Chương 491: 232.Five Vacancies 2

The conference room door opened. Maki came out first. Her face carried its usual lack of expression, her steps even steadier than when she'd gone in. Personal terminal in one hand, the other tucked naturally into her uniform pocket. Nothing about her gave away what had just concluded behind that door, or what layer of calculation her mind was currently running. Hedwig followed half a step behind, maintaining that precisely calibrated public-facing smile of hers.

Not fake, not suppressed—expression management trained down to instinct. For someone like her, it was probably no different from breathing: the first, most harmless line of defense she put on every morning before walking out the door. Lan looked up. Roy's hand paused. Even Jess momentarily forgot to keep lobbying for her fish cake. Maki swept her eyes over the freshly sorted files on the desk, gave a satisfied hum, and looked at Roy.

"Where are we on the individual-match schedule?"

"Three internal rounds, two inter-school liaison windows. Still missing cross-sector transport."

"Hold the cross-sector piece until after I sit in on the joint committee meeting. I'll clear it then."

"Understood."

"Lan, double-check the leave procedure with the academy's admin office. Don't let anyone lose their slot over a missing form."

"Already on it."

"Jess."

"Here!" Jess snapped upright, moving on pure reflex.

"Recalibrate the individual-match entrant list for me."

"How many passes?"

"However many it takes for no name to go missing."

"... Copy." Maki gave a small nod, said nothing more, set her terminal down, and pulled the oden bowl I'd pushed toward her earlier half a centimeter closer. Still didn't eat it. But that half-centimeter was exactly the Maki I knew. Even the things she'd been interrupted from, she remembered to keep within reach. I watched her, and the itch the hot soup had briefly tamped down started climbing again. I didn't ask her. Asking wouldn't work.

Kushima Maki is the kind of person who, with the very thing you want to know sitting right in front of you, can look you dead in the eye for two seconds and produce something perfectly reasonable, perfectly correct, and designed to tell you absolutely nothing. Going at her head-on is the rhetorical equivalent of ramming the Council desk with your skull—terrible efficiency, and everyone hears it. So I pulled my eyes off her and dropped them onto a different target.

Hedwig had walked to the desk and set her terminal down lightly. She took a new entrant list from Lan, flipped two pages, and made a tiny notation in the margin. Elegant movements, clean fingers, not a trace of just walked out of an encrypted meeting clinging to her. She was easier to pry open than Maki. Not because she was soft. Because she was used to talking. When Maki doesn't want to say something, she goes silent.

When Hedwig doesn't want to say something, she still answers—just so beautifully you can't tell whether you've been turned away. Right now, I didn't need an answer. I needed a seam. As long as there's a seam, something can leak through. So I waited. Not for a dramatic opening—just a gap where everyone's attention had drifted elsewhere. Roy was confirming the cross-sector transport table with Lan. Jess was hunched over the recalibration list, muttering, why does this roster have so many surnames I can't pronounce.

Maki had already been claimed by two new files, brow faintly creasing—clearly locked in combat with some department's terrible template. I set my bowl down, stood, gathered the two pairs of disposable chopsticks Jess had left scattered on the table, and headed for the small kitchenette on the side of the office. Passing Hedwig, I spoke, pitching my voice just loud enough for her alone.

"Your Highness. A word?" She looked up. In that instant, her smile didn't move. Not one millimeter. But her gaze paused very lightly on my face for half a beat, as if quickly confirming what I probably wanted, before she set the roster down, the motion natural enough to look like she'd been waiting for me to ask.

"Of course." She followed me to the kitchenette. Good spot. Back to the main desk, facing the window, a hot-drink dispenser and a tall file rack between us and everyone else. From anyone else's angle, this just looked like the Vice President and the Secretary discussing roster details—at worst, me complaining about Jess again. I dropped the chopsticks in the recycling bin, turned, and looked straight at her.

"What were you two talking about?" No warm-up. No fishing. No just curious, really pretense. I'm not Jefferson Sterling. She's not someone I need to handle with politician's courtesy. I asked straight. Hedwig looked at me. Her smile held, but something faint beneath it—call it a light—shifted position, very slightly, like the surface of water touched once by a fingertip. The ripple was small, but enough to tell me she'd just bumped me up one notch from generic Vice President.

