Chương 36: 16.Breathing Underwater, Counting Down 16-2

Warning lights pulsed around the pool's edge. Beneath the black water, the outline of a facility exterior slowly emerged. Not a full base—just a sectioned module: outer hull, maintenance hatch, lateral conduits, sensor masts, two simulated transfer lines. Enough for one instructor to elegantly dismantle your self-respect. Renard's first instruction was simple.

"Get in. Find three points that will start its collapse in ninety minutes." I looked at the black surface.

"Just find—no charges?"

"Just find," Renard said.

"Plenty of people know how to make things explode. The ones who know when not to are worth more." I fitted the rebreather, stepped to the platform edge, and looked down into the dark. No current. No sound. Still as a well designed specifically to hold fear. I hated places like this. Not the messy, violent kind of hatred—not the someone's-about-to-punch-you kind. Something quieter and more insidious. The kind where, the moment you step in, the world stops operating on any logic you recognize as human.

"Hoshino," Renard's voice came through the comm.

"What are you looking at?" I stared at the surface and answered honestly.

"Seeing if I'm going to die without any aesthetic dignity today."

"Wrong." I rolled my eyes.

"Then please enlighten me, sir."

"Look at the entry points," he said.

"Every time you're afraid, check the entries first. Not where it's darkest—where you can get in, and where you can get out." I blinked. That was an odd line. Odd because it didn't sound like tactics. It sounded like a survival habit. Like the first rule someone had distilled from actually spending too long in black water. I didn't say anything else. Drew a deep breath and dropped. Cold. Not ordinary cold.

The kind that hits every surface at once—skin, eardrums, the back of the neck, even the roots of your teeth—all touched by the same instant low temperature. The rebreather kicked in immediately. My own breathing filled my ears. Visibility was short in the black water. The beam from my lamp didn't help—it just felt like I was illuminating something that didn't want to be seen. I swam toward the facility's outer hull. When my gloved hand touched metal, the first impression wasn't hardness—it was slickness.

Like there was a thin film of cold adhesion over everything. Three routes ahead. Maintenance hatch. Side conduit crawlspace. Circulation pump casing below. A normal person would pick the maintenance hatch. Because it looks like a door. Like the place a protagonist is supposed to go. So I paused for a second, then headed down instead. Renard's voice came through the comm, perfectly flat.

"Reason." I ran the lamp over the pump casing and pipe junctions as I answered.

"The maintenance hatch is too much like the official answer. First-response techs will hit it first when something goes wrong. If you want to delay collapse, you start with the places they suspect last." Renard didn't reply immediately. In his instructional dialect, that probably translated to: Continue. You haven't done anything stupid enough to merit interruption yet. I worked my way along the underside and found the first point. Not the main pump. The unobtrusive pressure compensation line beside it.

I marked it with a gesture.

"Here," I said.

"Introduce a micro deviation. It won't shut down right away, but the pressure balance across the loop will skew over time. People will initially blame sensors or local blockage."

"And then?" I moved on, circling to the side of the structure and spotting a protective housing where the comm bundle entered the hull.

"Second point here," I said.

"Don't cut main communications. Delay the backup channel. Alarms get out, but not in time. Returns come back dirty." Silence in the water for a second. Then Renard: "Third." I stopped, lamp tracing along the hull seams. Not the main compartment—too early. Not the maintenance hatch—too obvious. My light caught an emergency vent valve housing under a side compartment. Exactly the kind of component no one looks at twice. Understanding hit almost simultaneously.

"…Here."

"Reason." My grip tightened on the housing, heart rate picking up.

"If the first two points already have them running, and this jams at the wrong moment, compartment sealing becomes half-effective," I said.

"They think they're isolating the failure. What they're really doing is feeding it." Two seconds of quiet on the other end. Then Renard said, "Surface." When I broke onto the platform, my breathing was heavy. Water dripped from my hair and suit. In another kind of story, this might have been described as disheveled but compelling. Unfortunately, this was Federal Special Operations. Right now I looked like an underage laborer dragged up from underwater waste processing.

