Chương 227: 88. Practical Evaluation 2

The words landed and the whole room snapped from farce back to serious in an instant. All eleven of us lined up again. Even D managed to smooth his face back into something professional. The hull diagram on the screen switched to a zoning layout. Several nodes lit up one by one — the central main corridor, the B-7 supply junction, the maintenance shaft, the lower observation deck, the forward medical section. Every one of them the kind of position that turns ugly fast the moment someone breaks through.

Takenaka turned and tapped the pointer across the map, point by point.

"The formal drill isn't about who moves fastest. It's about who can hold order in a hole like this one. Groups are as follows." He tapped the central corridor first.

"First Mobile Blockade Group. D, lead." I could practically hear a nonexistent spotlight click on behind D's head. D straightened, glowing. Takenaka went on.

"Roy, Harvey — assigned to First Mobile Blockade. Objective: corridor lockdown, false-target identification, casualty drag, emergency re-block." The second the names landed, the logic clicked. D's mouth, his fast eyes, his native comfort with chaos; Roy's steadiness; Harvey's ability to absorb pressure. This wasn't a squad built to fight pretty. It was built to hold the ugliest ground and keep it from falling apart. Then the pointer moved to the second node.

"Second Node Control Group. Maki, lead. Lan, Evelyn, assigned. Objective: line integrity, comms relay, fire-lane switching, node retention at all costs." Maki's expression didn't change. She said only:"Understood." As clean as a system acknowledgment. Then the pointer settled on a position between the center and the front.

"Forward Pressure and Flex Group. Jess, Hoshino, Aida, Akari. Jess leads the push. Hoshino runs flex cover — reinforce Second Node or fall back to support First Mobile Blockade as required." I went quiet for half a second. I understood. This arrangement was deliberate. Jess pushing forward, me filling the gaps in the middle, Maki controlling from the rear. Our three lines weren't parallel — they'd been built to cross.

Any time something broke, I'd be the one running back and forth between Jess's aggression and Maki's judgment. This wasn't team assignment. This was a stress test. Jess spoke first. Nothing overtly unhappy in her voice, but nothing pleased about it either.

"Hoshino's my flex support?" Takenaka looked at her.

"Not yours. Everyone's." Then he looked at me.

"Your position is the most complicated one. Which means you have to see faster than everyone else, and move steadier than everyone else. Don't let your emotions clear the corner ahead of your feet again."... That one landed exactly where it was aimed. All I could do was nod.

"Understood." Maki said nothing from her side of the room, but I knew she was listening. And D — of course D — was never going to let a setup like this pass quietly. He glanced from the screen to me, to Jess, to Maki, and his mouth started to curve. Not ordinary schadenfreude. Something closer to a director who'd just read the script and was already looking forward to the first act blowing up.

"Wow," D said.

"This lineup is going to be something."

"Think carefully before you finish that sentence," Jess said.

"I have," D said, spreading his hands, all innocence.

"Up front, a violent can opener. In the middle, a mobile patch kit. In the back, a sub-zero command post. If that's not interesting, what is?"

"Do you have some kind of fundamental misunderstanding about wanting to survive to the end of this?" I asked. D coughed once and snapped into a tone of improbable sincerity.

"Fine. Seriously — tactically, this configuration makes complete sense."

"... You actually just used the words 'makes sense.'""That's a little hurtful, Hoshino. One of the core values of First Mobile Blockade is that I'm occasionally serious." Harvey muttered, just loud enough to hear:"And when he is, it actually helps." D spun toward her, visibly moved.

"Harvey. That means more to me than the eighty did."

"That's because the eighty was too close a call to be sentimental about." The whole line laughed. Only Takenaka didn't.

"Done?" We shut up immediately.

"Formal drill starts tomorrow. Rest of today, drill by group. D — take First Mobile Blockade around the central ring. Maki — set up Second Node Control's defense. Jess, Hoshino — your group's with me. I want to see, personally, how you two run push and flex without tripping each other." I lit three sticks of incense for myself, silently, in my head. Jess buckled her visor and, passing me, dropped a line low.

"Don't fall behind." I turned to look at her.

"You say that like it's a challenge."

"It is."

"And if I keep up?" Jess snorted, and didn't answer directly.

