a serious bias problem." Akari finally delivered her verdict, with the energy of someone who had not fully woken up and did not plan to.

"Not bias. Just everyone's been alive long enough to know." Half a second of silence, and then the whole table laughed. I laughed too. Couldn't help it. Too accurate. This third-floor bloodbath, which had organized itself entirely around the question of who got to live next to me, settled temporarily into something that looked rational on the surface and was absolutely riddled with sentiment and self-interest underneath. Maki had secured the most critical position.

Jess wasn't happy about it, but she hadn't pushed it to the mat either. Aida had delivered remote strikes with the serenity of someone on a pleasant afternoon stroll. Everyone else had performed their supporting roles—spectators, instigators, record-keepers, and accelerants—with admirable commitment. I sat there, looking at the group chat and the faces around the table, and something strange settled over me. This was just the room next door. We hadn't even moved in yet.

And they had already generated, over the question of who should be closest to me, a complete body of logic and emotional wreckage thorough enough to fill an operational manual. Honestly, it was a little terrifying. And also a little— Never mind. I wasn't admitting that out loud right now. I picked up my cup and drank what had long since become cold soup, then spoke before anyone could redirect the conflict toward the question of who would end up using the flexible room most often.

"Stop. We're done for today." Jess immediately objected.

"Hey—it was just getting good."

"Can your life please stop requiring other people's drama to function?"

"No." Maki, characteristically, was the most decisive. She just closed her terminal.

"Right. Done for today." That one gesture was enough. Everyone else let the fire go out. I watched her do it—the completely natural way she'd held the ending in place for me—and felt a dim premonition of trouble. At this rate, the most dangerous thing on the third floor wasn't going to be Jess, or the room assignments. It was going to be me, gradually deciding that this feeling of being caught by her was just how things worked. That was the genuinely lethal part. I exhaled slowly, somewhere inside. Great.

The room situation wasn't even resolved, and the problem had already evolved. And I was entirely certain that tomorrow, without question, there would be further developments. Group 144 had never once let any engagement end in two rounds.