Chương 503: 239.Poor Acting 1

I didn't stay to watch the remaining schools face off. Not because I'd suddenly lost interest in youth, sweat, and the romance of being beaten senseless by physics equations from six thousand meters away. I still had a pile of details to sort out for tomorrow's final individual match. The schedule, routes through the venue, equipment checks, check-in times, restricted areas, and all the supplementary instructions the organizers could always conjure up at the last possible moment.

At Operation Nine Stars, the opponents on the field were never the only things to fear. There were also the administrative procedures off it, capable of torturing a person into a living form-filling machine. First, I took the shooting team back to their private lounge. The schedule meant they might still have another match to shoot. The priority was to get everyone settled before either their brains or their hands started coming apart.

Charles leaned back in a chair the moment he came through the door, as though he'd finally unloaded six thousand meters of pressure from his shoulders. Suzuki checked the information for the next round, her expression colder than a scope on the range. Louis was still stewing over the frustration he'd barely managed to swallow in the last match. Albert, meanwhile, wore the easy look of someone who considered any day he hadn't died a day well enough spent.

As for Akari, our anchor had only just brought the team home in style, and already she was half-sprawled on the sofa like a cat that had finally had enough sun.

"You are not going to sleep," I told her. Akari clutched a cushion. Her eyelids had made it halfway down before she dutifully opened them again.

"I'm just resting my eyes."

"I'm sure you told yourself that under the bed this morning, too." Charles laughed outright. Louis looked up at Akari, a little of the frustration still lingering on his face easing away.

"Under the bed," Albert repeated slowly.

"An interesting starting position for our anchor." Akari showed no trace of shame. If anything, she hugged the cushion tighter with the air of someone entirely within her rights.

"I was maintaining a tactical low profile."

"You were in a tactical coma." I dropped the information they might need for the next round onto the table.

"Everyone take a break. Just don't rest yourselves out of contact. I'll come back and check on you later." Suzuki nodded. Akari raised a hand and gave a languid wave of acknowledgment. Looking at her, I briefly wondered if she was about to demonstrate a complete power failure right there in the lounge. But everyone had made it back in one piece, and I couldn't be bothered to argue with her now. I turned and left. The door had barely shut behind me when something soft and troublesome wound itself around my wrist.

I didn't even need to look. There was probably only one person in the entire academy who could make clinging look accidental and package an invasion of personal space as good manners.

"Shinomiya." I turned my head, keeping my voice flat.

"Have you decided that being attached to me is your means of transportation today?"

"Oh, you recognized me already." Shinomiya linked her arm through mine and smiled as though she'd done nothing wrong.

"I'd hoped Vice President Hoshino would at least look down to see whether some lost girl had finally worked up the nerve to ask for help."

"Lost girls don't lie in wait for people coming out of lounges."

"Not necessarily." She lowered her voice, giving it the sort of softness that practically invited you to drop your guard.

"If a certain dependable, chilly vice president has rescued that lost girl a few times, she might get a little attached to taking that same route." I stopped and looked at her. Shinomiya met my gaze without flinching, a trace of amusement in her eyes. It wasn't an openly flirtatious smile. She used a thin veneer of harmlessness to force you half a step back. Snap at her, and you looked unreasonable. Let it pass, and she had every excuse to come another inch closer.

People like her were a living insult to the concept of personal space.

"You're talkative today."

"Seeing you puts me in a good mood."

"Then you need your mental health checked."

"How cruel." Shinomiya blinked softly.

"I finally find the courage to say hello, and your first concern is my brain."

"It looks more dangerous than your manners." That seemed to amuse her. The corner of her mouth curved, but the hand holding my arm showed no intention of letting go.

"Vice President, you'll give me the wrong idea."

"About what?"

"That you're actually rather good at playing along with me."

"You're welcome to assume I'm in a good mood today."

"Does that mean I can push my luck?"

"No."

"That was a quick refusal."

"You sound too practiced at asking." She laughed under her breath, apparently not embarrassed in the slightest. If anything, she enjoyed the exchange. But I knew Shinomiya hadn't come to cling to me out of boredom. Every flirtatious remark was foam on the surface. What she actually wanted lay underneath. She probably hadn't cornered me here to find out whether this much proximity could make my ears turn red.

More likely, she meant to use physical contact she had no real excuse for to steer the conversation toward something she cared about rather more. Sure enough, her next remark started straying.

"Speaking of which, the people over there were quite conspicuous today." She made it sound like a passing thought.

"Her Highness especially. When she stands in a crowd, even the air around her seems to belong to a higher social class."

"That's an original way of judging people."

"I'm simply more honest." She pressed a little closer, her voice suspiciously sweet.

