Chương 406: 186.Discipline Incarnate

I knew Freya Nikaido. Or so I'd thought. The night shift on December twenty-sixth gave me a thorough re-education in what it meant to have discipline branded into a person—no, branded isn't quite right. The word is welded. Not upbringing. Not principle. Not even a sense of responsibility. It was like someone had heated the word discipline until it glowed, then taken an industrial torch and welded it into her bones, millimeter by millimeter, until it grew into the person standing in front of me.

To prevent her from getting there first and giving me the "I've been here the whole time, your tardiness is your own problem" look, I showed up ten minutes early. She was already there. Logbook in hand. Standing straight at the school gate. Not leaning. Not pacing. Not inside the duty room warming up. Just standing there. Like a silver nail driven into the snow. When I rode in, I could feel her eyes scan from my helmet to my front tire.

Not aggressive—just the kind of look that triggers a very specific instinct: she's a little smug. I parked the bike. Before I'd had time to process my irritation into something sayable, I saw Hedwig and Yamada standing side by side outside the duty room, like two model students told to stand in the corner and reflect. The snow was still falling. Not a blizzard. Just fine, brittle, cold.

Not heavy enough to weigh anything on your shoulders, but with this very clear sense of I'm here to make sure you don't enjoy yourself today. I frowned.

"What are you two doing?" I pointed toward the inside of the duty room.

"It's snowing. There's a heater in there. Why are you standing outside?" Hedwig gave a faint, slightly defeated smile. The kind that said she hadn't fully processed the logic herself yet. Yamada clutched his clipboard and made a very small gesture with his chin toward the side. I followed his direction.

"... Nikaido?" Hedwig nodded. So did Yamada—and there was something in his nod that belonged to a new civil servant in their first week, freshly slapped by reality, developing a premature exhaustion with institutional systems.

"She got here at 1730," Yamada said. His voice sounded genuinely close to tears.

"Things were fine before she arrived."

"And after?" I asked. Hedwig tucked her hands into her sleeves and said, very evenly: "She was very polite." I knew immediately that sentence was going to end somewhere terrible.

"She said warmth makes the body's senses sluggish."

"..." I opened my mouth. There were too many angles of attack. For a moment I genuinely didn't know where to start. Technically, she wasn't wrong. From the perspective of human civilization, though, that sentence deserved a spot in Motivational Quotes You Should Never Use on Colleagues in Winter. I looked at Hedwig, then at Yamada's nearly frost-tipped ears, and finally just swallowed the sigh.

"Got it. You two are off duty. Go." Yamada's relief was immediate, visibly controlled but completely obvious—like someone had finally announced they could stop attending a pointless spiritual conditioning camp. Hedwig kept her usual steadiness, but as she passed me, she said very quietly:"Good luck." I looked at her. The snow on her lashes hadn't melted yet. The wind had loosened a few strands of hair at her edges. She'd been on duty all day and should have been tired, but her eyes were still very clean.

That kind of cleanness could be inconvenient—it made you feel like complaining too much would somehow be undignified. So I just pulled a corner of my mouth up.

"Still alive. That counts as profit." Hedwig seemed to think about that, and then nodded, very seriously.

"Good." Good. Sometimes she really did have a way of saying the most ordinary things in a tone that sounded like quiet, unassuming care. Not deliberate. Not ambiguous. Just genuinely, criminally simple. I looked away before I had to deal with any additional cardiac inconveniences on an already icy night. Yamada, standing nearby, seemed to want to add something. Finally, he did, very carefully:"Vice President—there's a notebook on the table inside. Nikaido put together a night patrol manual."

I heard the word put together and felt an immediate twitch in my brow. Anything involving Nikaido and the words compiled, organized, formatted, annotated, or supplemented was never going to be good news. — After Hedwig and Yamada left, I went into the duty room. The heater was still on, but after that "warmth makes the senses sluggish" comment, the whole space felt like even the hot air had been made guilty by association. On the desk, as promised, sat a thin booklet.

The cover was written in very neat characters: Night Patrol Manual I stared at those words for two seconds.

"... Has anyone really considered security drones?" Muttering to myself, I flipped it open. 2200, sharp: close main gate. 2210: confirm duty room equipment. 2230: conduct first visual exterior sweep. 2300, sharp: confirm lighting and locks in main academic zone. 2330: prepare equipment for first official patrol. 0000, sharp: begin first patrol circuit. I had been prepared to mock her for writing a duty shift like a military night exercise.

