Chương 225: 87. Punitive Evaluation 2

On the day of the written exam, the Security Division classroom felt more like a crime scene than yesterday's training room had. Not because anyone was actually bleeding. Because the instant Sergeant Takenaka slapped that stack of test papers onto the desk, I was fairly sure at least seven souls evacuated their bodies on the spot. Standard Federal classrooms weren't designed with much human warmth to begin with.

Grey-white walls, black sensor desks, a projection screen up front glaring like a tribunal backdrop, and the AC cranked so high it felt less like a classroom and more like a cold-storage unit the Security Division kept specifically for chilling rookie self-esteem. I sat third row, left of center. Maki was one seat ahead and to my right, spine so straight she looked like she was up for an officer review board. Jess was behind me and to the left, tapping her pen against the desk like a countdown timer.

D was slumped at the far end of the row, wearing the face of a man who'd just been handed a personal copy of his own death sentence — the version stamped no appeal. Takenaka stood up front, his smile hovering somewhere between kindly elder and adult who fully intends to make you suffer today.

"I told you yesterday," he said, flipping through his own copy in that falsely considerate, genuinely merciless tone.

"One person fails, everyone retakes." The room went vacuum-silent. Then D raised his hand.

"Sergeant. I have a very mature proposal." Takenaka glanced at him.

"Go ahead."

"How about we just skip straight to the collective retake and cut out the whole middle stretch where we all sit here suspecting and hating each other? Much more efficient." Half the room choked back a laugh. The other half looked ready to cry. Takenaka grinned.

"Denied. Begin." The whole room turned a page in unison. Then came the sound of souls cracking. I looked down at the first page and nearly flipped it back over to check the cover didn't actually read Fundamentals of Close-Quarters Shipboard Defense and Countermeasures (Instructor's Personal Revenge Expanded Edition). Question One.

List five prohibited responses for standard Federal combat armor in a sealed shipboard environment following release of a heat-triggered vaporizing explosive, and explain the mechanism of death for each. I stared at that line for three seconds. Five. With mechanisms of death. Takenaka wasn't running an exam. He was screening for whoever could write the most complete last testament. Question Two.

Assuming both sides are wearing standard armor with anti-beam coating, analyze the priority attack angle and pressure-stepping principle for a standard Mark-6 combat axe and anti-beam blast shield across three environments: a narrow corridor, a hatchway corner, and a low-gravity maintenance passage. Question Three. Compare the tactical function of the 7.

7 mm pulse laser rifle against a conventional powder-based firearm in shipboard close combat, and give an example of a scenario where the former is actually better suited to restricting an opponent's movement. I took a slow breath. It wasn't that I didn't know the material. It was the way Takenaka wrote his questions. Every line read like: Come on. Prove you were actually using your head yesterday. In front of me, Harvey's shoulders jerked when he hit page two. Not nerves.

That was a soul attempting emergency ejection and getting hauled back into the body by force. Roy muttered under his breath: "... Shit." Lan, on the other side, didn't even look up.

"Bit late to figure that out now," she said flatly.

"Is this a security course or an NCO instructor qualification exam..." Aida hissed.

"Did he just cut these straight out of his own lesson plan?"

"Not his lesson plan," Evelyn said, turning a page with zero expression.

"I suspect this is how he takes revenge on society." In the back, Akari had been holding onto a brave little smile right up until the last short-answer question, at which point her whole face collapsed.

"Why does 'compensating for the visual blind spot created by standard shield angle under alarm-strobe conditions' need a diagram?!"

"Because someone in this room yesterday was holding their shield like a lunch box," Takenaka said, without looking up. The room went dead silent. Then, with perfect unspoken coordination, every pair of eyes drifted toward D for exactly one second. D had been chewing on his pen. He felt the shift in the air and slowly raised his head.

"Why's everyone looking at me?" He looked genuinely wounded.

"That wasn't a lunch box yesterday. That was an experimental free-form shield angle." Jess laughed from behind him. No mercy in it whatsoever.

"Free-form enough to nearly offer up your own neck, right?"

"That was tactical baiting."

"Baiting them to chop you?"

"... Are you feeling especially hostile today?" Jess didn't bother answering. She put her head down and kept writing. But I could tell — neither of them was in their usual pure-bickering mode. After yesterday, everyone still made noise, still took shots at each other, but underneath the noise something else was pressing down. Something like: be careful. Something like: don't step on anything you shouldn't. Same with me. Staring at the test paper, my head was clearer than usual — uncomfortably clear.

