Chương 472: 223.Sauna and Bedrock Bath 1

After Maki pulled me away from the main pool, the noise behind us lost a layer—swallowed by the steam. The sound of water against stone was still there. Jess's voice, constitutionally unsuited to silence, was still there. But one archway and a short wooden corridor was all it took to push all of it into background.

Like the school-trip night was still going on somewhere behind us, warm and loud, while Maki and I had turned off into a different room—drier, closer, and significantly more likely to make your brain run hot. The sauna door swung open, and the heat didn't rush out to meet us. It wrapped around us whole. Different from the spring—that damp warmth that soaked in slowly along the skin. This was more like a silent siege.

The air carried dry wood, and the heat sat pressed between the walls, the benches, and the ceiling, until even the light looked like it had been baked soft. Dark wooden panels lined the walls in rising tiers, and the stone heater squatted in the corner with a low, reddish glow, patient and not to be underestimated—a small volcano with excellent manners. Compared to the almost theatrical luxury of the bathing halls outside, this room was plain. No garden. No decorative stones.

No low tables designed to make you lie down and forget yourself. Just heat. And the kind of space where distance, once shortened, became very short indeed.

"This feels more like an interrogation room." I sat down on the upper bench, back against the wall, and delivered what I felt was an entirely objective assessment. Maki settled beside me.

"Didn't you just say you wanted to try all the facilities?"

"I said experience. Not suffer."

"Think of it as early acclimatization to high-temperature environments."

"Why?"

"So the next time Jess drags you into a steam room, you won't be begging for rescue." I turned to look at her.

"When have I ever begged for rescue?" Maki turned to look at me, expression unchanged.

"Not yet."

"... That answer is extremely unpleasant." She laughed, barely. The sound was thin in the sauna air—just a small, brief loosening, like a knot giving one degree. I looked at her and thought: yes, this room is more dangerous than the main pool. Not because it was small, and not because of the heat. Because the quiet here was exactly calibrated.

Exactly enough to pull a person out of meetings and combat and collective noise, and exactly enough to make me remember the shower stall—the accidental brush, the half-second of stillness, and what she'd said after. If you come any closer, I won't be able to call it an accident anymore. Maki had probably remembered too. Because right now, though she was sitting with perfect posture, her hands weren't resting the way they usually did—loose, easy, like someone with nothing to prove. They were still on her knees.

Like she was very composedly restraining something she'd decided was unnecessary. This woman could pin an entire bridge crew in place with a single sentence, and yet the moment she walked into a room like this, she seemed to bring some part of herself she normally kept very well hidden. I shifted closer. Just a little. In a room like this, a little was already a lot.

"Shimo." She said my name. The heat had dropped her voice lower.

"Mm?"

"Are you doing this on purpose?"

"Which part?"

"All of it." I almost laughed out loud. There it was—the Seitokai President finally acknowledging that the problem wasn't any one specific action. It was me, as a general phenomenon.

"So what are you going to do about it?" I tilted my head.

"Throw me out?" This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Maki looked at me for two seconds. Then she reached over and brushed the damp hair off my forehead—the strands the heat had worked loose, falling into my face. Casual. Casual enough that she might have done it a hundred times before without thinking. Which was exactly why it was worse.

"Sit still," she said.

"Otherwise you'll pass out and I'll have to drag you out of here."

"You're terrible at atmosphere."

"Atmosphere doesn't work as emergency protocol."

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"You sometimes read exactly like a medical pamphlet that says no romance on the front cover." She didn't come back at me right away. Instead she turned her hand over and touched the back of it lightly to the side of my face—checking, maybe, whether I was already heat-delirious enough to be saying things like that. And then, in the middle of that silence that was somehow both nothing and not nothing at all, the corridor outside erupted in footsteps. Not one person. Several.

And the kind of voice that didn't need a face to tell you trouble was incoming.

"Hey!" Jess. I closed my eyes. The door flew open. Jess came through first, towel slung over her shoulder and used on her hair with approximately zero technique. The heat hit her immediately—she reeled back half a step, then recovered on pure stubbornness, like an animal that knew perfectly well the volcano was dangerous and had decided to lean in anyway.

"Huh." She squinted. Looked at me. Looked at Maki. Smiled in a way that should have been legally prohibited.

"Knew it. You two snuck off."

"Jess." Maki said her name once.