"And Kushima has been busy all day, hasn't she? So busy I've started wondering whether it's really the competition keeping her occupied." There it was. The real hook she'd brought today. All the nonsense before it had been a warm-up. Shinomiya hadn't come to flirt. Not only to flirt, at least. What she really wanted to feel out was the well-concealed connection between Maki and Hedwig.

She wanted to know where it led, whether she could get a foot in, and even whether House Shinomiya might stand to gain something from it. The only problem was that she thought she was being naturally roundabout. To anyone who knew what to look for, her performance probably wasn't much different from sticking "I WANT SOMETHING" across her forehead. I was about to pry her hand loose when a voice sounded behind us, cold and clear.

"When did you two... become so close?" My back went rigid. I turned. Maki Kushima and Hedwig stood behind us. Maki's expression was level as a frozen lake. Beside her, Hedwig was even quieter than usual, watching this less-than-aristocratic tug-of-war with something of an observer's interest. Their timing was so perfect I suspected half the nonsense Shinomiya had just spouted had been intended for these two all along.

"Oh, my..." Shinomiya's delighted little exclamation had no concern whatsoever for the trouble it might cause. Her voice lifted at the end, as though someone had laid out a free banquet of drama in front of her. For a moment, I could almost picture what she'd expected to see. Maki's face turning cold. Me caught in the middle, developing a headache. Some messy confrontation that would let Shinomiya keep sizing us up from the sidelines, reading the situation, and feeling her way another step forward.

Unfortunately for her, none of it happened. Not because Maki was feeling particularly gracious today. Because Maki had no intention of following her script. Maki glanced at Shinomiya. The look wasn't even hostile. It was the composure of someone who'd already seen through a petty scheme and couldn't be bothered to cooperate with the performance. Then, to my surprise, a faint smile touched her lips. That smile made me worry for Shinomiya instead.

When someone like Maki smiled, it generally didn't mean she'd stopped being angry. It meant someone was about to have a bad time. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Shinomiya." Maki's voice was mild enough to pass for a social reminder between respectable people.

"If you stay that close to Vice President Hoshino..." She glanced sideways at me. It was brief, but the message was perfectly clear. Sorry, Shimo. Before I could form a proper sense of impending disaster, Maki delivered the rest in the same steady tone.

"Careful. She might eat you up." The air went still for half a second. An actual half second. The sort in which no one had time to react, but a bomb under the table had already been lit. I stared, then nearly choked on the spot. Not because the remark was especially explicit. Coming from Maki, though, its destructive power defied all science. This was someone who usually looked as though even a joke had to clear three levels of approval before she could say it.

Yet her first move had taken the whole scene straight into the territory where Shinomiya was least equipped to operate. Shinomiya was visibly stunned, too. Not the kind she put on. She genuinely went blank for a moment. She'd probably been waiting for some sophisticated warning, a probing question, or an oblique maneuver that carried the scent of authority. Instead, she'd received a remark that ignored every rule of political etiquette.

"... Oh." First came that entirely uninformative syllable. Then her brain seemed to catch up with the meaning of "eat you up." A second later, her previously well-managed face began to flush, little by little. First the tips of her ears. Then her cheeks. Finally, the color climbed from her neck as though someone had lit it without asking permission, until her entire face was red. For an instant, I wondered whether this might be some sophisticated counterattack. I quickly realized it wasn't.

Shinomiya's eyes were genuinely unsettled. Her hand stiffened around my arm, too. She seemed to want to let go but couldn't quite accept it, wanted to keep performing but had suddenly lost her lines. She was stuck in a deeply awkward halfway position.

"You... you two..." She opened her mouth and produced a string of stammers that was nothing like Shinomiya. Honestly, the sight was so rare I almost forgot whose side I was supposed to be on. The person who'd come to my door last night wearing a gentle, harmless face to collect data on my reactions had now been shut down by a single remark, like a hothouse flower thrust into company for the first time.

If I hadn't been certain how much calculation lay behind her usual harmlessness, I might have wondered whether someone had loaded the wrong version of her. Beside Maki, Hedwig looked from Shinomiya to me, then back to Maki. Her eyes betrayed very little, but I had the distinct impression Her Imperial Highness was reassessing House Kushima's entertainment value. Shinomiya was still trying to assemble a sentence.

"You two are so... so..." I could almost see what she'd meant to say. Probably "You're all so vulgar," or "What on earth goes on in your heads?" Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't part of her prepared material. The trouble was, the harder she tried to climb out of this hole, the more she seemed to stamp her feet and dig herself in. Maki finally laughed. A soft sound, but more vicious than a direct attack. That laugh settled the matter.