The further I read, the more I realized the terrifying part wasn't how strict it was. It was that it was actually useful.

"You've got to be kidding me..." I turned the page and nearly laughed when I saw the diagram.

"The perimeter of this school is several city blocks." The full campus map was spread across the page, dense and complete, the kind of thing a municipal planning office might not even manage to produce. Total area: 225 square kilometers. Two swimming pools, dormitory blocks, athletic grounds, bridge simulation facilities, two mock spaceports for practicing ship operations.

Beyond that, a shooting range, workshop buildings, maintenance halls, and a long list of auxiliary facilities you forget exist until you need them. I was about to pre-emptively mourn my knees when I noticed someone had circled a small section in red, with two characters written beside it: Here. Main academic zone. Patrol the main academic zone only. For a brief moment, I felt something almost like goodwill toward the universe. At least it wasn't planning to take my kneecaps tonight. Knock. Knock. Light.

Almost polite. I looked up. Ice blue hair, lethal expression. Nikaido stood outside the duty room, logbook in her left hand, a black glove on her right. The light from the academic building made her silhouette very cold—even her hair looked like it had been given a cutting edge. When she wasn't speaking, she was actually quite striking—provided you could first forget that she'd just made two day-shift members stand in the snow. Right. Maybe the universe wasn't being all that kind after all.

I closed the manual and tilted my chin.

"Come in. Isn't the outside better for keeping the senses sharp?" Nikaido walked in, bringing a pocket of cold air with her. She looked at me once, then at the manual on the desk, expression carrying no excess information whatsoever.

"You read it?"

"Thanks to you." I patted the booklet.

"Very thorough. Next time, maybe attach a quiz? Then I can submit a reflection report when the shift ends." Nikaido didn't take the bait.

"If you need one, I can prepare it." I paused for half a second.... She genuinely was the type who could take a joke and convert it straight into policy.

"No," I said.

"I'd like to preserve a small amount of personal freedom." She set her logbook on the desk, still standing straight.

"Freedom isn't the same as carelessness."

"I never said carelessness was freedom."

"But you often conflate the two." I stared at her. She looked back. The duty room heater blew steadily between us. The warmth was real enough, but somehow it couldn't reach certain places. Like her tone. Like my temples. I genuinely admired Nikaido sometimes. Not the kind of opponent who made you want to flip a table—that was too low-level.

Nikaido's particular brand of aggravation was that she could take an ordinary sentence, slice it into thin strips, and lay them out in front of you so neatly that you'd realize, on your own: oh, I'm being looked down on right now. I pulled a chair over and sat.

"Alright. Would the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee like to explain why the heater poses a moral hazard to duty performance?" Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Not a moral hazard. A duty hazard." She answered immediately.

"Moving from a warm environment into a cold zone causes a temporary sensory lag. The last thing you want on night shift is a half-beat delay in your reactions."

"So you had Hedwig and Yamada stand outside in the cold."

"I had them acclimatize to the external temperature."... That sounded like something a cult would say. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

"Nikaido, if you ever stop being Chair of the Disciplinary Committee and open some kind of discipline retreat, I think you'd do very well." She either didn't catch the insult, or caught it and didn't care. She simply pulled out another sheet from the side and pushed it toward me.

"Tonight's patrol log format." I looked down, and nearly laughed. The columns were extremely detailed. Time / Location / Lighting Status / Door Lock Confirmed / Unusual Sounds / Slip Hazard from Snow Accumulation / Window Frame and Sensor Status / Visitor Items Left Behind / Notes. Even the notes column was split in half.

"You want my notes to read like a police report too?"

"To prevent post-hoc memory distortion."

"We're just on night duty. We're not filing a record for the school archives."

"Precisely because it's 'just duty' that people relax." When she said it, her gaze rested on my face—flat. Steady. Not provocation, not even hostility. Closer to a cold kind of faith—absolute belief that if she didn't watch me, I would turn this into a personalized evening stroll. The worst part was, she wasn't wrong. I slumped back with a long sigh.

"Alright. Since we're here, anything else, O exalted Chair?" She actually gave it some thought. Then: "Yes." I almost choked on my own breath.

"First, don't leave personal drinks next to the logbook during duty. Moisture risk. Second, don't point a flashlight directly at glass—creates double images. Third, at corridor corners, check the floor before looking ahead. Winter slip hazard. Fourth—""Stop." I raised a hand.