"Then don't disappoint me." She walked off. I was still processing that when Maki passed on my other side and left a sentence — shorter than Jess's, but far more like an order.

"On flex, watch the node first. Not the person." I looked up. Maki was already walking toward her own group, her back clean and precise, as if she had no idea how long a sentence like that was going to sit in someone else's head.... Right. Great. One of them telling me not to fall behind. One of them telling me to watch the node before the person. And starting tomorrow, I'd be running between the two of them. Federal shipboard counter-breach drills, in a very specific sense, are more lethal than open-space combat.

That afternoon, the Security Division classroom carried a smell that was hard to name. Not blood. Not disinfectant. The specific smell of an adult about to do something entirely within regulations, who wants you to believe he's being fair about it first. We'd barely set our gear down when the front door clicked open. Sergeant Takenaka walked in, punctual as a regulation alarm clock, face fixed, pace unhurried — but every step made something in your nervous system tighten in response.

The morning's written exam had nearly wrung the life out of every person in the room. By rights, the afternoon should have offered some kind of buffer — some small evidence the Federal military retained a baseline of humanitarian instinct toward underage trainees. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Unfortunately. I had clearly overestimated the Security Division. Takenaka wasn't carrying handouts today. He wasn't carrying an axe either. He was carrying a case.

An orange case. Bright enough to seem almost anxious that someone might miss it. Not standard-toolbox orange. The specific shade of orange that means this is very expensive, very dangerous, or both. On a warship it looked almost obscene — like someone had painted a lifeboat and then wrapped explosives inside it. A perfect little demonstration of Federal military-industrial aesthetics: if it's going to blow up anyway, at least make sure you can see it coming. He set the case on the lectern. Crack.

Every shoulder in the room jumped at once. D drew a slow breath from his seat, a bit ahead and to my right, and spoke in something close to religious dread.

"That color does not look like it contains joy."

"In what part of your entire life has anything looked like it contained joy?" Jess said from the back, cold. D turned around, completely sincere.

"Snacks."

"Then go ahead and ask the Sergeant if that's a box of cookies."

"I would like to keep living." Takenaka ignored every syllable of our survival instinct leaking into the open air. He planted himself behind the lectern, hands clasped behind his back, and swept his eyes over us. That look was very Security Division. Not looking at students. Looking at a batch of potential incident sources that hadn't died yet, and therefore still needed processing.

"Today: boarding combat." The room went quiet for half a second. Then a very specific, collective blankness settled over the air.... Wait. What? Not because the term was unfamiliar. Exactly the opposite. It was because it wasn't unfamiliar that it sounded so ominous.

There's a difference between reading "close-quarters shipboard combat," "hatch contests," or "enemy-vessel seizure operations" in a textbook — clean, tidy phrases — and having a Security Division instructor stand in front of you, perfectly calm, and say: Congratulations. You're about to learn how to turn each other into permanent trauma, at close range, inside a steel can. D raised his hand, slowly. Takenaka's expression didn't shift by a millimeter.

"Speak."

"Sergeant. When you say we're going to 'talk about' boarding combat today — do you mean 'talk' in the real, lecture-based sense? Or the Federal-issue version, where you talk for five minutes and then tell us to go demonstrate it by dying?" Takenaka looked at him. A look so flat I half-wondered if he'd already buried D once in his head and was simply being polite about the body.

"Depends on your capacity to understand."

"Got it," D said, nodding.

"The second one." Harvey put his face in his hands, like a man who genuinely regretted being assigned to this training cohort. Lan, true to form, didn't even bother looking up.

"You correctly decoded instructor-speak. Growth."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"You've all been doing this thing lately — start with something nice, then stab. It's an unhealthy group dynamic."

"Learned it from you," Jess said. D looked wounded, like his contributions to social culture were going permanently unrecognized. Takenaka pressed his hand flat against the lid of the orange case. He didn't open it yet. Just knocked his knuckles against it, twice. Knock. Knock. Not loud. But in a room gone this quiet, it carried.

"Generally speaking," Takenaka said, "if you're ever fortunate enough to run into boarding combat—" He let a small pause sit on the word fortunate. Beside me, Roy's mouth twitched. He'd clearly caught it too — calling a high-casualty scenario a stroke of fortune was Security Division phrasing at its darkest. Blacker than black humor.