I pulled off the mask and wiped water from my face.

"Well?" Renard watched the simulation replay, then said in that same flat tone:"Main pump isn't the answer. Primary comm isn't the answer. Main compartment isn't the answer. You avoided the three brightest mistakes." He lifted his eyes to me.

"That's good." I blinked. Oh. I'd been complimented. By someone who looked like a deep-sea revenant, no less. Rare experience. Before I could get properly sarcastic, he added:"But you still have one problem." …Knew it.

"What problem?" He looked at me, voice steady as ever.

"You still think of sabotage too much in terms of outcomes." I froze. Renard walked closer to the projection and connected the three points I'd chosen.

"Your locations are fine," he said.

"The problem is that you were thinking about how they'd eventually fail." He tapped the first mark.

"A real behind-the-lines saboteur doesn't focus on the failure itself." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Second point.

"He thinks about who goes to fix it first." Third.

"Who gets caught in transit." Back to the full structure.

"Who makes the wrong call. Who carries that mistake into the next compartment." He looked at me.

"The explosion isn't the answer. People are." For a moment I was genuinely quiet. Because I understood. This wasn't a class on destroying a facility. It was a class on using the people inside it so they'd finish the job for you. More sophisticated than just blowing things up. Also considerably filthier. After a few seconds I said, honestly:"Sir, this entire framework really isn't suitable for recruitment materials." Renard watched me, and for a heartbeat something almost shifted in his eyes. Not at the mouth.

Somewhere barely visible, something moved a fraction.

"That's why you're hearing it here," he said. …Fair. Awful, but fair. He pulled up a new simulation—not a facility cross-section but a longer mission sequence: approach, concealment, patrol timing, interference placement, delayed breach, exfil. One look told me the first run had been an appetizer.

"And now?" I asked.

"Now," Renard said evenly, "you learn how to make a station sick in twenty-seven minutes." … Excellent. That sentence successfully gave me new psychological damage around the term demolitions expert. Standing dripping on the platform, still holding the training pin, staring at a mission route that looked like a surgical plan, it hit me clearly: Karl had beaten me into learning how to stay alive. Mira had forced me to shoot straight in chaos.

What Renard was doing was worse— Teaching me how to kill a place slowly without ever engaging it directly. I stared at the schematic and exhaled softly.

"Impressive work, Federal system," I said.

"Even teaching people to do terrible things, you manage to be systematic about it." Renard didn't argue. He just started the second countdown. Behind the black water, the deep-pressure pool lit with that cold, transfer-inducing glow.

"Hoshino."

"Yes, sir."

"In." I looked at the dark surface, swore internally, and moved anyway. Because unfortunately, I was starting to get it. The expensive kind of destruction isn't the bang. It's making the enemy think they have time right up to the last second. The second run was far nastier than the first. The first had just shown me how naïve I was. The second was Renard personally drowning that naivety an inch at a time. This time the chamber added a countdown. Oxygen allocation: twenty-seven minutes.

Patrol cycle: every six minutes. Two external sensor masts on random rotation. Internal fault propagation: ninety minutes. My job: push the station into slow death that looked like internal accident—no main alarms, no early sealing. In short—the Federal curriculum wanted me to learn elegant ruination with technical precision. When I went under the second time, the black water felt like structured malice. On the first run, I'd feared cold, dark, limited visibility. By the second, what I feared had changed.

Now I feared time. Once you know what you're doing, the countdown becomes specific. Not numbers on a wall—every exhale, every turn, every glove-scrape against metal saying: you don't get to make the same mistake twice. I stayed tight to the underside, lamp at minimum, tracing seams with fingertips. First point: pressure compensation line. Not severed—seeded with a delayed micro-disruptor, set for irregular vibrations at twenty-two minutes. Early readings would look like aging hardware.

Second point: backup comm housing. Not a cut—latency. Signals go out late and dirty, returns come back wrong. The filthiest kind of problem—makes people doubt instruments first, then each other. For the third point, I'd planned the vent valve seat. But when I worked around to that angle, I stopped. The patrol light swept through. A narrow blade of cold white, drawing a fishbone trace that passed two meters ahead. It didn't catch me. It almost caught me. That almost activated every survival reflex simultaneously.