Shinomiya abruptly realized Maki had seen every bit of her blush, hesitation, and stammering. She'd handed over the composure she'd meant to project along with the rest. She'd been played. Completely. Shinomiya went even redder. This time it wasn't just embarrassment. Anger rose with it, the two together heating up that previously respectable outer shell of a model student from a distinguished house.

"Kushima, you...!"

"What about me?" Maki was still smiling, but her tone was as calm as if she'd offered a friendly reminder.

"I'm only looking out for you." Shinomiya stared at her, opened her mouth, and failed to find an elegant reply to throw back. Maki hadn't exposed Shinomiya outright or imperiously warned her to stay away from me. She'd simply taken the momentum of Shinomiya's approach and nudged it somewhere more embarrassing, somewhere she couldn't defend herself. Using her own force against her, in plain terms. You like performing? Fine. Perform. But you don't get to choose the stage.

And I knew perfectly well Maki wasn't doing this merely for amusement. She'd already recognized Shinomiya's abilities. She'd also seen that Shinomiya hadn't approached me just to flirt. Shinomiya wanted to probe the connection between House Kushima and Hedwig. Maki, meanwhile, was assessing her: whether she qualified, whether she'd take another step closer to get inside. People came to Maki asking for things. She would never lower herself to ask someone to do her work.

Under the circumstances, the obvious solution was to set a trap and let Shinomiya walk into it herself. Shinomiya had thought she was fishing. Someone else was angling for her, too. The thought suddenly made my position in the middle feel rather superfluous. On one side, Shinomiya was using me as a point of entry. On the other, Maki was considering Shinomiya as a spare piece for her board. Hedwig stood by like an imperial witness to two local aristocrats elegantly sabotaging each other.

If I hadn't been physically present, I might have wondered whether I was really just a sign marked "ENTRANCE" in their game.

"Vice President Hoshino." Shinomiya finally turned back to me, apparently hoping to recover some ground.

"A-aren't you going to do something about her?"

"About whom?" I asked honestly.

"Obviously..." She stopped halfway through. Whichever name she supplied now, it would look bad. Say Maki, and she'd show just how badly the remark had rattled her. Say me, and she'd look even more as though she'd taken "eat you up" to heart. That was what made Maki's remark so nasty. A lightly tossed pebble, landing exactly where Shinomiya was least able to deal with it. She knew how to tread on boundaries, draw close, and use ambiguity as smoke.

But let someone take that smoke seriously and calmly push it toward something more explicit, and she was the first to lose her footing. Perhaps hothouse flowers really didn't understand a way of talking that hoisted someone bodily onto a stove. Maki watched her, her smile thinning to the silent gleam along the spine of a blade.

"Why stop there?" Shinomiya bit her lip.

"... Just you wait!" The words had already cost her half her authority by the time they came out. She seemed to realize it, too, because she immediately added another line in an attempt to recover.

"You'll get what's coming to you in tomorrow's match!" That wasn't entirely empty. Taken literally, at least, it still had a little backbone. The trouble was that she was red all over and her voice had grown hurried at the end. Even the best threat delivered in that condition sounded more like a declaration of tactical retreat after a burn. With that, Shinomiya finally let go of my arm, turned, and left. Not a composed exit. Not an elegant withdrawal preserving the dignity of her house.

More the flight of someone trying to keep her pace measured and finally having to speed up because she was too angry and embarrassed to manage it. I watched her disappear around the corner, feeling an odd stillness inside. As though I'd just witnessed a social accident of the highest caliber. The corridor fell quiet for a moment. Maki's smile slowly receded, leaving her usual clean, cool expression, as though she hadn't just made half of Shinomiya's face flush with a single sentence. Hedwig remained quiet.

Her gaze paused between Maki and me, as though she'd noticed something she had no intention of mentioning yet. I turned to Maki.

"Wasn't that a little harsh?"

"Not particularly." Her expression stayed calm.

"I only reminded her to be careful."

"You call that a reminder?"

"What else would you call it?"

"For a second I thought I'd become promotional material for some highly dangerous predator." Maki looked at me again. There it was in her eyes: the apology she'd never actually voiced. Sorry, Shimo. But there was something else, too. Not simply a joke, not simply defending one of her own. A clean assessment. Shinomiya hadn't made Maki angry enough to lash out blindly. Maki was answering with the least effort possible, while finding out just how far she could unsettle her. Hedwig added a quiet remark from beside us.

"Social interaction in your Federation is surprisingly direct." I nearly choked on that one, too. Maki remained composed enough to answer at her leisure.

"My apologies for the spectacle, Your Highness."

"No." Hedwig's tone stayed level.

"It was quite instructive." I kept quiet for a second and decided not to consider too closely where Her Imperial Highness intended to apply that instruction. Operation Nine Stars were chaotic enough. I didn't want to start writing eulogies for future international social disasters.

