Chương 244: 96. Tactical Officer 2

Three hours later. My brain felt like it had been ejected out the airlock, drifted two full laps around the hull, smacked into the armor plating, and then gotten scooped up by some completely inconsiderate maintenance tech who dusted it off and shoved it back into my skull. Backwards.

"Alright, Hoshino." Tobita still had the same face. The same mild, someone-should-file-a-complaint smile.

"Tell me — how many warhead types does the Type-99 Fully-Automated Multi-Cell Deep-Space Anti-Air Guided Missile VLS carry?" I sat at the tactical station, one hand pressed to my forehead, and the projection panel in front of me had stopped looking like a projection panel at all. It looked like an epitaph, actively preparing to bury me alive.

"... Three," I said, in a voice running on its last half-breath.

"Which three?" I closed my eyes. I no longer felt like a student. I felt like a religious martyr being coerced into a confession.

"Anti-air guided — Shusui." I forced the words out.

"Anti-air flak — Wombat. Anti-ship heavy guided — Parsifal."

"Good." Tobita nodded. I was about to say finally. His next line stepped on that hope and kept walking.

"Two more questions. Then class is dismissed." I raised my head slowly, giving him the look of someone who had already seen through the illusions of mortal existence.

"You said that two fucking hours ago..." Jess collapsed against the railing beside me, laughing.

"Shimo, you said that half an hour ago too."

"Because he lied to me half an hour ago too!" Tobita, completely unbothered, waited patiently for me to finish complaining, then continued in exactly the same pleasant tone.

"When the torpedo tubes are open, what can't be activated?" I answered almost entirely on muscle memory.

"The bow-mounted axial main gun—""Full designation." I was now fully convinced this was deliberate. Every single longest, ugliest, most memory-insulting naming convention on the face of the universe had apparently been consolidated, in its entirety, into the Federal Navy's weapons development division. I dug up the last scrap of willpower I had and recited it like I was dictating my own last testament.

"Bow-Mounted Axial Hyper-Energy Positron-Negatron Annihilation Decimation Cannon—" Tobita's eyebrow ticked up. I gritted my teeth and tacked on the name that sounded less like a weapon designation and more like a curse someone had put on me personally.

"—Tannhäuser." The instant I finished the name, I felt like I was already dead. Not a metaphor. That string of weapon designations had punched straight through my skull and cleanly vaporized me into cosmic dust. The bridge went silent for a beat. Then Jess started clapping.

"Congratulations, Tactical Officer. You survived."

"I don't think she survived," D said — he'd drifted over from CIC at some point, arms crossed, standing just behind me with a deeply irresponsible expression of appreciation.

"She's more like a teaching specimen that happens to still have vocal function."

"Agreed," Harvey said. I didn't have the energy left to glare at either of them. I just let my forehead drop against the edge of the console.

"You assholes had better remember — the day we actually have to open fire for real, it's me who sat here memorizing Tannhäuser for you."

"Of course," Jess said, smiling sweetly.

"I'll be watching you fire it with a full and grateful heart."

"Then the first round's going in your face."

"So fierce," she said, delighted. Tobita finally closed whatever manual he'd produced from nowhere — the same one that somehow always managed to land exactly on my weakest point — and nodded, satisfied.

"Good. That's enough for today." I nearly teared up with relief. Then, in the very next breath, he turned to the crowd of onlooking classmates and said, in the friendliest tone imaginable:"You can carry Hoshino out now." The bridge went quiet for exactly one second. Then it erupted. I buried my face in my arms and let out a sound somewhere between resignation and a curse.

"... I can walk."

"But being carried has better visual impact," D said.

"And it fits the Tactical Officer's spirit of sacrifice today," Jess added.

"I think she needs medical transport," Harvey said, completely straight-faced.

"No," Maki's voice came from beside me, unfairly calm.

"She's just overheated." I'd been about to lift my head and argue. Then Maki actually reached over and pulled me up. Her hand on my arm was steady — not heavy, but entirely certain. I'd meant to insist I was fine. The second I stood, my legs decided otherwise. Jess saw it and laughed harder.

"Oh, she really can't stand."

"Shut up..."

"Need a hand, Tactical Officer?"

"You standing further away is the most help you can offer."

"So cold." Maki ignored Jess completely, kept me steady, and said, low:"Let's go." I glanced at her.

"... Right now, any glowing panel makes me want to throw up."

"Normal," she said.

"I think Tobita did that on purpose."

"Also normal."

"Why do you sound like that's completely reasonable?" She looked at me, the corner of her mouth moving just a fraction.

"Because you drew Tactical Officer. There was never a version where you got away." For some reason, that line hit harder than Tannhäuser. She walked me out. Behind us I could still hear D doing an impression of Tobita's voice, Jess offering alternate drafts of my dying words, and Harvey having a genuinely serious discussion with Aida about whether memorizing weapon designations counted as stress-inoculation training. Not one of these people is human.

