Chương 476: 224.Asgard at Midnight 2

[POV: Class 2-C Male Representative] The boys' dorm section, one level up, was considerably louder. Not loud-loud. The kind of loud that happens when a dozen people all deliberately keep their voices down, and the sum of a dozen whispers ends up sounding like a trading floor ten minutes before the close. The Class 2-C representative sat on the edge of his bunk, pen in hand, writing fast in a notebook that had no business being in a school-trip duffel bag.

The page was already dense with lines: If the Asgard is valued at warship grade. If the Seitokai is only acting as temporary custodian. If signatories are entitled to compensation. If there's hush money down the line. If it's not hush money but a security retainer. If those two things are, in practice, the same thing with different names. He was halfway down the page when the guy in the next bunk leaned over.

"What are you even doing?"

"Modeling."

"Modeling what?"

"Post-traumatic yield forecasting." The other boy stared at him for a full two seconds.

"Is that something a human being is allowed to say out loud?"

"What am I supposed to do instead? We almost died today. Everyone needs some way to process it." The Class 2-C rep said this with total seriousness.

"Some people turn to religion. I turn to spreadsheets." A burst of badly suppressed laughter rolled through the nearby bunks. Another boy leaned down from the top bunk.

"So? Figure anything out?"

"One thing." He set the pen down. His expression turned solemn, almost holy.

"Right now, the most valuable thing we've got isn't our lives. It's how much we know." Someone on the bottom bunk clicked his tongue.

"Sounds cool. Doesn't pay."

"Whether it pays, I couldn't tell you." The Class 2-C rep flipped to a new page.

"But it will definitely buy trouble." The room actually went quiet at that. Because it was too accurate. Accurate enough that even the ones running imaginary payout numbers in their heads had to admit that what they were holding tonight wasn't a treasure chest. It was a ticket that said potentially profitable on one side, and potentially fatal on the other. The silence lasted all of two seconds. Then someone sat up again.

"So if there is compensation, is it fairer to split it per head, or by risk exposure?"

"By risk."

"Bullshit. We were all on the same ship. How different can the risk really be?"

"Hugely different. Sitting in the back isn't the same as sitting on the bridge."

"Does almost getting thrown into a bulkhead count as a workplace injury?" The room detonated. The Class 2-C rep buried his face in his hands and had the sudden, clear thought that Federation students probably weren't afraid of ending up in the history books. They were only afraid of ending up in them cheap. [POV: Hedwig] Hedwig was leaving the observation lounge when she caught a few stray lines of conversation drifting from the corner near the dorm sector.

"If the payout really does end up tied to future contribution, shouldn't we start volunteering for night shifts right now?"

"Are you insane? This is a warship, not a club activity credit sheet."

"But getting in early never hurts, does it?" The princess stopped in the shadow of the corner without stepping into view. She listened to those half-earnest, half-ridiculous voices, and something faint and amused passed behind her eyes. It was absurd. It was also completely normal. People don't usually grow up in their most mature and most childish forms on separate nights. Usually both arrive at once. Signing an NDA, beginning to grasp that you've just been pulled into politics and assets—that was the mature part.

Immediately calculating whether you could squeeze some real-world return out of it—that was the other part. But it was, at least, honest. And that was exactly why this group wasn't yet as frightening as the Imperial court. The court calculated faster, deeper, and never once let the greed show on its face. By comparison, these students were, if nothing else, transparent. They blushed. They laughed.

They called each other out for falling into the money trap—and while calling each other out, quietly ran the same numbers themselves. Hedwig stepped forward. Her heels landed clean and clear on the deck. The cluster of students around the corner went silent all at once, with a synchronicity that looked almost like someone had hit pause. She looked them over, her voice even.

"Relax." She said.

"The ones who end up getting the most out of a ship like this are almost never the ones who started counting first." Several students froze. Some didn't follow. Some did, and their faces went considerably more complicated. Hedwig didn't offer a lesson. She walked past them, leaving only one more line behind her, almost as an afterthought.

"Decide which kind of gain you're actually willing to pay for. Then decide whether it's worth counting." By the time she'd gone several steps further, the corridor finally exhaled. Then someone whispered:"... Was she educating us just now? Or threatening us?" Someone else answered with total honesty.

"I don't know. But I suddenly don't feel like touching my calculator." [POV: Class 2-B Male Representative] Late at night, the student common room was usually just the most efficient rumor mill on the ship. The lights were only half on. Drink cans, towels, flattened copies of the NDA, and a few chairs dragged over from elsewhere pieced the room together into something with the cheap, oddly magnetic energy of an underground forum. Not a huge crowd. Not a small one, either. Some stood. Some sat.

