Chương 331: 141.Destroyed 2

After the Seawolf had been blasted into pieces its own ancestors wouldn't recognize, the air on the bridge finally retreated from the kind of tension that feels like it might shear your lungs, back to something closer to just busy. The difference was small. The first was when everyone had their nerves wired straight to the main-gun triggers. The second was when everyone was still alive, still working, but every life in the room had just been clawed back from between death's teeth.

On the surface, everyone looked normal. Under the skin, the bones were still hot. When I sat back down at the tactical station and touched the control board, I realized my fingertips still weren't quite behaving. Not the humiliating kind of shaking, but enough that if someone asked me to carry a cup filled to eight-tenths right now, I'd seriously consider jamming it straight into their mouth and telling them to find out for themselves what combat aftereffects felt like.

Jess leaned against the deputy station, still wearing the expression of someone who had just casually blown up an Imperial hyperdimensional submarine like she'd kicked over a trash can in a hallway. People like that made you want to hit them on a good day. After a fight, they made you want to hit them more, because they gave you a very unfair illusion — as if that insane, razor-thin engagement had just been her in a decent mood, hitting two extra switches.

Maki stood at the exec's station, head lowered over the border-scan and higher-dimensional residue data Lan and Akari were feeding her. Ash sat at the command position, expression as unchanged as if even the end of the universe would only warrant half a millimeter of movement in his brow. The bridge was quiet. Not silent. Everyone was filling the space with sound and deliberately keeping it at that professional, Federal, we are absolutely not going to admit we almost died together register.

Until the engine room feed lit. Lan tilted her head to verify the identifier, flicked a finger, and patched the voice into the main channel. I couldn't help but marvel at this ship's extraordinary will to live. Really. The Seawolf had taken hit after hit from me, especially those last shots into its aft reactor and engine section. I was very confident that "light cosmetic damage" was not how you'd describe what I'd done to it.

A normal vessel taking that kind of punishment should have shown at least some awareness that today might not be going well. The Seawolf had not. The thing was still fighting. And fighting ugly. After I'd put the Type-99 rotary plasma cannons into its stern, the hull that had still carried some trace of sinister composure was completely gone.

The higher-dimensional fold-lines, like torn nerves, were still trying to realign and fold back — but they couldn't quite get the old smooth slide-back-into-shadow routine working anymore. And yet, in this state that had one foot in the coffin, its close-in defensive laser grid was actually getting fiercer. One line. Two. Three. Bright lines weaving through the dark into a net of killing intent that barely bothered with logic, snapping at my Type-0 one bite at a time.

Not "controlled intercept fire" — more like something that had been stepped on, bleeding, lashing out with a blade in each hand. Oh. Looks like I'd genuinely pissed something off.

"AA fire density increasing!" Lan reported.

"I'm also being chased, thanks for the update!" I was already pulling the Type-0 outward, gritting my teeth as I hauled the nose through a diagonal arc. Several laser beams nearly scraped the canopy, bright enough to make your teeth ache, like someone had drawn a hot needle across the front of your eyes. Roy's voice came in immediately.

"Don't run straight, Hoshino. It's not aiming right now, it's panicking. Against something panicking, predicting the pattern is less useful than predicting how it'll go random."

"That sentence sounds exactly like how you'd describe Jess."

"I have ears!" Jess protested immediately.

"And I'm significantly cuter."

"Which courtroom is that going into as evidence?" My mouth was still working, but my hands hadn't stopped. The Type-0 rolled right under my inputs, tracing a maneuver that wasn't pretty but was enough to stay alive. This wasn't a sim evaluation — nobody was grading my turn posture. As long as I wasn't space debris, the technique was valid. The Seawolf convulsed again. This time it wasn't the simple imbalance of something taking hits. The whole vessel seemed to make a very bad decision.

It stopped trying to fold back toward higher-dimensional space. Instead, inside a chaotic field of gravity signatures, it wrenched its bow around. I froze for half a second. Then my spine went cold.

"…Something's wrong."

"What?" Ash asked.

"It's not running." I stared at the enemy silhouette on the HUD, bow swinging around like a desperate outlaw, my throat going tight.

"It's not going back to higher-dimensional space. It's turning toward us." A beat of silence on the channel. Then Akari's voice changed register.

"Confirmed! Seawolf gravity-signature fold is stopping! Bow is aligning on the Type-0's direction! It's not breaking off — it's accelerating!"

"Fuck… this thing is still fighting." While I pulled away from the Seawolf, I cut over to the Yukikaze's main combat channel, words coming out fast enough to run together.