Tobita stood in the center of the bridge, arms folded, looking like a head chef who'd just run his students through a meat grinder and was thoroughly pleased with the texture of the result. He gave us a nod as we left.

"Make sure you review properly tonight." Leaning on Maki, feet barely cooperating, I stepped through the bridge hatch with exactly one thought left in my head. If this was only day one of bridge simulation, someone was probably going to end up getting carried out for real very soon. By the time Maki had half-walked, half-dragged me back to the double, maybe thirty percent of my soul was still in residence.

The rest was split — some of it confiscated on the bridge for Captain Tobita's teaching purposes, the remainder still lodged somewhere inside Bow-Mounted Axial Hyper-Energy Positron-Negatron Annihilation Decimation Cannon, crawling toward the underworld one syllable at a time. The door closed. I didn't even get my jacket off before collapsing into the chair.

"I think," I said, staring at the desk, voice thin as if I'd just snuck out of Medical, "the people in the Federal Navy's weapons development division have some kind of systemic mental condition." Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Maki locked the door and set her data pad on the desk.

"Which part?"

"The naming." I made a weak gesture.

"Normal people don't christen a cannon like an incantation. That's not a weapon designation. That's a summoning ritual." She shrugged off her jacket, glanced at me.

"You recited it, though."

"That wasn't reciting." I said it dead flat.

"That was a death reflex." She didn't answer right away. She just walked over and started spreading out everything I'd hauled back — manuals, handouts, and whatever supplementary packet Tobita had slipped into my arms at some point without my noticing. I looked at the table, now buried under a mix of paper and projected data, and my breathing got heavier just looking at it.

"... What are you doing?"

"Helping you survive tomorrow."

"Why does that sound like you're walking me to an execution site?"

"Because it's close enough." She said it so naturally I lost the will to argue. Maki set the terminal up in the corner, pulled up the Yukikaze's full armament index, then opened Bridge Operations: Yukikaze Practical Guide — yes, the same relic Tobita had called "just a prop," the one that had somehow ended up in our room anyway — to the weapons index. I looked up slowly.

"... Wait."

"Mm?"

"Didn't he say that book was a prop?" Her hand paused on the page. Then, perfectly calm:"He gave it to me afterward."

"..."

"With a note," she added, expression unchanged.

"Hoshino will probably need this tonight." I sat with that for three full seconds. Then buried my face in my hands.

"Tobita isn't a captain."

"What is he, then?"

"An educational demon who learned to wear a uniform." Maki finally laughed, low — like a fingertip tapping once against glass. Quiet, but exactly the kind of thing that's impossible to ignore. Infuriating. Especially when your head's already a mess and the person next to you can make it messier just by smiling.

"Alright." She pushed the pad in front of me.

"Let's go." I eyed the dense rows of entries and felt my stomach clench.

"Now?"

"When else?"

"My brain already took an occupational injury today."

"Then work through it wounded."

"Are you my roommate or a disciplinary officer?" She considered it.

"Disciplinary officer. Tonight."... Right. I really do live with a woman who has no trouble weaponizing both roles at once. If I had to describe that evening, it would go something like this. At first, I thought I was reviewing weapons data. An hour in, I realized I was actually wrestling with eighteen generations of the Federal armory's ancestors. Two hours in, I started to suspect the Yukikaze wasn't a ship at all, but a memory-nightmare written in steel and propellant.

"Again." Maki sat across from me, pad in hand, voice level as an evening news anchor.

"Type-99 Fully-Automated Multi-Cell Deep-Space Anti-Air Guided Missile VLS." I closed my eyes, breathed in.

"... Three warhead types."

"Names."

"Anti-air guided — Shusui. Anti-air flak — Wombat. Anti-ship heavy guided — Parsifal."

"Functional distinction."

"Shusui's standard anti-air intercept. Wombat's close-range wide-area intercept and anti-missile saturation. Parsifal—" I stalled. She looked up.

"Mm?"

"... I hate the name Parsifal."

"I didn't ask if you liked it."

"It sounds like a limited-edition dessert at some overpriced restaurant."

"So the function?"

"... Heavy anti-ship strike."

"Good." She tapped something into the terminal, expression as calm as someone balancing a simple ledger. I glared at her.

"Why do you look completely unaffected?"

"Because I'm not the one Tobita made recite the weapons catalog today."

"That's a heartless amount of schadenfreude."

"You drew Tactical Officer." I slumped forward onto the desk.

"I'm starting to think that draw was rigged."

"It was." My head snapped up.

"What?!" Maki looked at me, same unhurried expression.

"The rigging was your luck."