"Enough. Any more and I'm going to start thinking this entire shift is a personal character correction program aimed at me." She frowned—barely.

"I have no such personal agenda." That stopped me for a second. Not because it was harsh, but because it was blunt. Blunt like the back of a knife, tapping your forehead. No blood. Still makes you angry.

"So if I feel targeted, that's just me flattering myself?" I said.

"If you interpret standard precautions as targeting, the issue isn't the precautions." Good. Great. I now fully understood why some people, when confronted with someone like her, suddenly felt the urge to do something juvenile and dumb. She was too correct. Correct like a rulebook that had grown legs and learned to breathe. And to make it worse, the rulebook happened to look good.

Her hair was tied back neatly tonight, ice blue pulled together with hardly a strand out of place, just a few wisps at her forehead catching the cold light like snow along a blade. Her jawline was already sharp; with her expression icy, she only grew harder to approach. But because it was so cold out, the tip of her nose and the edges of her ears were flushed just slightly, which annoyed me even more—like discipline had had to reluctantly concede she was alive.

I stared too long, realized I was staring, and snapped my eyes back to the manual. Time crawled. Not the usual "duty is boring" kind of slow. More like someone had tightened the valve on time so that each minute only dropped in reluctant little beads. The heater blew, the snow outside never stopped, and the security room felt wedged between climates, with Nikaido herself acting as a third, more unreasonable weather system. In the hours before gate closing, she actually made three kinds of movement.

First: standing outside at minus five with a clipboard, upright. Not metaphorically. Actually not moving. Her posture by the gate wasn't being on duty. It was being displayed. A disciplinary specimen in a glass case. Hair gathered, shoulders level, gaze straight, even her breathing seemed under regulation. Snow landed on her shoulders, on her hair, and she didn't bother to brush it off—as if if she didn't acknowledge the cold, the temperature couldn't be counted.

I watched through the glass at first, curious to see when human reflex would force some motion. It didn't. She stood like a human-sized sign that read Winter Duty Must Not Be Slack. Second movement: coming in for a sip of tea. One sip. Ten minutes, tops. At certain intervals, she'd push the door open and bring a gust of cold with her, peel off one glove, pick up the cup on the table, and take a sip. Not gulping. Not clutching it for warmth. Definitely not with any "saved at last" relief.

It was more like—how to put it—like she was performing a required fluid-maintenance protocol on a machine. Then, cup down, no more than a light clink. Glove back on. Out again. Perfectly calm, perfectly rationed. To a degree that bordered on immoral. I watched her back from the chair and thought one thing: If this person ever got posted to a polar station, she'd probably ask the ice shelf to file its wind direction data first. Third movement: occasional trips to the bathroom. Never more than five minutes.

I swear I wasn't intentionally timing it. But when someone's patterns are rigid enough, any deviation becomes an event. Every time she left, she set the clipboard in the exact same spot, pen at the right-hand corner, like she was afraid a bathroom run might corrupt the duty log. When she came back, even the hang of her scarf looked unchanged. I watched twice. By the third time, I stopped. If I was paying this much attention to her bathroom breaks, the one with the problem would no longer be her.

Honestly, I thought Nikaido's life must be exhausting. Not "busy" exhausting. The kind where simply being alive meant turning everything into annexes to a set of regulations. Other people stood at the gate to be on duty. She stood at the gate like she was signing a lifetime contract with the phrase must not relax. Other people drank tea to warm up. She drank tea like she'd agreed to consume the bare minimum ten milliliters of civilization required to keep a human organism functioning.

Other people go to the bathroom. She came back looking like she'd also recalculated the patrol route. There was a brief, stupid flicker of sympathy. Very brief. Any more and I'd have to apologize to Hedwig and Yamada for what she'd done to them in the snow. Finally, the time to close the gate came. I had thought that once the main gate shut, at least something that night would slide in a human-friendly direction. But even the way she locked the gate was weaponized. Check lock. Slide iron. Test latch.

Then write a line on the board. The whole sequence had the crispness of a low-budget drill. If she'd had a rank plate on her shoulder, I'd have saluted. Once the gate was secured, she walked back into the duty room and set a card down in front of me.

"Hoshino," she said.

"Put that in the drawer. We won't be doing outside perimeter tonight." I'd been slouched in lazy mode. That snapped me halfway awake.

"Why not?" No way this was a sudden fit of compassion. Even if she were compassionate, she'd turn it into an official memo with three appendices and a sign-off sheet.

