Chương 489: 231.Secret Consultation 2

I dug into the actual rules of Operation Nine Stars. My conclusion: the drafting was vague enough to reasonably suspect the committee had written it in shifts, passing the document around while progressively drunker. Not ordinary drunk—the specific joint military-political drunk where everyone's pounding the table shouting details don't matter, momentum first. The individual matches were sane enough. Five-on-five elimination, most wins advances. Clear. Comprehensible. Healthy. Civilized.

Like something a functioning human brain had actually reviewed. The problem was everything after that. I shoved the individual rules aside and stared at the team-competition page for nearly two minutes, still feeling like I was reading a document deliberately written vague enough to make blame-shifting easier down the line.

"President." I set my terminal on the desk and looked at Kushima Maki across from me. She was bent over a stack of documents, moving fast enough to suggest they weren't paper at all, but some kind of live hazard that would sprout legs and run if she slowed down for even a second.

"Mm?"

"I don't get it."

"Which part?"

"All of it," I said, honestly.

"What does the first-phase 'fleet formation and command' actually mean? You just said the back half is live this year—are they seriously going to have students command a real fleet?" Maki didn't even look up.

"You're overthinking it." Her tone was even, carrying a faint trace of disdain—like I'd asked whether the cafeteria dessert came with a free cruiser, not a question about competition rules.

"Federation fleets aren't toys. If they actually put academy reps on a regular bridge, Joint Operations Command would be torn in half by furious parents and sector councilors before tonight was over."

"So?" She finished signing the last page and finally looked up.

"My guess is a command-tower model."

"Command tower?"

"The rep team designates one ship as flagship." Maki tossed her pen aside and leaned back, finally willing to explain in something closer to plain language.

"The student core concentrates on the flagship and runs the escorts through a fleet command nexus. Aside from the flagship and a few essential support units, the rest will mostly be unmanned. Put bluntly: humans make the decisions, unmanned ships do the dying." She actually smiled at that.

"If they crewed every ship, the death benefits alone would gut the Federation budget after one round. If they actually ran it that way, they wouldn't need the Empire to knock us over—we'd collapse on our own." I flipped back to page two. Sure enough: Each representative academy shall designate one vessel as flagship, paired with several defensive escort vessels; beyond this, the majority of tactical units shall be composed of unmanned fleet elements.

The wording was as smooth as everything else—smooth enough to seem afraid of being understood—but the core meaning matched exactly. The longer I stared at the page, the more the whole rulebook felt like a suspicious stew made by forcibly blending student competition with military trial.

"Doesn't that burn money?"

"It doesn't," she answered immediately.

"Not on the unmanned side, anyway. Most of them are old hulls, decommissioned ships, or test craft already slated for the scrap list. As long as they can fly, take orders, and blow up, that's enough. What actually needs protecting is the command core. The rest are expendables." She said expendables so naturally it might as well have been born for use in regulations.

I let two seconds pass and decided not to open a discussion about humanitarianism with Kushima Maki—that conversation only ever ends with an answer that's perfectly rational, perfectly correct, and makes you want to smother her with a cushion.

"What about the flagship?" I asked.

"The rules are vague, but they can't use just anything." Maki pulled another stack closer and drew out a page.

"The flagship has to carry a full command nexus, but it also needs enough resilience, battlefield data-processing capacity, and tactical redundancy. You can't fake that with a ship that just happens to look bigger." She paused, as if something had occurred to her, the corner of her mouth curving.

"As for what we'll actually field—you'll find out when the time comes." I narrowed my eyes. I knew this line by now. Translated: I know. I'm not telling you right now. And even if you keep asking, I still won't. House Kushima's specialty. Beautifully wrapped silence. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. I scrolled through my terminal again and remembered something else.

"You said before that losses are always heavy when they run this."

"Yes."

"Heavy how?" Maki pressed her fingers to her brow, and for the first time her expression showed something faint, brief, but genuinely exasperated.

"Because the Imperial academy side always falls back behind Hohenzollern Fortress once things start going their way." I blinked.

"... What?"

"Exactly what it sounds like." She looked at me.

"The front half is academy versus academy. The back half usually mutates. Once the Empire draws the line back to Hohenzollern Fortress's outer perimeter, the Federation can't just concede and walk away—not politically. It ends with regular fleet forces forced in to take over." I pushed the terminal a little further away, as if physical distance might help against this particular blood-pressure hazard.

"Did you skip a few steps in there?"

"I already shortened it."

"How does a student competition turn into a fleet rescue and then a fortress siege?" Maki stayed perfectly calm—calm enough to be explaining why lunch was one side dish short.

"Because neither side is willing to pull back once momentum builds, and the Empire is especially good at letting 'exercise contact' slide naturally into 'limited tactical extension.' The Federation knows it's wrong every time, and still has to grit its teeth and follow along. By the end, it's Federation ships bleeding out against the Hohenzollern perimeter." She paused, eyes dropping back to the file.

"And it's not the first time." A chill crawled down my back.

