Chương 468: 221.Privilege 1

My words landed, and for half a second the conference room became a vacuum. Not silence. It was more like someone had tapped three hundred brains with a hammer, lightly, and every neural signal aboard had skidded in midair at once. Everyone had understood it — and precisely because they had understood, none of them knew whether to laugh first, play dead first, or first pretend they had suddenly gone deaf. Then the collapse began.

The Class A girl representative in the front row went red to her ears, red in layers, like someone had slapped a whole sunset across her face. She clearly wanted to keep the composure proper to a class representative; instead the corner of her mouth twitched once and she immediately dropped her head and started flipping furiously through her documents, flipping as if that file held an escape pod that could save her from social death. The boy representative beside her was even better.

First he straightened his back and put on the expression of "a cheap joke like that can't shake me," then the next second a classmate beside him muttered, too low to be polite but loud enough to be heard — "Were you feeling guilty just now?" — and he broke instantly, going red all the way up his neck to his uniform collar, still forcing his face into a glare. That glare was a science in itself. Because he didn't dare hold it long.

Two seconds and he had to look away, or his whole face would look even more like he had just been caught red-handed. The back row was a different kind of hell. Someone's shoulders shook like the bridge had just jumped again, and they absolutely refused to make a sound. Someone else pressed a fist to their mouth and faked a cough with excessive professionalism, coughing so hard the person beside them had to edge away before being sprayed by the sheer force of their survival instinct.

Two others who had been whispering together quietly put half a seat of distance between themselves, each wearing the clean-handed look of "please don't lump me in with people who would do horny things in public." Too late. The instant my line landed, every single person in the room looked suspicious.

Class C's class rep — who had just been stabbed by me over the Imperial-uniform posing photos and clearly hadn't yet climbed out of her previous round of social death — was now hit head-on by a fresh public morality issue. She first shot a murderous glare at the several people in her own class who had clearly been laughing too openly, a glare that plainly meant "you'd better not have actually done it."

Then, as if something had just occurred to her, she switched to glaring at a boy representative from the neighboring class on the other side who was working hard to look innocent. Watching that chain reaction of glances, I nearly wanted to applaud for her. Good. The meeting wasn't even half over and the crowd had already begun spontaneously cross-examining itself. Roy pressed a hand to his lips, his expression management barely still online, but the heat in his ears betrayed their owner with brutal honesty.

I could guarantee that right now his brain was computing, at financial-grade precision, whether he had actually made a sound just now, and whether making a sound would damage the chief navigator's asset of dignity. Lan was more straightforward. She simply turned her face away. It wasn't avoidance. It was a mature person understanding that some laughs, once let out, are very hard to fold back into the poise proper to a general affairs officer within thirty seconds.

So she chose to preserve what remained of her professional ethics and let her shoulders shake without a shred of loyalty. As for Jess — She was still coughing. Strictly speaking, she had evolved from "sprayed by water" to "sprayed by one of my sentences into a brief loss of focus on her entire worldview." One hand over her mouth, the other pressed to the tabletop, she was laughing so hard she nearly folded over, and there was even a touch of physiological tears at the corners of her eyes.

"You — what the hell did you even say in that meeting…" She forced one sentence out through her teeth. I was innocent.

"Discipline guidance."

"Whose discipline guidance looks like that?!"

"The forward-looking kind." I answered with a perfectly straight face. Hearing that, Jess nearly sprayed a second time. And just as that chaos was about to ferment in an even less manageable direction, Nikaido slowly set down the documents in her hands. It wasn't a big motion. But for some reason, the moment she moved, a small circle of people around her instinctively lowered their voices in response.

This woman probably really does feed on discipline; even sitting motionless she carried the pressure of "keep it up and I'll put you on a list." She raised her head and looked out over the room.

"Since the vice president has already raised this point." Her voice had no rise or fall, flat as if a legal statute had grown vocal cords of its own.

