Chương 172: 65.More Than Just a Ride 2

That afternoon, Maki condensed the Feasibility Assessment for Personal Motorized Vehicle Acquisition and Use During Off-Campus Residential Period into an external version, kept an internal version, and then did something entirely reasonable and entirely dangerous. She summoned Harvey.

I'd imagined bring Harvey in as technical consultant would mean finding a time when everyone was around, politely asking him to look over the vehicle options and budget, maybe adding a few you know more about this than we do for good measure.

What actually happened was that at 1517, a very displeased voice came from the direction of the basement:"I'm busy right now—who dragged me away from the main unit—" Then Harvey himself appeared at the top of the stairs, hair in a state suggesting he'd recently been in a physical altercation with a circuit board, sleeve cuffs smudged with something that was either machine oil or thermal paste, wearing the expression of someone who was one more inconvenience away from losing patience.

He walked into the living room, saw the tablet and documents on the table, and then saw the Narukami concept page Maki had kept as a reference. His footsteps stopped. With considerable technical precision. The kind of stop that happens when a technical person encounters high-priority keywords from their domain—the rational mind goes offline half a beat before the stubborn exterior can catch up.

"..." I leaned back in my chair, arms crossed, and watched the progression of expressions across his face with genuine appreciation. First: irritation. Then: recognition. Then: attempt to appear uninterested. Then: failure of that attempt. Excellent performance. Harvey stared at the image, brow slowly drawing together.

"Who showed you this?" Before I could answer, Maki had already replied.

"Internal concept material, not important. What's important is that we're not buying this one." Harvey pulled his gaze from the image, looked at Maki, then at me, then at the document on the table.

"... What are you two doing?" I raised my hand.

"I want to quietly buy a bike." Harvey looked at me with the expression of someone watching a child who'd just learned to walk announce they wanted to pilot a warship.

"You?"

"That you is rude."

"Not rude. Reality check." He pulled out a chair and sat down.

"Your licensing progress isn't even fully stable at low-speed simulation yet, and you're already thinking about models?"

"This is called advance planning."

"This is called getting ahead of yourself." Maki calmly pushed the document toward him.

"Which is why you're here. To make her getting ahead of herself at least logical." Harvey looked down and skimmed through the first two pages with obvious indifference. By the time he hit the budget breakdown, insurance, service schedule, parking location, and Student Council avoidance columns, his expression had shifted. His brow even moved slightly.

"... You made this?" Maki nodded. Harvey was quiet for two seconds. Then, with visible reluctance: "It's not bad." I nearly laughed. Hearing not bad from Harvey was roughly equivalent to a volcano announcing it was having a pleasant day. Maki didn't look remotely surprised. She just turned to the candidate list.

"The process isn't the issue. The issue is the model. She saw this image and got interested in the design language." Harvey finally looked at me properly at that. His expression said it all clearly: you're done.

"You're interested in this?" He pointed at the Narukami concept page. I was honest.

"It's striking."

"Obviously—that's what it was designed to do." Harvey gave a short, cold laugh.

"Raijin Series, Narukami. Dual plasma cores, front-rear dual drive, magnetic rail traction, neural sync—this thing isn't a vehicle. It's what happens when the lunatics at Kushima Technical Research get a budget and start slapping physics in the face." I looked at him.

"That doesn't sound like criticism."

"I'm not criticizing the engineering. I'm criticizing the cognitive structure of anyone who thinks this is a low-profile commuter solution."

"I wasn't the one who brought up the original spec."

"But you looked very interested."

"..." Right. Second person today to tell me my eyes give me away. Maki added from the side: "Which is why I've already eliminated military-spec, sync functions, and armaments. What we're discussing now is the civilian derivative in an older model." Harvey pushed the image aside and shifted into actual technical mode. When Harvey went into technical mode, he became very annoying and very useful.

"Let me be clear upfront." He tapped the table.

