Chương 504: 239.Poor Acting 2

That evening, I received a notice from the tournament committee. More precisely, not a pleasant notice. The kind that made you wonder whether the organizers had a personal grudge against the competitors. Tomorrow morning, we would be first up in armed combat. Which meant we couldn't do what we'd done in precision shooting: stand by while the rules and the venue joined forces to beat up someone else, and learn most of the venue's temperament in the process. We were opening.

No observation, no buffer, none of that commendable professional practice of letting someone else find the pitfalls for us. I stared at the notice for two seconds, then found I didn't feel much of anything.... On reflection, it probably didn't matter. Armed combat wasn't precision shooting. You didn't have to study how the air six thousand meters away might lose its mind, how gravity planned to cheat you, or which physics equation the organizers intended to torture students with.

Armed combat was, when you got down to it, exactly what it sounded like. Simple rules. Clear outcomes. The venue wouldn't suddenly start making murderous attempts on adolescence beyond the three-thousand-meter mark. If you could win, you could win. If you couldn't, someone pinned you down and beat you. There was only so much mischief the scheduling could do with that. After forwarding the notice to the armed combat team, I went to the rest area myself to speak directly to their captain.

Irena sat on the edge of a bench, elbows on her knees, methodically wiping the seams of her wrist armor. In daylight, her build had struck me as heavy machinery wearing human skin. At night, the subdued lights in the hotel corridors and lounges made that excessively clean mechanical quality even more pronounced. Steady movements. An unwavering gaze. Even the rhythm of the cloth against the metal seemed calibrated in advance.

Sometimes I wondered whether, if Irena stood still for more than ten minutes, someone would mistake her for a tactical demonstration unit the academy had brought in specially.

"Irena." I briefly explained the notice.

"We're first up in armed combat tomorrow morning." She looked up at me. No frown. No "Are you sure?" Not even the normal human urge to complain about the organizers before getting down to business. Irena simply listened, then gave a soft laugh. Not mockery or contempt. More like someone hearing tomorrow's forecast called for rain and calmly deciding to bring an extra umbrella.

"We let our ability speak for us." Irena put away the cloth, her voice as level as if she were stating an established fact from a technical specification.

"First match or last. It makes no difference to me." Looking at her, I felt the little thorn inside me settle. It hadn't quite amounted to anxiety, but now it eased all the same. From anyone else, that would probably have sounded like bravado. From Irena, it was a simple statement. Not because she believed she was certain to win. Because she didn't think the arrangement deserved any extra effort spent worrying about it.

"You're certainly steady."

"There's nothing here to panic about," Irena said.

"A precision shooting venue can play tricks. Armed combat can't. Weapons are much more honest than rules about how people die."... That was a distinctly armed-combat sort of statement. For a moment, I wasn't sure whether I should observe a little silence for tomorrow's opponents.

"I'll move tomorrow morning's assembly time forward," I said.

"Don't let your people get too relaxed tonight."

"I know." Irena nodded, then let her gaze rest on my face.

"You, though."

"What about me?"

"You look like the sort who gets nervous on everyone's behalf." I said nothing for a second. Annoyingly, she wasn't wrong.

"I'm just used to paying for trouble in advance."

"Then tomorrow, you'd better save half of that habit for yourself." Irena tilted her head slightly. There was little inflection in her voice, yet it carried a low, steady reassurance.

"I don't need you worrying about me in the first armed combat match. You have your own business tomorrow." It was an odd feeling, having the reminder turned back on me. I'd come to tell a captain to adjust her team's pace. Instead, this nearly two-meter-tall young lady built like a machine was calmly steering me back toward my own responsibilities. Not exactly gentle, but effective. Like someone lifting part of a weight off my shoulders in a distinctly unromantic fashion.

"Understood." I sighed.

"If you send someone flying right at the start tomorrow, I'll try not to look too surprised." Irena looked at me. A faint amusement actually appeared in those excessively steady eyes.