"—make sure you're carrying these." He opened the case. Inside, cylindrical canisters sat locked neatly into their housings — retention clips, safety mechanisms, detonation modules, all present and accounted for. The casing matched the box: aggressively bright, standard hazard markings printed down the side, as if they were terrified of not being noticed before they went off.

"Heat-triggered vaporizing explosives," Takenaka said.

"These save you a lot of unnecessary gunfights." Two seconds of silence. On the third, someone laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it was exactly what he'd say. That specific Security Division logic — don't overcomplicate things, save your rounds where you can, and if there's a more direct way to force someone back, don't stand there trading fire — was clean to the point of being brutal. Takenaka picked up one of the training canisters, turned it half a rotation so we could see the safeties, and kept going.

"In a close-quarters shipboard environment, a gunfight is the fastest way to lose control of everything. Bad sightlines, ricochets, narrow corridors, friendlies mixed in, and a long list of things you don't want holes punched through — piping, valve clusters, hatch mechanisms. Your own teammates."

"Wow," D murmured.

"That last one got very specific."

"Because you look exactly like the type who needs it spelled out," Aida said. Takenaka ignored the murmuring and continued.

"A vaporizing charge isn't for blowing people into pieces. That's the brainless use case. Correct use is suppression, isolation, forcing a retreat, cutting the space into sections. Make it impossible for them to hold ground comfortably. Let their formation break itself. So you're not stuck trading fire with someone every single time." He paused, then added the second half in the exact same conversational tone:"Unless they're charging you screaming 'long live the Emperor.'" One beat of silence.

Then the whole room actually laughed. Even I almost lost it. The image was too specific — Imperial troops, a narrow corridor, alarms strobing red, a squad advancing through smoke and chemical haze still yelling slogans. Ridiculous enough for a propaganda reel. Also entirely plausible. D laughed the loudest.

"That's a lot of effort. Chemical deterrent doesn't even stop them?"

"Which proves they're not ordinary trouble," Lan said, flat.

"That's premium trouble." Jess crossed her arms, one corner of her mouth curling up.

"Isn't that better? At least you know who to cut." I glanced sideways at her.... Her tactical instincts really are, without fail, exactly this. Very Jess. Takenaka slid the canister back into its housing and shut the case.

"Done laughing?" Nobody dared answer.

"Good. Then remember this: the stupidest thing you can do in a boarding action is fight it like an open-field shootout. You don't have the sightlines. You don't have the room. And you definitely don't have the luck."

"Sergeant." This time it was Roy. Roy is, in his own way, valuable. When the whole room gets swept up in whatever mood we're being dragged through, he's usually still the one asking the question a normal person would ask — wait, so how does this actually work. Sometimes it's a lifeline. Sometimes it's like watching a man take notes in a burning building and politely ask the firefighter about spray angle. Takenaka looked at him.

"Go."

"So — besides hand-to-hand, is there any ranged option at all?" The second he asked, I knew exactly what Roy was thinking. Not just Roy. Probably all of us. We live in the age of interstellar fleets. A few sessions ago in flight sim we were listening to lectures on plasma cannons, pulse lasers, micro-fusion torpedoes. Then we rotate into Security Division and the equipment loadout jumps sideways into shields, axes, vaporizing charges, and the occasional "if you're really out of options, there's the powder rifle."

A tech tree like that has a certain absurdity to it — civilization sprinting flat-out toward the edge of the galaxy, only to fall back on something a caveman would recognize the second the fight moves into a corridor. Takenaka didn't even pause.

"There is." Roy's eyes lit up.

"You can shoot them with a crossbow." The room went silent. Completely silent. I actually heard someone in the back choke on their own inhale. D turned his head slowly toward Roy, wearing an expression that said: See? Told you. None of the adults in this department are normal. Roy himself froze.

"... A crossbow?"

"A crossbow." Takenaka's face didn't move.

"Low noise, low heat signature. Under certain shipboard conditions, less likely to give away your position than an energy weapon — and it won't turn the corridor into something you're too scared to walk down yourself, the way spraying beam fire will." He paused.

"But that's not part of this course." D couldn't hold it in.