I pressed flat into the hull's shadow. My breathing in the rebreather suddenly seemed loud. Heart pounding undignifiedly. I could feel my fingers tremble. Renard's voice came through, level as ever.

"What are you panicking about?" I almost rolled my eyes. Asking that now had the educational value of choking someone and asking why they're gasping.

"Sir," I whispered, "there's a light."

"Wrong." …Here we go.

"Then enlighten me." Renard's voice cut through like a thin, cold blade.

"You're not afraid of being seen. You're afraid of being forced to change your plan." I went quiet for a second. Then had to admit, reluctantly, he was right. What had actually broken wasn't my body. It was the plan. I'd mapped the third point, the route, the approach angle. The moment the light swept through, my first thought wasn't how do I survive—it was shit, now I have to redo this. Embarrassing. Renard continued: "Sabotage isn't running a checklist. Once you're inside, every plan is a draft."

I bit the rebreather and sank deeper into shadow.

"So?"

"So stop protecting your plan," he said.

"Protect your objective." A beat of quiet in the black water. Got it. The third point didn't have to be the vent valve. What I needed was sealing failure at the worst moment—wrong corrective response from the people inside. Any point achieving that would work. I moved along the hull, angling up. Brief lamp-flick picked out a secondary environmental control bridge behind the maintenance hatch. There. Nobody would look first.

But once pressure drifted and comms lagged, if this bridge seized at the wrong moment, environment switching would fall half a beat behind. Not dramatic—but enough to send two teams to different locations, stomping response flow into paste. By the time I placed the last interference core, eight minutes remained. Renard was quiet for three seconds. Then: "Exfil." I turned immediately. The way back was harder—once everything's placed, there's an urge to keep checking your packages of disaster. I didn't look back.

Because I was understanding: high-end destruction isn't watching it happen. It's knowing it's inevitable and leaving. When I hit the platform, my legs almost gave. Not from distance—from constant tension. I tore off the rebreather and bent over, gasping. Black water dripped in a syncopated pat-pat-pat like half-hearted applause. Renard brought up my route with the fault cascade simulation. When I looked up, the timeline had finished: Minute 22: Pressure anomalies begin. Duty team misdiagnoses as wear.

Backup comm delay: 43-second reporting lag. Secondary env-control bridge seizes before sealing completes. Two teams cross-deploy, main control reads contradictions. Minute 63: Incident recognized as more than malfunction. Minute 87: Station operational capacity effectively dead. No explosion. No fire. No protagonist walking away. Just a cold diagram quietly informing you: This place is done. I stared for a few seconds, throat dry.

"…That counts as success?"

"It does," Renard said.

"But nothing blows."

"Which is why it's valuable." … Right. Another lesson logged. Federal classes seemed determined to murder my remaining romantic instincts. Renard shut the projection. The chamber fell back to baseline—damp, cold, fundamentally unfriendly to human souls. I stood on the wet platform, limbs heavy, shoulders aching. All I wanted was to go back, shower, lie flat, and rant about why the Federal system couldn't just train ordinary criminals. Renard wasn't finished. He walked up and looked down.

Up close, those light eyes looked even more like cold water. Not the freezing kind. The kind that strips everything down and leaves you awake.

"One comment," he said. I straightened slightly.

"Go ahead." Renard regarded me, voice steady to the point of cruelty.

"You're not especially good at destruction." He paused.

"You understand too quickly how people make mistakes in systems that are already failing." I froze. That didn't land like praise or criticism. It landed like a diagnosis. I opened my mouth, intending something sarcastic, and heard myself say:"…That doesn't sound like something a normal fourteen-year-old should be good at." Renard nodded.

"It isn't." …Thank you. Your idea of reassurance is about as gentle as the pressure pool. I wiped my face and gave a thin smile.