"Then I'll add, while we're here, the definition of a 'public place.'" Something in my head went, ah. Here it comes. The truly terrifying dry joke is never someone deliberately telling a joke. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. It's someone earnestly explaining the joke as a supplementary administrative clause. The room went quiet even faster than expected. Because everyone realized that Nikaido really would define it. She wouldn't even blush. She would just be precise."'

Public place' includes, but is not limited to." She reached out and tapped a fingertip once on the tabletop, as if beating time for the catalogue of disaster she was about to read out.

"Corridors, the mess hall, the artificial beach, the recreation room, the exterior rest area of the bathhouse, the entrances and exits of the sauna, the public seating area of the Officers' Club, onboard elevators, the standby area outside the bridge, the conference room, the observation seats of the training pod, and any space that three or more persons may enter and leave freely, or that is equipped with transparent partitions, surveillance equipment, or a duty patrol route."

Dead silence filled the conference room. Not because nobody understood. Because she had defined it too completely. So completely that I suspected she had already run every place on this ship where something could go wrong through some pessimism reserved for Disciplinary Committee use, working it out in her head beforehand. She wasn't finished.

"Additionally." Nikaido drove the knife in without a flicker of expression.

"If anyone attempts to argue that 'there was no one else present at the time,' allow me to remind everyone that the Disciplinary Committee's duties are not founded on anyone's luck. Onboard surveillance records, patrol sign-ins, access logs, and third-party witness testimony may all serve as grounds for a ruling." Someone in the back row let out a very faint gasp. Whether they had been frightened, or had suddenly remembered some past stretch of youth they had assumed no one would ever notice, I couldn't say.

Nikaido remained entirely without mercy.

"One further point." She even looked a little bit into it now."' Horny behavior,' if it causes noise, crowding, onlookers, equipment damage, medical bay overtime, distraction of personnel on duty, or imitation by other classes, will be handled with maximum severity." At this point even I wanted to applaud her. Outstanding. She had actually taken the word "horny" and, in the language of the Disciplinary Committee, translated it into a quantifiable, attributable, cross-class-contagious management risk.

This woman isn't managing students. She's managing a high-volatility youth disaster. Jess had her whole face buried in her arms, shoulders still shaking. Lan simply shut her eyes, as if conducting some quiet mourning for social reality. Roy wore the complicated expression of someone asking "what kind of meeting did I attend today?"

— as though he had believed he had just escaped with his life from an Imperial fortress, only to discover that the truly incomprehensible wall of civilization was actually inside the Federation. I turned my head and glanced at Nikaido. She still had that face that could go straight onto a cover of the school regulations. No shame. No awkwardness. Only a sense of duty to state things clearly. In a certain sense, that was genuinely terrifying.

Because if a person can talk about a topic like this the way one explains fire-drill precautions, then she has probably already passed beyond the ordinary human shame threshold and arrived at a higher order of institutional life-form. The laughter that had been about to scatter through the conference room turned, at this point, into something even more dangerous. Everyone was holding it in. Some held in laughter, some held in shame, some held in the urge to look at whoever was beside them.

And some who had done absolutely nothing had already begun wearing the innocent-victim expression of "why am I here listening to this?" Just then, Maki tapped the tabletop twice, lightly. Tap, tap. Not loud. But enough. Enough to pull the entire conference room back from the edge of a "large-scale youth incident prevention seminar" into formal session order. She didn't scold anyone right away, and she offered no comment at all on the line I had just delivered. She simply swept the room with a calm look.

That look was very much hers — not demanding that everyone grow up immediately, but reminding everyone that laughter was fine, and that something more realistic still had to be swallowed afterward. So the conference room slowly went quiet. Not fully recovered. But everyone had learned to tuck their laughter and their embarrassment behind their throats for now, saving it to explode back in their rooms later. Only then did Maki turn to the next page of her documents.

