Chương 471: 222.Early Access 2

The outer door was yanked open without ceremony, and the first thing through it was Jess McCallow's face, wearing an expression that all but announced I caught you. Her eyes swept the room and landed, instantly, on the distance between me and Maki that we hadn't had time to properly close. Then she grinned. The kind of grin she could probably trademark.

"Oh my—" She drew the vowel out, sauntering in with nothing but a towel wrapped around her, moving less like someone here for a bath and more like someone conducting a raid.

"You two really know how to pick a venue for team bonding."

"Jess." Maki's voice was flat. Flat the way water goes flat right before it freezes.

"Wash first."

"So fierce, Madam President." Jess complained, but had the sense to raise both hands.

"I was just here to check whether the Seitokai's been quietly monopolizing public resources."

"It has," I said, deadpan.

"And you're currently trespassing."

"Perfect. Then I'm right on time." She'd barely finished when a second set of footsteps followed her in.

"Jess, you have to rinse off before you get in the pool." Lan Weiss came in behind her, tone as level as ever—less like someone dragged along for a soak, more like someone conducting a bathhouse compliance audit. Her short silver hair was damp, softening a few degrees of her usual official edge, replacing it with the look of someone who'd just washed her hair and hadn't quite dried it. And then, unfortunately, I looked a second too long.... Right. Uniforms really were a deeply deceptive invention of civilization.

I pulled my gaze back immediately and pretended I'd only been checking whether her posture met basic academy standards.

"Shimo, that look was suspicious." Lan said it without warning.

"You're overthinking it."

"Sure." Her mouth said that. Her eyes said, I know you. Don't. Quieter than either of them, Akari Flak had already slipped in from somewhere near the steam—towel wrapped around her, standing at the edge of the mist with her usual half-dead, faintly bored expression toward the universe's general habit of excess. She looked around once. Delivered her verdict.

"Spacious." I nearly felt offended on the room's behalf. This scale. This layout. This level of luxury, capable of establishing an entire administration's legitimacy through sheer thermal engineering alone—and she gives it "Spacious"? If the Hohenzollern blew up in front of her, she'd probably just say, "Bit loud." Things were already messy enough. Then a fifth figure appeared in the doorway.

"All of you need to observe bathhouse regulations—" Freya Nikaido got halfway through the sentence before she registered who was actually inside.

"... Oh. It's the President and Vice President. You startled me." I spun around.

"Who dragged Freya here?"

"Jess," Lan and Akari said, in unison. Clean. Efficient. Admissible in court. I drew a breath and pointed straight at her.

"Jess! I knew it. It's always you. You're the worst!"

"Hey!" Freya bristled instantly, the last of her Disciplinary Chair restraint nearly blown out by one sentence.

"Hoshino Shimo, what's that supposed to mean?

'Dragged'? Am I a pest to you? Vermin?"

"You're not." I looked at her with complete sincerity.

"You're the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee."

"That's not better!"

"Feels about the same to me."

"Do you want to die?" We were about three lines away from this turning into a live enforcement action when Maki finally spoke, her voice gone cold.

"All of you. Come sit down." Not loud. But enough. Everyone stopped in the same breath. Even Jess only dared a small, silent sulk. Maki stood in the steam with her arms crossed, fully switched back into the mode that said one more word and I will personally press you into the tile.

"Wash. Then the pool." And so, through some mechanism I still don't fully understand, the six of us ended up arranged in a ring around the shower stalls. It wasn't a warm, healing girls'-bathhouse tableau, and it wasn't an elegant upscale soak, either. It looked more like a collective behavioral correction exercise—too many people, too many clashing personalities, discipline and mischief running headlong into each other, all of it forced into a mutual back-scrubbing chain by the Seitokai President.

Maki went back to washing my back first. I sat down and accepted my fate with what I felt was considerable dignity, privately mourning the almost-dangerous pink atmosphere that had, five minutes ago, belonged exclusively to the two of us. Off to the side, Jess had adopted Lan without asking.

"Lan, your shoulders are ridiculously tight."

"That's because I don't use inconveniencing people as a relaxation method, unlike you."

"That's hurtful."

"Then stop existing."

"Wow. Vicious. I love it." Further along, Akari was rinsing Freya off. The scene had an absurd sort of harmony to it—Akari being the kind of person who could scrub someone's back and make it look like long-range sensor calibration, and Freya, who'd arrived with a full "we are not that close" posture, already visibly losing her grip on it.