"Hoshino, if you really expected it, you wouldn't have come all this way to check again." The woman usually said little. When she did speak, she hit the mark. Another variety of difficult. Having said what needed saying, I left the rest area and headed back along the hotel corridor. It was much quieter at this hour than in the daytime. The lighting had been subdued into orderly bands of warmth. The carpet swallowed footsteps.

The air-conditioning maintained a fixed temperature that pretended to be considerate while having consulted absolutely no one. In a way, the place resembled the tournament committee: respectable on the surface, dictatorial underneath, and skilled at leaving you no way to complain. I'd just rounded a corner when I saw someone standing ahead. I paused. She looked up at me, too. Shinomiya. I was beginning to suspect she was lying in wait for me.

Otherwise, why did the corridor spawn her like an automatic system refresh every time I finished some actual work? If she told me one day that she was a permanent NPC in the hotel corridors, I probably wouldn't be surprised. But tonight's Shinomiya was different from the last two times. She didn't immediately press close or indulge in that deliberate flippancy that made every remark seven parts truth and three parts asking for trouble.

She simply stood there, hands lightly clasped in front of her, posture correct and expression much more restrained than usual. Still attractive. Still someone who could wrap harmlessness in flawless packaging. But the obvious effort to provoke a reaction had faded. This time she looked more as though she genuinely had something to say.... Or at least wanted me to believe she did.

"Shinomiya." I approached, stopping at a distance that was neither intimate nor pointedly aloof.

"No opening three remarks to make me regret stopping today?" She blinked, a slight curve touching her mouth.

"Is that how you see me now?"

"Your efforts have paid off remarkably well."

"Then I'd at least like to try another approach tonight." She looked at me, her voice light but stripped of most of the superficial flourishes she usually used to distract.

"May I have a few minutes?" If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. From anyone else, that would have been an ordinary opening. From Shinomiya, it was rather unusual. She'd finally stopped pretending she was only here by chance. I nodded.

"Go ahead." Shinomiya didn't speak immediately. She seemed to be reconsidering how to phrase it. Her fingertips curled slightly, a movement so small it was almost invisible. I would probably have missed it if her repeated efforts lately hadn't trained a Shinomiya-specific observational instinct into me.

"I'd like to apologize first," she said. I raised an eyebrow.

"You've said that before."

"I know." She didn't evade it. She met my eyes and finished steadily.

"Which is why I don't intend to use it merely as an opening line this time." That kept me quiet for half a second. Shinomiya was clever. One thing clever people particularly hated was putting a trick they'd already used back on the table. It amounted to admitting that last time had indeed been a performance. Now she wasn't just admitting it. She was laying it out herself. In a way, she'd swallowed a little of her pride. Not much. But a little.

"Then how do you want to say it this time?" I asked.

"More plainly." She drew a deep breath, as though she'd finally decided to unwrap the words from all that attractive, convoluted paper.

"I am interested in the dealings between President Kushima and Her Highness Hedwig." I said nothing.

"Not merely out of curiosity," Shinomiya continued.

"I believe there's something there House Shinomiya should pay attention to. Perhaps even... something we should consider becoming involved in." She said it steadily, without feigning innocence or using ambiguity as smoke. This time she really had put a card on the table. Only a corner of one, nowhere near revealing her hand, but at least this wasn't the game she'd played the last two times, circling me to watch my reactions. I looked at her. She looked back, her expression much quieter than usual.

Honestly, Shinomiya like this was harder to deal with than when she was spouting flirtatious nonsense. With someone making jokes, you could simply hit back in kind. But when someone accustomed to using distance as a tool suddenly seemed genuinely willing to negotiate, even imperfect sincerity made you want to believe her for a moment. Unfortunately, for a moment I did. But—"Sorry, Shinomiya." I scratched the back of my neck and answered honestly.