After losing control the way I had yesterday, something in you shifts into a kind of self-surveillance you hate. Even breathing feels like it's being monitored. Ahead and to my right, Maki's pen paused for a heartbeat. She didn't turn around. She just nudged her water bottle, very lightly, toward the corner of my desk. Small enough to pass for an accident. I knew what it meant anyway. Drink some water. Calm down. I stared at the bottle for two seconds, then picked it up and took a sip. Cold. Very cold.

But the tension I'd been carrying in my shoulders — that tight, coiled thing I hadn't even noticed — eased, just a little.... People like her really aren't fair. She talks the rest of the time like she's filing paperwork, but when she actually does something for you, the precision is calibrated to the millimeter. When I set the bottle back down, Maki still hadn't turned around. Her pen was already moving again, like nothing had happened. Jess, behind me and to the left, had probably seen it.

Her tapping stopped for a beat. Then it came back, twice, harder. I had the strange sensation of sitting at the exact center of some very peculiar tactical crossfire.... A Security Division written exam, and even the air in here was testing me. Twenty minutes in, the room had developed a full range of near-death symptoms. Harvey raised his hand first.

"Sergeant — in short-answer four, if 'pre-positioning' and 'predictive pressure-stepping' overlap conceptually, does writing them separately still count?" Takenaka, drinking tea at the front, didn't even lift his eyes. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"If you can write it, it counts." Harvey's expression didn't improve. If anything, he looked like someone who'd just been told he was permitted to go on living, but had to carry the pain with him. Five minutes later, Roy started pulling at his hair. Five minutes after that, Aida stared at the diagram box like she was tracing back exactly which life decision had led her here. D had entered a state of semi-dissociation.

"There's something wrong with this question. There genuinely is." He was slumped over his desk, muttering under his breath.

"Who asks you to write 'if a teammate goes down in a narrow corridor, list the three priority anatomical zones a shield-bearer must protect, and why'? This isn't Security Division. This is a forensics prep course." Lan cut in, cold as ever.

"Because yesterday you left Roy's head exposed twice." Roy's head snapped up.

"I'm still here, thanks."

"Which is exactly why you're qualified to serve as the documented wrong example." D clutched his chest.

"Lan, I've always known you had a sharp tongue. Today you're basically Takenaka's external speaker system."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I know." Under normal circumstances, I'd have laughed at that. Today I just thought: as long as everyone still has the energy to take shots at each other, we haven't hit rock bottom yet. What actually started doing real damage was the last ten minutes before collection. Takenaka stood up and rapped the desk with his knuckles.

"Reminder. Passing line is eighty. Collective retake still applies. If you don't want to sit this again, pray the person next to you's been using their brain too." The moment it landed, the room's mood upgraded from everyone dying alone to everyone watching everyone else for signs of dragging the squad under. D broke first.

"Who — who's done? Confidence check! This isn't cheating, this is team risk management!"

"Shut up," Jess said, not looking up.

"No, seriously, at least let me know who I need to hit first when the scores come out—""Worry about yourself," Akari said.

"I am worried!" D hissed, panicking.

"Right now everyone in this room looks like a potential war criminal who's about to make me retake this. And I'm pretty sure I look like one too." Harvey put his forehead in his hand.

"The only honest part of that sentence was the last one." When I finished the last question and looked up, I took a read of the room. Maki had already set her pen down and was checking her answers, expression so calm it was unsettling. Not confidence — more like a baseline assumption that this was, of course, well within spec. Jess was still writing, fast, like she meant to cut straight through the paper and the enemy bridge crew with it.

D was drenched in sweat, eyes darting left, right, up, down, before finally dropping his pen like a man making peace with the universe, still muttering curses at eight generations of ancestors. I felt a laugh rising. Yesterday everyone had been swinging axes and shields at each other. Today, a stack of paper had us on the edge of a collective mutiny. Adults really don't need blades to get their revenge. Handing in the papers was marginally more civilized than a public execution. Barely.

Once Takenaka collected the stack, he sat down at the front and started grading. On the spot. Right there. I'd assumed he'd at least pretend — take them to his office, give us the dignity of not knowing for a few hours. No. He put on his glasses, uncapped a red pen, and started marking at the lectern. The room went eerily quiet. Just the sound of red ink on paper. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Every stroke sounded like a blade being sharpened two inches from your heart. D sat there, hands clasped, lips moving.

