Chương 86: 34.Fully Convinced 34-2

At 1500 hours, Prep Room B was like a sealed tin can with a slow burn inside. The iron door scraped open and heat hit us in the face—canvas, machine oil, old metal, and dust all at once. I wrinkled my nose reflexively. Inside: several workbenches worn past any identifiable original color, walls hung with tools, harnesses, tie-downs, folding shovels, waterproof sheeting, and miscellaneous hardware I could name about half of. In the corner, an old scale platform, a timer beside it, and a few empty supply crates.

Harvey was already there. He was leaning against a bench, turning a marker in his fingers, wearing his usual expression—the one that suggested the entire world owed him sleep. When we walked in, his gaze moved across me, then Jess, then stopped on Maki. One second. Shorter than most people got. Which made it more dangerous.

"You're here," he said.

"Obviously. What, did you think this was my ghost checking in posthumously?" I dropped my pack on a bench. Harvey didn't look at me. He just raised a hand and pointed at the scale platform.

"Weigh in first."

"You greet people like you're processing inventory."

"Because you consistently present as scrap material awaiting disposal."

"You motherfucker—""Hoshino, hold off." Jess stepped aside with practiced ease.

"I want to watch how he's going to disassemble Kushima first." Maki set her pack on a separate bench. Not the Upper House kind—attractive but useless and light. She'd switched to a proper field-grade military pack, external attachments clean, compression straps pulled tight. Clearly not the same setup from this morning. I glanced at it. Whatever Harvey had told her to cut two days ago, she'd actually cut. Harvey walked over and hooked a finger through the side attachment ring.

"You revised the sheet and repacked this yourself?"

"Yes."

"Good. Empty it." No argument. She unclipped the buckles and took everything out one piece at a time, laying it on the bench. Medical kit, water purification set, waterproof sheeting, repair kit, cook set, rations, replacement liners, insect repellent, rope, signal cloth, compact record board, collapsible water bladder, multi-tool. Each item placed in its own zone, orientations roughly consistent. Jess let out a low whistle.

"She's not here to survive. She's here to host an exhibition."

"Still better than your method of compressing everything into a single explosive device," I said.

"I call that situational art."

"I call it improvised stupidity before a premature death." Harvey ignored us, bent over the bench, and picked up Maki's medical kit. He squeezed it, testing the thickness.

"Too rigid."

"Moisture protection," Maki answered immediately.

"So when your gloves are wet, you can't open it." He tossed it back.

"This isn't a desk. Where's the tourniquet?" Maki reached for it.

"Stop." Harvey said.

"Gloves on." She paused, pulled work gloves from her pocket, put them on, then retrieved the tourniquet. Her movements were still controlled, but visibly half a beat slower. Harvey watched. No expression.

"Ten seconds behind. That's enough to bleed out a puddle."

"Noted," Maki said. I'd expected her to argue. She didn't. She filed it directly and moved on, already planning her own correction. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. That kind of response made righteous dislike very hard to sustain. Infuriating. Harvey picked up her cook set and opened it.

"Fuel's packed too neatly." I couldn't help it. A short laugh escaped.

"You can get criticized for too neat?" Harvey finally looked at me.

"Yes. Means she still has bandwidth to care about neat."

"…That's a deeply unreasonable standard."

"The field will be worse." I had no answer for that. Maki calmly took the fuel kit back and stripped off one layer of organization straps on the spot.

"Like this?"

"Better. One more fixed point gone." Jess had settled against a workbench, watching with visible enjoyment.

"I get it now. This isn't a test. This is taming."

"You too," Harvey said. Jess's smile faltered.

"…I'm here to observe."

"Group 144 has no observers. Get over here." I laughed without any sympathy whatsoever. Karma moves fast. Extremely satisfying. For the next forty minutes, Harvey worked through each of us like he was sharpening something—cutting habits and packing choices down to the bone. My cherry cola got dragged out for another public flogging, naturally.

"Two cans," Harvey said.

"I already cut it to two."

"One."

"Go to hell."

"Half a can. Pour it in the water bladder."

"Are you actually a demon?"

"I'm the person who dies slightly after you do." Jess was laughing so hard she crouched down, and then the next second Harvey had her snack bag in his hand.

"What's this?"

"Psychological sustenance."

"Dead weight."

"You soulless equipment goblin—""Cut it." Maki was on the other side of the bench, already running her second layout pass. This time she was faster, and her packing logic had visibly shifted from presentable toward functional. She moved the tourniquet to an outer quick-access position, brought the repair kit up from the bottom, and recalculated the shared medical weight distribution. I watched her work and felt something sit wrong in my chest. Not irritation at her. Irritation that she was genuinely absorbing it.

