Chương 188: 71. Personnel Allocation 2

"Because Maki Kushima holds a mastery rating in every subject," Ash said, flat.

"You're welcome to pull her transcript if you don't believe me." Jess opened her mouth. Ash kept going.

"She picks her own primary specialty. The rest of her hours fill wherever the ship needs. That's not a favor. It's because you can drop her into any slot on this ship and she works." Wow. That landed harder than "open selection." Open selection sounded like a perk. You can drop her into any slot wasn't a perk. That was raw capability, stated flat, leaving no room to argue. Jess was finished this time. Completely. No comeback left, no foothold.

She closed her mouth slowly, wearing the specific misery of someone furious with nowhere solid to put it. I almost laughed. I was dangerously close. Close enough that I had to lift my cup and pretend to drink, using the rim to hide whatever my mouth was doing. Maki seemed to notice. Her eyes flicked toward me. Just once. But I was absolutely certain she'd seen. My heart skipped, and I tilted the cup higher, projecting the aura of someone with a deeply devout relationship to hydration. Damn it.

Getting caught by her, even now, was humiliating enough on its own.

"Harvey." Ash, apparently immune to the sideshow, kept moving down the list.

"Engine room." Harvey made a short, satisfied sound.

"Finally, something that makes sense."

"You're supervising," Ash added. Harvey's face soured instantly.

"Knew there was a catch."

"There are no free rides on the Yukikaze," Ash said.

"Put that on a plaque above the airlock," Harvey said flatly.

"If I find the time." The two of them had a strange, dry friction to their exchanges — sandpaper on sandpaper, coarse enough on both sides that it somehow came out smooth.

"Roy, Lan. Logistics," Ash said. Roy finally surfaced from the blast radius of Jess's meltdown and managed a stiff nod.

"Understood." Lan nodded too. Though I genuinely doubted he was thinking about logistics right now, and not about how his very private situation had become communal property in the Number 22 living room the night before. Aida, of course, had no intention of letting that go.

"A logistics duo." She smiled.

"I imagine your transport routes and inventory reconciliation are going to be extremely... synchronized." Roy's ears went visibly red. Lan said, quietly, "Senior. Please don't mix operational duties with strange implications."

"I'm not implying anything. I'm complimenting your efficiency."

"It's the tone," Roy finally snapped.

"The tone's the problem." Good. He was still alive. After last night's detonation, I'd half-expected him to spend the whole morning comatose. At least his basic defense systems were still online. Ash waited until everyone had more or less absorbed their own line, then rapped his knuckles on the table once more. Not loud. Effective.

"Questions now," he said.

"Don't wait till we're aboard to say you didn't know." The silence this time was shorter. Because this wasn't just a lecture anymore. People were holding paper with their actual names on it, and what was written there would decide their sleep schedule and, potentially, whether they survived. I looked down at my own line. Single-seat fighter drills. Something in my chest, annoyingly, ran warm again. There was anticipation. There was also pressure.

Real pressure — not the decorative kind attached to a dream, but the kind that shows up once the dream gets a slot on a timetable and your name attached to the consequences. I raised my hand.

"Senior." If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Go."

"The fighter drills — simulator only, or do we actually touch the airframes?" Ash looked at me. Brief. Measuring. Checking whether I was asking out of excitement, or because I actually understood what I was asking.

"Simulator first. Airframe after," he said.

"The order doesn't reverse. If you can't hold a stable run in the sim, putting you in the real thing is just wasted fuel."... Fair. Completely fair. Fair enough to leave no room for wishful thinking. I nodded.

"Understood." Across from me, Maki finally spoke.

"Ship-side fill assignments — pre-allocated on our end, or decided by the Yukikaze on the fly?" She always asked that kind of question. Never what do I want to do. Always how does this system actually run. Ash answered just as cleanly.

"Pre-allocated here. Ship retains final adjustment authority. In other words, what you're looking at now is a starting position — not a guaranteed seat through to the end." Akari nodded lightly beside her, as if already building a flowchart in her head. Jess, still frowning at the roster, muttered under her breath:"Who wants a seat through to the end anyway. The starting position alone is bad enough..." I almost laughed again. This time I held it. Because somewhere along the way, the mood at the table had shifted.

There were still jokes. Still stubborn mouths, still counterattacks, still people getting flattened by reality. But underneath all of it, something heavier had settled in. The groups weren't a joke. The roster wasn't decoration. Licenses, specialties, ratings, backfill slots, bridge call-and-response — once those things got attached to a name, you realized the Yukikaze wasn't scenery. It wasn't something to talk about, or fantasize over, or admire from a safe distance across the harbor.

It was a place that would swallow your daily rhythm whole. A place that would rearrange you according to your actual ability, your actual flaws, your actual reaction time. I looked down at the paper in my hands and, without meaning to, thought of the wind on the mountaintop last night. Of Maki standing unreasonably close. Of the exact second I'd leaned in first. Of the way the living room had gone up like a lit fuse the moment we got back. None of that had disappeared.

It had just been pushed one step behind this roster. Not erased. Just reminded: make sure you can board alive and finish your watch standing before you deal with the rest. Ash squared the roster's edges and set it aside.

"Know all of this by tonight," he said.