"Vice President..." she began. Then paused, very lightly.

"No. Hoshino." I frowned. That switch was small, and sly. Vice President is professional distance. Hoshino is a manufactured closeness—not because she actually wanted to get nearer, but because she wanted whatever came next to sound like one friend being honest with another.

"Do you remember what I told you in Lunar City?" My throat went a little dry.

"Haven't forgotten a single day." Hedwig smiled.

"Then that's enough." I frowned harder.

"What's that's enough supposed to mean?"

"It means you already have part of the answer," she said.

"You're just not willing to admit you have it yet." My mouth twitched. That framing was genuinely underhanded—underhanded precisely because I couldn't immediately argue with it. Because honestly, from the moment I'd read those team-competition rules earlier, to the instant she'd said the Asgard will have a different use this time out loud, some rough shape had already started forming in the back of my head. I just really didn't like how it looked, so I'd kept myself from bringing it into focus.

And Hedwig was standing here now, elegantly informing me: I know you're pretending not to see it.

"Hedwig." I kept my voice down.

"What exactly are you trying to do?" She looked at me, smiling. That smile was textbook. Textbook enough that, for the first time, I genuinely registered—someone like her had probably been trained since some very young age to snap this exact expression into place, automatically, for anyone, at any moment.

"Me?" Her tone was light.

"Nothing at all."

"Bullshit," I said, before I could stop myself. Her smile deepened by half a degree.

"See? You've always been very direct. That's a good thing."

"Don't change the subject."

"I'm not," she said.

"I'm answering you."

"You're not answering anything."

"I'm answering the part you're not quite ready to hear yet." I stared at her. Hedwig folded her hands lightly at her waist, the gesture graceful enough to belong in an etiquette textbook. What she said next was nothing like etiquette.

"If the Asgard is only this round's flagship, that would be an enormous waste." My heart skipped. Not visibly. But I felt it.

"You're saying—" I tried to push further. Hedwig raised one hand, cutting me off, gently.

"You don't need to rush to the next question," she said.

"Because even if I were willing to tell you right now, you might not be willing to hear it through to the end."

"Don't underestimate me."

"I'm not." Her tone softened a notch. That softness was infuriating. Infuriating enough to make me want to turn and walk away on principle, while knowing perfectly well that if I did, I wouldn't get another usable word out of her today.

"I simply know one thing very clearly," she went on.

"The ship that actually decides a battle rarely stands at the front. The one at the front is just the one best suited to be seen." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. I looked at her.

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Exactly what it says."

"Don't play word games with me."

"Hoshino." Her voice dropped lower, and grew clearer.

"Some things, once you've heard them, you don't get to pretend you haven't. Are you sure you want to make me finish this sentence right here, standing by the kitchenette, five steps from everyone else?" I shut my mouth. Damn it. People like her are genuinely infuriating—infuriating because even when refusing you, they manage to make it sound like you were the one who asked too crudely.

"So are you two—" I lowered my voice further, changed angle.

"Have you been keeping me out of this from the start?" Hedwig looked at me. She didn't answer right away. Not an awkward silence—a calculated blank, timed precisely to let something in my chest sink another half-inch. Then she smiled. Different from the standard one. Fainter. More careful.

"Hoshino."

"Mm."

"You haven't been excluded." Something in me loosened, half a notch. Only half. Because her next line pressed that half notch right back down, without mercy.

"On the contrary. The position you're standing in might be closer to the center than you're currently willing to imagine." I went rigid.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning," Hedwig smiled, "Maki isn't refusing to tell you. She just doesn't want you to know too early exactly where you're standing." That line landed right as the air conditioning sent a thread of cold air across the back of my neck. I didn't move. From the outside, I probably just looked like a Vice President holding two empty cups, chatting quietly with the Secretary about nothing important.

But I knew that sentence had just slid into the back of my neck like an extremely fine needle, settling quietly somewhere I normally never paid attention to. Too clean. No room to argue. Because if Hedwig had said you wouldn't understand, I could've accused her of looking down on me. If she'd said don't ask, I could've accused her of being coy for its own sake. Instead, she'd said— Maki isn't refusing to tell you. She just doesn't want you to know too early exactly where you're standing.