"No commercial arrangement, no personal favor, not endorsing anything just because she has a Kushima sitting next to her. I'm giving you my assessment based on your situation." I nodded.

"Please, Professor Harvey." His face went dark.

"Don't call me that."

"Of course, Professor Harvey."

"..." Maki, apparently deciding not to manage us, pulled up the candidate list directly. Four bikes on screen. Two with fairly ordinary profiles—the kind you'd pass on the street, think oh, a motorcycle, and forget the brand within five seconds. One with sharper lines, front end pressed low, clearly trying to write I'm street-legal but I have opinions on its face. And the last one—obviously some kind of deliberately neutered relative of the Narukami.

I didn't need to check the model number to know where my gaze had stopped. Harvey looked at me and made a sound of cold confirmation.

"Predictable."

"What's predictable?"

"Riders with limited experience look at bikes the same way they look at people. They notice the face first."

"That's normal."

"What's not normal is that you zeroed in on the closest civilian relative of the most complicated one." Maki enlarged the model designation. KGI-MC 417B / Two-Wheel Motorized Commuter Vehicle Name as unremarkable as a photocopier manual. But the profile—undeniably had the quality. Not the production Narukami's if the law weren't holding me back right now I could dismantle your entire worldview energy.

But it had kept the forward-leaning frame, the substantial side panels, the low center of gravity—just with everything that would give school administrators a cardiac event sanded off. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Like a thunderbeast that had been sent to law school, learned to wear a suit, pay taxes, and follow traffic regulations, but you could still tell it had bitten someone in its youth. I pointed at it honestly.

"I want this one." Harvey tilted his head back with an expression of comprehensive disdain.

"This is Kushima Technical Research Industries, not Kushima Heavy Industries proper. Know the difference." He pulled up the spec data.

"Kushima Heavy is the parent brand—heavy military-industrial work and the conglomerate's public face. Ground vehicles are actually handled by the Technical Research side. You're buying a bike, not a strategic deterrent."

"I know."

"Make sure you actually know." He kept scrolling.

"And even though this is civilian spec, the frame lineage is obvious. It runs on Kushima Technical Research's design philosophy of make the vehicle look like it can remove obstacles from your life. Advantage: stable, low center of gravity, high frame rigidity, suspension won't turn against a new rider. Disadvantage—" He stopped and looked at me.

"You'll think you're good at riding."

"... That's a disadvantage?"

"For a new rider, absolutely." Maki added, from the side: "Because the bike is so stable, it's easy to overestimate yourself." Harvey nodded.

"Exactly. Especially this older civilian version—if the maintenance is good, startup is clean, braking response is precise. You'll get the impression that you might have natural talent. In reality, the bike is just saving you." I felt slightly defensive.

"Do I look that prone to getting a big head?" Harvey and Maki both looked up at me simultaneously. Neither said anything. But that silence had written the answer out in full. Me: "... Next question." Maki turned to the corresponding section of the budget sheet.

"For something in the 417B range, the reasonable bracket for a used demo unit is around here." She named a figure. I did the mental arithmetic and frowned.

"That's tight."

"Which is why there's a breakdown," she said. Harvey pulled the data further down.

"Not just the purchase price—insurance, registration, initial service, tire condition, battery module health. If you're actually buying a used civilian bike in this category, the one thing you cannot cut is the upfront service check. Skip that, and it's you getting serviced later." I nodded. That I understood. Not being able to afford it was one thing. Buying something that would strand me and Maki on a mountain halfway through the return trip was something else entirely. That wasn't romantic—that was embarrassing.

At that thought, I coughed and kicked the phrase strand me and Maki on a mountain out of my head. Dangerous. Very dangerous. Harvey, apparently oblivious to my brief internal collision, continued: "Budget source—absolutely no loans." My fingers contracted slightly at that. But this time was different from yesterday. Because he wasn't raising it casually—he followed it immediately with: "Especially don't touch the student credit programs in the Kushima-Rengo Bank system." I looked up at him.

