Chương 216: 83. Type Zero Fighter Craft 1

Tobita gave us three minutes after that first round's mass, collective humiliation ended. Just three minutes. It's a strange length of time. Too short to reinvent yourself as a competent human being, but just long enough to seriously wonder whether you'd nearly thrown up your lunch and your dignity together inside that simulator pod. When the hatches popped, the whole row of us climbed out in our own distinct styles of wreckage. D was the "mouth still running, soul left behind in the cockpit" type.

One hand braced on the rim, the other clamped over his forehead, face gone white like he'd just survived three rounds with the Federal Revenue Service.

"For the record," he said, "that wasn't bad flying. That was the universe holding a personal grudge against me."

"The universe has good taste, then." Lan stood nearby, adjusting her gloves, delivering the verdict with complete objectivity.

"Hey. I'm dying here. Would it kill you to be a little gentle?"

"You're not dead yet." Harvey climbed down slowly from the other side. The second his boots hit the deck, he shut his eyes and took a long breath, like he was negotiating a ceasefire with his own stomach. Roy took it more seriously than that—he crouched beside his pod and studied the exterior plating with total focus, as if refusing to admit that the idiot who'd just spun into a bulkhead was himself might somehow undo the whole thing. Evelyn sat at the edge of her hatch, still a little pale.

Aida crouched in front of her, quietly talking her through her breathing. Akari had already pulled up a terminal and was reviewing the attitude logs from the run, expression so focused you'd think she'd come here purely for the data rather than nearly having been tossed into a cosmic salad. As for Jess— She was one of the rare ones who looked, on the surface, fine.

Assuming you ignored the fury barely banked at the corner of her left eye, and the way she'd stepped out of the pod hard enough to want to put a boot through the deck. She flicked the sensor gel off her gloves and looked straight at me.

"Hoshino," she said.

"You looked like you were having a lot of fun back there."

"It was all right," I said.

"I could've had more fun. If your big spin had held for another half rotation." Her eyes narrowed.

"You got a death wish?"

"No," I said, honestly.

"I just think you look exactly like your temper booting up when you fly." Her mouth twitched. Clearly deciding between hitting me now or hitting me later, in the air, where it would count. That was when Maki climbed down from the pod directly in front of mine. Her landing was steady—the same way she'd flown, quiet and clean, without a single wasted motion. She didn't have the obvious physical fallout the rest of us did. At most, a sheen of sweat at her temple, her breathing just slightly heavier than usual.

Deeply annoying woman. The rest of us had just been beaten around by the universe with a folding chair, and she looked like she'd taken a brisk walk up a flight of stairs. She glanced at me.

"You held up better than I expected." I nearly choked on my own spit.

"Could you say that a little quieter?"

"No."

"Did I offend you somehow?"

"Yes," she said, flat.

"Your act was too obvious." I was about to fire back when Tobita's voice cut in from the central control station.

"Break's over. Back in your pods." Nobody tried to negotiate. We'd all just had a very thorough demonstration that this man was not the type to sit down with students and discuss pedagogical warmth. He was the type to watch you spin out in simulated airspace and then sincerely tell you that two more laps would teach you exactly what you'd done wrong. When we strapped back in, the atmosphere was nothing like the first time. The first round had been chaos.

This one was focus—the kind that comes stapled to humiliation. I locked my harness back down. When my fingers found the stick, there was a layer of clarity there I did not appreciate. Because I knew Tobita had probably already worked it out: I wasn't starting from zero. Worse—Maki had seen it too. Which meant my plan to keep passing myself off as an ordinarily unlucky cadet had just been upgraded from barely feasible to please accept my condolences.

"Comms check, all stations," Tobita said. A chain of confirmations came back. Instead of launching us immediately, he pushed a simplified tactical overlay into the shared display.

"Second sortie is not basic attitude adaptation," he said.

"We're adding pursuit and breakaway. Your objective isn't to hit me. Your objective is to learn how to see me coming without immediately adding yourself to the memorial list." D muttered on the channel, just loud enough to be heard: "Real motivational speech." If Tobita heard it, he didn't care.

"Remember how the Type-Zero handles," he went on.

