Chương 265: 109. First Strike Wins 1

"Captain, this interference zone—""I see it, Lieutenant." Tobita cut straight across me. Not the reassuring yes, yes, I hear you, don't panic kind. The kind of response an old soldier gives the instant a keyword lands — brain skipping the language step entirely, jumping straight to assessment. He pulled the anomalous block off the main tactical display and threw it up alone on the central screen, cycling through several filter and return-comparison layers in quick succession.

The cold white light hardened his face — a face that was never built for good news to begin with — until he looked like an iron statue: the kind that would issue a retreat order, and absolutely refuse to retreat himself. Then, very slightly, his brow drew down. Light. But that single twitch carried more weight than a shouted we're screwed ever could.

"Bad," Tobita said, low.

"Ensign Lan — get me the Minazuki and the Chikuma. Now."

"Sir." Lan's fingers flew across the comm board. The speed was beautiful — not showy, just exact, the kind of exact that comes from having every key position carved into the bone. The comm interface split into multiple sub-windows, Federal encrypted-channel emblems lighting in sequence, handshake signals threading out like thin, cold wire.

"Connected." Two faces appeared on the main screen. Captain Oshima. Captain Nakata. Both backgrounds were shaking — clearly the Minazuki and the Chikuma were already in high-G maneuvers. The light on Oshima's side ran dim, half his face drowned in the console's blue glow. Nakata looked like he'd just forced his head up from a report longer than his own lifespan, his expression still carrying a trace of this had better actually be something. Tobita didn't waste a syllable.

"Captain Oshima. Captain Nakata. Pull your ships out of that sector immediately." His voice dropped.

"That is not signal interference—" Inside my head, I finished the rest of that sentence at almost the exact same moment. Too late. Not pessimism. The particular kind of too late where you've already watched something open its jaws beneath the surface, and the person standing on the bank is still asking, hey — is that a shadow? The two men on screen didn't even get their questions fully out. Oshima's lips had barely started to move; Nakata's brow had only just begun to knit.

Both feeds warped at the same instant, like something outside had seized the signal and crushed it in one fist. Static spiked. The audio sheared. And the next second— Black. The bridge went silent for a beat. Short — too short to finish drawing a full breath — but hard enough to feel like a block of ice shoved straight into the lungs. Tobita stared at the dead screens, his voice scraped out low, almost through his teeth.

"... Space minefield." The instant those words landed, a cold ran the full length of my spine. Of course. Not simple interference. Not natural turbulence. Not some casual electronic smoke screen the Imperial forces had thrown out on their way through. That zone had looked that ugly, that wrong, precisely because it had never been built to hide anything. It had been built to eat.

A minefield wrapped in electromagnetic camouflage — a mud pit deliberately dug right beside the shipping lane, waiting for someone to step in before revealing that what was underneath wasn't mud at all. It was teeth.

"No response from the Minazuki or the Chikuma..." For the first time, Akari's voice lost its half-dead, world-weary monotone. She stalled for a beat, then her speech rate spiked hard.

"Captain — massive space-time distortion dead ahead! Fleet-level warp signature!" The whole bridge came alive at once. No — not alive. Every nerve in the room got yanked taut simultaneously. The airspace-monitoring feed in the upper-right corner of the main display began refreshing at a frantic rate. The already-ugly returns dissolved into a boiling mess, and across the deep-space background, unnatural distortion points tore open one after another, like wounds splitting. Not asteroids. Not an ordinary freighter.

Not some confused tourist who'd parked a private yacht in the wrong sector. This was the textbook precursor signature for large-vessel warp insertion. And not one hull. A whole fleet. Akari's hands flew across her panel, the glow off the cursors and data streams making her already exhausted face look even more like a ghost's.

"IFF confirming..." She drew a quick breath, her voice gone dry.

"At least ten Imperial high-speed cruisers." At least. Those two words carried real venom. Because at least means: what you're looking at right now is already enough to fuel nightmares — and it still doesn't guarantee you've seen all of it.

"Optical capture complete," Lan added, flat as ice.

"Confirmed Imperial forces." The main screen split into three panels. One cut to long-range optical. Against the deep black of space, ten hull silhouettes surfaced one by one out of the distorted light. Silver-gray bellies. Long, aggressive bow profiles. Flank armor lines restrained in a way that made them more unnerving, not less.

Add to that the aesthetic the Empire always seemed to weld permanently into its design language — we're here, and we don't plan on being polite about it — and you didn't need a database readout. The naked eye alone was enough to make dinner want to come back up. Perfect. We hadn't even properly started, and we were already dead where we stood. Outnumbered to begin with — now upgraded straight to one against ten.

If the Federal military had ever designed a practicum titled How to Viscerally Understand Despair on Your First Live Deployment, this session had been curated with real love. They'd even sourced an actual enemy fleet as teaching material. I stared at the feed, and the first thing that surfaced in my head wasn't tactical analysis. It was the steakhouse owner's face — all frontier folk-wisdom, and thoroughly punchable.... Was that man actually in the steak business, or moonlighting as a fortune-teller?

Tobita didn't give anyone the right to stay frozen even half a second longer.