Some leaned against the wall with arms crossed. A few claimed they were only passing through—while their feet stayed exactly planted in the doorway. The Class 2-B representative stood at the front, holding a copy of the NDA already creased soft from how many times he'd turned it over. He hadn't planned on standing up here. At least, not two minutes ago.

But watching more and more people murmur does this mean we're stuck on this ship now, and did we even really have a choice, and was refusing to sign actually possible—he'd felt, suddenly, that someone had to say it plainly. And now, here he was.

"Let me say this up front." His voice wasn't loud. But in a room where everyone else was keeping theirs down, it cut through cleanly.

"I'm not saying we shouldn't be alive right now. I'm not saying the Seitokai didn't do its job. Without them, we'd probably already be smear marks on a star chart. I'll give them that." A few nods around the room. A few more who didn't nod, but whose shoulders loosened a little. That mattered. Pay the respect you owe up front, and what comes after is less likely to get dismissed on reflex as nonsense. The Class 2-B rep took a breath and kept going.

"But acknowledging that doesn't mean I have to swallow everything that came after it without question. That NDA tonight was, at its core, a demand that we take a position immediately, under extreme conditions. Call it necessary order if you want. Call it emergency procedure. But don't pretend it was a free choice." More agreement this time. A quiet yeah from somewhere. Someone frowning down hard at her own copy.

In the corner, someone finally sat up straight, as if they'd just heard the thing they'd been too careful to say first.

"So what exactly are we?" He lifted the paper and gave it a shake.

"Witnesses? Informed parties? Related persons? Or just—collateral the Seitokai happened to rope in?" The air in the room pulled tight. That was a heavy sentence. Heavy enough that even the people who'd wandered in for entertainment quietly dropped their smiles. Because this wasn't just running his mouth. This was touching a line that everyone in the room had felt, and that no one had wanted to be the first to name.

"We signed too fast tonight." He was finding his rhythm now, and his tone hardened along with it.

"Council President Kushima is good. I'll admit that too. She got the situation locked down and pulled the whole ship back into order faster than anyone had a right to expect. I even respect her for it. But respect is one thing. Being forced into something is another. If the Federation actually investigates this, or if anyone ever pulls apart who owns this ship, who's using it, who commandeered it—every single one of us who signed our names tonight is implicated. There's no clean way out of that."

The quiet spread further this time. Because he wasn't wrong. If anything, he had a point. A few more people had drifted in at the doorway. Someone with a drink. Someone still in damp post-bath loungewear, clearly pulled in by the noise. In moments like this, truth and gossip travel at roughly the same speed—and tonight, the two happened to look almost identical. The Class 2-B rep read the room and felt, for a second, that he'd found the rhythm.

"So I think this needs to be reopened." He raised his voice slightly.

"At the very least, we need to establish whether tonight's signatures constitute valid consent. And if there's a real question of rights, compensation, or asset arrangements later—" Up to here, he was fine. Some people were nodding hard. The mistake was the next sentence. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"—then it shouldn't apply equally to everyone." The air in the room changed. Not abstractly. Very concretely. Very practically. Very much the way only a room full of students can change. People who'd been nodding along a second ago suddenly had a glitter in their eyes. People who'd thought he had a point were now quietly recalculating whether that point was worth anything to them personally. The Class 2-B rep hadn't noticed he'd already stepped on the mine.

Or, more accurately, he had noticed—he'd just mistaken it for controversy instead of a dead line.

"Think about it. Who actually carried the real risk tonight? The people on the bridge. The people executing orders. The people dealing with the situation head-on. Not everyone hiding in the aft compartments who only found out what happened afterward gets to write themselves into the same ledger." The silence went one layer deeper. The kind of quiet right before a storm. He kept going.

"And besides—if there's any future benefit, how could it possibly be split evenly? That's emotional appeasement, not a distribution principle. If you ask me, the only rational approach is excluding anyone with no connection to core ship decisions. If we're going to calculate anything, it should only be for key posts, direct risk-bearers, or—""Say that again." A voice cut in from the back. Cold. Not loud. Perfectly clear. The Class 2-B rep blinked and looked over instinctively.

The speaker was a girl who'd been standing with her arms crossed the whole time. Her face held no particular expression. Her eyes looked like she'd already tried and executed someone's dividend eligibility in her head.

"I'm only saying distribution can't be arbitrary." He was still trying to hold his argument together.