"So." I folded my arms and looked at Maki.

"You already knew what Shinomiya wanted?"

"More or less." The answer came naturally.

"And you still let her come close."

"What else?" Maki asked.

"Send her away so House Shinomiya can look for another entrance? Or tell her outright: I won't volunteer what you want to know, but if you can find your own way to the door, I don't mind seeing whether you're worth using?" I looked at her. Proud, direct, and not remotely inclined to ask a favor. She'd always been like that. Want her attention, her approval, her cooperation? Fine. Find your own way to her. Expect her to humble herself and ask? You'd have better luck dreaming.

In other words, Shinomiya's repeated advances today weren't entirely a nuisance to Maki. They were more like a résumé delivered to her door, albeit with a flirtatious layout, noisy content, and a few lines of blatant probing attached. Maki's nudge had been both a warning and a way of gathering information.

"You deliberately made her anxious," I said.

"A little anxiety shows what's underneath." Maki's voice was calm.

"With someone that good at performing, it's hard to know what she's capable of until you break her rhythm." Hedwig didn't interrupt. She simply stood there quietly. The quieter she was, though, the more certain I became that something existed between these two that couldn't conveniently be laid out in the open. Shinomiya hadn't invented her suspicions. She simply hadn't reached the door handle yet. Maki hadn't missed them, either. She was standing inside, waiting for someone to approach. As for me.

I was probably the unfortunate plank caught in the doorway that everyone found so useful for leverage. I rubbed the space between my brows.

"Next time you want to test each other, could you not use my arm as a public venue?"

"Sorry." This time Maki was quite direct.

"I didn't mean to, either," Hedwig said mildly. I turned to her.

"Your Highness, you didn't do anything."

"But I was standing there," she said.

"Sometimes standing still puts pressure on people, too." That was so self-aware I couldn't find an argument. Maki gave a soft laugh, then brought the conversation back.

"Still, Shinomiya is more impatient than I'd expected."

"Impatient to investigate you and Her Highness."

"And to find a place for House Shinomiya," Maki said. That was true enough. Shinomiya's performance hadn't been clumsy because she lacked skill. She was more impatient than she let on. She'd seen something and trusted her judgment, which was why she wanted to use her connection to me to get inside. The trouble was, dealing with ambitious approaches was exactly what someone like Maki did best. If Shinomiya wanted in, it would have been stranger if Maki hadn't put her through repeated tests first. I let out a breath.

"Anyway, when she gets back today, she'll probably want to bury herself." Maki's expression remained mild.

"Not necessarily," she said.

"If she's as useful as I think she might be, being humiliated once will only make her figure out her next approach that much faster." Quiet as the words were, they made it suddenly clear. Maki wasn't playing. That cut had been a prank and a test. If Shinomiya was just an ordinary daughter of a distinguished house, that provocation might leave her nursing a grudge, backing away, or looking for a way to save face.

But if she could swallow the embarrassment and then settle the account, this would give her a reason to take another step closer herself. Maki wasn't keeping her out. She was waiting for her to return. A headache threatened. On one side, Shinomiya, full of flirtatious remarks and motives she hadn't buried very deep. On the other, Maki, respectable on the surface and stress-testing human hearts underneath.

And beside them, an imperial princess who'd said almost nothing but whose presence could lower the temperature of an entire corridor. I was stuck between them, with tomorrow's final individual match still ahead of me. Wonderful. Youth, competition, political undercurrents, and a hint of social gunpowder I wasn't sure whether to classify as a girl-on-girl incident. If this academy city ever published a travel guide, I'd personally print "NOT RECOMMENDED FOR EXTENDED STAYS BY THE SANE" on the cover.

"I have work to do," I said at last. Maki nodded. Hedwig inclined her head, too. I'd taken two steps when I stopped and turned back to Maki.

"One more thing."

"What?"

"Next time you make that sort of joke about me, at least tell me beforehand whether I'm the weapon or the bait." Maki looked at me, her expression mild, that almost imperceptible smile returning to her lips.

"Depends." I stared at her in silence for two seconds.

"That answer makes me want to hit you."

"Vice President Hoshino, haven't you always known that?" I shouldn't have asked. I turned and left, rearranging the tasks ahead in my mind as I walked. I had to check the information for tomorrow's final individual match again, smooth out the procedure, replenish the equipment, and get the timing right. I also had to allow for Shinomiya going back tonight and either deciding to stew in her own embarrassment or coming up with an even more suicidal way to attach herself to me tomorrow. Either would be a nuisance.

Worse, I could already predict that Maki wouldn't stop her. She would simply stand by and see whether Shinomiya could push the door open a little farther on her own. If she could, she was useful. If she couldn't, that merely eliminated an unqualified would-be entrant.