Harvey's brow was furrowed.

"Not saying there's anything wrong with it. Just that once you go through that channel, what you leave behind isn't a simple payment record. It's a complete financial trail. Who subsidized, who guaranteed, who reviewed, who saw your stated purpose—all of it, clean and documented. For most people that's called convenience. For someone who wants to stay low-profile, that's called voluntarily putting yourself on display." Maki nodded.

"Same conclusion I reached." Harvey made a sound.

"The Kushima bank isn't off-limits forever. Just not now. Not for this. You want a bike—not for the Student Council, the finance office, and whoever enjoys reading reports to all simultaneously learn what you're planning to buy and what routes you're planning to run." The next morning, I came downstairs to find Maki Kushima had already comprehensively occupied the dining table. Not in the ordinary up early, reading a book sense.

The kind where one look told you this woman hadn't gone straight to sleep after returning to her room last night—she'd taken something from concept in her head all the way to finished product capable of deceiving an administrative system. Center of the table: her tablet, two printed documents, three colors of sticky tabs, and a coffee so dark it looked capable of cleaning engine components.

She sat by the window, hair tied back, sleeves rolled up past her wrists, posture suggesting she was about to chair a small strategic meeting. The only thing missing was a flag planted on the table. I stood at the foot of the stairs for two seconds.

"... Are you buying a bike or staging a coup?" Maki didn't look up.

"The difference is that the latter requires more signatures."

"Thanks. That's not remotely reassuring." I walked over and sat across from her. The top sheet had a title written in neat, even characters: Feasibility Assessment for Personal Motorized Vehicle Acquisition and Use During Off-Campus Residential Period I stared at that line for three seconds, then looked at her.

"Did you deliberately make the title this boring?"

"Yes," she said.

"The more it reads like bureaucratic waste paper, the safer it is." Reasonable. The most effective stealth coating in the world wasn't black paint or radar-absorbing fiber—it was making a document look like something nobody would ever want to read past the first page. I turned to the next page. My eye twitched.

"... You actually organized it into chapters?"

"Because the Student Council isn't stupid—they're idle." She pushed the second document over.

"The best way to handle idle people isn't to hide things. It's to make the process more tedious than they are. If legitimacy, funding source, parking location, and stated purpose are all preemptively addressed, the most they can do is argue about grammar."

"Is your hostility toward the Student Council slightly personal?"

"Not hostility. Experience." I believed that. With a name like Kushima, she'd probably been navigating internal organizational politics since childhood—more than I'd absorbed from a lifetime of prime-time drama. I turned to the next page and found a photograph. A grey-black motorcycle with a very low, compressed profile, wheel rims edged with cold blue light, the whole thing shaped like if a shell casing decided to learn elegant low-altitude flight, it would probably look like this.

I looked at the image, and something pulled at the corner of my mouth.

"... Maki."

"Mm."

"If this thing were parked outside twenty-two, even the No politicians sign on the intercom next door would start wondering whether we'd brought private military into the neighborhood." Maki finally looked up, expression composed.

"Which is why the first thing I need to say is that you cannot buy the production version."

"Production version?" She tapped the image with one finger.

"Kushima Technical Research Industries. Raijin Series, Narukami. Dual plasma power cores, front-rear dual engine, full-wheel magnetic rail drive, neural sync cockpit, titanium-carbon composite heavy armor, and—" She paused. Her tone remained as level as someone reading a breakfast menu.

"Concealed integrated autocannon." I went quiet.

"... What exactly does your family make?"

"Strictly speaking, that's not my family—it's a division within the conglomerate that's very good at spending its budget."

"Oh, fantastic. Just a conglomerate, not a cottage industry. I feel so much better." I looked at the image again. I did not feel better. That vehicle was not in the thinking about commuting category. It was in the if someone rode this through the school gates, I'd assume today was a coup category. The ice-blue wheel rings, the absurdly thick armor shell, the body lines pressed down like a predator's shoulder line—this thing had no blood relation to the word inconspicuous.