"Okay, okay, I know—sit down, don't talk, don't break anything, no performing in the sauna." Jess recited it back in a very approximate impression of Maki's voice, dropped onto the lower bench with complete confidence, and immediately resumed the expression of someone who was cooperating only on a temporary basis. Lan came in behind her, winced at the heat before she'd fully crossed the threshold.

"It's hotter than I expected." She sat, folded her towel across her lap, and kept her voice level—but the heat had already pushed a faint sheen of sweat to her temples, and that made her look, just slightly, like a person who'd been steamed out of her usual General Affairs Officer mode and hadn't quite decided what to do about it. Akari entered like she was running an environmental assessment. She looked at the stone heater. Then at the temperature display on the wall.

Then she sat down and said, evenly:"This is very good for cooking people."

"Don't describe it like a weapons testing facility," I said.

"Structurally similar."

"How?"

"High-temperature sealed environment." Very Akari. Freya came in last. She stood at the door with the posture of someone who had not yet decided whether these people were worth the proximity risk, but once she actually closed the door and sat down, the heat moved in on her immediately, and the Disciplinary Chair's particular brand of rigidity started visibly softening under pressure. She was trying to stay upright. She was genuinely trying.

But the harder you tried to maintain formal posture in a sauna, the more you looked like an official document that was slowly wrinkling in the heat. Jess noticed, because Jess always noticed.

"Freya, you look almost done."

"Shut up."

"I'm checking on you."

"Your version of checking on people raises everyone else's mortality rate." Maki, who had already fully switched back into moderator mode, swept the room with a look.

"Everyone sit down. You're in here now. Quiet down." Jess raised her hand immediately.

"President, I have a very important suggestion."

"You usually don't."

"No, this one is genuinely important." Her eyes lit up as she pointed toward the wooden ladle and bucket beside the stone heater.

"The soul of a sauna," she said, with great solemnity, "is the experience." I felt the bad feeling before she'd even finished the sentence.

"Why do I think you're about to do something stupid?"

"Wrong." Jess stood up with the gravity of someone about to perform a public service.

"I'm about to elevate the experience for everyone." She picked up the ladle. Scooped water. Poured it onto the stones. Tsssss— The water hit the hot surface and exploded into a wave of steam—thicker, denser, hotter. The room's temperature climbed a full notch in an instant. The air went heavy and pressed directly into everyone's faces.

"Jess." Maki's voice had begun to cool. Jess didn't hear it. Or chose not to. She looked like she'd found a new favorite toy.

"Oh, that's good. That's really good. No wonder they call it a steam room—" Another ladle. Tsssss—"Jess, stop!" Lan was the first to break, one hand over her face, pressing back against the wooden wall. Akari's brow furrowed—a rare sight—as she visibly transitioned from academic observation of a high-temperature sealed environment to practical assessment of a woman who actually wants to kill us. Freya was more direct.

"What are you doing? Are you trying to cook everyone alive?"

"No, I'm making the temperature more complete!"

"That isn't complete, that's murder!" I'd been holding on, but after the third ladle, the sauna air had reached something close to tyranny. My throat went dry. The air in front of my eyes seemed to shimmer.

"Jess," I said, through my teeth.

"One more pour and I will personally use you as a heating stone."

"Come on, don't be like that—this is when it really starts to work—" Maki stood up. No shouting. No anger, even. She simply rose from beside me, walked over, and took the ladle directly out of Jess's hand. The whole thing took about three seconds. Quiet. Clean. Carrying the specific calm of someone who had given you a chance and watched you not take it. Jess shrank back by one full inch.

"... President, I was only trying to improve service quality."

"Your service quality was about to turn the Vice President into jerky." I was leaning against the wall when I heard that, and I nearly lost it. She'd found time, in the middle of a sauna intervention, to include a welfare note about me. Of course she had. Freya's entire face had gone red—from heat, from effort, from the sustained strain of maintaining Disciplinary Chair dignity while being slowly steamed alive.

She looked like a highly principled explosive that had committed to following proper detonation procedure even under duress.

"I propose," she said, slightly breathless but still firm, "that Jess be prohibited from touching any heating equipment going forward."

"Seconded." Lan's hand was up before the sentence finished.

"Agreed." I followed. Akari added one line.

"Strongly agreed." Jess looked around the room, then landed on Maki.

"President? You?" Maki looked at her, ladle still in hand.

"I'm considering adding you to the equipment management list." Even I laughed at that.