I assumed he was praying. I listened closer.

"God of the standard Mark-6 combat axe, god of shipboard defense, benevolent god of Federal exam-writing conscience — whichever one of you is free, please bail me out—""You're loud," Jess said.

"If I'm not loud now, I might not get another chance once the scores are out."

"Fair." Maki said nothing. She glanced once toward the lectern, then let her eyes drop. I followed her gaze and realized how fast Takenaka was grading. That kind of speed only comes in two flavors: either he wasn't reading at all and was marking at random, or he knew this material so well he could spot bullshit answers with his eyes half-closed. I believed the second. About fifteen minutes passed. Fifteen years, subjectively. Takenaka set the pen down, squared the stack, and looked up.

The whole class snapped straight.

"Overall," he said, "a little better than I expected." No one exhaled. Because the weight of a sentence like that always sits in the second half. Sure enough.

"Only a little." I knew it. He started reading scores.

"Evelyn. Ninety-one.

"Lan. Ninety.

"Kushima. Ninety-six." One beat of silence. D turned to Maki with something close to reverence.

"Did you memorize the entire handout last night?"

"No," Maki said, flat.

"Then how'd you get a ninety-six?"

"I paid attention in class." D went quiet for two full seconds, as if that line had personally insulted his character.

"Jess. Eighty-eight.

"Aida. Eighty-four.

"Akari. Eighty-two.

"Harvey. Eighty-one." Harvey let out a breath so hard he nearly slid off his chair, like someone kicked back from the edge of a cliff.

"Shit... I swear I just saw my great-grandmother."

"Roy. Eighty-five.

"Isshiki—" (a name not on the locked cast list; kept phonetic here pending confirmation) "—same margin, over the line." Then it was D's turn. Takenaka lifted the paper. The curve of his mouth was very bad news.

"D." D stood like a man called to the stand.

"Here."

"Eighty." The room held its breath for one second. Then it detonated.

"Oh, fuck—""The man who walked the line!!"

"You bastard, one point down and we'd all be retaking this!"

"I knew it'd be you!!!" D grabbed his own head — shock first, then wild relief, then a delayed terror that drained all the color out of his face.

"I passed? I actually passed?!"

"That's not passing," Lan said flatly.

"That's the passing line catching you by one fingernail." Harvey slammed the desk, half ready to cry.

"Do you have any idea my heart just stopped? Eighty! How do you have the nerve to score eighty?!"

"That's not fair!" D slammed the desk right back.

"I tried! That last question — 'three-stage pressure-stepping and shield-angle bias for a dual-vector fire corridor' — is that even human language?!"

"No," Jess said, smiling with no good intentions in it whatsoever.

"That's Takenaka-speak." The room erupted, everyone going after D in the kind of way that wouldn't earn a demerit but was more than sufficient to convey the depth of spiritual damage sustained. I'd meant to pile on too. But then I caught D's expression — that particular blend of survivor's relief and ten pairs of eyes hunting him down — and laughed instead. Honestly, the fact that someone like him had made it this far said something good about the Federal medical system.

Takenaka let it run, then, once the noise had thinned, added, almost idly:"Also — D, question six, part two. I was going to mark you down to seventy-nine." D's smile froze. The room flatlined all over again.

"But he added a note in the margin," Takenaka said.

"'If a teammate is the type to hold his shield like a lunch box, priority action should be revoking his right to stand in the front row.'" I nearly choked. Harvey burst into a coughing fit of laughter. Roy buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. Even Jess turned away, losing the fight with her own mouth. Maki closed her eyes for half a second, the exact look of someone enduring something with zero nutritional value that was, against her better judgment, a little funny. Takenaka grinned.

"Rude. But tactically sound. So I gave the point back." D just stared.

"... My own mouth saved me?"

"What else did you think you had going for you?" Lan said.

"The Federal military's baseline mercy for problem children," Aida added.

"I hereby declare," Harvey said, hand over his heart, "that from today, D's trash talk is officially a team asset."

"As if it wasn't already."

"Before, it was more of a team liability." This time even I had to duck my head to hide the laugh. And somewhere in the middle of laughing, that weight sitting on my chest since yesterday actually thinned out, just a little. People are like that sometimes. One day you turn a room into a bloodbath. The next, you're crammed into a classroom laughing like idiots, all because some bastard scraped an eighty and almost took the whole squad down with him. Embarrassing. Also what being alive feels like.