"Freya. Your right shoulder's tighter." Akari said it flatly.

"... I know."

"You get angry a lot."

"That's not the reason."

"I think it is." I almost laughed. Even the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee was human. No matter how thoroughly you breathed regulations, hot water and a steady scrubbing rhythm would eventually pry a few layers of armor loose. The worst offender, obviously, was Jess. She was technically lathering Lan's back, but her eyes were roaming the room, clearly hunting for the next angle of attack. It didn't take long before she found one.

"Whoa—" She stretched the word out, and something in her tone gave me an immediate, very bad feeling.

"Freya, you bundle up so tight normally, I genuinely had no idea." Freya blinked.

"... No idea about what?"

"I'm conducting a very objective disciplinary observation."

"Observe your own—" Jess ignored her completely, even gesturing in the air like some unlicensed tailor eyeballing a measurement.

"I am now formally reporting—" She took a breath, then announced, at a volume calibrated to reach every corner of the room:"Disciplinary Chair Freya Nikaido. E-cup. Violation of decency!" The room went silent for exactly one second. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Then Freya detonated.

"JESS—" The killing intent packed into that one syllable was roughly equivalent to a low-yield fury grenade going off in an enclosed bathing facility. She spun to lunge, towel nearly flying with her, but Akari caught her wrist without so much as a change in expression, like she'd calculated this outcome in advance.

"Freya. Floor's wet."

"Let go of me. I'm going to kill her."

"See? Anger issues." Jess retreated but still managed to land one more hit.

"Told you the shoulder was tight. Emotional regulation problems."

"Shut up!" Lan finally snapped, and threw an entire bucket of water straight at Jess's back.

"Wash yourself before you talk." Jess yelped, slipped, and nearly sat directly into the wooden tub. She grabbed the partition for support and still found the breath to file a complaint.

"Lan, that was personal!"

"Yes." No hesitation at all. Maki pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose. Watching the whole thing unfold, I realized the small, dangerous quiet that had briefly belonged just to Maki and me had now been thoroughly dissolved into a pool full of soap bubbles and what could only be described as a field-trip disaster. And the worse part— I wanted to laugh. Not kind of. Completely. Because the whole thing was too absurd. A few minutes ago, Maki and I had been turning steam into something else entirely.

A few minutes later, the Disciplinary Chair was attempting homicide, Akari was providing calm physical restraint, Lan was administering wooden-bucket justice, and Maki stood in the middle of it like a bathhouse CEO presiding over a management failure while still trying to hold onto her dignity. I buried my face in my arms, shoulders shaking. Maki glanced over.

"Shimo."

"... Yeah."

"If you laugh now, it gets worse."

"I know." I said it with real effort.

"But doesn't this feel exactly like something that ends up in an appendix to the ship's official history? Failed Leisure Management: A Case Study?" She didn't answer. But I saw the corner of her mouth move. Once. Faint. But I saw it. That was enough. After one deeply suspicious mutual back-scrub, one unnecessary public announcement of cup size, and one Disciplinary Committee execution narrowly averted in a shower stall, the six of us finally managed to get clean. Only then did we move toward the baths.

We passed through an archway where the steam thickened, and the space opened up all at once. The main pools were right there. I'd only caught a glimpse of them earlier, from the changing room. Standing inside properly now, I had to admit the layout hadn't lied. The bathing hall was wider than I'd pictured—the central pool like a small lake wrapped in mist and lamplight, its surface catching soft gold and pale blue under the high dome.

The two side pools ran smaller, one cool, one warm, as if the place had genuinely set aside two separate emotional registers for bathing. Tall columns held the ceiling up, decorative reliefs lined the walls, and overhead, the transparent dome pinned the whole galaxy in place—distant enough to feel like a dream, close enough that it seemed like it might fall in if you tipped your head back too far.

The garden rest area was visible off to one side—low tables, tea sets, stone lanterns, pines trimmed to an almost offensive degree of perfection, steam drifting slowly across the wood decking. None of it felt like a warship. It felt like the work of some obscenely wealthy, aesthetically unhinged Imperial garden designer who'd been handed a battleship and told to make it nice. Jess stood at the edge of the pool, looked left, looked right, and let out a sigh of genuine reverence.

"This isn't a hot spring."

"Then what is it?" She stared at the steam and the starlight with an expression bordering on ceremonial.