"Otherwise what does this become? A bunch of ordinary passengers thinking they get a cut of a warship because they signed a piece of paper? How is that different from winning the lottery?" Someone in the front row set their drink down. Someone in the back slowly rolled up a sleeve. The air, which a minute ago had resembled a debate club, was starting to develop the particular stillness that comes right before a group correction.

But the Class 2-B rep, either too deep in his own momentum or too confident in his own logic, added one more cut.

"Let's be honest. Most people tonight were rescued. They didn't contribute. If someone's already sitting here calculating what they can squeeze out of the Asgard, how is that any different from putting a price tag on their own life?" The sentence landed, and something in the room flipped, all at once, like a switch. Click. Reason: gone. Solidarity: gone. What was left was the oldest, most efficient instinct any group with shared interests has ever had: identifying the traitor in its own ranks.

"Get him down." No one could say who said it first. No one could say who moved first. By the time the Class 2-B rep registered what was happening, three people were already on him at once. One grabbed his arm. One yanked his shoulder. One kicked the chair out from under him. He didn't get out a full wait—before he was dragged straight into the crowd. What followed wasn't so much a beating as a highly student-specific price-discovery mechanism. There were fists. There were also throw pillows.

A rolled-up copy of the NDA, a large bath towel, and—from someone whose identity remained unclear—a pair of indoor slippers joined the process, contributing to an extremely undignified market correction.

"Who's an ordinary passenger!"

"Get your own mouth off the distribution table first!"

"You were all about free choice two minutes ago—the second money's on the table you start drawing class lines?"

"You think your signature's worth more than mine?"

"Reclassify his risk assets as current liabilities!" Someone was inventing financial terminology in real time while throwing punches. Somewhere in the noise, a genuinely academic roar:"That's not a distribution principle—that's a monopoly with a moral coat on it!"

"Delist him from the market!" Pinned to the floor, the Class 2-B rep curled his arms over his head. Whatever momentum he'd had as the principled objector had been beaten flat into something closer to a low-altitude skid. Commotion at the door. Maki walked in on exactly this scene. She stopped for one second. Only one.

Beside her, Freya came in with her brow already furrowed, eyes sweeping the room like she was running a live calculation on whether this counted as unlawful assembly, on-campus assault, or some overenthusiastic exercise in democratic education.

"Stop." Freya said it, cold. The first order didn't fully take. Not because she lacked authority—but because the boy on the floor chose that exact moment to struggle up and shout:"You're all just here for the money—" He went back down under a pillow before he finished the sentence. Even Maki closed her eyes, briefly. As if privately conceding that a crowd sometimes runs more efficiently than a formal procedure.

"Enough." Her voice wasn't loud. But the whole room stopped dead anyway, as if someone had reached in from behind and pulled its spine out. That was the inconvenient thing about her. When anyone else called for order, the room hesitated a couple of seconds and checked the mood first. When she spoke, it was as if everyone in the room simultaneously remembered they'd have to be human beings again tomorrow. The crowd slowly pulled back. The Class 2-B rep sat up, hair a mess, collar twisted.

Nothing serious in the way of injuries—the damage was concentrated almost entirely in his dignity and his market instincts. He looked dazed, like he hadn't quite planned to open the night as a man of principle and close it as an enemy of the profit-sharing revolution. Maki looked at him. She didn't lead with blame—of him, or of anyone else. She only said, evenly:"The first half of what you said was worth discussing." He froze. So did the people around him. Because that wasn't a dismissal.

It was an acknowledgment—that some of what he'd said had actually landed on something real. Then Maki's next line pulled the blade back into line.

"But the second half was a genuinely stupid mistake." Her tone stayed flat.

"You thought you were talking about a system. What you were actually doing was stealing everyone else's future before they'd had a chance to imagine it." The room went completely, cleanly silent.

"This ship held together tonight—not because of a handful of people, and not because one station carried all the risk. Question the procedure, fine. Debate rights and obligations, also fine. But if what you're actually proposing is taking the small, uncertain hope everyone just signed into, and rewriting it into something only a few people get to touch—" Maki swept her gaze across the room.

"Then you didn't get hit because you spoke up." She paused.

"You got hit because you tried to finish everyone else's math for them, too early." When that line landed, even the last traces of restlessness in the room settled. From that point on, there was only one voice left in the room. Not silence. A consensus. Tight, practical, close to unanimous: You can argue procedure. You can talk about risk. But nobody gets to slice the cake before it's even out of the oven. Freya stepped up beside her and added, without warmth:"Also. This unauthorized night assembly is over."

She glanced once at the Class 2-B rep on the floor.

