Chương 335: 143.Unexpected Person 1

The shuttle touched down clean, its locking clamps biting into the deck with a dull, muffled thud of metal on metal. I held my breath without meaning to. For a moment, the whole hangar bay went quiet — too quiet. Even the low hum of the ventilation system felt like it had been pushed off somewhere in the distance.

The footsteps, the comm static, the scrape of gear that had been running past my ears a second ago all dropped into the background, leaving nothing but that shuttle, freshly landed, sitting in the belly of the Yukikaze like a black period dropped where it had no business being. The main hatch wasn't the first to open. It was the security side-hatch. Two escorts came down first. Not an honor guard.

Not the kind of decorative bodyguards whose only job is to look good in photographs, standing on either side of the principal like a matched pair of expensive vases. These were people who actually did something. Grey-black armor, collars pulled low, gear lines clean and tight, every strap and attachment point squared away with a precision bordering on obsessive. Neither of them looked around when their boots hit the deck. No wasted expression.

They just ran the room — orientation, position, blind spots, exit routes. The rhythm of it was distinctive. Not nervous. Not posturing. Just habit — the habit of checking whether you could survive a room before deciding whether you were allowed to speak in it. I watched them for two seconds, and something along my spine pulled tight for no clear reason. Then the main hatch opened. Light spilled out first. Not bright.

Cold — a stark, near-colorless white that cut the shadow behind the hatch clean, clean enough that it felt like a scalpel parting the air. So before she ever stepped into view, what I saw wasn't a face. It was a silhouette. Too straight. Not the posture of someone who'd just scraped through with her life. Not someone who'd just been boxed in by three Imperial destroyers, transferred off her own ship, and watched that ship get scuttled behind her. That wasn't a survivor's silhouette.

It looked more like someone standing at the center of a courtroom, waiting for the verdict — someone who'd already run through every sentence the judge might hand down, before the judge even opened his mouth. She came down on the second beat. First, a black boot on the ramp. Then the hem of a dark uniform coat, pressed so sharp there wasn't a single wasted crease. Then a long black coat draped over her shoulders — clean lines, real weight to it, but nothing ornate enough to make anyone roll their eyes.

Only a handful of insignia pinned close to the collar and chest. Not many. But heavy enough, at a glance, that you knew they weren't there for decoration. They were there to remind you: you'd better know exactly who you're looking at. She didn't walk fast. But she wasn't weak, either. If anything, it was more like she had no intention of matching anyone's idea of how a fragile, freshly rescued subject was supposed to move. The first thing I actually registered was her hair. Gold.

Not the sweet, sunlit gold they slap a soft filter on for a commercial — closer to the cold edge of a blade on a winter morning before the sun's fully up, one thin line of pale gold skimming the metal. Long, immaculately kept, braided flat, not a single strand out of place. Which was already absurd on its own terms. The first time I climbed out of my Zero after live combat, forget my hair — my soul was about three-quarters detached from my body.

If someone had tried to snap a commemorative photo of me right then, the caption would've read: Underage Federal Pilot — Body Present, Soul Absent Without Leave. Then I saw her face. Young. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Absurdly young.

Move the scene to an Academy corridor, swap out the coat, shove a set of midterm study notes into her hands, and someone might genuinely mistake her for the kind of honor student everyone quietly hates — flawless uniform, strict parents, grades so perfect you'd want to curse her pencils to snap on every exam. But standing there, in that hangar, nobody was making that mistake. Because her eyes were wrong. Not the eyes of a girl living an ordinary campus life.

Not something you could file away into some cheap category like haughty young heiress and call it done. Her gaze was flat. Flat in the way a gaze goes flat once it's factored in too many variables and simply has nothing left to spend on visible reaction. Not empty. Not numb. Something quieter than either — the stillness of someone who'd been too awake for too long, and had that awareness hammered flat by force. That was when someone reacted faster than the rest of us. Sergeant Takenaka.

Something in him seemed to recognize her — his face went dark, his right hand snapped up. A half-second later, the security detail beside him — men in powered armor built like they could crush a human skull and everything that skull believed in, all with one hand — brought their weapons up in the same sharp motion. Black muzzles, leveled clean. Every one of them pointed straight at the blonde girl standing at the foot of the ramp.