"I don't know what's going on between President Kushima and Her Highness Hedwig. They haven't told me." I paused. Or rather, I hadn't managed to find out by asking, either. I added that silently, not aloud. Because that was a different matter. Shinomiya didn't answer immediately. Her expression was composed, beautifully so, almost. But I could still detect a slight hesitation beneath that composure. Not disappointment. More like a rapid assessment. She doubted me.

Wondered whether I genuinely didn't know or was covering for Maki. Perfectly normal. In her eyes, I was probably the only person still within reach of the door handle. If even that connection failed, her plans to get involved might have to shift from finding a way in to watching fate unfold from a distance. The trouble was, she couldn't afford to turn on me here. If I really was her only point of contact for now, the last thing she should do was smash it herself.

"I see..." Shinomiya smiled lightly. The smile was faint, and keeping it polite and smooth seemed to take more effort than usual.

"I've been too impatient." I looked at her. That might be true. At least half of it was. Her most obvious problem lately wasn't misjudging things. It was her impatience to confirm them. She'd caught the scent of something wrong too early and trusted her nose too much, so she kept reaching forward. But seeing a door didn't mean you could simply push it open. Push too quickly, and you were more likely to get your fingers caught.

"You're not too impatient," I said.

"You want all the answers at once." Her gaze faltered slightly.

"You make me sound like a student failing an exam."

"No. A failing student wouldn't start by targeting the person who sets the questions." That silenced her for a second. Then she actually laughed. Not the light laugh she'd previously put on for an audience. This one was brief and low, with a trace of "Fair enough. I'll give you that."

"Vice President Hoshino, you really can be nasty sometimes."

"Didn't you just complain that I was too good at playing along?"

"That's different."

"Much the same to me." Shinomiya lowered her eyes, apparently working out where to end the conversation. She clearly hadn't given up entirely, but she knew she couldn't press further. One more question now would be like stamping on a floor she already knew was thin. All she'd achieve was falling through it. So this time she'd learned. A little, at least.

"I understand." She raised her eyes again, her voice level.

"I won't ask you about this again." I didn't immediately answer that. With someone like Shinomiya, I knew "won't ask again" didn't usually mean giving up for good. More likely, since this way of asking had failed, she'd find another that wouldn't get her blocked on the spot. Sure enough, her next sentence let a little of the truth slip.

"But if you do learn anything later..."

"We'll see when the time comes." I cut the sentence off for her. Shinomiya looked at me without arguing. A fine trace of resignation passed through her eyes. Like someone who'd finally managed to compose herself properly and still couldn't pry anything substantial out of me. She probably wasn't pleased. But that was as far as her displeasure could go. I hadn't lied to her. I genuinely didn't know. And even if she suspected I was holding something back, she had no better way through at the moment.

The corridor fell quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a room door closed softly. An air vent kept up a regular noise that pretended not to exist. Shinomiya and I stood there, neither immediately pressing another step forward. The delicate pause was rather like her. All those calculations inside, while every inch of disappointment and urgency had to be trimmed into presentable manners on the surface.

"You're in the last match tomorrow, aren't you?" she asked suddenly. I nodded.

"The final individual match."

"Then should I feel honored that you're still willing to stop and talk about this tonight?"

"You're welcome to assume my mood isn't too bad today."

"Then I'll flatter myself, just this once." She said it lightly, without deliberately suspending the last note in that headache-inducing way she used before. She seemed to have recovered some of her natural rhythm. It made me more certain that her earlier hesitation hadn't been false. She really was weighing things, and she really was restraining herself. Holding back most of her dissatisfaction. Holding back from driving away her only point of contact.

And forcing herself to accept something she probably found deeply uncomfortable: she'd come to negotiate today and failed to get what she'd really wanted. In a way, that was harder to swallow than being undone by a single remark from Maki the previous evening. At least the previous evening she'd only lost face. Tonight, her progress had stalled.