Translated into plain language: You're not an irrelevant bystander being kept in the dark. You just haven't been officially dragged in yet.

"... Was that supposed to be comfort, or a threat?" I managed. Hedwig tilted her head, looking almost girlishly innocent—an expression wildly out of proportion with what she'd just said.

"Which sounds better to you?"

"Neither."

"Then I've probably done a bit of both."

"You're genuinely insufferable."

"I've heard that from many people."

"I'm not surprised at all." She laughed, low.

"You'll know soon enough, Hoshino," she said.

"Please bear with it a little longer." Then, entirely naturally, she gave me a small, graceful bow—no trace of having just been interrogated—turned, and walked back toward the main desk. I stood by the kitchenette and watched her go. Straight-backed. Light on her feet. Impeccably bred. Nothing about that silhouette suggested she'd just been running a very careful psychological blade across someone's throat. I looked down. Still holding two empty cups. I set them into the wash basin, slower than I meant to.

I'd spent all that time asking. I'd gotten nothing concrete. No plan, no use-case, no assigned roles, no timeline. On the surface, I'd walked out of that conversation with absolutely nothing. The moment the individual-match roster was finally verified, the Seitokai office briefly settled into a fragile, self-deceiving kind of peace. Lan set the final version in the center of the desk. Roy finished the last cross-check beside her.

Jess had collapsed fully into her chair, both hands wrapped around a now-cold cup of oden broth, wearing the expression of someone who'd just crawled back from the edge of death—even though all she'd done was proofread names. I genuinely couldn't explain how she made that look like returning from a battlefield. Hedwig sat nearby, composed, as if she'd never slid a needle into anyone by the kitchenette.

Maki sat at the main seat, already holding a new document, brow unmoved—but I could see it: she'd entered her internal countdown mode, the this is done, moving to the next thing setting. I pushed the individual-match roster aside and picked up the next unread stack. I hadn't particularly wanted to. After the last few hours—udon, oden, encrypted cards, flagships, unmanned fleets, fortress sieges, and Hedwig's needle—my brain was already well past capacity. But as I turned the page, my eyes caught the next title.

Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course. I blinked at the words. Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course. Sounded exactly like the kind of premium project a school invents when it wants to legally torture its students but needs to wrap everyone go nearly die together into a wholesome team-building activity. Still, it had endurance and obstacle in the title, so I opened it on the general theory of at least it's not another encrypted card. By page two, I wasn't laughing anymore. Not because the rules were terrifying.

Forget the rules—I have zero interest in providing free translation services for the Federation's athletics bureaucracy. It was the roster. The Academy Participant List had clean, neat columns: number, name, year, specialization notes. Formatted precisely enough to look like the administration had genuinely taken this seriously. But there were only five names. Five. I counted again, in case my eyes still hadn't recalibrated since Lunar City. Still five.

The requirements column, meanwhile, stated plainly: Participant quota: ten. I looked up. In that instant, something went cold from my stomach to the back of my neck.

"President." My voice shook a little.

"What is it?" Maki didn't look up.

"We're short." I stared at the roster and pushed it toward her.

"This event—we're short." This time, Maki stopped her pen. It took her exactly one second to take the roster from my hand—too fast to be unprepared, like she'd been waiting for me to notice exactly this. She scanned down, flipped the key columns with crisp fingers, cross-checked a few entries, then set it back on the desk.

"We're not short."

"What do you mean we're not short?" My voice had fully abandoned any pretense of calm.

"Ten slots. Five people."

"Mm, right," Maki said, as if it were obvious.

"The other five get filled by Seitokai officers. It's an old tradition." The office went completely still. Lan stopped sorting. Roy's hand froze halfway to a pen. Jess wore the very specific look of someone whose fire hadn't reached her yet, but who was already instinctively calculating whether to run. And I—as the first one to spot the roster— felt something very close to fainting climb from my feet to the crown of my head. Not an exaggeration.

"... Tradition," I managed.

"Yes."