"That sounds like institutionalized suicide."

"That's roughly what I think too," she said, flatly.

"So when the military first took the Empire's provocation this time, they had no intention of running it. Then pressure from every sector piled on at once—nobody wanted to be the one who looked like they flinched this year. In the end, it still had to go ahead."

"Is everyone up there insane?"

"If you want a serious answer, it'll be a long one."

"Forget it, then. I don't want to spend what's left of my life on a psychiatric report about Federation leadership." Maki laughed, low. Brief, almost gone before it landed. I still heard it.

"They've run eleven fortress sieges," she said, setting the terminal aside.

"Torn apart every time. Still haven't learned." I looked at her, briefly unsure whether to mock the Federation fleet's learning curve or marvel that the world could institutionalize the same mistake with the practiced ease of an annual holiday.

"I'm starting to understand why you said the results weren't the real problem."

"If you're only understanding that now, you're behind."

"Thanks for the reminder."

"You're welcome." I snorted and reached to turn the page. Maki stood. She signed the last two documents, dropped them into the finished pile, and walked to the sofa on the other side of the office—as if she'd finally had enough of that desk's administrative oppression—and sat directly across from me. I looked up.

"Done with the paperwork?"

"For now." She set her terminal in the center of the table. The bad feeling in my chest climbed again. Whenever Kushima Maki switched from talking while working to walking over specifically to sit facing you, whatever came next was never ordinary trouble.

"So..." I closed my terminal slowly.

"You want to use the Asgard as our flagship this time?"

"No, Hoshino." A familiar voice came from the doorway. Maki and I turned at the same time. Hedwig stood there, already back in her Seitokai Secretary attire—the Lower House uniform on her still carrying the effect of high-grade camouflage. A dark set of clothes that should have belonged to any ordinary student somehow gave the impression that even its buttons understood diplomatic protocol. She walked in, composed, holding a thin encrypted card.

"The Asgard will have a different use this time." I didn't speak. But I'll admit, in that instant, my whole attention nailed itself to that sentence. A different use. Four deeply irritating words. Irritating because they answered you while telling you nothing at all. Hedwig walked to the sofa and held the card out to Maki.

"President. I brought the proposal." Maki took it without comment and slotted it into her portable terminal. The moment the screen lit, I dropped my eyes back to my own page, pretending to still be studying the team rules that read like a midnight rush job. Pretending. Yes. Just pretending. Because people are strange. The more you tell yourself not to care, the more you do. The more you know you shouldn't look, the less your peripheral vision cooperates. I hadn't lifted my head.

My ears, apparently, had decided to work independently anyway. The faint electronic chirp of the terminal loading its encryption module. The soft rustle of Hedwig's uniform against her knee as she stood nearby. The pressure that made even the air go quiet while Maki read in silence. All of it was loud. Loud enough that I genuinely couldn't say whether I'd absorbed a single word of page two. Finally, I gave up. I put the terminal down and looked at them.

"Are you two... keeping something from me?"

"Yes," Maki said. Clean. Immediate. Not a second of hesitation. That confidence alone nearly gave me a new headache. Ladies and gentlemen: behold the legendary House Kushima method— I don't want to tell you, and I'm not even going to pretend otherwise. Maki's gaze moved from the terminal to me.

"The proposal's still under negotiation. Telling you now introduces too many variables." My mouth twitched. That was, annoyingly, a reasonable point.

"I see," I said, keeping my expression as neutral as I could.

"Got it." I got nothing. I only knew that pushing further would just earn me more precision-wrapped Kushima-brand silence. Maki looked at me once. She probably knew I was annoyed. She also knew that my annoyance wasn't going to change anything right now. So she simply ejected the card and handed it back to Hedwig.

"Once it's confirmed, you'll be the first to know." Hedwig took it back and stood quietly aside, not interrupting. I was still trying to hold onto some version of fine, I'll trust you for now, right up until Maki closed her terminal and added, with total calm:"If this goes well, this will be the last siege of the Fortress." I looked at her. And, very honestly, felt afraid. Not the cold alertness from before. Not the familiar unease of this woman is running a board I haven't figured out yet. Something more direct.

Fear. Because if someone can talk about the last siege of Hohenzollern Fortress in that steady a tone, it means what's in her head has already moved past how do we bring the team home safely. She's thinking about what comes after. Something bigger. Something far more likely to get people killed. I had a sudden, absurd sensation. Seitokai office. Documents stacked on the desk. Competition rules open on a terminal. Some club's oblivious promo track drifting in from outside.

Everything technically still hanging under the word campus. And Kushima Maki, sitting across from me, had already set her eyes on the far side of the Fortress. She had probably never treated Operation Nine Stars as a competition at all. Only as an entrance to a much larger board. I looked back at my terminal screen. Still stopped on that one vaguely written line: Phase One: Fleet Formation and Command. Good. Now I finally understood.

The reason this was written so vaguely wasn't necessarily because the drafters were drunk. It was because the ones who were actually sober had never intended to put the truth down on paper at all.