The atmosphere in the hangar went from "tense" to "somebody's finger twitches and they'll be the subject line of tonight's after-action report" in about the time it takes to blink.

"Hoshino." Ash's voice cut through the comm, flat as the back of a blade.

"Get to the hangar. Now."

"Copy!" Maki and I didn't waste half a word. We turned and ran. Not a figure of speech. We sprinted — full out. Boots hammering the deck, the metal corridors throwing the echo back at us from every direction. I'm fairly sure if anyone pulled the internal security footage afterward, they'd see two female officers charging for the express elevator like they were three seconds from missing the best disaster of the year.... And then I saw Jess, already standing at the elevator.

"Shouldn't you be on the bridge?" I glared at her between breaths — the woman had somehow beaten us there without anyone noticing. Jess patted my shoulder, delighted as someone who'd just scored a front-row seat to opening night.

"Please. I've been waiting all night for a scene this good." Me: "..." Maki: "..." I shook my head. I really could not deal with this woman and her compulsive need to watch things happen. If the Yukikaze ever actually went down, I was fairly sure she'd lean over the railing first to judge whether the sinking angle looked good, and only then decide whether to bother evacuating. The elevator doors opened and the three of us stepped in.

The doors slid shut, and the weightless pull of the descent settled lightly in my stomach. I stared at the falling floor numbers, my heart dropping notch by notch along with them. The scene from a moment ago played back rapidly in my head: the escorts' positioning, the cut of their uniforms, the height of their muzzles, the rhythm of the girl's steps, and Takenaka's almost reflexive order to raise weapons. Something was wrong. But not the obvious, linear kind of wrong—like oh no, Imperial uniforms snuck aboard.

It was the more troublesome kind of wrong. The elevator doors parted, and we stepped directly into the hangar bay's outer perimeter.

"Sergeant Takenaka. Report." The moment Maki's voice landed, it was as if the room had finally found an order it could move forward on. Takenaka snapped his head toward her, his face still hard and tight.

"XO, these people..." He glanced at the escorts, his voice thick with obvious guard.

"They're wearing Imperial Navy uniforms." I stepped up beside Maki and ran a fast sweep of the room's positioning. Then, I frowned.... Weird. Very weird. Not looks dangerous weird. It was if they actually wanted to make a move, this scene shouldn't still be intact weird. I looked at the shuttle, then at the two escorts whose positioning hadn't broken at all, who hadn't even moved their hands toward their weapons. Somewhere in my head, something clicked into place.

"If they were going for a sneak attack," I said, "I think you'd all be dead right now, Sergeant." Takenaka's face froze. The security detail beside him visibly hesitated. I raised a hand, pointing at the shuttle.

"All they had to do was toss two flashbangs the second the hatch opened, have the escorts step in and cut the angles, and your entire front line's line of sight would be gone. After that, whether it's close-quarters suppression, grabbing hostages, or just clearing an exfil route—any of it would be a lot more efficient than standing here letting you point guns at them."

I paused, then added one more thing:"In other words, the current situation either means they don't want to fight, or they don't consider those muzzles a threat. Either way, we shouldn't be the ones panicking first." Takenaka clearly hadn't thought that far ahead. For a second, his expression turned ugly. I couldn't blame him. Because this is how these things work—the more it feels like an emergency reaction, the easier it is to believe that raising your gun first means controlling the room.

But sometimes, raising your gun too fast just proves to the other side that you're not the calmest person in the room. I took two steps forward. Maki didn't stop me. Which meant she at least agreed my assessment wasn't stupid enough to warrant dragging me back by the collar. I stopped directly in front of the suspected Imperial soldiers, my eyes finally settling on the girl in the center. Up close, she looked even less like a normal person than before. Not because she was pretty.

Pretty was the cheapest thing about her. The real problem was her degree of completion. It was as if she had lived to a point where her posture, her gaze, her silence, and her breathing were no longer entirely her own—they had been trimmed, polished, and calibrated by something much larger, until they became the person standing in front of me. She looked at me calmly. She didn't step back. She didn't rush to explain.

Nor did she show a single trace of the unease someone staring down a ring of gun barrels ought to display. In that moment, I suddenly felt a spike of irritation. Not dislike. It was the specific irritation of: What gives you the right to be calmer than the people holding the guns pointing at you? So I stared at her and spoke.

"Care to explain, miss?"