"I ran into the garrison patrol when I was at the gate," she said, tone as flat as a stamped memo.

"The MPs are circling this sector tonight. The school decided we don't need to duplicate their outer perimeter coverage." I raised a brow.

"That convenient, huh?"

"I've already reported it to Academic Affairs."

"That's grea—" My "great" had just reached the threshold of hope when she added, expressionless:"So the 0000 patrol has been shifted to internal only." I went silent for two seconds. Then looked up at her.

"Nikaido," I narrowed my eyes.

"You're not just looking for an excuse to harass me, are you?" She crossed her arms. On anyone else, it might've read as defensive. On her, it read as I am now speaking on behalf of the rules.

"Hoshino," she said.

"If you're doing nothing wrong, you wouldn't think I am." … She was deeply irritating. Not in the flip-the-table sense. That would be too low-rent. Her particular brand of irritating came from being able to take what sounded like a provocation and phrase it as objective commentary. If you got mad, it made it look like the flaw was in you. Which is the worst way to lose. You end up stewing, wanting to do something juvenile just to prove you can.

I flipped the manual back open, forcing my eyes back onto the cold print. Calm down, Hoshino Shimo. It wasn't time for pettiness. Not yet.

"... Anyway," I cleared my throat.

"How long till midnight?"

"Thirty-seven minutes." Nikaido answered fast—so fast the number seemed to have been sitting on her tongue the whole time, just waiting for me to be dumb enough to ask. I glanced from the manual to the clock on the wall, and finally back to the Chair standing across from me. The heater was clearly running, but with Nikaido in the room, the whole space developed an unreasonable, dry coldness that had nothing to do with the thermostat. The temperature hadn't dropped. The atmosphere had.

It was the feeling of setting a hot cup of tea down on a war-room table—the tea's still hot, but nobody's relaxed enough to drink it.

"So," I picked up the clipboard, keeping my tone within civilized bounds, "how does the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee plan to spend these thirty-seven minutes?" She ignored the emphasis I'd put on her title and flipped to the next page like reading off a pre-drafted operational summary.

"We leave the duty room at 2350," she said.

"East connecting corridor first, confirming entry points between the first and second floors. Then the main academic zone's exterior locks, the second-floor empty classrooms, the equipment wing's outer corridor, and back to the central stairwell. We start logging from point one at 0000, sharp." I was quiet for two seconds. Then couldn't help myself.

"... You make an internal patrol sound like taking over a border checkpoint."

"Duty should have an order."

"I'm not objecting to order." I closed the manual with a small, deliberate snap.

"I'm just curious whether you also plan an exit route before going to buy a bottle of water at the convenience store." She gave me a flat look—the kind that said my question wasn't worth laughing at, but wasn't worth visibly dismissing either.

"If the environment is unfamiliar, yes."... This person was genuinely a hazard. I almost got convinced by how sincerely self-aware she was about her own condition. That was the scariest thing about her—she wasn't strict to control other people. She'd welded the rules into herself because she truly believed in them. To an almost religious degree. I tucked my scarf in a little further and reached for the flashlight. The instant my fingers touched the casing, her voice landed.

"Check the battery first." My hand stopped.

"... I was just about to."

"You reached straight for it."

"How much spare attention do your eyes even have?"

"Rather than spare, call it baseline vigilance." I looked at her, expressionless. She looked back, equally expressionless. The heater blew hard between us, accomplishing nothing against this particular conversation. I used to think the most exhausting part of dealing with people was arguing. Turns out it isn't. The most exhausting thing is having someone stand beside you, using completely unemotional correctness, continuously catching every lazy impulse before it's even fully formed.

I flipped the flashlight over and pressed the battery indicator. Three green bars.

"Satisfied?"

"Mm." Just that. One syllable. Even her victory was rationed, which somehow made rolling my eyes feel like throwing a tantrum. She jotted something on her clipboard. I didn't need to check to know it probably wasn't a note about my failure to test the battery first—at least, I hoped not. If this woman genuinely kept marginal notes on colleagues' duty attitude, tonight I wouldn't just want to haunt this building. I'd want to apply to have her permanently enshrined in the school history museum.

Wind scratched at the glass outside, raising a light, papery rustle. The snow wasn't heavy enough to block visibility—just the fine kind that makes the night whiter. Looking out, the whole campus looked submerged in watered-down milk: light present, warmth entirely absent. Nikaido tucked the clipboard under her arm, her gaze sliding to the half-full cup by my hand.