"It isn't a trainer built to catch you when you fall. It's the Federation's standard combat fighter, built to kill things. Twin 20 mm Type-99 plasma cannons at the wing roots—one second of sustained fire at close range cuts most targets in half. Twin 7. 7 mm pulse lasers at the nose. Those are for tracing a line, drawing a reaction, testing range. They are not there for you to spray around to feel brave. Understood?" The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Understood." The response came back a lot tighter this time.

"Good. Second sortie. Launch." The simulated airspace opened again. This time, we didn't collectively turn ourselves into space debris. We also didn't magically ascend to Federal ace status. But at least we'd stopped looking like a barrel of monkeys thrown into a washing machine for the first time. After his first two tumbles, D finally grasped a truth simple enough to print over a bathroom door: don't argue with inertia.

Roy's conservative lines started to take shape, even if he still flew like a man in a committed relationship with the traffic code. Harvey, unexpectedly, steadied up enough to have spare bandwidth for commentary, delivered in the low, graveled voice of someone technically dying. Jess's problem stayed very Jess. It wasn't that she couldn't fly. Quite the opposite. She had talent. The problem was her talent came with teeth.

The moment she entered a pursuit vector, she instinctively wanted to bite down, press the advantage, push the throttle one more notch—as if the Type-Zero wouldn't truly be hers unless it felt the heat behind her temper. That kind of flying had magnetism. It was also a great way to die first. Maki took the opposite road entirely. Her Type-Zero moved through the display with a quality of cold, almost excessive cleanness. Not the fastest. Not the most aggressive.

But every correction landed like she'd thought of it half a beat in advance. Everyone else was surviving up there. She was doing math. Annoying. And… beautiful. I rolled my eyes at myself, mentally, and pushed the throttle down below the safety line. This is not the time to admire her flying, Hoshino. This is a life-or-death struggle to look aggressively average. Then Tobita cut in from ahead.

If the rest of us had been flying like eleven separate peace treaties negotiated in a hurry with the laws of physics, Tobita's Type-Zero was something else entirely. His machine wasn't flying. It was writing in the airspace. Turns, feints, false breaks, angle cuts, reverse slips, the tight edge-of-stall feathering—all of it stripped down so far that even the desire to show off had burned away, leaving nothing behind but efficiency.

For the first time, I understood that the word ace wasn't exaggeration printed on a recruitment poster. It was a very specific, physical kind of pressure. When he cut through the middle of our formation, it was like a blade through a bowl of batter that hadn't set yet. The channel exploded.

"Upper right! Upper right!" Roy shouted.

"I know he's upper right, so why is he already not there!" D shouted back.

"Jess, don't bite alone—" Harvey started.

"Don't tell me what to do!" Jess had already slammed her throttle forward. A second later, her silhouette tore across the display, cutting hard along Tobita's break axis. The angle was vicious. It was also beautiful. But Tobita had clearly known exactly how she'd pounce—nose dipped, his whole Type-Zero sliding from what should have been an upward trajectory straight into her lower rear blind spot, and he flicked off a short, backhanded burst. Hit-confirmation sparks bloomed across her outer shields.

"Hit. Simulated kill." The channel went dead for half a second. Then Jess delivered a string of profanity so complete, and so entirely unfit for military documentation, that I nearly laughed—right up until Tobita's shadow swept across the left edge of my canopy. Too close. My body moved first.

Right hand on the stick, left hand cutting half a notch of thrust, riding the inertia that felt like it was trying to pull my eyeballs out of my skull—letting the frame fold inward instead of forcing a hard turn, with just enough slackness in the motion to make it feel like the machine had decided to go that way on its own. That wasn't textbook. At least, not the kind they teach you first.

It was closer to something a deeply awful man used to say, standing outside a training pod with an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth, addressing a room full of recruits who were about to be sick: Don't wrestle the airframe. Make it think it wants to go there itself. My Type-Zero slid past Tobita's rear visual line. I didn't tag him. But I didn't get cut in half the way I was supposed to, either. A second later, Tobita's voice hit the net.

"Hoshino." My scalp prickled.

"Sir?"

"Eyes on the fight." Three words. No follow-up. No calling me out. His tone was flat enough that he could've been tapping a gauge on his console. Which was exactly what made it worse. It meant he hadn't missed it—he'd seen it, and was choosing not to say anything yet. Maki's voice cut in right after, cold, with that particular unplaceable steadiness.