"What exactly does this so-called tradition mean?" Maki looked at me. Calm. Infuriatingly calm. She raised a finger and started pointing.

"Me." Herself.

"You." Me. Whatever remained of my functioning reason went dark right there.

"Hedwig." Hedwig smiled, perfectly natural, as if she'd been ready to receive this ballot all along.

"Lan." Lan closed her eyes, wearing the exact expression of someone who should not have gotten out of bed this morning. By this point I was already gearing up to protest—ten slots, she'd named four, one left, and by rights there were no more official Council officers to fill it. Our formal roster was exactly this many people. I clung to a thin hope that maybe, just once, Maki would be merciful and leave that last slot open to some general staffer, or find a more civilized way to recruit externally.

Instead, she moved her finger slowly, diagonally down.

"Jess."

"Huh?" Jess, who'd been enjoying the show, launched half off her chair, nearly losing her grip on her cup, looking like half her soul had just vacated the premises.

"What does this have to do with me—why me? I'm not a Council officer! I'm just—just the adorable roommate responsible for stress relief and—""Oh, my." Hedwig cut in, unhurried. That oh, my was drawn out with such elegance—elegant enough that I knew instantly: Jess was finished.

"Hasn't someone been going around the cafeteria lately, using the Council's name?" Hedwig looked at her, mild. That expression was different from the one at the kitchenette—that had been needle-insertion type. This was settlement type.

"The lunch lady came looking for Roy about the bill, and mentioned it—many, many, many times."

"Uh..." Jess's complexion started developing new layers.

"That wasn't—I mean, that was—""'The Council will top this up this term~' 'Just put it on the Council's tab, it's fine~' 'Don't worry, auntie, Roy will sort it~'" Hedwig's tone was soft as a bedtime story. Pity the story was entirely composed of Jess's black history.

"The lunch lady also mentioned you introduced yourself as—a beautiful, capable, and vital member of the Student Council responsible for community outreach?" Roy nodded beside her. Very sincerely. That nod made Jess take half a step back, as if she'd just discovered the door behind her opened straight onto hell.

"Roy, how could you—""I'm the treasurer," Roy said, his tone so calm I wanted to pour him tea.

"If there's a bill, I log it."

"That's outright betrayal!"

"This is called burden-sharing."

"Have you been brainwashed by the Council system?"

"At least I don't use the Council's name to con the lunch lady." Lan finally spoke up, her tone level to the point of cold.

"And the Eighth Dining Hall. The Third Co-op. The takeout joint across the street."

"Wait—" Jess's volume started climbing.

"How are the Eighth Dining Hall and the bento shop in this too?"

"You know exactly why," Lan said.

"I don't."

"You do."

"I really don't."

"Your face tells a different story." For the first time, I found myself thinking the Council's Treasurer and General Affairs pair carried more quiet lethality than the President and Vice President combined. Seeing this, Hedwig's tone slid up a notch in warmth. That warmth was the most terrifying part. It usually meant she was preparing the final cut.

"Well, McCallow?" She leaned in slightly.

"When you were collecting the perks, weren't you very enthusiastic about claiming Council membership?"

"Uh..."

"When the cafeteria lady shaved two pieces of fried chicken off your bill, didn't you say, quite happily, 'We at the Council really appreciate you, ma'am~'?"

"Uh, uh..."

"And now, when it's time to put in a little effort for the Council—" Hedwig smiled.

"—how did you manage to wash your hands of it so completely?" The office went quiet enough that only the air conditioning was audible. I watched Jess. Her expression cycled through layers—shock, comprehension, despair—finally settling on something very close to why was I born human. She tried to argue. Mouth opened, closed. Opened again, closed again. At one point she turned to me for rescue, eyes huge and wet, like a puppy that had just been kicked. I moved my gaze mercilessly to the window.

Nice weather out there today. Warm sunlight, a few students messing around in the courtyard, sounding appropriately youthful. Shame it had nothing to do with this room.

"Ho—Hoshino—" Jess's voice already carried a sob.

"Wait, wait a second, Vice President—you already disciplined me earlier, right? The knuckle grind, look, my head's still spinning—doesn't that count as already serving time for the Council? I think my sentence should at least get commuted down to an eight-person roster—""It doesn't count," I said, flat.