"Not recommended to drink too much before patrol." I looked up slowly.

"There's a rule for that too?"

"Cold environment plus movement tends to create unnecessary mid-route stops." I genuinely couldn't tell whether that counted as life advice or battlefield doctrine. In the end, I just picked up the cup and drank deliberately, right in front of her.

"My apologies," I said, setting it down.

"I prefer to patrol with a little humanity intact." She didn't take the bait, just added, evenly:"Just don't slow the schedule down." She really did know how to make an ordinary reminder sound like a character evaluation. I leaned against the desk and watched her for two seconds. Even I knew part of my annoyance wasn't entirely pure. If Nikaido were just plain unpleasant, I'd want to keep my distance. But she wasn't. She was the kind of person who made you want to observe her even standing perfectly still.

Ice blue hair pinned without a strand out of place, uniform buttoned exactly right, shoulders level, even the motion of putting on gloves carrying an almost premium quality of hostility. With someone like that standing in a duty room, clipboard in hand, the room only had two settings: match her rhythm, or get run over by it. The worst part was, I was clearly the second one right now.

"2350," Nikaido said suddenly.

"It's not because I enjoy starting early." For a second I actually thought she'd learned to read minds.

"... Then why?"

"I don't like moving right on the hour," she said.

"Cut the window too tight, and any extra variable becomes a failure." My first instinct was to say your life sounds exhausting. I swallowed it. Not out of tact—because her tone was too flat. It didn't sound like she was lecturing me. It sounded like she was just describing a method she'd developed a long time ago for dealing with the world. Don't cut it close. Don't leave gaps. Don't give anything uncontrolled a way in.... Sick. And thoroughly so. I fell quiet for a second, unexpectedly.

She probably misread that as a rare moment of receptiveness, because she carried on naturally:"Once we leave the duty room, you take the right."

"Why the right?"

"The east corridor has a lot of window surface. Right side keeps you out of the main glare zones."

"You've already decided where I'm standing?"

"It's more efficient."

"This is starting to feel like walking a dog." Nikaido finally looked me in the eye.

"If the Vice President cooperates, there's no need for a leash tonight." I looked at her. She looked at me. And I almost laughed. Because that sentence was delivered with such total sincerity that it looped back around to being funnier than any deliberate joke. She had no idea what she'd just said. If she'd ever had a sense of humor, she'd probably filed it away in a clearly labeled drawer and lost the key.

"Fine," I said, clipping the flashlight to my belt, standing up slowly.

"I'll do my best to demonstrate basic leash-awareness." She frowned, slightly. Not anger—more like she was genuinely weighing whether that line was worth correcting. In the end she seemed to give up, checking the time again instead. The minute hand crept forward one more notch. The duty room went briefly quiet. Not a comfortable quiet, but not awkward either—a quiet she'd organized. Even the blank spaces felt arranged to a format, waiting to be used before midnight.

Snow-glow through the window bleached the room's edges pale. The heater blew against my shins; the metal edges of the flashlight and clipboard caught the cold light. The whole night felt sliced into sections and laid across the table, with Nikaido holding a ruler, measuring each one out for me. I had the strangest feeling. Not fear. Not the annoyance itself, either.

More like—if the whole shift went exactly to her rhythm, I was probably going to end up wanting to do something that didn't strictly line up with the spirit of the school rules. The thought was faint, like a dry match scraped once across the inside of my skull—not quite catching. She wasn't looking at me. Just tightening her gloves again, thumb pressed along the seam at her wrist, checking the fit. On anyone else, that would just be prep. On her, it looked like the start of a ritual that didn't allow for mistakes.

"Time," she said. I picked up the clipboard, drained the last of my tea, and set the cup down before she could look over.

"Understood, Chair." Nikaido turned toward the door, her back straight enough to count as a dare. The door opened, and the cold outside cut straight in, carrying that hard, clean smell unique to a snowy night. The academic zone ahead was dead quiet, only the necessary lights on in the distance—like narrow, grudging safe paths left for people to walk. I followed, pausing once at the threshold for a last look at the warm light inside. Next step: the east connecting corridor.

And judging from the way Nikaido had already assigned which side of the hallway I'd walk on, the first half of tonight clearly still belonged to her.... Fine. Let's see exactly how standard this living rulebook could walk the night halls.