"This is Type-0 Zero-One, do you copy? Yukikaze! Take out the Seawolf now! It's going for a ramming run!" The first voice to answer wasn't Ash. Wasn't Maki. It was the one I could have guessed with my knees — bright, breezy, the kind of voice that was one step from tying a bow on the end of every sentence.

"On it, on it! Let me show you something!" … Of course. Jess. I swore internally, and then, inexplicably, felt half a breath of relief. Because in a moment like this, someone who could still sound like that was either out of their mind or had it completely under control. Which category Jess fell into had always been hard to tell. But at least today, either one worked for me. The Seawolf was still closing.

The aft turbulence I'd blown open was already a problem, the hull's geometry still misfiring, and yet it was driving forward on something close to sheer spite. It felt like a wolf with its stomach torn open, realizing it couldn't get back to its den, deciding to spend what bones it had left on one final charge. Genuinely vicious.

"Shimo, break lower-right." Maki's voice cut into my private line, still steady — like a blade pressed lightly against the side of your neck, forcing the panic out.

"Don't give it a straight-line angle to ram you."

"Copy." But somehow it was exactly that kind of thing — spare, squeezed out like it barely made it through — that hit hardest when everything was at its worst. Maki probably had no idea that the shorter she kept it, the less I could treat it as just another combat order. … Damn it. I pushed down the corner of my mouth, wouldn't let that mess climb to my face, and cut the Type-0 lower-right. The Seawolf dragged its half-collapsed hull after me, relentless. Then the Yukikaze fired.

A positron cannon beam sliced across the edge of my vision, bright enough it didn't look like something this patch of space was supposed to contain. Not fire — more like a white spear compressed past the point of reason, clean, cold, carrying the blunt rationality that only a capital ship's main battery could deliver, driving in from the Yukikaze's side— And grazing right past the Seawolf. Just grazing.

The beam swept a burning scar along the enemy's flank, scraped another layer off the already-wrecked hull — and didn't connect. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! I stared. Then I blew up.

"Fuck, Jess McCallow!!" The rage almost put teeth marks in the stick.

"Are your eyes installed in your ass?!" On the open channel, Jess's cheerful voice surfaced, as if the person who'd just nearly taken my heart out along with that graze wasn't her.

"Wow, so aggressive. Sorry, my hand slipped."

"Your hand had better have slipped!!"

"Really, you suddenly yelling like that makes me nervous, you know."

"You don't get to play—" I didn't finish the sentence. The second shot came. This time, Jess wasn't playing. The positron cannon's second round gave the Seawolf no breathing room whatsoever. The graze from the first shot had left a mark, and that mark acted like a guide — the pure-white beam followed the attitude deviation I'd already forced into the hull, and drove through the Seawolf's center-aft section. No sound. Vacuum doesn't scream for anything.

But in that moment I could almost feel something being punched through — like the iron pin holding a corpse upright finally snapped, and the whole frame collapsed from the inside.

"Hit," Akari said, her voice almost drifting.

"Penetration. The Seawolf's internal gravity field is beginning to collapse." I stared at the white light still burning on my retinas and swallowed. Right. After switching to the Helium-Hydrogen Power Plant, it wasn't just the propulsion that had gone insane — the main battery output had come along for the ride. The Yukikaze's guns had never been polite to begin with. Now they were more like someone who usually said very little, but when they did open their mouth, they flipped the table.

The Seawolf began to tumble out of control. If there had been any lingering illusion that it might hold together, Jess had just blown that illusion into space dust with one shot. The whole vessel rolled sideways first, then the penetration point mid-hull began to erupt in one irregular burst of dark-bright light after another. Not a clean, dramatic explosion — the uglier kind, chain-detonating in sequence, dismantling itself one section at a time. Belly splitting open. Stern blowing apart.

One of the higher-dimensional convergence fins that hadn't made it all the way back inside got caught in the runaway energy release and snapped off like a broken bone, dragging more warped debris into three-space to die alongside it.

"Wow…" Lan said, very quietly.

"Engine section secondary detonation," Aida followed immediately, tone cold as a lab report.

"Internal helium-hydrogen combustion chamber firing sequence lost. Beautiful. It would take real effort to survive that now."

"Watch the phrasing, Chief Technical Officer," Jess said, sounding thoroughly pleased with herself on the other end.

"I shot that. You're making it sound like you did."

"I'm simply expressing satisfaction at a weapon performing as designed."

