Chương 222: 86. Everyone Has Landmines 1

After the door opened, the scene was, at first, more normal than I'd expected. What I mean by that is — Even though every single middle-schooler in that group was wearing the face of someone who'd come specifically hoping to see something worth talking about for a week straight, at least while their supervising teacher was still standing in the doorway, their mouths maintained a basic outer layer of manners. Some stared at the weapon racks. Some stared at the white-lined ring.

Some stared at the hit-log projection still glowing faintly on the floor. And some — mainly the ones who lived for a crowd — swept their eyes across me, Maki, D, and Jess in rotation, like they were shopping for the loudest piece of material to drag back to the dorm tonight. D watched all of it. He didn't rush to clamp down. Didn't rush to play senior-student authority.

He just drifted naturally toward the center of the room, tapped his practice axe handle twice against his shield, and pulled every gaze back onto himself.

"Alright, since everyone's already in," he said, "let me do a basic public service first. Before anyone decides this is a tourist attraction and steps in expecting a show — this is actually where you learn how not to die." Not sharp. Not commanding. But the rhythm was steady. More importantly — it reclaimed the floor. The few kids who'd already been gearing up to cut in all paused. D raised one hand toward the display armor near the gear rack.

"Sergeant Takenaka already went through this once. I'll repeat it in human language," he said.

"This thing doesn't make you invincible. It just makes you slightly harder to kill."

"Very inspirational," Harvey said from behind.

"Thank you. I do my best to package Federal reality into something educational," D replied without turning. A few of the middle-schoolers laughed. Good. The room was still in his hands. He kept going:"This standard combat armor runs the M. K. I. O. core tactical computer, independent air filtration and circulation. Nerve agents, tear gas — those cheap tricks don't do much to it. Anti-beam coating on the surface too.

So if you're picturing yourself in this thing trading laser shots while looking cool — congratulations. Life's about to teach you something." A kid in the second row, glasses, carrying the unmistakable energy of a military-hardware enthusiast in early development, raised his hand immediately.

"So what actually works against it?" D looked at him and smiled.

"Good question. Two standard answers." He raised two fingers.

"One: a firearm. Two: close the distance and cut them down." The kid blinked. The ones around him lit up instantly. That's the thing about middle-schoolers. Talk to them about systems, specs, operational principles — half will fake understanding, half will glaze over. But the moment you say cut them down, the whole room snaps awake like someone poured ice water over their heads. D was visibly satisfied with the effect. He picked up the training shield nearby and hooked a practice axe along with it.

"Here. Simplest possible demo," he said.

"Not how to win. How not to die first." He waved Roy over.

"Model citizen. Need to borrow you again." Roy stood off to the side with the expression of a man who wanted to ask why is it always me, but ultimately just walked over with the quiet resignation of someone who'd accepted his fate.

"Because you're the most textbook person here," D reassured him, completely seriously.

"Best demonstration material."

"I don't feel reassured at all," Roy said. The middle-school group was already pressing forward. The supervising teacher, seeing the room holding steady for now, didn't intervene — just reminded them once not to cross the front sensor line, then stepped aside to exchange a few quiet words with the other instructor before heading out. The moment I saw that, the bad feeling in my gut jumped a level.... They're not seriously leaving. They were.

The second the teacher cleared the door, the middle-schoolers' posture — which had been maintaining a thin veneer of order — dissolved like a spine had been pulled out of it. Sideways glances. Suppressed grins. Elbows nudging neighbors. And a few whose eyes had clearly shifted registers — from I'm here for class to there's no adult in the room, can we try something. The shift was fast. Fast enough that if you weren't watching for it, you'd almost think you'd imagined it. D saw it. I saw it. Maki saw it, of course.

But D didn't flip. That was the thing about him. He pulled Roy into the white lines and ran a simple defense demo. How to set your shield angle, how to sink your weight, why you never let the axe hand drift high. He deliberately let Roy make the classic rookie mistake — shield opened too wide — then tapped the training axe cleanly into his rib sensor zone through the gap. System: red. A wave of ohhh came from the middle-school side. Good. As long as they were watching technique, the room could be held.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. D followed up with a demonstration of how to use the shield to force an angle, how to bind a wrist, how to use an opponent's forward lunge to send them out of the valid zone. His commentary didn't slow down — fast, rhythmic, and he knew exactly which words to pick.