"This is physical evidence of aristocratic corruption." I laughed, actually laughed, out loud. Even Maki didn't bother correcting her. She just said, flatly, "One more word and you're in the foot bath."

"So mean."

"I've always been mean."

"That one sounded more like pouting, though." I turned to stare at Jess. This woman had absolutely no death sense tonight. Maki just looked at her, cold enough that I almost wanted to observe a moment of silence on Jess's behalf. Thankfully, her survival instinct kicked in at the last possible second. She threw both hands up, then wisely became the first one into the water. The heat closed over her, and she let out a long, thoroughly undignified sigh of relief.

"Ahhh—this is what being alive feels like." Lan followed, delivering a cool follow-up.

"You said that in the briefing room, too."

"That was spiritually alive. This is physically alive."

"Your standard for physical aliveness is embarrassingly cheap," Akari said, delivering the final blow.

"But honest." Freya had arrived with the posture of I am keeping my distance from you people for safety reasons, but the moment the water reached her shoulders, she visibly went quiet, holding on to nothing but the last scraps of a Disciplinary Chair's dignity. She sat as far from Jess as the pool allowed, spine straight, like she was about to open a supplementary briefing on bath etiquette—as if relaxing even an inch would count as surrender to the forces of chaos. Maki and I got in last.

The moment the heat closed around me, I nearly ceased to exist. It was absurd. The distance between the Hohenzollern and this pool, covered in a single day, felt like someone had slammed a Federal military history textbook into a school trip itinerary and forced us to live in whatever came out the other side. I leaned back against the stone edge and let out a breath. Maki settled beside me. Her shoulder, through the heat and the steam, rested against mine—barely, and not by accident.

Hot water opens people up, and whatever's underneath floats to the surface. That's not a line you'd find in any Federal Military Academy wellness manual—they'd probably flag it as unsupported conjecture. But watching the six of us sharing this pool, I was fairly confident it was just true.

"I want to try the sauna after this." Jess was floating nearly horizontal, radiating the specific contentment of someone who hadn't, technically, just been pulled out from under an Imperial fortress's main gun, but had instead won some kind of luxury spa voucher. She paddled around in a manner that could charitably be called swimming, though it more closely resembled an otter rolling belly-up, or a large-scale hazard achieving self-propelled drift. Freya's temple twitched.

"Jess McCallow, do not swim in the hot spring. Honestly, do you have no basic manners at all?" Jess opened her mouth to play dumb. Then Maki said one word.

"Jess." And a miracle happened. The aquatic disruption event that had, seconds ago, been embracing total freedom immediately corrected itself—sat upright, relocated to the edge, and arranged her face into something resembling I have always had excellent manners. I watched this happen and had exactly one thought. The universal anti-Jess weapon. Some weapons are built for ships. Some for fortresses. And some are built specifically for organisms that don't respond to ordinary human language.

Maki clearly belonged to the last category—and she was the high-performance, mass-production model. Jess's body had gone still, but not her mouth.

"Seriously though, this pool is criminal. After this I want the steam room, then the sauna, then—" Halfway through the list, Maki cut in, calm.

"Whatever you're doing, do it fast." She leaned against the pool's edge, voice even, like she was mentioning the time—but with a clean authority underneath that closed off any argument.

"After midnight, the men come in." The pool went quiet for a beat. The men in question weren't some mysterious new species. Just Roy, D, and Harvey—the three of them getting whatever hot water was left, which was, honestly, fair. The place could be a coup-grade asset and still run on a schedule. The Seitokai couldn't drink the whole facility dry and leave nothing for anyone else—though I genuinely suspected Maki had considered trying. Jess's face fell completely.

"Three guys get the whole place to themselves? That's obscene." She said obscene with the specific outrage of someone personally wronged—not on the men's behalf, but on behalf of her own imminent eviction from paradise. I leaned back against the wall.

"You could volunteer to stay and keep them company." Jess turned to look at me, thoroughly unimpressed.

"Pass." She said it while sliding a very deliberate look toward Lan.

"Someone might think I'm after her boyfriend." I hadn't even had time to enjoy that before Lan dropped all pretense.

"Roy isn't like that!" Clean. Immediate. No hesitation whatsoever. The heat had her face flushed—whether from the water or from Jess, no one could say—but the response came out pure reflex, with none of the usual I can't be bothered with you cool she normally kept on hand for Jess. Jess's eyes lit up. Oh, no. That was her exact expression for discovering a toy that could move on its own.

"Ohh—" She dragged the sound out, grinning like she'd just fished something priceless off the bottom of the pool.