"Anything else?" I asked. Shinomiya looked at me as though she wanted to say yes, but knew that asking for one more thing would make her look wholly incapable of judging when to advance and when to retreat. In the end, she only shook her head slightly.

"No."

"Then get some rest, too."

"All right." She paused, then added, "You're first up in armed combat tomorrow, aren't you?" I looked at her.

"Your news travels fast."

"I do more than ask questions about President Kushima and Her Highness Hedwig." A faint smile touched her lips.

"And I do genuinely care what you'll be facing tomorrow." I didn't entirely believe that. But I didn't entirely disbelieve it, either. That was the most troublesome thing about someone like Shinomiya. Much of what she said wasn't false. Each truth simply tended to have another use attached. For that very reason, it was hard to classify her as a liar. She was more like someone who sliced the truth into attractive pieces and served whichever suited the present occasion best.

"Then thank you for your concern," I said.

"You're welcome." She tilted her head, finally showing a little of the Shinomiya I knew, though with far better restraint than before.

"If you have anything left in you after tomorrow's match, perhaps we could talk again."

"We'll see."

"Your 'we'll see' sounds more frightening than a refusal."

"That's your interpretation." Shinomiya smiled and didn't cling. This time she genuinely stepped half a pace back and let me pass, as though saying that, for tonight at least, this was enough. I walked past her. A few steps later, I heard her call softly from behind me.

"Vice President Hoshino." I turned. Under the light, Shinomiya looked quieter than usual, more like someone truly born to a distinguished house and taught from childhood how to fold ambition into her sleeves.

"... If you really don't know anything." Her gaze was steady.

"Then you should be careful, too." I paused. That surprised me a little. It didn't sound like a probe or a preamble. At least in that instant, it sounded more like a warning based on her judgment. Shinomiya might still be calculating, watching, and estimating whether her house could claim a share of whatever lay along that connection. But she also genuinely believed I stood close to it. And standing close wouldn't be safe.

"I know," I said. She nodded and said nothing more this time. I turned and continued toward my room, footsteps soft on the carpet. The corridor was still quiet, the light still steady. The whole hotel looked as though nothing had happened. But I knew perfectly well this conversation had been different from the last two. Shinomiya was no longer here simply to watch how I reacted. She'd begun trying to put herself in a position where we could negotiate. That wasn't a bad thing.

It didn't mean I should immediately consider her one of us, either. In the end, Shinomiya was still looking for a way in. She'd simply finally understood that harassment and probing would only take her in circles outside the door. To step inside, she'd have to offer something worthwhile. As for me— I took out my key card and paused outside the door for half a second. I genuinely didn't know the full picture of what was going on between Maki and Hedwig. But Shinomiya's suspicions weren't wrong, either.

I did stand a little closer than most. Being close simply didn't mean I could see everything. I swiped the door open, went inside, and leaned my back against it, letting out a slow breath. Tomorrow morning, the first armed combat match. Later tomorrow, my own final individual match. And beyond those visible fixtures, a whole collection of things I couldn't see was slowly unfolding off the field. No one intended to hand me the rulebook in advance, either.

The thought made me wonder whether precision shooting, with gravity, wind drift, and the Coriolis variable printed right on the rules sheet, might actually be the honest sort of competition. At least it told you which way a bullet was likely to stray. People didn't. I checked tomorrow's information again, set my alarm, and gave my communications terminal a quick once-over before putting it beside the bed. That was about as far as I could go. The rest lay beyond anything else I could do tonight.

Tomorrow's opening match had to be fought. So did tomorrow's final one. Whether Shinomiya would actually behave now. How long Maki intended to leave her waiting. How much longer Hedwig planned to watch from the sidelines— None of those questions would grow its own answer tonight. So I switched off the light and gave the room back to the dark, leaving myself one simple conclusion. Tomorrow probably wouldn't be peaceful, either.

Still, if Operation Nine Stars ever were peaceful, that would be a sign something had gone seriously wrong.