"This isn't about being stronger," he said.

"It's about having the patience to wait for them to rush first."

"Shipboard space is tight. What's worth the most isn't looking good — it's whether you've kept the path held."

"And don't think picking up an axe means you've suddenly become a hero. Most of the time, you're just holding a metal problem that's more likely to send you away first." The glasses kid started nodding. A taller kid next to him cut in fast: "What if the other guy has a shield too?"

"Then it comes down to who's better at lying," D said, "or who can hold out longer." At that, the short-haired kid up front laughed once.

"You talk like you're actually good at this." Oh. Here it came. I knew that tone. Not a direct challenge. Just a foot nudging the line, lightly, testing whether you'd flinch. D turned to look at him, still smiling.

"What," he said, "you want me to talk like I was just getting dragged around by the room back there?" A few more kids laughed. The short-haired kid's mouth curved, but he didn't follow up. Good — first probe, deflected cleanly. The problem was, kids this age, once they decide the room can still be played, don't stop. They just want to find out exactly where the line is. So round two started.

A bigger kid — broader than the others — stepped forward, eyes sweeping across Roy, then me and Jess, and finally settling on Maki.

"What was that thing you were doing earlier, anyway?" he said.

"Didn't look that impressive. Just looked like you were bumping into each other." More of a barb than the last one. Still not over the line. But already starting to throw things at people. Roy's brow tightened, like he was about to answer. D raised one hand first — still that easy, settle-the-room gesture.

"That," D said, "is what we call the standard spectator take. Didn't step in yourself, already reviewing other people's performance." The middle-school group laughed at that. The bigger kid looked annoyed and shot back: "So you're saying you're better?"

"I'm saying it's a lot easier to talk from outside the lines," D said.

"And I also know the most common mistake people make once they actually step in isn't losing. It's walking in already convinced they're better than they are." I watched from the side, and a slow, specific unease started building. Because the cleaner D's deflections were, the less inclined these kids would be to back off. Every smooth answer just told them there was still room to push.

And once I need to prove I'm not scared of you started fermenting in a group like this, it always ran toward the cheapest available target. Sure enough. The short-haired kid spoke again. This time he didn't look at D. He looked straight at me.

"That was you in the white lines just now, wasn't it?" he said. My stomach dropped.

"Yeah," I said.

"What about it?"

"Nothing," he said, drawing the word out, deliberately loose.

"Just thought you fought kind of... weird." I narrowed my eyes.

"Weird how?"

"Hard to say." He smiled a little.

"Didn't really look like fighting. More like... a performance." A few kids around him snickered, low. That was more deliberate than before. Still not the worst. I could still hold it. Because making something out of someone's love life is, at the end of the day, mostly just tiresome. Ugly, cheap, but still within the range of you're being an idiot and I can't be bothered. But people are like this. The moment they see you don't flip immediately, they decide they've found the right direction. And they push deeper.

The bigger kid — the one the others kept orbiting — finally grinned and delivered the next line. His gaze dropped from my face, traveled down, paused for a second, then climbed back up. Then he said:"Well, that explains it. No wonder you fight so awkward." He grinned.

"What are you even supposed to be, anyway? A guy or a girl?" The entire training bay went silent. Not figuratively. For one actual instant, even the hum of the ventilation seemed to pull back. I stood there, the training shield still in my hand. And in that moment, the first thing that surfaced in my head wasn't the sparring match, wasn't D's commentary, wasn't the image of Maki watching me from across the white lines. It was older things. Uglier things. Dr. Heinrich's compounds.

A puberty that had been delayed, suppressed, diverted. Secondary sex characteristics that never caught up with everyone else's. The body in the mirror — unmistakably a girl's, but with certain parts that always felt like someone had quietly hit pause on them. I never talked about it. Not because it didn't matter. But because caring about it was already exhausting enough on its own. So I didn't say anything. And the people around me were smart enough not to touch it.

Because they understood the difference: making something out of someone's love life — that's called romance. Making something out of someone's body — that's called an attack. And this arrogant little shit, who didn't know the first thing about where the ceiling was, had just stomped straight through that line. I heard D pull in a breath. The amusement dropped off Jess's face instantly. Maki didn't make a sound. But I knew the air pressure around her had changed. Except — They were all half a beat too slow.

