Chương 161: 60. Allocation 3

The day Group 144 officially moved into 22 Platinum Bridge Street, the weather was perfect. A bad sign. In my experience, the more a day looks like it was designed for moving in, for starting fresh, for carrying boxes through a wide entryway while a pleasant soundtrack plays in the background—the higher the probability that it ends in chaos. I was right. We were using a staggered-move system. Reasonable in principle. But Group 144 had a talent for taking reasonable things and growing them sideways.

By early morning, the first wave of belongings had already accumulated outside the front door of twenty-two: boxes, books, terminals, folding tables, clothing, toolkits, tactical boards, miscellaneous daily supplies, and several crates of indeterminate contents that I had no interest in asking about. I stood at the entrance and watched D and Harvey carry a heavy crate inside, one on each side, and my first thought was: this isn't a move. This is a small irregular unit relocating its base of operations.

Jess came in dragging two rolling bags and announced immediately upon crossing the threshold: "For the record, I want the room with the best light." Maki walked in behind her, arms full of organized file folders, without looking at her.

"You were already vetoed yesterday."

"Yesterday's veto was for adjacency rights. Not lighting rights."

"You have a very extensive personal rights portfolio."

"I take residential quality seriously."

"You take dramatic effect seriously," I said.

"Those aren't mutually exclusive." Lan had already produced her move-in checklist, which was formatted like a military supply manifest.

"Stop arguing. Today runs in three stages: move belongings, confirm rooms, organize common areas. Anyone who starts claiming rooms during stage one gets their name in the violations column." Harvey raised his hand.

"What happens if you're in the violations column?"

"You clean the kitchen."

"... I've always been a very rule-abiding person, actually."

"Excellent," Lan said, without expression.

"Then start by moving that crate of tools to the basement." The basement. Harvey's eyes lit up at those two words like something carnivorous and engineering-minded had just been told it could eat. The first thing he cared about on move-in day wasn't his bed, his desk, or the bathroom. It was the basement.

"Main unit goes down first?" he murmured to D.

"Down, not installed," D said.

"Why not?"

"Because once you install it, you won't surface before dinner."

"... Fair point." Listening to them was giving me a headache. These two weren't talking like people moving into a new house. They sounded like they'd finally located suitable terrain for a command node. On the other side, the girls' floor had already entered a different kind of war. The moment the third-floor doors opened, Jess made her move.

"I'm checking the room with the best light—" She didn't finish. Maki caught her luggage handle from behind in one clean motion. Not forceful, just precise.

"Follow yesterday's provisional assignments." Jess turned around, wounded.

"You really love destroying youth."

"You really love creating problems."

"That's what makes life interesting."

"We don't need you to make it more interesting." I dragged my suitcase up the stairs, watching the two of them face off in the middle of the corridor, and had exactly one thought: excellent. Day one, and the battle lines are forming on schedule. Akari had already ghosted her minimal luggage into the quietest room with an efficiency that suggested she existed entirely outside the range of human social friction. Lan was measuring the distance between her door and the bathroom.

Evelyn stood in a doorway, checking outlet placement and potential signal interference from the walls. As for me— I looked at my room and went quiet for two seconds. Not too big, not too small. Just right. Centrally placed, close to the stairs, one shared wall with Maki, the flexible room on the other side. Yesterday this had been the subject of a diplomatic crisis in the group chat. Standing in the actual doorway today, it felt strangely unreal. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent.

Report sightings. Maki came up behind me, footsteps soft.

"Something wrong?"

"Nothing." I pulled my suitcase inside.

"Just—it's actually starting." She stood beside me and glanced into the room.

"Yeah." Then she naturally took one of the bags from my hand—the one full of books.

"I'll put this in for you."

"I can do it myself."

"You still have a second trip downstairs."

"... How do you know that?" Maki looked at me with an expression of absolute calm that was genuinely infuriating.

"Because you brought more books than clothes." I shut up. Because she was right. After noon, the whole building entered phase two chaos. The common areas were being properly occupied.

The enormous dining table on the first floor went through rapid evolution: buried under boxes, half-cleared, then gradually acquired Jess's drinks, Roy's move-in checklist, Harvey's screw organizers, and my textbooks, until it had successfully transformed into a hybrid meeting table, dining surface, temporary storage platform, and source of ambient psychological damage. The kitchen was even better.

The moment that oversized refrigerator hummed to life, it was like someone had fired the opening shot of a territorial war.

"Desserts go on the top shelf."

"Keep drinks separate from raw food."

"Who put energy drinks in the vegetable section?"

"That's not the vegetable section, that's my temporary zone."

"There are no temporary zones in the refrigerator."

"There is now."

"No." I stood in the doorway and watched Maki and Jess conduct an extremely civilized but thoroughly combustible negotiation over whether a box of pudding belonged on the second shelf, and suddenly understood: some wars don't need a front line. You just need to put a group of people in the same kitchen and give them a big enough refrigerator. Lan organized the cookware and dry goods cabinet.

Her movements were efficient to the point of being unsettling—twenty minutes and the counter that had looked like it had been carpet-bombed by a moving company was back in order. Roy stood beside her with his checklist, noting what was missing and calculating replacement costs. D handled heavy items, checked door locks, and walked the floor plan.

