Chương 500: 237.Operation Nine Stars Curtain-Raiser 2

If anyone asked why I wasn't watching the match, the answer was simple. Compared to the cheers exploding outside in fits and starts, whatever was playing out in this VIP room was, quite frankly, infinitely more entertaining. Carpet thick enough to swallow footsteps whole. Food and drinks laid out like a gallery display, even the light off the glassware looking pre-planned.

Soft music leaking from the corners — not loud enough to compete with anything, just loud enough to remind everyone that this room was expensive, and had taste. The room, undeniably, was high class. The people in it were another matter. From the moment the legacy scions drifted in, Kushima Maki turned into a moving target. Whoever strolled over threw two testing cuts first.

Pleasantries on the surface, tone even friendly, but underneath, tearing through her clothes, her seating, her academy's rankings, eventually circling around to whether House Kushima had started picking its companions on some kind of populist, charity-case platform lately. I was, unfortunately, that companion. Someone had a comment about my uniform. Someone had a comment about my background.

Someone else spent the whole exchange technically talking to Maki while letting their eyes drift toward me, dropping a light, offhand remark — the verbal equivalent of picking me up off the wall to use as a punchline. I showed a lot of restraint today. I played along from start to finish — smiled when I was supposed to, nodded when I was supposed to, played dumb when playing dumb was the safer move. The problem with a service smile is that if you hold it too long, your face starts to mutiny.

By the end, my mouth felt like it was being held up on a wire, stiff no matter how I arranged it. So I dropped the smile and switched to something less demanding. The result was that the room began, very diplomatically, questioning my intelligence. Fine. I'll admit that particular expression probably did look a bit like a primate who'd only just learned to stand upright — and not a particularly bright one. Another wave of cheering rolled in from outside, sounded like Unarmed Combat had just produced another result.

The stadium's energy kept spiking, while I stood on that carpet feeling like a piece of furniture that had been put on display and had absolutely no intention of cooperating with the lighting. The second Maki and Freya Nikaido started properly absorbing the room's fire, I found my window and slipped out. Sorry. Humans have priorities, and bladder outranks politics every single time. I made it to the restroom fast. Didn't take long.

Finished, washed my hands, and was about to head back when a voice came from inside one of the stalls.

"Excuse me — is someone out there?" Timid voice. Soft, light, carrying the hesitation of someone who genuinely hates inconveniencing others. I looked up.

"Yeah. What's up?"

"Sorry — there's no tissue left in here. Could you pass me a roll from next door?" A request harmless enough to be almost insulting to my intelligence. I didn't think twice, just grabbed a roll and passed it under. A moment later, the door opened. The girl who stepped out looked harmless. Harmless enough that your guard dropped half an inch just looking at her.

Her hair was a pale ash-brown, soft as if it had been steeped in good light, falling to just the right length on her shoulders, the ends curling inward — tidy, clearly styled, but styled specifically to look unthreatening. Her fringe was thin, didn't cover her eyes, which only made them look cleaner. Not a sharp kind of pretty.

The kind that makes you assume she'd never start trouble on her own — and that if she ever did do something wrong, it was probably only because she'd been too polite to notice she'd stepped straight into your life. Even her face looked well-behaved. Not the stupid kind of well-behaved. The kind that makes people assume she's easy to talk to, and that any mistake she made was probably an accident of excessive courtesy. She finished washing her hands, turned, and gave me a perfectly correct bow.

"I'm Shinomiya Hyouka. Thank you for the help." I blinked, then bowed back.

"Ah — House Shinomiya. Forgive me. I'm Hoshino Shimo, Vice President of the Seitokai, United Interstellar Military Academy." I delivered that whole title with disturbing fluency. Fluent enough that I had to wonder, for a second, whether that counted as absorbing good habits by proximity or getting contaminated by proximity. Shinomiya Hyouka looked up at me and let out a small "Ah."

"You're the one from the Yukikaze. And Lunar City. That one?" My mouth twitched. That one. Convenient. Dismissive. Carrying exactly the kind of legendary vagueness the actual person involved never appreciates. Before I could correct her, another wave of cheering drifted in from somewhere outside — sounded like another match had just wrapped up. I needed to get back. I was just trying to find a polite exit when Shinomiya Hyouka stepped forward and caught my sleeve.

"Could you — take me back with you?" Her eyes were very clean. Clean enough to look exactly like someone genuinely afraid of getting lost. And I was in a hurry — my brain had zero spare capacity to open up a second layer of suspicion. Restroom. Heir. No tissue. Chance encounter. I helped her out. She asked to be walked back. The whole sequence ran smooth enough to be stupid, and I completely failed to catch it in the moment.

It wasn't until I stepped back into the VIP room, Shinomiya Hyouka's arm looped naturally through mine, that a single thought detonated in my head. Fuck. I walked right into it. At least a dozen pairs of eyes swept over us at once. The ones who knew what they were looking at had already started repositioning invisible chess pieces in the air — probably calculating whether House Shinomiya and House Kushima had quietly reached some new understanding.