"Helm." His voice wasn't loud. But right then it was steady in a way that bordered on wrong — the sound of a nail driven cleanly into wood, pinning the bridge's nearly scattered nerves straight back to their stations.

"Proceed to the coordinates I'm sending you." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Roy stalled for something like a fraction of a second. Not defiance — pure human instinct. Any normal brain, on hearing at least ten Imperial high-speed cruisers ahead, should produce, in order: retreat, evade, get away, get further away, please let the universe take today off. Not understood, proceeding to new coordinates.

But Tobita's data had already hit Roy's nav system ahead of him. The instant the new track lit up, I nearly swore out loud. That wasn't a route away from the enemy. It wasn't even something a sane person would call a way out. The line skimmed the outer edge of the minefield at an angle sharp enough to make your teeth ache — like tracing a blade along the veins on the back of your own hand.

Drift even slightly, and ahead sat the Imperial firing line, beside sat the minefield, and behind sat two friendly hulls that had just gone dark. This wasn't a course. It was a survival exam only someone with a genuinely elevated psychiatric profile could have drawn. Then I saw Tobita smile. Not a broad grin. Not the rousing, recruitment-poster kind of smile. Just the corner of his mouth lifting — brief, thin, carrying a trace of something that raised the hair on your arms.

That particular smile only shows up on two kinds of people: the lunatic who's just spotted a weakness in his prey, or the master player who's just watched the board finally settle into exactly the shape he wanted.... Fuck. He really was a lunatic. Not even an ordinary one. The most dangerous kind — the sort who looks like he's rationing syllables on an ordinary day, and only truly comes alive once a situation has rotted into something interesting enough to be a real challenge.

A specific, hard-to-dismiss dread settled under my ribs. Tobita wasn't charging blindly. He'd already looked at a battlespace wrecked beyond recognition and found the one seam that only a lunatic would call a road. And worse — sitting at the tactical station, watching that coordinate line overlay the minefield and the Imperial jump points, I was starting to understand, dimly, exactly what he was trying to do. Understanding your CO in a moment like this is never something worth feeling good about.

Because it usually means: you're about to have to go just as crazy along with him.

"All hands, battle stations!" Tobita's voice wasn't loud. It still drove into the bridge clean and sharp as an iron spike.

"Bridge shielding down! All weapons control — full unlock! Executive Officer!"

"Sir." Maki didn't stop for half a second. She grabbed the shipwide handset off the bulkhead with one hand, hitting the electronic action-stations alarm with the other. A moment later, a deep, massive electronic toll rolled up out of the Yukikaze's core— Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong— It wasn't just loud.

It felt like someone taking a metal hammer and striking every single nerve on the ship, one beat at a time — shattering whatever was still lingering in the bloodstream: shore leave, exhaustion, confusion, and every are we about to die spiral that had built up since the minefield reveal. At the same moment, the heavy shielding plates outside the bridge's forward viewport began sliding down in sequence. The cold exterior light cut off.

Interior lighting snapped to combat-dim, console and tactical-display brightness redistributing on the fly. The whole bridge changed its face in an instant — from warship to a blade that had actually been drawn to draw blood. Maki drew a breath. Her voice went out through the shipwide net, steady.

"General Quarters, General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations!" She paused less than a beat, then continued — no excess inflection, calm to the point of coldness. It was exactly that calm that tightened the back of your neck.

"Movement routes: starboard, forward and up. Port, aft and down. Ship entering full airtight lockdown." Then, dropping her voice slightly, she delivered the last line with total clarity.

"This is not a drill." Four words. Anyone aboard who hadn't fully caught up yet got slapped awake by that alone. I sat at tactical and watched Maki hang the handset back up, the console's cold light cutting a clean, sharp line across her profile. In that moment she looked nothing like a student, nothing like someone hastily conscripted into a rank she technically shouldn't have.

She looked like something that had simply always belonged inside a hull — cold, steady, hard, carrying a pressure that left no room to argue.... Damn it. Looking that composed at a time like this was a genuine violation of wartime fairness. Tobita glanced once more toward CIC, as if running a final check of the whole chain of command in his head, then spoke.

"Ensign Evelyn Sado. CIC is yours."

"Sir!" Evelyn's response came back almost instantly. Tense — but not shaking. That already put her ahead of the curve. Everyone here was still young, and they'd just been shoved into something that looked nothing like let the students try it once. I looked up at Tobita on instinct. Not insubordination — I just wanted to ask: what about Elena? Tobita apparently ran some kind of dedicated radar for subordinate questions, because he cut me off before I'd even fully turned my head.

"Lieutenant Hoshino. Stop staring at me," he said, flat.

"I know what you're thinking. Major Kirishima isn't this ship's assigned engagement officer. She's been transferred to another unit." My mouth twitched. Come on. This was textbook robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul, right up until there's no wall left and you're just propping the gap with a tabletop and a spare door. Back at the Academy, listening to instructors go on about the rigorous, comprehensive Federal logistics chain and flexible, highly efficient command deployment, I'd at least kept the outer shell of respect.

Looking at this now, that speech belonged to the same literary genre as a tourist brochure claiming excellent local security, perfect for evening strolls.