"As is any unauthorized proposal for redistributing future revenue." The line was cold enough to sound like regulations that had grown teeth. Somehow, more than one person in the room nearly laughed. [POV: Roy] If the chaos in the common room proved anything, it was that people sense opportunity faster than they sense danger. Roy had this confirmed for him in full, half an hour later, when he got surrounded.

The venue had shifted to the auxiliary conference room below the bridge—normally just a handful of folding chairs where night watch could sort paperwork in peace. Now it held twenty-odd students packed into a deeply unprofessional, deeply enthusiastic makeshift investor briefing. And he was the only one who'd been pushed up front to give it.

"Let me say this up front." Roy stood at the whiteboard, holding a marker somebody had shoved into his hand, wearing the expression of a man who'd given up holding the universe accountable for anything.

"The Asgard is not a financial product." A hand went up immediately in the front row.

"What if we treat her as a high-volatility special asset?" Roy stared at the kid for two seconds.

"No." Someone else jumped in from the side.

"But she has scarcity value, strategic value, and future cash-flow potential."

"Still no." A voice from the back, brighter than the rest:"If you look at it as event-driven investing, didn't we basically just enter at the bottom tonight?" Roy set the marker down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. For one brief moment, he wanted very badly to leave this universe.

"Can everyone get one thing straight first?" He finally said.

"Tonight wasn't an entry point. Tonight was almost an exit point. In the literal, physical sense." Someone nodded, apparently in understanding. Then, a second later, asked:"So does this count as post-disaster revaluation?" Roy was quiet for half a beat.

"How do you people manage to digest a near-death experience into a finance seminar?" A girl in the front row answered with complete honesty:"Because fear's hard to sleep through unless you turn it into terminology first." That was, somehow, too reasonable to argue with right away. And so this absurd, impromptu briefing officially began, in an atmosphere best described as the lecturer wants to die, the students want to get rich. The whiteboard quickly filled with a few large words: Risk. Equity. Cost. Delusion.

The last one, Roy added himself.

"First." He tapped the first word.

"Risk isn't a chip you use tonight to buy expected returns. You weren't investors who entered voluntarily. You were dragged in by the event. Those are two completely different things." A hand shot up immediately.

"But doesn't passive holding still count as holding?"

"No."

"If there's ever future compensation, don't we at least have exposure?"

"... Who taught you that word?"

"Hedwig." The room went quiet for a second. Roy's temple twitched. Reasonable. And also completely unreasonable.

"Fine." He took a long breath, forcing his tone to stay somewhere short of homicidal.

"Even if you have exposure, it's political exposure, legal exposure, confidentiality exposure. Not the kind with red and green numbers jumping around in your heads." A murmur from the back:"So, asymmetric downside risk."

"But uncapped upside."

"Shut up." Roy didn't even turn around. Pinpoint suppression. The whiteboard grew a second heading. The Asgard Is Not a Futures Contract.

"Your biggest mistake right now is treating this ship like some unlisted asset you happen to have inside information on." He tapped the words with the marker.

"She isn't. She's a ship, first. A political problem, second. Your fantasies of return come in a very distant third." A boy in the front wasn't satisfied.

"But the scarcity's real."

"Volcanic eruptions are scarce too. Want to buy one?"

"That's different."

"How is it different?"

"The Asgard can move."

"Great. Moving problems cost more." Someone nearby actually started taking notes. Genuinely taking notes. Watching that, Roy finally understood why some civilizations manage to survive. Not because they're especially noble. Because there's always somebody who starts writing up the meeting minutes the second the smoke clears. Then the worst question of the night arrived, as promised. A boy sitting in the middle, who'd been holding back the whole time, raised his hand with an expression of unusual gravity.

"Hypothetically." He cleared his throat.

"I mean—just hypothetically." Roy's eyelid twitched. He had a standing rule about openings like that. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, whatever came next wasn't a sentence a sane person should say. Sure enough.

"What if we just pivoted—turned the Asgard into an armed platform, formed a student self-governing mercenary company? Wouldn't that generate better cash flow than waiting around for the Federation to sort this out?" The room went dead silent for three full seconds. Not from shock. Because too many people, in that first second, had actually started running the numbers. Roy's eyes died. Completely.

"Say that again." The boy, apparently convinced he'd hit on something, brightened.

"I mean, we already have the ship, real combat experience, the skeleton of a chain of command, a shared confidentiality bond, and the market demand for armed escort, border contracting, secure transport—""Stop." Roy raised a hand.

"Shut up."

"But from a vertical-integration standpoint—""I said shut up."