"Good." She said. The moment those one syllable came out, I could almost feel an entire row of people below straighten their backs a little. And then, instead of doing what everyone expected — piling on more rules, more restrictions, more student council clauses capable of making a person question their life — she closed that page of documents. She just closed it. Slap. The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a clean, decisive sense of closure. Like a judge's gavel, or like a notice postponing an execution.

Either way, for the crowd below — just back from rolling out of Imperial main gun range and now nearly collectively socially dead over the "horny things in public" announcement — it counted as mercy.

"That's all for today." Maki said mildly. The conference room froze for a beat first. I could almost see the light that lit up in some people's eyes. That wasn't wisdom, and it wasn't discipline. It was pure, plain survival instinct — the relief of knowing they wouldn't, for the moment, be stabbed one clause at a time by the student council president. But Maki's next line quickly put a collar back on that fidgeting joy.

"What I said just now — class representatives, take it back and relay it to your classes immediately." Her tone was flat. Flat like she was describing an everyday little thing that would end very badly for anyone who failed to do it.

"The nondisclosure agreement, the facility hours, the duty and drinking restrictions, the discipline cooperation items — not one may be left out." The eyes below that had just started to shine immediately sobered up a good deal. That's what makes her formidable. She doesn't need to raise her voice, and she doesn't need to slam the table. She only has to state things calmly, and everyone will realize on their own that treating any of it as a passing breeze means dying later with a deeply procedural flavor.

Maki's gaze swept slowly over the room.

"Also." Here it comes. Those two words usually mean she is about to add the genuinely lethal item.

"Starting tonight, you may rest, you may relax, and you may celebrate." A few people below straightened up again without meaning to.

"However—" Of course. A student council president never lets anyone live too comfortably.

"Don't let me receive a pile of incidents tomorrow morning that can't be written into an official report." I nearly laughed. The brilliance of that line is that she never spells out what those "incidents" actually include. And precisely because she doesn't, everyone's brain automatically supplies a set of images far worse than any explicit list. And some of those images, ninety-nine percent of them, would be inseparable from the line I had just delivered. Maki clearly knew that too.

Because after saying it, her gaze still drifted lightly over in my direction. That glance was very short. Short enough to look like nothing had happened. But I still read something very familiar in it — Vice President, the sparks you just threw out had better not actually burn down the whole ship. … You can't blame me for that, surely. I was only being very practical and preventing a discipline disaster in advance.

"If there's nothing else, we're adjourned." She said. This time, the conference room finally let out a sound of genuine release. Someone exhaled long. Someone immediately looked down to gather their documents. Someone exchanged a look with the person beside them — and that look wasn't about the meeting anymore. It was asking: so, later, artificial beach first, or recreation room first?

And quite a few who had been working hard to look composed a moment ago now stood up with a flush on their faces that hadn't fully faded. Good. I'd bet anything that the line "don't do horny things in public" was going to grow legs tonight and run all over the Asgard. Nikaido packed up her documents and stood, still wearing the face of someone no one would dare commit a crime in front of. But whether it was my imagination, she glanced my way before leaving — and that look clearly still held an unspoken sentence.

You had better not make me actually use that definition. Very sensibly, I pressed my smile back down and pretended I had been, from start to finish, a vice president of upright conduct, cautious speech, and a love of public order. Whether anyone believed it was another matter. The crowd in the conference room began to disperse outward. Chair legs scraped the floor, paper turned, and murmuring rose again. The air that Maki had been pressing down so hard finally showed signs of loosening.

The feeling was strange — like a nightmare that had nearly swallowed everyone whole had finally agreed to leave one door open at the end, so everyone could stagger out carrying fatigue, lingering fear, and a slightly unhealthy excitement. Watching that crowd come back to life, only one thought surfaced in my mind. Good. The meeting was over.

Next, this pack of students just back from the gates of death was finally going to start figuring out how to submerge themselves in entertainment and pretend nothing had happened today. And I was quite certain. That was going to be the start of another disaster.