"All right. Everyone sharpen up." The air on the bridge cinched in another notch. Then Tobita's eyes locked onto the helm.

"Roy. Hands steady. Follow the course I gave you — slow." He paused, then added, with pure malice:"It's just a little minefield next to us." I nearly lost it on the spot. Just a little minefield? He said it as casually as just a few clouds or that's just a flower bed on your left, please don't step in it. The problem being that what sat beside us wasn't a flower bed. It was a cosmic-scale minefield fully capable of turning the Yukikaze into a Federal military case study.

Roy sat at the helm, his face pale with a certain artistic quality.

"Can't we use autopilot..." The line carried a completely honest, completely undignified struggle. Watching the sheen at his temple, I genuinely couldn't tell whether it was sweat, tears, or if the two had already formed a strategic alliance under extreme pressure.

"No," Tobita answered, sharp and immediate, without a shred of sympathy.

"Autopilot isn't afraid of dying. Which means it also doesn't know when it's supposed to be." Infuriatingly, that actually made sense. Under Roy's hands, the Yukikaze began sliding along the outer edge of the minefield. Not charging. Not threading a needle. And definitely not the reckless trust me rush you see in bad action dramas with the music swelling behind it. Sliding — like the edge of one blade brushing along the flat of another. Off by even a fraction, and it wouldn't be a navigation error.

It would be the whole ship turning into the night sky's most expensive fireworks display. I watched the plotted track on the tactical display and felt my stomach clench. The curve was wide, tracing a jaw-aching outer arc that looked like neither a retreat nor a simple dodge. It hugged the minefield's edge, cutting slowly along the outer flank of the Imperial jump point — like someone stitching a seam along an enemy's back with a needle. No blood drawn yet. Already an ache. Then I understood. Of course.

Tobita wasn't running. He was circling — around behind the Imperial formation, to deliver a surprise even they weren't going to enjoy. In that instant, I finally understood the smile. A normal person looks at this and sees one against ten. A lunatic looks at it and sees ten hulls fresh out of warp, formation not yet locked, fire coverage limited, pinned beside a minefield they themselves don't dare touch. The first kind thinks about how not to die too badly.

The second thinks about how to put a boot in the enemy's face before they've found their footing. The whole Yukikaze right now was a clown balanced on a blade's edge. One slip, and tactical surprise turns into an eternal punchline. But the problem was — this might actually work. Nobody on the bridge wasted a word. Just system callouts, console work, the low hum of the engines, and Roy's increasingly careful, increasingly slow helm rhythm — like a surgeon cutting along a vein.

Akari began feeding quiet updates on the enemy formation's shifts. Lan pulled Imperial comm-chain noise and encrypted jump residue out of the static, thread by thread. Jess had clearly had something to say, but one look at the minefield's outline was enough to make her shut her mouth, fingers resting near the weapons backup interface — a bird that was usually loud, finally aware it wasn't the moment to squawk. Maki stood at the XO station, gaze cycling between the course, the hull attitude, and the station reports.

She didn't say much — just the occasional line, as short as physically possible, and every one landed exactly where it mattered.

"Port drift's too wide. Pull it in half a degree."

"Log that comm delay."

"CIC — stop watching the show. Watch the data." That last one was almost certainly aimed at whoever had started treating their own terror as a spectator sport. Maki was still Maki. Even now, she could drag someone straight back from an out-of-body experience with a single sentence. Just as the Yukikaze completed the final leg of that wide, edge-skimming arc, Tobita spoke again.

"Lieutenant Hoshino."

"Sir."

"The moment we clear their flank — hit them. Hard." He wasn't looking at me. His eyes stayed fixed on the enemy formation projection. But his voice carried a very specific edge, like he'd already plotted the fall of the first volley in his head and had just been waiting for the moment to say it out loud.

"I want at least four hulls out of it." The corner of my mouth twitched.

"Sir." I hadn't known until today that killing Imperial ships came with a KPI. I understood the logic, of course. Four wasn't a random number. Knock four hulls out of a ten-cruiser formation — sunk, crippled, or simply stripped of firing rhythm — and the entire back half of their deployment falls apart. Fire-control chains, maneuvering room, support angles, psychological pressure — all of it breaks at once. Tobita didn't want a satisfying hit. He wanted their formation thrown off-balance from the very first bite.

Rationally, I understood. Emotionally, I still wanted to say: that's a brutal quarterly target to set. I re-sorted the fire-control priority list at the tactical station, fingers sliding across each enemy ID tag one by one. The cruisers' silhouettes spread across the projection — vanguard, flank, rear — ten blades already drawn, pressing forward. And we were sliding right along the one blind arc they least wanted anyone to occupy. Just a little more. A little more, and we'd be poking our heads out from behind them.

In that instant, whoever fired first would decide whose bodies fell first. I drew a slow breath, palm flat against the main interface, and felt my own heartbeat picking up speed. Not fear.... Fine. Some fear, obviously. But more than that — something harder to name. Like being shoved off a cliff, and only realizing halfway down that you were actually holding a knife. The Yukikaze's bow began sliding, silent, toward the shadow behind the Imperial line.