"So am I qualified or defective?" Renard looked at me, voice without inflection:"They're not mutually exclusive." I almost laughed. Okay. Good. I liked that one. Cold, but with style. Right then, the deep-pressure sector's PA crackled. Not the standard tone. More like someone hijacking the channel mid-sentence. Renard's brow twitched, barely. A second later, an unfamiliar male voice—bright and overly cheerful—exploded through the bay.

"Good afternoon, my damp friends—especially the little silver-haired specimen who just crawled out of the black water." I went rigid. …Who? The voice was too bright. Like someone had jammed a self-amused, high-velocity comet into the Federal comms net.

"Renard," the voice drawled, "put your deep-sea pickling on pause. I've got an empty slot in my centrifuge, and I hear—" Deliberate pause.

"—the kid you've got still has a brain and stomach that aren't completely ruined." I lifted my head slowly. Renard's expression was still flat. Just flatter in a colder way. He hit the comm key, tone unchanged.

"J. J., you're stealing my sector channel." The other end laughed immediately. The laugh wasn't unpleasant. If anything, it was too happy. Happy enough to trigger every survival instinct on principle.

"Don't be stingy, Colonel Moore," the voice said.

"Resource sharing—Federal virtue. Besides, I'm just getting ahead of introductions with the new student." Light tapping came through the broadcast, like someone idly knocking knuckles against a metal bulkhead.

"Hey, kid. You reading me?" I stared up at the audio grille in the ceiling and stayed quiet for two seconds.

"…If I say no, will you—" I caught myself.

"—will you disappear?" The other end burst into laughter immediately.

"Oh, I like this one. Voice doesn't sound waterlogged yet. Good, good." Renard ended this life-shortening first contact for me.

"She's not going to your sector today."

"Of course not today." J. J. sounded like he was discussing afternoon tea.

"I'm not about to stuff her in a Zero-class and spin her thirty times right now. I'm just giving advance notice—" The voice dropped a notch.

"Tell her to keep dinner light. And she'd better learn to find a bag before she pukes. My cockpit is hell to clean." I stood there, expression completely flat. …Perfect. New lunatic acquired. And the kind who was already giving me a preemptive headache before we'd even met. Renard cut the broadcast with a cold tap. The chamber fell silent again, leaving only the low thrum of the pressure pumps and the steady drip of water from my suit. I turned to him.

"Sir."

"Yes."

"That was the next one?"

"Unfortunately," Renard said evenly, "yes." I closed my eyes briefly.

"The Federal instructor roster really does read like it's sorted by psychiatric profile."

"You're adapting well," Renard said.

"That doesn't sound remotely like comfort."

"It isn't meant to." …Right. Another day with zero consolation. And somehow, I was actually getting used to it. Renard saved my simulation records, tone returning to that regulation calm that bordered on cruelty.

"Go back. Stow your gear, take a hot shower, get some sleep tonight."

"Starting tomorrow, your schedule gets uglier." I let out a breath.

"Thanks for the warning. At least I can brace for it." Renard glanced at me.

"Don't brace too much."

"Why not?"

"Because J. J. doesn't work in sequence." … Wonderful. One instructor teaching me how to let enemies kill themselves slowly. Another preparing to strap me into a single-seat zero-G combat craft—the Zero-class—that spins, accelerates, and will probably make me vomit up my internal organs. Federal development programs never disappoint. I pulled off my gloves, shook the cold water from my hands, and took one last look at the black expanse of the simulation pool. Today I hadn't learned how to blow things up.

I'd learned how to wait. How to calculate. How to pick the worst possible moment to bury an error inside someone else's system and let them nurture it themselves. And tomorrow— Tomorrow, from the sound of it, someone was going to teach me how to turn the sky into a trap as well. I exhaled and followed Renard toward the exit. Behind us, the deep-pressure chamber door slid shut with that low, heavy sound—like a coffin lid settling into place. And I really didn't want to admit it, but after hearing J. J.'

s overly cheerful voice, alongside the sense of impending doom in my stomach, something else had taken up residence. Something small. Something I wasn't entirely ready to name.