"This afternoon I drill call-and-response. Tomorrow, handover procedure. If anyone still can't call out 'Captain on the bridge' properly the day after that, they'll remember it for a full week."

"That sounds ominous," Aida said.

"Then memorize it," Ash said. He set the roster down. And that was when I noticed it. There was another sheet still under his hand. Not the roster. Not the earlier briefing either. Narrower than the roster, formatted like a supplementary attachment — the name columns packed tighter than standard, with a few handwritten notes in the margin. The unease that had just started to settle in my chest floated right back up. I had no idea why, but I was suddenly sure the real trouble hadn't started yet.

Ash caught me looking. He held my gaze for a second. Then, very naturally, he flipped the paper over and pressed it face-down on the table.

"As for this one," he said, "we'll talk after you've finished eating." The table went quiet for a beat. Jess frowned first. Aida's smile thinned slightly. Roy and Lan wore the exact same look — there's a second round? I stared at the sheet under Ash's hand and thought: all the grouping, the banter, the takedowns, the licenses and mastery ratings — that had all just been the warm-up. By the time we'd mostly finished breakfast, Ash finally moved.

He wasn't the type to drag things out for effect, so when he flipped over the sheet that had been sitting face-down at his elbow — the one that looked like it carried somebody's death date — the table went quiet again, almost in unison. Not out of respect. Out of a shared, unspoken understanding: the duty roster had only been the first cut. The second was coming down now. Ash smoothed the sheet flat and pressed his fingertip to the header. The title was blunt. Blunt enough to make you want to leave the room.

Yukikaze Pre-Boarding Special Assignments.... Wonderful. Of course it wasn't here to make anyone's life easier. Jess frowned immediately.

"I'm saying this now," she said, setting down her fork and raising every shield she owned in advance.

"If there's a single line on that sheet about 'building team spirit,' I'm requesting an immediate transfer to Engineering." Harvey didn't look up.

"Engineering doesn't take complainers."

"Then how'd you get in?" Aida asked, smiling. Harvey shot her a cold look.

"Merit."

"Ah. So complaining at a professional level counts as merit," Aida nodded, filing it away. I almost laughed. I'd been bracing for a stomachache, and instead we'd started arguing before the pain even set in. Table 22's breakfasts really were something — they didn't just provide calories, they came with a complimentary side of psychological wear. Ash ignored the crossfire, sweeping the table with a look that plainly said I'll wait till you're done. Once the noise died down on its own, he spoke.

"This isn't a reward. It isn't a punishment," he said.... Whenever someone opens with that line, it usually turns out to be both — a reward for command, unpaid overtime for whoever's on the list.

"On departure day, the Yukikaze will be running standard boarding procedure while also hosting an observation tour from the Federal Military Affiliated Middle School." Ash slid the sheet toward the center.

"Which means you're not just here for practicum. You'll also be supporting live demonstrations, guiding foot traffic, and handling safety response — without disrupting normal ship operations." Aida blinked.

"So we're working while being watched."

"Not watched," Ash corrected.

"Observed." Jess shot back instantly.

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes." Ash's face stayed flat.

"Being watched is just embarrassing. Being observed goes on the record." The table went quiet for a second. I held half a second of silence for all of us who were about to be observed. He had a real gift for taking one bad thing and describing it as an even worse one.

"Simply put," he went on, "you're not chaperoning a middle school field trip. You're prep-division cadets running a normal practicum with outside visitors present. Anyone who lets the pace slip into a day trip, I will personally kick back down to the ground." Even Jess didn't have a comeback ready. Not just because his tone was flat. That particular flatness carried more weight than shouting would have. Like someone setting a knife on the table — not raised, not pointed at anyone, just there.

Letting you know: I'm not joking. Ash's finger dropped down the page.

"Special assignments split into three categories: public routing, demonstration support, restricted-zone response." I straightened without meaning to. I recognized that kind of breakdown. Not because it was new — because it's exactly the sort of classification you only use when you're actually slotting people into a working system. Not one decorative word in it.

"Public routing first." Ash looked at the sheet.

"Aida."

"Here." Aida answered immediately, sweet as candy, entirely unbothered by the gravity of the moment.

"You're on CIC tour briefing and route guidance." She blinked once, then smiled.

"You've finally recognized this mouth as a national asset?"

"I've recognized that if I send anyone else, the briefing turns into a eulogy," Ash said.

"You'll at least keep a bunch of middle schoolers awake while they fail to understand it." Aida looked delighted.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"It's not a compliment," Ash said, flat.

"It's a minimum bar."

"Even better. I prefer it that way." She said it like it was obvious — as if being insulted and handed something important in the same breath was some premium treatment she'd specifically requested.

"Evelyn." Ash went on.

"You're inside CIC on system monitoring, plus verbal explanation and removal for the restricted zone." Evelyn adjusted her glasses and nodded.

"Understood. Meaning if anyone touches something they shouldn't, I remove them using socially acceptable language." Aida rested her chin on her hand, smiling.

"Your version of 'socially acceptable language' usually ensures they never touch anything again for the rest of their life."

"If it works, it works," Evelyn said, utterly unbothered. Fair enough. That assignment made sense for her. The people you actually need to worry about were never the ones who yelled. It's the ones who stand next to you, perfectly calm, and let you realize on your own that one more inch and you become a case number in someone's incident report.