"That was you reaping what your own mouth sowed."

"... You're really saying that."

"It's true."

"Are you all ganging up on me?"

"You already know the answer to that," Hedwig added, with great refinement.

"And, McCallow—" Her smile snapped back into its standard public setting, this time carrying a sweetness harmless enough to be unsettling.

"This is called—""Don't," Jess said, burying her face in her hands.

"Please. Don't say it."

"—socialization," Hedwig finished anyway. Jess let out a sound somewhere between a wail and a sob—creative, entirely without language—and collapsed back into her chair, looking like someone had removed her spine. Roy finally couldn't hold it in, snorted once, and immediately faked a cough to cover it. Lan glanced at him. He straightened up immediately. At that point, I had to admit something. In a place like the Seitokai, official titles barely mattered.

What actually decided whether your name ended up on a disaster roster was never your job description. It was your conduct. Your credit. How many pieces of fried chicken you'd conned out of the cafeteria, and under what name.

"So." Maki waited until things had mostly quieted before speaking, unhurried.

"Headcount confirmed."

"Me, you, Hedwig, Lan, Jess." Her knuckle tapped the roster lightly.

"Five." I went on alert immediately.

"We're still short five."

"The other five come from volunteers," Maki said, like it was nothing.

"There's always a line of underclassmen every year hoping to get face time with the Council. Good opportunity for them."

"So the official 'officer substitutes' are just the five of us?"

"Right."

"And this is the grand tradition?"

"This is the grand tradition." I closed my eyes. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. The inherited wisdom of the Federation education system, once again arriving right when you're least prepared for it. I grabbed the roster to double-check, then looked up at her.

"Headcount's confirmed," I said.

"But specifically—what is this Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course actually going to be?" Maki looked at me. As usual, she didn't answer right away. Not because she didn't know—she was clearly selecting a phrasing that would get me to stop asking, without committing to any actual details. Two seconds passed. She lifted her finger off the roster, the corner of her mouth curving faintly.

"Exactly what it sounds like." I narrowed my eyes.

"Sentences like that make me want to hit something."

"Then I'll use a more accessible version," she said.

"It's roughly..." Maki smiled.

"A relay race, I'd guess." I stared at her.

"... A relay race."

"Mm."

"The Federation's going to burn team-competition slots, force-draft Council officers, for a relay race?"

"Mm."

"The more casually you say that, the more terrified I get."

"Good," she said, closing her terminal, voice light.

"The official rules come out tomorrow anyway. You can read them then. There's still time." I looked at her and genuinely wanted to swear. Because I knew her too well. When Kushima Maki chooses exactly what it sounds like and a relay race, I'd guess to describe something, there's a ninety-percent chance it's neither what it sounds like nor anything close to a mere relay race. I closed the Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course file and pressed my knuckles into the cover.

Something oddly split was running through me at once— On one side, a petty, dark satisfaction that Jess had been dragged down with the rest of us, meaning I at least wasn't completely alone. On the other, Hedwig's needle still hadn't fully worked its way through, and now Maki had layered another I'm not telling you the details yet right on top of it. Maki isn't the type to use words like roughly and I'd guess to describe anything she's genuinely preparing for.

When she talks like that, it usually means— The event itself is simple. What she plans to do with it isn't. I set the roster back on the desk and looked up at her.

"I'm going to read those rules very carefully tomorrow."

"Please do," Maki said.

"Once you've read them, you might deeply regret not finishing yelling at me today." I stared at her. Maki looked back, her smile barely there—as if she'd deliberately left one small, ordinary-looking thing for me to hold onto in the middle of all this bad news. I let out a breath, said nothing more, picked up my terminal, and went back to pretending to check other files. The sunlight outside hadn't changed. The office air conditioning hadn't changed. The cold oden on the desk hadn't changed.

But I knew perfectly well. From the Asgard will have a different use this time to a relay race, I'd guess—those two lines were, underneath, the same thing. Kushima Maki and Hedwig were, each in the way they knew best, walking me one step at a time toward a particular position. I still couldn't see exactly what that position looked like. I only knew one thing. It wasn't going to be comfortable.