Chương 192: 73. When Fledglings Leave Nest 1

Military orders are absolute. Usually, that phrase sounds like something printed on a disciplinary placard. When it actually lands in your life, the meaning is generally much more direct: you were still telling yourself there's probably a few days left yesterday, and then, first thing this morning, someone drives a truck to your door and informs you, very calmly, that there isn't. Move. Now. That was the reality I woke up to the next morning. No buffer at all.

I'd barely made it downstairs before I saw a small cargo truck already parked outside Number 22, its flatbed clean and empty, looking like a mobile notice that read: stop dragging your feet and load whatever's left of your private life onto this thing. Aida was standing beside it, clipboard in one hand, waving people in with the other, somehow looking more like the logistics company than anyone who actually worked for one.

"You're up?" She spotted me and smiled, easy and natural.

"Good timing. First batch goes to the harbor now." I stood in the doorway and stared at the truck for two full seconds before my brain caught up.... Right. It wasn't almost time to leave anymore. It was start moving, right now.

"Hoshino." Aida seemed to remember something and called after me.

"Your motorcycle — make sure it's in the garage and locked." I blinked.

"Oh — right. I almost forgot." I heard myself say that and felt mildly embarrassed. I'd nearly forgotten about the bike entirely. That wasn't the mental state of someone about to ship out — that was the mental state of someone with half their brain still stuck in yesterday and the other half being physically dragged into today. Aida sighed, but it wasn't impatience. More like someone watching a person who usually managed fine suddenly glitching in real time.

"Come on, Hoshino. Get it together."

"... Yes." I answered dutifully and looked in the direction she was pointing. I almost sighed again. Jess was still crouched in front of her boxes, in a state that could only be described as mutually assured destruction with Form B-147. She was clutching the ill-fated scarf, expression tragic enough to suggest the Federation was personally forcing her to bury civilization with her own hands. I stood there for two seconds, and then, silently, let out a very long internal sigh.

We were already at the stage of loading things onto a destroyer, and this person was still in hand-to-hand combat with a scarf. In a certain sense, her spiritual resilience was genuinely impressive. The next half-day, Number 22 existed in a state that could only be described as somewhere between a house move, an emergency evacuation, and a pre-deployment logistics staging operation.

Boxes, labels, forms, checklists, handbooks, clothing, personal gear, first-batch items bound for the East Harbor Staging Area — all of it mixed together. Someone was confirming inventory. Someone was hauling things. Someone was complaining. Someone else wore the expression of a person who couldn't understand how this group managed to make even this loud, and was quietly helping finish the job anyway. I pushed the motorcycle into the garage, confirmed the lock, came back and made several more trips.

By the time the truck had run its first batch and second batch, the sun had already tipped past midday. After that, the house emptied out gradually. Some people headed back to the school to handle paperwork. Some went with the truck for another run to the harbor. Some stayed to do a final check on whatever was left. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. And then, eventually, Number 22 had exactly one person in it. The quiet felt unfamiliar.

I stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. The common area, usually buried under collective chaos, had opened up. The cups on the table were gone. A few of the throw pillows that had lived permanently on the sofa were missing. Even that ambient noise — the kind that came from someone always being around, always in the middle of doing something slightly strange — had disappeared. Just me. And the last traces of a daily life that hadn't been fully packed away yet. I started the final check.

Windows, interior doors, storage room, rear passage, main power, security module, garage link, perimeter sensor array. None of this was difficult for me. If anything, I was more practiced at closing things down than most people. Walk through a space, confirm what needed to be shut, what needed to be locked, what couldn't be left open — once that kind of routine started, the body just moved through it on its own.

By the time I'd cleared the last checkpoint and stepped outside to arm the perimeter security, a faint band of blue light rose along the outer walls of the building, as if a transparent membrane had descended from the roofline and sealed everything inside — the noise, the mess, the brief and chaotic stretch of shared life — into something held in suspension. I stood there for two seconds. For no clear reason, it felt like leaving something in storage. Not a farewell. Not an ordinary outing either.

More like — the loud, chaotic, somehow-it-became-normal life we'd all been living together had just been put on standby.

"Off on a long trip?" A voice came from beside me, older and unhurried. I turned. On the other side of the fence stood a man in his sixties. Dark hair, slightly disheveled, though the bone structure suggested he'd probably been striking when he was younger. He was holding a white ceramic cup, steam rising from the rim; when the wind shifted, it carried a strong smell of tea — and underneath that, the sharp, cheap bite of something that was not tea.... Right.

That combination was really very hard to pretend not to notice. It was the retired marshal from before. I straightened instinctively and offered a standard salute. Not because he still held any active office. Some people, even after they step down, carry something that doesn't retire with them.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"I apologize for the disturbance, Marshal." He responded by waving a hand like the title itself was an inconvenience he'd been trying to shake off for years.

"I'm retired," he said.

"Just an old man collecting a pension." His voice was unhurried, even a little lazy. But the eyes were steady — not the kind of steady that pressed down on you, more the kind that came from having seen too much, and just quietly kept the weight. He looked at me for a moment, then asked:"... Is there a war?" I blinked, then answered:"No, sir. Just end-of-term practicum." The old man didn't respond right away.

He looked down and took a sip from his cup — or rather, from whatever was living inside that cup under the name of tea — and was quiet for a few seconds, as if the phrase just practicum had given him some mild, private objection. Then, slowly:"Is that so." He raised his head again.

"What's your name?"

"Hoshino," I said.

"Hoshino Shimo."

"Hoshino... Cadet Hoshino, then." He seemed to be testing the name in his mouth, settling on the safest form of it. His expression shifted — briefly, strangely. Not wariness, not suspicion. Something closer to a hesitation that looked almost like embarrassment, the way a person looks when they'd been about to say something and then decided, at the last second, to say something safer instead.

"Don't push yourself too hard," he said.

"There is nothing in this world worth trading your life for." I didn't answer immediately. Because if someone else had said that, it would have sounded like a slogan on a wall. But coming from a retired marshal standing behind a fence, holding a cup of tea that was clearly also something else, it was an entirely different thing. It wasn't advice.

It was more like what you get from someone who's seen too many prices paid and can't be bothered to wrap it nicely anymore — just the shortest, truest version of what they actually think, handed over without ceremony. I saluted him again.

"Yes, sir." I was about to say something else when my communicator went off. I glanced down. Jess, of course. Judging by the message length and density of punctuation, she'd escalated to phase two. The content was probably not where are you but rather why is this process so stupid and can someone please regulate the universe. I lit a quiet internal candle for whatever came next, looked back up at the old man, gave one more salute, and turned to go.

On the bus, I looked out the window just as the door to Number 24 was pushed open. A middle-aged woman stepped out, a shawl around her shoulders. Even in the fading light, even just standing in the doorway, she had the kind of presence that was difficult to ignore — the unhurried ease of someone who had seen enough of the world that she no longer needed to use any of it as leverage. She walked to the man's side, glanced down at the white ceramic cup in his hand, and took it from him without a word.

She brought it close and smelled it. And then, predictably, she frowned. The old man immediately produced the expression of someone caught in the act who had absolutely no intention of apologizing for it — a slightly sheepish, slightly ridiculous smile, one hand going up to scratch at that already-disheveled dark hair.... I watched that, and smiled. Not a real laugh. More like the corner of my mouth moved on its own, and I didn't notice until half a second later that it had. The bus pulled away.

I brought my eyes back to the string of messages from Jess. Back to school. Back to the bureaucracy, and the human disasters that came with it.