"Lose focus one more time, and you're the next one to blow up." Technically, she was saving my life. It sounded like she was annoyed I wasn't dying efficiently enough. … Fine. That tracked. By the back half of the second round, keeping up the act had gotten hard. Not because I'd suddenly decided to play hero. Tobita's flying was just that unforgiving.

The more you tried to hide, the more it felt like he was taking a scalpel to your movements, peeling back layer after layer, until the only way to survive was to use what you actually knew. And once I started flying for real, muscle memory turned out to be a lot more honest than my mouth. I didn't dare go full throttle, but I started cutting in from angles that weren't exactly clean—nose-mounted 7.

7 mm pulses first, to trace a line, press, force a reaction, then small throttle corrections to bite down for half a heartbeat whenever he broke. I didn't hit him. Of course I didn't. But the moment that not-quite-unreachable distance showed up in my own movements, even I knew I'd made trouble for myself. Maki caught up fast. No—she didn't catch up to my rhythm. She read exactly what I was doing.

"Hoshino," she said, on a private short channel.

"What?"

"Stop pretending."

"Is that an order or a review?"

"Both." A half-beat pause. Her voice dropped a fraction.

"You fly. I'll watch your exit." Something tightened in my chest without permission. Annoying. This woman spent most of her time talking like she was pinning people to walls, and then, every so often, she'd drop one flat, direct line, and something in my ribs would do something small and embarrassing.

"…Say it like that and it feels like a loan shark just noticed me."

"Relax," she said.

"You're not worth that interest rate yet." Damn her. That stupid little flutter of warmth—strangled by the woman herself, in real time, with her own hands. When the second round finally ended, the eleven of us were set back on the deck like components Tobita had personally taken apart, each in a different way. The hatches opened again. I climbed out less of a wreck than the first time, but my palms were soaked.

Jess vaulted straight out of her pod, wearing an expression somewhere between fury and exhilaration—a gambler who'd just lost, and lost hard enough to get addicted.

"He's not human," Jess said.

"High praise," Harvey said, one hand on the rim.

"Usually reserved for tax auditors and legends." D dragged himself over, looking spiritually deceased.

"I've got exactly two theories about everyone passing this," he announced.

"One: the Federation needs a miracle. Two: the Federation needs a new captain."

"You could suggest that to his face," Lan said.

"No. I'd like to keep living a little longer." The bay went quiet the moment Tobita stepped down from the control platform. It wasn't fear of being yelled at. It was that this man had just used raw skill to shave away every surface anyone might've used to talk tough. Opening your mouth now would just prove you were the kind of mammal that hadn't been disciplined quite enough yet. He looked at Jess first—not long, but long enough for the last of the fight at the corner of her mouth to settle back down.

Then his gaze swept over Roy, Harvey, Akari, and finally stopped in front of me.

"Hoshino Shimo." I straightened.

"Sir."

"With me." The whole room instantly became an excellent place to die. I didn't even need to turn around to feel all ten stares line up perfectly on my back. Especially Jess's—that scorching, I knew something was up look, burning a hole straight through the back of my skull. Tobita walked me over to the Type-Zero fuselage display, stopped, and looked at me. Up close, his eyes weren't nearly as lazy as they seemed from a distance.

There was something in them that belonged specifically to veteran pilots—the kind of recognition left over after watching too many airframes, too many maneuvers, too many people who came back and too many who didn't. He didn't waste words. Just tipped his chin.

"Final round. You fly up front." I blinked.

"…Me?"

"You." Tobita said it lightly.

"Stop burying yourself in the pack." That was it. No exposure. No interrogation. Not even the courtesy of an explanation. He'd simply reached into the formation I'd been using to hide and dropped me straight into the spot most likely to get me killed first. I stayed quiet for two seconds. All I had was:"Understood." He looked at me once more and added:"This time, I'll be watching properly." … Wonderful. Compared to being interrogated on the spot, I'll write it down and we'll settle later was much more his style.

Which didn't make it better. He turned to walk back.

"Return to formation." I followed him, feeling roughly like a lab animal on the way to the dissection table.