Why else would the host's own second-in-command personally escort their heir back in? The ones who didn't know better were just watching for entertainment, faces basically reading oh no, the Shinomiya girl's at it again, one step short of taking bets on who'd get burned this round. And the very last gaze that landed on me wasn't analysis, and it wasn't entertainment. It was murder. From Kushima Maki. I genuinely thought her high ponytail might stand up on its own out of sheer fury.

If a look could actually kill, I'd already have been minced, wrapped, steamed, and served. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. I shook Shinomiya Hyouka's arm off and got back to my assigned spot at a speed I'd rarely accessed in my entire life. Maki looked at me. Her voice was cold enough to have just come out of a freezer.

"Where did you go?"

"Bathroom," I said. Honestly.

"Why was that bitch on your arm?" That line didn't come from Maki. It came from Freya Nikaido. I stared at her, genuinely shocked. In my whole experience of Freya, our Chair of the Disciplinary Committee, even when she was using someone as a live example for a rules violation, she wasn't the type to reach for a word like that. Today, apparently, she was. And she used it completely naturally. Shinomiya Hyouka's reputation, it seemed, had a very specific flavor.

"I ran into her in the bathroom," I said fast.

"She said her stall was out of tissue and asked me to hand her a roll." Maki listened, snorted once — and then actually smiled.

"That one really knows how to lie." She glanced sideways at me.

"Shimo. Do you know that a normal restroom usually keeps more than one roll stocked per stall?" I froze for half a beat. Then woke all the way up.

"Fuck. So she was camped out in there waiting for me."

"You've been marked," Nikaido said, deadpan, her expression somehow also carrying the deep, inexplicable resentment of a wronged palace consort.

"Hoshino. Be careful. Shinomiya Hyouka has a pathological habit of taking other people's things." I looked over at her. She'd already drifted back to her own seat, looking completely unbothered, even offering someone nearby a smile that came off innocent, quiet, and utterly unaware of anything she might have just done. One thought settled in my head, very clearly. This woman is absolutely not to be underestimated. She doesn't kick a door down. She lets you open it yourself. She doesn't grab.

She lets you think you were just doing her a small favor. Maki gave me a look. That look had exactly one sentence written across it. We'll settle this account when we get home. I straightened up immediately. For the rest of the day's proceedings, I kept my distance. Not just from Shinomiya Hyouka. Honestly, from both of them. Because I was absolutely certain that one more time sharing a frame with her, and House Shinomiya would start running the numbers while Kushima Maki went straight to the knife.

Tonight, in the name of Operation Nine Stars, the tournament committee had arranged unified lodging for all the visiting teams. I had zero personal interest in this. The logic was simple: we already had a house. We could go back to 22 Platinum Bridge Street. No sane person's brain bends toward a hotel when that's an option.

But the liaison sent by the committee wore the exact standard-issue civil-servant smile and explained, very courteously, that in the interest of fairness, every official representative team had been allocated an equal quota — the Central Star team included no exceptions — and would we please cooperate. I'd meant to decline. Genuinely.

I even had the sentences lined up in my head: we appreciate the committee's generosity, our side already has full lodging arranged, we wouldn't want to occupy additional public resources — the kind of line that sounds transparently hollow and is nonetheless the technically correct thing to say. Then Akari heard about it and objected first.

"The hotel's right next to the venue." She tapped her own sternum with one finger, sounding like I was about to revoke a basic human right.

"I want to sleep in a little. Once I'm up, it's ten minutes on foot, max." I looked at her. Her color wasn't great today — faint shadows under her eyes. She still carried that usual I can punch through three layers of armor and traumatize the referee while I'm at it energy, but underneath it, the drag of exhaustion wasn't quite hidden. For one second I was actually curious what she did at night. Maintain her guns until she could hold a conversation with them?

Or just run sims until she'd worn herself down to this state? I hadn't gotten around to asking when D slapped my shoulder, practiced as ever. He pulled up the hotel's promo page on his terminal and shoved it in front of me. I looked down. Gilded layout, room photos shot like an ad for high society. What actually made my eyelid twitch wasn't the lobby or the chandeliers or the executive lounge. It was one line near the bottom, circled in thick, unmissable red. On-site professional gym. Open twenty-four hours.

My mouth twitched. Given where this was headed, the next line was already written.

"In that case, Shimo." Maki looked at me, her tone as level as if she were reading off a prewritten order.

"I'll leave both teams in your care tonight." I froze.

"... Hm?" Wait. In your care. Tonight. I pulled those phrases apart in my head and put them back together. Every time I did, the absurdity got a little more complete.

"Hold on," I said.

"Just me?"

"Yes." Her voice stayed flat. Flat as a gavel coming down. The instant that "yes" landed, I nearly heard something crack behind my ribs.

"Lan and the others are staying home. So is Her Highness." She looked at me.