"You Upper House people really do love hard." The Seawolf was still rolling. More precisely, it was coming apart. The chain detonations were chasing forward from the center-aft, burning up along dried-out blood vessels. That sinister, slick, always-half-in-another-dimension malice was finally losing its shape in the cascade. It no longer looked like a wolf in hiding. It looked like a dead beast dragged into daylight, bones cracking and smoking as it went.

Finally, the whole ship came apart under the continuous detonations. Not a clean, decisive boom and done. More like something that refused to admit it was finished, with the universe holding it down and forcing it to collapse one inch at a time. The forward bow section tumbled out trailing residual fire. The middle broke into several pieces.

The stern scattered in one last burst, debris and warped gravity signatures spraying outward in every direction — as if the last of its defiance had been blown to ash along with everything else. I watched it and, for a moment, could barely breathe. Not from fear. It was that my body finally agreed to admit it: this was really over.

The tension that had been locked in my bones through the entire sequence — launch, warhead drop, being chased, the AA grid, the belly cut, the stern shots — released all at once, arriving late, like someone had finally cut the wire. My hands were still on the stick, but my knuckles were starting to ache. My shoulders hadn't taken a hit, but they felt like they were carrying two bags of wet sand.

"Type-0 Zero-One, report status," Ash said. I blinked and realized I'd been staring at the Seawolf's wreckage for a moment longer than I'd intended.

"…I'm alive." Jess cut in immediately.

"Semantically correct. Technically non-standard format."

"Shut up." I didn't have a lot of energy behind it.

"Type-0 Zero-One, frame is controllable, pilot is… probably controllable."

"Probably?" Roy asked.

"My hands feel like they belong to someone else, but they're still working."

"That's enough," Roy said, and his voice had, for once, a faint quality of something coming untensed.

"Return to ship. Don't be enough of a hero to crash after the fight's over. That would be embarrassing."

"…The way this ship comforts people really needs to be reviewed by the Ministry of Education."

"The Ministry of Education has no jurisdiction over deep-space combat," Lan said calmly.

"Also, you had real spirit in those insults at Jess," Akari added.

"Assessment: cognitively intact." I rolled my eyes, and then, belatedly, realized — I had the energy to roll my eyes. That was a good sign. It meant I hadn't been scared empty, and hadn't thrown up. Today, both my dignity and my stomach had cooperated. Ahead, the Yukikaze settled into recovery posture. She looked exactly the same from the outside. Destroying a hyperdimensional attack submarine hadn't suddenly given her a protagonist's glow.

The hull was still cold, hard, functional, running lights showing one by one in the dark, like something that wasn't good at saying nice things but would reliably get you home. … Strange. When I'd been launched out here, the universe had felt so vast it made me nauseous. Looking at the Yukikaze now, all those layers of steel and corridor suddenly felt almost gentle. Like they were waving me in. I brought the Type-0 back onto the recovery lane. The run back had no exchanges of fire. It should have been easy.

Instead, it was harder than any stretch of the fight. Because once combat ends, all the things the body had been told to shut up and wait suddenly start talking at once. Hands begin to shake. Back begins to ache. Throat goes dry. The cold sweat that hadn't registered during the action suddenly makes itself very known. Worse, I now had time to think about what I'd just actually done. First live sortie. Alone off-ship. Phase-oscillation warhead into a higher-dimensional slice. Cut under the enemy hull.

Blew a hole in its engine section. Then, before the positron cannon cleaned up, managed to yell at Jess from start to finish. … Fantastic. If someone cut this sequence into a highlight reel for school consumption, I'd probably be filed straight under not recommended for normal campus counseling.

"Shimo." Maki's voice, suddenly in my ear. Not the open channel. Private line. I sat up slightly without thinking about it.

"Here."

"Don't let go on the approach," Maki said.

"A lot of people don't die in the fight. They die in the moment they think the fight is over."

"…Understood." Half a beat, then Maki added one more line.

"And."

"Yeah?"

"Well done." Three words. And I nearly flew the Type-0 off-course on the spot.

"Y-you realize that's very dangerous timing," I muttered.

"Saying that now."

"That's why I'm saying it while you still have work to do," Maki said, flat.

"So you can't melt down on the spot." …This woman was truly awful. Awful in a way that was precise as hell — the kind that made your heart heat up and left you nowhere to put the feeling. I swallowed it down and managed only:"…I'll yell at you about it when I get back."

"Fine," Maki said.

"Assuming you get back first." When the channel clicked back to the open net, I realized the corners of my mouth were refusing to go down. Embarrassing. Thankfully, no one could see my face right now. The Type-0 slipped into the recovery sequence, hangar guide lights coming on one segment at a time. I followed the indicators into the bay. When the cradle re-engaged around the frame, cabin pressure equalized, and the external arms locked on, that one breath I'd been holding hard finally let itself go properly.