"Lan just admitted it—""Shut up."

"I wasn't even finished."

"Nothing good ever comes out of your mouth."

"Aw, defending him that fast? People might get the wrong idea." Lan looked about two seconds from throwing pool water directly into Jess's face. I cut in first.

"Both of you. Enough. Don't push it." I wasn't trying to sound mature. I genuinely had a feeling that if Jess kept pulling on that thread, this pool was going to produce another incident before the night was over. We'd just survived one round of disciplinary education back in the briefing room. I wasn't in the mood to print out a second incident report for Freya. Jess opened her mouth to keep going. Then Maki moved. She stood. Water slid off her shoulders and arms, lifting a thin veil of mist.

It wasn't a pose—she wasn't trying for anything. But she had the kind of presence that made even standing up look like the next item on an agenda, and just that was enough to press the small chaos around her down by several degrees. Then she held out her hand to me.

"Come on, Shimo," she said.

"Sauna." Right. Perfect. On the surface, it was completely unremarkable—administrative, even. Just the President moving on to the next facility with her Vice President. Nothing worth making a scene over. Except. I knew her too well. Well enough to know that when she reached out like that, it wasn't just get up. There was something openly partial in it—a closeness calibrated exactly for me to catch, and not quite legible enough for anyone else to point at.

Like she was saying: you've entertained this whole pool long enough. Now come with me. Everyone else had clearly noticed, too. Jess blinked, and the corner of her mouth started climbing—slow, deliberate, and extremely punchable, the exact expression of someone who'd already drafted her next ten lines and was just deciding which to lead with. Lan looked away, very pointedly, and put on an expression of I am simply studying the light refraction on the water's surface.

Her ears, still faintly red, did not help her case. Akari was the worst of all. She glanced up once, registered the scene, and looked away again with the energy of Seitokai internal power structure: stable. No anomalies detected. And Freya— Her brow furrowed. Not displeasure. Not surprise.

More like a Disciplinary Chair rapidly running the scene through her internal rulebook: did President invites Vice President to the sauna qualify as a reportable offense, or did it simply fall under members jointly using bathhouse facilities? I could practically hear the gears of her regulatory framework spinning at full speed. It had to be exhausting, being her. I looked at Maki's hand, still hanging in the air, and felt an unexpected urge to laugh.

The pink, dangerous atmosphere from the shower stalls—the one Jess and the others had thoroughly wrecked—was being quietly, precisely reassembled. Not through anything dramatic. Just a hand. A name. Too deliberate by half.

"What?" Maki looked at me, tone easy.

"Vice President too comfortable to move?"

"I'm thinking." I put my hand in hers and let her pull me up, still managing to get a line in on the way.

"Isn't the Council President flagrantly singling someone out right now? That sounds like abuse of authority." Her hand was steady. And hot. Hot like this whole pool had been boiled out of her patience and her particular brand of favoritism.

"No." She pulled me to my feet without a flicker.

"That's efficient redistribution of facility use." I surrendered completely. There it was. The Seitokai President, through and through. She could isolate one person out of a pool full of people and make it sound like a resource optimization strategy. Jess couldn't hold it in.

"Wow. Efficient redistribution of facility use." She propped her chin on the pool's edge, grinning like a cat about to muddy up a fish tank.

"President, want me to come along too? I could help document the usage efficiency." Maki didn't even look at her.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you're loud." I nearly slipped on the pool steps laughing. Airtight. Even Jess couldn't argue with it—not because it was unfair, but because it was completely true. She would be loud. Not might be. Would. Freya delivered the finishing blow from the far end.

"I support the President's assessment."

"You too?"

"Based on empirical observation."

"You're all ganging up on me."

"Not ganging up," Lan said, perfectly flat.

"Risk management." A small ripple of laughter moved through the pool. As Maki pulled me toward the edge, I glanced back once at the four of them still soaking—the Damage Control Officer, the Communications Officer, the Radar Operator, and the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee, all stewing in the same pot, trading insults, their nerves finally letting go by half an inch.

On the other side: the Seitokai President walking off with her Vice President, under a reason that sounded entirely legitimate—and that, as far as I could tell, was maybe thirty percent duty, twenty percent rest, and fifty percent something that was never making it into the official minutes. I stepped up onto the stone, water sliding off my legs, the air suddenly a shade cooler. Maki still hadn't let go. She just kept walking, very naturally, and took me with her.