If it still qualified as civilian, the definition of civilian needed revision.

"So what you're saying is—""You can reference its design language. You cannot touch its military-spec contents." She turned to another sheet.

"The actual low-profile solution is: civilian-spec, de-weaponized, de-synced, de-armored." I blinked.

"That sounds like skinning a thunderbeast down to its street-legal skeleton."

"Roughly." Her tone was dry.

"The production Narukami has several features that are fundamentally incompatible with student ownership. First, the dual-core plasma output is excessive. Second, full-wheel magnetic rail drive requires high-intensity maintenance. Third, the neural sync interface requires medical and military clearance. Fourth—""Fourth is the autocannon."

"Yes."

"I feel like fourth should be first."

"For most people, yes." She glanced at me.

"For Kushima Technical Research's development sequence, no." I pressed a hand to my forehead. Right. People with money and technical capability really do treat certain deeply unnatural things as ordinary background. Maki turned the tablet toward me.

"So I've drafted three tiers." The screen was clearly organized. Option A: Pure civilian-spec used bike. Standard appearance, dark paint, single-core hybrid power, standard rear-wheel drive, no sync components. Cheapest, easiest to transfer, least visible. Drawback: performance only sufficient for commuting and short-range passenger transport. Option B: Demo unit.

Civilian derivative from Kushima Technical Research, retaining some frame design and suspension stability, all military-spec functions removed, output restricted, complete maintenance records, mid-range price. Drawback: if anyone traces the brand origin, it becomes slightly complicated. Option C: Legally retired internal test vehicle. My scalp started prickling the moment I read that line.

"Wait." I raised a hand.

"Stop. What is Option C and why does it sound like something that gets me called to the disciplinary office before graduation?" Maki's expression didn't flicker.

"Which is why it's listed as not recommended."

"Then why are you listing it here in complete seriousness?"

"So you know I considered it and determined it was too conspicuous." This woman was genuinely honest to a fault. Honest enough that sometimes you wished she'd be slightly less thorough. I looked back down and stopped my finger on Option B.

"So this is what you're actually recommending."

"Yes." She said.

"Demo unit, civilian spec. Three reasons. First, the price works. Second, the frame stability is sufficient—you're a new rider, you don't want the bike turning on you. Third, it can look slightly expensive without looking like ordnance."

"That's a very precise description."

"And it should be an older model." She turned to the next page.

"Not the latest version. New models attract attention once they're registered. Older models are safer—especially something that's been on the market a year or two, past the conversation window, but still mechanically sound." I looked at the budget breakdown she'd laid out. More detailed than yesterday. Not just a total figure—split into: savings, holiday subsidy differential, personal expense reduction, projected practicum stipend recovery, and one line she'd boxed and highlighted separately: No loans.

No family subsidy. No advance against school name. I looked at that line and stopped. Maki didn't look at me. She just moved her coffee half a centimeter to the side, like she was deliberately leaving me a space to receive that without having to say anything. I said quietly: "You even put a box around it."

"Because it's a hard limit," she answered, evenly.

"If it can't be touched, no part of the process should come near it." I made a sound of acknowledgment and kept reading.

"So is the money enough?"

"Enough, at the edge of safe margin," she said.

"If you put in everything you have on hand, you can reach the lower-mid tier of Option B. If you trim a little, you can fold in insurance, parking, and the first service check."

"Trim a little meaning?"

"Over the next two weeks: fewer bubble teas from outside, fewer late-night snacks with Jess, fewer times letting Harvey talk you into tool kits you don't need."

"... Did you install a spending monitor on me?"

"No." Perfectly calm.

"Your spending habits just have a distinctive character. Usually not expensive—just inconsistent." Infuriating. Impossible to argue with.