The canopy opened. The first thing I felt wasn't it's good to be alive. It was — Why does the air feel this heavy. So heavy it felt like the entire ship had just dumped all of reality back onto my shoulders. In vacuum I'd still been able to hold it back through focus. The moment the smell of metal, grease, and people hit my nose, my knees almost came out from under me right there.

By the time the deckhand climbed up to unclip my harness, I realized my palms were soaked — so wet the inside of the gloves were practically sticking.

"Lieutenant, you all right?" a crewman asked quietly.

"Fine." I stayed slumped against the seat, voice coming out rough.

"If you give me a bed, a glass of water, and a rope long enough to strangle Jess with, I'll be even better." The crewman froze for half a second, then visibly forced his smile back down.

"…Mental status seems sound."

"Thanks. I think so too." When I stepped down the ladder, my knees betrayed me with one brief buckle. Small. So small that I was probably the only one who noticed. Which, somehow, made it more annoying. Turns out the truly embarrassing part isn't screaming mid-fight. It's your body filing a belated request for collapse once the fight's already over. I had no intention of granting it.

I just took the water they handed me in the hangar, downed two mouthfuls to get my throat back into a state capable of forming words, and headed for the bridge. When the doors opened, the lights and instruments inside still carried the echo of combat. Ash stood at the main position. Maki at the executive station. Jess half-hung over the tactical console, wearing the exact look of someone who had just incidentally saved the universe.

The moment I walked in, Jess turned to look at me, smiling like a cat that had just stolen something and was making sure you saw the tail.

"Yo. You made it back alive." I walked over, expression flat.

"What else."

"I figured you might throw up in the hangar first and then come up." I pushed the half-finished water bottle straight into her arms.

"That first shot was on purpose, wasn't it." Jess blinked, all innocence.

"I don't know what you're talking about. My hand slipped."

"Do you think even the automatic doors on this ship would buy that?" Jess's smile got brighter, eyes lit up like she'd just stolen a whole bag of candy from deep space.

"Okay, seventy percent on purpose."

"Seventy percent?!"

"I needed to knock the Seawolf off-balance a bit more first. And also—" She dragged out the end of the sentence, leaned in slightly, dropped her voice.

"The way you yelled at me had real spirit. That's how I knew you weren't dead yet." …This woman was genuinely asking for it. Except when she said it, there was something very faint in her voice — light, fast, almost unhearable. Something like relief, packed up in sharp words because she wouldn't say it any other way. I opened my mouth, ready for another two words, but Maki spoke first.

"You're back. Sit down." I turned. Maki looked up at me, let her gaze run from head to toe like she was checking for missing hardware. It was quick. So quick that if I weren't currently wired like an exposed cable, I might have missed it.

"Battle report can wait," she said.

"Water first." …Right. Good. The person who'd just told me well done was now telling me water first. Was there a quota of cardiac events they were trying to hit today? I sat down quietly and took the new cup a deputy handed me. The moment the rim touched my lips, I realized how thirsty I actually was — like the whole fight had boiled half the water, courage, and common sense out of my system. Ash finally spoke, voice as steady as ever.

"Type-0 Zero-One, combat mission complete. Galactic Imperial Military hyperdimensional attack submarine Seawolf confirmed destroyed. All stations: log combat data. Priority-seal the higher-dimensional fold signatures and ASW strike sequence."

"Yes, sir," came the chorus. Then Ash looked at me.

"Hoshino." I looked up on reflex.

"First live frame," he said.

"You didn't fly ugly." Four words. But from Ash, somehow heavier than an entire paragraph of praise. I set the cup down, doing my best to keep my face in one piece.

"Thank you, Acting Captain." I hesitated for a beat, then added:"Though, if possible, maybe next time we could start with a tutorial enemy friendlier than a hyperdimensional attack submarine?" Jess broke into open laughter. Roy turned his head slightly, shoulders loosening by a millimeter. Lan coughed once, like she was holding the comms officer's dignity together by sheer throat muscle. Akari had already buried herself back in the data, but the tips of her ears were a shade redder than usual.

Aida didn't laugh; she just dropped, cool as ever:"That's fine. Next time you can spend three days repairing coolant lines first. A much friendlier introduction to the profession."

"…On second thought, I'll take the hyperdimensional attack submarine." This time even Maki's mouth moved. Barely. But I saw it. And in that moment, the sense of having been hurled clean out into the universe finally felt like it had somewhere to land.