Because I moved first. I didn't lunge. That would've looked ugly. Too much like losing control. I just set the shield down to one side and walked forward. One step. Two. By the third, the bigger kid had clearly registered something was wrong — his shoulder came up on reflex, half wanting to back away, half still trying to save face and hold his ground. Too late. My fist hit his mouth first. Not a trained strike. Not anything clean enough to write into a manual. Just a punch — direct, with heat behind it.

His head snapped sideways. Blood burst at the corner of his mouth. Someone screamed nearby. I didn't stop. He hadn't gone down yet, so my second hit was already moving — not his face this time, his stomach. He folded. I grabbed his collar and drove him into the floor. The impact was heavy. Really heavy. Built as he was, the sound he made hitting the sensor floor was solid — like a sack of meat that hadn't learned to keep quiet, slammed straight into the deck.

He'd just started to push up when my knee pinned him back down.

"What did you just say?" I heard my own voice. Steady. Too steady to sound like mine. He struggled, still trying to hold his jaw set. My next punch caught him along the side of the face. This time I heard something I didn't like. A crack. Small. But enough. Someone nearby sucked in air. The boy howled. Blood filled his mouth. Half a tooth, mixed with bloody froth, rolled across the floor and caught the white glare of the sensor line. Every wire in my head had already snapped.

I kept my grip on his collar, drove him back down, and hit him again. And again. Not wild. I knew exactly where I was hitting. I knew exactly what I was avoiding. Which made it worse. Because I wasn't losing control. I was very deliberately teaching him a lesson.

"Make jokes about who I'm seeing," I said through my teeth, "and I'll just write you off as an idiot." He thrashed, cried, kicked uselessly. I wrenched his wrist back against the floor.

"Make jokes about my body—" I leaned down, staring at the face that had been so smug a minute ago and now held nothing but terror and blood.

"What the hell do you think you are?" The room finally broke.

"Hoshino! Enough!"

"Hey—!"

"Get her off—!" But the first two people who actually touched me were D and Maki. D came in from the side — not grabbing for my fist, but locking down my right shoulder and elbow, trying to break my leverage axis.

"Hoshino! Stop!" For the first time, there was nothing joking in his voice. Maki came from the front. One hand clamped around my wrist. The other pinned my shoulder. She was almost kneeling, hauling me back with her whole weight.

"Enough." Her voice wasn't loud. But those two syllables drove into my ear like a nail. I still wanted to keep going. Maki's grip tightened.

"Look at me," she said. I actually looked up. And I saw her — those eyes that were usually so composed they were infuriating, right there, close enough that I could see clearly: not blame. Not shock. Something harder than either of those. Something solid and steady, absolutely unwilling to let me fall any further. D was still pressing my shoulder down, his voice stripped of its usual lightness.

"Okay. That's enough. Really enough," he said.

"Keep going and Sergeant Takenaka's going to bury all eleven of us when he gets back." That was when running footsteps sounded from outside. The teacher. Not just the teacher. Several others, clearly having heard the screaming and come running. The lead instructor came through the door and saw, in sequence: the blood on the floor, the tooth, the kid still gasping and bleeding where I'd put him. Then me — armor askew, breathing wrecked, knuckles covered in blood, held back by D and Maki together.

For one moment, the air in the room felt like it had been slapped. Everyone went silent. Completely. The teacher's face changed.

"What happened here?!" Nobody answered right away. Because the scene was too complete to need explaining. The kid on the floor, who'd been laughing so easily a few minutes ago, was now crying, missing part of a tooth, bleeding everywhere, reduced to nothing but instinctive gasping and shaking. I was locked down by Maki's grip on my wrist and D's weight on my shoulder, my chest still heaving, the fire in me not gone — only forced under. Jess stood off to the side.

Whatever amusement had been on her face earlier was long gone. Arms crossed, eyes cold as a blade. And the other middle-schoolers — the ones who'd laughed, who'd egged it on, who'd thought pushing the line was fun — had all gone white. Because they'd finally understood one thing. There are things you can say. And there are things that, once said, actually break something.