Akari sat at the living room table looking like she was spacing out, but whenever someone couldn't find something, she would lazily point out: "You put it behind the second box on the left." I suspected she wasn't spacing out at all. She just didn't want to look like she was working. As for Harvey— He was in the basement. From 1400 onward, he never fully emerged.

Every so often he'd surface from the freight elevator side with tools, tape, or some kind of adapter that I took one look at and decided not to ask about, muttering things like "this space actually works" and "ventilation's better than expected" and "the power supply is suspiciously stable." In his own way, he had probably already fallen in love with the building. By evening, the operation had shifted from "large-scale material invasion" to "first official meal." This should have been a warm moment.

First dinner in the new place, everyone working together in the big kitchen, warm lighting, good smells, a bit of ordinary bickering, then eleven people around the long table to mark something new beginning. That's what a normal story would give you. Unfortunately, we weren't that story. The reality:"Who put the knife in the wrong drawer!"

"That's not wrong, that's provisional!"

"Provisional is wrong!"

"Is this pot too big?"

"There are eleven of us. Were you going to use a field ration tin?"

"Who bought this much meat?"

"Me," D said.

"Who bought this much junk food?"

"Me," Jess said.

"Who bought three different brands of high-caffeine drinks?"

"... Me," Harvey called from the basement.

"Who started planning a logistics supply system on day one of move-in?"

"... All of us," Roy said, completely honest. I stood at the counter chopping vegetables when it struck me that this scene was absurd enough to be a documentary. The title would be: How Eleven Military Cadets Attempted to Cook Their First Edible Dinner in a Suspiciously High-End Residence of Questionable Origin Maki was prepping ingredients beside me. Clean movements, no wasted motion, no performance. But standing next to her, you could feel the rhythm of everything stabilizing.

I cut a carrot at a bad angle and she nudged the cutting board slightly toward me without comment.

"Keep the blade lower."

"I know."

"That slice wasn't cut by someone who knows."

"Have you been getting more critical of me lately?"

"No," she said, without inflection.

"I've just been saying the facts out loud more often." Right. That particular evolution was nothing to celebrate. Across the kitchen, Jess was stealing freshly pan-fried food while Lan chased her around.

"That's not plated yet!"

"This is quality control."

"That's theft."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"You've used 'not mutually exclusive' too many times today," I said.

"It's a useful phrase." The first dinner turned out surprisingly decent. Better than decent, actually—for a group that had spent the day fighting over territory and was now relying on instinct and improvised division of labor to produce a full table of food, the result was almost scientifically improbable. Maybe it was because the kitchen was big enough. Maybe the table was.

Or maybe it was just that this group, which normally functioned like scattered sand wrapped around a slow-burning fuse, had a tendency to slot naturally into the right positions the moment something actually needed to get done. When all eleven of us finally sat down around that massive table, something in me went quiet for a moment. The lights were on. Cutlery clattered.

Someone was complaining about the salt, someone was fighting for the last piece of meat, someone was making a list of tomorrow's supply needs, someone was asking when the basement simulation system could go in. Loud. Chaotic. And I was completely certain it would only get worse. But sitting there, my first thought wasn't a headache. It was: ah. We actually live here now. Not hypothetically. Not on a floor plan that had nearly caused a diplomatic incident in the group chat. For real.

Starting today, 22 Platinum Bridge Street wasn't just an address in the residential assignment field. It was starting to become ours. Jess raised her glass.

"To Group 144's illegal but reasonable new nest. Cheers?"

"Nothing illegal," Roy corrected immediately.

"At least not on paper," Lan added.

"At least not yet," Harvey called from the direction of the basement stairs, making it worse. I pressed a hand to my forehead.

"Could you all get through the first dinner without saying things that will keep people awake at night." D raised his glass with complete composure.

"To the finals." Maki raised hers.

"To not killing each other in the first week." Akari slowly lifted hers.

"Practical expectations." I looked at them, then picked up my glass.

"... To still being alive." The glasses touched with a small, light sound. Not loud. But somehow, it felt like a signal that something had actually started running. Looking around that table, I was hit with a very clear premonition: these two weeks weren't going to make any of us more relaxed. They were just going to make this building absorb Group 144's particular brand of contamination faster. The refrigerator would get carved into zones. The basement would be conquered.

The third-floor corridor would become off-limits to civilians. The second floor would gradually evolve into some kind of functional habitat for the male species. And I—I'd probably figure out soon enough that moving in was never the hard part. The hard part was what came after. When you started treating these people, this table, these headache-inducing noises, as just how things were. That was the actually dangerous part. Because once you got used to something like this, losing it would hurt.... Disgusting thought.

I took a sip of soup and pushed that thoroughly inconvenient sentiment back where it came from. At least for tonight, I wouldn't look that far ahead. Tonight I just needed to survive the first dinner—survive Jess trying to steal the last piece of fried chicken, Harvey wanting to convert the basement into a server room, and Maki already drafting my makeup course schedule for tomorrow. That was exhausting enough. And this was only the beginning.