Chương 249: 99. Immediate Redeployment 2

Once the link died, the quiet on the bridge sounded wrong. Oshima had rattled the whole room with laughter alone. The second he was gone and the screen went black, what was left wasn't calm — it was the specific blankness of a room that had just had a layer of air peeled off it. I sat at Tactical, still not over "Boy Scouts." Honestly, I wanted to argue with it. The problem was that it stung precisely because it wasn't entirely wrong. Ten minutes earlier, we'd flown the Yukikaze into the ground in simulation.

Thirty seconds later, someone had dropped a convoy's coordinates in our laps and laughed while asking Tobita since when he'd started babysitting. Worse — Tobita didn't snap back. He just sat in the chair, one hand on the armrest, eyes on the main screen where the two coordinate sets still hung. Maybe looking at the numbers. Maybe looking at us — the students who hadn't finished sweating out the sim yet. Then he spoke.

"That's the situation." Flat. Like reciting tonight's dinner menu, not handing us a job people could genuinely die doing.

"You all did reasonably well." I let out a breath. Not from the praise. Because it sounded exactly like: right, that's enough for today, go digest how you sank your own ship. My hands were already coming off the board. I was already deciding whether to spend the next ten minutes buried under a blanket pretending to be dead. Then:"But an opportunity like this doesn't come often." Every muscle in me locked. My first thought wasn't even we're finished.

It was one complete, sincere sentence I won't reproduce here in full, aimed directly at him.... I knew it. There was a small, punchable brightness in Tobita's voice he couldn't quite hide. Not the booming kind. The quiet satisfaction of a man who'd been waiting for exactly this card to turn up.

"Since you've got the basics down, might as well move to the advanced material," he said, reaching for the intercom.

"You'd be doing live-ship ops third year anyway." No. Wait. What does might as well mean, coming from this man? What does advanced material mean? I'd nearly been buried alive by weapons data last night. We'd just killed the ship in simulation this morning. And now he was sitting in the captain's chair, using the tone of someone scheduling an after-school club, about to drag us straight from sim into a live escort operation? That's not advanced material. That's accelerated culling. Tobita hit the intercom key.

"Major Elena Kirishima. Bridge. Now." Only then did he turn to Ash and Maki.

"You two — take what you can from this," he said, mild.

"I don't promise to run it a hundred percent by the book. I do promise it'll keep you breathing." The half-joking, half-vicious atmosphere pulled back a notch. Because that wasn't a pretty line. That was a Tobita-brand field guarantee. Rough. Ugly to hear. Worth a great deal. The bridge doors opened. Silver-grey hair, cropped short. Clean, efficient stride. Uniform without a single crease out of place. Major Kirishima swept the bridge with one look, checked CIC, then let her eyes settle on Tobita.

The way she looked at things was distinctive — not carrying obvious feeling like Jess, not the quiet pressure Maki radiates. More like she was appraising the entire scene for salvage value, deciding which parts needed to be thrown out and rebuilt. Then she frowned.

"What is this." She was looking at CIC when she said it. Tobita glanced over.

"Ah... CIC's little helpers?" Even he sounded unsure.

"Think of them as household brownies, or something."

"I'd rather give them socks." I genuinely laughed — quiet, but real. Because the comparison was too precise. CIC's current lineup really did look like a handful of house sprites shoved into a kitchen, unsure whether they counted as staff or a hazard. Elena watched for a moment, then made her first clean cut. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"D. Out." He blinked.

"Why? I feel like this is discrimination."

"It's not discrimination." She didn't spare him a second glance.

"I just don't want the Yukikaze's CIC turning into your rugby pitch." This time I couldn't hold it in at all. Jess's shoulders were shaking beside me. D stepped out of CIC wearing the full wounded dignity of a man convinced the universe simply failed to appreciate his genius.

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Bridge security." Not Elena. Akari — delivered in that same flat, maintenance-log voice she uses for everything. Which made it funnier. D's expression upgraded instantly from wounded to publicly humiliated by fate.

"What the hell is bridge security?"

"Means if someone's too loud, you throw them out first," Jess supplied, helpfully.

"Care to repeat that?"

"See," Harvey said, cold, "that's exactly why she pulled you out of CIC." D retreated, muttering what were probably silent curses at a universe that refused to recognize talent. Evelyn shifted naturally into the center console, the way someone settles into a seat that was always going to be hers. Tobita finally pulled his attention back to the full bridge.

"Effective immediately, this ship will execute a convoy-escort mission." No preamble. No "simulation's over, let's run a small practicum." Just one line, cutting straight through. At Tactical, my spine tightened, very slightly. Everything I'd used to laugh at myself a minute earlier stopped being funny. Because "escort mission" only means one thing: everything we touch from here isn't for the lesson. It's for actually getting a convoy through.

"All hands to Condition Two," Tobita said. He looked at Maki.

"XO. Orange alert, ship-wide." She lifted the handset, voice level, no extra weight in it.