"And if you factor in the risk premium—""Shut. Up." This time, the whole room lost it. Not the suppressed kind. The kind that had been building all night and finally found one proposal absurd enough to blow the cork clean out. Even people who'd only come to listen were doubled over. Someone slapped the table. Someone buried their face in their hands. Someone kept laughing while quietly writing student self-governing mercenary company into the margin of their notes.

Roy looked at all of them and understood, for the first time in his life, what it meant to feel educationally powerless. He took a slow breath and wrote at the very bottom of the whiteboard, hard enough to nearly punch through it: NO PIVOTING TO MERCENARY WORK.

"That's not a suggestion." He turned around. His face was blank.

"That's a hard limit." Someone in the back still had a hand up.

"What if it's more of an affiliate structure—""One more word and I'm sending you to keep the distribution specialist company." The hand went down immediately. Its owner chose to value his continued existence. The room finally, tentatively stabilized. That was when Maki walked in. She looked at the whiteboard. When she read what was written on it, even she paused, briefly. The Asgard Is Not a Futures Contract. NO PIVOTING TO MERCENARY WORK.

Her gaze moved from Roy's face to the crowd of students—clearly overstimulated, clearly already beaten back once by reality tonight.

"Should I be relieved that you haven't gotten as far as discussing an IPO?" No one laughed. But more than one face very clearly said: wait, that's an option? Roy nearly snapped the marker in half. Maki saw it, and chose not to twist the knife further. She said, evenly:"That's enough for tonight." Her voice wasn't raised. But it was final.

"The details of the NDA, shipboard order, follow-up rights and obligations—there'll be a formal briefing tomorrow. As of right now, every private projection, verbal valuation, revenue fantasy, and warship-to-startup business plan stops." She swept the room.

"Especially the last one." The mercenary-company boy quietly pulled his hands back onto his knees, like civilization itself had just called him out by name. Maki added one more line.

"And if I hear anyone treating the Asgard as a trading asset again, you'll spend tomorrow hauling supplies for the engine crew until you understand exactly what a fixed cost feels like." No one dared open their mouth after that. Because everyone had just remembered that no revenue fantasy, however beautiful, was worth losing the right to breathe freely before getting sent off to remedial labor.

Freya came in right after her, record board already in hand, clearly ready to log every out-of-control incident tonight into a procedural document precise enough to make sure no one wanted a repeat. She looked at the whiteboard. Paused for half a second.

"I'd recommend keeping that line." She meant the last one. NO PIVOTING TO MERCENARY WORK. Roy stared at her.

"You're serious?"

"Yes." Her tone was flat.

"If it can be written into the regulations, don't leave room for it to be misunderstood." Someone nearby nearly laughed again, and swallowed it hard. Maki pressed two fingers briefly to her temple. The gesture was small and quick. But anyone who knew her could see it for what it was—one more time tonight, she'd had to compress an entire ship's worth of absurdity back down into something governable.

"Dismissed." She said, finally.

"Right now. Before tomorrow morning, I don't want to hear that anyone's run a present-value discount on the Asgard." The line was vicious. And exact. Chairs scraped. People stood. Someone packed their notebook away. Someone else silently memorized the whiteboard. One student, passing Roy on the way out, asked with real sincerity:"So we really can't treat her as an event-driven asset at all?" Roy looked up at him. There was no anger in it. Only a deep, dry exhaustion.

"You get to walk out of here alive and go to sleep tonight." He said.

"That's the only return you've got confirmed." The student opened his mouth, reconsidered, and—apparently finding this genuinely persuasive—nodded and walked off. The crowd drained out. The conference room went quiet again, leaving only the whiteboard behind, its lines standing like the ruins of some post-disaster civilization only Federation students could have produced. Maki stayed where she was and looked at Roy.

"Good work tonight." Roy leaned against the edge of the whiteboard, his voice a little hollow.

"I finally understand why real financial officers never look like they're going to live long." Freya, still bent over her record board, added without looking up:"Tonight's briefing had value. At minimum, you stopped an attempted student mercenary movement before it got off the ground." Roy was quiet for two seconds.

"That doesn't sound like a compliment."

"It isn't one." She looked up.

"It's a statement of fact." Maki let out a thin breath—somewhere between exhausted and amused—as if she were still trying to find the narrow seam between the two, and still walking forward through it anyway. Tomorrow would begin soon enough. 0930—recreation facilities open. NDA follow-up briefing. Order, formalized. Students, still processing. The Asgard, still running. As for tonight—at least one thing had been confirmed by the entire ship, in the fastest, crudest, and most honest way available.

This ship could hold a great many opinions. But whoever reached for everyone else's slice of the cake first would lose the right to speak, immediately. By the standards of political theory, that was crude. By the standards of governance, it worked with startling efficiency.