"..." I almost threw my pen at her. I didn't — mostly because any large motion right now risked shaking loose every weapon name I'd only just barely gotten to stay put. The data spread across the table was starting to look less like reference material and more like an enemy deployment map. Main guns. Torpedoes. VLS. CIWS. Flak. Attitude-linkage limits. Bow axial firing arc. Broadside secondaries. Power-priority ladders. I'd always assumed the weight in "Tactical Officer" sat in Tactical. Now I knew better.

It sat in Officer. Because that's the part that makes every single name official-length.

"Shimo."

"What."

"When the torpedo tubes are open, what can't be activated?" I answered on pure reflex.

"Bow axial main gun."

"Full designation."

"..."

"Full designation." I lifted my head slowly and looked at her.

"You've turned into Tobita."

"No."

"Yes."

"Tobita would be enjoying this more."... Uncomfortably accurate. I ground my teeth and recited the whole cursed string a second time. Somewhere around the halfway mark my own voice started making me dizzy. Maki just listened, unbothered, and nodded once I finished.

"Fine. Still alive."

"Are your standards for me getting a little low?"

"For someone who was halfway to the spirit world under a stack of manuals three hours ago? Not particularly." My mouth twitched. Then she slid a small cup toward my hand.

"Drink." I looked down. Black liquid. Hot. Still steaming. Immediate suspicion.

"What is this?"

"Coffee."

"Why does it look like coolant?"

"Because I made it strong."

"Are you trying to kill me?"

"No. I'm trying to keep you conscious until midnight." She said it so matter-of-factly that "until midnight" sounded like a courtesy rather than an extension of the sentence. I picked up the cup and sniffed it.... Okay. Technically still coffee. Just strong enough that I wondered whether it doubled as barrel solvent. First sip. My whole face folded in on itself. Maki watched, and something faint moved through her eyes.

"Bad?"

"It's not a question of bad." I forced it down.

"This thing has military-grade penetration."

"As long as it works."

"Do you have some fundamental misunderstanding of human taste buds?"

"No," she said, even.

"You've still got the close-in defense chain to get through." I nearly cracked the cup. Time, after that, stopped behaving reasonably. The ship's night lighting had already dropped to its softer setting. The corridor outside had gone quiet, even the distant mechanical hum seeming to retreat deeper into the hull. Only the desk lamp stayed lit in the double room — a circle of warm yellow falling across the weapons manual, the terminal projection, and my own steadily deteriorating face.

At some point Maki tied her hair back. Just a simple knot, leaving the line of her neck and jaw exposed. When she bent over the data, or looked up to ask something, the lamplight caught that line in a way that was — extremely inconvenient.

Especially while I was supposed to be memorizing exactly which threat tier triggers the close-in defense system's automatic barrage instead of manual allocation from Tactical, while sitting next to the same woman who'd upended my pulse last night and was now, with total composure, tutoring me as if none of it had happened. This universe has zero mercy for me.

"Shimo."

"Mm?"

"You're drifting."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm contemplating the relationship between weapons systems and the human condition."

"And your conclusion?" I looked at the string of launch-module codes and said, with complete sincerity:"Life shouldn't require this many launch modules." For once, she didn't shoot it down immediately. She just looked at me for two seconds, then laughed, quiet.

"I agree with that one." I blinked. People who almost never play along are dangerous exactly because of that — the rare times they do, you hold onto it far longer than you should. Like right now. I was supposed to be focused on effective-range differences between Wombat and Shusui. Instead half my brain was stuck on: she just laughed. Hopeless. Completely hopeless.

"Next," Maki said, dragging me back without an ounce of pity.

"Enemy presents as a high-mobility small-cluster target. We're mid-evasion turn. Priority?"

"... Close-in defense chain and Wombat dispersal, adjusted for main-gun arc and friendly positions."

"Why?"

"Because main-gun tracking cost is too high, the solution's unstable mid-turn, and using a broadsword to swat mosquitoes is stupid."

"Good." She tapped the corner of my notes.

"Remember it like that. Don't rote-memorize. Know what each blade is for first." I paused. It was almost the exact line Tobita had used that afternoon — but out of her mouth, it didn't sound like doctrine. It sounded like she was actually trying to find me a way to keep it.

"You..."

"Mm?"

"Are you always this harsh when you help people study?" She thought about it for two seconds.

"No."

"Then I'm honored."

"You could also take it," she said, looking at me, tone flat, "as me not wanting to watch you die twice on the bridge tomorrow." Something in my chest did something stupid. From most people, that line would just be ordinary concern. From Maki — because she says things like that so rarely — it landed with unusual clarity. I looked down and pretended to reorganize my notes.

"... Oh."

"Oh what."