The kind of person who actually integrates feedback isn't a decoration—they start changing the shape of the team around them. Harvey dropped the timer on the bench.

"Next drill. Simulated emergency repack. Thirty seconds to get everything back in the bag and on your back. Wrong order, bad weight distribution, loose external attachment—start over." I raised my hand.

"Is it too late to resign from Group 144?"

"Yes," Jess said.

"You already signed your name. You sold yourself."

"I should have read the fine print."

"Did you read it?"

"No."

"Then you deserve this."

"Shit." Harvey hit the timer.

"Go." The prep room went down to buckle-clicks, fabric friction, and the compressed breathing of three people working against a clock. I packed by muscle memory—what goes against the back, what rides the hip, what can go to the bottom. I'd done it enough that my hands were ahead of my brain. Maki's first pass was still too clean, but on the second she started trading symmetry for weight balance. Twenty-seven seconds—I swung the pack onto my shoulder.

Twenty-nine seconds—Jess got the last strap buckled while cursing. Just over thirty—Maki pressed the top flap down. Harvey didn't look at any of us. He walked to Maki and gave the side compression strap a sharp tug. The whole pack shifted.

"Dead," he said. Maki exhaled. Set the pack down.

"Again."

"Not a request. A requirement."

"I know." She unpacked and started over. Faster this time, and rougher. The Upper House precision was still there, but it was picking up field grime—less about looking right, more about working right. I watched her from the side and felt an unexpected urge to laugh. This morning she'd been in the admin office using indexed tabs to back Linde into a corner. This afternoon Harvey was taking her apart and rebuilding her on a timer. Poetic, really. Very Lower House. Second round: she came in at twenty-eight seconds.

Harvey reached out and pressed the side of the pack. No shift this time. He said one sentence.

"That works. The other half, we'll see in the field." Maki nodded. There was sweat at her temple. Her voice was still even.

"That's enough." I raised an eyebrow.

"Your bar's that low?"

"Not low." She pulled off her gloves and tucked them back into the quick-access pocket.

"That's what this stage is worth." …That was also a pretty unreasonable thing to say. Harvey heard it and, remarkably, didn't argue. He just unfolded her revised supply sheet on the bench and drew a few more circles on it with the marker.

"Shared medical kit is yours to manage, but emergency access isn't yours alone. Hoshino, Jess—memorize the location."

"Already know it," I said.

"Water treatment is Kushima's primary, Knox verification." Jess picked up the thread and stretched it out deliberately.

"What am I responsible for? Laughing the enemy to death?" Harvey didn't look up.

"Observation and documentation. And reminding Hoshino not to do anything impulsive when her brain overheats." I turned immediately.

"Why am I the default first to overheat?" Jess patted my shoulder with great maternal warmth.

"Prior incidents."

"You'd better not have any."

"I do. I just acknowledge them faster." I genuinely wanted to press her face into the waterproof sheeting. Harvey dropped the marker and looked at the three of us.

"Listen. The sheet is just a sheet. Starting today, you're not preparing individually—you're splitting the weight of one shared life. Every piece of dead weight someone carries is weight that ends up on someone else's back." The prep room went quiet for a moment. Not because it was moving. Because it was too direct to dodge. I looked at the gear on the bench, then at Maki's repacked bag.

She was standing there with her sleeve pushed up one turn, the back of her hand slightly red, uniform no longer looking like something from a display case. She was starting to look like someone who was actually going to go to that place with us. Annoying. But not useless. Coming from me, that was a fairly high evaluation. Jess resettled her pack on her shoulder and tilted her head at me.

"So, acting squad leader. How's the assessment?"

"Who's acting squad leader?"

"The way you were looking at her just now. Like you were running incoming-asset classification on a new category of hazardous material."

"I was evaluating wear rate." Maki tightened the last strap and answered without looking up.

"Conclusion?" I looked at her and made a short sound.

"Not returning the merchandise. For now." Jess burst out laughing. Harvey gave a very shallow eye-roll—the kind that meant you people talk too much but didn't bother saying it. From the hallway outside the prep room, the distant assembly bell rang, its metallic tail dragging long and dry, like a reminder: no matter how much like a team you look right now, when you walk into that forest in three days, whatever's going to break will still break. I shouldered my pack.

The weight pulled down, but it settled more evenly than yesterday's scattered mess. Only a little. But enough to remember.