"You go here." A deeply disrespectful thought surfaced immediately. They're all adults. They don't need a babysitter. And strictly speaking, some of them weren't just adults — some of them could execute a person on the psychological and physical planes simultaneously. If anyone here needed supervision, it definitely wasn't me who should be holding that job. Unfortunately, that thought stayed exactly where it was: in my head. Because Maki's posture made it clear there was zero room to negotiate.

She wasn't asking for input. She was making an assignment. And I'm self-aware enough to know when to swallow why me along with the face that goes with it. In the end, all I said was: "... Understood." And that settled it. The committee's lodging was, indeed, absurdly close. Via the venue's dedicated side corridor, it took under ten minutes on foot — seven, generously.

Close enough that I genuinely suspected the Federation's dream was for competitors to wake up, brush their teeth, yawn, take two steps, and land in the ring, sparing everyone the risk of growing half a stray thought on the commute. I walked both teams over to check in. Walked is generous. It was closer to an escort. The lobby lighting was aggressively respectable, floors polished to a mirror shine, front desk staff smiling with the consistency of something batch-produced from a training manual.

Check-in moved fast — the committee had already sorted names and room cards, so the desk only had to confirm identities, hand things over, and repeat a round of pleasantries polite enough to feel entirely inhuman. I stood off to the side, counting heads. The second Akari had her card, her first question wasn't about the restaurant or the floor plan.

"What time does the gym close?" The receptionist blinked, visibly, but held her professional smile.

"It's open twenty-four hours." D, standing nearby, lit right up. Watching the two of them, a very bad feeling settled in. A normal person hears "twenty-four hours" and thinks convenient. These two heard it and their brains had probably already started auto-generating training schedules. Everyone else reacted far more normally — checking room numbers, checking the floor layout, confirming tomorrow's assembly time.

I was the only one keeping half an eye on the desk and half an eye on the group scattering, perfectly clear on what Maki's "I'll leave them in your care" actually meant, translated into plain language: Don't let them train themselves half to death before tomorrow's matches. Don't let them get written up. And do not, under any circumstances, let them start a fight with another school's team inside this hotel. That job description outranked babysitting by a significant margin.

Once check-in wrapped, I spent almost half an hour stuffing everyone back, one by one, into where they were actually supposed to be. Marching Akari to her room felt like escorting a prisoner — she kept glancing back toward the gym, twice per hallway, an expression of pure betrayed freedom on her face. D, on the surface, was fully cooperative and said nothing objectionable, which somehow made him more suspicious, not less — like a man who'd already scheduled a 2 a. m.

solo session in the weight room and was simply waiting me out. All I could do was fix him with a look.

"You'd better actually sleep." D gave me a look of total innocence.

"I'm always well-behaved." I stared at him, deadpan, for three full seconds.

"That sentence carries exactly the same credibility as I definitely won't sneak off to the gym." D, with rare good judgment, shut up. Once both teams were more or less settled, the hallway finally went quiet. Night had settled in too. The hotel's soundproofing was excellent.

All the roaring that had come rolling out of the arena in waves throughout the day had, by this hour, been filtered clean through walls, floors, thick carpet, and high-grade glass, leaving only a faint, distant hum — like engine noise from some far-off port. Outside the window, the city's lights were coming on in layers; the whole capital looked wide awake. But step into a room and shut the door, and the world shrinks fast. Back in my own room, the first thing I did was kick off my shoes.

Second thing: sit on the edge of the bed and stare at nothing for thirty seconds. Between the opening ceremony, the VIP room, Shinomiya Hyouka, and then this whole escort operation, the entire day had felt like someone taking a small blade to my nerves and trimming the edges, over and over. Not the kind of exhaustion that comes in big swings — the fine, continuous, grinding kind, where by the end even getting properly angry feels like too much effort. I glanced down at my terminal. The message feed sat quiet.

Nothing from Maki. Which was, if anything, more unsettling than a message would have been. Because when Kushima Maki actually wants to deal with you on the spot, she comes and does it in person. If she goes quiet instead, it usually means she's filed the matter away, waiting for a more convenient moment to collect. I know this woman. Which is exactly why I really didn't want to think about her right now. I got up, hung my jacket, took a quick shower, dried my hair to a half-damp state.

I left most of the lights off — just the bedside lamp and the entryway glow, both warm-toned. That level of brightness was exactly right: enough to let you relax, enough to make you believe, briefly, that today might actually be over. I sat on the edge of the bed and reached to switch my terminal to silent. Someone knocked. Two knocks. Light. Not urgent, not heavy — the knock of someone completely certain that whoever was inside would come open the door regardless. My hand stopped. This hour. That knock.

Whatever fatigue had just started settling over me got shoved aside, fast, by something sharper. I looked up at the door. And the only thought left in my head was: Please, not her.... Of course. The person you least want it to be is, as a rule, almost always exactly who's standing on the other side.