By the time we'd recovered from nearly being dragged into a collective retake by D, Takenaka squared the papers and, casual as a last cut, said:"Since you all passed — practical drills resume this afternoon. Don't celebrate too early." One second of silence. Then a chorus somewhere between a wail and a curse.

"You've got to be kidding me!"

"Sergeant, you genuinely have no heart!"

"I'd rather retake the exam — no, I take that back!"

"Shut it," Jess said, kicking the leg of D's chair.

"You don't get to say retake." D clutched his score sheet, wounded.

"I was the hero who saved this entire team from the abyss of seventy-nine today."

"The guy who nearly pushed the team into the abyss gets to call himself a hero?" Lan said.

"Of course. That's called narrative tension."

"That's called garbage." I turned my head, still smiling, and caught Maki sliding her pen into its case. Clean, efficient, same as always. Maybe she felt me looking. She turned her face slightly.

"You didn't do badly." I blinked.

"... Is that a compliment?"

"It's a fact."

"Could you, just once, deliver a fact in a way that sounds slightly more human?"

"No." I stared at her expressionless face for two seconds, then couldn't help laughing.

"Fine. I'll take it as a compliment anyway." Maki didn't answer. Just a small, quiet nod. Jess, beside us, caught the whole exchange. Her pen cap clicked down harder than it needed to. I pretended I hadn't heard it. On this ship, there are some alarms that, even when you hear them clearly, it's best to act like the system hasn't upgraded to auto-report yet.

At noon, carrying the fragile relief of people who'd just narrowly survived something, we walked out of the classroom and ran straight into a knot of middle-schoolers at the far end of the corridor. Normally that age bracket — old enough to be bold, too young to know better — looked at us with looking for trouble written plainly across their faces. Not today. The moment they saw me, their footsteps stuttered in unison. One of them had been mid-laugh. The laugh froze. He looked at the floor, too fast to be natural.

"G-good afternoon, senior." I stopped. So did D.

"... What's happening?" he muttered. Another kid scrambled to follow.

"Thank you for your hard work, senior."

"... Oh," I said, on reflex.

"You too.... Hard work." He nodded like he'd just been handed a pardon and flattened himself against the wall to clear the whole passage. I stood there feeling like I'd tuned into the wrong channel by accident. Then, from around the corner, came a scream. Real. Raw.

"AAAAAAAAH — it's her —!!" A second later, a middle-school boy built like someone who'd hit puberty three years early and gone straight into heavy infantry leaned half his face around the corner, pale as chalk. Him again. The former tyrant. The one I'd ground into the floor until a tooth came loose. The moment he saw me, his pupils blew wide, like he was looking at something that shouldn't exist.

"D-don't come near me!!" Then he ran. Not a normal run. The kind of run you do when you're convinced a warship's main gun has locked onto your spine and one more second means vaporization. Me: "..." D: "..." Harvey: "..." Jess laughed first — the full, unrestrained kind, shoulders shaking, not even trying to hold it back.

"Wow." She wiped at a tear that wasn't there.

"Your urban-legend tier in the middle-school wing has probably cleared Security Division's training materials by now."

"I'm not happy about this at all. Thanks."

"No, this is great," D said, rubbing his chin with total sincerity while talking complete nonsense.

"You've got natural deterrence now. Next anti-boarding drill, just stand at the end of the corridor. Enemy morale: zeroed."

"Want me to zero yours first?"

"Sorry — I just scored an eighty. Life's especially precious today." I rolled my eyes, but there was no real heat in it. Walking down that corridor, though, something sat wrong in my chest. Hard to say if it was more absurdity or discomfort. Whatever yesterday left behind clearly wasn't just a violation report and one instructor's written-exam revenge. Somebody had dug something up, and it had drifted through the ship the way rumors always do on a closed vessel. —Hoshino Shimo once stormed an Imperial warship.

—She rammed the enemy to scrap with her own ship. I didn't need to guess what that would ferment into once it reached a group of middle-schoolers stuck exactly between worshipping hero legends and terrified of real blood. In their heads, I'd probably been upgraded from that senior who looks like trouble to the quiet one who knocks your teeth out and rams ships into people the second she moves.... Honestly. Enough already.

But for some reason — compared to yesterday's suffocating, want-to-tear-myself-apart-and-rebuild feeling — this brand of absurdity actually sat lighter. At least they'd learned one thing. Using someone else's body as a joke isn't humor. It's asking to die. And I happen to be very good at helping people tell those two apart.