"Sergeant. Just to confirm. Are you saying that, theoretically, in a Federal shipboard engagement, we could carry a shield in one hand, an axe in the other, and a crossbow slung across our backs?" Takenaka didn't even look at him.

"Theoretically, if you can manage it, nobody's stopping you."

"... The Federal military is remarkably progressive."

"The Federal military isn't progressive," Lan said.

"The Federal military is just honest that in a tight space, what works matters more than what looks good." I almost wanted to applaud her. That was exactly it. Half of what Security Division actually teaches isn't how to fight well. It's how to fight ugly, fight steady, fight in a way that doesn't get you killed. As long as you can walk out and push the other side back, weapon aesthetics, combat romance, and heroics all get shoved to the back of the line. That's what made Sergeant Takenaka so infuriating.

It's also what made him so dangerous. Because he was usually right. Takenaka put his hands behind his back again, gaze sweeping over us.

"My goal is still to teach you basic close-combat skills. Not because I enjoy watching you hack at each other with axes. Because once you're actually at contact range, the people who never learned this tend to end up in one of two situations." D, right on cue, supplied helpfully:"One is dead." Harvey pressed a hand to his forehead.

"The other's a worse kind of dead?" Takenaka actually nodded.

"More or less."... I decided, right then, that I had no interest in hearing the fuller version of that sentence. Once the room had settled, Takenaka turned and pulled a thin data pad out from the side of the lectern.

"Also — about today's practical assessment—" Every shoulder in the room tensed at once. The morning's written exam had nearly dragged us all into collective-retake hell. At the word assessment, I was fairly sure I'd developed an actual conditioned reflex — the second Takenaka used that particular calm tone, my body started dreading it before my brain had even caught up. He glanced at the pad, then back at us.

"Your shipboard defense scores were decent." The class: "..." That sentence was too suspicious to take at face value. The kind of suspicious you feel when someone stops you in a corridor to say you look energetic today — because nine times out of ten, the next line is a request to move three crates of ammunition. D had clearly caught the same scent. He shrank back in his seat.

"We're done," he muttered.

"That's setup."

"The fact that you're sometimes right about this is genuinely sad," Aida said. Takenaka kept going, his tone edging toward something almost agreeable.

"It at least proves you're not a squad of idiots lining up to die behind your own shields." My eye twitched. That wasn't praise anymore. That was hauling someone back from the edge of a cliff, and then, on the way, kicking them once in the stomach for good measure. Roy let out a slow breath, looking like a man trying to accept that as a compliment and finding the process genuinely painful. Takenaka's mouth curved.

Not a smile — the faint, specific arc that only shows up on an adult's face right before they announce something you're going to hate.

"So — the two practical exams that were scheduled—" My stomach dropped. Here it comes.

"—I've combined them into one." Silence. Deeper than the crossbow silence. It wasn't that we didn't understand. It was precisely because we understood that nobody knew where to start swearing first. D made the first sound. Not a scream. Not a protest. More like a soul missing a step inside its own body.

"... Huh?" Harvey turned his head toward him, slow.

"Confirm something for me. Was that good news, or Federal-military good news?"

"I'm hoping for the first one. The Sergeant's tone sounded a lot more like the second." Jess, meanwhile, sat forward slightly, eyes sharpening — not pure bloodlust, but the specific focus of someone who'd finally heard a test worth taking. Maki's expression didn't move at all. She just watched Takenaka, like she'd already started calculating exactly what shape this "one exam" was going to take. As for me — I started missing the written exam from this morning. At least paper doesn't hit back.

Takenaka ignored the wave of psychological damage spreading across the room, set the data pad down, laced his fingers together, and said, light as air:"The rules are simple." Simple. Coming out of a Security Division instructor's mouth, those three syllables carry roughly the same threat level as a folk tale's don't be scared yet. D swallowed.

"Sergeant. Simple for who, usually?"

"For me."... Right. Of course. The whole class went quiet together. Takenaka finally delivered the rest of it.

"Take me down," he said, with a low chuckle, "and you pass." The room didn't explode. Because everyone's brain needed a beat to catch up — like a system hit with more data than it could parse at once, stalling while it tried to decide whether to file this under joke, threat, military training, or premeditated adult revenge. I sat there, staring at Takenaka's perfectly regulation-flat face, and one very sincere thought rose slowly to the surface.... No. This is punishment.