"Orange alert. Orange alert. All hands to Condition Two." The broadcast rolled through the hull. Not the sharp edge of a red alert. But precisely because it wasn't sharp, it felt more like a real beginning. Not the start of a drill. The start of work. Only then did Tobita finally pick "Boy Scouts" back up. He wasn't angry. He didn't show even a flicker of having his tail stepped on. With Tobita, genuine irritation usually makes him look calmer, not less.

"Captain Oshima wasn't entirely wrong," he said, mild. The bridge drew in a little. I looked up on reflex. Tobita sat with his expression more contained than a minute before.

"You don't look like real crew yet," he said.

"Too slow in a lot of places. Too clean in others. Too unwilling to let go in most of them." Heavy. And unarguable — we'd just proven it with the Yukikaze's virtual wreckage. But his next line wasn't burying us further.

"Boy Scouts do have their uses, though." My eyebrow twitched.... Where is this going. The corner of his mouth moved, barely.

"At least you haven't hardened into the wrong shape yet."

"So — eyes open, ears open, brain in the seat."

"Don't rush to prove you look like veterans."

"What you're doing today is making sure nobody gets to laugh with those three words a second time." That landed harder than any straight "don't embarrass me" ever could. Because there was no rally in it. No "for glory." No "prove them wrong." He just took Oshima's "Boy Scouts," turned it over, and set it down on every set of shoulders in the room as weight. Not: become heroes. Just: don't be the punchline.... Extremely Tobita. Also extremely effective. No one shouted anything.

No one slammed a fist and barked a fired-up "yes, sir." But whatever looseness had been drifting through the room got quietly folded away. Lan turned back first, feeding the external coordinates into the handshake-verification queue. The second she sat, the station absorbed her — quiet, precise, cross-checking format strings against the convoy's preset IFF codes. Aida was back at Technical, pulling full-ship status and the supply, engineering, and damage-control readiness pages.

Her face was still flat, but I knew by now that flatness wasn't absence — it was everything shoved into the drawer marked deal with it later, work first. Jess didn't return straight to Tactical Operator. She drifted toward CIC instead, leaning half her weight on the rail, talking low to D. D, nominally Bridge Security now but wearing the complicated expression of a man who'd been reassigned rather than exiled from the human race, naturally bent over the route projection with her anyway.

"If the convoy cuts in from here," Jess said, low, "that debris ring outside Pike-6 stops being scenery."

"Turns into cover," D said, right with her.

"Also somewhere to bury people."

"Starting to sound like an actual CIC brownie."

"Get lost." Those two together always generate an atmosphere impossible to file as purely working or purely mutual destruction. Right now, watching it, I felt oddly reassured anyway. I settled back into the Tactical Officer's chair and looked at the fire-control page lighting up in front of me again. In the sim, these systems had looked bright, tidy, carrying a faintly punchable familiarity — come on, you memorized me last night. They looked exactly the same now. Buttons unchanged. Menus unchanged.

Warhead names unchanged. But for the first time, I understood with total clarity: what was about to load into these systems next wasn't sim rounds. Not the kind of data that lets you press the wrong key once, then go write a report about it. The real thing. Things that would actually cross vacuum, actually tear another ship open — and invite the same done to us. I stared at the row of labels — Main Battery, VLS, CIWS, Torpedoes — and my throat went dry.

Last night I'd been memorizing their names until I half-wondered if I'd personally offended the Federal Navy's weapons development division in a past life. Now what I had to think about was: if Tobita really handed me full fire-control authority tonight, every key I pressed would no longer cost a synthetic voice saying "Yukikaze, destroyed." A small, light touch landed on the edge of my console. I turned. Maki. She'd drifted back at some point, fingertip resting on the board's edge, like checking I was still there.

"Shimo."

"... Mm?"

"Your hand." I looked down and realized my fingers had hooked onto the console edge without my noticing — hard enough to leave marks. I eased them open slowly, trying to make it look casual.

"I know."

"You'd better really know it," she said, mild as ever. I looked up at her. She'd already turned back to her post, like the whole exchange had been nothing but routine. Which was exactly why it landed somewhere warm in my chest. Infuriating. Getting knocked off-balance by one small, unbothered gesture, right now of all times, is not a good sign for my long-term survival prospects. I was still shoving that stray reaction back where it belonged when Tobita's voice came down from the captain's chair.

"Tactical." I snapped back.

"Sir."

"From this point on, forget the words 'sim rounds.'" My spine went straight. He didn't look at me — eyes still on the two coordinate sets on the main screen.

"Everything under your hand from here on is real." I didn't answer. It didn't need repeating. I'd already understood it, a minute ago. Tobita, as if deliberately stripping away the last layer of padding, kept his tone just as level.

"So if you fire," he said, "don't think of it as a term you memorized last night."

"Think of it as you deciding which thing dies first." The bridge went quiet again. This time, I didn't look at anyone. I just looked at the row of weapons-control pages in front of me, took one long breath, and straightened my back. Right. Understood. From here on, this isn't practice.