"Oh, meaning," I kept my eyes on the weapons list, working to keep my voice normal, "when someone like you occasionally says something decent, it's hard to know what to do with it."

"You managed."

"That was barely staying alive."

"Then keep staying alive," she said.

"Half an hour more." The words half an hour set off every alarm I had.

"Is that a real half hour, or a Tobita half hour?" She went quiet for a second. Then, very rarely, looked away.

"... Best effort at a real one." I pointed at her immediately.

"See! Even you don't believe it!" This time she actually laughed — not the barely-there version. Her mouth genuinely curved, and her eyes went soft with it. That expression carried more killing power than any turret schematic. I nearly forgot, in real time, that Parsifal was an anti-ship missile and not a dessert. This room is dangerous. For my grades. For my heart. Both. That "half an hour" stretched into an hour and ten minutes. I knew it would. I should have known from the start.

By the time Maki finally pried the pad out of my hands and said, "Enough. Sleep," I'd reached a very particular state — every term still floating loose in my skull, eyes already closing on their own. Right before I face-planted into the mattress, I still managed one last, resentful line:"If I dream about Tobita tonight, he's going to chase me with Tannhäuser." Maki dimmed the lamp. Her voice drifted over, unhurried.

"Then hit him with Wombat."

"... Wombat's the flak shell."

"Mm. Should work nicely, then." I laughed into the pillow — actually laughed, and surprised myself doing it. Crammed weapons data until nearly dawn, and the thing that almost woke me back up was Maki delivering a completely flat joke with zero inflection. This world makes no sense.

"Night," she said.

"... Night." I'd expected not to sleep. Turns out, past a certain point of exhaustion, sleep doesn't wait for permission — it just cuts the power. No dreams either. But right before I went under completely, the last clear thought in my head wasn't Shusui, or Wombat, or Parsifal. It was: Maki looked really good laughing like that.... I'm finished. Genuinely, completely finished. The next morning I only managed to dig myself out of bed on the second alarm. Headache. Dry eyes. Stiff neck.

A whole queue of weapon names doing morning laps behind my forehead. I sat on the edge of the bed, blank for three seconds, before registering that I was still alive — which felt like a minor miracle. Maki was already up. She stood at the sink, fixing her collar, and caught my eyes in the mirror.

"You look like you took a direct graze off the main gun."

"Thanks. Very energizing, first thing in the morning."

"I'm just being accurate." I dragged myself to the sink. The second I looked up at the mirror, I nearly saluted my own reflection. Dark circles. Genuine, full-strength dark circles. Not the "up a little late" kind — the kind where, if I put on something white and the corridor lights flickered twice, I could walk straight onto the set of a shipboard ghost story.

"..."

"What," Maki asked.

"This face," I pointed at the mirror, "belongs on the cover of the weapons manual as the do not cram the night before cautionary example." She looked once and, unbelievably, nodded.

"Fairly convincing."

"Have you considered, even once, offering your roommate some actual comfort?"

"I have." She handed me a can. Functional energy drink.

"... This is your comfort?"

"And this." A nutrition bar followed. I stood there holding both, silent for two seconds. Then, with complete sincerity: "Maki."

"Mm."

"You're basically raising a soldier for the front line." She considered it.

"In some ways, that's not wrong." I had nothing. Breakfast went down almost entirely on autopilot. D whistled at the sight of me, said I looked like I'd spent the night brawling with the entire fire-control system. Jess nearly upended her tray laughing, then very helpfully offered to log my dark circles into the bridge damage report. Harvey was the worst of all — one look, and he delivered his verdict, perfectly composed:"Effective."

"Effective how?"

"Tobita's training method," he said.

"At least it looks like the data actually went in."

"How exactly do you read knowledge retention off eyebags?"

"Because if it hadn't gone in, you'd just look like you stayed up. Right now you look like you stayed up and got something out of it." This man talks the way you peel an apple with a scalpel. Thin slices. Every one draws blood. By the time our group reassembled outside the bridge, I had my pad clutched against my chest, shadows under both eyes, a head full of weapon names, and an overall condition somewhere between technically upright and requires dragging. The hatch opened.

The bridge lighting hit harder than the corridor's — my eyes stung on contact. Tobita stood up front. He turned at the sound, his gaze landing on my face, held there for one second — and then the corner of his mouth lifted. Visibly. We were finished. That smile was never, under any circumstances, a good sign. And Jess, nearly the same instant my foot crossed the threshold, dropped her voice into that particular register of pure, unearned delight:"Wow. Tactical Officer."

"You finally look like someone who'd actually order live fire." I kept my eyes forward, expressionless.

"Say one more word and the first round goes into you."

"So fierce." She was beaming.

"Guess it really did stick last night." I now understand, with complete personal clarity, why some captains insist on keeping a brig operational.